Hush Money (6 page)

I pulled the phone over and called Hall, Peary.

“Louis Vincent, please.”

I got switched to his secretary who told me that Mr. Vincent was in a meeting and could he call me back. I said no and hung up. I looked at the pile of material on my desk. I got up and made coffee and drank some. I looked at the pile. I finished my coffee and got up and walked downtown to State Street to see if Louis Vincent was out of his meeting.

He was. But he was on the phone to Tokyo and really couldn’t see anybody today without an appointment. His secretary was maybe twenty-three, the kind of athletic-looking young woman who walks to work in her running shoes and sweat socks, carrying her heels in a Coach bag. I tried out one of my specialty smiles – paternal, yet seductive, which is usually very effective with athletic young women. She smiled back. Though she might have been responding to the paternal, and ignoring the seductive. Takes all kinds.

“I can wait,” I said.

“Certainly,” she said, “though I really can’t encourage you.”

“That’s okay.”

I took out one of my business cards, and wrote on the back of it,
KC Roth
. I handed it to the secretary.

“If you’ll just give him this, perhaps he’ll be able to squeeze me in.”

“Worth a try, sir,” she said and took my card.

As she went into Vincent’s office I noticed that she must have done a lot of work on the StairMaster. I noticed also that she didn’t look at the card. In shape
and
discreet was a good combination. She was in there maybe two minutes and when she came out she smiled at me.

“He’ll see you in just a moment,” she said.

“It’s the business card,” I said. “It pays to get a quality print job.”

She smiled again.

“I’m sure it does,” she said.

The office door opened and a man stood in the doorway in full upwardly mobile regalia. He was a tall man who looked like he’d be good at racquet sports. He wore a blue striped shirt with a white collar and a pink bow tie, wide pink suspenders, and the trousers of a dark blue pinstripe suit. His blond hair was longish and combed straight back like Pat Riley’s, and his skin had the ruddy look of health and maybe Retin A.

“Spenser? Come on in.”

I went in. He must have been churning a lot of accounts. It was a corner office, filled with pictures of family and horses and famous clients, trophies from tennis tournaments, and ribbons from horse shows. His children looked like the kids you see in cereal commercials. His wife looked like a model. The jacket of his blue suit hung on a coat hanger on a coatrack behind the door. There was a pink silk pocket square showing. He gestured me to a seat in front of his desk. The diamonds in his heavy gold cuff links glinted in the understated light from his green shaded desk lamp. He glanced at his watch. A Rolex, how surprising.

“Now how can I help you?” he said.

“Tell me about KC Roth,” I said.

“Why do you think I know anything about a person named KC Roth?”

“She told me you were until recently her boyfriend.”

He raised his eyebrows and leaned back a little in his chair, and clasped his hands behind his head. Beyond him the view stretched into Boston Harbor and out to the harbor islands. To his left a big color computer screen flickered with the facts of someone’s life savings.

“Did she?” he said.

I nodded ingenuously. He leaned back some more.

“By God, you’re a big fella, aren’t you,” he said.

“I try to be modest about it,” I said.

“You play some sports?”

“Used to be a fighter,” I said. “I’m not sure it was play.”

“Ah, the sweet science,” he said.

“Sweet science is what happened to my nose,” I said. “Were you KC Roth’s boyfriend?”

“What is this in regard to?”

“A criminal case.”

“Something happen to her?”

“Nothing permanent,” I said.

“Well, I… I wouldn’t want anything to happen to her.”

“She’s fine,” I said. “You were her boyfriend?”

He shrugged and grinned. His teeth gleamed.

“Well, I can count on your discretion?” he said.

“In my business,” I said, “you’re discreet or you’re not in business.”

It wasn’t really true. I’d blab his name in a minute if I needed to, but there was no point in telling him that. And the answer I gave him sounded like the kind of answer he’d want to believe.

“Yeah, same in my business. You know? You’re fucking with people’s money, babe, and their hair stands up real stiff.”

“So you and KC Roth?”

