“He’s a very clever lyricist,” she said defensively.
“I got a pal who’s very clever at leg-breaking,” R.J. said. “But I didn’t bring him to lunch.”
“All right, R.J., I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought Michael along, and I know it. I just couldn’t face you alone.”
R.J. nodded. “You never could,” he said quietly.
“But can’t we put all that behind us?” Belle pleaded. “I know I was no great shakes as a mother. But I had some damn good excuses.”
She said it with a valiant attempt at a smile that she obviously didn’t feel. R.J. softened in spite of himself.
“You sure as hell did,” he said.
“But I’ve been sober for fifteen years, R.J. I really am a different person. I
detest
some of the things that other Belle Fontaine did.”
And she should: She had trampled on people, stabbed fellow actors in the back, clawed her way to the top over the mangled careers of everyone who stood in her way. And her son had not always been spared.
R.J. felt her hand covering his and looked down in shock. He couldn’t remember the last time she had touched him.
He looked up into those famous, gorgeous blue eyes, now wet with tears she was trying not to show.
“It may be too late to be your mother,” she said, her voice not quite breaking, “but could I at least be your friend? We hardly know each other.”
“It’s hard to really know somebody in ninety minutes a year,” he said, wanting to buy into what she was saying but not daring to, not yet, not so easily.
“You know, R.J.,” she husked in her best velvet voice, “I’m trying very hard, I really am. When you get to be a certain age, family is a lot more important.”
“More important than your career?” he asked her.
“Oh, God, you’re a bastard when you want to be.” She took her hand away. “Just like your father.” She rummaged through her handbag and pulled out a tissue, dabbing at her eyes and then blowing her nose genteelly. “You even look like him when you say those things, and it makes me crazy, darling. I miss him terribly.”
It was a good recovery. The use of the word “darling” was a tip-off, though. She was back in control.
That was about it. Michael came back and they waded through a miserable, awkward lunch. Sixteen people stopped and asked politely for autographs. Michael sang a few snatches of his terribly clever lyrics. A total stranger insisted on paying the check.
And R.J. staggered out an hour later, wondering at that strange interlude with his mother. She’d seemed sincere, but then Belle had made a career out of seeming sincere. And he had a nagging suspicion that he’d heard some of her lines before, in one of her old movies.
It was true that she was a different person now, sober. But he still didn’t know who that person was. And, stubbornly, he felt it was up to her to let him know.
He went home uneasy about the whole thing, unwilling to believe that somebody could really change that much, and unable to dismiss the idea completely. But the uneasiness faded as he got back to work on a new case, a man who thought his wife was sleeping with his father.
It was almost a year before he thought about that lunch again, and his mother’s hand reaching across the table to hold his.
And then it was too late.
CHAPTER 2
R.J. checked the illuminated dial of his Ebel watch—a gift from his partially satisfied client—and figured he’d given them long enough. With his Pentax IQ, fitted with a lens and automatic focus, he’d already gotten the girl’s picture when she arrived.
Another redhead. Not as young as the old man’s usual prey: college girl, no doubt, working her way through school on her back. She’d only hook until she had her B.A. Sure she would.
Tough not to be cynical on this end of the camera, R.J. thought as he snapped off half a dozen of the girl and Burkette climbing out of the car and giggling on into the townhouse.
But street shots weren’t enough. The jaded magistrates of New York’s matrimonial bench needed animated fuck shots. They weren’t the only ones.
“I want the bastard’s balls,” Tina Burkette had said, handing over R.J.’s retainer.
“For the right price,” he’d assured her, “I’ll give ’em to you in a pickle jar for your mantel.”
That had pleased her, and she wasn’t shy about showing it. They’d spent a memorable evening cementing client-investigator relationships in a hot tub and a waterbed the size of Long Island Sound.
