Small Vices

"Mister Spenser," he said.

"Hello, Steven," I said. "Is Mrs. Utley in?"

Steven stepped back from the door so I could come in.

"Come into the library," he said, "while I find out if she can see you."

The room was in the front of the house. There was a clean fireplace with a green marble hearth on the left wall. The big arched windows looked out onto Sixty-fifth Street. There were filigreed metal inserts on the inside of each, which effectively barred someone from breaking in. I sat on a big hassock covered in green leather. All of the furniture was leather covered in green or a kind of off blue. The walls were paneled in oak, and the whole room looked exactly like the library of someone who never read but watched Masterpiece Theater a lot. There was a bookcase on either side of the cold fireplace. She seemed to have moved all her books up from Thirty-seventh Street. I remembered some of them: The Complete Works of Charles Dickens, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Longfellow: Complete Poetical and Prose Works, The Outline of History, The Canterbury Tales. They didn't look as if they'd been taken down and thumbed through fondly in the twenty years since I first saw them.

Patricia Utley herself, when she came into the room, didn't look like she'd been thumbed through much either. She was as pulled together as she always was. Her hair was maybe a little brighter, and thus a little less credible, blonder than it had been when I'd first met her. It was short and full but it didn't look lacquered. There were crow's-feet at her eyes, and only the subtlest hint of lines at the corners of her mouth. She was small, trim, stylish in a black pantsuit with a white blouse. The blouse had a low neck line, and a short rope of pearls lay against her skin above it. Her glasses were big and round and black-rimmed. I had no idea what age she was, but whatever it was she looked good. She put her hand out as she walked across the room. I stood and took her hand. She leaned gracefully forward and kissed me cheek.

"Still a detective?" she said.

"Yes," I said. "Still a madam?"

"Yes, and a fabulously successful one, if I may say so."

"As the move uptown would suggest," I said.

"My previous home was not impoverished," she said.

"No, it wasn't."

"Would you like a glass of sherry?" she said. "A real drink?"

"No, thank you," I said. "Just some talk."

"I hope you won't mind if I have a glass."

"Not at all."

She walked to a small sideboard between the big windows and poured herself a pony of sherry from a cut-glass decanter, and turned, standing in front of the window so the light silhouetted her.

"So what stray are you looking for this time?" she said.

"Maybe I just dropped in to say hi," I said. "Maybe I miss you."

"I'm sure you do," Patricia Utley said. "But I do know that in the past, whenever you have come to see me you were looking for someone's little lost lamb."

"More like a wolf this time," I said.

"Really?"

"Guy named Rugar, he's been hired to kill me, and he almost did."

"I would have thought that would be hard to do."

"He didn't succeed," I said.

The library door opened and Steven came in with what appeared to be a black and white aardvark on a leash. The aardvark had a bright red choke collar around his neck. His lost-and-found tag dangled from one of the loops on the collar. The tag was bright red also, and heart shaped.

"She's had her walk," Steven said. "And the maid says she was very good."

He leaned over and unsnapped the leash and the aardvark dashed over to Patricia Utley and wagged its tail. Astonishingly, Patricia Utley went to her knees and put her face down where the aardvark could lap it. It wasn't a very big aardvark. Maybe it was too small to be an aardvark.

"Did you have a lovely tinky tinky?" Patricia Utley said.

As I studied it, it was definitely too small to be an aardvark. But whatever it was, it was a lapping fool. It lapped Patricia Utley's face very intently.

"This is Rosie," Patricia Utley said.

She was turning her face to avoid losing all her makeup.

"That's great," I said. "Rosie is not an aardvark, is she?"

"No, of course not. She's a miniature bullterrier."

"That was going to be my next guess," I said. "Like Spuds McKenzie in the beer ads."

"I don't watch beer ads," Patricia Utley said.

She stood and Rosie turned and wiggled over to me and rolled on her back.

"She wants you to rub her stomach," Patricia Utley said.

I sat back down on the hassock and bent over and rubbed Rosie's stomach, which was quite pink.

"She likes it if you say rub rub rub, while you're doing it."

"I can't do that," I said. "You'd tell."

"Rub, rub, rub," Patricia Utley said for me.

She brought her sherry to the blue leather couch and sat on the edge of it, her knees together, her hands, holding the sherry, folded quietly in her lap. Rosie turned immediately over onto her feet, trotted to the couch, and elevated onto it without any apparent effort, as if somehow she had jumped with all four feet equally. She lay down beside Patricia Utley, put her head on Patricia Utley's lap, and stared at me with her almond-shaped black eyes that had no more depth than two slivers of obsidian.

"And now you are looking for this Rugar person?"

"Yes."

"I don't know anyone of that name."

"He works through a lawyer," I said. "Or he used to."

"Is he based in New York?"

"I think so."

"Do you know anything else about him?"

"Rugar or the lawyer?"

"Either," Patricia Utley said.

She was smoothing the fur on Rosie's tail, which looked like it belonged on a short Dalmatian. Rosie would occasionally open her mouth and close it again.

"He's American born, worked for the Israelis for a while. He's in his forties or fifties. Tall, athletic, gray hair, gray skin, seems to dress all in gray. Rugar probably isn't his real name. Very expensive, very covert."

"And if I wished to hire him I would go to a lawyer?"

"A particular lawyer. Who would set up an appointment with Rugar."

"And you don't know who the lawyer is?"

"No, hell, I don't even know if his name is Rugar."

Patricia Utley ran the tip of her tongue along her lower lip. I waited. She sipped her sherry and swallowed and repeated the tongue-on-lower-lip movement. Rosie kept looking at me. Occasionally she wagged her tail.

"I don't know of any such lawyer," she said finally.

"Where would you go if you needed someone killed?" I said.

"I have never had to consider that," she said. "Bribery has always been entirely serviceable."

"And so much more genteel," I said.

She smiled and sipped her sherry again.

"Will you be in the City long?"

"Depends how long this takes," I said.

"You would be amazed at the diversity of my client list," she said.

"No, I wouldn't," I said.

She smiled and made an assenting gesture with her head.

"No, probably you wouldn't be. But I have contact with a vast range of rich and important people. If this man, who might be named Rugar, is truly expensive, my clientele would be his market."