Robert B Parker - Spenser 03 - Mortal Stakes

by Mortal Stakes(lit)

  "Marty's shy, Mr. Spenser," she said. And to the boy: "Do you want cranberry or blueberry, Marty?" The boy turned his head toward her leg and mumbled something I couldn't hear. He looked about three. Linda Rabb picked up a blueberry muffin and gave it to him. "Why don't you get your crayons," she said, "and bring them in here and draw here on the floor while I talk with Mr. Spenser?" The kid mumbled something again that I couldn't hear. Linda Rabb took a deep breath and said, "Okay, Marty, come on, I'll go with you to get them." And to me: "Excuse me, Mr. Spenser."

  They went out, the kid hanging onto Linda Rabb's pants leg as they went. No wonder so many housewives ended up drinking Boone's Farm in the morning. They were back in maybe two minutes with a lined yellow legal-sized pad of paper and a box of crayons. The kid got down on the floor by his mother's chair and began to draw stick-figured people in various colors, with orange predominant.

  "Now, what can I do for you, Mr. Spenser?" she asked.

  I hadn't counted on the kid. "Well, it's kind of complicated, Mrs. Rabb, maybe I ought to come back when the boy isn't..." I left it hanging. I didn't know how much the kid would understand, and I didn't want him to think I didn't want him around.

  "Oh, that's all right, Mr. Spenser, Marty's fine. He doesn't mind what we talk about."

  "Well, I don't know, this is kind of ticklish."

  "For heaven's sake, Mr. Spenser, say what's on your mind. Believe me, it is all right."

  I drank some coffee. "Okay, I'll tell you two things; then you decide whether we should go on. First, I'm not a writer, I'm a private detective. Second, I've seen a film called Suburban Fancy."

  She put her hand down on the boy's head; otherwise she didn't move. But her face got white and crowded.

  "Who hired you?" she said.

  "Erskine, but that doesn't matter. I won't hurt you."

  "Why?" she said.

  "Why did Erskine hire me? He wanted to find out if your husband was involved in fixing baseball games."

  "O my God Jesus," she said, and the kid looked up at her. She smiled. "Oh, isn't that a nice family you're drawing.

  There's the momma and the daddy and the baby."

  "Would it be better if I came back?" I said.

  "There's nothing to come back for," Linda Rabb said. "I don't know anything about it. There's nothing to talk about."

  "Mrs. Rabb, you know there is," I said. "You're panicky now and you don't know what to say, so you just say no, and hope if you keep saying it, it'll be true. But there's a lot to talk about."

  "No."

  "Yeah, there is. I can't help you if I don't know."

  "Erskine didn't hire you to help us."

  "I'm not sure if he did or not. I can always give him his money back."

  "There's nothing to help. We don't need any help."

  "Yeah, you do."

  The kid tugged at his mother's pants leg again and held up his drawing. "That's lovely, Marty," she said. "Is that a doggie?" The kid turned and held the picture so I could see it.

  I said, "I like that very much. Do you want to tell me about it?"

  The kid shook his head. "No," I said, "I don't blame you. I don't like to talk about my work all that much either."

  "Marty," Linda Rabb said, "draw a house for the doggie." The boy bent back to the task. I noticed that he stuck his tongue out as he worked.

  "Even if we did need help, what could you do?" Linda Rabb said.

  "Depends on what exactly is going on. But this is my kind of work. I'm pretty sure to be better at it than you are."

  My coffee cup was empty, and Linda Rabb got up and refilled it. I took a corn muffin, my third. I hoped she didn't notice.

  "I've got to talk with Marty," she said.

  I bit off one side of my corn muffin. Probably should have broken it first. Susan Silverman was always telling me about taking small bites and such. Linda Rabb didn't notice.

  She was looking at her watch. "Little Marty goes to nursery school for a couple of hours in the afternoon." She looked at the telephone and then at the kid and then at her watch again. Then she looked at me. "Why don't you come back a little after one?"

  "Okay."

  I got up and went to the door. Linda Rabb came with me. The kid came right behind her, close to her leg but no longer hanging on. As I left, I pointed my finger at him, from the hip, and brought my thumb down like the hammer of a pistol. He looked at me silently and made no response. On the other hand, he didn't run and hide. Always had a way with kids. The Dr. Spock of the gumshoes.

  Outside on Mass Ave, I looked at my watch: 11:35. An hour and a half to kill. I went around the corner to the Y on Huntington Ave where I am a member and got in a full workout on the Universal, including an extra set of bench presses and two extra sets of wrist rolls. By the time I got showered and dressed my pulse rate was back down under 100 and my breathing was almost under control. At 1:15 I was back at Linda Rabb's door. She answered the first ring.

