Sudden Mischief s-25

by Robert B. Parker

  "Or it might tell you how she felt about Sterling."

  "And what the hell has all this got to do with the Ronan lawsuit?"

  "I don't know," I said. "Got a guess?"

  "Maybe nothing," Quirk said. "Maybe it's got nothing to do with it."

  chapter thirty-one

  JEANETTE RONAN WANTED to meet me at ten A.M. in the food court at the Northshore Shopping Center in Peabody. Public and anonymous. I got there early and cruised the place to make sure I wasn't walking into a setup. She might have leveled with her husband, and the good jurist, officer of the court be damned, was dangerous. Other than the dangers inherent if you actually ate there, the food court looked safe enough. I got a cup of coffee and sat at one of the small tables and looked at the mall rats.

  The Northshore Shopping Center had opened for business late in 1957 with a Filene's being the first. Since then it had divided and multiplied and roofed over and become a vast enclosed warren indistinguishable from a mall in Buffalo, Boise, or San Bernardino. It was someplace to go for young mothers with unhappy children, and old people on whom the walls had begun to close. It provided an indoor place with security, food, bathrooms, and other people. If all else failed, you could buy something. I was in my business suit: running shoes, jeans, a tee shirt, leather jacket, and accessorized with a short Smith & Wesson and some iridescent Oakley shades. I could see my reflection in the plate glass window of the bookstore opposite and I was everything the haute monde gum shoe was supposed to be. Maybe more.

  Jeannette Ronan arrived about 10:10, which would have been right on the button for Susan, so I hadn't begun to think she was late yet. Her blonde hair was below her shoulders and gleamed of a thousand brush strokes. She wore a dark lavender suit with a short skirt, and no stockings. Her legs were very smooth and tanned the color of caramel candy. When she sat down she gave off the gentle aura of good perfume.

  "Coffee?" I said.

  She shook her head. Brusque. She reached into her matching purse and took out a checkbook and a big gold fountain pen.

  "How much?" she said.

  "To spend the night with me?" I said. "I usually get one thousand."

  "Don't be coarse," she said. "How much for the photographs."

  "Oh, those are free," I said. "You want the one with my body oiled, or the all-natural one?"

  She spoke as if the hinges of her jaw were sore. "I will pay you for the pictures of me," she said. "How much do you want?"

  She was working her tail off to be icy. But she wasn't old enough or smart enough or tough enough. She barely managed sullen.

  "Jeanette," I said. "I'm not here to sell you pictures. The Polaroid stuff was just to get you here. We need to talk."

  She stared at me.

  "Besides, nobody will give you back blackmail items in return for a check, for heaven's sake. Next thing you'll be asking if I accept Visa or MasterCard."

  She continued to stare. She held onto the checkbook and pen as if they would fend me off. Looking like she did and having money was all the defense she would ever have, if she needed one. Smart wasn't going to be part of it.

  "Do you demand cash?" she said.

  "No."

  "Why wouldn't you take a check?"

  "If I were blackmailing you, I take the check, give you the pictures, you go home and stop payment on the check. Call the cops. I try to cash it and they've got me with proof of my extortion."

  "They what?" she said.

  "It's okay. I'm not going to ask you for money."

  "Well, how do I get the pictures?"

  "You don't."

  "Then…"

  "I want information. I'm going to use the pictures to force you to give me information."

  "See, you are blackmailing me."

  "Yes I am. You change your mind about coffee?"

  "I… yes," she said and her eyes shifted. "I'll have some, black."

  "Fine, and if you're not here when I come back with it I will show these pictures to your husband."

  "How do I know you even have the pictures?"

  "There are four of them altogether," I said. "They were in with some love letters signed `J' in a shoebox under Brad Sterling's bed."

  I took one out of my jacket pocket. "Here's one of them," I said.

  She looked and quickly looked away. "Put that away," she said.

  Under the careful tan her face and neck flushed richly. I put the picture back in my jacket pocket.

  "Large coffee?" I said.

