Bad Business

by Robert B. Parker

  I took the elevator to the seventh floor, and walked down to the twelfth door to the left, which was where Rowley had knocked. It was room number 717. I wrote it down and went back downstairs and took a seat in the lobby near the elevators, across from a little guy with a big nose. He was wearing a tan windbreaker and reading the paper. He was seriously engaged with his newspaper. Now and then as he read he'd smile or frown or shake his head. I on the other hand was seriously engaged in looking at the people who came and went into and out of the elevator. In my first hour I saw three women who passed muster, one of whom was a rare sighting. She earned nine on a scale where Susan was ten. I could hear the piano in the cocktail lounge. By 11:15 the foot traffic had thinned at the elevator. I had turned to thinking about my all-fathers-and-sons baseball team. The little guy with the big nose had finally given up on the newspaper and appeared to be whistling silently. Songs unheard are sweeter far. Ihad gotten as far as Dick Sisler at first when the door to room 717 opened and Trent Rowley came out with a woman. The woman was carrying a large purse with a shoulder strap. They walked to the elevator and came down. She looked good getting off the elevator. Short blond hair brushed back. Good body, maybe a little heavy in the legs, but nothing to disqualify her. Her eyes were made up and her lipstick looked fresh. Despite that, I thought there was some sort of postcoital blur in her expression. It might not stand up in court, but it was an expression I'd seen elsewhere.

  I wasn't wrong. They walked past us toward the corridor that led to the parking garage. I got up as soon as they passed and hot-footed it down to get my car from the doorman. The little guy with the nose was right behind me. We looked at each other while the doorman got our car keys.

  "You're following her," I said. He grinned.

  "And you're following him." I grinned.

  "And now we'll switch," I said. He nodded.

  "You'll follow her home, and I'll follow him home. And then we'll know who's who."

  "Might be easier," I said, "to pool information."

  "Nope," the little guy said, "got to be done right."

  The little guy took a business card out of his shirt pocket. "But maybe we can talk later." He handed me the card. "Save you from chasing down my registration."

  I took his card and gave him one of mine and we both got in our cars as Rowley pulled out of the parking garage. The little guy gave me a thumbs-up gesture and pulled out behind Rowley and drove off after him. I did the same with the woman.

  5

  The little guy's name was Elmer O'Neill, and his card said he conducted discreet inquiries. Me too. He arrived at my office the next morning right after I did.

  "You got any coffee?" he said.

  "I'm about to make some," I said.

  "Good."

  He sat in one of my client chairs with his legs crossed, while I measured the coffee into the filter basket and the water into the reservoir and turned on the coffeemaker.

  "Your name's Spenser," he said.

  "Yep."

  "You know mine."

  "I do."

  The coffeemaker gurgled encouragingly. I put out two coffee mugs and two spoons, and some sugar, and a small carton of half-and-half. Elmer looked around my office.

  "You must be doing okay," he said.

  "Because my office is so elegant?" I said.

  "Naw. The place is a dump. But the location-must cost you some rent."

  "Dump seems harsh," I said.

  E lmer made a gesture with his hand as if he were shooing a fly.

  "It's why I'm in Arlington," he said. "Costs a lot less and I can still get in town quick when I need to."

  The coffee was done. I poured it out.

  "You find out my client's name yet?" I said.

  "He lives in Manchester," Elmer said. "And after we talk I can check his plates at the registry."

  I nodded.

  "His name is Trenton Rowley," I said. "He's the CFO of a company in Waltham called Kinergy."

  E lmer nodded as if that meant something to him. He set his coffee cup on the edge of my desk, took out a small notebook, and wrote it down.

  "Who's the woman?" I said.

  "Ellen Eisen," he said. "Husband works the same place."

  "Kinergy?"

  "Un-huh."

  "And they live in the new Ritz condos off Tremont Street."

  "And you were going to check her plates at the registry if I didn't tell you."

  "Might anyway," I said.

