Hundred-Dollar Baby

by Robert B. Parker

  “First of all,” Corsetti said. “I got no beef with you people. I’m not looking to jam you up. I’m just looking for information on something else.”

  “And he thinks we’re the Travelers Aid station,” Brooks said and looked around the room with a big smile. The lawyer and Arnie kept their eyes on Corsetti. The bodyguard looked at nothing.

  “We know you’re doing business with some people named Lionel Farnsworth and April Kyle. We believe it’s about the whore business. We ain’t vice. We don’t care about whores.”

  “What makes you think we know them people?” Brooks said.

  Arnie glanced at him but didn’t say anything.

  “Your lawyer and I have already discussed this,” Corsetti said. “Let’s not waste time.”

  Brooks looked at the lawyer. The lawyer nodded.

  “What do you care about?” the lawyer said.

  “They’re involved in another case, where somebody died,” Corsetti said.

  “So what?” Galvin said.

  “We’d be grateful if you told us what you know about them. Might help us with the killing.”

  “We had nothing to do with killing nobody,” Brooks said. Nobody paid him any attention. Galvin and Fisher were looking at each other. The bodyguard remained blank.

  “How grateful?” Galvin said.

  “You know me, Arnie,” Corsetti said. “What goes around comes around. You do me a favor, I owe you a favor.”

  “His word’s good,” Arnie said to Galvin.

  The lawyer nodded. He looked at me.

  “How about you?” he said.

  “I’m with Corsetti,” I said.

  “He solid?” Galvin said to Corsetti.

  “Yes.”

  Galvin looked at Arnie. Arnie nodded. Galvin nodded back.

  Arnie said, “They’re looking for money.”

  “Hey,” Brooks said. “Why you telling these fuckers anything.”

  Galvin reached across the table and put a hand on Brook’s forearm and patted softly.

  “They want to set up a chain of brothels called Dream girl. National deal. They claim they already got one in Boston, and Philly and New Haven.”

  “They being Farnsworth and Kyle,” Corsetti said.

  “Yeah.”

  “And they’re looking for investors,” Corsetti said.

  Arnie nodded.

  “How’d they get to you?”

  “Mutual acquaintance,” Arnie said. “Woman named Utley. Runs a big house in the city.”

  “She sent them to you,” I said.

  “Yeah. They said she was a partner in the deal. Reason we talked to them.”

  “And,” Corsetti said, “you invest?”

  “No.”

  “Why not.”

  “I checked with Utley,” Arnie said. “She said she didn’t know anything about Farnsworth being in the deal. She said she wasn’t in it, either, as long as he was.”

  “You care who’s in it?” I said.

  “Nope, as long as they settle it. We’re not putting money into no family feud.”

  “So you told them that,” I said. “Down at Spring Street.”

  “Yeah,” Arnie said. “We said for them to straighten out who was in and who wasn’t. Get back to us.”

  “They okay with that?” Corsetti said.

  “They weren’t happy.”

  “Ask us if we care,” Brooks said.

  No one asked.

  “What did you think of the business plan?” I said to Arnie.

  He shrugged. “Plan was good. Like boutique whorehouses all over the country. Upscale whores, you know. Part-time. Housewives, stewardesses, college girls, teachers, that sort of thing. Plaid skirts, cashmere sweaters. No fucking in the washroom, blow jobs in the backseat of your car. Unnerstand? Safe, pleasant environment. Johnny Mathis on the stereo. Like fucking your eighth-grade teacher, you know?”

  “You talk with Utley?” I said.

  “Not yet.”

  “What’s in the deal for you?” Corsetti said.

  “Fifty percent.”

  “Management?”

  “We don’t put a bunch of money in something, we don’t get a say in how it goes.”

  “They cool with that?” I said.

  “He was. I’m not so sure she was,” Arnie said. “Don’t know about Utley, if she’s still in it.”

  “You think she might not be?” I said.

