The Boxer and the Spy

by Robert B. Parker

  “Terry and Abby,” she said with an even bigger smile. “If only you could vote.”

  “We will in a while,” Abby said.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Trent said. “You are the future.”

  They stood uneasily for a moment. Mrs. Trent glanced at the young woman assistant, who nodded slightly toward the two chairs. She made a talking gesture with her thumb and fingers.

  “Do sit down,” Mrs. Trent said. “Give me how things look from your perspective.”

  The woman stood beside the door. The cameraman stood on the other side.

  “Excuse me, ma‘am,” Abby said. “But we have to speak with you in private.”

  “Uh-oh,” Mrs. Trent said, and smiled harder. She looked at the assistant. The assistant nodded.

  “Come on, Harry,” the assistant said. “Give them a little privacy.”

  The assistant and the camera guy left the room. Mrs. Trent sat back down behind her desk, crossed her legs, smoothed her skirt over her knees, folded her hands in her lap, and leaned back slightly in her chair. She smiled at them brightly.

  “Okay, what secrets do you have to tell me?” she said.

  Here it was. The moment. Terry could feel, in the center of himself, the jagged thump of its arrival. They had rehearsed it twenty times. They had agreed that Abby would start off. It would be easier to hear, they thought, coming from Abby. And Abby was more socially graceful than Terry. She could talk better.

  “We need you to help us,” Abby said.

  Mrs. Trent was warm.

  “I will if I can,” she said.

  “We think something bad is going on in town, something to do with Jason Green and the construction near the Eel Pond Woods, and maybe something to do with steroids, and with Kip Carter, and Mr. Bullard.”

  Mrs. Trent’s face began to stiffen.

  “And,” Abby said, “we know you’re having an affair with Mr. Bullard.”

  Mrs. Trent’s face went gray-white. She stared at them. The stiff and pointless smile began to fade away. Terry felt as if he might not be able to breathe. He looked at Abby. She seemed calm and friendly and perfectly able to breathe. Mrs. Trent’s face was now the color of sea ice, the way it got sometimes when it was really cold and the harbor froze along the edges. Her mouth was open as if she were going to speak. But she didn’t speak.

  “Could you help us with this?” Abby said.

  She stared at them some more, and as she stared, the color in her face began to reverse itself. The blood came slowly back until her face was actually flushed, and she looked almost like she might have a fever.

  “How ...” She stopped and took a breath. “How dare you come in here and say such a thing.”

  “We need your help,” Terry said.

  They had rehearsed this, too. The first time she responded to Abby, Terry would answer. After that they’d have to play it by ear.

  Mrs. Trent was outraged.

  “Everything you have said, everything, is a huge and disgusting lie. I cannot imagine how you think you can get away with taking my time to come in here and behave like this.”

  “We saw you and Mr. Bullard making love,” Abby said.

  Again the stare, the color shifting in her face. The sense that she might be fighting for oxygen.

  “That’s not possible,” she said. “And the accusation is disgusting.”

  “You have a small blue butterfly tattooed on your butt,” Terry said.

  Again the long awful silence. Mrs. Trent looked at her office door. No help there. She looked at the campaign poster that said, LET’S RALLY BEHIND SALLY. Then she seemed to brace herself.

  “Is this what you do?” she said finally. “You sneak around in the night like little rats and peek in windows?”

  They waited.

  “That kind of behavior is disgusting,” she said.

  Neither of them said anything.

  “It’s also illegal,” she said. “Do you realize there’s a police cruiser right outside? If I call them in, they’ll arrest you right here.”

  They waited.

  “Who would believe you?” she said.

  Terry shrugged. Abby looked blank.

  “It would simply be the word of two idiotic children against mine,” she said.

  Abby took her cell phone from her school bag and held it up.

  “Why are you showing me that?” Mrs. Trent said.

  “Takes pictures,” Terry said.

  Abby kept holding it up. Mrs. Trent kept looking at it.

  After what seemed a long time, she said in a hushed voice, “You took pictures?”

