Cold Night (Jack Paine Mysteries) (11 page)

"Something wrong, Bobby?"

"Some asshole over here decided I shouldn't talk with you. I can handle it. Dannon's been on my case, just like I told you."

"You're the only guy I'd back off for, Bobby. Just ask." He could almost hear Petty's back stiffen. "Fuck you," he said. Then he added, "Hold on, Jack, let me take the call in an empty office."

Paine heard emptiness, then Bobby came back on. He sounded like he was in another country; the usual background of typewriters and voices was gone.

Petty said, "Dannon's bringing the whole thing out again." Petty emphasized the word "whole."

"I told you I'd chuck it," Paine said.

"And I said fuck you. It's just that it was hard enough on Terry the first time around. She still thinks all the grief I got after backing you caused the miscarriage. And now to drag it all into the open again—"

"She's pregnant?" Paine interrupted. He knew there were only a few things that would get Petty to go on like this.

"Yeah," Bob answered. He laughed gruffly. "You know she always wanted three."

She would have had them
hung between the words.

It would do no good to give in to Dannon. If he tried to do that, Bobby would scream and kick his butt until they both called Dannon and told him to fuck himself. Petty was marine stock, and Irish, and nothing could get him to change his mind. If he thought Paine was giving up on something because of him, it would be worse for everybody —for Paine, for Terry, for Bobby himself. He could almost hear Petty berating himself for letting any emotion show. "Why did you call, Jack?"

"There's another creep, named Lucas Druckman. A loan shark, probably. He's from California, might be here now."

"I have a friend named Ray at LAPD." There was silence, then Bobby said gingerly, "You know, if Dannon gets his way, it's going to open all the holes up for you again."

"I know that."

"All of them, Jack."

"Yeah."

"What I mean is . . ."

"Will I fall apart? Try to kill myself?"

"Well . . ." Two beats of silence. "Don't forget I'm here for you, if you need me."

"Don't worry about me, Bobby."

Another beat of silence. "Let me go punch out that bastard who said I wasn't here."

"Do that, Bobby."

Paine sat staring at the phone. There was a noise at the
door and he looked up to see Margie. She wore her typical
pained expression.

"He wants you," she said.

"My body or mind?"

Margie smiled grimly and turned back to the reception area.

The music in Barker's office was still Rachmaninoff, but
the tape loop had been changed. Now it was Variations on a Theme by Paganini. A big showstopper in pop classical
concerts. It was another piece that Paine liked, and now, he
knew, would come to hate.

Fucking idiot.

As he sank into the chair opposite Barker the tape ended.

Then, seconds later, it started again.

"You're going to Boston," Barker said, staring out the window at a place above Paine's head. "Gloria Fulman wants to talk to you."

"Why can't she talk to me on the phone?"

Barker affected disinterest. "Because that's what she wants. She's paying for it."

"She's not a client."

"She is now."

"Did she sign a contract, or just buy you?"

Now Barker looked at him. It was the kind of gaze a man gives a sample of pond scum under a microscope.

"Go," he said.

He turned to some work on his desk, pretending that Paine had already left.

After a while, Paine had.

T
he limousine picked him up at Logan Airport. Paine had been in Boston once on police business and once when his cousin got married. Both times he'd gotten lost. Boston was a maze you drove into where, no matter how sure your sense of direction, you always arrived at a place different from your destination.

But the limo had no such problems. It glided through one-way streets like a magnet drawn to iron. The iron was Gloria Fulman.

Paine tried to look through the smoky gray glass to the front seat and see if the driver was really doing his job, or if the car worked by radio control.

There was a driver up there, because when they arrived at the Fulman Building he emerged and opened the door for Paine. Paine felt like tipping him. There was a doorman, in a smart red suit and a red pillbox hat brocaded in gold, who held the front door of the building open. Paine went in. There was a desk man, who merely nodded as Paine walked by.

He walked toward the elevator banks but a discreet cough from the desk man made him stop. The desk man smiled primly and motioned to a lone elevator set inconspicuously into the marble facade of the lobby to the left. The desk man looked down at his desk again. To him, Paine no longer existed. The man was standing. Paine wondered if he had to stand all day long.

As Paine stepped in front of the elevator, there was the audible click of a lock being disengaged. The door slid smoothly open. There was no
up
button. The interior of the elevator was marble-facaded, a mock of the lobby; there were recently polished bronze columns set into the four corners, bottomed in claw feet and topped in lions' heads. The elevator ceiling was paneled in mirrors. Paine looked up at himself. He could barely feel movement, and he wondered if the elevator was moving until it bumped demurely to a stop and the door whispered open.

More marble. A hallway, the walls bordered with bronze-framed mirrors every half dozen feet. The hallway ended in a right turn. There was another length of hallway which finally ended in huge double doors. Another doorman, more red velvet and brocade. This one stood. Again no seat. The doorman had heavy-soled shoes on, brightly and blackly polished. The build underneath the pillbox cap and organ-grinder's monkey suit looked like ex-middleweight.

"Mr. Paine," the doorman said. His eyes were flat, devoid of expression.

The doorman must have been miked; he never moved but the doors opened from within. As Paine walked in, the doors were closed by yet another doorman.

This is getting silly,
Paine thought.

He was in an entrance hall as large and as furnished as his apartment. Gloria Fulman was there to greet him.

"Mr. Paine," she said, her voice as flat as the doorman's.

"Hello," Paine said.

