Hundred-Dollar Baby

by Robert B. Parker

  “Informed guess?”

  “She’ll be overwhelmed,” Susan said.

  “Any tips on saving her?” I said.

  “Maybe she can’t be saved,” Susan said.

  “I know,” I said.

  “She’s had these furrows grooved into her soul by her whole existence.”

  “Shrinks don’t say ‘soul.’”

  “Never tell,” Susan said. “When are you coming home?”

  “Tomorrow or the next day,” I said. “How about that phone sex?”

  “Better than nothing,” Susan said.

  60

  I was in the backseat of a Cadillac with Arnie Fisher, driving slowly though Central Park. There was a glass partition between us and the driver. There were joggers. The trees were beginning to bud. Baseball opened next week. Life was quickening.

  “Corsetti said you wanted to talk private, just me and you.”

  “What are your plans for April Kyle.”

  “Depends,” Arnie said.

  “On?”

  “Well, naturally, Brooks gotta okay anything we do.”

  “Or his daddy,” I said.

  “His daddy’s in jail,” Arnie said.

  “Yeah?”

  “So Brooks is the man.”

  “The hell he is,” I said. “Brooks couldn’t run a birthday party.”

  “No?” Arnie said.

  “The old man’s running it through you,” I said.

  Arnie shrugged. “If that were true, so what?”

  “So what are your plans with April Kyle?”

  Arnie grinned.

  “You’re pretty cocky for a yokel out of Beantown,” he said.

  “Ever since we won the series,” I said. “You still interested in Dreamgirl?”

  “What’s your interest?”

  “April Kyle.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yep.”

  Arnie nodded slowly.

  “Corsetti says you’re the real deal,” Arnie said.

  I waited.

  Arnie nodded some more.

  Then he said, “We like the concept.”

  “Dreamgirl,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Even though the cops are starting to circle it?”

  “We can await developments on that,” Arnie said. “It’s not a deal-breaker.”

  “So what’s your problem.”

  “We’re not happy with the management setup,” Arnie said. “Girl don’t seem too smart. Guy is a weasel.”

  “Ah,” I said, “you know Lionel.”

  Arnie grinned.

  “I know a lot of Lionels. Half as smart as they think they are. Word’s no good. Pressure builds, they’ll sell you out for a bottle of beer.

  “We could work with her,” Arnie said. “But she ain’t in.”

  “Why not just take the idea and run with it?” I said.

  “Could,” Arnie said. “Thing is, we ain’t really interested in being in the whore business. Dion don’t actually approve of it. But this thing falls in our lap. We consider it. But we got to start from scratch. We got better things to do.”

  “How’d they get to you in the first place?”

  Arnie smiled.

  “Brooks,” he said.

  “Figures,” I said. “How’d he know them?”

  “Knew Farnsworth in Allenwood.”

  “Brooks has done time?” I said.

  “You wanna call it that,” Arnie said. “Six months watching TV.”

  “So Brooks likes this idea?”

  “Brooks trying to be a player.”

  “Genes seem to thin out, don’t they,” I said, “as the generations proceed.”

  “He ain’t Dion,” Arnie said. “But he’s Dion’s kid. We look out for him.”

  “So it doesn’t matter whether he likes this deal or not.”

  “No, not really,” Arnie said.

  “So without Patricia Utley, there’s no deal.”

  “We might go for an arrangement,” Arnie said, “where we had one of our people running it.”

  I nodded.

  “You have people that know the whorehouse business?” I said.

  “The broad and Lionel can run that part,” Arnie said. “Our guy would run the books.”

  “Where do you stand now with them?” I said.

  “They’ll get back to us,” Arnie said. “Why you after April Kyle?”

  “I’m trying to save her,” I said.

  “From what?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  61

  When I got back to the hotel, there was a message on my voice mail.

  “Corsetti. Meet me at Farnsworth’s place.”

  Talkative.

  I decided I could walk there as fast as I could cab, so I did. When I got to Central Park West I saw the police vehicles, five or six of them, including the coroner’s wagon. Half a dozen uniforms were standing outside, giving the hard eye to pedestrians. The doorman was standing around in a state of proprietary uncertainty.

  “Detective Corsetti told me to meet him here,” I said to a thick uniform by the front door.

  “Yeah? What’s your name?” the uniform said.

  “Spenser,” I said.

  “What’s he want to see you about?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  The cop looked annoyed. He turned and opened the little brass door and took out the house phone. He looked at it for a moment, then turned to the doorman.

  “You,” he said. “Dial the apartment, ask for Corsetti, gimme the phone.”

  “You bet,” the doorman said and did it.

  “Flanagan, on the front door, Detective. Guy down here named”—he looked at me—“whad did you say your name was?”

  “Spenser.”

  “Spenser,” the cop said into the phone. “What, okay Detective, okay.”

  He handed the phone back to the doorman. And jerked his head at me.

  “Go ahead,” he said.

  It sounded as if he didn’t like saying it.

  When I got off the elevator, there were two more uniforms in the hallway outside Farnsworth’s apartment.