  “Why not,” Terry said.

  Again she seemed silent forever.

  Then she said, “What do you want?”

  CHAPTER 38

  She was so close to being governor.

  She was ahead in every poll.... Her opponent had been shooting himself in the foot since the campaign began.... She was a lock ... except for these stupid little kids.... How could they spoil it for her.... She was smarter than they were, older, wiser.... Toughen up, Sally.... Think !... Think!

  “We need you to help us,” Abby said, with a nice smile. “We need you to help us figure out what happened to Jason, and what’s going on at the tech arts construction site, and what’s up with Mr. Bullard....”

  “Besides you,” Terry said.

  Abby smiled at his remark and kept talking.

  “... and Kip Carter, and steroids, and, things like that.”

  Go along with them.... Pretend to be with them.... Buy some time.... These are kids.... Don’t give it up.... Don’t quit.... Come on, Sally, handle it.... Play hardball.

  She smiled.

  “That seems a pretty big order,” she said. “And I don’t see how I can be much help. But if I could help, and did, what happens?”

  “All we know disappears forever,” Abby said.

  Mrs. Trent nodded.

  “And if I can’t help you?”

  “We have a letter,” Terry said. “Telling everything we know and suspect. It goes to a whole bunch of newspapers and TV stations.”

  Terry glanced at Abby. She looked at her notebook in her lap and read aloud from her list.

  “The Globe,” she said. “The Herald. The New Bedford Standard Times, Salem News, Lynn Item, Lowell Sun, Lawrence Eagle- Tribune, Worcester Gazette, Springfield Republican, Channels 4, 5, 7. You get the idea.”

  “And,” Mrs. Trent said kindly, “where are these letters now?”

  “A bunch of our friends have them,” Abby said. “Sealed, stamped, and addressed.”

  “Do they know the contents?” Mrs. Trent said, as if it didn’t really matter and she was just curious.

  “No,” Terry said. “But they know to send the letters if anything happens to us.”

  Mrs. Trent widened her eyes.

  “Happens to you?” she said. “My dear boy, aren’t you getting a little overheated?”

  She shifted in her chair.

  “Something happened to Jason,” Abby said.

  Nice legs, though, Terry thought, for her age.

  “I understood that was suicide,” Mrs. Trent said.

  Keep talking to them.... Work them, Sally, work them.... You’ve come too far, Sally, to let yourself be ruined by a couple of high school kids.... You’ve got them talking to you.... Pretty soon you can have them explaining.... You know how to do this, Sally, play them.

  Terry looked at his watch.

  “We’re going to give this one more minute,” he said. “Then we will get up and go out and tell our friends to mail their letters.”

  She stared contemptuously at Terry. Sally Trent, the most powerful woman in the state, being confronted by two stupid little kids. She wanted to spit on them.

  After nearly a minute she said, “There are things I can give you.”

  CHAPTER 39

  The female assistant stuck her head in the office door.

  “Everything going well?” she asked brightly.

  Mrs
. Trent waved her away. The door closed again.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Trent said, “I have a relationship with Paxton Bullard.”

  Terry and Abby looked at each other.

  Paxton!

  “How old are you,” Mrs. Trent asked, “seventeen or so?”

  “We’re both fifteen,” Abby said.

  “Well, you look older,” Mrs. Trent said. “But even more to the point, you are probably not able to understand this sort of thing. But ...” She took a breath. “Paxton is a long-time friend of my husband’s. He and Gerry were friends in college. When Gerry was head of the planning board, here in Cabot, Paxton came to him with a scheme. The school had just instituted an ambitious technical arts program, one of the first of its kind in an, ah, affluent school like Dawes Regional. He had a plan to use the resources of the technical arts program to build houses for nothing, and sell them for a great deal, and keep the money. Obviously he needed the kind of help only town officials could provide.”

  Abby was sitting straight in her chair, with her knees and ankles together, fully absorbed in what Mrs. Trent was saying. Terry looked at her profile. He didn’t know if she looked older than fifteen. But he knew she was beautiful.

