Читать книгу The Stranger - Kathleen O'Brien - Страница 8

TYLER BALFOUR WAS running late, and he didn’t like that. He refused to spend all day playing catch-up, so he pulled out his cell phone, called his assistant and, after about two seconds’ hesitation, told her to cancel his lunch with Sally.

The two seconds were because Sally, a beautiful blonde with the temper of a blazing redhead, had warned him that the next time he canceled a date she would assume he was canceling the whole relationship.

She didn’t mean it, of course. It probably wouldn’t take him more than another two seconds to sweet-talk her out of her snit. But he realized suddenly that he probably wouldn’t bother. Sally was gorgeous, but the thrill was gone. She was too high-maintenance anyhow. Two seconds here, two seconds there…it added up.

On the spur of the moment, he also told his assistant to ditch his three-o’clock interview. That interview was worthless. The guy might be a U.S. Senator, but he wouldn’t ever talk on the record, and Tyler hated anonymous sources.

Besides, he needed to free up some serious time. The man he was on his way to meet right now might be a lot less exalted, but he was a whole hell of a lot more interesting.

Dilday Merle was the chair of academic affairs at tiny Moresville College in Heyday, Virginia, which meant that, in the grand scheme of things, he was pretty much nobody.

But when Professor Merle had called Tyler yesterday and asked for an hour to talk about the Heyday Eight, Tyler hadn’t even hesitated. Hell, yes, he had time. He’d make time. The Heyday Eight had won Tyler a Pulitzer when he broke the story a few years ago, and they were expected to make him a couple of million dollars next year, when he published his detailed hardback version of the scandal.

He’d taken his time finding the right publisher, though several houses had been interested. He wanted to find someone who would let him tell the story straight, not just as pure exploitation. And, of course, he’d wanted a lot of money.

It was ironic, really. Eight ditzy blond college girls who spanked grown men with toy whips, then bedded them for fun and profit, had done what a decade of serious investigative reporting couldn’t do. They had set Tyler free from the underpaid grind of life at a daily newspaper.

No clock-punching for Tyler anymore. Mostly he worked on the upcoming book, which the publisher wanted to call Shenandoah Sex Circus, though Tyler was fighting to keep it simple. The Heyday Eight was good enough.

If he wrote anything else these days, he did it for magazines. In-depth and on his own schedule. In fact, his New Yorker piece should have hit the stands today. He had arranged to meet Dilday Merle in front of Bennie’s News Stand on M Street. If he hurried, he might get there early enough to grab a copy before the professor showed up.

Bennie had been selling Tyler newspapers and magazines for more than ten years, ever since Tyler was a senior at Georgetown and working on the school paper. Back then, Tyler had bought the Washington Post the way some men might buy a lottery ticket, just holding it reverently and praying that maybe, someday, it would be his byline on the front page.

“Hey, there, big shot! Who’s the man?” Bennie hailed Tyler with enthusiasm from the shadows of his crowded counter. Though it was a muggy spring day in D.C., Bennie wore his usual uniform, a pair of black sweatpants and a black sweatshirt with a hood pulled up over his balding head. He held up a copy of the New Yorker. “Who’s famous today?”

Tyler pulled out a couple of bills and traded them for the magazine. “I believe that would be me,” he said with a smile. He leafed through the pages to his story, scanned it to make sure they hadn’t cut him too much or spelled his name wrong. Good—they’d given him great play. Six pages, with full color.

Snapping it shut, he looked back at Bennie. “Did you read it?”

No one ever actually ever saw Bennie reading the merchandise, but he was the best-informed man in Washington, so Tyler assumed he must be doing it on the sly.

“Yeah,” Bennie said. “You’re slick, man. Real slick. You did a tap dance on that oil boy. You fishing for another Pulitzer?”

Tyler rolled up the magazine and stuffed it in his pocket. “It’s the Ellies when it’s magazines. But no, I’m not fishing for anything. I just tell the truth. I just tell it like it is.”

Bennie stuffed a sweet-smelling slab of gum into his mouth and eyed Tyler speculatively. “So you say. But is it really as easy as that? You gonna sleep okay when oil boy’s busting rocks in the slammer?”

