Hundred Dollar Baby

"You saying she might not mean it?" Hawk said.

"She may mean it, but it's been a long time since she did it for love," I said.

"Been a long time since she knew somebody like me," Hawk said. "Plus, she say she have a dream, and she tell me she want to share that dream with me, with a man like me strong enough to believe in dreams, strong enough to make them come true."

"Yeah," I said, "that would be you."

"She tell me about Dreamgirl, like I never heard of it, and about how everybody keep trying to stop her and keep betraying her but how she won't give up and all we need to be happy is to be together and support each other."

"She mention me at all?" I said.

"She did," Hawk said.

"She love you better than me?"

"She didn't actually say so, but I able to surmise it," Hawk said.

"Anything specific?"

"She ask me to kill you," Hawk said.

I drank some beer.

"So that's what she wants," I said.

" 'Pears so," Hawk said. "Plus, of course, she love me."

"She say why she might want you to kill me?"

"She say you won't leave her alone. That you want to control her like her daddy did and keep her a child and won't let her achieve her dream."

"Damn," I said. "And here I thought it was just tough love."

"Parenting is hard," Hawk said.

"Did you agree?" I said.

"I tole her we could talk about it over di

"So you haven't decided yet," I said.

"Actually, I have," Hawk said. "I can't kill you. Ain't nobody else can stand me."

"Good point," I said.

63

I sat with Hawk in his car, half a block from the mansion, looking at April's front door.

"You talk with Susan 'bout April?" Hawk said.

"No."

"You think you might want to talk with Susan 'bout April?" Hawk said.

"No."

"She knows about stuff like this," Hawk said.

"She does."

"But?"

"But since April has decided to have me killed, Susan's objectivity will be too compromised," I said. "Won't matter what she knows."

"Unlike you and me," Hawk said.

"We're used to having people decide to kill us."

"And not being able to," Hawk said.

"So far," I said.

Hawk turned his head to look at me.

"Really upbeat today," he said.

I shrugged.

" 'Spose we can't just kill her first," Hawk said. " 'Fore she finds somebody willing to try."

"No," I said.

"Okay," Hawk said. "So we wait. When she finds somebody willing to try, we kill him."

I nodded. We sat and looked at her front door. Spring had finally arrived in the Back Bay. The snow was mostly gone. Birds hopped in the budding trees. I was comfortable in my lightweight warm-up jacket.

Without looking at me, Hawk said, "You done what you could.

I nodded.

"Her old man kicked her out of the house twenty years ago," Hawk said.

I nodded.

"Called her a whore," I said.

"She been living up to it ever since," Hawk said.

"Makes salvation hard."

"It does."

A young woman in jeans and a red fleece vest walked four small dogs on leashes along the mall in the middle of the avenue.

"The pimps got her," Hawk said. "You got her away from them."

"And sent her to a madam."

"A high-class madam that would look out for her," Hawk said.

I nodded.

"What were your choices?" Hawk said. "She wouldn't go home. She wouldn't go to the state. You go

I shook my head.

"You done what you could," Hawk said.

I didn't answer. Two well-dressed men turned into the front walk of the mansion. I looked at my watch. Eleven fifteen in the morning.

"She had it pretty good with Patricia Utley," Hawk said. "And she run off."

"She thought she was in love," I said.

Hawk nodded.

"And she ends up in like sexual slavery," Hawk said. "And you get her out of that."

"Crown Prince Clubs," I said. "Probably where she got the Dreamgirl idea."

"Being as she was having so much fun," Hawk said.

I watched the quartet of small dogs with their walker. Three of them pulled hard, stretched out at the end of the leashes. One, a wired-haired dachshund, stayed close to her walker's ankles.

"You can't save her," Hawk said. "She been in the muck too long. She fell into it too early."

"I know," I said.

"She probably kill Ollie DeMars. It's why Ollie let her in and made sure they were alone. He think he going to get his ashes hauled."

"I know."

"Pretty surely she kill Lionel in New York," Hawk said. "Ain't no one else that makes any sense for it."

"I know."

The sun was nearly overhead. The car was warm. We sat with the engine off and the windows open. Traffic was sparse at midday. The promising spring air moved through the car.

"So why don't you just give her to Belson," Hawk said. "Let him and Corsetti sort it out."

I didn't say anything.

"Okay," Hawk said. "You don't like that, I got another suggestion. Whyn't you go on in and try to save her. Give her a chance to shoot you."

"I was thinking more along those lines," I said.

64

April and I were in her apartment on the top floor of the mansion again. She looked as good as she had when she came to my office in the winter. Even in jeans and a white T-shirt, she was elegantly pulled together, with just enough maturity in her face to look like a grown-up.

"I don't know what we have to say to each other," she said.

"There's a lot I don't know," I said. "And there's probably some I'll never know. Everybody has been lying to me since we began. But here's how I think it went."

"What are you talking about?" April said.

"I figure it started clean enough. Mrs. Utley gave you charge of one of her spin-off houses. It was probably mostly an experiment, see how they worked. But you had already fallen in love with Lionel Farnsworth, and it went south pretty quick."

"That's ridiculous," April said.

She sat on her couch with her bare feet tucked under her, looking aloof and languid.

"I don't know when it happened," I said, "or who thought it up, but somewhere in there the Dreamgirl scheme hatched, and you and Lionel started embezzling."

"Have you been drinking?" April said.

"Not enough," I said. "Then, somewhere in here, I don't know how, you found out that Lionel was involved in the same scheme with other women-in Philly and in New Haven. And you broke it off. Lionel was vexed by that, so he called on his old jail buddy Ollie DeMars to get you to rethink everything. And you hired me to chase him off. Which I did. But that left you without a man in your life, except me. And I wasn't suitable for romance."

April didn't bother to respond to that. She just shook her head sadly.

"So you took up with Ollie. And Ollie got far enough into things here to scoop some of the security tapes. Ollie being Ollie, he probably enjoyed watching them, but, Ollie being Ollie, he also probably saw their practical, which is to say blackmail, application. My guess is he used the threat of outing your customers to weasel in on the business."

April was begi

"You knew I wouldn't kill him for you," I said. "But you also knew if I took him off your back again he'd blab and I'd learn too much about what was going on."

She studied the window.

"So you killed him," I said.

She had probably prepared herself once she saw where I was going. She turned her head slowly from the window and widened her eyes.

"Oh my God," she said.

"But that left you," I said, "right back where you were, chasing your dream with no man to help. So you reestablished with Lionel."