Hundred Dollar Baby (20 page)

"I don't know," I said.

When I got back to the hotel, there was a message on my voice mail.

"Corsetti. Meet me at Farnsworth's place."

Talkative
.

I decided I could walk there as fast as I could cab, so I did. When I got to Central Park West I saw the police vehicles, five or six of them, including the coroner's wagon. Half a dozen uniforms were standing outside, giving the hard eye to pedestrians. The doorman was standing around in a state of proprietary uncertainty.

"Detective Corsetti told me to meet him here," I said to a thick uniform by the front door.

"Yeah? What's your name?" the uniform said.

"Spenser," I said.

"What's he want to see you about?"

"He didn't say."

The cop looked annoyed. He turned and opened the little brass door and took out the house phone. He looked at it for a moment, then turned to the doorman.

"You," he said. "Dial the apartment, ask for Corsetti, gimme the phone."

"You bet," the doorman said and did it.

"Flanagan, on the front door, Detective. Guy down here named"-he looked at me-"whaddid you say your name was?"

"Spenser."

"Spenser," the cop said into the phone. "What, okay Detective, okay."

He handed the phone back to the doorman. And jerked his head at me.

"Go ahead," he said.

It sounded as if he didn't like saying it.

When I got off the elevator, there were two more uniforms in the hallway outside Farnsworth's apartment.

"Corsetti?" I said.

"You Spenser?"

"Yeah."

One of the cops jerked his head at the apartment door, and I went in. There were technicians at work and several detectives standing around with notebooks. One was Corsetti.

On the floor among them was a body, with a crime-scene guy crouched beside it.

"Farnsworth?" I said to Corsetti.

"Probably," Corsetti said. "You know him, take a look."

I stepped over and looked. It was not a fresh kill.

"Yeah," I said. "Farnsworth."

"Cleaning service comes once a week," Corsetti said. "They came in this morning and found him."

"How long?" I said.

Corsetti glanced at his notebook.

"Yesterday sometime," he said. "Small-caliber gun. Several wounds. Won't know exactly how many until they get him on the table downtown. No shell casings."

"So probably a revolver," I said.

"Or a neat shooter," Corsetti said.

"And a cool one," I said. "Fire off several rounds in a residential building and stop to police the brass?"

"If he did, he got away with it," Corsetti said.

"Good point," I said.

"You know anything about this?" Corsetti said.

"No."

"Where's your little girl friend?"

"April? I don't know."

It was technically not a lie. I didn't know exactly where she was.

Corsetti nodded.

"How about Patricia Utley?" he said.

"Wow," I said, "you remembered."

"Of course I remembered. How do you think I made detective?"

"I was wondering about that," I said.

"You got any reason to think she could have shot Lionel?"

"You know what I know," I said. "There was some conflict over this deal with the DeNuccis. But nothing should make her shoot him."

"Just run through it again for me," Corsetti said.

I did, including the part where April smacked her around.

"Maybe she lied about who hit her," Corsetti said. "Maybe it was Farnsworth slapped her around. Maybe she got even."

"Doesn't seem like Farnsworth's style," I said.

Corsetti nodded.

"Small-caliber gun," he said, "like a woman would use."

"Yeah," I said, "sure. You know and I know that most people use the gun they can get their hands on, not the gun ideally suited to them."

"Just a thought," Corsetti said. "What do you think about the DeNuccis?"

"My guess, no," I said. "Talking to Arnie Fisher, I think they will do the deal on their terms or not at all, and they don't much care which."

"'Course that's what Arnie says."

"And I'm a gullible guy," I said.

"Aren't we all," Corsetti said.

"Lionel let the shooter in?" I said.

"Apparently," Corsetti said. "No sign of forced entry. No sign of socializing, either, no wineglasses, no coffee cups. Bed was made. Cleaning people say he normally left it on made on the day they came, so they could change the linen and make it."

"So he didn't sleep in it last night," I said.

Corsetti nodded, looking down at the corpse.

"Lionel probably slept right here last night," he said. "You run into April, you'll let me know."