Tyler thought of oil boy and his bankrupt company, his laid-off employees, his creditors who were basically screwed, and his investors who were suddenly destitute. One of them, an eighty-year-old man, had already shot himself to death rather than end up a burden to his children.

“You bet I will,” Tyler said. “Like a baby.”

Bennie looked as if he might enjoy a good debate, but Tyler, who had, as always, been subtly scanning the other customers—just in case the vice president’s wife had chosen this spot to rendezvous with her boyfriend, or the local minister was shoplifting a copy of Penthouse—realized that one of the old guys reading in the back of the store looked vaguely familiar.

He narrowed his eyes. Who was it? Thin, stooped, with shaggy white hair. Even from the back, the man was obviously not a local. His clothes were too ill fitting and tweedy for D.C.

Finally, the light went on. It had been almost three years since Tyler had seen him, but this had to be Dilday Merle.

He cleared his throat. “Good afternoon, Professor.”

Bennie’s store was small enough that Tyler didn’t even have to raise his voice. Which meant, of course, that Merle must have been able to hear every word Tyler had said since he walked into the newsstand. Tyler wondered why the old man had kept silent so long. The last time they’d met, when Merle had been trying to talk Tyler out of printing his story on the Heyday Eight, he hadn’t exactly been shy.

Merle turned around with a smile, and Tyler saw that the professor was holding the current copy of the New Yorker.

“Hello, Tyler. I’ve just been reading your latest article.” Merle glanced down. “Still chasing the bad guys, I see. Your style hasn’t changed much.”

A small chuckle came from Bennie’s side of the counter. “Perhaps not,” Tyler said neutrally, watching as Merle walked toward him. “But then, the bad guys don’t change much, either.”

Merle gazed at him through his thick glasses, which made his eyes seem large and owlish, as if they didn’t miss much. “And you’re still not losing sleep over it,” he said. He glanced at Bennie. “Or so I hear.”

Bennie laughed outright at that. “If you’re looking for a bleeding heart, man, you better look somewhere else. Mr. Tyler here, he traded his heart in ten years ago. Got himself a bigger brain instead.”

Tyler shot Bennie a hard look. Surely he knew better than to bring up that ancient history. What happened ten years ago was none of Dilday Merle’s business. It wasn’t any of Bennie’s business, either, but unfortunately Tyler had been young at the time, and emotional. He’d talked too much.

But Merle obviously wasn’t interested in Tyler’s past. He stopped, set down the magazine and held out his hand. “I’m glad to hear that,” he said. “Because I don’t need a heart this time. I need a brain.”

“Oh, yeah?” Tyler shook Merle’s hand, noting with surprise how firm the grip was. “Why is that?”

Merle looked at Bennie, and seemed relieved that the vendor was fully absorbed with another customer.

“Because I’m being blackmailed. And I want you to catch the bastard who’s doing it.”

Twenty minutes later, when they were settled at Tyler’s favorite café, and the waiter had taken their order and departed, Tyler knocked back some scalding black coffee and turned to the man beside him.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s start over. Slowly. From the beginning. Because I’m having a little trouble believing I heard you right.”

“You did.” Dilday Merle had ordered bottled water, and he was carefully decanting it into the empty glass the waiter had provided. “I’m being blackmailed.”

This time, Tyler was better able to control his shock. But still…it was insane. Seventy-something-year-old Dilday Merle, with his old-fashioned etiquette and his bow ties, and his owl eyes?

This stuffy, ivory-tower academic was being blackmailed?

Though it was the lunch hour, and dozens of people thronged the quaint little café, the anonymity of the crowd provided its own privacy.

“What the hell could anyone blackmail you about?”

“Hell is the perfect word for it.” Merle’s voice carried some heat. He might be close to eighty, but there wasn’t anything frail about him. “Some bastard has been calling me up, ordering me to pay him a thousand dollars every two weeks or else he’ll tell the board of regents that I was mixed up with the Heyday Eight.”

Tyler, who had just lifted his coffee cup, froze in place. He felt the steam moisten his lips, but he was too distracted to drink.