  "Shit," Elmer said. "You don't trust me?"

  "He hire you?" I said.

  "Yep. Rowley's wife hire you?"

  "Un-huh."

  E lmer leaned back a little in his chair so that the front legs cleared the floor. He rocked the chair slightly with his toes. "Well," he said. "We know they're fucking."

  "We know they spent time together in a hotel room," I said.

  "Oh hell," Elmer said. "A purist."

  "Didn't you say everything had to be done right?"

  "That's because I didn't know if I could trust you."

  "How unkind," I said. "My client will want something more solid than the shared hotel room. She plans to 'get-everything-he-has-the-philandering-bastard.' "

  "My guy just wants to know is she cheating on him," Elmer said.

  "His name is Eisen?"

  "Yeah, sure."

  "Sometimes women keep their, ah, premarital name," I said.

  "Ain't that horseshit," Elmer said. "Guy's name is Bernard Eisen. He's COO at, whatsitsname, Kinergy."

  "Small world," I said.

  "So," he said. "I guess we should tell the clients."

  "I'd like to let themselves dig a deeper hole," I said. He drank a little more coffee.

  "That's 'cause your client wants more than mine does."

  "True," I said. "But if you tell yours then I probably won't be able to get what my client wants."

  "But my client will settle for what I know now."

  "An ethical dilemma," I said.

  E lmer frowned a little.

  "Don't run into many of them anymore," he said. "You got more coffee?"

  I poured him another cup. He added a lot of sugar and half-and-half, stirred it slowly.

  "There's another little thing," he said.

  "Well," I said. "Two cups of coffee ought to buy me something."

  He grinned.

  "Somebody seems to be tailing Mrs. Rowley, too."

  6

  Susan and I were sitting on a stone pier at the beach in KenS nebunkport, looking at the ocean and eating lunch out of a wicker basket.

  "So," she said, "if I understand it. You are, on behalf of Mrs. Rowley, trailing Mr. Rowley, who is having a clandestine affair with Mrs. Eisen, who is being followed by Elmer O'Neill on behalf of Mr. Eisen."

  "Exactly," I said.

  Susan had a lobster club sandwich, which she ate by taking the two slices of bread apart and eating the various components of the sandwich separately, slowly, and in very small bites.

  "And after their rendezvous, for purposes of identification, you trailed Mrs. Eisen home . . ."

  "To the new Ritz."

  She ate a piece of bacon from the sandwich. I had a pastrami on light rye, which I ate in the conventional manner.

  "And Mr. O'Neill trailed Mr. Rowley home."

  "Yes."

  "And encountered someone conducting surveillance on Mrs. Rowley."

  "Yes. "

  "How hideous," Susan said.

  "Hideous?"

  "A gaggle of private detectives," she said. "You assume that Mr. Rowley is also trying to catch Mrs. Rowley?"

  "I do," I said.

  Susan ate a part of a lettuce leaf. A fishing boat chugged in toward the river past us, a boy at the wheel. A man stood next to him. We watched as they passed.

  "A veritable circle jerk," Susan said.

  "Wow," I said, "you shrinks have a technical language all your own, don't you?"

  "Bet your ass," Susan said. "Do you know the identity of t
he third snoop?"

  "No. Elmer didn't get the plate numbers."

  I ate my half-sour pickle and looked at the dark water moving against the great granite blocks below us.

  Susan said, "None of this changes what you were hired to do, of course."

  "Of course."

  "Do what you were hired to do, collect your pay, and move on."

  "Yep."

  The movement of the immediate water sort of dragged me outward toward a bigger and bigger seascape until I felt the near eternal presence of the ocean far past the horizon.

  "But you won't," Susan said.

  "I won't?"

  "Nope."

  We had a couple of bottles of Riesling. I poured us some wine. "A jug of wine, some plastic cups, and thou," I said.

  "You will have to know if Mr. Rowley hired someone to follow Mrs. Rowley and if so, why."

  "I will?"

  "Yes."

