Rough Weather

by Robert B. Parker

  “So you quit,” I said.

  “I resigned,” she said. “Yes.”

  “And why was it you said that you worked for the Bradshaws plural?”

  “I did,” Maggie said. “I was equally assistant to both. Run the household staff, arrange their travel, see to the laundry and dry cleaning, deal with the caterer, manage their social calendar, everything . . . except finances.”

  “Who handled the finances?”

  “Mr. Bradshaw,” she said.

  “Himself?” I said.

  “Yes, he was very private about that.”

  I nodded.

  “And is that what you came here to tell me?” I said. “That you worked for both of them?”

  “Well, yes . . . no. I don’t know. I was originally hired by Mr. Bradshaw. But what I guess I really thought you should know is that they weren’t actually separated.”

  “Tell me about that,” I said.

  “He was at the island often. They were . . . When he came to the island, almost always they . . .”

  Maggie’s face got slightly pink. She hesitated.

  “They were intimate?” I said.

  “Yes,” she said, “rather carelessly, I thought.”

  “Don’t you hate that,” I said. “Why the fake estrangement?”

  “They never explained exactly why to me, but the official word was that she had kicked him out.”

  “You don’t think his frequent intimate visits were an attempt to reconcile?”

  “No. They explained to me carefully that they weren’t really separated. But it had to do with Mr. Bradshaw’s business.”

  “But when Bradshaw died . . .” I said.

  “I felt it might be a clue,” she said.

  “But it wasn’t a clue when Adelaide was kidnapped and six people died?”

  “No, I know, it sounds foolish, but I am a loyal person.”

  “Is it fair to say you were more loyal to Mr. Bradshaw than to Mrs.?” I said.

  “I admired him very much,” she said.

  “During his time there, how did he get along with his stepdaughter?”

  “Oh,” Maggie Lane said, “Adelaide.”

  “Adelaide,” I said.

  “It was hard to get along with Adelaide. She was so mean and whiny.”

  “Anger and self-pity?” I said.

  “I suppose,” Maggie said. “I know Mr. Bradshaw tried to befriend her. But . . .”

  “Didn’t like Adelaide so well yourself?”

  “No. I mean, I was always thoroughly professional,” Maggie said. “But she was very difficult.”

  “Who did Adelaide get along with?” I said.

  Maggie thought for a moment, and shook her head.

  “How about Maurice Lessard,” I said. “Her momentary husband?”

  “I really saw very little of him or of them together,” Maggie said.

  I nodded.

  “She close to her mother?”

  Maggie almost sniffed in disdain.

  “Heidi never showed much mothering instinct,” she said.

  “How about spousal instinct?” I said.

  “I saw very little,” Maggie said. “It was mostly about sex and money.”

  “Her, too,” I said.

  “I think Mr. Bradshaw tried to be a good father to Adelaide and a good husband to Heidi.”

  “And to you?” I said.

  Her face, which had gotten pinkish at the mention of intimacy between Mr. and Mrs. Bradshaw, began to glow brightly.

  “He was a very kind employer,” she said.

  “I’m sure he was,” I said. “How about intimacy?”

  She didn’t know what to do with her face.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  I smiled at her.

  “Okay,” I said. “I won’t make you say it out loud. We both know there was intimacy. We both know you were taken with him. We both know it’s why you didn’t say anything until he was gone.”

  She put her head down into her hands.

  “Don’t feel bad,” I said. “Most of us have thought with our pelvis at one time or another.”

  61

  We were in my office. It was overcast outside, and raining tentatively with the promise of more vigor as the day wore on. Hawk was making coffee. I was gazing alertly out the window, assessing the rainwear of the women on the street.

  “You know what I can’t figure out,” I said.

  “Almost everything?” Hawk said.

  “There’s that,” I said. “But more specifically, I can’t figure out why women can look sexy in few clothes, and equally so in ankle-length yellow slickers.”