Dilday Merle and the Heyday Eight?

He didn’t want to fall into stale clichés about old people, but come on. His mind tried to picture Greta Swinburne or Pammy Russe straddling this elegant, elderly man, snapping their little black whips across his bony backside.

No way.

“For God’s sake, son, get that look off your face.” Merle tightened his mouth. His high forehead wrinkled in an intense scowl. “It isn’t true.”

As if the projector of his life had started rolling again, Tyler blinked back to reality. He sipped at his coffee, trying to look unfazed.

“Of course it’s not true,” he said. “Greta gave me the complete list of their customers when I broke the story. You definitely weren’t on that list. I would have noticed.”

“And plastered my name all over your story, no doubt.”

Tyler shrugged. He was used to this attitude. He hadn’t made those stupid college girls buy rhinestone-studded sex-whips, and he hadn’t made those pathetic men buy their services. He’d just let the world—including the girls’ parents, the men’s wives, and the local police—know what was going on.

You’d think they might even be grateful that he’d brought an end to something so fundamentally unhealthy for all concerned. But about ninety percent of the people in Heyday had automatically hated Tyler Balfour’s guts.

Oh, well, it was an occupational hazard for journalists. Everyone liked to shoot the messenger.

Still, he wondered what the huffy Heydayers had thought when they’d learned who journalist Tyler Balfour really was. When they learned that he was a McClintock by birth and had inherited a third of their precious little town.

But that was another story.

Merle was still frowning. “Wouldn’t you?”

“What? Publish your name?” Tyler returned Merle’s gaze without flinching. “You are a high-profile community leader. You worked with those girls at the college, in a position of trust. At least part of your salary comes from public funds. So yeah, I probably would have put your name front and center.”

Merle snorted softly. He managed to make even that sound elegant. “Fair enough. Well, anyhow, this accusation is a bunch of baloney. But the blackmailer obviously knows that, in my position, I can’t afford to have charges like that leveled at me. The school can’t afford it, not after the scandals it’s already been through.”

Tyler nodded. “The guy sounds pretty clever. He’s made the payment just small enough that it’ll hurt less to pay it than to fight it. That’s what usually trips blackmailers up. They get greedy and they ask for too much. Their victim is left with no choice but to call in the police.”

Merle offered him a one-sided smile. “Two thousand dollars a month hurts plenty,” he said. “Not all of us just inherited a small town, you know. In fact, I have to tell you it still seems positively feudal that anyone can inherit a town.”

Tyler chuckled, then leaned back as the waiter arrived with their meals. It did sound ridiculous, which was why he didn’t intend to touch this inheritance with a ten-foot pole. He had left a standing order to sell everything, as soon as there was a legitimate buyer. So far he hadn’t been able to unload any of it. Property in Heyday, Virginia, wasn’t exactly in high demand.

Neither of them spoke until the waiter had gone through the requisite frills and flourishes, asking them three times if they needed anything further.

Finally they were alone. Merle looked at his dark green and yellow salad as if he’d never seen anything like it before. Then he put his fork down and gave Tyler another of those appraising stares. Tyler had to smile. He could just imagine how effective that glare had been in the classroom.

“I’ve always wanted to ask you something,” Merle said. “When you came to Heyday and uncovered the prostitution ring, no one had any idea you had a connection to the town.”

While Tyler waited for Merle to continue, he chewed a mouthful of sprouts and spinach. Georgetown college students were way too health-conscious. Even the dressing was clear and artery-friendly. The damn thing tasted like wet grass.

Merle was still staring at him. “No one knew you were related to the McClintock family.”

“Right.” Tyler washed his grass down with coffee. “But you said you wanted to ask me something. I haven’t heard a question yet.”

“I’m asking if it was just coincidence. Because I don’t buy it. I don’t buy that you just happened to be passing through the very town where your natural father lived. I don’t believe that, out of all the insignificant little burgs on the map, you stumbled by accident onto Heyday.”