  "Why is that?" I said.

  "Because of how you are. When you pick something up, you can't put it down until you know it entirely," Susan said. "Your imagination simply won't let go of it, and, whether you want to or not, you'll be turning it every which way to see what it's made of."

  "Do you have a diagnosis?"

  "It's what in my profession we call characterological."

  "Which means you haven't an explanation."

  "Basically yes," Susan said. "It's simply how you are."

  "You sure?"

  "Yes."

  "Because you know me so well?"

  She smiled. "Yes."

  "And ... ?" I said.

  She smiled wider. "Because that's how I am too.

  "Makes you good at what you do," I said.

  "Makes both of us good," Susan said. "We are hounds for the truth."

  "Woof," I said.

  We sat with our shoulders touching and our backs to the land, and ate our lunch, and drank our wine, and felt the pull of the ocean's implacable kinesis.

  "Should we walk back to the White Barn and have a nap?" I said. "And afterwards a swim in the pool, and cocktails, and dinner?"

  "Is `nap' a euphemism for something more active?" Susan said.

  "The two are not mutually exclusive," I said.

  "No," Susan. "But its important that they don't coincide."

  Which they didn't.

  7

  "Here's the deal," I said to Elmer. "You stay with Ellen Eisen, and let me know if she meets my guy, and I'll see what I can find out about who's watching Mrs. Rowley."

  "Whadda you care who's watching Mrs. Rowley?"

  "It's characterological," I said.

  "Sure it is," Elmer said. "I'll buy in if I get something out of it."

  "I'll owe you," I said.

  "If finding out gets you any money," Elmer said, "half of it's mine."

  "You bet," I said.

  "Can I trust you," Elmor Said.

  "You bet," I said.

  He looked at me for a time without saying anything. His little dark eyes were slightly oval, as if, maybe, a long way back, one of the O'Neills had been Asian. Finally he nodded to himself slowly.

  "Yeah," he said. "Your word is good."

  "How do you know that?" I said.

  "I know," Elmer said. "I'll keep in touch."

  He got up and went toward the door. He walked with a little swagger. He would have walked with a big swagger had he been larger. Pearl the Wonder Dog II stood up on the office sofa and stared at Elmer as he walked past. She didn't bristle, but she didn't wag her tail either.

  "Fucking dog don't like me," he said.

  "She's just cautious," I said. "She hasn't been with us very long."

  "He some kinda Doberman?"

  "She's a German shorthaired pointer," I said.

  "Same thing," Elmer said.

  I walked over and sat on the couch beside Pearl, and she stretched up her neck to give me a lap.

  "Now's your chance," I said. "Make a break for it."

  A fter Elmer made his escape, Pearl and I sat on the couch for a while until I was sure Elmer hadn't hurt her feelings. Then I took her to Susan's house. Susan was seeing patients on the first floor. Pearl ran up the stairs to the second floor where Susan lived. When I opened the door she raced into Susan's bedroom, jumped on the bed, clamped onto one of the pillows, and subdued it ferociously. Her self-esteem seemed intact. I gave her a cookie, made sure there was water, left a note on the front hall table for Susan, and went to Manchester.

  8

  Set well back from the road, on a corner lot, devoid of foundation plantings, the Rowley house was as big and costly and ugly as anything north of Boston. Postmodern, the designer probably said. The look of the twenty-first century without sacrificing the values of the past, he probably insisted. I thought it looked like a house assembled by a committee. There were dormers and columns and niches, and peaks and porches and round windows and a roof line that fluctuated like my income. In the front yard there were no flowers, shrubs, or trees. Just a long dull inexpensive sweep of recently cut grass, traversed by a hot top driveway that led to a turnaround apron in front of the garage. It was as if they'd run out of money after the house was built. The place was painted an exciting white. With imaginative gray shutters.