  She looked around the room. No one was paying any attention. She nodded yes to my question and I went up and got her a cup and one for me, cream, two sugars, and went back to the table with them. She had crossed her legs, which was a good thing, and was leaning back a little in her chair, being serene and ladylike in a difficult situation. I put her coffee down in front of her carefully, without spilling any, and put mine in front of me and got back in my chair. We sat. While we sat I surveyed the room. No sign of anyone intending to shoot me. Jeanette didn't touch her coffee. Susan did that too. You gave her something to eat or drink and she allowed it to sit there for a while. Maybe it was a gender thing. When presented with something ingestible, I began at once to ingest it. Jeanette met my eyes in a long look.

  "Did you like what you saw in the pictures?" she said.

  "Absolutely," I said. "My congratulations to your trainer."

  "I'm not ashamed of my body."

  "I'm not ashamed of it either."

  "You said something a moment ago about spending the night," Jeanette said.

  "It was an attempt at levity," I said.

  "We could, you know."

  "Spend the night together?" I said.

  She smiled at me. It was a smile full of invitation and promise. A nice smile, very practiced.

  "And all I have to do is give you the pictures?"

  "It might be a night to remember," Jeanette said.

  She made a small show of looking at her watch. It was gold and silver and had a big face.

  "Maybe," she smiled again, "a day and night to remember."

  "That a Cartier watch?" I said.

  "Yes," she said, "a Panther."

  "Nice," I said.

  She looked at her coffee and didn't drink it.

  With her eyes demurely on the coffee cup she said, "Are you interested in my offer?"

  "More than the spoken word can tell," I said. "But no thank you."

  She looked up and there was something like fear on her face. I knew what it was. She'd tried money and she'd tried sex. Neither had worked. There wasn't anything else.

  "Well," she said, "what the fuck do you want?"

  "I'd like you to tell me about the sexual harassment suit against Brad Sterling," I said.

  "You'll have to talk with my husband," she said.

  "Mm umm," I said.

  "What do you mean, `umm hmm'?"

  "I mean you want to think that through a little?"

  "Why should I?" she said. "He's my husband, he's a brilliant lawyer. You'll have to talk with him."

  "Does he know?" I said.

  "About me and Brad?"

  "Yes.

  "No."

  "Does he know that the lawsuit is a fraud?"

  "Fraud?"

  "Fraud."

  "I don't know what you are talking about. I admit to a brief period of foolish sexual intimacy. But that doesn't mean he has the right to harass me."

  "May I call you Jeanette?" I said.

  "Of course."

  She smiled when she said it. The response and the smile were automatic. Neither was appropriate to the situation.

  "Jeanette," I said, "you're in a mess. And the only way out of the mess is for me to help you. But if I'm going to help you, you really have to stop trying to outwit me. I don't mean to be unkind, but you're ill equipped."

  She flushed again and her eyes blurred a little as if she were going to cry.

  "Here's the mess you're in," I said. "I may have a few details wrong, but I'm p
retty sure about the, ah, broad outlines of it. You meet Brad Sterling while he's running Galapalooza and you're volunteering. Maybe you were interested in doing something charitable. Maybe you and your girlfriends just thought it would be fun, maybe meet some celebrities. Brad's an attractive guy, and you get involved. Then one way or another your husband gets wind of it. Maybe you love your husband, maybe you like the life he gives you, whatever, you want to save your marriage. So you say it's not what it looks like: It's a case of sexual harassment."

  She was sitting very still, her coffee still undisturbed in front of her. She was trying to hold my gaze but not doing it very well. Her eyes were definitely teary.

  "It's not a bad ploy. But you know who and what your husband is. And you should have guessed that he'd sue the bastard."

  The tears that had blurred her eyes were beginning to spill. She picked up her napkin and blotted them, carefully, so as not to spoil the eye makeup.

  "So," I said, "you got your girlfriends to help join in, make it more credible, take some of the heat off you. And your husband sues on behalf of all of you."

  "He flirted with all of us," Jeanette said.

  "I'm sure he did."

  "So there really was some harassment," she said.

  "I'm not sure flirtation's harassment," I said. "But that's not my issue."

  "Well, it's an important issue," she said.

