Текст книги "Small Vices"

Автор книги: Robert B. Parker

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Chapter 42

I SLID THE pin into the bottom notch of the weight stack on one of the chest-press machines at the Harbor Health Club, and sidled in under it, and took a wide spread grip and inhaled and pushed the weight up as I exhaled. Things creaked in my right shoulder, but the bar went up. I eased it down, pushed it up again. I did this eight more times and let the bar come back to rest. Henry Cimoli was watching me.

"Ten reps," he said. "You got another set in you."

I nodded, breathing deeply, waiting. Then I did ten more reps, struggling to keep form. And rested and did ten more.

"That's as good as you did before," Henry said.

I slid off of the machine and stood waiting for my oxygen levels to normalize, watching the rest of the club members exercise. Most of them were women in spandex. Across the room was a bank of treadmills and Stair Climbers each with a small television screen so that you could exercise while watching an assortment of daytime talk shows, with maybe a videotape of a public dismemberment thrown in to cleanse the palate.

"Weigh in," Henry said, and we walked to the balance scale. I got on, Henry adjusted the weights. I weighed to 210. The same weight I'd carried into the river almost a year ago.

"I'd say you're as good as new," Henry said.

"Too bad," I said. "I was hoping for better."

"We all were," Henry said. "But you can't shine shit."

"You're awfully short for a philosopher," I said.

"Hell," Henry said. "I'm awful short for a person. But I'm fun."

I got off the scale and went and drank some water and wiped my face with a hand towel. There were mirrors on all the walls so that you could admire yourself from every angle. I was doing that when Vinnie Morris came in and glanced around the room and walked over to me.

"I tried your office and you weren't there," Vinnie said. "Figured you'd be here."

"Ever consider a career as a private investigator?"

"Naw," Vinnie said. "Gino wants to see you."

"You told him I was back," I said.

"He's out in the car," Vinnie said.

I went to Henry's office, got my jacket and my gun, put both of them on, and went out with Vinnie. There was a big silver Mercedes sedan double-parked on Atlantic Ave. The street was already narrowed by construction, and the traffic was having trouble getting around the car. There was a lot of honking, to which, as far as I could see, no one paid any attention. Gino Fish was in the backseat. A guy with a thick neck and a black suit was behind the wheel.

Vinnie opened the back door and I got in beside Gino. Vinnie got in the front. Gino was wearing a blue suit, a blue striped shirt, and a gold silk necktie. His hair was cut so short that he seemed bald, though he actually wasn't. He was wearing bright blue reflective Oakley sun glasses, which seemed totally out of keeping with the rest of his look.

"Drive about, please, Sammy," Gino said.

And the Mercedes pulled into traffic, cutting off a maroon van and causing more honking of horns. Neither Sammy nor Gino seemed to hear them. We cruised slowly north along Atlantic Avenue.

"I understand you were injured," Gino said.

"Yes."

"Specifically you were shot."

"Yes."

"Vinnie tells me this man dresses in gray and may be named Rugar."

"Or he may not be," I said.

"Yes," Gino said. "It is good to be precise."

We passed the garage in the North End where the Brinks job went down almost fifty years ago, and the Charlestown Bridge to what had once been City Square. Sammy kept on straight on Atlantic, under the elevated trains in front of the old Boston Garden, with the new Boston Garden behind it.

"I know of such a man," Gino said.

"Gray man?"

"Yes."

"Called Rugar?"

"Yes."

I waited. We bore right past the Garden and North Station, past the ruins of what used to be the West End.

There was a single defiant three-decker remaining, surrounded by pavement, like the isolated tombstone of a neighborhood that disappeared.

"This Rugar, who affects gray all the time-so tacky-is a gunman. He works out of New York and he is very expensive and, hence, very exclusive."

"Ever use him?" I said.

"I have Vinnie," Gino said.

"Before you had Vinnie," I said.

Gino smiled gently.

"His arrangement is simple. You pay nothing until it's done. Then you pay him promptly in full and in cash and he disappears. Once he commits to a project he stays on it until it is done, no matter how long it takes, no matter how far he has to travel. He guarantees results and he requests no payment until he gets them. Anyone who has dealt with him is not likely to try and, ah, renege on payment.

"And it prevents him from getting stung if the client turns out to be an undercover cop. He doesn't take money, he can just say he was humoring them and had no intention of killing anyone."

We went past the old Registry building and the new Suffolk County jail, past the Charles River dam, and onto Storrow Drive, going west at a leisurely pace.

"Where do I find Rugar?" I said.

"One might be better not to find him," Gino said.

