Hundred Dollar Baby

64

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."

She studied the window.

"So you killed him," I said.

She had probably prepared herself once she saw where I was going. She turned her head slowly from the window and widened her eyes.

"Oh my God," she said.

"But that left you," I said, "right back where you were, chasing your dream with no man to help. So you reestablished with Lionel."

"This is absurd," she said. "How long is this going to go on?"

"Almost done," I said. "Lionel and you were working it pretty good. Probably because you needed her support, I would guess, perhaps for her money, you brought Mrs. Utley in somewhere along the way without exactly telling her about Lionel. He was probably going to get rid of the other girls, he said, in the other houses, and you and he would run it all, together, once it was in place. You didn't exactly tell him about Mrs. Utley. You could ease her out once you had things rolling and were in control."

April was silent, trying to look amused.

"But the DeNuccis blew all that out of the water. They did the due diligence. They found out Mrs. Utley wouldn't do business if Lionel were involved. So no funding. Even when you smacked her, Mrs. Utley wouldn't go for it. Worse, the DeNuccis wanted to control the deal, and, my guess, Lionel wanted to go along with it. Your dream would be run by a bunch of men. Smart, bad men. They got in there, you knew it was over for you. The whole dream. You went to talk Lionel out of it. You couldn't. Maybe you fought. Maybe you lost control of yourself. Maybe he threatened you. And you shot him dead."

"You are insane," April said.

She stood and walked to the window next to the antique desk and looked out.

"And then of course you had this other problem. Me. I was a mistake. I kept trying to save you, and in doing so I kept gumming up the works. Poking around, pushing at things. I wouldn't let it be. And the more I tried to save you, the more I screwed everything up."

April turned from the window and sat down at the little desk, facing me.

"So here you were, back from New York. The DeNucci deal gone. Nobody to help you. No man in your life but me, whom you desperately didn't want in your life. Maybe you could patch it up with Patricia Utley. Maybe you could find somebody else to help you. But first it was important to get me out of your life."

April rolled her eyes up and stared at the ceiling. Resignation.

"So you asked Hawk to kill me."

She flinched as if she were startled, and her eyes came back down from the ceiling. She stared at me. I stared back. Her eyes had changed. Whoever she was, she wasn't April anymore.

"He told you that?" she said.

There was no denial in her voice. Just the sound of surprise that Hawk had ratted her out.

"He told me you offered the usual incentive package," I said.

April nodded slowly. She opened the middle drawer of her desk and took out a.22-caliber revolver. It looked like a Colt. She pointed it at me.

"When all else fails…" I said.

"You bastard," she said. "You bastard bastard. You wouldn't leave it alone."

"No," I said.

"Why wouldn't you leave it alone?"

"I wanted to save you," I said.

She laughed, though not as if there were anything funny.

"From a life of depravity?" she said.

"I haven't been a big success with that," I said.

"It was all I ever wanted. It was my freedom. My chance for a life. Money. Control. Free of men."

"Pretty to think so," I said.

"I can still make it work."

I shook my head.

"Too damaged," I said.

"Damaged by men," she said. "This was my chance to be rid of you bastards."

"Except that you couldn't do it without men. Everything you ever got you got by sex with men. You can't go it alone."

"I can. I can kill you. I can go back to New York. I can make it up with Mrs. Utley. Start over. I can do this."

I shook my head.

"I don't know if you can kill me," I said. "If you do, Hawk will kill you. If you don't kill me and go back to New York, and Mrs. Utley buys your story, which she won't, you've still got your life around your neck. You'll have to find another Lionel, or Ollie. My guess would be Brooks DeNucci."

She raised the gun and pointed it at me. I waited. She pointed.

"Fuck you," she said, and put the muzzle of the gun in her mouth and pulled the trigger. Her body rocked back and then forward, the way Ollie's had. And she fell over her small desk and was still. I went to her and felt her pulse. It was faint. The bullet had not exited her skull, which meant it had churned around in there. There was no point to an ambulance. She was already dead in all the ways that matter. I stood beside her, my hand on her throat, and felt her pulse flutter and stop. I stood there for a time after it had stopped. The room was infinitely quiet. I could hear my breathing. Then I patted her throat and turned and left the room and walked downstairs and out the front door.

At Hawk's car, I gestured toward the trunk. He popped it from inside. I took off my jacket and removed my Kevlar vest, tossed it in the trunk, closed the lid, and got in the car.

"Dead?" Hawk said.

"Yes."

"You did what you could," Hawk said.

"Wasn't enough," I said.

"Sometimes it isn't," Hawk said.