The Professional (16 page)

“But you don’t like it,” I said.

“I don’t see that broad doing anything for love,” Belson said.

“You don’t like Beth?” I said.

“I think she killed her husband,” Belson said.

“Not herself,” I said.

“No, but there’s people who’ll do anything you need if you have money.”

“She didn’t have it until her husband died,” I said.

“So maybe she got a trusting hit guy,” Belson said.

“Like who?” I said.

Belson shrugged.

“Don’t know any trusting hit guys,” he said.

We were quiet. Belson ate the last strawberry-frosted.

“Love and money,” he said.

“Or sex and money,” I said.

“Same thing,” Belson said.

“You think they took it out in trade?” I said.

“It’s what she’s got,” Belson said.

“And it’s gotten her this far,” I said.

“So it’s a theory,” Belson said.

He found a chocolate-cream donut under a cinnamon one, and took it out from under and dusted off the accidental cinnamon and took a careful bite. The donut had a squishy filling, and Belson was very neat.

“She know anybody would kill somebody?” Belson said.

“Her husband did,” I said. “She probably met some. She knew Boo and Zel.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” Belson said.

“Doesn’t explain why she’s living with Gary and Estelle,” I said.

“Nope,” Belson said.

I located the cinnamon donut that Belson had put aside in favor of chocolate cream. We ate silently for a moment.

“We don’t have any idea what we’re doing,” I said.

“No,” Belson said. “We don’t seem to.”

I OPENED THE BPD FOLDER on Beth. She had been born Elizabeth Boudreau in a shabby little town on the Merrimack River, east of Proctor. She was thirty-six. In the month she graduated from Tarbridge High School, she married a guy name Boley LaBonte, and divorced him a year later.

Nobody was paying me to do anything. On the other hand, no one was paying me to do nothing, either. Business was slow. I was nosy. And I had kind of a bad feeling about this long-running mess I’d wandered into and hadn’t done a hell of a lot to improve. So I got my car from the alley where I had a deal with the meter maids, and headed north from Boston on a very nice February day with the temperature above freezing and stuff melting gently.

You enter Tarbridge on a two-lane highway from the south. The town is basically three unpainted cinder-block buildings and a red light. A few clapboard houses, some with paint, dwindle away from the cinder block. Up a hill past the red light, maybe a half-mile away, stood a regal-looking redbrick high school. The fact that Tarbridge had a municipal identity was stretching it a bit. That it had a high school was jaw-dropping. It had to be a regional school. But why they had located a regional high school in Tarbridge could only have to do with available land, or, of course, graft.

The town clerk was a fat woman with a red face and a tight perm. She had her offices in a trailer attached to one of the cinder-block buildings. The plastic nameplate on her desk said she was Mrs. Estevia Root.

I handed her my card, and she studied it through some pink-rimmed glasses with rhinestones on them, which hung around her neck on what appeared to be a cut-down shoelace.

“What do ya wanna see Mrs. Boudreau for?” the clerk said.

“I’m investigating a case,” I said. “In Boston.”

“Boston?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What the hell are you doing up here?”

“Just background stuff,” I said. “Where would I find Mrs. Boudreau.”

“Probably in her kitchen, where she usually is.”

“And where is the kitchen located?”

“Back of the house,” Estevia said.

I nodded happily.

“And the house?” I said.

“Passed it on the way in, if you come from Boston,” Estevia said. “’Bout a hundred yards back, be on your right heading out. Kinda run-down, looks empty, but she’ll be in there.”

I felt a chill. If Estevia thought it looked run-down . . .

“Did you happen to know her daughter?” I said. “Beth?”

“She run off long time ago, and no loss,” Estevia said.

“No loss?”

“Best she was gone, ’fore she dragged half the kids in town down with her.”

“Bad girl?” I said.

Estevia’s mouth became a thin, hard line. Her round face seemed to plane into angles.

“Yes,” she said.

“Bad how?” I said.

“Just bad,” Estevia said.

It was all I was going to get from Estevia.

“Thank you for your time,” I said.

IT WAS A very small house. It not only looked empty, it looked like it should be empty. There wasn’t enough paint left on the front to indicate what color it might once have been. The roof-line was bowed. The windows were closed and dirty. Something that might once have been curtains hung in tattered disarray in the windows.

