“Yeah, Bucky Maynard—I don’t know the real first name, maybe that’s it—and Lester Floyd.” I was gambling she’d never followed sports and had never heard of Maynard.
I didn’t want to tie Donna Burlington to the Red Sox, but I needed to know. If she’d ever heard of Bucky Maynard, she gave no sign. Lester didn’t look like a self-starter. If he was in on this, it was a good bet he represented Maynard.
“I’ll see,” she said. She picked up a phone on the end table near the couch and dialed a three-digit number. “Would you please check the subscription list, specifically on Suburban Fancy, and see if we have either a Bucky Maynard or a Lester Floyd, and the address and date? Thank you. Yes, call me right back, I’m in the library.”
“How many copies of that film are there?” I asked.
“I won’t tell you,” she said. “That’s confidential.”
“Okay, it doesn’t matter anyway. The real question is can I get all the copies?”
“No, I offered to show you the film and you didn’t want to.”
“That’s not the point.”
The phone rang and Patricia Utley answered, listened a moment, wrote on a note pad, and hung up.
“There is a Lester Floyd on our subscription list. There is no Bucky Maynard.”
“What’s the address on Floyd?”
“Harbor Towers, Atlantic Avenue, Boston, Mass. Do you need the street number?”
“No, thank you, that’s fine.” I finished my brandy and she poured me another.
“The point I was making before is that I don’t want the films to look at. I want them to destroy. Donna Burlington has a nice life now. Married, kid, shiny oak floors in her living room, all-electric kitchen. Her husband loves her. That kind of stuff. These films could destroy her.”
“That is hardly my problem, Spenser. The odds are very good that no one who saw these films would know Donna or connect her with them. And this is not eighteen seventy-five. Queen Victoria is dead. Aren’t you being a little dramatic that someone who acted once in an erotic movie would be destroyed?”
“Not in her circles. In her circles it would be murder.”
“Well, even if you are right, as I said, it is not my problem. I am in business, not social work. Destroying those films is not profitable.”
“Even if purchased at what us collectors like to call fair market value?”
“Not the master. That would be like killing the goose.
You can have all the prints you want, at fair market value, but not the master.”
I got up and walked across the room and looked out the windows at Thirty-seventh Street. The streetlights had come on, and while it wasn’t full dark yet, there was a softening bronze tinge to everything. The traffic was light, and the people who strolled by looked like extras in a Fred Astaire movie. Well dressed and good-looking. Brilliant red flowers the size of a trumpet bell bloomed in the little garden.
“Mrs. Utley,” I said, “I think that Donna’s being blackmailed and that the blackmailer will eventually ruin her life and her husband’s and he’s using your films.”
Silence behind me. I turned around and put my hands in my hip pocket. “If I can get those films, I can take away his leverage.” She sat quietly with her knees together and her ankles crossed as she had before and took a delicate sip of sherry. “You remember Donna, don’t you? Like a niece almost.
You taught her everything. Pygmalion. Remember her? She started out in life caught in a mudhole. And she’s climbed out.
She has gotten out of the bog and onto solid ground, and now she’s getting dragged back in. You don’t need money. You told me that.”
“I’m a businesswoman,” she said. “I do not follow bad business practices.”
“Is that how you stay out of the bog?” I said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You climbed out of the mudhole a bit too, is that how?
You keep telling yourself you’re a businesswoman and that’s the code you live by. So that you don’t have to deal with the fact that you are also a pimp. Like Violet.”
There was no change in her expression. “You lousy nodick son of a bitch,” she said.
I laughed. “Now, baby, now we are getting it together.
You got a lot of style and great manners, but you and I are from the same neighborhood, darling, and now that we both know it maybe we can do business. I want those goddamned films, and I’ll do what I have to to get them.”
Her face was whiter now than it had been. I could see the makeup more clearly.
“You want her back in the mudhole?” I said. “She got out, and you helped her. Now she’s got style and manners, and there’s a man that wants to dirty her up and rub her nose in what she was. It’ll destroy her. You want to destroy her?
For business? When I said you were like Violet, you got mad.
Think how mad it would make Violet.” She reached over and picked up the phone and pressed the intercom button.
“Steven,” she said, “I need you.”