  “Corsetti?” I said.

  “You Spenser?”

  “Yeah.”

  One of the cops jerked his head at the apartment door, and I went in. There were technicians at work and several detectives standing around with notebooks. One was Corsetti. On the floor among them was a body, with a crime-scene guy crouched beside it.

  “Farnsworth?” I said to Corsetti.

  “Probably,” Corsetti said. “You know him, take a look.”

  I stepped over and looked. It was not a fresh kill.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Farnsworth.”

  “Cleaning service comes once a week,” Corsetti said. “They came in this morning and found him.”

  “How long?” I said.

  Corsetti glanced at his notebook.

  “Yesterday sometime,” he said. “Small-caliber gun. Several wounds. Won’t know exactly how many until they get him on the table downtown. No shell casings.”

  “So probably a revolver,” I said.

  “Or a neat shooter,” Corsetti said.

  “And a cool one,” I said. “Fire off several rounds in a residential building and stop to police the brass?”

  “If he did, he got away with it,” Corsetti said.

  “Good point,” I said.

  “You know anything about this?” Corsetti said.

  “No.”

  “Where’s your little girl friend?”

  “April? I don’t know.”

  It was technically not a lie. I didn’t know exactly where she was.

  Corsetti nodded.

  “How about Patricia Utley?” he said.

  “Wow,” I said, “you remembered.”

  “Of course I remembered. How do you think I made detective?”

  “I was wondering about that,” I said.

  “You got any reason to think she could
have shot Lionel?”

  “You know what I know,” I said. “There was some conflict over this deal with the DeNuccis. But nothing should make her shoot him.”

  “Just run through it again for me,” Corsetti said.

  I did, including the part where April smacked her around.

  “Maybe she lied about who hit her,” Corsetti said. “Maybe it was Farnsworth slapped her around. Maybe she got even.”

  “Doesn’t seem like Farnsworth’s style,” I said.

  Corsetti nodded.

  “Small-caliber gun,” he said, “like a woman would use.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “sure. You know and I know that most people use the gun they can get their hands on, not the gun ideally suited to them.”

  “Just a thought,” Corsetti said. “What do you think about the DeNuccis?”

  “My guess, no,” I said. “Talking to Arnie Fisher, I think they will do the deal on their terms or not at all, and they don’t much care which.”

  “’Course that’s what Arnie says.”

  “And I’m a gullible guy,” I said.

  “Aren’t we all,” Corsetti said.

  “Lionel let the shooter in?” I said.

  “Apparently,” Corsetti said. “No sign of forced entry. No sign of socializing, either, no wineglasses, no coffee cups. Bed was made. Cleaning people say he normally left it un-made on the day they came, so they could change the linen and make it.”

  “So he didn’t sleep in it last night,” I said.

  Corsetti nodded, looking down at the corpse.

  “Lionel probably slept right here last night,” he said. “You run into April, you’ll let me know.”

  “You bet,” I said.

  62

  I got home from New York around two in the afternoon. I stood for a while and enjoyed it. The silence in my apartment. The lack of clutter. The mine-ness. I looked at Susan’s picture on my mantel. She’d be with patients until five today. Then she had a seminar she was giving at Harvard. Tomorrow she was mine. I went into the bedroom and unpacked. At quarter to three, Hawk showed up and we sat at my kitchen counter and had a beer.

  “Where is April?” I said.

  “In the mansion,” Hawk said. “I stopped by, told her I was in the neighborhood. See if she was okay.”

  “She okay?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Hawk said.

  We were quiet. Hawk’s face showed nothing. But there was something.

  “What?” I said.

  “I think she have a new man in her life,” Hawk said.

  “Who?”

  Hawk studied the label on the beer bottle. Blue Moon Belgian White.

  “How come this Belgian stuff brewed in Denver?” he said.

  “Nothing is as it seems,” I said. “Who’s the new man?”

  Hawk smiled. There was always something radiant about Hawk’s smile. It came so suddenly and passed so quickly, and yet seemed so genuine in its short span.

  “Me,” Hawk said.

  I was silent for a moment.

  Then I said, “Oh, Christ.”

  “Yep,” Hawk said. “She say since she first saw me she attracted.”

  “Isn’t everybody,” I said.

  “True,” he said. “She say she tried not to let herself feel that way, but she wasn’t strong enough. She suggested carnal relations.”

  I waited.

  “I tole her I tried to take Thursdays off,” Hawk said. “Rest up for the weekend.”

  “How’d she take that?”

  “Sort of rattled her,” Hawk said. “But she kept her focus. She say, ‘Okay, let’s have dinner tomorrow.’”

  “What does she want?” I said.

  “You saying she might not mean it?” Hawk said.

  “She may mean it, but it’s been a long time since she did it for love,” I said.

  “Been a long time since she knew somebody like me,” Hawk said. “Plus, she say she have a dream, and she tell me she want to share that dream with me, with a man like me strong enough to believe in dreams, strong enough to make them come true.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “that would be you.”

