Playmates

by Robert B. Parker

“We put you in the ground,” Deegan said. His voice was pleasant.

  “Eek,” I said.

  “Sure, sure,” Deegan said. “I know you’re tough. We talked to a couple guys we know up here. But think about it. What’s worth dying for here? You take Dwayne down, you ruin a kid’s life that ain’t got many options. And you probably get killed in the deal. Who gets hurt if you walk around it? You get some bread for your trouble. Dwayne gets to be a big star in the NBA instead of a small time hoodlum in Bed-Sty. And who gets hurt? Team wins that should win, fans are happy. You think the college wants you to find out that there’s points being shaved? Dwayne’s a good kid, pal. Why fuck him up?”

  “How much you willing to give me?” I said.

  Deegan glanced around my office again. “Two bills,” he said.

  I shook my head.

  “How much you want?” Deegan said.

  “Two hundred thirty-eight billion,” I said.

  Deegan was silent for a moment, then he grinned slowly. “Well, like the old joke, we’ve established what you are, now we’re just haggling over price.”

  “Be a long haggle,” I said.

  Deegan nodded. “Option two’s looking better,” he said.

  We sat for a moment quietly while Deegan lit another cigarette.

  “So what are you going to do?” Deegan said.

  “Hell, Bobby, I don’t know. I was trying to figure that out when you came in and distracted me.”

  “I thought you was trying to get a look at some broad’s ass,” Deegan said.

  “That too,” I said.

  Deegan rose. “Okay, pal. You think about it some more, and I’ll check back with you. Try not to be too fucking stupid.”

  “I been trying for years,” I said. “Usually it doesn’t work out.”

  Deegan laughed and walked to the door. He opened it and stopped and looked back at me.

  “You know we mean it,” he said.

  “Sure,” I said.

  Deegan shrugged and started out.

  “Leave the door open,” I said. “I didn’t hear her come back yet.”

  13

  MAYBE a minute after Deegan left, the paralegal across the hall came back from wherever she’d been. Worth the wait.

  I put my feet up on my desk and looked at the toes of my Reeboks. Okay. I knew that Dwayne was shaving points for some New York guys of whom Bobby Deegan was one. Maybe Danny Davis. Deegan hadn’t mentioned him, but he had no reason to. I hadn’t talked to Davis. Bobby had no reason to think he was a suspect. But the kid at the school paper had said the story source was somebody’s girlfriend, and I was willing to bet it hadn’t been Chantel. Which meant at least one of the others was in on it. So what? If I decided to take Dwayne down, anyone else involved would have to go down too. If I let Dwayne off, they got off too. No point thinking about them at the moment. The thing was, a lot of Deegan’s arguments were right. Some bookies took a bath, but otherwise nobody much suffered from point shaving. The integrity of the game maybe suffered, but that was too abstract for me.

  Outside my door the corridor was still. All around me people were working away on bills of sale, and order forms and service calls. No one had time to be hanging around the corridor, not if they were going to get ahead, or be number one, or not get fired. Actually it was probably Dwayne who got hurt. Shaving points couldn’t do much for your self-respect unless you got a good feeling from slipping one by the establishment. It would make a guy like Deegan feel good. He was a nearly ideal wiseguy. He’d love the shiftiness, the hustle of it, the smart money he was making. I didn’t think Dwayne was like Deegan ... He might want to be. Who knew. So was I going to bust Dwayne for his own good? Hurts me more than it does you, Dwayne.

  “Shit,” I said.

  I owed Baron Morton and Taft University the job I’d agreed to do when they hired me. I owed Dwayne Woodcock nothing. He was an arrogant kid, but he was sullen. Okay. So I don’t turn the kid in.

  I got up and looked out my office window at the still bleak spring. Berkeley Street was washed in a pale yellow sun. On the corner of Boylston, opposite me, a young woman walked with two short gray woolly dogs on a pair of leashes. She held the leashes in one hand and carried a pooper scooper in the other. The task was a challenge to her. The dogs, who looked straight from a Disney movie, were crisscrossing in front of her tangling their leashes, and the young woman was trying to untangle them without letting go of the pooper scooper.

