Bad Business

by Robert B. Parker

  "I'll talk to Healy about the murder," he said. "You have any thoughts?"

  "I don't have a thought. I have a feeling."

  "Swell," Quirk said. "I'm a feelings guy."

  "O'Mara is in this thing someplace. Everywhere I look I see the tip of his tail going around the corner."

  "You think Gavin did it and felt bad, and popped himself?"

  "No."

  "Even though he says so?"

  "Even though somebody says so."

  "You think somebody else popped him?"

  "I don't know," I said. "I don't know enough about him."

  "I will," Quirk said. "In time."

  O ne of the crime-scene people opened the back door. "Captain," she said. "Something you should see." "Come on," Quirk said, and we went back into the house. A small bookcase against the far wall had been moved aside and Belson was squatting on his heels. He was shining a flashlight on the wall just above the baseboard.

  "Fresh patch here," Belson said. "Little one."

  Q uirk and I bent over. The baseboard and wall were painted burgundy. About three inches up from the baseboard was a small white circle of something that looked like joint compound.

  "Could be a bullet hole," Quirk said. "Or a phone jack, or a gouge in the plaster."

  "Behind the bookcase?" Quirk said. "Dig it out."

  I t was a bullet. Belson dug it out and dusted it off and rolled it around a little in the palm of his hand.

  "There's a fireplace on the other side," Belson said. "Slug was up against the firebox."

  Q uirk nodded. He bent over, looking at the slug in Belson's upturned palm.

  "Looks like a nine to me," Belson said.

  Q uirk nodded again and looked at the bookcase. "No hole in the furniture," Quirk said.

  "So the bookcase was moved."

  "Or it wasn't there in the first place," Quirk said. "When the shot was fired."

  "Patching compound is fresh," Belson said. "Surface is hard, but you dig in and it's not dry yet."

  "So it's recent," Quirk said.

  "We can call the manufacturer," Belson said. "Get a drythrough time. Then we'll know how recent."

  Q uirk glanced at Gavin's body on the floor.

  "Can't be the bullet that killed him," Quirk said. "Unless he was standing on his head when he shot himself."

  "The other slug, the one that killed him was high on the wall," Bclson said. "About where it should have been." Quirk looked at the wall where the first bullet had been dug out.

  "Forensics will help us with that," Quirk said.

  The three of us were quiet, looking at the dug-out bullet hole, low in the wall, behind where the bookcase had stood. Then Quirk went and sat on his heels beside the body and moved Gavin's right hand. He looked at it and looked at the bullet hole. He dropped the hand and stood.

  "Let's not treat this as a suicide yet," he said.

  36

  Wilma Cooper was gardening in the vast backyard of her home in Lincoln.

  "I always garden in the morning," she had said without looking at me. "Summers are so short."

  I walked up the long curve of the driveway and across a brick patio bigger than my apartment and around to the back of the house where she had told me she'd be.

  A nd there she was, in a halter top, an ankle-length blue denim sundress, a huge straw hat, big yellow gardening gloves, and battered brown sandals. She was, in fact, big. Tall, rawboned, angular, with weathered skin and a pinched face that made her look worried. The gray hair that showed under her hat looked permed.

  She took off her gloves to shake hands with me, and looked off to the left over my right shoulder while she did so. There was iced tea in a big pitcher on a lacy green metal table, with four lacy green metal chairs. Beside the tea was a small plate of Oreo cookies. We sat.

  "I really don't see how I can be of help to you," she said. "I know little of my husband's business affairs."

  "It was nice of you to make the iced tea," I said.

  "What? Oh. Yes. I mean, I ... thank you."

  This was not a good sign. If she had trouble with thanks for the iced tea, how would she do with, did your husband kill anybody? I decided to be circumspect. She poured us each some iced tea.

  "Terrible thing about Mr. Gavin," I said.

  I drank a little of my iced tea. It was made from a mix, I was pretty sure. Pre-sweetened. Diet. She looked at hers. Then sort of obliquely at me, and smiled vaguely. At what?

