“All right,” she said, “say you are correct. Why should I discuss it with you?”
A waiter brought our drinks and I waited while he put them down. Mine rather disdainfully, I thought.
“Because I can cause you aggravation—cops, newspapers, maybe the feds—maybe I could cause you trouble, I don’t know. Depends on how heavy the bankrollers really are.
If you talk with me, then it’s confidential, there’s no aggravation at all. And I might do another one-arm push- up for you.”
“What if my bankrollers decided to cause you aggravation?”
“I have a very high aggravation tolerance.”
She sipped her Campari. “It’s funny, or maybe it’s not funny at all, but you’re the second person who’s come asking about Donna.”
“Who else?”
“He never said, but he was quite odd. He was, oh, what, in costume, I guess you’d say. Dressed all in white, white suit and shirt, white tie, white shoes and a big white straw hat like a South American planter.”
“Tall and slim? Chewed gum?”
“Yes.”
I said, “Aha.”
“Aha?”
“Yeah, like Aha I see a connection, or Aha I have discovered a clue. It’s detective talk.”
“You know who he is then.”
“Yes, I do. What did he want?”
She sipped some more Campari. I drank some Heineken. “Among my enterprises,” she said, “is a film business. This gentleman had apparently seen Donna in one of our films and wanted the master print.”
“Aha, aha!” I said. “Corporate diversification.” The waiter came for our order. When he was gone, I said, “Start from the beginning. When did you meet Donna, what did she do for you, what kind of film was she in, tell me all.”
“Very well, if you promise not to keep saying Aha.”
“Agreed.”
“Donna came to me through a client. He’d picked her up down in the East Village when he was drunk.” She grimaced. “She was working for Violet then; her boyfriend had pimped for her before but had run from Violet. I don’t know what happened to the boyfriend. The client thought she was too nice a girl to be hustling out of the back of a car with a two-dollar pimp like Violet. He put her in touch with me.”
The waiter came with our soup. I had gazpacho; Patricia Utley had vichyssoise.
“I run a very first-rate operation, Spenser.”
“I can tell that,” I said.
“Of course, I would deny this to anyone if it ever came up.”
“It won’t. I don’t care about your operation. I only care about Donna Burlington.”
“But you disapprove.”
“I don’t approve or disapprove. To tell you the truth, Mrs. Utley, I don’t give a damn. I think about one thing at a time. Right now I’m thinking about Donna Burlington.”
“It’s a volunteer business,” she said. “It exists because men have needs.” She said it as if the needs had a foul odor.
“Now who’s disapproving?”
“You don’t know,” she said. “You’ve never seen what I’ve seen.”
“About Donna Burlington,” I said.
“She was eighteen when I took her. She didn’t know anything. She didn’t know how to dress, how to do her hair, how to wear makeup. She hadn’t read anything, been anyplace, talked to anyone. I had her two years and taught her everything. How to walk, how to sit, how to talk with people. I gave her books to read, showed her how to make up, how to dress.”
The waiter brought the fish. Sole in a saffron sauce for her. Scallops St. Jacques for me.
“You and Rex Harrison,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “It was rather like that. I liked Donna, she was a very unsophisticated little thing. It was like having a, oh not a daughter, but a niece perhaps. Then one day she left. To get married.”
“Who’d she marry?”
“She wouldn’t tell me—a client, I gathered, but she wouldn’t say whom, and I never saw her again.”
“When was this?”
Patricia Utley thought for a moment. “It was the same year as the Cambodian raids and the great protest, nineteen seventy. She left me in winter nineteen seventy. I remember it was winter because I watched her walk away in a lovely fur-collared tweed coat she had.”