  “You think you’ve got problems,” I said.

  I sat back down and began admiring the toes of my shoes again. I couldn’t just walk away from it. I couldn’t blow the whistle on Dwayne yet, but I couldn’t leave Deegan and company in place either, and there was the matter of literacy. I figured Deegan wouldn’t try to shoot me for the moment. If I was killed while investigating point shaving it would produce just the result they were trying to avoid. If they were logical. I picked up the Taft file from my desk and flipped through it looking at my notes. Madelaine Roth, Ph.D.

  I got up and put on my leather jacket and went out and closed the office door behind me. When in doubt do something; and hope that if you keep doing it you’ll come to understand what it is. Across the hall the door to the paralegal office was open. She was at her desk thumbing through The Harvard Law Review. She looked up as I stepped out of my office, and smiled. I smiled back and gave her the kind of wave where you hold your hand still and wiggle your fingers. She wiggled back.

  Enthralled.

  14

  MADELAINE Roth had high cheekbones and very pale skin and a mass of auburn hair. She sat in her office wearing a dark blue silk dress splattered with red flowers, crossed her legs and let her swivel chair tilt back behind her big blond desk. The wall was covered with pictures of the Taft basketball team, clippings, letters from former players and announcements of summer tutorial offerings, new courses, new academic regulations and her three degrees, each separately framed in blond wood that matched her desk. There were bookcases on two walls filled mostly with paperback books that had the look of required reading. Her desktop was covered with papers. Her big round blue-rimmed glasses lay among the papers. There were two ballpoint pens and a red pencil among the papers as well.

  “I read the article in the student newspaper, Mr. Spenser,” she said. “And really, unfounded allegations, rumors, unnamed sources. It is simply amazing how much these students refuse to learn.”

  “Amazing in fact,” I said. “Did you ever notice that Dwayne Woodcock can’t read?”

  Madelaine’s face flushed and her dark blue eyes rounded and then narrowed almost at once.

  “I beg your pardon,” she said.

  “I said have you ever noticed that Dwayne Woodcock can’t read?”

  She shook her head. Her face was still flushed.

  “That’s, that’s simply, ah, crazy. Dwayne’s a senior in college, of course he can read. Why on earth would you say he can’t.”

  “I gave him a few pages of typescript to read and he couldn’t read it.”

  “Well, for heaven’s sake, it’s like the old voter literacy tests in Mississippi, you ask someone to read a complicated technical report and when they can’t, or perhaps simply won’t, you assume they’re illiterate.”

  “It was a discussion of several basketball games in which he played,” I said.

  Her face was very red now, and she shook her head firmly. “Literacy testing is quite a complex specialty, Mr. Spenser. I suspect that you were not entirely qualified. I wonder if Dwayne were white if you’d be so quick to assume illiteracy.”

  “Some of my best friends are jigaboos,” I said.

  Dr. Roth looked like she’d swallowed a hairbrush.

  “Mr. Spenser, I assume you’re trying to joke; but the racial cliché is offensive.”

  “I’m feeling offensive, Dr. Roth. I am sitting here being bullshitted in patronizing tones, and we both know you know he’s illiterate.”

  “I’m afraid that’s enough, Mr. Spenser
. You’ll have to leave.” Madelaine spoke with as much dignity as one could who was blushing scarlet.

  “That’s silly, Madelaine,” I said. “This is a testable hypothesis. Kicking me out won’t protect you from embarrassment when Dwayne’s illiteracy becomes public knowledge and people ask you how come you’re writing these rave reviews of his academic performance.”

  “I feel no embarrassment in trying to help a poor black boy to stay in school. Would you have me send him back to the ghetto?”

  “So you know he can’t read,” I said.

  “I know his skills are not, perhaps, what they should be, granted, but would he be better off back in that environment? The boy has a future here.”

  “He’d probably rather be called a man,” I said.

  “I know about calling black people ‘boy,’” Madelaine said. “But he is a boy.”

  “Not on a basketball court,” I said.

  “But otherwise,” Madelaine said. “He’s not a grown man. He’s a boy.”

