Mortal Stakes (5 page)

”Oh, I’m glad for you. Did you also encounter any clues?“ She opened the hamper as she talked and took out a red-and-white-checked tablecloth and spread it between us.

The day was warm and still, and the cloth lay quiet on the ground.

”Yeah. I found out a lot of things and all of them are bad. I think. It’s kind of complicated at the moment.“

She took dark blue glossy-finish paper plates out of the hamper and set them out on the cloth. ”Tell me about it.

Maybe it’ll help you sort out the complicated parts.“

I was looking into the hamper. ”Is that wine in there?“

I said. She took my nose and turned my head away.

”Be patient,“ she said. ”I went to a lot of trouble to arrange this and bring it out one item at a time and impress the hell out of you, and I’ll not have it spoiled.“

”Instinct,“ I said. ”Remember I’m a trained sleuth.“

”Tell me about your trip.“ She put out two sets of what looked like real silver.

”Okay, Rabb’s got reason to be dumping a game or two.“

”Oh, that’s too bad.“

”Yeah. Mrs. Rabb isn’t who she’s supposed to be. She’s a kid from lower-middle America who smoked a little dope early and ran off with a local hotshot when she was eighteen.

She went to New York, was a whore for a while, and went into acting. Her acting was done with her clothes off in films distributed by mail. She started out turning tricks in one-night cheap hotels. Then she graduated to a high-class call girl operation run, or at least fronted, by a very swish woman out of a fancy town house on the East Side. That’s when I think she met her husband.“

Brenda placed two big wine goblets in front of us and handed me a bottle of rose and a corkscrew. ”You mean, he was a—what should I call him—a customer?“

”Yeah, I think so. How can I talk and open the wine at the same time? You know my powers of concentration.“

”I’ve heard,“ she said, ”that you can’t walk and whistle at the same time. Just open the wine and then talk while I pour.“

I opened the wine and handed it to her. ”Now,“ I said, ”where was I?“

”Oh, giant intellect,“ she said, and poured some wine into my glass. ”You were saying that Marty Rabb had met his wife when she was—as we sociologists would put it—screwing him professionally.“

”Words,“ I said, ”what a magic web you weave with them. Yeah, that’s what I think.“

”How do you know?“ She poured herself a half glass of wine.

”Well, he’s covering up her past. He lied about how he met her and where they were married. I don’t know what he knows, but he knows something.“

Brenda brought out an unsliced loaf of bread and took off the transparent wrapping.

”Sourdough?“ I said.

She nodded and put the loaf on one of the paper plates.

”Is there more?“ she said.

”Yeah. A print of the film she made was sold to Lester Floyd.“ She looked puzzled. ”Lester Floyd,“ I said, ”is Bucky Maynard’s gofer, and Bucky Maynard is, in case you forgot, the play by play man for the Sox.“

”What’s a gofer?“

”A lackey. Someone to go-for coffee and go-for cigarettes and go-for whatever he’s told.“

”And you think Maynard told him to go-for the film?“

”Yeah, maybe, anyway, say Bucky got a look at the film and recognized Mrs. Rabb. Is that smoked turkey?“

Brenda nodded and put a cranshaw melon out beside it, and four nectarines.

”Oh, I hope she doesn’t know,“ she said.

”Yeah, but I think she does know. And I think Marty knows.“

”Some kind of blackmail?“

”Yeah. First I thought it was maybe Maynard or Lester of the costumes getting Rabb to shave a game here and there and cleaning up from the bookies. But they don’t seem to bet any these days, and I found out that Maynard owes money to a shylock.“

”Is that like a loan shark?“

”Just like a loan shark,“ I said.

A large wedge of Monterey Jack cheese came out of the hamper, and a small crystal vase with a single red rose in it, which Brenda placed in the middle of the tablecloth.

”That hamper is like the clown car at the circus. I’m waiting for the sommelier to jump out with his gold key and ask if Monsieur is pleased with the wine.“

”Eat,“ she said.

