Linwood Barclay: Stone Rain

“What asshole would that be?”

Trixie hauled her purse, a good-sized one, onto her lap and started rooting around. First, she pulled out a stack of mail and put it on our table so that she could better see what she had in there. “Just give me a minute,” she said. “I have a post office box, get as little mail as possible delivered to my home.” I noticed what looked like a Visa bill, possibly a property tax notice from the town of Oakwood, something from a car company labeled “Important: Recall Notice,” and a number of what appeared to be personal letters, none with return addresses.

I lightly thumbed them. “Fan mail?”

“Hmm?” Trixie said. “Oh, sometimes men write to me ahead of time, tell me what they want. They don’t want anything showing up in the ‘sent messages’ in their Outlook Express, if you know what I mean, in case the wife happens to read it.”

“Sure.”

She saw the recall envelope for, it seemed, the first time. “Oh shit, not another. Never buy a German luxury car, at least not a GF300. I thought the GF stood for ‘goes fast.’ Now I think it’s for ‘get fixed.’ It’s been recalled for the fuel injection, a power seat, cruise control glitches. Who’s got time to get all those things fixed? Open that, see what it’s for while I try to find this thing.”

I opened the envelope, pulled out the paperwork. “Let me see here. Uh, okay, you’ve got extra-sensitive air bag sensors. Slightest hit on the front bumper can set them-”

“Here it is.” Trixie slapped a newspaper clipping onto the table, then scooped all her mail back into the purse. I picked up the clipping. It was a column, with a guy’s head shot, and a name in bold caps: “MARTIN BENSON.”

The headline read, “Council Misses Boat on Harbor Review.”

“Something about the Oakwood harbor? What do you have to do with that?” I asked.

“Nothing. I don’t care about the story. I just wanted you to see who the asshole was.”

“Martin Benson.”

“Yeah.”

“What paper is this from?”

“The Suburban.”

Oakwood’s local, community newspaper. Light on news but heavy on inserted ads, it was delivered free to most of the town’s households.

“I don’t remember this guy from when we lived there,” I said. When we had a house in Oakwood, I’d at least turn the pages of the Suburban before dropping it into the recycling bin.

“He’s a new guy. Trying to make a name for himself. By fucking me over.”

“Why don’t you start at the beginning.”

“Okay, this Benson guy, he hears through the grapevine what kind of business I might be operating in my home.”

“You mean, like, a house of pleasure and pain.”

“I offer pain. But some people do find that pleasing.”

“Where do you think he heard about it?”

Trixie shrugged. “Any number of people know. Clients. Former neighbors.” She gave me a look.

“Not guilty,” I said.

“He did a piece on Roger Carpington. He’s already out, you know. Maybe he told him something off the record, like, ‘Hey, you know what goes on in your supposedly respectable neighborhood?’”

Carpington was a former Oakwood town councillor who’d lost his position after being convicted of accepting money to vote the right way on a housing development. Carpington had never been a client of Trixie’s, as far as I knew, but the man who’d been paying him off had been. He might have told Carpington about his recreational activities before having the life squeezed out of him by a python. (Hey, it’s a long story.)

“But the thing is,” Trixie went on, “it doesn’t fucking much matter where he found out. The fact is, he suspects something.”

“Okay, so how do you know that?”

“He called me, says he wants to interview me. I say, what about? He says he’s doing a column about Oakwood’s kinkier side, thinks I might be able to help him out with that.”

“Maybe he doesn’t want to write about you. Maybe he just wants a freebie.”

“Yeah, well, if I thought strapping him down and giving him forty whacks would keep him quiet, I’d do it. But I think he’s the real deal. He wants to do a story.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I said I had no idea what he was talking about and hung up.”

I had some more latte-thingy. “So did that take care of it?”

Trixie shook her head. “He calls again, says he’d like to do the story even if I remained anonymous. So he can still do his story about kinky suburbanites. So I tell him again, I’ve got nothing to say. Then, after that, there’s a car hanging around the street, a little Corolla or something, the sort of car a guy working for a paper like the Suburban could afford. I see it enough times that I start to get suspicious, so I decide to go out there, see who it is, ask him what he’s doing. As I get close to the car, I recognize him from his picture in the paper.”

She displayed the clipping, pointed to Benson’s face.

“I’m about to ask him what the fuck he’s up to, and he starts to hold up his phone, and I’m sure it’s one of those goddamn camera phones, so I put my hands up over my face and run back inside the house.”

“Well,” I said, “I’m sure that didn’t look suspicious.”

“So I’ve had to cancel all my appointments. I can’t have clients coming to the house, having their picture taken, running the risk of it showing up in the paper. I haven’t spanked a guy in over a week.” She spoke like someone who’d recently given up smoking.

I shook my head. “So just lay low for a while, then. He can’t spend all his time parked out front of your house. He’ll give up after a while, go on to something else.”

“I’m not so sure. I wish I knew someone who could scare the shit out of him, but you never know with journalists.” She looked at me and smiled. “Sometimes, when they’re threatened, they’re more determined than ever to write their story. It’s like the only way to stop them is to kill them.”

I guess I was supposed to laugh at that, but when I didn’t, Trixie said, “That was a joke.”

“I know. It’s just, I don’t really know what you want me to do, Trixie. Maybe you’ll actually have to make a respectable living for a while as an accountant. I mean, you are good at it. You know everything there is to know about balancing the books.”

“Or making them appear to balance even if they don’t,” Trixie said, like she was remembering something that happened a long time ago. “And by the way,” she said, “thanks for not judging.”

“Huh?”

“‘A respectable living,’ I believe you said. That I might want to consider one, for a while.”

“Trixie, don’t try to guilt-trip me. You operate outside the law. Like most places, Oakwood has laws against prostitu-”

Trixie jabbed a finger at me. “I am not a hooker, Zack. I do not fuck these men. They don’t get so much as a handjob from me.” She became very serious. “I do not cross that line. I provide them an entertaining, fantasy-like environment.”

“Okay, but you might have a difficult time persuading the authorities of that.”

Trixie shook her head in frustration, then leaned forward in her leather chair, which drew me in as well.

“What I was thinking,” she said, “was that you could talk to him.”

“What?”

“Just, you know, have a little conversation with him. You’re a reporter with a big city newspaper. He probably wants to get on at a place like the Metropolitan. You could tell him no one gives a shit about two-bit stories like this, that if he really wants to make the jump to the big time, he needs to go after city hall. Politicians on the take, bad cops, that kind of thing. Not some woman trying to make a living.”