  “Maybe got to do with the woman more than it got to do with the outfit,” Hawk said.

  “That’s a possibility,” I said.

  “Or maybe it got to do with the observer,” Hawk said.

  “You are a deep bastard,” I said.

  “I am,” Hawk said. “And I’m glad you focused on the big issues.”

  “Like why Heidi and Harden were pretending to be estranged?”

  “No, I know we can’t figure that out,” Hawk said. “I was wondering why Bradshaw was boppin’ Miss Maggie.”

  “Because he could?” I said.

  “You and me could,” Hawk said.

  “But you and me wouldn’t,” I said.

  “So the question remains,” Hawk said.

  “Supply and demand?” I said.

  “Supply no issue in my life,” Hawk said.

  “Nor mine,” I said.

  “Not much variety,” Hawk said. “But very high quality.”

  “So what else could it be,” I said.

  “Taste,” Hawk said.

  My phone rang and I answered.

  “Do you know who this is?” the caller said.

  Even his voice sounded gray.

  “I do,” I said. “Thanks for asking.”

  “This is the cell phone equivalent,” Rugar said, “of a white flag. I am perhaps five minutes from your office. I have a young woman with me. I want no trouble.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to come to your office with the young woman and talk with you.”

  “Hawk is here,” I said.

  “I assumed he would be.”

  “Come ahead,” I said.

  “No one else,” Rugar said.

  “Nobody but me and Hawk,” I said.

  “Your word,” Rugar said.

  “My word,” I said.

  “Five minutes,” Rugar said.

  I hung up. Hawk looked at me.

  “Rugar,” I said, “five minutes. Under a flag of truce. He has a young woman with him.”

  Hawk nodded.

  “Curiouser,” Hawk said, “and fucking curiouser.”

  62

  When Rugar came in, Hawk was standing against the wall to my far left with his gun out. In honor of the truce, he let it hang at his side, pointing at the floor. I was behind my desk with my right-hand drawer open so I could reach a gun easily. Trust, but verify.

  Rugar was wearing a gray trench coat and a gray snap-brim hat. With him was a young woman in jeans and a white sweater. She wore a black down vest over the sweater. Her hair was in a ponytail tucked out through the opening in an adjustable Detroit Tigers cap. She wore very little makeup. She looked to be about twenty-one.

  “Adelaide?” I said.

  She nodded without saying anything. I looked at Rugar.

  “The truce does not extend to us letting you walk out of here with her,” I said.

  “She can do what she wishes,” Rugar said. “I am not her captor.”

  He took off his trench coat and folded it neatly over the arm of Pearl’s couch. He put his hat on top of it. As always, he was in gray, featuring a gray tweed jacket. His cuff links were sapphire. He took Adelaide’s down vest and placed it next to his coat. Then he nodded at a chair in front of my desk. Adelaide sat in it. He turned toward Hawk.

  “Hawk,” he said.

&
nbsp; Hawk nodded. Rugar sat down beside Adelaide. He looked at me.

  “You’re hard to kill,” he said.

  “So far,” I said.

  “You know I sent the ones who failed,” he said.

  “Yep,” I said. “I figure you knew Leonard from Marshport, and when you wanted me aced you got hold of him, and he tried to do you a favor, which got him killed. What I don’t get is why you didn’t do it yourself. It’s not your style to send someone.”

  Rugar nodded.

  “I assume you killed Bradshaw,” I said.

  Rugar nodded.

  “And now,” I said, “conscience-stricken, you’ve come to give yourself up.”

  Rugar smiled faintly.

  “I have a rather long story to tell you,” Rugar said, “at the conclusion of which we will discuss options.”

  Hawk was motionless against the far wall. He could stand perfectly still for hours if there was reason to. He didn’t get restless. He didn’t get tired. The gun didn’t get heavy. His attention didn’t waver. Adelaide sat with her knees together and her hands folded in her lap. She looked different from how she had looked. Her color was better. She looked as if she might be working out. She glanced frequently at Rugar. Otherwise, she was still. I left the drawer in my desk open.

