Karen Hawley loved Neal Carey deeply, but he did have a horse-and-cart problem. And now that she had a sabbatical semester, it was starting to become her horse-and-cart problem.
“The checks,” Graham said, “were not meant to be a pension. They were sort of disability payments while you had to hide out.”
Were? Neal thought. This didn’t sound good.
“What are you saying, Dad?” Neal asked.
“I’m saying you can be Neal Carey again if you want.”
Why would I want to do something like that? Neal thought.
“Who did you pay off?” Neal asked.
The “you” in this case being Kitteredge’s bank in Providence, Rhode Island.
“The usual,” Graham said. Washington politicians were about as hard to purchase as magazine subscriptions, although you did have to renew them more often. Besides, the feds didn’t have much of a hard-on for this case. If someone did them a favor by disposing of a dirtbag neo-Nazi like Strekker, well, it was one less dirtbag they had to worry about. Graham couldn’t prove that Neal had performed this particular service and they had never talked about it, but the last time Joe Graham had seen Neal Carey, he had been trotting out into the sagebrush with a rifle in his hands.
“Ed thinks it’s time you came back to work,” Graham said.
Ed was Ed Levine, manager of Friends’ New York office, where Graham worked and Neal usually didn’t.
“Who’s missing?” Neal sighed. “Who do you want me to find?”
Because that was mostly what he did for Friends.
Graham smiled his rat-sucking-on-garbage smile and said, “That’s the beauty part.”
“What’s the beauty part?” Neal asked. Giving in and asking was easier than letting Graham drag it out.
“You don’t have to find anybody,” Graham answered. “We already found her.”
“Sooo…?” Neal asked.
Graham grinned.
“We want you to teach her English.”
“Who? Why? Where’s she from?”
“Brooklyn,” Graham answered.
“Which leaves who and why,” Neal said.
“Are you taking the job?” asked Graham.
He wasn’t going to give up anything else unless Neal was on the job.
Uh-uh, thought Neal. I say yes and then you tell me you found her in some prison in Outer Mongolia and my job is to break in, teach her English, and escape on camelback across the Soviet Union.
“I’m retired,” Neal repeated.
“How much?” Karen asked Graham.
Neal raised his eyebrows at her.
“We’ve been talking about putting a deck on the back of the house,” she explained.
Neal turned to Graham. “What is she, a witness?”
“Maybe,” Graham answered.
“Maybe?”
Graham said, “It might depend on how good you do with her.”
“Who is she,” Neal asked, “Eliza Doolittle?”
Graham rubbed his artificial hand into his real palm. It was a habit he had when he got nervous or impatient.
“Are you on, or what?” Graham asked.
“Is this a mob thing?” Neal asked. Because mob witnesses were dangerous. People tended to get killed in their general vicinity. “You want me to clean up some mob bimbo who’s mad because Guido slapped her around, and now she wants to tell the world about his funny friends, right?”
“Nothing like that,” Graham promised.
“And where do I have to go?”
“That’s the next beauty part. You don’t even have to leave the house. We want to bring her here.”
“Here,” Neal echoed.
“Here?” Karen asked.
“Here,” Graham repeated.
Neal laughed and turned to Karen. “Now how much do you want the deck?”
Graham also turned to Karen and gave her his most obsequious smile. “We think you would be a major asset in the cleaning-up process.”
Karen poured Graham a fresh cup of coffee, sat down next to him, and put her arm around his shoulder.
“You know, Joe,” she said, “when I envision this deck, I see a cedar hot tub on it.”
Neal whooped with laughter.
“I like her,” Graham said. “She’s a vicious putz like you, but I like her.”
“There’s a lot to like,” Neal agreed. A lot to love, he thought.
Graham said, “Okay, we’re talking deck with Jacuzzi money.”
“That was easy. Who is this mystery witness?” Neal asked.
Graham paused dramatically. He chewed his last bite of toast twenty-eight times and announced, “Polly Paget.”
Karen’s big blue eyes got bigger.
“The whole country’s looking for Polly Paget,” Neal said. “I should have known you had her.”
Graham shrugged.
“Where is she?” Neal asked.
“Out in the car.”
“You left that woman sitting out in the car?!” Karen yelled. “What do you think she is, luggage?”
“She was asleep.”
Karen punched Graham in the shoulder and stormed out the kitchen door.
“Ouch,” Graham said, looking a little hurt.
“One of Karen’s dirty little secrets,” Neal explained as he took a blueberry muffin, “is that she reads People magazine. Is it all true?”
“Polly Paget says it is,” Graham said as he rubbed his shoulder.
Neal munched on the muffin. Graham’s answer meant that he didn’t know whether or not to believe what Polly Paget was saying about Jackson Landis.
2
Polly Paget had been a typist in the secretarial pool of Jack Landis’s New York office and, according to Polly, Jack Landis had done a few laps in her end of the pool.
On its own, Neal knew this was not particularly earthshaking. Polly Paget certainly wouldn’t be the first secretary who had typed twenty words an hour and had the job security of a federal employee, and she wouldn’t be the last secretary who did more work on her desk than at it. What started to make Polly Paget exceptional was the fact that she claimed she had been raped.
None of which would have even made the paper, except that the alleged rapist was none other than Jackson Landis himself, the founder, president, and majority owner of the Family Cable Network. Jack was also the devoted husband of Candy Landis, with whom he cohosted the top-rated cable show in the country, “The Jack and Candy Family Hour,” a program so wholesome it made “The Lawrence Welk Show” look like a Tijuana animal act.
Neal didn’t know whether he believed Polly himself.
She fits the part, Neal thought.
“Disiz a cute lihul place yoo got heah,” Polly said as Karen set her suitcase down in the kitchen. “Gawd, izit faw enough away from evryting, or what. Oi mean, we drove an drove an drove an drove and Oi dint see anyting, nevuh moind a mall. An joo have a batroom Oi could use? Oi have really gadda pee.”
Polly Paget was a walking, talking-especially talking-stereotype. Her auburn hair was big-teased, blow-dried, and sprayed into a huge red halo that looked like a sunset over an oil refinery. She had a handsome, long face with a wide slash of mouth and two long incisors that looked just a little like fangs and gave her a slightly predatory look. Her long, thin nose had a slight Roman curve. Neal had to admit to himself that her eyes were sexy. Framed by wide red eyebrows, her green cat eyes sparkled behind the layers of mascara, eyeliner, and fake lashes. Everything about Polly screamed bimbo.
And Polly Paget was tall-a good five ten, with long legs, small breasts, and wide shoulders. She looked a hell of a lot more like the wolf than the lamb.
And the clothes: Today she was dressed entirely in brand-new denim that made it look as if she’d gone shopping for her trip to the West. Lots of silver and turquoise jewelry, and bright red fingernails that were so long, she couldn’t possibly type even if she wanted to.