  “No idea,” Arnie said. “Long as we got our guy in place, we don’t care who’s in or out.”

  “Any other problems,” Corsetti said.

  Arnie shrugged.

  “Stuff needed to be cleared up. Property acquisition in each city. Who had to be greased in each city. Sources of employees…I mean, your average young housewife in suburban Dallas or someplace may not want to be a whore.”

  “Hard to imagine,” I said.

  Arnie shrugged. “You don’t invest a lot of money in something,” he said, “without knowing the answers to all your questions.”

  “Due diligence,” Corsetti said.

  “Exactly.”

  58

  “How did you know where I live?” Patricia Utley said when she let me into her apartment.

  “I’m a detective,” I said. “What happened to your face?”

  She shook her head without answering me, and we sat in her living room. Her face was swollen and bruised.

  “Somebody hit you,” I said.

  She shook her head again.

  “Would you like coffee?” she said. “A drink?”

  “Coffee,” I said.

  She went to the kitchen. She didn’t move as if she were hurt. She was steady on her feet. I looked around the living room. Tasteful, expensive, maybe too preplanned, maybe a little too much the look of a decorator. But nice. In a small while she came back and gave me my coffee in a big white mug with a painted red apple on it. Then she sat across from me on the sofa. She looked as pulled together as she always did, which was impressive since I had arrived in midafternoon, unannounced. Her makeup was covering her bruises as artfully as it could.

  “You did not come here for coffee,” she said. “What do you want?”

  “What’s going on among you and Lionel and April?” I said.

  I felt good about “among.” Spenser, gumshoe and linguist.

  Patricia Utley looked at me for a while. She was too smart to think she could pretend there was nothing. She knew that I must know, or I wouldn’t be asking the question.

  “After I talked to you last,” she said, “I called her and asked her about Lionel and the other houses. She denied everything. Said Lionel had been trying to horn in, but she had refused. Said he tried to force her and she had to hire you. She said you put a stop to it. But that you seemed somewhat too interested in the business yourself and she had to fire you.”

  “Always wanted to be a pimp,” I said.

  “I know. I was skeptical of her, and when she told me that, I knew it wasn’t true and I wondered if anything she told me were true. I pressed her. She became very upset. She said she was grateful to me for giving her the chance to run the Boston house. She said that she had nothing further to do with Lionel, and the harder I pressed her on that, the more upset she became. Finally I said, ‘Okay, we’ll agree that Lionel is history, and that he is not now, nor will he be, involved with your business—and mine.’ She agreed.”

  The light from the declining sun was reflecting off a window in the building across the street and making a small prismatic rainbow on the wall behind Patricia Utley. She didn’t appear to notice. She was looking at her hands, clasped in her lap. I waited. She didn’t say anything.

  “And?” I said after a while.

  “She began to talk about her Dreamgirl idea. She wondered if I might wish to invest.”

  “Did you?”

  “No. She assured me that she would not exploit our business in Boston, or anywhere else, but that she was looking for financing and, if I didn’t want to be involved,
did I know anyone.”

  “Who could lend her money so she could compete with you,” I said.

  Patricia Utley shrugged slightly.

  “That doesn’t seem a serious threat to me,” she said. “This is a girl’s fantasy. I’m going to be a princess as soon as I can find the right prince to help me.”

  “Did you send her to anyone?” I said.

  “No. I have contacts in this city, financial sources. But I didn’t want to compromise them. I didn’t want to be the one to send her to someone who would regret doing business with her.”

  “She’s unraveling,” I said.

  “Yes. Before our eyes,” Patricia Utley said. “I have liked her especially, partly because you sent her to me, but…” She shook her head. “The life she has led is catching up to her.”

  “Your life hasn’t unraveled you,” I said.

  “My life is not her life,” Patricia Utley said. “I got into the sex business because, frankly, I liked sex, and it seemed easy money. And, early, I got into the management end of it.”