But the truth was, he didn’t really give a rat’s ass who or what the millionaire tycoon was shacked up with tonight in his brownstone lair near Gramercy Park. If the guy wanted to screw an albino manatee that was okay with R.J.—as long as the manatee didn’t mind. But R.J. had a job to do.
He grabbed his camera, locked the car door, and crossed the street in the November gloom. It was after two
A.M.
and the neighborhood was deserted. It was chilly, in the upper thirties, and R.J. shivered slightly as he crossed the street.
Moving in shadows close to the building, he was almost invisible in his black jogging pants, black turtleneck sweater, and dark running shoes. A pair of wire cutters hung from his belt and infrared goggles around his neck.
He sheltered in a doorway while a man in a fur coat walked a barbered poodle across the way. The dog stopped and arched its back, then walked in a tight little circle as it forced the turds out onto the sidewalk. When it was done, the man in the fur coat stooped over and collected the turds with a plastic glove, dropping them into a Baggie.
The two walked away. R.J. slid out of the doorway, looked carefully down the street, and moved on.
In the distance, a wind-driven siren wailed near Times Square. A stolen car chase, shootout in the Garment District, more slaughter on Fifth Avenue.
But here the sidewalks were clean and safe, the buildings well-lit and professionally monitored. Only Mafia neighborhoods were more secure. Jaguars, Caddies, and Lincoln Town Cars snuggled against the curbs. A few blocks closer to the river and they would be cannibalized before dawn.
It was a hell of a thing, what was happening to his hometown, R.J. thought. Corporate raiders and subway marauders, grime and soot and social decay in every quarter. Wasn’t even a good place to visit anymore.
But it got into your blood, and R.J. didn’t think he could live anywhere else. Home wasn’t always where you were born. He’d come east from California for college and never left. Some places you could live and never belong. But R.J. Brooks belonged in Manhattan.
He glanced at a sketch of the layout of Burkette’s hideaway and hoped Tina’s relationship with a member of her husband’s security detail was enough to guarantee the reliability of the floor plan.
Burkette’s damned bodyguard was another worry. The night before R.J. and the brute had tangled. It hadn’t been much fun. R J. would have to work fast and keep out of the big guy’s way.
He shinnied up a utility pole in the alley behind the Burkette place, having already scoped out the power line that connected to the brownstone.
A phone call from the mother of his son was really eating at him. He shouldn’t have popped off about the reason his support check was late this month. He’d spent his limited funds out of humanitarian concerns—the creature comforts of one R.J. Brooks. In other words, he’d eaten his customary two meals every other day whether he was hungry or not.
But this time Billie Sue wasn’t talking money. It was Danny. “He’s your son too,” she’d said. “And you’re no better daddy to him than your grand old man was to you.”
R.J. cut the power line with the steel cutters from his belt. It had been a rotten thing to say, but maybe Billie Sue was right. Maybe he needed to get closer to the kid somehow. Hell, R.J. had needed somebody to show him how to behave. His son was no different—and he couldn’t be getting much help from Billie Sue.
The kid was in trouble at school again, hot Cavalier blood boiling in his veins. R.J. didn’t understand his son any better than he’d understood Billie Sue. What had he ever seen in that Southern flower child of his youth? Firm breasts and gentle hands. Ready mouth and white teeth nipping at the strictures of the Establishment.
Let the sun shine. Let the sun shine in.
Booze and pills. Pills and booze. Sour breath morning, noon, and night.
Let the sun shine in.
Halfway up the pole R.J. realized he was short of breath. He tried to clear his lungs with three deep breaths. Ought to go on a diet before the Christmas glut, he thought. Maybe level off around a hundred and sixty. Mom was right: I’m carrying too much weight for 5’11”. It was damned hard keeping it down, though, after getting off cigars and booze. Needed to exercise more. Live dangerously, jog in the Park.
He hadn’t heard from his mother, beyond one quick phone call and a birthday card, since that lunch almost a year before. He hadn’t spent much time feeling bad about that, either.
