Robert B. Parker's Someone to Watch Over Me (Spenser #48)(2)

I leaned back from the desk. Outside, down on the street, I could hear the whine of an industrial drill and planks of wood tossed against the pavement. A car without a muffler passed and headed out of earshot. A symphony of the Back Bay.

“Chloe knows a girl who knows a girl who promised her an easy five hundred bucks.”

“To meet a man at the club?”

“And give him a massage,” Mattie said. “Chloe says she was promised that was all there was to it.”

“Had she ever met him?”

“Nope.”

“Did she have any expertise as a massage therapist?”

“Christ, no,” Mattie said. “She’s just a kid.”

“How old?”

Mattie tossed her head to the side and leveled her eyes at me. “Fifteen.”

I felt the hair raise up my neck. My stomach turned a bit.

“I know,” Mattie said. “But part of what I promise is confidentiality.”

“This sounds like a felony.”

“Hold on,” Mattie said. “Only gets worse.”

I listened.

“Chloe says when she first got there, a woman met her at the club and gave her an envelope stuffed with cash,” Mattie said. “The woman told her the guy was some big-time executive hotshot. She didn’t need to speak unless spoken to, had to wear this special outfit, pay attention to his feet.”

“His feet.”

“All creeps are into feet,” Mattie said. “Anyway, she goes in there, the room all dim with scented candles and all that. And there’s the man, laying on his back with a sheet covering the lower half of his body. Chloe says she was so nervous her hands were shaking. She starts to rub the man’s feet like she’d been told. The man makes some small talk with her. What’s your name? What music do you like? Do you have a boyfriend? All that kind of stuff. She said he was nice. And not bad-looking for an old dude. She said he was polite until things got weird.”

“Massaging a grown man’s feet is the definition of weird.”

“Chloe said she thought the whole thing was legit until at one point the man raised up, threw off the sheet, and started going to town on himself.”

I felt my face flush. I wasn’t comfortable talking about such matters with Mattie. I remembered when she was fourteen, coming to see me with a collection of crumpled bills in the hope of finding her mother’s killer. She was tough as old boots but would always be a lost little girl to me.

“Chloe said she just froze up,” Mattie said. “She couldn’t scream. She couldn’t talk. She couldn’t move. She just stood there as the man got finished with his business.”

“Ick,” I said.

“Yep,” Mattie said. “That’s when she bolted from the room and the club and left her clothes, her laptop inside that backpack. She doesn’t want any trouble. She doesn’t want to see that man again. All she wants is her stuff.”

“Okay,” I said. “Let me help.”

“Advice,” Mattie said. “I only want advice.”

“I’d much rather assist.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have told you.”

“You made the right move.”

“You want to beat the hell out of this guy,” she said. “Don’t you?”

“Chloe should file a complaint with the police.”

“She can’t.”

“Why?”

“Because she took the money,” Mattie said. “Don’t you see?”

“That doesn’t make what happened right.”

“What would you do?”

I leaned back in my office chair and kicked my Nikes up onto the side of the desk. I began to mentally run through the collection of creeps I’ve known over the years. My go-to action would have been physical or public humiliation. Perhaps tacking his manhood to the tallest tree in the Common.

“Does Chloe know this man’s name?”

“No.”

“Does she know anything about him?”

“Nothing,” she said. “I already asked.”

“If it were me, I’d go back to this club and tell them they can either turn over the backpack or else you’ll tell your story on Channel 7. Say you have Hank Phillippi Ryan on speed dial.”

“But I don’t.”

“But I do,” I said.

“And she’d show up with cameras?”

“In a heartbeat.”

“Okay,” Mattie said.

“I want you to have Chloe talk to someone in sex crimes,” I said. “I’ll call Quirk and arrange it.”

“She won’t,” Mattie said. “But I’ll try.”

Mattie let herself out, the anteroom door closing with a light click. I reached for my coffee and turned to stare out the window. I spent a lot of time staring out windows. Perhaps if I stared long enough, a sign would appear somewhere in the clouds. I peered into the sky, but there were no clouds today. So many creeps. So little time.

I turned back to my desk. Besides the sub and the newspaper, it was bare. I hadn’t had a decent case since returning from Los Angeles earlier that year. Maybe it might be time for me to dig into my 401k, if only I had a 401k.