Family Honor

by Robert B. Parker

  “Primitive,” I said aloud, “with a strong representational impulse.”

  I was learning, but it was slow. I still took courses, and I was going to get my MFA because I hate to quit things before they’re finished. But I knew the MFA didn’t have a lot to do with my work. I had to learn myself how to do my work. Other painters could sometimes tell me things not to do, but they didn’t even know how, or exactly why, they did what they did. I’d never met one who could tell me how to do what I did. The rest of the classroom work was theory, and a review of criticism. It was interesting. I liked knowing the sort of Kenneth Clark stuff about how art both shapes and records the culture it comes from. But it didn’t help me to get Tyler Street complete. I had to figure that out myself.

  Rosie was asleep on my bed with one paw over her nose. She woke up suddenly and jumped down and went to the door. In a minute the doorbell rang, and Rosie did a couple of spins and jumped up against the door and barked, her tail wagging very fast. Normally that would mean my father or Richie. I went to the door.

  I was right. It was my father. Unfortunately it was also my mother.

  “Did we interrupt anything?” my mother said.

  “No, I was painting, I need a break.”

  My father got down on the floor with Rosie and let her lap his nose. Since my father was built like a short blacksmith it was an interesting display.

  “Oh God, Phil, be careful of your knee,” my mother said.

  My father had been shot fifteen years before, arresting a man who’d murdered three women, and his left kneecap had been shattered. An orthopedic surgeon had pieced it back together, and while he limped slightly and it ached occasionally, it was as durable as the right knee. I knew that. He knew that, and, I think, my mother knew that. But she always warned him anyway.

  My mother and I went to the kitchen and I put on coffee. My mother had brought some raspberry turnovers. My mother almost always brought something. My father got up and came into the kitchen and picked up a turnover.

  “Phil, wash your hands, for God’s sake. How do you know where that dog’s tongue has been.”

  My father winked at me and bit into the turnover. I had come to realize as I matured that one basis of their relationship was his ability to ignore her. If she noticed it, she didn’t seem to care.

  “Well, don’t be coming around trying to kiss me with dog slobber all over your face,” my mother said.

  “I may have to, Em,” my father said. “You’re so goddamned irresistible.”

  We had some coffee and turnovers at my kitchen table with Rosie in continuous agitation for a bite. My father broke off a piece of turnover and gave her some.

  “Phil,” my mother said, “you shouldn’t feed her from the table.”

  “Certainly not,” my father said.

  “How are your courses?” my mother said.

  She liked to think of me as a graduate student. It made her seem younger and it was more respectable than being a private detective.

  “Fine,” I said. “I only take one a semester, all the time I have.”

  “Won’t it take a long time to finish?”

  “Yes.”

  “But doesn’t it postpone when you can become a painter?”

  “I think she is a painter,” my father said.

  “You know what I mean. I mean full-time.”

  “I may never do it full-time,” I said. “I like the detective stuff, too.”

  “Well, that’s foolish,” my mother said.

  “Because it’s not proper work for a woman?”

  “No,” my mother said, “because it’s not proper work for my daughter.”

  I nodded. My father was munching his turnover and giving some to Rosie and looking at my incomplete painting of Chinatown at the other end of the room. I wasn’t sure he even heard my mother.

  “I never had your choices,” my mother said. I’d heard it before. I could have recited it with her, had I cared to. “My generation married and had children and stayed home and raised them.”

  But you, I recited in my head, you have a smorgasbord to pick from.

  “. . . a smorgasbord to choose from,” my mother said.

  Damn, she varied it on me.

  “You can be anything you want to be and why you would throw that chance away and settle for this silly detective business . . .”

  Now she shakes her head.

  She shook her head.

  It’s beyond me.

  “It’s beyond me.”

  “I like the detective business,” I said. “My B.A. was in social work, remember.”

  “And you’re so pretty, too,” my mother said.

  “You hear from Richie?” my father said.

  “I saw him three nights ago,” I said. “We had dinner.”

  “How you doing?” my father said.

  “How should she be doing,” my mother said. “She’s divorced from him.”

  “You getting along?”

  “Better than we did when we were married,” I said.

  My father smiled as if he understood that.

  “The thing is,” I said, “we are really connected, and divorce or not, the tie between us is pretty strong.”

  “Divorce cuts that tie,” my mother said. “Don’t fall for it. You don’t need a husband, and if you decided you wanted one, why would you want a hoodlum?”

  “Richie’s not a hoodlum,” I said.

  My mother looked at me the way you look at a slow child. My father picked Rosie up in his lap and let her lap him some more.

  “I like Richie,” my father said, his face was screwed tight against Rosie’s kisses. “He’s straight as far as I know. I don’t like his father so much, or his uncle, but they’re stand-up guys.”

  “Whatever that means,” my mother said.

  “You working on something?” my father said.

  “I’m working on a missing girl, a runaway, she’s fifteen.”

  “Where’s she from?”

  “South Natick.”

  “You think she’s in Boston?”

  “That would be my guess,” I said. “You don’t run away from South Natick to Medfield.”

  “Richie giving you a hand?”

  “He put me in contact with someone who could help.”

  My father nodded.

  “You figure she’s hooking?” my father said.

  “Probably,” I said.