  "Marty's at school, Mr. Spenser. We can talk openly," she said.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THE COFFEE AND MUFFINS were gone. Linda Rabb said, Has it been raining somewhere? Your hair's wet."

  "Shower," I said. "I went over to the Y and worked out."

  "Oh, how nice."

  "Sound mind in a healthy body and all that."

  "Could you show me some identification, Mr. Spenser?"

  I got out the photostat of my license in its little plastic case and handed it to her. Also my driver's license. She looked at them both and gave them back.

  "I guess you really are a detective."

  "Thanks," I said, "I need reassurance sometimes."

  "Just what do you know, Mr. Spenser?"

  "I've been to Redford, Illinois, I've talked with Sheriff Donaldson and with your mother and father. I know you got busted there in 'sixty-six for possession of marijuana. I know you ran away with a guy named Tony Reece and that you haven't been back. I know you went to New York, that you lived in a rooming house on Thirteenth Street in the East Village, that you were hustling for a living first for old Tony, then for a pimp named Violet. I know you moved uptown, went to work for Patricia Utley, made one pornographic movie, fell in love with one of your customers, and left to get married in the winter of nineteen seventy, wearing a lovely fur-collared tweed coat. I've been to New York, I've talked with Violet and with Patricia Utley, I preferred Mrs. Utley."

  "Yes," Linda Rabb said without any expression, "I did too. Did you see me in the movie?"

  "Yeah."

  She was looking past me out the window. "Did you enjoy it?"

  "I think you're very pretty."

  She kept staring out the window. There wasn't anything to see except the dome of the Christian Science Mother Church. I was quiet.

  "What do you want?" she said finally.

  "I don't know yet. I told you what I know; now I'll tell you what I think. I think the client you married was Marty. I think someone got hold of Suburban Fancy that knows you and is blackmailing you and Marty, and that Marty is modifying some of the games he pitches so that whoever is blackmailing you can bet right and make a bundle."

  Again silence and the stare. I thought about moving in front of the window to intercept it.

  "If I hadn't made the film," she said. "It was just a break, in a way, from turning tricks with strangers. I mean there was every kind of sex in it, but it was just acting. It was always just acting, but in the movie it was supposed to be acting and the guy was acting and there were people you knew around. You didn't have to go alone to a strange hotel room and make conversation with someone you didn't know and wonder if he might be freaky, you know? I mean, some of them are freaky. Christ, you don't know." She shifted her stare from the window to me. I wanted to look out the window.

  "One film," she said. "One goddamned film for good money under first-class conditions and no S and M or group sex, and right after that I met Marty."

  "In New York?"

  "Yes, they were in town t
o play the Yankees, and one of the other players set it up. Mrs. Utley sent three of us over to the hotel. It was Marty's first time with a whore." The word came out harsh and her stare was heavy on me. "He was always very straight."

  More silence.

  "He was a little drunk and laughing and making suggestive remarks, but as soon as we were alone, he got embarrassed. I had to lead him through it. And afterward we had some food sent up and ate a late supper and watched an old movie on TV. I still remember it. It was a Jimmy Stewart western called Broken Arrow. He kissed me good-bye when I left, and he was embarrassed to death to pay me."

  "And you saw him again?"

  "Yes, I called him at his hotel the next day. It was raining and the game with the Yankees was canceled. So we went to the Museum of Natural History."

  "How about the other two players that night? Didn't they recognize you?"

  "No, I had on a blond wig and different makeup. They didn't pay much attention to me anyway. Nobody looks at a whore. When I met Marty the next day, he didn't even recognize me at first."

  "When did you get married?"

  "When we said, except that we changed it. Marty and I worked out the story about me being from Arlington Heights and meeting in Chicago and all. I'd been to Chicago a couple of times and knew my way around okay if anyone wanted to ask about it. And Marty and I went out there before we were married and went to Comiskey Park, or whatever it's called now, and around Chicago so my story would sound okay."

  "Where'd you get Arlington Heights?"

  "Picked it out on a map."

  We looked at each other. I could hear the faint hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen. And somewhere down the corridor a door opened and closed.

  "That goddamned movie," she said. "When the letter came, I wanted to confess, but Marty wouldn't let me."

  "What letter?"

  "The first blackmail letter."

  "Do you know who sent it?"

  "No."

  "I assume you don't have it."

  "No."

  "What did it say?"

  "It said--I can remember it almost exactly--it was to Marty and it said, 'I have a copy of a movie called Suburban Fancy. If you don't lose your next ball game, I'll release it to the media.'" "That's all?"

  "That's all. No name or return address or anything."

  "And did he?"

  Linda Rabb looked blank. "Did he what?"

  "Did Marty lose his next game?"

