Vixen by Bill Pronzini Page A

lets him live with her here.”
    â€œTook care of him when he was a kid, too, after their mama died.”
    â€œWhich makes her motives all the more inexplicable. She must want him to beat the theft charge, or she wouldn’t have hired a high-powered lawyer like Wasserman to defend him.”
    â€œKind of a mind fuck, all right,” Tamara said.
    I gave her a look, and she grinned and waggled an eyebrow. Old-fashioned workplace decorum defeated once more by the modern penchant for casual obscenity.
    â€œWhat else did you find out about the Becketts?” I asked.
    â€œNothing else on Kenny. A few more eyebrow-raisers about her.”
    â€œSuch as?”
    â€œFor one, she got busted one night in L.A. when she was nineteen for lewd and lascivious behavior, soliciting, and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Got caught with a kid from a rich family she did some nanny work for, fifteen years old, doing the nasty in a public park.”
    â€œWhere does the soliciting charge come in?”
    â€œSeems she told the kid she’d let him screw her for two hundred bucks. She had the cash in her purse.”
    â€œNice,” I said sourly. “Disposition of the case?”
    â€œWasn’t any. All charges dropped before she could be arraigned.”
    â€œHow come?”
    â€œThe kid changed his story about who offered the two hundred, said it was him, not her. His old man refused to press the other two charges. So she got off with a wrist-slap fine.”
    â€œWhy would the father step in that way?”
    â€œWhy do you think?” Tamara flashed another impish grin. “Not that there was any hard evidence to prove he was screwing her, too.”
    I let that pass. “She have any other trouble with the law?”
    â€œOne brush, about a year later. Got mixed up with an ex-con named Hutchinson. Ugly biker dude with weird-ass tats all over him—there’s a photo on the Net. Had a list of burglary and armed robbery priors a foot long. Suspected of a couple of murders, too, but the law couldn’t prove anything.”
    â€œHutchinson. Beckett mentioned that name to Jake.”
    â€œRight. Wonder why. For sure he doesn’t have anything to do with what’s going on now.”
    â€œNo? How do you know?”
    â€œDude’s dead. Been dead six years. Shot and killed by the Riverside cops during commission of an armed robbery. Some suspicion Cory was mixed up in a couple of his other crimes right before that, but they couldn’t prove it. So she walked.”
    Evidently Cory Beckett was not in the least discriminating when it came to men. Young, old, handsome, ugly, felons, yachtsmen, and Christ knew what other kind. The only constant seemed to be money—how much an individual had, how much she could get her hands on.
    â€œWhat’s her family background?” I asked.
    â€œGrew up poor in a little town near Riverside,” Tamara said. “Father split around the time Kenny was born, mother worked as a housecleaner and died of an aneurysm when Cory was sixteen and Kenny twelve. Kids lived with an aunt for two years, during which time Cory got herself thrown out of high school. No public record of the reason, but you can pretty much figure it had something to do with sex. Right around then she moved out on her own and took her brother with her.”
    â€œSupported them how?”
    â€œNanny jobs with rich folks. Humping for money, too, probably. Made enough to move to Santa Monica. That was when Kenny started working the boating scene. A year after that, she climbed on the big-time marriage-go-round.”
    â€œPretty sorry r é sum é .”
    â€œSay that again. So what do we do about her?”
    â€œNot much we can do, unless Abe Melikian wants us to pursue the matter on his behalf.”
    â€œNot him. All he cares about is not losing his bond money.”
    I wasn’t so sure about that, given the way he’d fawned