I parked and went to the front door. There was no path shoveled. The uncut weeds of summer, now long dead, stuck up through the diminishing snow. There was no doorknob, and the hole where there had been one was plugged with a rag. I knocked. No one answered. I pushed on the door. It didn’t move. I’m not sure it was locked; it was more likely just warped shut.

I went around to the side of the house and found what might be a kitchen door. There was a screen door and an inner door. The screening had torn loose and was curled up along one side. The inner door had a glass window that was so grimy, I couldn’t see through it. I knocked.

From inside somebody croaked, “Go ’way.”

It didn’t sound welcoming, but I figured the somebody didn’t really mean it, so I opened the inside door and stepped in. She looked like a huge sack of soiled laundry, slouched inertly at the kitchen table, drinking Pastene port wine from a small jelly glass with cartoon pictures on it. The table was covered with linoleum whose color and design were long since lost. There were pots and dishes in the soapstone sink, piles of newspapers and magazines in various corners. A small television with rabbit ears was playing jaggedly. The scripted conviviality and canned laughter was eerie in the desperate room. A black iron stove stood against the far wall, and the room reeked of kerosene and heat.

“Mrs. Boudreau?” I said.

“Go ’way,” she croaked again.

She was very fat, wearing some sort of robe or housedress. It was hard to tell, and in truth, I didn’t look very closely.

“My name is Spenser,” I said, and handed her a card. She didn’t take it, so I put it on the table.

“You’re Elizabeth Boudreau’s mother,” I said.

Her glass was empty. She picked up the bottle of port with both hands and carefully poured it into the jelly glass. She put the bottle down carefully, and picked up the glass carefully with both hands and sipped the port. Then she looked at me as if I hadn’t spoken.

“Could you tell me a little about Elizabeth?” I said.

“Elizabeth.”

“Your daughter.”

“Gone,” the woman said.

“Elizabeth’s gone?”

Mrs. Boudreau nodded.

“Long time,” she said.

“What can you tell me about her?” I said.

“Bitch,” her mother said.

I nodded. If Beth was thirty-six, this woman was probably sixty, maybe younger. She looked older than Angkor Wat.

“Why bitch?” I said.

“Whore.”

This wasn’t going terribly well.

“How about Mr. Boudreau?” I said.

She drank port and stared at me.

“He around?” I said.

“No.”

“Dead?”

“Don’t know.”

“Can you tell me anything about him?” I said.

“Bastard,” she said.

“Could you tell me where to find him?”

“No.”

I had hung around in this reeking trash bin as long as I could stand it. There was nothing I could find out that would be worth staying any longer.

“Thank you,” I said, and turned and went out.

I took in some big breaths as I walked to my car. The air felt clean.

BOLEY LABONTE OWNED a bowling alley and lounge called Kingpin Lanes, which sat in the middle of a big parking lot on South Tarbridge Road. There were two pickups and an old Buick sedan parked outside. Inside, four guys were bowling together. In the lounge three other guys were sitting at the bar, drinking beer and watching a woman with few clothes on dancing at a brass pole to music I neither recognized nor liked. It was two o’clock in the afternoon.

I sat at the bar and ordered a beer. The bartender was a red-haired woman with an angular face and skin you could strike a match on.

“Boley around?” I said.

“Who wants to know?” the bartender said.

I gave her my card, the understated one, where my name was not spelled out in bullet holes. She looked at it.

“A freaking private eye?” she said.

“Exactly,” I said.

“Why you want to talk with Boley?”

“None of your business,” I said.

“Yeah, I guess not,” she said, and took the card and walked down to the end of the bar and ducked under, which was not easy given how tight her jeans were. She opened a door marked Office and went in; a moment later she came out and ducked back behind the bar.

“Boley says he’ll be right out,” she said.

I nodded and sipped my beer. The girl on the pole was a kid, maybe eighteen, nineteen, looking deadly serious, starting her long climb to stardom. A man came out of the office and walked down the bar and sat on the stool next to me.

“How ya doin’,” he said. “I’m Boley LaBonte.”

We shook hands.

