Back Bay by William Martin Read Free Book Online Page A

successful?”
    Pratt flipped the sampler to Soames, who read the lines and smiled.
    Sally Korbel felt great. In three hours, she had made nearly two thousand dollars and spread her legs just once. She poured a vodka on the rocks and studied her appointment book. She had threemore tricks, regulars, before eleven. Wednesday was her busy day. She wanted to cancel them and spend the rest of the night with her girlfriend Maria. But good call girls never turn down the regulars who tip well. She showered and went back to work.
    That night, she cleared three hundred dollars. At eleven o’clock, she returned to her apartment with a bottle of champagne under her arm and an ounce of cocaine in her purse. She hoped that Maria would be awake when she called. She let herself into the apartment and fumbled for the light switch. She never found it.
    The door slammed behind her and something slammed her against the wall. She dropped the champagne, but the bottle didn’t break. She smelled perfume and wondered what kind of freak wore Shalimar when he robbed a working girl. Then a silk stocking closed around her neck, and she knew it was one of her own. She sprinkled them with perfume every week.
    She tried to scream, but the sound was caught. She reached for the letter opener. Too far. She elbowed the body in the ribs. She tried to kick free. The silk was drawn tight around her throat. She heard something pop. The champagne blew its cork across the room.
    Thirty thousand feet over Nevada, Philip Pratt sipped Scotch and read
Business Week
as American Flight 5 streaked to Boston.
    It was closing time in the Sixpence, a basement bar with low ceilings, cramped tables, and countless violations of the fire code. The Sixpence was a favorite spot with Harvard people, and Fallon had been drinking there since his freshman year.
    He sat at the end of the bar while Hank Miller, owner and bartender, served the last call. He opened DL’s letter and placed it in front of him. He had been thinking about it all night. It was puzzling, cryptic, completely unlike Pratt’s usual correspondence. He wanted to investigate the letter, and he wanted to learn something more about the contemporary Pratts, who seemed so secretive. After a few sips of beer, he told himself that he had no right to invade other people’s privacy and the letter probably meant nothing. Its references—DL, the Eagle, Gravelly Point—might even beexplained in his high-school text. Moreover, he imagined that Pratt would have been more careful about burning the letter, had it contained anything incriminating.
    Fallon folded the letter, put it in his pocket, and finished his beer. For a while, he stared into the bottom of the glass and tried not to think. Then he took out the letter and opened it again.
    “You been lookin’ at that thing all night, Peter. What the hell is it?” asked Miller.
    “A puzzle.”
    “You want another beer?”
    Fallon nodded and began to study the letter. It was a distraction he didn’t need. He was trying to finish his dissertation by the end of September. Then, armed with a Harvard B.A. and a Ph.D. in history, he would hit the streets. He had applied for teaching positions at sixty-five university history departments. There were twelve openings, and he had received two offers: one from an agricultural school in Minnesota, the other from a Fundamentalist college that boasted of its basketball team and banned alcohol, dancing, and unmarried sex for anyone connected with the institution. And no one had offered him tenure. After three years in history, he was telling himself that he should have gone to law school.
    He decided he needed a bender, a full-scale drunk to clear his head and keep him writing until the dissertation was done. He folded the note and put it in his pocket. He resolved that he would not look at it again.
    “Hey, Hank, bring me a Jameson’s first, then the beer.”
    “You sure?” asked the bartender.
    Fallon nodded.
    “I guess it must