  "Sure," I said. "What I don't get is why Sterling is so passive about it."

  "Maybe he felt guilty," she said.

  "About what?"

  "Well, he was having an affair with a married woman," she said.

  "Sure," I said. "That's probably it."

  We were quiet. She dabbed again at her eyes. They looked fine.

  "That about how it went?" I said.

  She nodded.

  "You wouldn't have any thoughts on where Brad might be now, would you?"

  "No."

  "You know he's a suspect in a murder case?" I said.

  She nodded.

  "See any connection between your lawsuit and the murder?" I said.

  "My… good God no," she said. "What could that have to do with murder?"

  I shrugged.

  "Ripples in a pond," I said.

  "Ripples?"

  "Know anybody named Richard Gavin?"

  "No."

  "Know why your husband would hire a couple of sluggers to scare me off the case?"

  "Sluggers?" She wrinkled her nose at the word. "My husband?" She was horrified. "My husband certainly wouldn't…"

  "I'll take that as a no," I said. "Ever hear of an organization called Civil Streets?"

  She said, "Certainly."

  At last an answer.

  "It's one of the beneficiary organizations for Galapalooza," she said proudly.

  "Know what it does?"

  "I believe it is a rehabilitating agency for criminals." She corrected herself. "Former criminals."

  "Know how much they received from Galapalooza?"

  "It was all pre-allotted," she said, "by share. How many tables everyone sold, that sort of thing."

  "But you don't know how much they actually got."

  "No."

  "You know how much anyone got?" I said.

  "I heard that the costs were so high that they weren't able to distribute as much to charity as they had hoped."

  "I heard that too," I said.

  We sat quietly. She had never touched her coffee. I had drunk all of mine and was thinking maybe she'd had the better idea.

  "Anything else you can tell me?" I said.

  "About what?"

  "About Brad Sterling or Galapalooza or the guy got killed in Brad Sterling's office, guy named Cony Brown, or a woman named Carla Quagliozzi or what you plan to do about the sexual harassment suit?"

  "I don't know… What do you mean about the sexual harassment suit?"

  "You can't press it," I said. "I have your letters and your pictures. You take it to court and you'll lose, quite publicly."

  "But I can't tell my husband," she said in a tone that suggested that I was an idiot for suggesting otherwise.

  "Well, you don't have to right now. Until we find Brad, you can probably sit tight and keep your mouth shut."

  "But what if you find him?"

  "Well, maybe he won't come back," she said hopefully.

  "Then the lawsuit becomes moot, doesn't it," I said.

  She nodded slowly. "Yes. I… guess… so."

  "But take a worst-case scenario, maybe I'll find him."

  She shook her head and looked at the tabletop and didn't speak.

  "If," I said, "anything happens that prevents him from coming back. And if you had anything to do with it, I will tell everyone everything I know," I said.

  "You don't think I… My God, you must think I'm simply awful."

  "Yeah," I said. "I guess I do."

  chapter thirty-two

  HAWK HAD BEEN bored outside of Civil Streets for nearly a week. No one had showed up there. Quirk had the accountants poking into the books, but they were having difficulty, mostly because there wasn't much in the way of books to poke into. The corporation appeared to consist entirely of some stationery and the empty store front in Stoneham Square. I wanted to know the connection between Gavin and Carla, which logically, would help explain the connection between Gavin and Sterling. Logic was less common and considerably less useful than it was cracked up to be. But it was a place to start. I could hang around Carla, and if Gavin spotted me he'd come by and terrify me again, and maybe feel, this time, he had to back it up, which wouldn't get me what I was after. It would be hard to stake Carla out covertly where she lived on the Somerville waterfront. And she showed no pressing need to drop in on Civil Streets and flaunt her presidency. The better bet was probably to follow him around, and maybe he and Carla would cross paths. If Gavin was a mob guy, he might take a little more tailing than if he was an account manager at Smith Barney. So I rescued Hawk from Stoneham Square.

