Robert B. Parker’s Someone to Watch Over Me

31

I was seated at my desk listening to Sarah Vaughan and tapping along to the music with an unsharpened pencil when Captain Glass called.

“Spenser,” she said. “Where are you?”

“Strolling with the one girl,” I said. “Sighing sigh after sigh.”

“Are you drinking on the job?”

“Sumatran roast,” I said, lifting a mug. “With a little sugar.”

“Listen up, bud,” she said. “The victim I told you about. I spoke to her. And she says she’ll talk to you.”

I dropped my unsharpened pencil and picked up a pen.

“Just you,” she said. “Don’t bring along that Southie Nancy Drew. Okay? This thing that happened was ten years ago. It’s taken her some time to make sense of it all. Steiner and Poppy Palmer made her life a living hell. She can’t take any more trouble from that freak show.”

“Would any of her troubles be facilitated by a certain security company in Miami?” I said.

“Who’d you talk to?”

“I often work in strange and mysterious ways.”

“Strange is right,” Glass said. “Woman’s name is Grace Bennett. She has a studio in the Seaport. I warned her you could be a real pain in the ass.”

“Ah,” I said. “You like me. You really like me.”

I was about to ask her for contact information. But Glass had already hung up.

Just then, Mattie walked into my office. She’d been doing a little online research for me in the anteroom to my office. “Anything?” Mattie said.

I told her. And the condition of me going alone.

“That’s bullshit,” she said.

“Maybe,” I said. “Consider me a surrogate sleuth.”

“But if she won’t talk to me or the Feds, what good is she?” Mattie said. “We need every victim we can find.”

“I’ll try and make the case.”

Mattie walked over and took a seat on the edge of my desk. She reached over to the computer and shut off Sarah Vaughan. She mashed a couple buttons, and soon there was some electric drumbeat and the sound of a woman whose voice seemed well autotuned. Sarah didn’t need autotune.

“You’re going to try and work the ole Spenser charm?”

“My charm is timeless.”

“It better be.”

With that, I took the stairs down to the back alley and drove to the Seaport.

Grace Bennett lived on the fifth floor of a rehabbed brick building off Sleeper Street in what developers call a live/work space.

It was hard for me to think of the area as anything but the old Fort Point Channel, a bunch of warehouses by the docks and piers. But with new branding came new hotels, restaurants, shops, and art galleries. She buzzed me in immediately and pulled back a large metal industrial door to let me in.

Bennett was a young black woman, tall and thin, with lots of curly hair and nice dimples. She wore cut-off jean shorts and a red T-shirt that advertised Raising a Reader. Her feet were bare, and her hands covered in blue paint. Her skin was light, and her eyes were green. There was something about her that reminded me of a young Dorothy Dandridge.

“You look different than I expected,” she said.

“What did you expect?”

“Humphrey Bogart in a trench coat.”

“The stuff dreams are made of,” I said in my best Bogart.

She gave me a confused glance and led me to a chair by a long bank of industrial windows, not unlike those in my new place in the Navy Yard. But her view, with windows that looked out to a nearly identical brick warehouse across the street, wasn’t as stunning.

“I guess you know everything,” she said.

“Actually,” I said. “I know next to nothing.”

“Lorraine didn’t tell you anything?”

I shook my head and took a seat in a wide, comfortable blue chair. “I’m not even allowed to call her Lorraine. Only Captain. Your Highness, if I’m being informal.”

“She’s not as mean as she acts,” Grace said. She sat in an identical chair across from me and tucked her bare feet up under her. “She was actually very kind to me and my sister during this whole thing.”

“Actually, for some reason, that doesn’t surprise me.”

“Damn,” Grace said. “This was a long time ago. Did you know I had to leave Boston?”

I shook my head.

“Moved to Cleveland for a while.”

“I would make a Cleveland joke,” I said. “But I happen to like it.”

“It’s not bad,” she said. “Right?”

I nodded. A calico cat wandered in from the workspace along a far wall where there were a few easels and several large paintings. I wasn’t close enough to see what they were or what style, but they looked very modern to me, with bright and bold colors. Most of what I knew about paintings had come from those who’d spent their lives trying to steal them.

The cat hopped up in my lap and expected me to reward it with a good scratch. I obliged. I didn’t think Pearl would mind.

“I worked for that son of a bitch for almost two years,” Grace said. “I was young, naïve, and ambitious as hell. That’s what got me. I was told I was one art show away from fame. I trusted them. I let them flatter me. I introduced them to my little sister. God. It’s so awful. I was so stupid and selfish to let that happen.”

Grace began to cry. I continued to scratch the cat and waited to hear more.