"You bet," I said.

I got home from New York around two in the afternoon. I stood for a while and enjoyed it. The silence in my apartment. The lack of clutter. The mine-ness. I looked at Susan's picture on my mantel. She'd be with patients until five today. Then she had a seminar she was giving at Harvard. Tomorrow she was mine. I went into the bedroom and unpacked. At quarter to three, Hawk showed up and we sat at my kitchen counter and had a beer.

"Where is April?" I said.

"In the mansion," Hawk said. "I stopped by, told her I was in the neighborhood. See if she was okay."

"She okay?"

"Oh, yeah," Hawk said.

We were quiet. Hawk's face showed nothing. But there was something.

"What?" I said.

"I think she have a new man in her life," Hawk said.

"Who?"

Hawk studied the label on the beer bottle. Blue Moon Belgian White.

"How come this Belgian stuff brewed in Denver?" he said.

"Nothing is as it seems," I said. "Who's the new man?"

Hawk smiled. There was always something radiant about Hawk's smile. It came so suddenly and passed so quickly, and yet seemed so genuine in its short span.

"Me," Hawk said.

I was silent for a moment.

Then I said, "Oh, Christ."

"Yep," Hawk said. "She say since she first saw me she attracted."

"Isn't everybody," I said.

"True," he said. "She say she tried not to let herself feel that way, but she wasn't strong enough. She suggested carnal relations."

I waited.

"I tole her I tried to take Thursdays off," Hawk said. "Rest up for the weekend."

"How'd she take that?"

"Sort of rattled her," Hawk said. "But she kept her focus. She say, 'Okay, let's have dinner tomorrow.' "

"What does she want?" I said.

"You saying she might not mean it?" Hawk said.

"She may mean it, but it's been a long time since she did it for love," I said.

"Been a long time since she knew somebody like me," Hawk said. "Plus, she say she have a dream, and she tell me she want to share that dream with me, with a man like me strong enough to believe in dreams, strong enough to make them come true."

"Yeah," I said, "that would be you."

"She tell me about Dreamgirl, like I never heard of it, and about how everybody keep trying to stop her and keep betraying her but how she won't give up and all we need to be happy is to be together and support each other."

"She mention me at all?" I said.

"She did," Hawk said.

"She love you better than me?"

"She didn't actually say so, but I able to surmise it," Hawk said.

"Anything specific?"

"She ask me to kill you," Hawk said.

I drank some beer.

"So that's what she wants," I said.

" 'Pears so," Hawk said. "Plus, of course, she love me."

"She say why she might want you to kill me?"

"She say you won't leave her alone. That you want to control her like her daddy did and keep her a child and won't let her achieve her dream."

"Damn," I said. "And here I thought it was just tough love."

"Parenting is hard," Hawk said.

"Did you agree?" I said.

"I tole her we could talk about it over dinner."

"So you haven't decided yet," I said.

"Actually, I have," Hawk said. "I can't kill you. Ain't nobody else can stand me."

"Good point," I said.

I sat with Hawk in his car, half a block from the mansion, looking at April's front door.

"You talk with Susan 'bout April?" Hawk said.

"No."

"You think you might want to talk with Susan 'bout April?" Hawk said.

"No."

"She knows about stuff like this," Hawk said.

"She does."

"But?"

"But since April has decided to have me killed, Susan's objectivity will be too compromised," I said. "Won't matter what she knows."

"Unlike you and me," Hawk said.

"We're used to having people decide to kill us."

"And not being able to," Hawk said.

"So far," I said.

Hawk turned his head to look at me.

"Really upbeat today," he said.

I shrugged.

" 'Spose we can't just kill her first," Hawk said. " 'Fore she finds somebody willing to try."

"No," I said.

"Okay," Hawk said. "So we wait. When she finds somebody willing to try, we kill him."

I nodded. We sat and looked at her front door. Spring had finally arrived in the Back Bay. The snow was mostly gone. Birds hopped in the budding trees. I was comfortable in my lightweight warm-up jacket.