  “Where liking sex didn’t matter.”

  “Where I could choose who to have sex with,” she said, “and never mix it with business.”

  “For April, sex mixes with everything,” I said.

  “Your girlfriend could probably explain it,” Patricia Utley said. “I only know that it’s so.”

  “My girlfriend can explain everything,” I said.

  “You are very lucky,” Patricia Utley said.

  “Yes,” I said. “I am.”

  “More coffee,” she said.

  “Thank you, no.”

  We were quiet again.

  “We’ll get to the bruises eventually,” I said.

  She was still looking at her hands. She nodded slowly. I waited.

  “I got a visit,” she said gently, still looking down, almost as if she were talking to herself. “From a man named Arnie Fisher.”

  “You know Fisher?” I said.

  “I knew of him. We had never met. He told me that April and Lionel wanted investment money from the DeNucci family,” she said.

  “He said DeNucci?”

  “No. He said his people, but I know who his people are.”

  I nodded.

  “He said that they told him I was the third partner in the deal,” Patricia Utley said. “That I had a proven track record running this sort of thing. They said that they had already established three Dreamgirl sites.”

  Patricia Utley shook her head sadly.

  “One in Boston,” she said. “One in Philly. One in New Haven.”

  “These are bad amateurs,” I said.

  “Yes. Imagine scamming the DeNucci family?”

  “You spoke up?” I said.

  She raised her head and smiled at me without very much oomph.

  “Yes. I said I had nothing to do with Dreamgirl, that April was an amatuer, and that Farnsworth was dishonest and incompetent.”

  “What did Fisher say?”

  “Very little. He listened. He nodded. When I was through he thanked me and said he’d like to talk with me again, if I were willing.”

  “Were you willing.”

  “I said I was always willing to talk.”

  I sat back a little on my chair, looking at the rainbow on the wall. It had shifted position as the sun sank and the angle of reflection changed. It had also elongated.

  “And when they had lunch downtown,” I said, “with Arnie and Brooks DeNucci, Arnie told them no deal unless Lionel were out. And, maybe, you were in.”

  She shrugged.

  “And they came roaring up here to talk you into it and there was an argument and somebody hit you.”

  “April,” Patricia Utley said. “She was crazy. She said it was her chance and she was going to make it happen. We talked and talked, but I wouldn’t budge. They said it was a lock if I were in, that was Farnsworth’s word, a ‘lock.’ And I said I was not in and would never be in, if he were involved. We argued about that some more until I said that it was futile and asked them to leave. I stood. We walked to the door. And she started quite suddenly and without a word to hit me. First a slap and then with her fists.”

  “What did you do?” I said.

  “I was as much startled as hurt at first, and I covered up and backed away. She came after me, hitting me.”

  “What did Farnsworth do.”

  “Nothing,” Patricia Utley said. “I sort of had the sense that it scared him. He doesn’t seem a physical type of man.”

  “Then what?” I said.

  “She stopped quite suddenly and turned and walked out with Farnsworth behind her.”

  “And that was it?”

  “No, a few hours later she called to apologize. She said she had lost her mind for a moment, the way a kid does with her mother. I had been like a mother to her, she said.”

  “Apology accepted?”

  Patricia Utley shrugged.

  “I’ve been hit before,” she said. “And, you know, I still care about April. So do you. It’s why you’re here.”

  I nodded.

  “She say anything else?”

  “She said if I’d think about joining Dreamgirl, she would rid us of Lionel.”

  “What’d you say?”

  “I was trying to think still how best to save her, if it’s not too late.”

  “I think it’s too late,” I said.

  “But you’re not sure, and neither am I. I told her if she could demonstrate to me that Lionel was really out of her business and her life, we could talk.”

  “Were you serious?” I said.

  “I was serious about talking,” Patricia Utley said. “I was not serious about the business.”

  “You hear from her since?”

  “No.”

  I let out a long breath. Patricia Utley smiled at me.