He grinned, hands still clasped behind his head. He put his feet up on the corner of the desk.

“She could fuck the balls off a brass monkey,” he said.

“Good to know.”

“Don’t misunderstand,” he said. “I’m married and plan to stay that way, but, ah, you’ve seen KC?”

“Un huh.”

“So you can see how easy it would be to wander off the reservation one time.”

My guess was that he’d been wandering off the reservation since his voice changed.

“Easy,” I said.

“Well, I did and I’m not proud of it, but it was a ride.”

He winked at me. We knew the score, he and I. Couple of studs. More notches on the weapon than John Wesley Harding.

“Why’d it end?” I said.

“For crissake she left her husband. She wanted me to marry her.”

“Don’t you hate when that happens,” I said.

“You better believe it. I got three kids, big job, my wife’s no slouch in the sack either, mind you. KC wanted us to go to Key West and live on the beach.”

He laughed. I laughed. Women are so silly. Fortunately there are a lot of them.

“What a ditz,” he said. “I told her this isn’t about love, KC, this is about fucking. You know what she said? You wanna know?”

“What’d she say?”

“She says, ‘What’s the difference?’ You believe that? What’s the difference.”

He chuckled. I chuckled too. Man of the world.

“She didn’t threaten you when you dumped her?” I said.

“With what?”

“Tell your wife?”

“No. She wouldn’t. She’s not like that. She’s a really sappy broad, but she’s not mean. Besides I think she likes the drama. She’s all drama. She likes the drama of a clandestine affair, and she likes the drama of a sorrowful breakup, and being heartbroken and all that.”

Vincent was a little smarter than he seemed. Or I was as dumb as he was. I too thought that life for KC was a series of dramatic renditions.

“Somebody is stalking her,” I said.

“And you’re coming to me?”

“Ex-husbands, ex-boyfriends, that’s where you usually go,” I said.

“Hey pal, I dumped her, you know. I’m not some heartbroken loser sneaking around in the dark. There’s plenty more where she came from. Try her husband.”

“You replace her yet?” I said.

He grinned at me.

“Like Kleenex,” he said. “Use once and discard. There’s plenty more.”

“Your wife?” I said.

He shrugged.

“She’s fine. House in Weston. Kids in private school. Drives a Range Rover. Plays golf. Sex is still good. I’m home at least three nights a week.”

“What could be better?” I said.

He nodded enthusiastically. Irony was not his strength.

“It’s a pretty good gig,” he said. “I gotta admit it. There much money in your line of work?”

“No,” I said. “But you meet interesting people.”

He stood and put out his hand.

“Nice talking to you.”

“You have no thoughts on who might be stalking KC?” I said. “Knowing KC,” he said, “she probably made him up. Have fun.”

I nodded.

“Fun’s what it’s all about,” I said.

“And the winner dies broke,” he said.

“Your friends are nice,” I said.

“Yes, they are.”

“As nice as my friends?” I said.

“Like Hawk, say? Or Vinnie Morris?”

“Well, yes.”

“Please!” Susan said.

We were on Garden Street walking past the Harvard Police Station. I decided to move the conversation forward, and told her about my encounter with Louis Vincent at Hall, Peary.

“Kleenex?” Susan said. “Women are like Kleenex?”

“Un huh. Use and discard. There’s plenty more.”

I watched her ears closely to see if any steam escaped. But she was controlled.

“The man is an absolute fucking pig,” she said.

“There’s that,” I said.

“I want him to be the stalker.”

“Because he’s a pig?”

“Yes.”

“Does he fit the profile?”

Susan glared at me for a moment, before she said, “No.”

“He appears to be one of the masters of the universe,” I said. “Good-looking, well married, good job, lots of dough, endless poon tang on the side. Stalkers are usually losers.”

“I know.”

“It’s usually about control,” I said. “Isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“I’d guess this guy is in control.”

“Not of his libido,” Susan said.

“No, maybe not,” I said. “On the other hand KC wasn’t bopping him under duress.”

Susan gave a long sigh.

