Free The Widening Gyre by Robert B. Parker Page A

pushing gesture with his hand. ”It’s the way I talk,“ he said. ”I know Hawk. Something happens to you, he’ll be a royal pain in the ass till he gets it straightened out.“
    I waited. Vinnie thought some more. Then he smiled.
    ”So for the moment, say we don’t buzz you. We still got things our way. We got Browne in our pocket, and if he loses, then we got Alexander in our pocket, ‘cause we got the films.“
    ”So far,“ I said.
    ”So far,“ Vinnie said. ”We’d rather have Browne, all things being equal. He’s in place, and we know him, and he’s not as stupid as Alexander. But Meade would do in a pinch.“
    ”He’ll be pleased with the endorsement,“ I said.
    Vinnie grinned his cold, genuine grin. ”He’ll have to be,“ he said.
    I thought about things after Vinnie left. It didn’t sit right, none of it.
    I’d thought up a lot of good reasons why they didn’t just go public with Ronni in the buff, but they didn’t persuade me. The reasoning was too subtle for Joe Broz. Broz was old-fashioned and direct. His idea of finesse was to wire a bomb to your ignition. He wouldn’t pussyfoot around with this. He’d spread the picture around and expect Alexander to go down the tube. And he’d be right. Alexander’s constituency would not swallow having their hero married to the Whore of Babylon. And his opponents would be so heartened and amused that Alexander couldn’t get elected to Cuckolds Unlimited. I knew something Vinnie didn’t. I knew that Alexander would go in the tank for them rather than let his wife be smeared. I looked at my watch: ten of eleven. Too early for Irish whiskey.
    The more I thought about things, the more they didn’t make any sense. It wasn’t Broz’s style. It wasn’t even Vinnie’s. It was about Ed’s style. It was something that should have been simple and was being complicated. Usually when that happened to something I was trying to figure out, it meant that there was too much I didn’t know.
    Why didn’t they just use that film? Why the fancy blackmail? It didn’t make sense. Not Broz’s kind of sense. It made amateurish sense. But Broz was not amateurish. I looked at my watch again. Eleven o’clock. I had to see the film. I didn’t like to ask, but I had to. I had nowhere else to go. I spent some time reassuring myself that my interest in the film was simply professional. And it was. Completely. Like a doctor. Detached. Maybe if I got an early flight to D.C. I could watch the movies in the afternoon.
    I called Alexander’s office in Washington and told him that I was coming down and why. Then I pulled out my typewriter and wrote up what little I knew about things. It took one page, double-spaced. I folded it up, put it into an envelope, sealed the envelope, and took it over to the Harbor Health Club to leave with Henry Cimoli.
    Henry had a problem with T-shirts. If he got them big enough for his upper body, they tended to hang down to his knees like a dress. If he got them the right length, he couldn’t get his arms through the sleeves. He’d solved it so far by getting the right length and cutting the sleeves off, but as his health club got tonier and tonier, he’d begun to look into custom tailoring.
    ”If anything happens to me, give it to Hawk,“ I said. ”Otherwise don’t open it.“
    ”Can’t be a list of the people who don’t like you,“ Henry said. ”Envelope’s not thick enough.“
    ”It’s my secret formula,“ I said. ”How to be more than five foot four.“
    ”I’m five six,“ Henry said.
    ”So how come when you fought Sandy Sadler he kept punching you on the top of the head?“
    ”I was trying to bull inside,“ Henry said.
    I went home to pack.

Chapter 15
    Alexander’s Washington home was a three-story yellow frame house on the corner of Thirty-first and O Streets in Georgetown. He let me in.
    ”Ronni’s away for the afternoon,“ he said. ”It’s in the den.“
    He led the way. The house was elegant Victorian,