I hung up and called Quirk. 'You find Sterling yet?'
'No we haven't,' Quirk said. 'But thanks for asking.'
'You got an identification on the body in the office?' I said.
'Name's Cony Brown. Long record in Rhode Island: mostly assault and extortion. Been charged twice in Rhode Island with murder, no convictions. Indicted and tried here in 1994 for assault. Case dismissed.'
'Let me guess,' I said. 'The witnesses didn't show up.'
'Close enough,' Quirk said. 'The plaintiff recanted.'
'Who was the plaintiff?'
'Insurance broker named Rentzel, since deceased.'
'Natural causes?'
'Heart attack.'
'What's Providence say about Cony?'
'A shooter,' Quirk said. 'Freelance. Gets along with the Italians, but basically a contract guy.'
'Any regular connection up here?'
'Nobody knows one.'
'You didn't come across a blue disk anywhere in the office, did you?'
'What do you know about a blue disk?'
'Same thing you do,' I said. 'It was mentioned on Sterling's hard disk.'
'How'd you happen to come into possession of information from Sterling's computer?' Quirk said.
'I forgot.'
'Sometimes maybe you get too cute,' Quirk said.
'What do you mean `maybe'?'
'And sometimes maybe you do it too often,' Quirk said.
'Are you keeping track?'
'Yeah,' Quirk said. 'I am.'
He hung up without saying if he'd found the blue disk.
chapter twenty-eight
I WAS HAVING very little success following the Galapalooza trail. Which was why I decided to revisit sexual harassment. Which is why I was sitting at my desk, studying the several nude pictures of Jeanette Ronan that I'd taken from Sterling's apartment, looking for clues. The fact that there were no clues didn't make looking a waste of time.
The existence of the pictures was a clue; so was the existence of the letters. Both raised a serious question about the validity of a sexual harassment charge. You could certainly harass someone with whom you'd been intimate. But the pictures, and the letters, some dated after the alleged harassment, would make it hard as hell to win a court case. Even if the complaint were legitimate, a lot of women wouldn't want to take it to court and have the pictures and the letters surface. Jeanette knew about the pictures. Did she really think he wouldn't keep them? Or did she have some reason to believe he wouldn't use them? Why wouldn't he use them? One good approach would be to ask her. I got the phone and called her number. She answered. I said my name. She hung up.
Maybe another approach would be good.
I looked into my case file on Sterling and found Olivia Hanson's number. I dialed. She answered.
'Spenser,' I said, 'with a rain check for lunch.'
'The detective,' she said.
'That's me,' I said.
'With the short gun.'
'But effective,' I said. 'How about that lunch now?'
She was silent for a moment.
'I won't ask you a single question about Jeanette Ronan,' I said. 'Or Brad Sterling.'
She was still silent.
'Someplace you've been dying to go,' I said.
'I don't know,' she said.
'What are your plans for today?' I said. 'Add a cup of hot water to some instant soup mix? Chicken noodle maybe? Watch some daytime TV?'
'You have a point,' she said.
'Time to get out of the house,' I said.
'Okay. But no talking about the case.'