R.J. heard a renewed burst of sirens from uptown and looked at his watch. Twenty minutes had passed. They must be getting it on by now. He made his way off the pole and onto the lip of a stone fence that enclosed the brownstone’s garden.
He sneezed, almost falling. Then he sneezed again—four, five, six times before the eruption subsided. A goddamn serial sneezer. He struggled to keep his balance until his eyes cleared. Christ, he’d be shot for sport by the first insomniac who poked his head outside for a breath of fresh air pollution.
To have come to this, he thought, shaking his head at the stereotyped movie image of the jaundiced private eye. Burning cigarettes dangling from the corner of his mouth, dark glass of rotgut cradled in his hands, the tinny clink of piano keys in the hazy lounge of some gin joint on the other side of the world. Waiting for
her
to walk in, see…
He moved along the lip of the fence toward the drainpipe
that ran from ground level up the side of the building. Who was he trying to kid? He hated what he did, but he was exactly where he wanted to be. It suited him. He wanted this outsider independence. He trusted no man, woman, or institution to shape his existence. The world was a mess, and most people were going to hell in a handbasket. That was all right with him. He’d even helped a few get there.
“I’m a simple guy,” he’d told Tina Burkette when she hired him. “I have a job to do. I go at it the most direct way I know. One step at a time. Eventually I get where I’m going.” They’d been heading for the hot tub in the Burkette mansion on Long Island. “You know what he’d do to you,” Tina had giggled while she decorated him with bubbles, “he catch you paddling in my bath water?”
R.J. shifted an unlit cigar to the other side of his mouth and stepped off the fence onto a wall bracket that secured the drainpipe. He almost lost his footing as a face peered at him from a window—his reflection. Sam Spade, my ass. He looked more like a cat burglar with delusions of grandeur. He had his fictional mentor’s devil streak, all right, and the jutting jaw line, but his eyes were cobalt blue, like his mother’s; and although he could talk as tough as his crusty old man when the chips were down, he usually tried to reason his way out of scrapes before resorting to rough stuff.
But there were some burdens you just couldn’t run away from. Genetics, for one thing. Some said he had his mother’s sultry mannerisms, and what he remembered of his combative father’s knotted physique and eccentric lisp. But he’d also shared their devotion to strong drink.
He wondered briefly why he was thinking about his parents and tried to bring his mind back to the job before he fell off and got a fence post up his ass. I could use a shot now, he thought, licking at the dryness in his mouth. Rye, Scotch, bourbon. Crankcase oil.
He clutched the drainpipe and pulled his other foot away from the fence, hoping the pipe would support his weight. Hanging there, he rubbed nervous perspiration out of the scar-dimple on his chin, the result of a childhood car accident, and felt his pulse quicken as he considered the part booze had played in his life. Relationships destined to self-destruct were at the top of the list.
A self-recovered alcoholic, R.J. hadn’t gotten high on anything but a little weed in a decade. But where was being sober getting him? In those years he’d seen it all: adulterous spouses, bestial employers, crooked unionists, representatives of the cloth with a taste for altar boys, and corrupt government officials at every level. He exercised his talents in a human cesspool.
Maybe he should pack it all in and take the kid down to Key West. Buy into one of those charter boat outfits. Live a life of sun, sea, and middle-class normality. Forget the Tina Burkettes and their precious spoils. Forget Billie Sue’s anger. Forget his unforgettable mother and father. Forget—
He almost jumped over the fence when a garage door across the alley slammed and a car engine suddenly fired up.
It was time to get moving. The old man would be approaching paydirt by now. The bodyguard was probably on his second shot with the Puerto Rican housekeeper downstairs in the servants’ quarters.
R.J. slipped his infrared goggles into place and eased onto the wrought-iron railing of the balcony.
* * *
Uptown at a posh Manhattan hotel, an aging house detective swallowed thickly. “Jaysus,” he said. “Imagine getting it like that. Right in the saddle.”