"One might."

Gino sort of smiled. If it was a smile. Whatever it was, it was devoid of warmth or humor.

"People who wish to hire him," Gino said, "see an attorney in New York who arranges a meeting."

"And if the cops ever backtrack to him," I said, "he can claim that all his dealings with Rugar are privileged communication between a lawyer and his client."

"You are an astute man," Gino said.

"Yeah, and a swell dancer. How come you're telling me this?"

"Vinnie holds you in high regard."

"Good employee relations?" I said.

Gino spread his hands. They looked like the hands of a violinist.

"You know the attorney?" I said.

"Not anymore," Gino said.

"But the one you knew was a New York guy?" I said.

"Yes."

"And you don't know who replaced him?"

"No."

"No reason to think it wouldn't be a New York guy," I said.

"No reason," Gino said.

"Thanks," I said.

"You're entirely welcome," Gino said. "Where would you like us to drop you off?"

The sublet had run out, I had my office back. "My office is fine, corner of Berkeley and Boylston."

"I know where your office is," Gino said.

He leaned forward slightly.

"Did you hear that, Sammy?"

"Yes, sir," Sammy said. "Berkeley and Boylston."

"While we drive you there, may I offer another thought? I'm a thoughtful man, and what I think is often valuable."

"And your diction is tres elegant," I said.

"Thank you. My dealings with Rugar remain my business. I have spent a long and successful life among very deadly people. If I were a fearful sort, I would fear Rugar more than anyone I've ever known. I advise you to stay away from him."

"How's he compare with Vinnie?" I said.

"I would not ask Vinnie to go against him alone."

Vinnie sat in the front seat looking at the coeds from Emerson College as we turned off Storrow Drive and onto Beacon Street. He didn't seem interested in our conversation. In fact, Vinnie wasn't interested in many things. What he could do was shoot. I had never met anyone I wouldn't send Vinnie up against-except maybe Hawk. Or me.

We went up Beacon to Clarendon, turned up to Boylston, and drove back down to Berkeley. Sammy pulled up and double parked outside my building.

I said, "Thanks for the information, Mr. Fish."

"And the advice," Gino said. "You would be wise to heed the advice."

"And spend the rest of my life waiting for him to come back?"

"Perhaps he'll never learn that you survived," Gino said.

Several drivers behind us blared their horns. Sammy ignored them.

"He will if I do what I signed on to do."

"Get that schwartza out of jail?"

"Yes."

"The world is a better place," Gino said, "with him in jail."

"He didn't do what he's there for. I said I'd get him out."

"And you keep your word," Gino said.

"Yes."

Gino nodded slowly, looking past me at the corner of the Public Garden that showed on the left at the end of the block. Then he looked at me. His eyes were pale blue and as flat as a couple of one-inch washers. Again he made the motion with his face that might have been a smile.

"I don't think the beard becomes you," he said.

I got out of the car and watched as it pulled away and headed down Boylston. I watched it until it turned left on Charles Street and disappeared. Then I turned and went up to my office.

Chapter 43

"CAN'T YOU SIMPLY turn over what you have to Rita and her big law firm," Susan said. "And let them get Ellis Alves out of jail?"

"I have knowledge. I have no evidence."

"You know that the witnesses against Alves are cousins of Clint Stapleton," she said. "You know that Clint Stapleton was the victim's boyfriend. You know that that State Police Detective…"

"Tommy Miller."

"Tommy Miller was involved in some kind of cover-up and then was shot when you were threatening to find out what it was. You know that a man shot you, to prevent you from looking further."

"And I know who it was," I said. "But none of that proves that Alves was framed, and so far there is no demonstrable connection between the Gray Man and the Stapleton family."

"But you know they hired him, don't you? You know that you were shot right after you confronted Clint Stapleton."

"I don't think I can get a court to just take my word for it," I said. "I think I have to be able to prove it. Especially with a guy like Alves. Even Gino Fish thinks the world is a better place with Ellis in jail."

"So how can you prove it?"

"Keep pushing. Stapleton, his father, his mother, cousin Hunt and his wife Ms. Congeniality. They're not pros. One of them will break."

"But pushing them makes you vulnerable to the Gray Man."

"So I'll have to deal with him first."

"You think you can find him through this lawyer?"

"Yes."

"You have to do it alone?"

"The goal is to decommission the Gray Man. How is not as important."

"Hawk would help you, and Vinnie. Chollo would come if you asked him."

I nodded. We were lying in bed together in Susan's bedroom. Pearl was draped diagonally across the foot, having been but recently allowed back in. The room was dark, lit only by the odd tangential light of the mercury street lamps on Linnaean Street.

