The coffee and muffins were gone. Linda Rabb said, “Has it been raining somewhere? Your hair’s wet.”
“Shower,” I said. “I went over to the Y and worked out.”
“Oh, how nice.”
“Sound mind in a healthy body and all that.”
“Could you show me some identification, Mr. Spenser?”
I got out the photostat of my license in its little plastic case and handed it to her. Also my driver’s license. She looked at them both and gave them back.
“I guess you really are a detective.”
“Thanks,” I said, “I need reassurance sometimes.”
“Just what do you know, Mr. Spenser?”
“I’ve been to Redford, Illinois, I’ve talked with Sheriff Donaldson and with your mother and father. I know you got busted there in ’sixty-six for possession of marijuana. I know you ran away with a guy named Tony Reece and that you haven’t been back. I know you went to New York, that you lived in a rooming house on Thirteenth Street in the East Village, that you were hustling for a living first for old Tony, then for a pimp named Violet. I know you moved uptown, went to work for Patricia Utley, made one pornographic movie, fell in love with one of your customers, and left to get married in the winter of nineteen seventy, wearing a lovely fur-collared tweed coat. I’ve been to New York, I’ve talked with Violet and with Patricia Utley, I preferred Mrs. Utley.”
“Yes,” Linda Rabb said without any expression, “I did too. Did you see me in the movie?”
“Yeah.”
She was looking past me out the window. “Did you enjoy it?”
“I think you’re very pretty.”
She kept staring out the window. There wasn’t anything to see except the dome of the Christian Science Mother Church. I was quiet.
“What do you want?” she said finally.
“I don’t know yet. I told you what I know; now I’ll tell you what I think. I think the client you married was Marty. I think someone got hold of Suburban Fancy that knows you and is blackmailing you and Marty, and that Marty is modifying some of the games he pitches so that whoever is blackmailing you can bet right and make a bundle.”
Again silence and the stare. I thought about moving in front of the window to intercept it.
“If I hadn’t made the film,” she said. “It was just a break, in a way, from turning tricks with strangers. I mean there was every kind of sex in it, but it was just acting. It was always just acting, but in the movie it was supposed to be acting and the guy was acting and there were people you knew around. You didn’t have to go alone to a strange hotel room and make conversation with someone you didn’t know and wonder if he might be freaky, you know? I mean, some of them are freaky. Christ, you don’t know.” She shifted her stare from the window to me. I wanted to look out the window.
“One film,” she said. “One goddamned film for good money under first-class conditions and no S and M or group sex, and right after that I met Marty.”
“In New York?”
“Yes, they were in town to play the Yankees, and one of the other players set it up. Mrs. Utley sent three of us over to the hotel. It was Marty’s first time with a whore.” The word came out harsh and her stare was heavy on me. “He was always very straight.”
More silence.
“He was a little drunk and laughing and making suggestive remarks, but as soon as we were alone, he got embarrassed. I had to lead him through it. And afterward we had some food sent up and ate a late supper and watched an old movie on TV. I still remember it. It was a Jimmy Stewart western called Broken Arrow. He kissed me good-bye when I left, and he was embarrassed to death to pay me.”
“And you saw him again?”
“Yes, I called him at his hotel the next day. It was raining and the game with the Yankees was canceled. So we went to the Museum of Natural History.”
“Yes.”
“How about the other two players that night? Didn’t they recognize you?”
“No, I had on a blond wig and different makeup. They didn’t pay much attention to me anyway. Nobody looks at a whore. When I met Marty the next day, he didn’t even recognize me at first.”
“When did you get married?”
“When we said, except that we changed it. Marty and I worked out the story about me being from Arlington Heights and meeting in Chicago and all. I’d been to Chicago a couple of times and knew my way around okay if anyone wanted to ask about it. And Marty and I went out there before we were married and went to Comiskey Park, or whatever it’s now, and around Chicago so my sound okay.”
“Where’d you get Arlington
“Picked it out on a map.”
We looked at each other. I could hear the faint hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen. And somewhere down the corridor a door opened and closed.
