Early Autumn Part 24

Susan showed up in the MG at two thirty. She had on a soft felt hat with a big floppy brim and a bra.s.s ring on the hatband. She also wore a light leather trench coat and high-heeled boots of the same color. I wished I were going to look at ballet schools with her. "This will be the real test," I said to Susan. "If the instructional staff doesn't attempt to seduce you en ma.s.se it will prove they're gay."

She wrinkled her nose at me. "I'll tell them how big and tough you are," she said. "Maybe they'll hesitate long enough for us to escape."

Paul said, "What if they attempt to seduce me?"

I grinned. "That would be further proof, I think."

They left and I finished up my phone calls. There were no surprises.

I made the final notes on my master sheet and then got out some fresh bond paper and typed it all out neatly and went out to a copy shop and had two copies made and came back and filed the original in my office. I mailed the second one to myself at my apartment and stuck the third copy in my pocket for handy reference. Also maybe for showing to Mel Giacomin along with threats. I looked at my watch. Four twenty. I had to get away from the desk.

I locked up the office, got into the Bronco, and cruised down to the waterfront. Henry Cimoli was sitting behind the office desk in the Harbour Health Club in white pants, sneakers, and a white T-shirt He looked like the world's toughest jockey. He had in fact been one of the best lightweight fighters around and gone fifteen rounds once and lost a split decision to Willie Pep. His arms bulged against the T-shirt and his short body moved like a compressed spring, a great deal of contained energy.

"Come to try and rescue what's left, kid?" he said.

"Yeah. You think it's too late?"

"Almost"

I went to my locker and changed. In the exercise room there were weight machines, barbells, dumbbells, a heavy bag, two speed bags. The walls were mirrored. I started working on bench presses.

I was almost through my workout when Hawk came in at about seven. He wore silky-looking warm-up pants with the bottoms unzipped, and high white boxer's shoes and no shirt He had a pair of speed gloves in the hip pocket of the warmup pants and he carried a jump rope. Most of the people in the room eyed him covertly. He nodded at me, did a few stretching exercises, and began to jump rope. He jumped rope for a half hour, varying the step and speed, crisscrossing the rope.

As he finished I started on the speed bag. He hung the rope up and came over beside me and started on the other bag. As I began to get a rhythm down on the bag he began to punch in counterpoint. I grinned and started to whistle "Sweet Georgia Brown."

He nodded and picked up the beat. We began to alternate, picking up the pace. Like a battle of two drummers from the forties. Hawk picked up the tempo, I picked it up a little more. Hawk used his elbows and fists. I alternated one hand then the other. People began to group around us and the rhythm of the bag and the sense of compet.i.tion began to carry me. I concentrated as the bag was a wine-colored blur in time with Hawk's. We did paradiddles and rolls, and some of the men in the exercise room cheered at one or another of us. Then they began to clap in rhythm to the bags and Hawk and I carried them with us until the place was in an uproar and Henry came in from the front desk and yelled at Hawk, "Telephone."

Hawk did shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits on his bag and I responded and we stopped, and Hawk, grinning widely, went to the phone. The rest of the room cheered and clapped. I yelled after him.

"Hey, gee whiz, my dad's got a barn, maybe we can put on a show."

Hawk disappeared around the corner and I went to the heavy bag. When he came back his grin wasn't as wide, but his face had a look of real pleasure.

He leaned on the other side of the bag while I pounded it.

"You going to like this, babe," he said.

"You been drafted," I said.

"You been messing with Harry Cotton, haven't you?"

I dug a hook into the bag. "I spoke with him."

"You got that slick way, you know, how you talk so sweet to people. Harry putting out a hit on you."

"He's too sensitive," I said. "Call a guy a weasel and tell him he smells bad and he goes right into a G.o.dd.a.m.ned swivet," I said.

"He do smell bad, that's a fact," Hawk said.

"You know Harry?"

"Oh, yes. Harry's an important person in this town."

"That him on the phone?"

"Yeah. He want me to whack you." Hawk's smile got wider. "He ask me if I know who you are. I say, yeah, I think so."

I did a left jab and an overhand right.

"How much he offering?" I said.

"Five G's."

"That's insulting," I said.

"You'd have been proud of me," Hawk said. "I told him that. I said I wouldn't do it for less than ten. He say lot of people be happy to do it for five. I said that wasn't the point. I said lot of people be happy to do it for nothing, but they can't, 'cause they ain't good enough. I said it's a ten-thousand-dollar job at least. He say no."

"Harry was always cheap," I said.

"So I said no. Guess you safe again."

"From you at least." I did some low body punches into the bag. Hawk held it steady.

"Harry will hire cheap," Hawk said. "He'll hire some b.u.m, don't know no better. You'll bury him and..." Hawk spread his hands. "I got nothing going for a while. Maybe I hang around with you some."

"What would the rate for hitting us both be?" I said.

"'Bout one hundred and thirty-two trillion," Hawk said.

"Harry's too cheap for that," I said.

CHAPTER 29.

At nine o'clock I was at the Giacomin house in Lexington. I forced the back door and went in and turned on the lights. In Patty Giacomin's bedroom was a small secretary with slender curving legs and gold stenciling. Her picture in a leather frame was on it. I opened the leaf and sat down on the small rush-bottomed stool in front of it and began to go through the contents. When I'd been here I'd seen Patty do her bills here, and there wasn't much else but bill payment receipts and canceled checks. The only handle I had besides her sweet Stephen was her periodic trips to New York.

In a half hour I found what I wanted: American Express receipts from the New York Hilton dated roughly a month apart going back several years. They were all room charges, she'd paid them all with her American Express card, and she'd kept the receipts. She kept all receipts apparently without discrimination. So there was nothing terribly significant about her keeping these. She probably didn't know what was important, so she kept them all.