  I parked around the corner on the side street where I could see Rowley's driveway through the shade trees along the road. I played my new Gerry Mulligan/Chet Baker CD. I sang along a little with Chet. They're writing songs of love, but not for me ... Then I played Lee Wiley and Bobby Hackett. At 4:30 in the afternoon a silver Lexus SUV came down the street and pulled into the driveway. It parked at the head of the driveway and Marlene got out, carrying a pale pink garment bag. A dark maroon Chevy sedan came down the street in the same direction Marlene had come from, and turned in onto my side street. The driver looked at me carefully as he passed. I read his registration in my rearview mirror, a trick that always impressed people, and wrote it down. Maybe fifty yards up the street lie U-turned and parked behind me.

  We sat. I listened to some Dean Martin. I always thought lie sounded like me. Susan has always said he didn't. Some starlings were working the lawn in front of the Rowleys' house, and two chickadees. I turned Dean down, and called Frank Belson on my car phone and got shuffled around the homioiclc division for about five minutes before I got him.

  "Can you check a car registration for me," I said.

  "Of course," he said. "I welcome the chance to do real police work."

  "Don't let them push you around at the Registry," I said, and gave him the number and hung up. In my rearview mirror I could see the guy behind me on his car phone. I smiled. Pretty soon we'd know each other's name. I listened some more to Dino, and watched the birds foraging on the lawn some more until Belson called me back.

  "Car's registered to the Templeton Group, one hundred Summer Street," Belson said.

  "Company car," I said.

  "Unless there's some guy walking around named Templeton Group."

  "You know what the company does?"

  "I figured you'd ask so I used a special investigative tool known only to law enforcement."

  "You looked them up in the phone book."

  "I did. Detective agency."

  "Of course it's a detective agency," I said.

  "You owe me two martinis and a steak," Belson said.

  "Put it on my account," I said.

  "There's no room left on your account," Belson said and hung up.

  I called Rita Fiore.

  "Cone, Oakes use a particular detective agency?" I said.

  "That's it?" Rita said. "No `hello you sexy thing, who does Cone, Oakes use?' "

  "Who do they use?" I said.

  "I use you."

  "I know, but who, for divorce work, say, or corporate crime?"

  "I do criminal litigation, for crissake. I don't know who the white collar doo doos use."

  "You could ask."

  "And call you back?"

  "Exactly," I said. "You sexy thing."<
br />
  Rita hung up. I put in my CD of Benny Goodman's 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert. We were halfway through Avalon when Rita called back.

  "Lawton Associates," she said. "Big firm on Broad Street. I'm told they're very discreet."

  "Unlike yourself," I said.

  Rita laughed and hung up. She had a great laugh. I thought about things for a little while. Whoever had hired the Templeton Group probably hadn't done it through Cone, Oakes. Didn't mean it wasn't somebody at Kinergy. But it didn't mean it was. I always hated clues that didn't tell you anything. I thought about things some more. After a while, I got sick of that, and decided to do something instead of doing nothing, so I got out of my car and walked back to the maroon Chevy. It was a warm day. The driver had his window open.

  "Find out who I am yet?" I said.

  "They're calling me back," the driver said.

  I took a business card from my shirt pocket and handed it to him. He read it and nodded, and handed it back to me. "You know who I am?" he said.

  "I know you work for the Templeton Group," I said.

  "You got a quicker trace than I did."

  "Better contacts," I said. "You want to talk."

  "May as well," he said and nodded toward the passenger door. I went around and got in.

  "Name's Francis," he said. "Jerry Francis.

  He was a square-faced, square-shouldered guy wearing Oakley wraparounds, and a straw fedora with a wide brim and a blue silk hatband.

  "Who you tailing?" he said.

  "You first," I said.

  He shook his head.

  "It's against company policy," he said, "to discuss any aspect of a case with any unauthorized person."

  "And I'm about as unauthorized as it gets," I said. "On the other hand you showed up a few hundred yards behind Marlene Rowley. That might be a clue."

  Francis shrugged.

  "I've been tailing Trent Rowley," I said. Francis grinned.