  "Yes," she said after a while.

  "Did you know him well?"

  She thought about that for a little while. Far below us at the distant bottom of the backyard, a sprinkler went on by itself.

  "Ah . . . Steve ... was in our wedding."

  "Really?"

  She nodded. There was nothing else to drink so I swilled in a bit more of the ersatz iced tea.

  "So you've been friends for a long time," I said.

  She smiled again at nothing, and looked down the slope of her backyard.

  "He was my husband's friend, really," she said.

  "You didn't socialize."

  "Oh ... no ... not really."

  I took a quiet breath.

  "Did you know Trent Rowley?"

  "Ah, yes."

  "Marlene Rowley?"

  "She ... she was ... Trent's wife ... I believe."

  "Bernie and Ellen Eisen?"

  "He worked with my husband," she said.

  A full sentence. She was getting into the flow.

  "But you didn't socialize," I said.

  She shook her head and giggled slightly. Then she stood suddenly. Or as suddenly as Big Wilma was as likely to do anything.

  "Excuse me," she said. "I have to do something in the house."

  Then she turned and walked away. I watched her go. Her movements were stiff, as if she were not used to them. Was she leaving me in the lurch, or would she be back? I decided to wait it out. After all I had a whole pitcher of iced tea and a lovely platter of cookies. The circle at the far end of the sloping lawn made a fine spray full of small prismatic rainbows. A cardinal swooped past me, on his way someplace. Had it been something I said? I considered more tea and rejected the idea. It certainly wasn't my appearance. I had on my Ray-Bans, always a classic look. Extending the look, I was wearing a dark blue linen blazer with white buttons, a white silk tee shirt, a shortbarreled Smith & Wesson revolver with a walnut handle in a black leather hip holster, pressed jeans, and black New Balance cross trainers with no socks. How could she bear to leave me?

  She couldn't. She reappeared and walked briskly back across her patio toward me.

  "Sorry," she said with a smile, "something I forgot."

  "Sure," I said.

  She looked right at me. Her eyes were bright and wide. She sat down and drank some tea.

  "So," she said, "where were we?"

  "You didn't socialize much with the Eisens."

  "No."

  "Lovely home," I said.

  "Thank you," she said. "I was born here."

  She picked up an Oreo cookie and popped it in her mouth and chewed and swallowed.

  "Really?" I said.

  Y ou get a workable response, you stick with it.

  "Yes, I moved here with my husband after my mother died."

  "That's great," I said. Mr. Enthusiasm. "Be an expensive house to buy now."

  "I could afford it," she said.

  "Mr. Cooper does very well," I said.

  "I could afford it without Mr. Cooper," she said. "I have plenty of money of my own."

  "Family money," I said, just to say something.

  "Yes. In fact my husband's own wealth is actually family money too."

  "His family or yours?"

  "The business in which my husband has been so successful was once known as Waltham Tool and Pipe. My father started it after the war. When I married my husband, Dad took him into the business, and when Dad retired he made my husband the chief executive officer."

  "I know it's i
ndiscreet," I said, "to ask. But who has the most money, you or Mr. Cooper."

  "Oh, God," she said. "I could buy and sell him ten times over."

  She ate another Oreo.

  "Did you ever meet a man named Darrin O'Mara?" I said.

  "The sex man on the radio?"

  "Yes."

  "God no. Why do you ask? I would have little interest in anything he had to say."

  "He is apparently a friend of your husband's."

  "That's ridiculous," Big Wilma said. "My husband would have no reason to spend time with someone like O'Mara."

  "He was apparently friends with the Eisens and the Rowleys too," I said.

  "I'm not surprised," she said.

  "Why?"

  "Why am I not surprised?"

  "Yeah."

  "It's the kind of repugnant claptrap with which women like that would become involved."

  "So you do know these women?" I said.

  "I know what they're like," Big Wilma said.

  We talked until she had eaten all the Oreos and drunk most of the iced tea.

