by Stuart Woods
“Not as well as you, but I dabble.”
“I suppose I’ll have to put clothes on to go up to Grace’s Market.”
“Yes, unless you want a ride home in a police car.”
“On my way, I’ll pick up something more casual. I haven’t been shopping for way too long.”
“As you wish.”
They settled into the sofa and sipped their drinks.
“How have your spent your time off?” Stone asked.
“Mostly just vegging and watching old movies on TV.”
“What did you watch?”
“Singin’ in the Rain, Gone with the Wind, The Best Years of Our Lives.”
“All favorites of mine, too. My son is a moviemaker. Did I tell you?”
“No. What’s he done?”
“A little independent called Autumn Kill that cost nothing to make and earned sixty-something million, worldwide.”
“Wow, he must be very good.”
“He certainly is. He has a deal at Centurion Studios, and he’s out there now, completing his second film.”
They nattered on for an hour and had a second drink.
• • •
Dino was working late when he got a phone call from the lead detective on the Bats Buono murder. “What’s happening, kid? Any luck on nabbing Marty Parese?”
“’Fraid not, Chief. Apparently, he took a powder when we raided the chop shop. Nobody will admit laying eyes on him. We’re running down some leads, though.”
“Anything new on the girl? Hank?”
“Not a thing. Her only involvement is as a victim, far as I can tell.”
“Okay, keep me posted.” Dino hung up and called Stone.
• • •
“Excuse me,” Stone said to Hank, picking up the phone. “Hello?”
“Hiya, pal.”
“Hey, Dino.”
“Just wanted to give you an update. We haven’t been able to find Marty Parese. He blew after the raid on the chop shop.”
“Oh, well,” Stone said.
“Better news—Hank is no longer considered a suspect.”
“That is good news. She’s here now, we’re having a drink and going to the Four Seasons. You and Viv want to join us?”
“Can’t do it—we’re both working late. Tomorrow night? We’ll drink some of your booze.”
“Sure.”
“We’ll let ourselves in.”
“See you then.”
They both hung up.
“How’s Dino?” Hank asked.
“He’s good, and he had a couple of pieces of news: they’ve been looking for a guy named Marty Parese, who was Buono’s partner, but no luck. Apparently, he made himself scarce after the raid on the chop shop.”
“Oh, yeah, I met him once. Onofrio introduced us in a restaurant.”
“The good news: you’re no longer a suspect.”
“That’s a relief, I guess. I’d better let Herb Fisher know.”
“You ready for some dinner?”
“I’m starving. I’ve never been to the Four Seasons.”
“It will be my pleasure to introduce you.”
Stone let them out the front door. “You saw how to arm the system going out. This is how you disarm it when you come in.” He showed her the six-digit code, then rearmed the system and locked the door behind them. They cabbed it the few blocks to the restaurant and were soon seated at a poolside table in the main dining room.
• • •
An hour and a half later, Hank dabbed at her lips with a napkin. “That was just wonderful,” she said.
“I’m glad you enjoyed it.”
“I have to go to the little girls’ room.”
“It’s on the way out. I’ll show you.” Stone signed the check, then led her downstairs. “I’ll get a cab and wait for you outside.”
Hank disappeared into the ladies’ room, and Stone asked the doorman for a cab. Nearly ten minutes passed before he found one, and Hank was just coming out the door.
• • •
Minutes later, Stone let them into the house, and after he had rearmed the system, they took the elevator upstairs.
They made love for half an hour or so, then collapsed in each other’s arms. Sometime in the night, Stone rolled over and was surprised to find her side of the bed empty, but she returned from the direction of her bathroom and crawled back in with him.
Still later, Stone was half wakened by what sounded like an electronic beep, but then he drifted off to sleep again.
• • •
In the morning, Helene sent up a big breakfast on the dumbwaiter, along with the morning papers, and they dawdled in bed. Halfway through the morning, the phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Stone, it’s Bill Eggers. I’m doing some work on the Arrington account, and I can’t find the year-to-date statement. Have you got a copy?”
“Sure, Bill. I’ll go downstairs and fax it to you.”
“Thanks. See you later.”
Stone got out of bed and put on some pants, a shirt, and a pair of slippers.
“Going somewhere?”
“I just have to run down to my office and fax a document to my law partner, Bill Eggers. He’s doing some weekend work.”
“Don’t be long,” she said.
• • •
As Stone approached his office door, he heard the sound of machinery running and wondered if Joan was doing some weekend work, too. He opened the door and saw some sort of business machine on his desk and realized it was counting and sorting money. Joan must have found a machine after all.
Then something solid struck him on the back of the neck. He didn’t remember falling to the floor.
51
Stone smelled leather, and he couldn’t understand why. There was a murmur of voices from somewhere and the fluttery sound of a machine running. He opened his eyes and found himself facedown on his office sofa; his hands were chained behind him and his feet clamped together. He had a headache centered at the base of his skull, and he was having trouble thinking clearly.
He decided not to move for a while, just to listen and get oriented.
