Hundred-Dollar Baby Read online

  Hundred-Dollar Baby

  THE SPENSER NOVELS

  School Days

  Cold Service

  Bad Business

  Back Story

  Widow’s Walk

  Potshot

  Hugger Mugger

  Hush Money

  Sudden Mischief

  Small Vices

  Chance

  Thin Air

  Walking Shadow

  Paper Doll

  Double Deuce

  Pastime

  Stardust

  Playmates

  Crimson Joy

  Pale Kings and Princes Taming a Sea-Horse

  A Catskill Eagle

  Valediction

  The Widening Gyre

  Ceremony

  A Savage Place

  Early Autumn

  Looking for Rachel Wallace The Judas Goat

  Promised Land

  Mortal Stakes

  God Save the Child

  The Godwulf Manuscript

  THE JESSE STONE NOVELS

  Sea Change

  Stone Cold

  Death in Paradise

  Trouble in Paradise

  Night Passage

  THE SUNNY RANDALL NOVELS

  Blue Screen

  Melancholy Baby

  Shrink Rap

  Perish Twice

  Family Honor

  ALSO BY ROBERT B. PARKER

  Appaloosa

  Double Play

  Gunman’s Rhapsody

  All Our Yesterdays

  A Year at the Races (with Joan Parker)

  Perchance to Dream

  Poodle Springs (with Raymond Chandler)

  Love and Glory

  Wilderness

  Three Weeks in Spring (with Joan Parker)

  Training with Weights (with John R. Marsh)

  Hundred-Dollar Baby

  ROBERT B. PARKER

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  New York

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  Publishers Since 1838

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), Cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2006 by Robert B. Parker

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not

  participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the

  author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Parker, Robert B. Hundred-dollar baby / Robert B. Parker.

  p. cm.

  ISBN : 978-1-1012-0620-1

  1. Spenser (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Private investigators—Massachusetts—Boston—Fiction. 3. Boston (Mass.)—Fiction. I. Title. PS3566.A686H86 2006 2006022972 813'.54—dc22

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  For Joan: Priceless

  Hundred-Dollar Baby

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  1

  The woman who came into my office on a bright January day was a knockout. Her hair had blond highlights and her fawn-colored suit appeared to have been hand-sewn by Michael Kors. She took off some sort of fur-lined cape and tossed it over the arm of my couch, and came over and sat down in one of my client chairs. She smiled at me. I smiled at her. She waited. The light coming in my window was especially bright this morning, enhanced by the light snowfall that had collected overnight. She didn’t seem dangerous. I remained calm.

  “You don’t know who I am,” she said after a while. “Do you.”

  Her voice sounded as if it had been polished by old money. It was her eyes. Someone I knew was in there behind those eyes.

  “Not yet,” I said.

  She smiled.

  “‘Not yet,’” she said. “That’s so you. ‘I don’t know now, but I will.’”

  “My glass is always half full,” I said. “Are you going to tell me or do I have to frisk you.”

  “God, it’s good to see you,” she said. “It’s April.”

  I stared at her. And then there she was.

  “April Kyle,” I said, and stood up.

  She stood up, too. I walked around the desk and she almost jumped against me. I put my arms around her. She was beautiful, but the incest taboo had kicked in the moment I knew who she was. It was like hugging a little girl. All the cool elegance was gone. She stayed against me with her arms around me and pressed her face against my chest.

  “It’s like coming home,” she said.

  “When you have to go there, they have to take you in,” I said.
/>   “Robert Frost.”

  “Very good,” I said.

  “You taught me that,” she said.

  I nodded. She kept her face pressed against my chest. It made her voice muffle a little.

  “You taught me almost everything I know that matters,” she said.

  “That’s not so hard,” I said. “Because not many things matter.”

  “But the ones that do,” she said, “matter a lot.”

  She let me go and stood back and looked at me for a moment, then sat back down. I went back to my desk chair and tilted back in it.

  “Are you still with Susan?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  She nodded. “And you’re still doing what you do.”

  “And charmingly,” I said.

  “You look the same,” she said.

  “Is that good or bad?” I said.

  “It’s absolutely marvelous,” she said. “It’s been so long. I was terrified you wouldn’t be here. But here you are. Looking the same. Full of irony and strength.”

  “You’ve become quite beautiful,” I said.

  “Thank you.”

  “And graceful,” I said.

  She smiled.

  “Is it real?” I said.

  “Mostly,” she said.

  I was quiet. I could smell her perfume. It smelled expensive. She was expensive. Everything about her: clothes, manner, makeup, the way she crossed her legs. The way she spoke.

  “I’m still a whore,” she said.

  “And a very successful one,” I said.

  “Actually, I don’t do so much of the, ah, hands-on anymore,” she said and smiled at me. “I’m management now.”

  “It’s what makes America great,” I said.

  “You don’t disapprove,” she said.

  “I’m the guy sent you to Mrs. Utley,” I said.

  “You had no choice,” April said. “I was a complete mess. You had to find someone to take care of me.”

  “How about you,” I said. “Do you disapprove?”

  “Disapprove?” April said. “I’ve been in this business since I was fifteen.”

  “Doesn’t mean you approve,” I said.

  “And you sending me to the best madam in New York doesn’t mean you approve,” April said.

  “I had to think about it a little because of you,” I said. “And if it’s among consenting adults and no one is demeaned—seems okay to me.”

  “Have you ever had sex with a whore?” April said.

  “Not lately,” I said.

  “So maybe you do disapprove.”