  We picked Gavin up on a rainy morning in Winthrop Square where Gavin and Warren had offices. We tracked him unseen and relentless to Starbuck's, where he had a coffee and a big bun. Then we tracked him back to Winthrop Square and stood in doorways alert for every development until about 6:45 that night when he came out and walked over to the Waterfront and went into his condo on Lewis Wharf. Hawk and I stood around for maybe half an hour more, to be sure the rain had soaked through evenly, and then we went over to the bar in the Marriott.

  "Feel like a fucking haddock," Hawk said.

  He ordered a Glennfidich on the rocks. I had a tall Courvoisier and soda.

  "You see any clues?" I said.

  Hawk looked at me without speaking. The rain had beaded brilliantly on his smooth head.

  "No, me either," I said.

  The bar was full of dark suits and white shirts and colorful suspenders and ripe cigars. There were a few women there, mostly in red dresses. Several were smoking cigars.

  "This the best idea you got?" Hawk said.

  I knew that being uncomfortable always made him peevish.

  "When in doubt, follow someone around," I said.

  "How come when you in doubt," Hawk said, "I get to do half the following?"

  "Because you are my friend," I said.

  "Oh," Hawk said. "That's good. I was thinking it was because I was an asshole."

  "That too," I said.

  The next morning it was still rainy, but I was better dressed for it in a brown leather trenchcoat and a Harris tweed scally cap. Hawk wore a black leather poncho and a big cowboy hat with silver conchos on the headband.

  "First rule of good tracking," I said. "Remain inconspicuous."

  "Exactly," Hawk said.

  We stood as best we could out of the weather, drinking coffee and discussing some of our most interesting romantic encounters. Hawk's were more exotic and of a grander scale. So he got to talk more than I did. Gavin came out and walked over to Starbuck's and had coffee and a bun and
walked back to his office. Hawk and I dogged his every footstep. That is, both of us dogged him on the way to. I dogged him alone on the way back, while Hawk bought us two large Guatemalan coffees and two lemon scones and caught up with me back in the doorway.

  "Spot anything?" Hawk said.

  "Shut up," I said.

  "Shame they don't sell donuts," Hawk said.

  "Pretty soon, I figure, Dunkin' will be selling scones."

  "Don't it always seem to go," Hawk said.

  We moved on from romantic interludes to Junior Griffey and Michael Jordan and Evander Holyfield, which turned us inevitably to Willie Mays and Oscar Robertson and Muhammad Ali, which segued into Ben Webster and June Christie, which then moved associatively to Gayle Sayers and Jim Brown, which led on to David McCullough's biography of Truman and an old Burt Lancaster western called Ulzana's Raid. We had started on naming our all-time all-white basketball team, which Hawk contended was an oxymoron, and had gotten as far as Jerry West and John Havlicek when Gavin came out of his office building with his collar up and got into a black Chrysler Town Car parked in front of the building with its motor running.

  "Oh boy," Hawk said.

  Hawk had parked on a hydrant at the right spot so that we could go whichever way Gavin could take in the one-way warren of downtown. It had denied us the comfort of a warm dry car, but we would have been warm, dry, and lonely had we done it another way.

  We followed the Town Car through the maze of center city digging. Then we were on the Southeast Expressway and in time we were onto Route 3.

  "This is the most excitement I had since that lemon scone," Hawk said.

  The Town Car cruised at the speed limit. We lay pretty well back off of Gavin; there wasn't much traffic and the exits gave you ample warning. We were in no danger of losing him. In Hanover, they turned off and we drifted off after them and went west a few hundred suburban yards and pulled into the parking lot of an Italian restaurant named Elsie's. Gavin's driver pulled around behind the restaurant and parked. Hawk parked on the other side.

  "He knows me," I said.

  "I'll go in," Hawk said.

  He took off the cowboy hat and the leather poncho and stepped out of the car. In two steps he was into the entryway, with barely a rain drop on his cashmere blazer. I slipped into the driver's seat in case we needed to be quick and tried to find jazz on the radio and failed. Besides all the current music, there was classical and there was a couple of music-of-your-life stations. I had long ago decided that Gogi Grant singing "The Wayward Wind" was not the music of my life, and I settled for a classical station.