  “In the early 1980s,” Rugar said, “I was working for the American government in Bucharest, doing the kind of work I do.”

  “I know that,” I said.

  Rugar tipped his head forward a little.

  “I’ve never doubted that you’re smart,” Rugar said.

  “Industrious,” I said.

  Rugar smiled again without any humor.

  “Both,” he said. “During that period I ran across an American named Harden Bradshaw. He was working for the embassy in some sort of propaganda capacity, and having an affair with a woman named Heidi Van Meer, who’d followed him to Romania, though she was still married to Peter Van Meer and remained so for six more years.”

  I nodded.

  “You knew that?” Rugar said.

  I nodded again.

  “You are industrious,” he said. “During the time when she was in Bucharest with Bradshaw, I met Heidi, and we had a brief sexual relationship.”

  “Excuse me, Adelaide, but Heidi has probably had a sexual relationship with Namu the killer whale,” I said.

  This time Rugar’s smile hinted at actual amusement.

  “I was hoping that she might be more selective, but I don’t think the exaggeration is misplaced.”

  “I think it was sort of how she got to be Heidi,” I said.

  Rugar nodded.

  “Have I told you anything new?” he said.

  “I figured you knew Bradshaw and probably Heidi. It was too big a coincidence that you and she and her third husband were all in Bucharest at the same time and twentysomething years later you appear and shoot up a wedding.”

  “That was not quite the plan,” Rugar said. “But I don’t want to get ahead of myself.”

  “No rush,” I said.

  Adelaide kept a check on Rugar as the story spooled out, but more and more she was watching me, too.

  “We did not have a very long run, Heidi and I,” Rugar said. “My income fluctuates. But it never constituted great wealth. Heidi was adroit and very much enjoyed physical sensation. I don’t believe she ever felt very much else.”

  I looked at Adelaide.

  “Do you mind hearing this about your mother?” I said.

  “No,” Adelaide said.

  I looked back at Rugar.

  “I left Bucharest at the end of 1984,” Rugar said. “And went on to Berlin and elsewhere. Heidi returned to her husband, Peter Van Meer. Adelaide was born in 1985. Heidi continued her affair with Bradshaw while living with Van Meer until 1990, when she divorced Van Meer, whose wealth had begun to decline, and married Bradshaw, whose wealth had increased dramatically with the death of his father.”

  “What’s love got to do with it?” I said.

  “Somewhere in the year 2004, Bradshaw’s wealth began to decline. He would never be poor in terms we would understand,” Rugar said. “But in a few years he would be unable to maintain Heidi at the level of exorbitance that she required.”

  “And she came to you,” I said.

  “They did, a few months ago,” Rugar said. “In Bucharest all those years ago, Bradshaw had become fascinated with the kind of specialty service I was able to perform. If he ever needed such, he asked, how could he reach me? I provided him a means.”

  “Both of them,” I said.

  “So Maggie Lane was right,” I said. “The estrangement was pretense.”

  Rugar smiled.

  “You underestimate Heidi,” he said. “It was, and was not, a pretense. She separated from him to coerce him but gave him sexual access, to keep him tied to her.”

  I glanced at Adelaide. She was nodding slowly.

  “Was Bradshaw in on it all the way?” I said.

  “No, he was the yenta,” Rugar said. “Once he had reconnected us, he stepped away. I think he felt that the less he knew, the less he could be asked if things went badly.”

  “So it was you and she?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “From my vantage point,” I said, “it is the most cockamamie scheme I’ve ever seen. What were you thinking?”

  “Adelaide was engaged to be married to Maurice Lessard, whose family had more money than they could ever run out of. Adelaide would be his heir, from the moment of I do. Heidi was very careful about that. Bradshaw’s major asset was his large insurance policy in Heidi’s benefit, which he still maintained through the separation.”

  “Which was probably another reason for her to remain in”—I glanced at Adelaide—“ah, sexual proximity.”

