Cold Night (Jack Paine Mysteries) (21 page)

He saw her face again, heard her telling him what he knew in his heart and mind to be true.

"You're right, Rebecca, I can't."

His hand relaxed, letting the .44 go, letting it wash itself in a sea of spent bourbon.

He looked up and saw the stars.

He sat for a long time under the stars and said good-bye to her.

Then he got up and went to keep his promise.

N
o smiles at the front door this time. Paine managed his way past the first guard, but the desk man in the lobby was the real general. Paine couldn't even see the private elevator from the partitioned area around the man's desk; for all he knew the slim golden door was a wonderland illusion.

"Tell her it's about her daughter," Paine said to the stone face of the desk man.

The stone face spoke into the phone, and then the stone turned to soft wax and he said to Paine, "You may go up."

Paine walked past the desk and walked to the left and found the private elevator set in the marble facade. It was just where he had left it.

The doors opened, he got in, the elevator went up and he got off. The hallway, the right turn, the huge double doors. The ex-boxer doorman with the flat eyes nodded and said
his name and the double doors magically opened once more.

Gloria Fulman was waiting for him in the entrance hail. There were a lot of bags packed in the foyer. She must have worked up quite a sweat telling all those maids and doormen where to pile things up.

"Little trip?" Paine asked.

"The other room, please," she said. Paine followed.

No tea sandwiches this time, or little cups of coffee with doilies under the saucers. Gloria Fulman went to one Sheraton sofa and sat down. Paine sat on its twin, facing her, and crossed his legs. The door to the pantry was in his line of sight to the left. The hallway was slightly to his right; another door was to his extreme right, almost beyond his peripheral vision, but he thought he'd be able to handle it if anyone came through.

Paine's right hand rested lightly on the front of his jacket, near his .38.

The coffee stains had been cleaned from the Persian rug. Gloria Fulman continued to glare at him, so Paine spoke first.

"I've been wondering what kind of man your husband is. He must be a lot like Morris Grumbach. He can forget about ever running for President."

"You said something about my daughter, Mr. Paine."

He watched her. He enjoyed watching her, and there was some guilt in this but not much. He was watching her the way she had watched him, the way Barker had watched everyone in his life, the way all people with the big hand watch the loser with the pair of deuces. He watched her wheels turn; watched her go through and reject the options —money, violence, blackmail, murder—and then he saw her come to a dead stop. The wheels rusted. She knew she had lost. The bags in the hallway, she knew, would not be packed into the Rolls-Royce and driven, along with her and her infant daughter and husband, to a private plane in a far and quiet corner of Logan Airport. She would not leave the country for a place without extradition, where her money, safe and available in Switzerland, would soon make her powerful and wanted again. She would not own the colorfully corrupt mayor, the police chief and whatever ministers, civil servants, private maids and thugs she would possibly need. She knew that none of this would happen now, because she was too late.

She sat for a few moments, and Paine watched many of the fancy parts of her flake away, and when she was finished with her inventory of options and her miniature devolution she said, in a voice that was small and almost private, the voice that was deep inside her behind all the masks, in whatever tiny place she kept things that she really believed, "She's better off with me."

"I bet your mother said that each morning," Paine said.

He took a slim envelope from his jacket pocket and slid it across the coffee table at her. She looked at it but did not pick it up. Scribbled across the face of it was the name "Mr. Johnson" in Rebecca Meyer's handwriting.

"Inside the envelope is a
Los Angeles Times
clipping on your daughter's kidnapping," Paine said to her. "Rebecca found it in Les Paterna's brown folder, along with a copy of the birth certificate he falsified for you. He was probably going to use it on you somewhere down the line, when things at Bravura Enterprises got a little tight.

"I've made plenty of copies of it. A policeman friend of mine has one, and he got in touch with a man in the Boston office of the FBI who will come to chat with you after I leave. I heard this morning, before I came over here, that there's a very happy couple in Pasadena who had given up hope that their infant daughter would be found. He's a sanitation worker, and she has to work as a salesgirl in a mall part-time, but they get by. From what I hear, they miss their little girl a lot."

He got up and left. He walked to the door and let himself out into the hallway, then he let himself out the front door, leaving it open for the doorman with the flat stare and black shiny shoes. He went to the elevator and the elevator brought him down to the lobby and he walked toward the desk man.

He felt the bulge of his .38 in his jacket, and he took it out as he went by and put it gently on the desk.

Outside, the day had started cloudy, but there were some breaks in the clouds and it looked like there might be sun.