While I was breaking a chunk off the sourdough bread, Brenda said, ”So what does the loan shark mean?“

I said, ”Phnumph.“

She said, ”Don’t talk with your mouth full. I’ll wait till you’ve eaten a little and gotten control of yourself.“

I drank some wine and said, ”My compliments to the chef.“

She said, ”The chef is Bert Heidemann at Bert’s Deli on Newbury Street. I’ll tell him you were pleased.“

”The shylock means that maybe Maynard can’t pay up and they’ve put the squeeze on him and he gave them Rabb.“

”What do you mean, gave them Rabb?“

”Well, say Maynard owes a lot of bread to the shylock and he can’t pay, and he can’t pay the vig, and—“

“The what?”

“The vig, vigorish, interest. A good shylock can keep you paying interest the rest of your life and never dent the principal… like a revolving charge… Anyway, say Maynard can’t make the payments. Shylocks like Wally Hogg are quite scary. They threaten broken bones, or propane torches on the bottoms of feet, or maybe cut off a finger each time you miss a payment.”

Brenda shivered and made a face.

“Yeah, I know, okay, say that’s the case and along comes this piece of luck. Mrs. Rabb in the skin flick. He tells the shylock he can control the games that Marty Rabb pitches, and Rabb, being probably the best pitcher now active, if he’s under control can make the shylock and his employers a good many tax-free muffins.”

“But would he go for it?” Brenda asked. “I mean it would be embarrassing, but the sexual revolution has been won. No one, surely, would stone her to death.”

“Maybe so if she were married to someone in a different line of work, but baseball is more conservative than the entire city of Buffalo. And Rabb is part of a whole ethic: Man protects the family, no matter what.”

“Even if he has to throw games? What about the jock ethic? You know winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.

Wouldn’t that be a problem?”

“That’s not the real jock ethic, that’s the jock ethic that people who don’t know a hell of a lot about jocks believe. The real jock ethic’s a lot more complicated.”

“My, we’re a little touchy about the jock ethic, aren’t we?”

“I didn’t mean you,” I said.

“Maybe you haven’t outgrown the jock ethic yourself.”

“Maybe it’s not something to outgrow,” I said. “Anyway, some other time I’ll give my widely acclaimed lecture on the real jock ethic. The thing is that unless I misjudged Rabb a lot, he’s in an awful bind. Because his ethic is violated whichever way he turns. He feels commitment to play the game as best he can and to protect his wife and family as best he can. Both those commitments are probably absolute, and the point when they conflict must be sharp.”

Brenda sipped some wine and looked at me without saying anything.

“A quarter for your thoughts if you accept Diners Club?”

She smiled. “You sound sort of caught up in all this.

Maybe you’re talking some about yourself too. I think maybe you are.”

I leered at her. “Want me to tell you about the movie Mrs. Rabb was in and what they did?”

“You think I need pointers?” Brenda said.

“When we stop learning, we stop growing,” I said.

“And you got us off that subject nicely, didn’t you?”

I had once again qualified for membership in the clean plate club by then, and we had begun a second bottle of wine.

“You have to get back to work?” I said.

“No, I took the afternoon off. I had the feeling lunch would stretch out.”

“That’s good,” I said, and filled my wineglass again.

I SPENT A GOOD DEAL of time thinking about how to get the master print of Suburban Fancy from Patricia Utley and consequently spent not very much time sleeping till about 4:00 A.M. I didn’t think of anything before I fell asleep, and when I woke up, it was almost 10 and I hadn’t thought of anything while I slept. I was shaving at 10:20 when there was a knock at the door. I opened it with a towel around my middle, and there was a porter with a neat square package.

“Mr. Spenser?”

“Yeah.”

“Gentleman asked me to give this to you.”

I took it, went to the bureau, found two quarters, and gave them to the porter. He said thank you and went away. I closed the door and sat on the bed and opened the package. It was a canister of film. In the package was a note typed on white parchment paper.

Spenser, This is the master print of Suburban Fancy. I have destroyed the remaining two copies in my possession. My records show a copy sold to the gentleman we discussed last night. There are ten other copies outstanding, but I can find no pattern in their distribution. You will have to deal with the gentleman mentioned above. I wish you success in that.

Doing this violates good business practice and has cost me a good deal more than the money involved.

Violet would not have done it.

Yours, Patricia C. Utley She had signed it with a black felt-tipped pen in handwriting so neat it looked like type. I’d wasted a sleepless night.