  "Yes, he hung a curve in the seventh inning with the bases loaded against the Tigers, on purpose. I woke up in the middle of the night, that night, and he wasn't in bed, he was out in the living room, looking out the window and crying."

  Her face was very white, and her eyes were puffy.

  "And you wanted to confess it again."

  "Yes. But he said no. And I said, 'It will kill you to throw games.' And he said a man looked out for his wife and his kid, and I said, 'But it will kill you.' And he wouldn't talk about it again. He said it was done and maybe there wouldn't be another letter, but we both knew there would."

  "And there was."

  She nodded.

  "And they kept coming?"

  She nodded.

  "And Marty kept doing what they said to do?"

  She nodded again.

  "How often?" I said.

  "The letters? Not often. Marty gets about thirty-five starts a year. There were maybe five or six letters last year, three so far this year."

  "Smart," I said. "Didn't get greedy. Do you have any idea who it is?"

  "No."

  "It's a hell of a hustle," I said. "Blackmail is dangerous if the victim knows you or at the point when the money is exchanged. This is perfect. There is no money exchanged. You render a service, and he gets the money elsewhere. He never has to reveal himself. There are probably one hundred thousand people who've seen that film, and you can't know who they are. He mails his instructions, bets his money, and who's to know?"

  "Yes."

  "And furthermore, the act of payment is itself a blackmailable offense so that the more you comply with his requests, the more he's got to blackmail you for."

  "I know that too," she said. "If there was a hint of gambling influence, Marty would be out of baseball forever."

  "If you look at it by itself, it's almost beautiful."

  "I've never looked at it by itself."

  "Yeah, I guess not." I said, "Is it killing Marty?"

  "A little, I think. He says you get used to anything-maybe he's right."

  "How are you?"

  "It's not me that has to cheat at my job."

  "It's you that has to feel guilty about it," I said. "He can say he's doing it for you. What do you say?"

  Tears formed in her eyes and began to run down her face. "I say it's what he gets for marrying a whore."

  "See what I mean?" I said. "Wouldn't you rather be him?"

  She didn't answer me. She sat still with her hands clenched in her lap, and the tears ran down her face without sound.

  I got up and walked around the living room with my hands in my hip pockets. I'd found out what I was supposed to find out, and I'd earned the pay I'd hired on at.

  "Did you call your husband?" I said.

  She shook her head. "He's pitching today," she said, and her voice was steady but without inflection. "I don't like to bother him on the days he's pitching. I don't want to break his concentration. He should be thinking about the Oakland hitters."

  "Mrs. Rabb, it's not a goddamned religion," I said.

  "He's not out there in Oakland building a temple to the Lord or a stairway to paradise. He's throwing a ball and the other guys are trying to hit it. Kids do it every day in schoolyards all over the land."

  "It's Marty's religion," she said. "It's what he does."

  "How about you?"

  "We're part of it too, me and the boy--the game and the family. It's all he cares about. That's why it's killing him because he has to screw us or screw the game. Which is like screwing himself."

  I should be gone. I should be in Harold Erskine's office, laying it all out for him and getting a bonus and maybe a plaque: OFFICIAL MAJOR LEAGUE PRIVATE EYE. Gumshoe of the stars. But I knew I wasn't going to be gone. I knew that I was here, and I probably knew it back in Redford, Illinois, when I went to her house and met her mom and dad.

  "I'm going to get you out of this," I said.

  She didn't look at me.

  "I know who's blackmailing you."

  This time she looked.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I TOLD HER what I knew and what I thought.

  "Maybe you can scare him off," she said. "Maybe when he realizes you know who he is, he'll stop."

  "If he's wearing Frank Doerr's harness, I'd say no."

  "Why?"

  "Because he's got to be more scared of Frank Doerr than I can make him of me."

  "Are you sure he's working for Frank What's'isname?"

  "I'm not sure of anything. I'm guessing. Right after I started looking around the ball club, Doerr came to my office with one of his gunbearers and told me I might become an endangered species if I kept at it. That's suggestive, but it ain't definitive."

  "Can you find out?"

  "Maybe."

  "Marty makes a lot of money. We could pay you. How much do you charge?"

  "My normal retainer is two corn muffins and a black coffee. I bill the rest upon completion."

  "I'm serious. We can pay a lot."

  "Like Jack Webb would say, you already have, ma'am."

  "Thank you."

  "You're welcome."

  "But I don't want you to start until we get Marty's approval."

  "Un-unh. Your retainer doesn't buy that. I'm still also working for Erskine, and I'm still looking into the situation.

  I'm now looking with an eye to getting you unhooked, but you can't call me off."

  "But you won't say anything about us?" Her eyes were wide and her face was pale and tight again and she was sc
ared.

  "No," I said.

  "Not unless Marty says okay."

  "Not until I've checked with you and Marty."