“That goddamned movie,” she said. “When the letter came, I wanted to confess, but Marty wouldn’t let me.”
“What letter?”
“The first blackmail letter.”
“Do you know who sent it?”
“No.”
“I assume you don’t have it.”
“No.”
“What did it say?”
“It said—I can remember it almost exactly—it was to Marty and it said, ‘I have a copy of a movie called Suburban Fancy. If you don’t lose your next ball game, I’ll release it to the media.’ ”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all. No name or return address or anything.”
“And did he?”
Linda Rabb looked blank. “Did he what?”
“Did Marty lose his next game?”
“Yes, he hung a curve in the seventh inning with the bases loaded against the Tigers, on purpose. I woke up in the middle of the night, that night, and he wasn’t in bed, he was out in the living room, looking out the window and crying.”
Her face was very white, and her eyes were puffy.
“And you wanted to confess it again.”
“Yes. But he said no. And I said, ‘It will kill you to throw games.’ And he said a man looked out for his wife and his kid, and I said, ‘But it will kill you.’ And he wouldn’t talk about it again. He said it was done and maybe there wouldn’t be another letter, but we both knew there would.”
“And there was.”
She nodded.
“And they kept coming?”
“And Marty kept doing what they said to do?”
She nodded again.
“How often?” I said.
“The letters? Not often. Marty gets about thirty-five starts a year. There were maybe five or six letters last year, three so far this year.”
“Smart,” I said. “Didn’t get greedy. Do you have any idea who it is?”
“No.”
“It’s a hell of a hustle,” I said. “Blackmail is dangerous if the victim knows you or at the point when the money is exchanged. This is perfect. There is no money exchanged. You render a service, and he gets the money elsewhere. He never has to reveal himself. There are probably one hundred thousand people who’ve seen that film, and you can’t know who they are. He mails his instructions, bets his money, and who’s to know?”
“Yes.”
“And furthermore, the act of payment is itself a blackmailable offense so that the more you comply with his requests, the more he’s got to blackmail you for.”
“I know that too,” she said. “If there was a hint of gambling influence, Marty would be out of baseball forever.”
“If you look at it by itself, it’s almost beautiful.”
“I’ve never looked at it by itself.”
“Yeah, I guess not.” I said, “Is it killing Marty?”
“A little, I think. He says you get used to anything—maybe he’s right.”
“How are you?”
“It’s not me that has to cheat at my job.”
“It’s you that has to feel guilty about it,” I said. “He can say he’s doing it for you. What do you say?”
Tears formed in her eyes and began to run down her face. “I say it’s what he gets for marrying a whore.”
“See what I mean?” I said. “Wouldn’t you rather be him?”
She didn’t answer me. She sat still with her hands clenched in her lap, and the tears ran down her face without sound.
I got up and walked around the living room with my hands in my hip pockets. I’d found out what I was supposed to find out, and I’d earned the pay I’d hired on at.
“Did you call your husband?” I said.
She shook her head. “He’s pitching today,” she said, and her voice was steady but without inflection. “I don’t like to bother him on the days he’s pitching. I don’t want to break his concentration. He should be thinking about the Oakland hitters.”
“Mrs. Rabb, it’s not a goddamned religion,” I said. “He’s not out there in Oakland building a temple to the Lord or a stairway to paradise. He’s throwing a ball and the other guys are trying to hit it. Kids do it every day in schoolyards all over the land.”
“It’s Marty’s religion,” she said. “It’s what he does.”
“How about you?”
“We’re part of it too, me and the boy—the game and the family. It’s all he cares about. That’s why it’s killing him because he has to screw us or screw the game. Which is like screwing himself.”
I should be gone. I should be in Harold Erskine’s office, laying it all out for him and getting a bonus and maybe a plaque: OFFICIAL MAJOR LEAGUE PRIVATE EYE. Gumshoe of the stars. But I knew I wasn’t going to be gone. I knew that I was here, and I probably knew it back in Redford, Illinois, when I went to her house and met her mom and dad.
“I’m going to get you out of this,” I said.
She didn’t look at me.
“I know who’s blackmailing you.”
This time she looked.