  “Why do you say so?” I said.

  “For God’s sake,” Madelaine said. “He can’t even read.”

  I smiled. Madelaine looked at me, puzzled; why was I smiling? I smiled some more. The room was quiet. Madelaine frowned. Then the light went on. Had she not been flushed she would have flushed.

  “Well, not just because he can’t read,” Madelaine said. It was weak, and she knew it, but like a lot of academics I had met she kept chewing at it. She was so used to manipulating meaning with language that both became relative. As if you could make falsehood true by richly said restatement. Academics are not first rate at saying I was wrong.

  “What are the other aspects of his boy-ness?” I said, finally.

  Madelaine opened her mouth, closed it, took a long breath. “This is pointless,” she said. “I do not have the time to sit here and argue with some redneck detective.”

  “We’re not arguing, Dr. Roth. I’m trying to educate you, and you’re resisting. We can’t just let Dwayne’s illiteracy go,” I said, “because we think he won’t need to be able to read or because we think he can’t or won’t learn. Those assumptions, Doc, are racist, and it’s what’s wrong with this whole deal. This kid has gone through sixteen years of education, public and private, and he can’t read, and no one has bothered about that.”

  “You just called him a kid,” Madelaine said. She was sullen now.

  “He is a kid. He hasn’t got the shrewdness or the strength to admit he can’t read and get help so that he can. He thinks he’s going to make so much dough playing basketball that he won’t ever have to read. He’ll get a smart agent. And he’ll be entirely dependent on him. And when Dwayne’s about thirty-four, thirty-five, he won’t be making any more money playing basketball, and so he won’t have an agent and then what’s he going to do? Manage his affairs?”

  “But you were dreadful to me when I called him a boy.”

  “Dreadful’s a little strong,” I said.

  “I’m not a racist,” she said.

  “What’s in a name,” I said. “But when I came in here, I wasn’t sure what to do with Dwayne. Now I am. And it’s you that showed me. I’m going to treat him like a man.”

  “Does that mean you’re going to turn him in?” Madelaine said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But whatever I do I’m going to treat him like he’s responsible for himself and his life.”

  “And what about me?” she said.

  “What about you?”

  “Are you going to tell that he can’t read?”

  I stared at her.

  “It would be very hurtful to my professional standing,” she said.

  She was leaning forward in her chair now, her hands resting on the edge of her desk. Her mouth was open and her tongue moved rapidly back and forth over her lower lip.

  I was still staring.

  “Holy Christ,” I said.

  15

  HAWK and I tried to have dinner together once a week or so just as if we were regular people. After a session with Madelaine Roth, Hawk looked a lot more regular to me than he used to. We had a table against the wall in a storefront place called the East Coast Grill in Inman Square, where all the cooking was done over an open barbecue pit in the back, by a guy in a red baseball cap. I ordered the ribs, Hawk asked for grilled tuna.

  “Don’t dare order the ribs, do you?” I said.

  “Heard it came with a wedge of watermelon,” Hawk said.

  “Your national cuisine,” I said.

  We were drinking Lone Star beer, in respect to the barbecue, and the first one went quickly. As we drank, people glanced covertly at Hawk. He was wearing white leather pants and a black silk shirt. His shaved head gleamed, and his movements were almost balletic: economical and surgically exact. He never moved for no reason. He never spoke to make conversation. His white leather jacket hung on the back of the chair, and if you paid attention to stuff like that, you could see where it hung a little lopsided from the weight of the gun in the right hand pocket. When he brought the beer glass to his lips you could see the muscles in his upper arm swell, stretching the silk of his shirt sleeve. The waitress brought us a second beer.

  Hawk said, “Guy named Bobby Deegan came by to see me.”

  “Bobby gets around,” I said.

  “You know him?” Hawk said.

  “Came by my office this morning,” I said. “Urged me to lay off a thing I was looking into.”

  “S’pose you said, ‘sho nuff, Bobby,’” Hawk said.

  “I was going to,” I said. “But my chin was trembling so bad it was hard to talk.”

  “Ah,” Hawk said. “That why Bobby looking to have you clipped.”

  “Clipped?”