I got out the Manhattan Yellow Pages from the bedside table and looked under “Photographic Equipment” till I found a store in my area that rented projectors. I was going to have to look at the film. If it turned out to be a film on traffic safety, or VD prevention, I would look like an awful goober. Patricia Utley had no reason particularly to lie to me but I was premising too much on the film’s authenticity to proceed without looking.

I had mediocre eggs Benedict in the hotel coffee shop and went out and got my projector. Walking back up Fiftyseventh Street with it, I felt furtive, as if the watch and ward society had a tail on me. Going up in the elevator, I tried to look like an executive going to a sales conference. Back in my room I set up the projector on the luggage rack, pulled the drapes, shut off the lights, and sat on one of the beds to watch the movie. Wasteful practice giving me a room with two beds.

Motels did that to me often. Alone in a two-bed room. A great song title, maybe I’d get me a funny suit and a guitar and record it. The projector whirred. The movie showed up on the bare wall.

Patricia Utley was right, it was a high-class operation.

The color was good, even on the beige wall. I hadn’t bothered with sound. The titles were professional, and the set was well lit and realistic-looking. The plot, as I got it without the sound, was about a housewife, frustrated by her church, children, and kitchen existence, who relieves her sense of limitation in the time-honored manner of skin flicks immemorial.

The housewife was, in fact, Linda Rabb.

Watching in the darkened motel room, I felt nasty. A middle-aged man alone in a motel watching a dirty movie.

When I got through here, I could go down to Forty-second Street and feed quarters into the peep show Movieolas. After the first sexual contact had established for sure what I was looking at, I shut off the projector and rewound the film. I went into the bathroom and stripped the film off the reel into the tub. I got the package of complimentary matches from the bedside table and lit the film. When it had burned up, I turned on the shower and washed the remnants down the drain. It was close to noon when I checked out of the hotel.

Before I caught the shuttle back to Boston, I wanted to visit the Metropolitan Museum. On the way uptown in a cab, I stopped at a flower shop and had a dozen roses delivered to Patricia Utley. I checked my overnight bag at the museum, spent the afternoon walking about and throwing my head back and squinting at paintings, had lunch in the fountain room, took a cab to La Guardia, and caught the six o’clock shuttle to Boston. At seven forty-five I was home.

My apartment was as empty as it had been when I left, but stuffier. I opened all the windows, got a bottle of Amstel out of the refrigerator, and sat by the front window to drink it. After a while I got hungry and went to the kitchen.

There was nothing to eat. I drank another beer and looked again, and found half a loaf of whole wheat bread behind the beer in the back of the refrigerator and an unopened jar of peanut butter in the cupboard. I made two peanut butter sandwiches and put them on a plate, opened another bottle of beer and went and sat by the window and looked out and ate the sandwiches and drank the beer. Bas cuisine.

At nine thirty I got into bed and read another chapter in Morison’s History and went to sleep. I dreamed something strange about the colonists playing baseball with the British and I was playing third for the colonists and struck out with the bases loaded. In the morning I woke up depressed.

I hadn’t worked out during my travels, and my body craved exercise. I jogged along the river and worked out in the BU gym. When I was through and showered and dressed, I didn’t feel depressed anymore. So what’s a strikeout? Ty Cobb must have struck out once in a while.

It was about ten when I went into the Yorktown Tavern. Already there were drinkers, sitting separate from each other smoking cigarettes, drinking a shot and a beer, watching The Price Is Right on TV or looking into the beer glass. In his booth in the back, Lennie Seltzer had set up for the day.

He was reading the Globe. The Herald American and the New York Daily News were folded neatly on the table in front of him. A glass of beer stood by his right hand. He was wearing a light tan glen plaid three-piece suit today, and he smelled of bay rum.

He said, “How’s business, kid?” as I slid in opposite him.

“The poor are always with us,” I said. He started to gesture at the bartender, and I shook my head. “Not at ten in the morning, Len.”

“Why not, tastes just as good then as any other time.

Better, in fact, I think.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of. I got enough trouble staying sober now.”

“It’s pacing, kid, all pacing, ya know. I mean, I just sip a little beer and let it rest and sip a little more and let it rest and I do it all day and it don’t bother me. I go home to my old lady, and I’m sober as a freaking nun, ya know.” He took an illustrative sip of beer and set the glass down precisely in the ring it had left on the tabletop. “Find out if Marty Rabb’s going into el tanko yet?”