Life's Work (16 page)

"Did Parks testify before the grand jury?"

"I assume he did," Petrie said.

"Did Clayton tell you he did?" I said.

"No. Not specifically. He wasn't very specific about anything, actually. Except for the murder."

"What about the murder?"

"I guess that didn't make the afternoon paper, did it?" Petrie said, massaging his huge brow. "It was about the girl. C. W. O'Hara. Clayton said that she'd cooperated in the investigation. She'd helped entrap Parks. Bill apparently found out about it this week. And that's why he killed her."
 

I was so intrigued by what Petrie had said that I didn't answer him when he went on to ask me whether I was willing to continue to work for the Cougars.

"Are you sure Clayton said that C.W. played a part in turning Parks?" I said.

Petrie nodded.

"Did he give you a reason why she would do something like that?"

Petrie shrugged. "Your guess would be as good as mine. Bill wasn't the smartest man in the world, and it's probable that the girl stood to gain by betraying him. Maybe she thought she was doing him a service-getting him off drugs."

It was an interesting theory, seeing that it fit so neatly with some of the things that Laurel had told me about C.W.'s attempts to reform her man. On the other hand, it was a terribly risky way to go about doing it. And I said as much to Petrie.

"You don't know football players, Stoner," he answered superciliously. "Guys like Parks don't have any idea who they are off the field unless someone tells them. They're easy to dupe. Christ, I told you what Kaplan did to Bill. There's no reason to think that the girl acted any differently. Or that she thought she was taking an unjustifiable risk. She was probably expert at manipulating him."

"I have a little trouble seeing Parks as her victim." Petrie furrowed his brow. "Something pissed him off at her."

That much was indisputable, although it didn't explain the way he had butchered her. It was the child and the mother he had tried to destroy. But then, according to Laurel, C.W. had used her pregnancy to manipulate Parks, too. Maybe he'd seen them as coequal, the drug arrest and the baby -two instances of a betrayal that C. W. O'Hara had visited on him. Just thinking about him like that, as capable of feeling betrayed, made him seem more complicated to me. More than the mindless caveman I'd imagined earlier in the day.

"Well?" Petrie said. "Are you going to help us out or not?"

I stared at his helmeted face and knew that he didn't give a damn what I found or what I hazarded, as long as the team came out of it without a blemish. And I didn't really care about cleansing the Cougars' stables. It was the crime itself that interested me, the savage puzzlement of it. I thought it over, weighing my curiosity against the undeniable risks I would be taking. I'd been warned off by two very dangerous men, Clayton and Kaplan. Three, if I counted Bluerock. Only I counted Bluerock on my side. And then there was Laurel to consider. She would have to be guaranteed safety.

"You'll agree to use your money and influence to help me out?" I said to him.

"Of course."

"And if there's trouble?"

"There's always that possibility," Petrie said with something like an appetite. "You'll have to use your own judgment. Remember, I don't want you to catch Bill. I don't give a damn about Bill anymore. I just want this Clayton mess cleared up and our reputation restored. In case you forgot, we still have a season coming up, a campaign to wage."

"I may need some help."

"What did you have in mind?"

"Bluerock," I said. "It would be good to have him in my corner."

"That's fine with me, if he's willing."

"There's got to be a payoff for him," I said. "If he agrees to help, you've got to promise that you'll give him another shot. Another year on the team, at top pay. That is, if he wants it."

Petrie's face darkened angrily. "I don't like to be blackmailed, Harry. I've told you that."

"It's not blackmail, Hugh. It's negotiation."

"Christ," he said dismally. "Another goddamn agent."
 
 

Around seven thirty we reached an agreement. I didn't even have to appear on the Trumpy show or talk to the papers. Petrie caved in like a sinkhole. Which was an indication of just how desperate he was to clean up the mess that Parks had left behind him. He promised to give Otto another year at top pay, although he didn't promise he'd start him. I said that that was agreeable. We shook on it, and Petrie left.

When she heard the front door shut, Laurel wandered in from the bedroom and sat down across from me on the couch.

"Is it okay if I stay in here?" she said. "I feel kind of like hired help in the bedroom."

I grinned at her. "It's okay."

I picked up the phone and called Otto.

He didn't sound his usual self when he answered the phone. He didn't bellow or curse. But then I realized that he must have seen the day's paper, that he knew what had happened at G.W.'s ranch house.

I presented him with the proposition. He heard me out in silence, without any of the usual heckling or jeers, and without showing any enthusiasm either. Then I gave him the hard part. Not the risk of crossing Kaplan or Clayton -he already knew about the one, and I explained about the other, about Clayton's reputation for corruption. It was his friend, Parks, who was the problem.

"He's a killer, Blue," I said. "We can't change that fact. And part of my job is going to involve proving his guilt."

Bluerock didn't answer right away. When he did, he sounded melancholy. "You don't know the whole story, sport," he said. "None of us do. Whatever Bill did, he did because he was driven to it. I'd stake my life on that. What you don't understand yet, Harry, was that Bill didn't play football, he was the football. So show a little mercy, for chrissake, until you've seen the big picture."

I started to tell him about the picture I'd seen in C. W. O'Hara's bedroom, but let it go.

"Are you interested in joining my team?" I said.

"I'm leaning that way," he replied. "Let me sleep on it."

"You do understand that it could get rough, Blue," I said.

Otto laughed. "Football's a contact sport."

"This isn't football," I said.

"Sure it is, Harry," he said. "It's all football. Haven't you figured that out, yet?"
 