  “Un huh.”

  “A sweetie like me?”

  “Un huh.”

  “Gee,” I said. “I thought I’d won him over.”

  “Guess not,” Hawk said. “Bobby come in to Henry’s looking for me. Said he needed some pest removal work done. Heard I was in that business.”

  I shook my head. “Pest removal,” I said. “That hurts.”

  “Can see why it would,” Hawk said.

  The waitress came and brought ribs for me and tuna for Hawk. On the plate with my ribs were some beans, some watermelon and a big piece of cornbread.

  Hawk looked at the slab of ribs. “Mighta made an error,” Hawk said.

  “Tuna’s good for you,” I said.

  “Sure,” Hawk said. “So I ask Bobby where he heard that, and he said, guy he’d done some business with in town. I say ‘gimme a name.’ He say …” Hawk smiled happily, “ ‘Gerry Broz.’”

  I said, “A blast from the past.”

  Hawk cut a morsel off his tuna and inspected. It was pink, as promised. Hawk nodded his head once and put the tuna into his mouth and chewed. He nodded once again, and swallowed.

  “So I figure the guy’s probably straight, using Joe’s kid’s name, anybody can know Joe’s, but most folks don’t know ’bout Gerry.

  “So I say what’s the pest’s name, and he say you.”

  I was struggling happily with my ribs. Normally I ended up with barbecue sauce in my socks when I ate ribs, but I always figured they were worth it.

  “What’s he paying?” I said when I could.

  “Five bills,” Hawk said.

  “For crissake,” I said, “Harry Cotton was offering that, when, seven, eight years ago.”

  “Yeah, well, Bobby’s out of town, he don’t know ’bout you. So, I say, ‘You tell Gerry who you want hit?’ And he say, ‘No, what’s the difference?’ and I say, ‘No difference.’”

  Hawk ate a couple of grilled vegetables. I ate some beans. Hawk drank some beer, patted his lips carefully with his napkin, put it back on his lap.

  “So Bobby say, ‘Well?’ And I say, ‘Well what?’ and Bobby say, ‘You want the job?’ and I say, ‘no.’ And Bobby say, ‘How come?’ and I just look at him for a while and Bobby say, ‘Well, okay, fine, you don’
t want it.’ And I just looking at him and he say, ‘You got any suggestions?’ and I say, ‘no’ and Bobby takes a walk.”

  I shook my head. “Five grand,” I said. “That’s insulting.”

  “Hey,” Hawk said, “I just reporting the news.”

  I nodded. My ribs were gone, also the beans and the watermelon and the cornbread. Also my beer. I’d done another good job at the table.

  “These are serious guys,” I said. “Bobby came into my office this morning, offered a bribe, made a threat, neither one worked, so he went right out and found you.”

  “And when I said no he probably went on and found somebody else not as good,” Hawk said. He was working on his supper now that it was my turn to talk.

  “The only one as good would be me,” I said, “and I wouldn’t do it either.”

  “Still, they probably find some people willing,” Hawk said. “Not everybody know better.”

  “Sucker born every minute,” I said.

  “What you into?” Hawk said.

  “Basketball,” I said.

  “The national sport,” Hawk said, “of ma people. Better tell me about it.”

  I did. While I did, Hawk finished his meal, the waiter came and cleared it and brought dessert menus.

  “The bread pudding with whiskey sauce,” I said to Hawk.

  Hawk held up two fingers to the waiter and said, “Bread pudding.”

  We were eating the pudding by the time I got to Madelaine Roth. And I finished with Madelaine and the pudding at about the same time.

  “What you think ’bout Bobby,” Hawk said when I got through.

  “I think that cheerful, pally act is a very thin veneer over a very tough guy,” I said.

  Hawk nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “How ’bout I cruise around with you a while. Might meet me some adventurous coeds.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “might be able to help me get Dwayne’s attention too.”

  “Or Chantel’s,” Hawk said.

  “Hawk,” I said, “Dwayne is, you gotta remember, approximately the size of Harlem.”

  “There’s that,” Hawk said.

  “Besides, I think we’re trying to help him,” I said.