  “That sounds almost like a sigh,” she said.

  “If I weren’t such a toughie,” I said, “it would be.”

  59

  It was pretty good spring weather, so when I left Patricia Utley I walked back to the West Side. I needed the exercise. I had done nothing but sit and stare and listen and nod for days. I felt like a rusty crankshaft. There were a lot of dogs in the park, which made me feel better. When I got to Lionel’s building, Hawk wasn’t there. Which meant April wasn’t there. I thought about bracing Lionel, but I knew I’d have trouble with the doorman, who already knew me for a phony and a Bostonian. It was late. I walked back across the park to my hotel.

  In the room, my message light was flashing. I had voice mail. It was Hawk.

  “Called your cell,” he said. “But no answer. Figured you don’t know how to retrieve messages on it. So I didn’t leave one. April come out, got her car, and headed north, me behind her. At the moment I’m behind her, south of Hartford. I think we going home.”

  I called Hawk’s cell.

  “Yeah?” he said.

  “Stay with her,” I said. “I got a couple bases to touch here and then I’ll drive your car home and bring your stuff.”

  “Careful of the car,” Hawk said.

  “I’ll be in touch,” I said.

  After I hung up I made myself a strong scotch and soda and took a pull and looked out the window and let out a long, though tough and manly, exhale and rubbed the back of my neck. Below me the traffic, mostly cabs, raced uptown as if it was important to get there. I watched them for a while and drank my scotch. It seemed a perfect time to review what I was doing. Which didn’t take long, since I didn’t know. The crime under consideration was who killed Ollie DeMars. I was supposed to be interested in that. It was what I did. But my real goal seemed to be the salvation, again, of April Kyle. Which, I supposed, was also what I did. What I knew was that I wasn’t getting anywhere with either.

  I went back to the minibar for a refill, then I sat on the bed with my drink and called Susan.

  “I’m alone in my hotel room,” I said, “drinking scotch and heaving long sighs.”
r />   “Would phone sex help?” she said.

  “Probably.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Glad to accommodate—who is this, please?”

  “Oh, good,” I said. “Toy with me, in my despair.”

  “You have never despaired in your life,” Susan said.

  “Until now,” I said.

  “Tell me about it,” Susan said.

  I did. Susan listened quietly, offering only an occasional encouraging “uh-huh.”

  “So,” I said, “my question to you, doctor, is, What’s up with April?”

  “I’ll spare you the perfunctory preface about not having examined April and thus not being in a position to make a solid diagnosis.”

  “Thanks,” I said, “for sparing me that.”

  “I can, however,” Susan said, “make an informed guess.”

  “Please,” I said.

  “I’ll probably need to use the phrase deeply ambivalent,” Susan said. “Can you handle it.”

  “You’re a shrink,” I said. “You have to talk that way.”

  “Okay,” Susan said. “I would guess, and what I know of her history would certainly suggest it, that she is deeply ambivalent about men.”

  “There it is,” I said.

  “Yes,” Susan said, “I warned you. Everything that she has ever gotten she has gotten by seducing men, you included.”

  “Seduced in a broad sense,” I said.

  “Yes. Seduction needn’t be sexual. And everything bad that has ever happened to her has been caused by men.”

  “In fact?” I said.

  “In her fact,” Susan said. “The way people experience things is not necessarily consonant with empirical fact.”

  “Consonant.”

  “Remember the Harvard Ph.D.,” she said. “This Dream girl scheme seems a perfect expression of her situation.”

  “She sees it as a way out of dependence on men,” I said. “But to do it she has to depend on men.”

  “She has moved from Lionel, to Ollie, to you, to Lionel again. My guess is that you, or maybe even Hawk, are waiting in the wings, when the buffeting of circumstance, and her own ambivalence, overwhelms her again with Lionel.”

  “Which it will?” I said.

  “Predictions are hard,” Susan said. “Explaining afterwards is what shrinks do better.”