Mortal Stakes (6 page)

I shook my head. “I need some information on some betting habits, though.”

“Uh-huh?”

“Guy named Lester Floyd. Ever hear of him?”

Seltzer shook his head. “How about Bucky Maynard?”

“The announcer?”

“Yeah. Floyd is his batman.”

“His what?”

“Batman, like in the British army, each officer had a batman, a personal servant.”

“You spend too much time reading, Spenser. You know more stuff that don’t make you money than anybody I know.”

“‘Tis better to know than not to know,” I said.

“Aw bullshit, what is it you want to know about Maynard and what’s’isname?”

“Lester Floyd. I want to know if they bet on baseball and, if they do, what games they bet on. I want the dates. And I need an idea of how much they’re betting. Either one or both.”

Seltzer nodded. “Okay, I’ll let you know.”

AT PATRICIA UTLEY S HOME I returned to the Calvados. Patricia Utley had some sherry.

“Would you care to see the film, Spenser?” she said.

“No, thank you.”

“Why not? I never met a man that didn’t care for eroticism.”

“Oh, I’m all for eroticism.” I was thinking of Linda Rabb in her Church Park apartment in her clean white jeans.

“It’s movies I don’t like.”

“AS YOU wish.” She sipped some sherry. “You were going to mention some names to me.”

“Yeah, Bucky Maynard—I don’t know the real first name, maybe that’s it—and Lester Floyd.” I was gambling she’d never followed sports and had never heard of Maynard.

I didn’t want to tie Donna Burlington to the Red Sox, but I needed to know. If she’d ever heard of Bucky Maynard, she gave no sign. Lester didn’t look like a self-starter. If he was in on this, it was a good bet he represented Maynard.

“I’ll see,” she said. She picked up a phone on the end table near the couch and dialed a three-digit number. “Would you please check the subscription list, specifically on Suburban Fancy, and see if we have either a Bucky Maynard or a Lester Floyd, and the address and date? Thank you. Yes, call me right back, I’m in the library.”

“How many copies of that film are there?” I asked.

“I won’t tell you,” she said. “That’s confidential.”

“Okay, it doesn’t matter anyway. The real question is can I get all the copies?”

“No, I offered to show you the film and you didn’t want to.”

“That’s not the point.”

The phone rang and Patricia Utley answered, listened a moment, wrote on a note pad, and hung up.

“There is a Lester Floyd on our subscription list. There is no Bucky Maynard.”

“What’s the address on Floyd?”

“Harbor Towers, Atlantic Avenue, Boston, Mass. Do you need the street number?”

“No, thank you, that’s fine.” I finished my brandy and she poured me another.

“The point I was making before is that I don’t want the films to look at. I want them to destroy. Donna Burlington has a nice life now. Married, kid, shiny oak floors in her living room, all-electric kitchen. Her husband loves her. That kind of stuff. These films could destroy her.”

“That is hardly my problem, Spenser. The odds are very good that no one who saw these films would know Donna or connect her with them. And this is not eighteen seventy-five. Queen Victoria is dead. Aren’t you being a little dramatic that someone who acted once in an erotic movie would be destroyed?”

“Not in her circles. In her circles it would be murder.”

“Well, even if you are right, as I said, it is not my problem. I am in business, not social work. Destroying those films is not profitable.”

“Even if purchased at what us collectors like to call fair market value?”

“Not the master. That would be like killing the goose.

You can have all the prints you want, at fair market value, but not the master.”

I got up and walked across the room and looked out the windows at Thirty-seventh Street. The streetlights had come on, and while it wasn’t full dark yet, there was a softening bronze tinge to everything. The traffic was light, and the people who strolled by looked like extras in a Fred Astaire movie. Well dressed and good-looking. Brilliant red flowers the size of a trumpet bell bloomed in the little garden.

“Mrs. Utley,” I said, “I think that Donna’s being blackmailed and that the blackmailer will eventually ruin her life and her husband’s and he’s using your films.”

Silence behind me. I turned around and put my hands in my hip pocket. “If I can get those films, I can take away his leverage.” She sat quietly with her knees together and her ankles crossed as she had before and took a delicate sip of sherry. “You remember Donna, don’t you? Like a niece almost.

You taught her everything. Pygmalion. Remember her? She started out in life caught in a mudhole. And she’s climbed out.

She has gotten out of the bog and onto solid ground, and now she’s getting dragged back in. You don’t need money. You told me that.”

