Taming a Sea Horse

33

At nine-fifteen the next morning I got a call from Warren Whitfield's personal, senior, confidential assistant.

"Mr. Whitfield would like to have you stop by this morning at ten o'clock," she said.

"Be pleased to," I said.

"Thank you," she said.

DePaul Federal was about a half-hour walk from my office. With Hawk drifting along behind me on the other side of the street I set out at nine-thirty. I liked to walk and had been falling behind on my jogging lately, so the walk was especially welcome. The weather was about as good as summer gets as I headed down Boylston Street. Temperature eighty-one, sunny, small breeze.

The DePaul Building was forty-five stories with a high art deco lobby facing out on Franklin Street and Post Office Square. The cashiers and floor people occupied most of the floor, and a bank of elevators off a slightly raised walkway led to the executive offices up on top.

Hawk stayed in the lobby. No one was likely to hit me in the office of the man they'd been trying so hard to keep out of trouble. I found Whitfield's name on the directory and went to the thirty-seventh floor at a rate sufficient to make my ears block. I got out of the elevator, swallowing to clear my eustachian tubes. The foyer was deeply carpeted in banker's gray. Straight ahead was a large mahogany desk and a, receptionist.

I said, "My name is Spenser. I have an appointment with Prez Whitfield."

"Yes, sir," she said with a lovely smile. "I'll tell him you're here."

She picked up the phone and punched a button. Her fingernails were painted a muted pink.

"Mr. Spenser is here," she said into the phone. Then she hung up. Almost at once the door behind her opened and a woman came it wearing a gray pinstripe suit and a white shirt with a ruffled bow at the collar.

"Mr. Spenser," she said. "Please come in." I followed her. The skirt of her suit came just to the bend of her knee. She wore black pumps. We walked through another waiting room with a black oak desk in it and a woman sitting at it who wore dark maroon nail polish. I followed the pinstripe through one of a set of raised-panel oak doors into an office that looked out over Boston Harbor and south past Dorchester and the painted gas tanks along the Southeast Expressway. In front of the big windows a man sat at a bleached maple worktable, nearly bare of papers, with a phone bank near the left-hand corner, and a couple of manila folders stacked on the right. Against the left wall was another desk with a lot of papers and a similar phone bank and an empty black swivel chair with arms.

"Mr. Spenser," Pinstripe said, "Mr. Whitfield."

Whitfield rose but didn't put out a hand. I stood opposite him across the desk.

"I'll see Mr. Spenser alone, Helen," Whitfield said. He was looking steadily at me.

"Fine," Pinstripe said, and went out and closed the door.

Whitfield and I remained standing. He was a short man, and overweight. His hair was short and combed straight back and he had a clipped mustache that was sprinkled with gray. Dark suit, white shirt, yellow tie. Yellow was supposed to be the new power color.

Whitfield kept staring at me. His eyes were very pale blue and unblinking. The killer stare. I looked back. The office was silent. Everywhere money must have been being dispersed and collected and counted. But no sound of it reached the office. Whitfield pursed his lips silently, as if coming to a negative conclusion on my loan application. He looked some more.

"I'm getting bored," I said. "You want me to faint or anything?"

"Sit down," Whitfield said.

I sat in a mahogany chair upholstered in black leather. Whitfield went and sat in his high-backed leather swivel. He leaned back slightly and folded his arms, still gazing at me. I waited.

There were paintings of sailing ships on the walls.

"What game are you playing?" Whitfield said.

"I'm trying to find April Kyle, and I'm trying to find out what happened to Ginger Buckey, and how come someone killed her?"

Whitfield made a short dismissive shake of his head. "I'm not concerned," he said, "with how you waste your time. When it's yours. I want to know what game you're playing with me."

"You knew Ginger Buckey," I said. "You took her to the Crown Prince resort in St. Thomas and she dumped you and went off with a reed man named Robert Rambeaux. He's dead too."

"If you make any such allegation before a witness," Whitfield said, "I will certainly sue you."

"Sure," I said. "But what I'd rather is that you tell me about Ginger, and maybe about April."

Whitfield slapped his open hand down on the desk. "Are you crazy?" he said. "Who the hell do you think you're talking to. You're looking for a couple of adolescent chippies and you come into my office and ask me? Do you have any idea what you're doing?"

"I didn't say they were chippies," I said.

Whitfield leaned forward over the desk, letting the swivel chair come forward with him. "Don't play cute games with me, pal," he said.

"Warren," I said, "if you keep scaring me to death this is going to take all day. You think you're a powerful guy. You think it's because of something in you that you're powerful, so you figure to unleash a little of that power on me and watch me get limp and shriveled."

Whitfield's eyes were narrowed a little and both hands were flat on the top of the desk as he looked at me.

"But you're not a powerful guy," I said, "and what power you have isn't in you, it's in the job, in the fact that you control a lot of money and a lot of jobs and people want both, so they suck around. I don't want either. I want to know what you know about Ginger Buckey, and I'm going to find out."