The machine stopped, and there was the sound of something tapping from the direction of his desk. He turned his head sideways so that he could see. There was a strange man seated at his desk; he was removing stacks of bills from the machine, tapping them on the desktop to square them, then banding them and arranging them in a suitcase that lay open beside the desk, while reading numbers from the machine and noting them on a yellow legal pad. Then he heard a voice he hadn’t expected to hear.
“How long do you think this will take?” Hank asked.
Stone moved his chin down enough to allow himself a view of the other side of the desk. Hank was removing a double-handful of money from one of the leaf bags, squaring batches of the bills, then stacking them into the machine. That done, she switched it on, and it began separating and sorting the tens and twenties.
“Shit,” the man said, “even with the machine, it’s going to take us all day, at least.”
“I guess there’s no faster way to do this,” she said.
“Not unless we had a couple more counter-sorters and more people to help, and we sure as hell don’t want more people in on this.”
“No,” she said, “we don’t.”
Stone saw her begin to look his way and closed his eyes.
“He’s still out,” Hank said. “How hard did you hit him?” Her tone was one of idle curiosity, not of concern.
“Jeez, I don’t know. Hard enough to put him down and out, but not hard enough to kill him, I hope. We may need him at some point.”
“I can’t imagine why,” Hank replied.
Okay, Stone said to himself, I think I’m getting this. He rewound his memory to earlier in the evening and watched the replay on the inside of his eyelids. They had drinks; he gave Hank a key; he showed her how the security system worked; she spent ten minutes in the Four Seasons’ ladies’ room while he got
a cab; she must have made a phone call. Who else could the guy be but Marty Parese? They stopped talking and worked, and that gave him more time to think. He had come down to fax Eggers the year-to-date statement. If Bill didn’t receive it, would he send somebody over here? Stone’s question was almost immediately answered.
The phone rang three times, and the voice mail system picked up. “Stone? It’s Bill. Never mind faxing the document, we found our copy. Sorry to trouble you.” Eggers hung up.
Shit. No cavalry arriving from that direction. He did some more thinking. God knows where Joan is; long weekend. No conceivable cavalry from any other direction, either. Assuming they didn’t kill him—and that, he thought, might be an unwarranted assumption—nobody would find him until Tuesday morning. Where would Hank and her friend be by then? Acapulco? Rio? Answer: anywhere they damn well pleased. They would have a lot of luggage, of course, given the bulk of his five million dollars, even neatly stacked in suitcases. Unlikely that they would take a commercial flight; they wouldn’t want to be separated from their bags. So, they’d drive. Somewhere they could exchange the money for hundreds. Where the hell could they do that? They couldn’t just wheel it into a bank and make reverse change. Any banker in his right mind would call the FBI.
Wait a minute; why would Marty Parese have a cash counter-sorter handy on short notice? You couldn’t rent one at a tool rental place. Chop shop had to be a cash business; if you sold somebody a few thousand bucks’ worth of Mercedes bits and pieces, you wouldn’t take a check, and you wouldn’t put the cash in the bank. You’d launder it, somehow. Run it through a legit business account, maybe? One that dealt in a lot of cash? Casino? Check cashing service? Dirty bank? There must be dirty banks.
“Marty, tell me you got the groceries,” Hank said.
“A week’s worth.”
“I gave you a list.”
“Yeah, I got most of that. I couldn’t find truffle oil.”
She gave him a shopping list. When? On the phone from the ladies’ room, or maybe before that. She had a plan; she called him for dinner, not the other way around. Where would they need groceries, especially Hank’s kind of groceries? Someplace with a kitchen.
A wave of nausea struck Stone. Could a blow to the back of the head do that? He answered his own question by vomiting over the edge of the sofa.
“Jesus,” Marty said.
“Oh, Stone, poor baby,” Hank said. She went into his office bathroom and came out with a couple of towels and a trash can. She wiped his face with a damp facecloth, cleaned up the mess, and put the towels in the trash can. “Let’s sit you up,” she said. She rolled him onto his side, put his feet on the floor, and sat him up. “Is that better?”
Stone nodded and looked as dazed as he could, which, given the circumstances, wasn’t hard. He moved his hands: cuffs. He looked down at his feet: duct tape. He was secured.
“You want some water, Stone?”
He nodded. She went to the bathroom and came back with a glass. He took a sip, swished it around in his mouth, and spat into the trash can. “More.” He drank half the glass.
“Put some of that duct tape on his mouth,” Parese said.
“I can’t do that,” Hank replied. “If he vomits again, he could choke on it.”
“So what? I don’t care if he chokes, I’d just as soon put a bullet in his head.”
“Marty, I’ve told you before: if we kill him they’ll never stop looking for us, wherever we go. It’s not like killing Bats—nobody cares about him. Stone has friends in the police, and they’d really come after us. Stone can take the five-million-dollar hit without blinking. He might even be too embarrassed to tell anybody.”
“Whatever you say, babe. Now keep feeding the machine money.”
“How much are we up to?”
“Two hundred and twenty thou.”
“God. We’ll be here until Tuesday.”
“Not that long—we’re getting the hang of it now.”
They went back to work.