“I’m a businesswoman,” she said. “I do not follow bad business practices.”

“Is that how you stay out of the bog?” I said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You climbed out of the mudhole a bit too, is that how?

You keep telling yourself you’re a businesswoman and that’s the code you live by. So that you don’t have to deal with the fact that you are also a pimp. Like Violet.”

There was no change in her expression. “You lousy nodick son of a bitch,” she said.

I laughed. “Now, baby, now we are getting it together.

You got a lot of style and great manners, but you and I are from the same neighborhood, darling, and now that we both know it maybe we can do business. I want those goddamned films, and I’ll do what I have to to get them.”

Her face was whiter now than it had been. I could see the makeup more clearly.

“You want her back in the mudhole?” I said. “She got out, and you helped her. Now she’s got style and manners, and there’s a man that wants to dirty her up and rub her nose in what she was. It’ll destroy her. You want to destroy her?

For business? When I said you were like Violet, you got mad.

Think how mad it would make Violet.” She reached over and picked up the phone and pressed the intercom button.

“Steven,” she said, “I need you.”

By the time the phone was back in the cradle, Steven was in the room. He had a nice springy step when he walked.

Vigorous. He also had a.38 caliber Ruger Black Hawk.

Patricia Utley said, “I believe he has a gun, Steven.”

Steven said, “Yeah, right hip, I spotted it when he came in. Shall I take it away from him?” Steven was holding the Ruger at his side, the barrel pointing at the floor. As he spoke, he slapped it absentmindedly against his thigh.

“No,” Patricia Utley said, “just show him to the street, please.”

Steven gestured with his head toward the door. “Move it,” he said.

I looked at Patricia Utley. Her color had returned. She was poised, still controlled, handsome. I couldn’t think of anything to say. So I moved it.

Outside, it was a warm summer night. Dark now, the bronze glow gone. And on the East Side, midtown, quiet. I walked over to Fifth Avenue and caught a cab uptown to my motel. The West Side was a little noisier but nowhere near as suave. When I got into my room, I turned up the air conditioner, turned on the television, and took a shower. When I came out, there was a Yankee game on and I lay on the bed and watched it.

Was it Lester? Was it Maynard with Lester as the straw? It had to be something like that. The coincidence would have been too big. The rumor that Rabb is shading games, the wife’s past, Marty knew something about it. He lied about the marriage circumstances, and Lester Floyd showing up asking about the wife and Lester Floyd’s name being on the mailing list. It had to be. Lester or Maynard had spotted Linda Rabb in the film and put the screws on her husband. I couldn’t prove it, but I didn’t have to. I could report back to Erskine that it looked probable Rabb was in somebody’s pocket and he could go to the DA and they could take it from there. I could get a print of the film and show Erskine and we could brace Rabb and talk about the integrity of the game and what he ought to do for the good of baseball and the kids of America. Then I could throw up.

I wasn’t going to do any of those things, and I knew it when I started thinking about it. The Yankee game went into extra innings and was won by John Briggs in the tenth inning, when he singled Don Money in from third. Milwaukee was doing better in New York than I was.

IT WAS A CLASSIC summer morning when I dropped Brenda Loring off at her Charles River Park apartment. The river was a vigorous and optimistic blue, and the MDC cop at Leverett Circle was whistling “Buttons and Bows” as he directed traffic. Across the river Cambridge looked clean and bright in sharp relief against the sky. I went around Leverett Circle and headed back westbound on Storrow Drive. The last hurrah of the rush-hour traffic was still to be heard, and it took me twenty minutes to get to Church Park. I parked at a hydrant and took the elevator to the sixth floor. I’d called before I left that morning, so Linda Rabb was expecting me. Marty wasn’t home; he was with the club in Oakland.

“Coffee, Mr. Spenser?” she said when I came in.

“Yeah, I’d love some,” I said. It was already perked and on the coffee table with a plate of assorted muffins: corn, cranberry, and blueberry; all among my favorites. She was wearing pale blue jeans and a blue-and-pink-striped man-tailored shirt, open at the neck with a pink scarf knotted at the throat.

On her feet were cork-soled blue suede slip-on shoes. The engagement ring on her right hand had a heart-shaped diamond in it big enough to make her arm weary. The wedding ring on her left was a wide gold band, unadorned. A small boy who looked like his father hung around the coffee table, eyeing the muffins but hesitant about snatching one from so close to me.

I picked up the plate and offered him one, and he retreated quickly back behind his mother’s leg.

“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?”