  “My husband is a weak man. But he is loyal to his friends and, sad to say, I guess, is a bit greedy. I was head of the selectmen at the time. He asked me to do some things that seemed innocent, and I did them for him. He did some things. And among the things he did was to imply that he was speaking for me and to sign my name to a number of documents, which, in short, allowed this project to proceed.”

  Neither Terry nor Abby said anything. The story was starting to be told and they didn’t want to break the spell. Mrs. Trent seemed almost dreamy as she talked.

  “I’m very orderly,” she said. “And very careful. I was reviewing my recent activities on the board when it struck me that some of the decisions I seemed to have signed on to were specious.”

  Terry wasn’t exactly sure what specious meant. But Abby would know, and until he could ask her, he had a pretty good idea from the context.

  “I confronted Gerry, my husband, and he confessed to me. He begged me to let it go. He’s terrified of Paxton. Most people are, I suppose. He’s so big, and he has all those muscles, and he has such an explosive temper. But I have a conscience, and I have a duty to those people who elected me to represent them. So I went to Paxton, and I said, ‘This has to stop, now! ”’

  She paused for a moment, looking not at them really, more past them, at something that seemed far away. Terry and Abby sat motionless, waiting for her to go on.

  “He laughed at me,” Mrs. Trent said. “He is a troglodyte. Some sort of antediluvian beast, I think.”

  A couple of other words he’d have to ask Abby about.

  “He said there was no paper with his name on it,” Mrs. Trent went on. “He said that if we did anything to expose the scheme, he’d take my husband and myself down with him and that we’d fall a lot farther and land a lot harder.”

  Again she paused, again the faraway look of soft sadness.

  “My husband is a weak fool, and he’s not terribly bright,” she said finally. “But he’s my husband and I love him. I could not expose him to that, and Bullard knew it.”

  She had shifted from “Paxton” to “Bullard,” Terry noticed.

  “And then ...” She paused again, as if she were fighting off tears. “And then he said that to cement our new conspiracy, our new partnership, so to speak ...”

  She stopped and put her hands on either side of her face and pressed, as if she were trying to keep herself together.

  “He said that I had to become his mistress....”

  She slid her hands together and buried her face in them and sat for a long time.

  “Does Mr. Malcolm know about this house thing?” Terry said.

  Her voice was muffled as she spoke with her face still in her hands.

  “I assume so,” she said.

  “How about Kip Carter?” Abby said. “Where does he fit in?”

  Mrs. Trent straightened and took a Kleenex from her purse and dabbed at her eyes, carefully, so as not to disturb her makeup. Her eyes looked dry, Terry thought. Then she folded her hands, still clutching the Kleenex, and placed them in her lap.

  “Paxton uses him as a kind of enforcer with the kids,” she said calmly. “He helped Kip with his scholarship to Illinois. And he, I believe, supplies Kip and some of his pals with steroids. Paxton uses them himself, I know. Perhaps it accounts for his vicious temper.”

  “What do you mean, enforcer?” Abby said.

  “Make sure all the kids that knew about the project didn’t get nosy or talk about it the wrong way,” Mrs. Trent said. “You know. If they thought something was wrong and it was the principal’s fault, they might tell somebody. But, and you probably know these rules better than I do, they wouldn’t squeal on one of the other kids.”

  “Plus Kip Carter is the biggest wheel in the school,” Abby said.

  “And the toughest guy,” Terry said.

  “So,” Abby said, “yes. You’re right. Kids would much rather not rat out Kip Carter. Loyalty, fear ...” Abby moved her hands in sort of random circles as she searched for the right word.

  “Tribal loyalty, perhaps,” Mrs. Trent said.

  “Yes, that’s right,” Abby said.

  “How’s he get away with all this?” Terry said.

  “He is both school superintendent and principal of the high school,” Mrs. Trent said. “That’s quite unusual. Not unheard of, but unusual. It gives him unusual autonomy.”