Whitfield raised his hand. With the index mnger extended he jabbed toward me with it. I kept right on talking.

"And until I find out," I said, "I'm going to be so annoying that it will make your eyes water."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Whitfield said. "I've been to the Crown Prince Club locally once or twice for lunch. I occasionally vacation in St. Thomas. But I don't know any Ginger Whatsis, or any April."

"Yeah you do," I said, "and you know Perry Lehman who runs the place and you know some other stuff that Mr. Milo doesn't want me to mnd out, and I want to know what that is too."

The name Mr. Milo rocked him. He sat back and some of the edge went off his voice. "Mr. Milo?" he said.

"Un huh."

"Who's Mr. Milo?" he said.

I shook my head. "Come off it, Warren. We both know you know who Mr. Milo is. Even if you were clean, you'd know who Mr. Milo was."

He was back to looking at me again. But the look was fuzzier now.

"And I know that something is going down here between you and Mr. Milo because Mr. Milo has already tried to hit me after I started looking for you. The too-bad part for you, Warren, is that I'm probably going to knock the whole thing over, whereas if someone had told me about April Kyle back at the start, I wouldn't care much what you and Mr. Milo were doing."

"I…" Whitfield started to talk and stopped. On the right wall past the assistant's desk a door opened and Jacky Wax walked through. He walked over to Whitfield's desk and punched one of the buttons on the phone.

"Jesus Christ," Whitfield said. "You can't show yourself here."

"Shut up," Jacky said without heat. He wasn't looking at Whitfield. He was looking at me.

"How's things, Jacky," I said.

"I don't think they're too good, right now," Jacky said, "especially for you."

He was a tall wiry guy with high shoulders. He was wearing an eight-hundred-dollar suit of pale gray, with a pink shirt and a pink-and-lavender striped tie. His pocket handkerchief was lavender-and-pink dots. His shoes were shiny black and long and pointy and probably cost nearly what the suit cost. He was wearing the kind of sunglasses that lighten inside and darken outside. His dark hair was cut long on top and short on the sides and combed back with a big wave in front and a part on the left side.

"Dammit, Jacky," Whitfield said, "I warned you to stay out of sight. Now he knows."

"He knows anyway," Jacky said. "He don't know any more than he did. And it's nothing he can prove."

I nodded. "He's right," I said to Whitfield. "I know you're conected to Mr. Milo. I know you went to St. Thomas with Ginger Buckey. And so far there's nothing I can prove. But there will be."

"No," Jacky said, "there won't. No need to be fancy about this. We're going to kill you." Jacky had no emotion in his voice. He might have been talking about real estate.

I was watching Whitfield. The talk was scaring him badly.

"Like I said, all I want is a kid named April Kyle, you clucks have been in a goddamned lather to keep me away from Whitfield when all I want is April Kyle, now you've got it escalated to where you've got to kill me."

"Don't make any difference," Jacky said, "how it got here, it's where we are. I'd have done it a long time ago, but I'm not in charge."

"How 'bout Warren?" I said. "He's looking a little peckish."

"He does what he's told," Jacky said. "And he likes it."

"You may have to do him too," I said. "I think the strain's getting to him."

"Don't matter none to me," Jacky said. "Won't matter much to you either, you being dead and all."

"God damn it, Jacky, I don't want this kind of thing talked about in here. It implicates me. Take this talk out into the streets where it belongs."

Jacky turned toward him slowly. "You really got to understand something, Whitfield. We don't work for you. You work for us. We supply the bimbos, you do what you're told."

"For God's sake, Jacky," Whitfield said. "I'm president of-"

"You're shit," Jacky said. "You work for us. Don't you?"

Whitfield stared at him. Jacky leaned slightly toward him.

"Don't you?"

Whitfield nodded slowly.

Jacky looked back at me. "You got any final words?" he said.

I said, "You know I've got all this stashed with someone so if I go down it goes to the cops."

"And if you don't go down?"

"Maybe it doesn't have to," I said.

"Nothing you can prove anyway."

"You know better, Jacky. The feds find out you're connected to this bank and they'll be all over you like leather on a baseball. They'll turn something up."

Jacky shrugged. "They've turned up stuff before. We're still in business."

"Sensible attitude," I said, "except you been acting just the other way, like if I got to Whitfield the sky would fall."

"So you got a proposition?" Jacky said.

"I want April Kyle, and I want to know what happened to Ginger Buckey."

"And that's all?" I nodded.

"Okay," Jacky said, "take a hike. We'll get back to you."

I made a shooting gesture at Whitfield with my forefinger and thumb, and went on out. Downstairs in the lobby Hawk was leaning against one of the writing islands looking at two guys near the door.

He nodded toward them. "Mr. Milo?" he said.

"Un huh. Jacky was upstairs."

"I bet he mentioned shooting you," Hawk said. We were walking straight at the two guys near the door.

"Sort of. I offered him an alternative."

"He go for it?" Hawk said.

"We'll see," I said.

The two guys by the door moved aside as we reached them and we went out onto Franklin Street.