Stone felt better for throwing up; his head was clear now; he could think. Trouble was, he couldn’t think of any way out of this. There were things in the office he could use, but he couldn’t move. They could do with him as they willed.
That thought made him nauseous again, but he fought it down. He took some deep breaths.
“You okay, Stone?” Hank asked.
“Just confused,” he said.
“Yes, I guess this is pretty confusing for you.”
“So, was it you and Bats or you and Marty?”
“It was always Marty,” she said. “Bats was just a schmuck.”
“Ah,” he said, “all is revealed.” He was a schmuck, too. Now all he could do was sit here and wait to find out who won the argument over whether or not to kill him.
52
Jack and Hillary finished their round and went back to the clubhouse for lunch.
“You beat me on handicap,” Hillary said, after they had ordered.
“Come on, I don’t even have a handicap yet.”
“You’re playing consistently, though, which nobody with your experience ever does. I think your instructor is wrong about your playing at the eighteen-handicap level. I think you’re closer to a fifteen.”
“From your lips to God’s ear,” Jack said.
“You seem very much at peace today, Jack. I had noticed a little tension the past few days. Did something good happen?”
“Yes, something good happened. I just cleared up a little of the underbrush of my past life.”
“Underbrush? That’s a funny word.”
“Now everything is just smooth, freshly mown fairway. I don’t think I’ve ever felt quite so free.”
She squeezed his hand. “I’m happy for you, Jack. I’m happy for both of us.” She looked out at the golf course for a moment, as if she had something on her mind. “There’s something I have to say to you.”
Oh, God, he thought. And it had been going so well. His greatest fear had been something like this. He had been thinking of marriage, but now he was about to be cut down to size. “What is it?” he asked, as steadily as he could.
“Will you marry me, Jack?”
He nearly spilled his iced tea. “I was going to . . .”
“I know, you were going to back out. I was afraid that you were afraid of me.”
“Oh, no,” he said.
“You haven’t answered me. Do you want to know about my circumstances? I love you, Jack, and I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”
“There’s nothing I need to know about you, Hillary. I love you, and I’ll marry you just as fast as we can do whatever it takes to get it done.”
“Oh, that’s such a relief,” she said. “I was afraid you were afraid of my wealth.”
“Not your wealth, hon, just our different stations in life.”
“There’s no difference, Jack. We live in the same community, in the same building, even. We play at the same golf course, we have the same best friends.”
“You’re a very generous person, Hillary.”
“You’re right, I am, but I’m not exercising generosity. I feel that we are absolute equals. I’m sorry about the difference in our fortunes, but it wasn’t my fault—I inherited it.”
“I promise I won’t hold it against you.”
“There are some things you need to know about my life and the way I live it.”
“I don’t need to know anything.”
“If we’re to be married, you need to know everything. I was married twice before I met you: divorced once, then widowed. Bob was a very wealthy man, and neither of us had children. After the estate was wound up and the taxes paid, I had a stock account with about seventy million in it, and four houses. I sold the one in Scottsdale. Now I live here in the winter and in Northeast Harbor, Maine, in the summer, and the spring and autumn on Fifth Avenue in New York, across from Central Park. Do you think you could live like that? I mean, I can sell any place you don’t want to live.”<
br />
“Excuse me, I’m a little breathless,” Jack said. “I’m sure that any place you love will be fine with me.”
“There’s a lovely sailboat in Maine. Have you ever sailed?”
“Only on the Staten Island Ferry.”
“I think you’ll like it. I’m also the largest stockholder in Bob’s company and on the board, and I have the use of the corporate jet, so we don’t have to bother with the airlines. Have you done any traveling?”
“Almost none.”
“Let’s take a look at Paris, London, and Rome—for a start.”
“You talked me into it.”
“I’ve checked—we need to go to the courthouse and get a license, then there’s a three-day waiting period, and then anybody who’s a notary public can marry us. I thought my lawyer could do it.”
“That’s fine with me. Let’s ask Winston and Elizabeth to stand up for us.”
“Yes, of course. My apartment is so much bigger than yours—will you move in with me?”
“Of course.”
“The sooner the better, as far as I’m concerned.”
“Great.”
“I haven’t felt so good in years,” she said.
“I’ve never felt so good,” he replied.
“You know when I knew?” she asked.
“When?”
“When you bought the Bentley. I liked it that you included me in your decision, and especially that you had no problem taking my advice. A lot of men wouldn’t want a woman’s opinion.”
“I will always want your opinion, and I’d be a fool not to follow your advice.”
“That’s it, then.”
“Yes,” he said, “that’s it.”
“Would you like to play another round after lunch?”
“I’d love it.”
Two women in golf clothes got up from a table on the other side of the restaurant, and Hillary waved them over. “Hi, girls,” she said. “Let me introduce you to my fiancé, Jack Coulter. Jack, this is Nikki Seybold and Gail Barley, both of whom I’ve known since college.”
Everyone shook hands.
“Would you like to join us and make a foursome?” one of the women asked.
“Thanks,” Hillary said, “but I want Jack all to myself.”