I went through everything else in the house and there was nothing else worth looking at. I took all the American Express receipts and Patty's picture, turned off the lights, and closed the door.

The spring night was quiet in Lexington. The rain had stopped. Lights shone in people's houses and there were open windows. Voices drifted out occasionally, and the sounds of television. It was late, but there were still cooking smells in the air. As I went toward my car, a cat slid past me and into the shrubs in the next yard. I thought about Harry Cotton's contract. I touched the gun on my hip. The street, when I got to the car, was empty. In the circle of the streetlights moths flew without apparent purpose. The cat appeared from the shrubs and sat on its haunches under the streetlight and looked up at the moths. It was a yellow-striped cat with white chest and face and paws.

I got into the Bronco and started up and drove away from Emerson Road. The ball game was coming in from Milwaukee and it made the sound it always made, soft crowd murmur in the background, the voices of the announcers in familiar pattern, the occasional sound of the bat hitting the ball, the metallic stilted voice of the P.A. announcer, repeating the hitter's last name. The sound seemed almost eternal.

It was nearly midnight when I got back to my apartment. Susan and Paul were still up watching a movie on television. Susan said, "There's a sub out there if you haven't eaten."

I got the sandwich and a beer and came back into the living room. The movie was An American in Paris. "How was the Laurel School?" I said.

"The admissions guy was a feeb," Paul said.

I looked at Susan. She nodded. "Regrettable but true," she said. "Everything you hoped he wouldn't be."

"Effeminate?"

"Effeminate, affected, supercilious," Susan said.

"Susan yelled at him," Paul said. His eyes were bright.

I looked at Susan. "He was a pompous little twerp," she said.

"Is he now aware of that?" I said.

"That's what she told him," Paul said.

"Did he get scared?" I said.

Susan said, "I think so."

"Well," I said. "It can't be the only school in the world."

There was an extended dance scene on the television screen. Paul watched it closely. We were quiet while I finished the sub and the beer. I went to the kitchen and put the can in the wastebasket and the plate in the dishwasher. I washed my hands and face at the kitchen sink and came back into the livingroom. There was a commercial on the tube.

I said to Paul, "You ever been to New York?"

He said, "No."

"Want to go tomorrow?"

"Okay."

"How about you, sugarplum?" I said to Susan.

"I've been," she said.

"I know," I said. "Want to go again?"

"Yes."

I felt the softening of relief and pleasure in the area of my diaphragm.

"We'll hit the shuttle, bright and early."

"Bright maybe," Susan said, "but not too early. I have to call in sick and I have to pack."

"We'll go when you're ready, my love," I said.

And the next day we did. We got the one o'clock shuttle from Logan to LaGuardia. I had my stuff and Paul's in a single suitcase. Susan had two. As I drove to the airport I noticed Hawk's silver Jag parked outside my house. It followed me to the airport garage and as I turned in, it drove by and headed out the exit road. Neither Susan nor Paul noticed. I didn't remark on it.

We got into New York at about one thirty and into the New York Hilton at about two fifteen. We got adjoining rooms. Paul and me in one, Susan in the other. The New York Hilton is big and conveniently located on Sixth Avenue. It is efficient, flossy, and as charming as an electric razor.

Paul was looking out the window of the hotel, staring down into Fifty-fourth Street far below. I remembered the first time I'd come to New York. I'd come with my father at about Paul's age. My father had brought me to go to ball games and tour Rockefeller Center and eat in an Italian restaurant he knew of. He'd pinned half his money to his undershirt in the hotel room, and put the other half back into his wallet. I remembered his grin when he pinned the money to his undershirt. Always tell a country boy, he'd said. I remembered the smell of the city and the sound of it, and the sense of it boiling at all hours, and almost always the sound of a siren somewhere at the edge of the sound. I had stood as Paul was standing, staring out. I'd never seen anything like it. And since then I never have.

I went through the connecting door into Susan's room. She was carefully hanging her clothes up.

I said, "Have you ever noticed what happens to me when I enter a hotel room?"

She said, "Yes. Actually it seems to happen in the elevator going up to the hotel room. But what are we going to tell Paul?"

"Maybe later," I said. "The little fella has to sleep sometime, doesn't he?"

"Let us hope so," Susan said. "Now that we're here, what are we here for?"

"I want to look into Patty Giacomin. She came here about once a month and stayed overnight. It's all I could find that seemed in any way unusual. I thought I'd ask around."

She looked at her watch. "Do you think Paul would care for a tour of Radio City?"

"I would think so," I said. "Can you stand to take him?"

"Yes."

"Thank you."

She smiled. "You're welcome. If he's very tired tonight, he may go to sleep early."

I nodded.

"Do you suppose they have champagne on the room service menu?" she said.

"They better," I said.

Her clothes were all hung up. She was very careful with them. She checked herself in the mirror, made an unidentifiable adjustment to her hair, went to the other room and said, "Come on, Paul. We'll go for a mystery walk."

"What's that?" Paul said.

"You'll find out," Susan said.

Paul opened the door. Susan paused in it and said to me, "I want the Four Seasons," she said.

"Tonight," I said. "It's yours."

When they were gone I made the reservation and then took Patty's picture and went down to the lobby. There was an a.s.sistant manager's desk near the elevator bank. The a.s.sistant manager was behind it, in a three-piece black pinstripe suit and a pink shirt with a pin collar. I took my license out and placed it on the desk in front of him. He read it without expression. Then he looked at me. "Yes?" he said.

"Who's your security man and/or woman as the case may be?"