"You're going to do it alone, aren't you?"

Susan's head was on my shoulder, my right arm was around her. A Browning 9mm. semiautomatic pistol lay unholstered right beside the alarm clock on the table next to the bed.

"We'll see," I said.

"Is it like being thrown from a horse? You have to get right up and ride it again so you won't be scared?"

"Something like that, maybe."

"Are you afraid?"

"It's not a question I ask myself," I said. "It's sort of like flying. Most people I know, in fact, are a little afraid of flying. But you fly anyway because life's too complicated if you don't, and you don't pay much attention, unless you're phobic, to whether in fact you are afraid."

"Do you intend to kill him?"

"I guess that's up to him," I said.

"You plan to give him a chance to surrender?"

"I'm not sure what I'm going to do, Suze. Some things become self-evident as they develop. Readiness is all."

Susan raised up on her elbow and put her face very close to mine. Her voice was very soft, and very fierce.

"Fuck readiness is all," she said. "And fuck Shakespeare. Don't give the Gray Man a chance. Kill him as soon as you can."

"Fuck Shakespeare?"

"And the whole English Renaissance for that matter," Susan said.

"And you a Harvard grad?" I said. "A resident of Cambridge?"

"This isn't some sort of knightly errand," Susan said. "This is your life, our life. Bring Hawk with you, and Vinnie. Kill him on sight."

"I'll try to do it the best way I can," I said.

Susan settled back down with her head on my shoulder again. We were quiet.

"Yes," Susan said finally, "you will. Which is the way you should do it."

Pearl got off the bed and went purposefully to the kitchen, where I could hear her lapping water from her dish.

"Have you noticed that I have no clothes on," Susan said.

"This was brought to my attention quite forcefully," I said. "About an hour ago."

Susan ran her forefinger along the line of my bicep. "I suppose, since you've been wounded, and since you are not as young as you were when we first met, that bringing it forcefully to your attention again would be too much."

"Probably," I said. "On the other hand, it seems a shame to waste all that nudity. Maybe we should fumble around a little and see what develops."

Susan reached over and closed the bedroom door.

"Pearl won't like being shut out," I said.

"It'll only be for a little while."

"Maybe it'll be a long while," I said.

"One can only hope."

I heard Pearl return to the closed door and snuffle a little, and sigh and lie down against it. She seemed to have figured out that there were times when we had to be alone. And accepted it philosophically.

"Well, for heaven's sake," Susan whispered. "Something seems to be developing already."

"Strong," I said. "Like a bull."

Susan giggled a little bit.

"The resemblance ends there," she said.

Chapter 44

I TALKED WITH Ellis Alves again, alone, in a small conference room on the thirty-second floor at Cone, Oakes and Baldwin. He was as hostile and interior as he had been the last time. I remembered what Hawk had said: You in for life, hope will kill you. There was nothing on the conference table except a water carafe and some paper cups stacked upside down. Ellis paid no attention to it. He stood motionless, silhouetted against the bright picture window with the early fall light filling the room.

"Where's Hawk?" Alves said.

"Elsewhere," I said. "I have some things to tell you."

He didn't say anything. He simply waited, standing on the other side of the small conference table, for what I might have to say. I imagined in prison you learn to wait.

"I know you didn't kill Melissa Henderson," I said.

Alves waited.

"I can't prove it yet, but I will."

Alves waited.

"You interested in what I know?" I said.

"No."

"You're going to get out," I said.

Alves stood without speaking or moving.

"You got any questions?"

"No."

"Okay, then that's all I got to say."

"Make you feel better?" Alves said.

"No. I just figured you ought to know you're going to get out pretty soon, so you wouldn't do something dumb in the interim."

"Yeah," Alves said.

"Don't try to escape. Don't get into a fight. Don't break any rules. Nobody much wants you to get out, so don't give them an excuse to keep you."

Alves didn't say anything. He was looking at me, but I felt no contact. It was like exchanging stares with a statue.

"You got anything else you want to say before I get the guards?"

"No."

"Okay."

I got up and started for the door.

Behind me, Alves said, "How long it going to take?"

"I don't know, weeks probably, maybe days. I need to make somebody confess."

"What happens they don't?"

"I'll force it," I said.

"Been almost a year," Alves said. "How come you still doing this?"

"I was hired to do this."

"What happens to me, somethin' happen to you?"

"Hawk will finish it," I said.

We stood looking at each other for a minute.

"Couple niggers fighting the system," Alves said.