  Finally she said, "I'm sorry to be rude, but I'm developing a dreadful headache, and I simply must lie down."

  "A lotta that going around," I said. "Everybody I talk to."

  She smiled politely and I left. No loss. I wasn't learning anything. Driving back in Route 2, I speculated on what Big Wilma had ingested when she went inside. And whether what I saw afterward was Jekyll or Hyde.

  37

  The next morning when I went into my office Hawk was sitting in my chair with his feet up on my desk, drinking my Volvic water from the bottle, and reading a book called The Teammates, by David Halberstam.

  "Did I leave the door unlocked?" I said.

  "No."

  "At least you brought your own book," I said.

  I checked my answering machine, which displayed no messages. I got a bottle of Volvic water from the office refrigerator, and sat down in the client chair. Hawk flapped his page and closed the book and put it down on the desk.

  "Me 'n Cecile went and took the weekend seminar with Darrin O'Mara," Hawk said. "Now we feelin' sorry for you and Susan."

  "Because we're hung up on monogamy."

  "Exactly," Hawk said. "Darrin say we got to, ah, I believe he say, throw off our shackles, and experience our libidos unstructured and unconstricted."

  "Wow," I said.

  "Tha's what I thought," Hawk said.

  He was deep into his feet-do-yo'-duty accent, which meant he was deeply scornful of his subject.

  "Darrin say ... he always encourage us to call hisself Darrin ... Darrin say that if you fully unfettered your id, and experience passion without regard to convention or previous condition of servitude . . ."

  "He didn't say previous condition of servitude," I said. Hawk grinned.

  "I jess throwed that in," Hawk said. "If you do that, Darrin say, then you still feel love and passion for one person more than any other, that be how you know you in love."

  "And I been walking around all this time thinking I loved Susan without really knowing."

  "Maybe you learned it," Hawk said, "when we out chasing her around out west."

  "I already knew it," I said. "That's why we were chasing."

  "Oh yeah," Hawk said. "I got to check back with Darrin on that. I think he pretty sure you just think you in love and don't really know."

  "So, say you buy into this," I said. "You supposed to go out and chase down enough people to test the theory, or does he have a placement service?"

  "He say we explore this with the other members of the class. I be swamped, a course. And Cecile say she be sort of uncomfortable starting out, so to speak, with the folks in the seminar, and was there any other way. And he say, he can also help us meet other people."

  "How exciting," I said. "O'Mara tell you, or Cecile, what he could arrange for her?"

  "There be a party," Hawk said. "Friday night. Invitation only."

  "You be there?"

  "Cecile will," Hawk said.

  "You didn't make the cut, huh?"

  "They 'fraid of the competition," Hawk said.

  "And what if Cecile is swept up in it all, and arranges to dash off with some guy to Quincy or Nyack?"

  "She be free to follow her passion," Hawk said.

  "And the guy?"

  "He be dead."

  38

  I was drinking coffee with Belson in his car parked in the lot of a Dunkin' Donuts near Fresh Pond Circle. There was a box of donuts on the console between us. The windows were down to catch the breeze from the parkway, and through the windshield we could look at the industrial fencing in front of us. Belson selected a Boston cream donut and took a careful bite. He swallowed and wiped a little of the cream filling off the corner of his mouth.

  "You wouldn't want to eat one of these things on a date," Belson said.

  "Frank," I said, "when's the last time you had a date."

  "Me and the wife went over to Carson Beach and took a walk last Sunday."

  "And did you eat a Boston cream?"

  "'Course not."

  I selected a dainty plain donut.

  "What's the forensic scoop on the late Gavin?" I said.

  "Nine millimeter through the top of his mouth and out the back of his head. Angle consistent with a self-inflicted wound," Belson said.

  "Powder residue?"

  "Hands and around his mouth," Belson said.

  "Anything on the suicide note?"

  "Nope. Just a note on the computer screen. Nothing to tell us yea or nay."

  "Dead long?"

  "Around six hours before we got there."

  "So around what, nine A.M.?"