“Of course I didn’t. I went there to check out McClintock. I had just found out about him. My father—”

Tyler paused. It had been several years now since he’d learned the truth, but it still caught him by surprise to think that Jim Balfour was merely his adopted father. It still disappointed him, too. Jim Balfour was a great man, quiet and introverted, but more decent and loyal than anyone Tyler had ever met. Anderson McClintock, on the other hand, had been something completely different. Fiery, self-indulgent, opinionated, arrogant. The classic rich SOB.

He started over. “The man I considered my father, Jim Balfour, decided that I ought to know. My mother had just died. She was the one who had been determined to keep it all a secret. I think she was ashamed. She and Anderson hadn’t ever married.” He forked another clump of grass. “Although, when I did my research, I discovered that she was probably the only woman in Virginia he didn’t marry.”

Merle smiled. “That’s overstating it, but not by much.”

“Whatever. So I went to Heyday to get a look at the guy. I didn’t announce myself, obviously. I wanted anonymity, in case I—”

“Hated him?”

Tyler chuckled softly. “Now that’s an overstatement. You can’t hate a total stranger. And frankly I don’t waste energy hating anybody. I like to keep things simple, that’s all. The whole thing—second father, second family, second set of entanglements—sounded far too complicated. I thought it quite likely I wouldn’t want to get involved.”

Merle had an infuriatingly unconvinced expression on his face, as if he didn’t believe a word Tyler was saying. Well, too bad. Ten years ago Tyler had learned to keep a safe distance from messy emotional situations, and once he learned a lesson, he never forgot it.

“Must have come as a shock, then,” Merle observed dryly, “when Anderson put you in his will. Inheriting almost a full third of Heyday, just like his other sons. Your brothers, who were, of course, just as shocked as you were, I’m sure. Kind of hard to keep your distance from that.”

Tyler put his napkin on the table and gave up all pretence of eating. “Look, Merle, I don’t mean to be rude, but maybe we should get to the point. You didn’t come here to talk about the complexities of life as Anderson McClintock’s secret baby.”

Merle tilted his head. “No. You’re right. I didn’t.”

“So let me tell you what I think this is all about. You obviously heard I’m writing a book on the Heyday Eight. You knew I’d be interested—more than interested—to learn there are new developments in that situation. A blackmailer operating nearly three years after the girls were put out of business is definitely great copy.”

Merle smiled wryly. “I hadn’t thought of it quite like that, but—” He nodded. “Yes. I was hoping your curiosity would be piqued. I’m checkmated here, Tyler. If I don’t pay him, he’ll smear me, I’ll be ruined, and the police won’t ever expose him. They won’t even have enough incentive to try very hard. But you might. Naming the blackmailer. Having an arrest. That would make even better copy, right?”

“Right.”

Merle sighed heavily, as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. “Then you’ll find out who this guy is? You’ll come back to Heyday?”

Come back to Heyday.

Tyler thought of the silly little city, where everything, even the co-ed prostitutes, had a circus theme. He thought of the old bastard Anderson McClintock, now dead, who had run the city like a feudal overlord. He thought of his brothers, Kieran and Bryce, whom Tyler had met, but had deliberately avoided getting close to.

Obviously, now that he’d committed to writing this book, he was going to have to return to Heyday sooner or later. He was a good reporter, and he wouldn’t leave all those stones unturned.

But he remembered the Heyday residents, who hated his guts. He particularly remembered Mallory Rackham Platt, the sexy young woman who had run the Ringmaster Café, where the girls had concocted the Heyday Eight and had gathered to make their dates and count their profits.

Mallory, who had let Tyler spend so many hours there, chatting her up and complimenting her coffee, never guessing that he was gathering notes for his exposé.

Mallory, beautiful and ridiculously naive, unaware of what was going on under her nose. Mallory, whose husband had been one of the Heyday Eight’s best customers. Mallory, who had tossed a plate of French fries, complete with ketchup, into Tyler’s face when she found out who he really was.

Mallory, who for some strange reason was the only person in ten years to put Tyler’s disciplined objectivity and emotional distance in jeopardy.

“All right,” he said, ignoring the wriggle of doubt. “I’ll come back to Heyday.”