  “Surely,” Rugar said. “Heidi’s plan was as follows. At the wedding, as soon as the vows were sealed, I would kidnap Adelaide. In the process I would kill Maurice Lessard, and Bradshaw. I would hold Adelaide for ransom, which Heidi felt sure her new in-laws would pay. She would collect on the insurance, get the ransom, be reunited with her daughter, and then Heidi and I could be together again with more money than we would ever need, especially when Adelaide shared her inheritance from Maurice. The whole thing would be done in such a way as to take the focus off the two murders.”

  “Which,” I said, “if they were just routine murders, the cops would look at once for who benefited. And the finger of suspicion would point at Heidi and Adelaide.”

  “Exactly,” Rugar said.

  “But if they seemed an accidental by-product of a kidnapping attempt . . .”

  “They would expend most of their energy looking for Adelaide.”

  “And you’d get to walk into the sunset with Heidi,” I said.

  Rugar’s smile was cold.

  “I knew better,” he said.

  “But you went for it?”

  “I rejected it. I told her the plan was too convoluted. That she’d have to find someone else. I didn’t bother to ask her how her daughter might feel.”

  “She said no, it had to be me. She couldn’t trust anyone else to do it.”

  “I thanked her for her confidence but declined. And she said, ‘All right. I wasn’t going to tell you, but I have no choice.’ I said it won’t make any difference what you tell me. And she said, ‘Adelaide is your daughter.’”

  63

  It was perhaps the longest silence I’ve ever sat through. Nobody spoke. Nobody moved. Except that Hawk tapped his gun slowly against his thigh as he stood. Behind me, through my bay windows, the day was darker, and the rain was hard now, streaming down the glass. Finally, Rugar spoke.

  “I was somewhat startled myself,” he said.

  “Have you authenticated the relationship?” I said.

  “DNA,” Rugar said. “She is my daughter.”

  “Did you know, Adelaide?”

  “Not until my mother told us,” she said. “And even then I didn’t believe it until we had the
DNA test. It made it easier to go through the kidnapping.”

  I nodded.

  “And that’s why you did it?” I said to Rugar.

  “Yes,” he said. “I have no relatives. The thought of having one pleased me.”

  “I’m surprised,” I said.

  “As am I,” Rugar said.

  “Until now you had thought Van Meer was your father,” I said to Adelaide.

  “Yes.”

  “Were you close to him?”

  “No,” she said.

  “How do you feel about your new father?” I said.

  “I love him,” she said. “Papa is the first person I’ve ever had.”

  I looked at Hawk. Silently, he mouthed the word Papa.

  I looked at Rugar. He nodded.

  “Okay, Papa,” I said. “Then what happened.”

  “I knew enough about Heidi to know she would find someone to do this foolish scheme if I declined,” Rugar said. “And at least if I did it, I could see that it was done well, and I could look out for Adelaide.”

  “So you agreed.”

  “I told her I would do it,” Rugar said. “But she was to do nothing without clearing it with me.”

  “Which she agreed to and ignored,” I said.

  “She hired you,” Rugar said. “That would have been a deal-breaker had I known in advance.”

  “Why’d she do it?” I said.

  “Probably because I frightened her, and the entire adventure frightened her, and she wanted personal protection from someone who knew me.”

  “She had the Tashtego patrol,” I said.

  “She knew that those on duty would have to be eliminated if this scheme were to work.”

  “So she hired me to protect her from the consequences of an action she initiated,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s crazy,” I said.

  “I have thought since the beginning that some of what we were doing is putting on a kidnapping that was worthy of Heidi Bradshaw, and I still think so.”

  I nodded.

  “But hiring you was the ultimate mistake,” Rugar said. “I knew you would not leave it alone. I should have killed you as soon as I saw you.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You should have.”

  “It would have jeopardized the timetable. And it would have caused several formidable people, on both sides of the law, to attempt revenge.”