“No,” Susan said, “she wasn’t.”

“And she didn’t dump him, did she?”

Susan thought about that.

“In one sense,” she said, “maybe not. She left her husband to marry him. He said, ‘I won’t marry you.’ But who said, ‘Therefore it’s over’?”

I raised both eyebrows. I could raise one eyebrow, like Brian Donlevy, but I didn’t very often, because most people didn’t know who Brian Donlevy was, or what I was doing with my face.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll ask.”

Susan looked pleased.

“Maybe he could still be the stalker.”

“We can always hope,” I said.

We reached Linnaean Street and turned right toward Susan’s place.

“How about that thing you’re doing for Hawk?”

“Well, it is, I believe, turning into a hair ball.”

“Oh?”

“I don’t think the Lamont kid killed himself.”

“Why not?”

I told her how his friends said he was happy and how they were scornful of the possibility that he was having an affair with Robinson Nevins and how the window was hard to open and how Lamont was said to be approximately the size of a dandelion, but not as strong.

“Suicides often appear happy prior to the suicide,” Susan said. “They’ve decided to do it.”

“Thus solving all their problems.”

“And getting even with whomever they are getting even.”

“Which is usually why people do it?”

“Yes,” Susan said. “The pathology is often similar, oddly enough, to the pathology which causes stalking – see what you’ve made me do is a kind of back door control. It forces emotion from the object of your ambivalence.”

“I don’t think he could have opened the window,” I said.

“Maybe it was conveniently open when the time came. Maybe its openness was the presenting moment, so to speak.”

“I checked,” I said. “It was thirty-six degrees, raining hard, with a strong wind on the day he went out.”

Susan smiled at me.

“So much for psychoanalytic hypothesis,” she said.

“It’s very helpful,” I said. “Especially when you asked about who actually ended KC’s affair. But it isn’t intended to replace the truth, is it?”

“No. It’s intended to get at it.”

We went into Susan’s office. Her office and waiting room and what she called her library (it looked remarkably like a spare room with a bath to me) were on the first floor. Her quarters, and Pearl’s, were on the second. When Susan opened the door to her living room, Pearl bounded about giving and receiving wet kisses, torn with her passion to greet us both at the same time. But, being a dog, she quickly got over her bifurcating ambivalence and went back and sat on the sofa with her tongue out and looked at us happily.

Susan got me a beer from her refrigerator and poured herself a bracing glass of Evian, and we sat down together at her kitchen counter. Pearl sat on the floor beside us in case we moved into eating.

“So where to now,” Susan said.

“One thing is I’ll ask KC to go through the breakup, see if he might have experienced it as her leaving him. Second, I figure that Louis has fooled around before.”

“I think you can bank on it,” Susan said.

“So I’m going to see if I can find a few former girlfriends and see if there’s been any stalking. If he’s a wacko, KC can’t be the only one he’s been a wacko with.”

Susan nodded and sipped some Evian. I drank some beer.

“How about the other case?”

“I’ve got a stack of back issues of the magazine that Lamont published:
OUTrageous
.”

“As in OUT of the closet?”

“Yes. I’ll read through that and see if there’s a suspect. I’ll look at the plans for future issues, which I also have, and see if there’s any suspects there.”

“And if there aren’t?”

“Then I’ll try to establish whether there was or was not a relationship between Nevins and Lamont, and if there was why people didn’t know and if there wasn’t why people said there was.”

“And if that doesn’t work?”

“I’ll ask you,” I said.

“For some psychoanalytic theory?”

“Can’t hurt,” I said. “What I think we should do is go take a shower and brush our teeth and lie on my bed and see what kind of theory we can develop.”

“I’m pretty sure I know what will develop,” I said.

“Should we shower together?” Susan said.

“If we do, things may develop too soon.”

“Good point,” Susan said. “I’ll go first.”

“And Pearl?” I said.

“In the living room with the TV on Fox – loud. She loves to watch Catherine Crier.”

“Anyone would,” I said.

And Susan disappeared into her bedroom.