 

I told Bluerock I'd call him in the morning to get his reply to my proposition, then turned my attention to Laurel, who had been sitting patiently on the couch, listening to the phone conversation with a rapt and vaguely calculating air. I didn't pull my punches with her either. I explained it all-about Clayton and his stun gun, about Kaplan and the grand jury. She already knew, firsthand, what Parks was capable of. I thought that hearing the truth might unnerve her, coming as it did so hard on the murder of her friend. While she paled visibly when I told her about smiling Phil Clayton, she heard the rest of it out with surprising cool.

When I'd finished, she stared at me so curiously that I didn't know what to make of her look.

"So what is it you expect me to say?" she finally said. "You expect me to freak out again? Well, I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to give you that satisfaction, Harry Stoner. I'll tell you this, though. I think you're fucked in the head. You, and your friend Bluerock too. You must be crazy to want to tangle with those guys."

"So I guess we can count you out," I said.

"I didn't say that," she said. "I don't understand how you could do that, anyway. Heck, everybody and his brother knows I've been hanging around with you. Clay and Stacey and the crowd at the Waterhole. I'm screwed no matter how you look at it. I can't go home and I can't leave here. I guess I gotta go along for the ride."

"You could go to Corbin."

"That ain't far enough," she said.

"Then maybe we could send you somewhere else. How'd you like to spend a month in Hawaii? All expenses paid, courtesy of the Cougars."

Her doll-like face, which had knotted up as if it were being squeezed in a vise, sprang back to its true proportions.

"You could do that?" she said, with a touch of awe in her voice.

I nodded.

She wrinkled her nose. "I don't know if I want to go that far -all alone."

"Then take someone with you. Take Stacey."

"She's such a child," Laurel said. But I could tell that the proposition pleased her. She spent a moment picnicking with the idea, then her face clouded over as if it had begun to rain on the sandwiches. "What's the catch? What's the trade-ofI?"

A couple of years of whoring had given Laurel a keen sense of commerce.

"You answer a few more questions," I said.

She thought it over for a moment with her rapt, deliberative air. I thought she was going to accept the deal. But when she finally spoke, what she said was, "What else is in it for me?"

I gawked at her, then started to laugh. "The Hawaiian vacation for two isn't enough?"

"Hawaii's a long way off," she said defensively. "I'm going to have to have some beach clothes to wear, and a little pocket change to live on. You know, I'd be giving up a lot, going away for a month. Do you know how much money I could make in a month at the Waterhole?"

"How much?" I said.

"A lot," she said.

"How much is a lot?"

She pursed her lips, closed her eyes, and silently totted up the blackmail. "Two thousand dollars," she said, and then corrected herself. "Two thousand two hundred fifty dollars. You owe me two hundred fifty dollars from last night -a hundred and fifty for telling you about Bill and C.W. in the first place," she explained.

I stared at her sweet face. The girl added a whole new meaning to the word venal.

"Okay," I said. "I'll arrange it."

"Then ask away," she said happily. "I'm all yours."
 

I opened the desk drawer, got out my notebook and the manila envelope containing the arrest reports, and brought them over to the couch.

"I want you to help me put together a picture of what led up to last night, what led up to the murder," I explained to Laurel. "We know that Parks left camp on Monday. I thought at first that it was because of the situation at home. But it looks now as if he may also have been preparing to testify before the grand jury in a drug investigation."

"That's news to me," Laurel said flatly.

It had been news to Bluerock too. But then, I supposed, it was not a situation that Parks or C.W. would have wanted to advertise -each for their own reasons.

"C.W. never mentioned a bust of any kind to you? Drug or otherwise?"

"Nope," Laurel said. "But she could be mighty closemouthed about her personal affairs, especially if they didn't jibe with her plans for Bill and her. All she talked about the last time we spoke was the way Bill's mom was jacking him around. C. W. said Jewel'd been on Bill's case all week long."

"On his case about what?" I said.

"The baby, I think. Jewel's kind of a weirdo. I mean, she made C.W. look like a piker when it came to being self-righteous."

"You've met her?"

"Once, when she and Bill's dad came to visit."

"What did she look like?" I said.

"You know the little picture of Dolley Madison on those fried pies you get at the Stop-N-Go? That's what she looks like -a round, pretty face and big, dimpled cheeks and lots of curls."

That sounded like a fair description of the woman in the photograph I'd found in Parks's desk.

"She looks sweet as candy," Laurel went on. "But, good Lord, she's got a wicked tongue! She just about run everybody ragged trying to please her -Bill, and her own husband, and poor C.W. worst of all. Nothing was good enough for her. Nobody did things right. The food was lousy. The way C.W. kept house was lousy. The way she dressed was whorish. Jeez, you could kind of understand how Bill got to be the way he is just by watching her operate. I mean, you could never please somebody like her, no matter how hard you tried. And what made it even worse was that she kept reciting chapter and verse to prove her points. Like it wasn't enough for her to say that C. W. was a bad housekeeper. She said it was sinful to be a bad housekeeper. I mean jewel saw everything as a sign of grace. And in her book, poor C.W. was as damned as they come."

"I guess C.W.'s pregnancy must have been hard for jewel to swallow," I said.

"She didn't know about it until last week," Laurel said.

"They kept that a deep secret -them not being married yet."

"How did jewel find out?"

"I think Bill must have told her. He and C.W.'d been fighting about it so much, he must've forgotten himself and blurted it out. It was certainly on his mind."

"Why?" I said.

"He never wanted her to have a baby, for one thing. And then C.W. went into Deaconess for this series of tests, and the doctors found out that something was wrong with the fetus."

"Do you know what was wrong?"

She didn't answer me directly. "C.W. acted like it was a shameful thing, like it was her fault that the baby wasn't right. And Bill -he acted the same way. He was furious with C.W. Like the whole thing was a judgment on her and on him. He got her so upset that she even thought of having an abortion. But Reverend Dice talked her out of it."