"Couple niggers and the biggest law firm in Boston," I said.

Alves walked stiffly over to the window and looked out at Boston Harbor.

"I ain't counting on nothing," Alves said.

"Best way to be," I said.

Alves nodded once, his eyes flat and meaningless, his face empty.

"Yeah," he said. "It is."

I knocked on the door and the guards opened it. "All done," I said.

They went past me into the conference room and I walked out to the corridor and punched the button on the elevator. It arrived in time, and I got in it with mail room clerks and young female secretaries and a couple of suits, and down we went.

I stopped in the lobby for a minute and watched the people hurrying freely about. They would have taken Ellis down in the service elevator and out the back. In an hour he'd be back in the joint, looking at life; his only chance to get out in the hands of a white guy he neither knew nor trusted…

breeding/lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/memory and desire… If you're a lifer, hope will kill you…

Was I mixing up my poets? At least no one was calling me the hyacinth girl.

I walked over to the parking garage where they'd found Tommy Miller's body and got in my car and headed for New York.

Chapter 45

PATRICIA UTLEY HAD moved uptown. She had a townhouse on Sixty-fifth Street between Park and Madison with an etched glass front door, which I noticed had been covered with a thick sheet of clear Lexan. On either side of the entrance there were little pillars, like the entrance to some sort of Greco-Roman shrine. Steven opened the door. He was still black and well set up, still moved with a light springiness. His short hair had started to gray. In keeping with the times, he had turned in his white coat and was wearing a blue blazer. He recognized me, though the recognition didn't overpower him.

"Mister Spenser," he said.

"Hello, Steven," I said. "Is Mrs. Utley in?"

Steven stepped back from the door so I could come in.

"Come into the library," he said, "while I find out if she can see you."

The room was in the front of the house. There was a clean fireplace with a green marble hearth on the left wall. The big arched windows looked out onto Sixty-fifth Street. There were filigreed metal inserts on the inside of each, which effectively barred someone from breaking in. I sat on a big hassock covered in green leather. All of the furniture was leather covered in green or a kind of off blue. The walls were paneled in oak, and the whole room looked exactly like the library of someone who never read but watched Masterpiece Theater a lot. There was a bookcase on either side of the cold fireplace. She seemed to have moved all her books up from Thirty-seventh Street. I remembered some of them: The Complete Works of Charles Dickens, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Longfellow: Complete Poetical and Prose Works, The Outline of History, The Canterbury Tales. They didn't look as if they'd been taken down and thumbed through fondly in the twenty years since I first saw them.

Patricia Utley herself, when she came into the room, didn't look like she'd been thumbed through much either. She was as pulled together as she always was. Her hair was maybe a little brighter, and thus a little less credible, blonder than it had been when I'd first met her. It was short and full but it didn't look lacquered. There were crow's-feet at her eyes, and only the subtlest hint of lines at the corners of her mouth. She was small, trim, stylish in a black pantsuit with a white blouse. The blouse had a low neck line, and a short rope of pearls lay against her skin above it. Her glasses were big and round and black-rimmed. I had no idea what age she was, but whatever it was she looked good. She put her hand out as she walked across the room. I stood and took her hand. She leaned gracefully forward and kissed me cheek.

"Still a detective?" she said.

"Yes," I said. "Still a madam?"

"Yes, and a fabulously successful one, if I may say so."

"As the move uptown would suggest," I said.

"My previous home was not impoverished," she said.

"No, it wasn't."

"Would you like a glass of sherry?" she said. "A real drink?"

"No, thank you," I said. "Just some talk."

"I hope you won't mind if I have a glass."

"Not at all."

She walked to a small sideboard between the big windows and poured herself a pony of sherry from a cut-glass decanter, and turned, standing in front of the window so the light silhouetted her.

"So what stray are you looking for this time?" she said.

"Maybe I just dropped in to say hi," I said. "Maybe I miss you."

"I'm sure you do," Patricia Utley said. "But I do know that in the past, whenever you have come to see me you were looking for someone's little lost lamb."

"More like a wolf this time," I said.

"Really?"

"Guy named Rugar, he's been hired to kill me, and he almost did."

"I would have thought that would be hard to do."

"He didn't succeed," I said.

The library door opened and Steven came in with what appeared to be a black and white aardvark on a leash. The aardvark had a bright red choke collar around his neck. His lost-and-found tag dangled from one of the loops on the collar. The tag was bright red also, and heart shaped.

"She's had her walk," Steven said. "And the maid says she was very good."