  "Around then."

  "Who found him?"

  "Cleaning lady, comes two afternoons a week. Let herself in, she thinks around two, found him like that."

  "How long's it take that patching goop to dry through?"

  "Eight hours," Belson said.

  "That slug a nine, too?"

  "Yeah. Matches the one that killed Gavin."

  Belson had finished his Boston cream and was now selecting a strawberry-frosted donut with multicolored sprinkles on it.

  "You're going to eat that?" I said.

  "Sure."

  "You got no taste in donuts, Frank."

  "I must have," Frank said. "I'm a cop."

  I drank some coffee.

  "So it all works out nice as a suicide."

  "Except for the second slug," Belson said. He had a bite of the strawberry-frosted donut. I looked away.

  "Except for that," I said.

  "You thought about that?" Belson said.

  "I have."

  "You got a theory?"

  "I have."

  "You want to share it with me," Belson said, "or are you just in it for the donuts?"

  "I'm thinking that somebody could have shot him in the mouth the way he was shot, and then put his hand on the gun and put the gun next to his face, and fired that bullet into the wall."

  Belson nodded.

  "Which would mean," Belson said, "that he had to move the bookcase first."

  "Yep," I said, "which would also mean that he had to bring the patching plaster with him."

  "Which would also mean that he planned this thing out pretty carefully," Belson said.

  "And it might mean that he knew his way around the apartment."

  "He did put that slug into the wall behind the fireplace, which meant it wouldn't go through."

  "And," I said, "if he did all this, so as to get powder residue, he was probably not uninformed in these matters."

  "Sort of the way me and Quirk been thinking," Belson said.

  "Either of you talked with Healy?"

  "Quirk," Belson said. "Staties don't have a clue."

  "How's Quirk treating the thing?"

  "Publicly we're wrapping up loose ends on a probable suicide. Internally we're thinking murder."

  "And maybe it's related to the murder of T
rent Rowley?"

  "Yeah," Belson said. "We're thinking that it might be."

  "And maybe it's connected to Kinergy," I said.

  "Sure," Belson said. "And maybe it ain't."

  "That covers most of the possibilities," I said. Belson took another frosted donut from the box. "What kind is that?" I said.

  "Maple frosted," he said. "With strawberry sprinkles."

  "Good Jesus," I said.

  39

  Matters of the Heart held its Friday mixer on a rainy night in a ballroom at the Balmoral Castle Hotel in Canton. We went in my car.

  "You think I'll meet Mr. Right?" Cecile said as I slowed in front of the hotel.

  "We here investigating," Hawk said.

  "But won't I have to sleep with a few?" Cecile said. "Make it look real?"

  "No sacrifice too great," I said.

  I t was raining hard. I parked under the pseudo porte cochere to let them out.

  "Aren't we early," Cecile said.

  "Need to be here 'fore anyone else," Hawk said. "So Spenser get a look at the guests."

  "So can't we wait here?"

  "Need to look around," Hawk said. "Let him know the setup."

  "Well," Cecile said, "I suppose it's good, if Mr. Right shows up, he'll find me waiting."

  They got out and went into the hotel. I pulled away and went around the porte cochere and parked in the front parking lot, where I could still see the hotel entrance. In five minutes my cell phone rang.

  "Balmoral Castle appear to be leaking," Hawk said.

  "Leaking?"

  "They got barrels around, and plastic sheeting hung so's to funnel the rain into the barrels."

  "Wow, the perfect setting," I said. "Where's the mixer?"

  "In the back end, enter from the lobby."

  "Any other likely entrances?"

  "Nope. Anyone coming gonna have to come in through the lobby."

  "O'Mara there?"

  "He already inside with the DJ, couple of assistants."

  "No guests."

  "Just me and Cecile," Hawk said.

  "Anyplace for me?"

  "Yeah. Pub. Off the lobby, sit at the bar and you can see the door to the room. Big sign on an easel."

  "I can see who turns out for the event," I said.

  "If you alert," Hawk said.