“I’m looking into a case involving Elizabeth Boudreau,” I said. “I understand you were married to her.”

He had dark, curly hair, worn sort of long and brushed back. He had a thin mustache. His flowered shirt was unbuttoned to his sternum, showing a hairy chest and a gold chain. The material of the shirt stretched a little tight over his biceps.

“That was a trip,” he said.

“What can you tell me about her?” I said.

“Jesus,” he said, and looked at the bartender. “Mavis, gimme a Coke.”

She put it in front of him, and he drank some and looked at my beer bottle.

“You okay?” he said.

I said I was.

“Beth Boudreau,” he said. “I heard she’s doing good.”

“Married money,” I said.

“Good for her,” Boley said. “You know anything about where she come from?”

“I talked with her mother this morning,” I said.

“Alberta?” Boley said. “She still alive?”

“Sort of,” I said. “Is there a Mr. Boudreau?”

“Nope,” Boley said. “Never was. Alberta got knocked up.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“Yeah,” Boley said. “Hard to think about.”

I nodded.

“Anyway,” Boley said. “Alberta Boudreau was always fat and homely, and my old man says never had a date. Then one day she comes up pregnant. It was a joke in town, Alberta was one for one, you know?”

“Who was the father?”

“Don’t know. Nobody seems to,” he said.

He drank some more Coke.

“This ain’t Boston,” he said. “Or Cambridge. Everybody’s like shocked back, what? Thirty-six years ago, something like that. But goddamn, Alberta has the kid. Everybody thought she had it to prove she’d gotten laid.”

“Could be other reasons,” I said.

“Could be,” Boley said.

He finished his Coke, and the bartender delivered a second one without being asked.

“How they get along?” I said.

“Beth and her mother?” Boley said. “Don’t know. Don’t know anybody was ever in the house.”

“I was,” I said.

Boley made a face.

“I don’t want to know,” he said.

“No,” I said. “You don’t. How about school. Beth catch any grief about all this in school?”

“I dunno. I’m ten years older than her. But . . .” He drank some Coke. “You know how school is.”

“I do,” I said. “How’d you meet her?”

“She was working the pole here,” Boley said. “At the time, I’m the bouncer. Used to box a little—Golden Gloves and stuff.” He shrugged. “Good enough for here.”

“And now you own it,” I said.

“Yeah,” Boley said. “Guy owned it was a lush, he was going under. My old man died, left me a little insurance dough. I got it cheap.”

“Great country,” I said.

Boley was looking at me.

“You used to fight,” he said. “Am I right?”

“Yep.”

“It’s the nose, mostly,” Boley said. “And around the eyes. Ever fight pro?”

“Yep.”

“Heavy?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You good?” Boley said.

“I was good,” I said. “Not great.”

“So you was never gonna be champ,” Boley said.

“No.”

“But I bet you ain’t lost many on the street,” Boley said.

“Not many,” I said.

“Thing about boxing,” Boley said, “you know. You may not win, but you got a plan.”

I nodded.

“And,” Boley said, “when you box, you learn that getting hit ain’t the end of the fucking world.”

I nodded again.

“Just another day at the office,” I said.

He grinned. We were quiet for a time, watching the girl making love to the brass pole.

“Beth was like that kid,” Boley said. “She come here thinking she was a performer, you know? Thinking this was her ticket out of Palookaville.”

“But it wasn’t,” I said.

“Not from dancing,” he said.

“You sleep with her?” I said.

“Course,” Boley said. The bartender brought him another Coke. “Sleep with them all, part of the deal. I hire ’em to strip for the customers and fuck the owner.” He grinned. “Which is me.”

“You sleeping with this kid?” I said.

“Sure.”

“How old is she?”

“She’s eighteen,” Boley said. “Gotta be eighteen to do this, and I’m careful about that.”

“Any of the dancers freelance with the clients?”

“On their own time,” he said. “Not on mine. Don’t look like much now, but most nights we’re jumping. It’s a nice business for me. I’m not gonna hire anybody underage. I’m not gonna serve anybody underage. I’m not gonna allow no soliciting on my premises.”

I nodded.

“You still bouncing?” I said.

He shook his head.

“I hire it done now,” he said.