He leaned over and unsnapped the leash and the aardvark dashed over to Patricia Utley and wagged its tail. Astonishingly, Patricia Utley went to her knees and put her face down where the aardvark could lap it. It wasn't a very big aardvark. Maybe it was too small to be an aardvark.

"Did you have a lovely tinky tinky?" Patricia Utley said.

As I studied it, it was definitely too small to be an aardvark. But whatever it was, it was a lapping fool. It lapped Patricia Utley's face very intently.

"This is Rosie," Patricia Utley said.

She was turning her face to avoid losing all her makeup.

"That's great," I said. "Rosie is not an aardvark, is she?"

"No, of course not. She's a miniature bullterrier."

"That was going to be my next guess," I said. "Like Spuds McKenzie in the beer ads."

"I don't watch beer ads," Patricia Utley said.

She stood and Rosie turned and wiggled over to me and rolled on her back.

"She wants you to rub her stomach," Patricia Utley said.

I sat back down on the hassock and bent over and rubbed Rosie's stomach, which was quite pink.

"She likes it if you say rub rub rub, while you're doing it."

"I can't do that," I said. "You'd tell."

"Rub, rub, rub," Patricia Utley said for me.

She brought her sherry to the blue leather couch and sat on the edge of it, her knees together, her hands, holding the sherry, folded quietly in her lap. Rosie turned immediately over onto her feet, trotted to the couch, and elevated onto it without any apparent effort, as if somehow she had jumped with all four feet equally. She lay down beside Patricia Utley, put her head on Patricia Utley's lap, and stared at me with her almond-shaped black eyes that had no more depth than two slivers of obsidian.

"And now you are looking for this Rugar person?"

"Yes."

"I don't know anyone of that name."

"He works through a lawyer," I said. "Or he used to."

"Is he based in New York?"

"I think so."

"Do you know anything else about him?"

"Rugar or the lawyer?"

"Either," Patricia Utley said.

She was smoothing the fur on Rosie's tail, which looked like it belonged on a short Dalmatian. Rosie would occasionally open her mouth and close it again.

"He's American born, worked for the Israelis for a while. He's in his forties or fifties. Tall, athletic, gray hair, gray skin, seems to dress all in gray. Rugar probably isn't his real name. Very expensive, very covert."

"And if I wished to hire him I would go to a lawyer?"

"A particular lawyer. Who would set up an appointment with Rugar."

"And you don't know who the lawyer is?"

"No, hell, I don't even know if his name is Rugar."

Patricia Utley ran the tip of her tongue along her lower lip. I waited. She sipped her sherry and swallowed and repeated the tongue-on-lower-lip movement. Rosie kept looking at me. Occasionally she wagged her tail.

"I don't know of any such lawyer," she said finally.

"Where would you go if you needed someone killed?" I said.

"I have never had to consider that," she said. "Bribery has always been entirely serviceable."

"And so much more genteel," I said.

She smiled and sipped her sherry again.

"Will you be in the City long?"

"Depends how long this takes," I said.

"You would be amazed at the diversity of my client list," she said.

"No, I wouldn't," I said.

She smiled and made an assenting gesture with her head.

"No, probably you wouldn't be. But I have contact with a vast range of rich and important people. If this man, who might be named Rugar, is truly expensive, my clientele would be his market."

"Can you ask around without being too direct?"

She gave me a look as flat and impenetrable as Rosie's.

"Of course you can," I said.

She smiled.

"Where are you staying?" she said.

"Days Inn on the West Side."

She wrinkled her nose. "Really?"

"I'm on my own time," I said, "and Susan's not with me."

"Don't you yourself deserve to go first class?" she said.

"I probably deserve whatever I can get," I said. "But all I need is a room and a bath. Days Inn will do fine."

She nodded as if she weren't really listening to me.

"I'll get in touch with you there," she said.

I stood. Rosie sprang from the couch and dashed over to me and did a quick spin.

"She wants you to pick her up," Patricia Utley said.

I did. She weighed more than I would have thought.

"Dog's built like a Humvee," I said.

"But much cuter," Patricia Utley said.

"And her nose is longer," I said.

Rosie lapped me slurpily under the chin as I walked toward the door carrying her. Patricia Utley walked with me. Steven appeared in the hall. I had noticed over the years, both on Thirty-seventh Street and now here, that the front door never opened unless Steven was present. He opened it.

I handed Rosie to him and leaned over and kissed Patricia Utley on the cheek and went down the steps and turned west on Sixty-fifth Street. West Fifty-seventh Street was only about ten blocks away, but it was a lot farther than that from where Patricia Utley lived.