She turned, personally escorting him to a sitting room off the entrance hall. She even opened the white doors leading into it herself. Paine was more interested than flattered at the attention. She wanted more than to buy him, that was sure.

The sitting room was elegant and cold. The rugs looked as old as Persia.

"You'll take coffee?" she asked. On cue, the maid Paine had seen at the suite in New York appeared with the same silver service and the same kind of tea sandwiches. The maid handed coffee to him the way he liked it.

Gloria Fulman sat down on a lavender Sheraton sofa, and Paine sat down on a matching piece on the other side of the coffee table. As in New York, Gloria Fulman didn't touch her coffee.

"I want you to do an important piece of business for me, Mr. Paine," she said.

"And what would that be?"

"I want you to find Les Paterna's brown folder."

"You'll have to stand on line to get it."

Something stirred in the coffee-cold depths of her eyes.

"I know all about Henry Kopiak," she said. "This matter concerns the Fulmans. Your employer understands."

Paine stood up and walked to a framed etching on one wall. It was a beautifully frozen moment capturing two young girls on a swing in a park arching into the air, while a bum on a bench admired them. "So you're saying you made a deal with Barker that if I find the folder, you get it, and the hell with Kopiak?"

The etching had a pencil signature in the lower right-hand corner and was dated 1907.

Behind him, she rose from the couch.

"Mr. Paine," she said, and he turned to see her standing nearly at his elbow. She was pleasantly plump as he had remembered her, but this close he saw that she would look even more plump if she did not have the finest clothes altered with precision. If she had been forced to buy off-the-rack, she would not look so pleasant. Up close, she still looked ten years older than twenty-five.

"I'm saying that your employer expects you to do what you're paid for. My circumstances are . . . special."

He waited for her to go on. After trying to stare into his eyes for a few moments she turned and paced away from him.

"My husband," she said in a lowered, careful voice, "is in a precarious political position. There are people who will destroy him if they can."

"Are you being blackmailed?"

She stopped in front of her coffee and sat down again. She picked up the cup and then put it down. Her hand slipped, and coffee spilled over the rim onto the saucer. Paine watched a drop of it fall to the highly polished coffee table. He expected an alarm to go off, the mechanical maid to rush in with lemon polish and whisk the drop into oblivion.

Paine said, "I can smell blackmail a mile away. I smell it everywhere I look with your family." He looked at her levelly. "Did you know Lucas Druckman?"

This time he had caught her. Her eyes shifted subtly, filled in with life before going blank again. Her hand brushed across the top of her coffee cup, upsetting it again. "Who?" she said, not as firmly as she wished.

He took Druckman's picture out. "I already showed you this once."

"I don't know him," she said. She looked at the coffee table, and for a horrible moment Paine thought she was going to summon the maid to clean her spill. Instead she dabbed it up herself, with the corner of a napkin.

Paine sat down on the sofa and leaned forward. "Mrs. Fulman, has someone tried to kill you?"

"What do you mean?" she said. She was more and more unsure of herself, and Paine admitted to himself that he was enjoying it.

"I mean the bodyguards posing as bellboys you've got all over this place. I know hired muscles when I see them. This place looks like a Mafia don's love nest. I doubt you keep three armed men around all the time, even if your collection of etchings is valuable. Has someone tried to kill you?"

"Yes," she said.

"And you're sure that whoever tried to kill you killed Les Paterna, and maybe your father and sister, too?"

She had regained some of her composure. "I've hired you to find out who killed Les Paterna."

"Why do I get the feeling I'm only getting exactly what you want me to know?"

"Because that's true."

"Was Les Paterna blackmailing you?"

"That doesn't matter."

"Why didn't you tell me you knew him?"

She was silent, a part of the furniture, the room, the money itself.

Paine suddenly swept his arm across the coffee table, knocking the china cups, the coffee, the tea service, the little square sandwiches with the crusts removed, onto the rug. There were coffee droplets spattered in a line along the coffee table, and coffee stains setting comfortably into the Persian rug. He hoped they would be hard to get out. He hoped there was mayonnaise in the tea sandwiches, and that that would be hell to get out, too.

Gloria Fulman didn't move.

There was a polite knock at the double doors, and then they opened. Paine heard what sounded like a kitten crying. The maid wheeled a large white bassinet on large wheels into the room. The crying came from the bassinet.

"It's time for her four o'clock feeding, ma'am," the maid said. "I thought you'd want to know."

"Thank you, Barbara," Gloria Fulman said. There was a baby in the bassinet, small as a cat, and she picked it up. Paine studied her face and there was something akin to maternity on it.

Gloria Fulman said to Barbara, "We've had a little accident. We'll need someone to come and look at the rug. And please tell Jeff to bring the limousine around front. Mr. Paine will be going back to the airport now."

A
t twenty-five thousand feet in the air, with the sustained muffled scream of jet engines to lull him, Paine closed his eyes and the third bad place found him.

It was a night place. There was only darkness, the
snick-snick
of windshield wipers, the tarp-bright, slick blackness of wet street reflecting the colors of man-made night: dirt-yellow streetlamps, squares of dim light in rows of dead black buildings. The windows in the patrol car were down; the night smelled wet and close and dirty. Dannon was driving, and he wouldn't stop talking. He had been talking ever since they went on shift, first about his fishing trip, the Pennsylvania walleye pike he had caught in a big reservoir. Then he talked about the Yankees.