  Another one for Abby, Terry thought. Must mean something like power.

  “And Jason?” Terry asked. “Do you know what happened to Jason Green?”

  Mrs. Trent shifted again in her chair, so that she was facing more toward Terry. She crossed her legs the other way and smoothed her skirt. Then she looked up and gazed hard and straight at Terry.

  “No,” Mrs. Trent said. “As God is my witness. I do not know what happened to Jason Green.”

  CHAPTER 40

  The posse of kids gathered around them as they came out of the storefront.

  “What’d she say? ... She tell you anything? ... What’d she tell you? ... What happened? Do we mail the letters?”

  “Hang on to the letters,” Terry said. “Don’t mail them. Don’t lose them. Just stand by on the letters.”

  “What’d she say?”

  Terry shook his head.

  “Abby and me are going to go to the café and go over what she said. Give us some time to do that, okay?”

  “To the café,” Tank shouted, and pointed grandly down the street. From the patrol car, the cop looked at them with mild amusement and shook his head slightly. As they trooped down the street, Sally Trent and her assistant came out of the storefront and got in a car. The car took them away, and the police car went with them. In the shadow of the theater entrance, Kip Carter stared after them.

  It was a slow time in the café. Too late for lunch, too early for supper, but kind of late for a coffee and a snack. Terry and Abby went to a booth in the back and sat across from each other and ordered coffee.

  “Paxton?” Terry said.

  “He always signs everything P. F. Bullard,” Abby said. “I never knew his name was Paxton.”

  “What do you suppose the ‘F’ stands for?” Terry asked.

  “Fauntleroy?” Abby said.

  They laughed and sipped their coffee.

  “Do you believe what she told us?” Terry said.

  “Of course not,” Abby said.

  “No?”

  “Remember she said there were things she could give us.”

  “Yeah?”

  “She gave us her husband and her boyfriend,” Abby said.

  “What don’t you believe?”

  “Most of it,” Abby said. “For instance, say the basic events are true, and Bullard’s making money off the school, and maybe distributing ‘roids to some of his joc
k faves.... You think he’s going to risk getting fired, maybe going to jail, and losing, what, a million dollars? On the house-building thing? You think he’s going to risk all that to have sex with Sally Trent?”

  “Is that what he did?”

  “Sure,” Abby said. “Essentially she said, he said, have sex with me or I’ll turn us all in.”

  “She said he said that his name wasn’t on any documents.”

  “Maybe,” Abby said. “Maybe it wasn’t. But if he tells his story, you think he won’t get connected to it? You think he would think that?”

  “No.”

  “Correct. So if we believe her story, he’s willing to risk everything to have sex with her.”

  “She does have pretty good legs,” Terry said.

  Abby slapped his forearm.

  “Stop that,” she said.

  He grinned at her.

  “Well,” he said. “One thing, when we were peeking in, while you were hiding your eyes and saying ‘eek,’ I was taking a look, and I don’t know all that much about it, but she didn’t act like she was doing anything she didn’t want to do ... you know?”

  “Yuck,” Abby said.

  “But you do know what I mean?”

  Abby blushed slightly.

  “Yes,” she said. “So you don’t believe her either?”

  Terry held his coffee mug in both hands and sipped from it while he looked at her over the rim of the mug.

  “Here’s what I think,” he said. “I think Bullard is involved in making money out of the house-building project. I believe he takes steroids, and I bet he gives some to Kip Carter. Mr. Trent’s probably involved too. And maybe something happened to Jason because he found out about this. He was in the tech arts program, you know.”

  “But if Jason found out anything, would he tell Mr. Bullard?”

  “He might have told Mr. Malcolm, or asked him about it, or something,” Terry said. “And Malcolm told Bullard.”

  “Are you saying that Mr. Bullard killed Jason?” Abby said.

  “I don’t know. We got this bunch of illegal stuff going on and right in the middle of it Jason dies, and when we start asking about it, Bullard and Kip Carter are on us like a heavy storm.”

  “Why not Mr. Malcolm?”