Without looking at me, Hawk said, "You done what you could.

I nodded.

"Her old man kicked her out of the house twenty years ago," Hawk said.

I nodded.

"Called her a whore," I said.

"She been living up to it ever since," Hawk said.

"Makes salvation hard."

"It does."

A young woman in jeans and a red fleece vest walked four small dogs on leashes along the mall in the middle of the avenue.

"The pimps got her," Hawk said. "You got her away from them."

"And sent her to a madam."

"A high-class madam that would look out for her," Hawk said.

I nodded.

"What were your choices?" Hawk said. "She wouldn't go home. She wouldn't go to the state. You gonna adopt her?"

I shook my head.

"You done what you could," Hawk said.

I didn't answer. Two well-dressed men turned into the front walk of the mansion. I looked at my watch. Eleven fifteen in the morning.

"She had it pretty good with Patricia Utley," Hawk said. "And she run off."

"She thought she was in love," I said.

Hawk nodded.

"And she ends up in like sexual slavery," Hawk said. "And you get her out of that."

"Crown Prince Clubs," I said. "Probably where she got the Dreamgirl idea."

"Being as she was having so much fun," Hawk said.

I watched the quartet of small dogs with their walker. Three of them pulled hard, stretched out at the end of the leashes. One, a wired-haired dachshund, stayed close to her walker's ankles.

"You can't save her," Hawk said. "She been in the muck too long. She fell into it too early."

"I know," I said.

"She probably kill Ollie DeMars. It's why Ollie let her in and made sure they were alone. He think he going to get his ashes hauled."

"I know."

"Pretty surely she kill Lionel in New York," Hawk said. "Ain't no one else that makes any sense for it."

"I know."

The sun was nearly overhead. The car was warm. We sat with the engine off and the windows open. Traffic was sparse at midday. The promising spring air moved through the car.

"So why don't you just give her to Belson," Hawk said. "Let him and Corsetti sort it out."

I didn't say anything.

"Okay," Hawk said. "You don't like that, I got another suggestion. Whyn't you go on in and try to save her. Give her a chance to shoot you."

"I was thinking more along those lines," I said.

April and I were in her apartment on the top floor of the mansion again. She looked as good as she had when she came to my office in the winter. Even in jeans and a white T-shirt, she was elegantly pulled together, with just enough maturity in her face to look like a grown-up.

"I don't know what we have to say to each other," she said.

"There's a lot I don't know," I said. "And there's probably some I'll never know. Everybody has been lying to me since we began. But here's how I think it went."

"What are you talking about?" April said.

"I figure it started clean enough. Mrs. Utley gave you charge of one of her spin-off houses. It was probably mostly an experiment, see how they worked. But you had already fallen in love with Lionel Farnsworth, and it went south pretty quick."

"That's ridiculous," April said.

She sat on her couch with her bare feet tucked under her, looking aloof and languid.

"I don't know when it happened," I said, "or who thought it up, but somewhere in there the Dreamgirl scheme hatched, and you and Lionel started embezzling."

"Have you been drinking?" April said.

"Not enough," I said. "Then, somewhere in here, I don't know how, you found out that Lionel was involved in the same scheme with other women-in Philly and in New Haven. And you broke it off. Lionel was vexed by that, so he called on his old jail buddy Ollie DeMars to get you to rethink everything. And you hired me to chase him off. Which I did. But that left you without a man in your life, except me. And I wasn't suitable for romance."

April didn't bother to respond to that. She just shook her head sadly.

"So you took up with Ollie. And Ollie got far enough into things here to scoop some of the security tapes. Ollie being Ollie, he probably enjoyed watching them, but, Ollie being Ollie, he also probably saw their practical, which is to say blackmail, application. My guess is he used the threat of outing your customers to weasel in on the business."

April was beginning to vacillate between contemptuous and remote. She was trying remote now, looking past me out her window.

"You knew I wouldn't kill him for you," I said. "But you also knew if I took him off your back again he'd blab and I'd learn too much about what was going on."