  “She tell me about Dreamgirl, like I never heard of it, and about how everybody keep trying to stop her and keep betraying her but how she won’t give up and all we need to be happy is to be together and support each other.”

  “She mention me at all?” I said.

  “She did,” Hawk said.

  “She love you better than me?”

  “She didn’t actually say so, but I able to surmise it,” Hawk said.

  “Anything specific?”

  “She ask me to kill you,” Hawk said.

  I drank some beer.

  “So that’s what she wants,” I said.

  “’Pears so,” Hawk said. “Plus, of course, she love me.”

  “She say why she might want you to kill me?”

  “She say you won’t leave her alone. That you want to control her like her daddy did and keep her a child and won’t let her achieve her dream.”

  “Damn,” I said. “And here I thought it was just tough love.”

  “Parenting is hard,” Hawk said.

  “Did you agree?” I said.

  “I tole her we could talk about it over dinner.”

  “So you haven’t decided yet,” I said.

  “Actually, I have,” Hawk said. “I can’t kill you. Ain’t nobody else can stand me.”

  “Good point,” I said.

  63

  I sat with Hawk in his car, half a block from the mansion, looking at April’s front door.

  “You talk with Susan ’bout April?” Hawk said.

  “No.”

  “You think you might want to talk with Susan ’bout April?” Hawk said.

  “No.”

  “She knows about stuff like this,” Hawk said.

  “She does.”

  “But?”

  “But since April has decided to have me killed, Susan’s objectivity will be too compromised,” I said. “Won’t matter what she knows.”

  “Unlike you and me,” Hawk said.

  “We’re used to having people decide to kill us.”

  “And not being able to,” Hawk said.

  “So far,” I said.

  Hawk turned his head to look at me.

  “Really upbeat today,” he said.

  I shrugged.

  “’Spose we can’t just kill her first,” Hawk said. “’Fore she finds somebody willing to try.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Okay,” Hawk said. “So we wait. When she finds somebody willing to try, we kill him.”

  I nodded. We sat and looked at her front door. Spring had finally arrived in the Back Bay. The snow was mostly gone. Birds hopped in the budding trees. I was comfortable in my lightweight warm-up jacket.

  Without looking at me, Hawk said, “You done what you could.”

  I nodded.

  “Her old man kicked her out of the house twenty years ago,” Hawk said.

  I nodded.

  “Called her a whore,” I said.

  “She been living up to it ever since,” Hawk said. “Makes salvation hard.”

  “It does.”

  A young woman in jeans and a red fleece vest walked four small dogs on leashes along the mall in the middle of the avenue.

  “The pimps got her,” Hawk said. “You got her away from them.”

  “And sent her to a madam.”

  “A high-class madam that would look out for her,” Hawk said.

  I nodded.

  “What were your choices?” Hawk said. “She wouldn’t go home. She wouldn’t go to the state. You gonna adopt her?”

  I shook my head.

  “You done what you could,” Hawk said.

  I didn’t answer. Two well-dressed men turned into the front walk of the mansion. I looked at my watch. Eleven fifteen in the morning.

  “She had it pretty good with Patricia Utley,” Hawk said. “And she run off.”r />
  “She thought she was in love,” I said.

  Hawk nodded.

  “And she ends up in like sexual slavery,” Hawk said. “And you get her out of that.”

  “Crown Prince Clubs,” I said. “Probably where she got the Dreamgirl idea.”

  “Being as she was having so much fun,” Hawk said.

  I watched the quartet of small dogs with their walker. Three of them pulled hard, stretched out at the end of the leashes. One, a wiredhaired dachshund, stayed close to her walker’s ankles.

  “You can’t save her,” Hawk said. “She been in the muck too long. She fell into it too early.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “She probably kill Ollie DeMars. It’s why Ollie let her in and made sure they were alone. He think he going to get his ashes hauled.”

  “I know.”

  “Pretty surely she kill Lionel in New York,” Hawk said. “Ain’t no one else that makes any sense for it.”

  “I know.”

  The sun was nearly overhead. The car was warm. We sat with the engine off and the windows open. Traffic was sparse at midday. The promising spring air moved through the car.

  “So why don’t you just give her to Belson,” Hawk said. “Let him and Corsetti sort it out.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Okay,” Hawk said. “You don’t like that, I got another suggestion. Why n’t you go on in and try to save her. Give her a chance to shoot you.”

  “I was thinking more along those lines,” I said.

  64

  April and I were in her apartment on the top floor of the mansion again. She looked as good as she had when she came to my office in the winter. Even in jeans and a white T-shirt, she was elegantly pulled together, with just enough maturity in her face to look like a grown-up.

  “I don’t know what we have to say to each other,” she said.

  “There’s a lot I don’t know,” I said. “And there’s probably some I’ll never know. Everybody has been lying to me since we began. But here’s how I think it went.”

  “What are you talking about?” April said.

  “I figure it started clean enough. Mrs. Utley gave you charge of one of her spin-off houses. It was probably mostly an experiment, see how they worked. But you had already fallen in love with Lionel Farnsworth, and it went south pretty quick.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” April said.