Fucking idiot.
As he sank into the chair opposite Barker the tape ended.
Then, seconds later, it started again.
"You're going to Boston," Barker said, staring out the window at a place above Paine's head. "Gloria Fulman wants to talk to you."
"Why can't she talk to me on the phone?"
Barker affected disinterest. "Because that's what she wants. She's paying for it."
"She's not a client."
"She is now."
"Did she sign a contract, or just buy you?"
Now Barker looked at him. It was the kind of gaze a man gives a sample of pond scum under a microscope.
"Go," he said.
He turned to some work on his desk, pretending that Paine had already left.
After a while, Paine had.
FIFTEEN
The limousine picked him up at Logan Airport. Paine had been in Boston once on police business and once when his cousin got married. Both times he'd gotten lost. Boston was a maze you drove into where, no matter how sure your sense of direction, you always arrived at a place different from your destination.
But the limo had no such problems. It glided through one-way streets like a magnet drawn to iron. The iron was Gloria Fulman.
Paine tried to look through the smoky gray glass to the front seat and see if the driver was really doing his job, or if the car worked by radio control.
There was a driver up there, because when they arrived at the Fulman Building he emerged and opened the door for Paine. Paine felt like tipping him. There was a doorman, in a smart red suit and a red pillbox hat brocaded in gold, who held the front door of the building open. Paine went in. There was a desk man, who merely nodded as Paine walked by.
He walked toward the elevator banks but a discreet cough from the desk man made him stop. The desk man smiled primly and motioned to a lone elevator set inconspicuously into the marble facade of the lobby to the left. The desk man looked down at his desk again. To him, Paine no longer existed. The man was standing. Paine wondered if he had to stand all day long.
As Paine stepped in front of the elevator, there was the audible click of a lock being disengaged. The door slid smoothly open. There was no up button. The interior of the elevator was marble-facaded, a mock of the lobby; there were recently polished bronze columns set into the four corners, bottomed in claw feet and topped in lions' heads. The elevator ceiling was paneled in mirrors. Paine looked up at himself. He could barely feel movement, and he wondered if the elevator was moving until it bumped demurely to a stop and the door whispered open.
More marble. A hallway, the walls bordered with bronze-framed mirrors every half dozen feet. The hallway ended in a right turn. There was another length of hallway which finally ended in huge double doors. Another doorman, more red velvet and brocade. This one stood. Again no seat. The doorman had heavy-soled shoes on, brightly and blackly polished. The build underneath the pillbox cap and organ-grinder's monkey suit looked like ex-middleweight.
"Mr. Paine," the doorman said. His eyes were flat, devoid of expression.
The doorman must have been miked; he never moved but the doors opened from within. As Paine walked in, the doors were closed by yet another doorman.
This is getting silly, Paine thought.
He was in an entrance hall as large and as furnished as his apartment. Gloria Fulman was there to greet him.
"Mr. Paine," she said, her voice as flat as the doorman's.
"Hello," Paine said.
She turned, personally escorting him to a sitting room off the entrance hall. She even opened the white doors leading into it herself. Paine was more interested than flattered at the attention. She wanted more than to buy him, that was sure.
The sitting room was elegant and cold. The rugs looked as old as Persia.
"You'll take coffee?" she asked. On cue, the maid Paine had seen at the suite in New York appeared with the same silver service and the same kind of tea sandwiches. The maid handed coffee to him the way he liked it.
Gloria Fulman sat down on a lavender Sheraton sofa, and Paine sat down on a matching piece on the other side of the coffee table. As in New York, Gloria Fulman didn't touch her coffee.
"I want you to do an important piece of business for me, Mr. Paine," she said.
"And what would that be?"
"I want you to find Les Paterna's brown folder."
"You'll have to stand on line to get it."
Something stirred in the coffee-cold depths of her eyes.
"I know all about Henry Kopiak," she said. "This matter concerns the Fulmans. Your employer understands."
Paine stood up and walked to a framed etching on one wall. It was a beautifully frozen moment capturing two young girls on a swing in a park arching into the air, while a bum on a bench admired them. "So you're saying you made a deal with Barker that if I find the folder, you get it, and the hell with Kopiak?"
The etching had a pencil signature in the lower right-hand corner and was dated 1907.
Behind him, she rose from the couch.
"Mr. Paine," she said, and he turned to see her standing nearly at his elbow. She was pleasantly plump as he had remembered her, but this close he saw that she would look even more plump if she did not have the finest clothes altered with precision. If she had been forced to buy off-the-rack, she would not look so pleasant. Up close, she still looked ten years older than twenty-five.
"I'm saying that your employer expects you to do what you're paid for. My circumstances are. . special."
He waited for her to go on. After trying to stare into his eyes for a few moments she turned and paced away from him.
"My husband," she said in a lowered, careful voice, "is in a precarious political position. There are people who will destroy him if they can."
"Are you being blackmailed?"
She stopped in front of her coffee and sat down again. She picked up the cup and then put it down. Her hand slipped, and coffee spilled over the rim onto the saucer. Paine watched a drop of it fall to the highly polished coffee table. He expected an alarm to go off, the mechanical maid to rush in with lemon polish and whisk the drop into oblivion.
Paine said, "I can smell blackmail a mile away. I smell it everywhere I look with your family." He looked at her levelly. "Did you know Lucas Druckman?"
This time he had caught her. Her eyes shifted subtly, filled in with life before going blank again. Her hand brushed across the top of her coffee cup, upsetting it again. "Who?" she said, not as firmly as she wished.
He took Druckman's picture out. "I already showed you this once."
"I don't know him," she said. She looked at the coffee table, and for a horrible moment Paine thought she was going to summon the maid to clean her spill. Instead she dabbed it up herself, with the corner of a napkin.
Paine sat down on the sofa and leaned forward. "Mrs. Fulman, has someone tried to kill you?"
"What do you mean?" she said. She was more and more unsure of herself, and Paine admitted to himself that he was enjoying it.
"I mean the bodyguards posing as bellboys you've got all over this place. I know hired muscles when I see them. This place looks like a Mafia don's love nest. I doubt you keep three armed men around all the time, even if your collection of etchings is valuable. Has someone tried to kill you?"
"Yes," she said.
"And you're sure that whoever tried to kill you killed Les Paterna, and maybe your father and sister, too?"
She had regained some of her composure. "I've hired you to find out who killed Les Paterna."
"Why do I get the feeling I'm only getting exactly what you want me to know?"