  “Or maybe I’m such a chick magnet,” I said, “that I never had time.”

  April smiled and looked for a moment at the bright morning hovering over Berkeley Street.

  “Do you disapprove of me?” she said.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t.”

  “I guess that’s probably what I really was asking.”

  “Probably,” I said.

  “I’ve been back in Boston for more than a year,” April said.

  I nodded.

  “I never called you.”

  I nodded again.

  “I guess I was afraid you wouldn’t still be you, and, maybe, I guess, I was afraid you wouldn’t like it that I was still in the whore business.”

  “I think the current correct phrase,” I said, “is sex worker.”

  April shook her head a little.

  “You used to say that a thing is what it is and not something else.”

  “I did,” I said.

  We were quiet again. She wanted me to help her out of whatever trouble she was in, but she didn’t want to admit she was in trouble. Half the people who came into my office were that way.

  I waited.

  “Two years ago,” April said, “she gave me some money and sent me up here.”

  “Patricia Utley,” I said.

  “Yes. You know her operation in New York?”

  “Yes.”

  “She wanted me to open a branch up here,” April said.

  “And?”

  “And I did. I bought a mansion in the Back Bay and hired the girls, and paid off the proper people, and…the whole thing.”

  “Big job,” I said.

  “Big payoff,” she said. “The business is very successful. I’m making a lot of money for her, and a lot of money for me.”

  “Good,” I said.

  “It’s an all-woman enterprise,” April said. “Mrs. Utley, me, the girls, even the more-or-less non-sex staff, bartenders, food preparation, everyone is female. The only men anywhere are the clients, and for them it’s like a private club.”

  I nodded. She stopped talking and looked though the window again. I waited.

  “And now some men are trying to take it away from us,” she said.

  Aha!

  2

  Hawk parked his Jaguar in a resident-only space in front of April’s mansion. The sun was bright but without warmth. The weather was very cold, and it had kept the light snow cover from melting, so that the mall along Commonwealth Ave was still clean and white, and what snow there was underfoot was crisp and dry like sand.

  We sat for a moment with the motor running and the heater on, and looked at the house. It was a beauty, a town house on a corner, four stories high with a big semicircular glass-roofed atrium on the cross-street side.

  “April doesn’t know who it is that’s trying to shake her down,” I said. “It was an anonymous phone call. But when she told him no, a couple guys showed up the next day and disrupted, ah, the orderly flow of enterprise.”

  “And they kept showing up?”

  I nodded.

  “It’s an all-woman enterprise,” I said. “And it’s tricky. They are, after all, an illegal enterprise. It’s hard to call the cops.”

  “Ain’t there bribe money spread around?” Hawk said.

  “Yes. But it’s effective only when there’s not a lot of attention drawn.”

  Hawk nodded, looking at the house.

  “Girl’s got nice taste,” Hawk said.

  “Like you would know,” I said.

  “Who more tasteful than me?” Hawk said.

  “I told her we’d come around and discourage the interlopers,” I said. “Maybe see who they represent.”

  Hawk nodded slowly, still looking at the house.

  “Bouncer at a whorehouse,” Hawk said. “The capstone of my career. We getting paid?”

  “Yes.”

  “How much?”

  “We haven’t established that yet.”

  “Free samples?” Hawk said.

  “You’ll have to negotiate that with the samplees,” I said.

  Hawk shut off the engine and we got out. I had on a sheepskin jacket. Hawk was wearing a black fur coat. It was maybe eight degrees, but not much wind and it didn’t feel too bad in the short walk to the front door.

  There was a front desk in the high foyer. A good-looking young woman in a tailored suit was at the desk. A discreet sign on the desk said Concierge. She looked a little nervous when we came in. There were doors off the foyer in all directions, and an elegant staircase that curved up toward the second floor.

  “My name is Spenser,” I said. “For April Kyle.”

  The concierge looked relieved. She picked up the phone and spoke, and almost at once a door opened behind her and April appeared, looking just as elegant as she had in my office.

  “Thank God you’re here,” she said. “They’re coming.”

  We were in the office. It was spartan. There was a big modern work desk against the back wall. Desks where two women sat working at computers. A bank of file cabinets stood along one wall. There was a bank of television monitors high on the wall above the door.

  “For future reference,” April said to the office workers, “these are the good guys.”

  The two women looked at us silently. April didn’t introduce us. She was all business, as if stepping into her work space had made her someone else. Hawk and I t
ook off our coats and hung them on a hat rack near the door.

  “The monitors are for security cameras,” she said. “The one in the center is on the front door.”

  “Who’s coming,” I said.

  “The man called,” April said.

  Her voice was flat and didn’t sound emotional, except that she spoke very swiftly.

  “He said they were tired of waiting. He said they were coming.”

  “To remonstrate with you?” I said.

  “Yes,” April said. “He told me this time it would be worse.”

  “Probably not,” I said.

  “I won’t give in,” April said. “I won’t. He can’t have this.”

  “What they do last time?” Hawk said.

  “They pushed past Doris on the desk, and went through the house interrupting the girls and their guests, chasing the guests out.”

  “Very bad for business,” Hawk said.

  “Yes,” April said. “Those guests are unlikely to return.”

  “You have a gun?” I said.

  “Yes. But I don’t want to use it. I don’t want either of you to use one. That would be the end of it if someone got shot here.”

  “It would,” I said.

  “This is a good business,” April said. “A good woman’s business. I’m not going to give it up because some man wants part of it.”

  Hawk was watching the monitor.