  “Oh for God’s sake,” my mother said. “Must we talk about runaways and whores?”

  My mother hated it when my father and I talked business. I knew she felt excluded and I knew she was jealous that he spoke to me as an equal. Good.

  “Well,” my father said, “you need something, you’ll call.”

  “Yes.”

  “We had an auction,” my mother said, “raised nearly a thousand dollars for the couples club last month.”

  My father and I listened quietly to the details.

  CHAPTER 11

  Tony Marcus was having huevos rancheros at a table in the back of Beans & Rice restaurant, which wasn’t open yet. Junior was with him, and a thin jittery little cokehead named Ty-Bop, who looked like he might be twenty. Junior was the muscle. Ty-Bop was the shooter. Spike sat at the table with Tony, straddling a chair, his forearms resting on the back.

  “You called?” I said to Tony.

  “Sit down, Sunny Randall,” Tony said.

  I sat beside Spike who patted my thigh.

  “Got your girl for you,” Tony Marcus said.

  “You make me proud, Tony.”

  “She’s hooking for Pharaoh Fox.”

  “You heard it here first,” Spike said.

  I smiled at him.

 
“Pharaoh know about me?” I asked Tony.

  “No.”

  “He prepared to give her up?”

  “We didn’t discuss it, Sunny.”

  Leaning against the wall, Ty-Bop seemed to be listening to music that no one else could hear. He tapped and bounced next to Junior who was motionless.

  “Will you speak to him about me?” I said.

  “Thought I let you do that,” Tony said, and smiled.

  I nodded.

  “That will be the hard way,” I said.

  “Might be,” Tony said. “Pharaoh like his hookers.”

  “Like a father to them,” I said. “Wouldn’t it go easier if you told him to give me the girl?”

  “Sure would,” Tony said and smiled at me.

  I waited. Tony turned his attention to the huevos rancheros.

  “But you won’t,” I said.

  “Let you do that,” he said again.

  I looked at Spike.

  “Tony’s hard to figure,” Spike said. “He’ll help you locate the kid because he wants to stay cool with the Burkes, and maybe because he feels like helping you. Tony’s a whimsical guy.”

  “So why stop short?” I said.

  Tony continued with his eggs. Spike answered.

  “Because it amuses him. He wants to see if you can handle Pharaoh.”

  “And why does he want to know that?” I said.

  Spike shrugged. “‘Cause he doesn’t know it now.”

  “Is that right, Tony?” I said.

  Tony smiled at me.

  “Sure,” he said.

  Ty-Bop boogied to the beat of his own drummer against the exposed brick wall. A couple of waiters set the tables toward the front of the restaurant. Junior watched them blankly.

  “Anybody can handle anybody,” I said. “It’s only a matter of how far you’re willing to go.”

  “Might be the case,” Tony said.

  He was finished eating.

  “Can you tell me where I might find the girl?”

  Tony stood up.

  “Pharaoh turn her out different places,” Marcus said. “You a detective. You’ll find her.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I will.”

  Tony grinned at me as if he genuinely liked me.

  “You go, girl,” he said.

  Then he nodded at Junior and Ty-Bop, and they followed him out of the restaurant.

  “What the hell was that all about,” I said to Spike.

  “What I said,” Spike answered. “He’s never met a female detective. I think he wants to see if you can cut it.”

  “Just to amuse himself?”

  “Maybe Tony’s not a feminist,” Spike said.

  “More’s the shame,” I said.

  “I could trail along with you,” Spike said.

  “I thought gay guys were supposed to be sissies,” I said.

  “Growing up gay is a toughening process,” Spike said.

  “You’d stand up to Pharaoh Fox for me?”

  “Sure.”

  “Thank you, Spike. But I can do this myself.”

  “I’m sure you can,” Spike said. “How far you willing to go?”

  I grinned at him. “All the way,” I said.

  “Heard that about you,” Spike said.

  CHAPTER 12

  One of the things I had learned about Julie in the time that had passed since freshman year, when we roomed together, was that in her professional life, she was by reputation a good and wise counselor. Her personal self was an hysteric. For reasons having to do probably with my own perversity, I had always liked that about her. The hysteria was on full display at her son Michael’s sixth birthday party, to which Rosie and I had been reluctant invitees. And we were the cream of the crop.

  Others included five other children, aged six or less, bundled up because it was really too cold to have an outside party, but Michael had wanted a pony. There were also a couple of mothers, who seemed as hysterical as Julie, a bored pony, and a guy dressed up in a clown suit who was leading the pony around.

  We were on Julie’s front lawn in the suburbs. There was a card table set up with a yellow paper table covering taped onto it. The wind kept tearing the flappy edges of it. There was maybe a third of a chocolate birthday cake on the table, and a carton of half-melted vanilla ice cream. Several children, including Michael, were afraid of the pony. Michael was also afraid of the clown.

  “Who wants a ride?” Julie said.

  The grim cheerfulness she was grinding out made her voice reach registers I didn’t know she had. Rosie was sitting in my lap. She didn’t like small children any more than I did, but she was more genuine about it. A little girl in a pink dress came over and poked her in the ribs. Rosie growled. The little girl went immediately to Julie.

  “That dog wants to bite me,” she said.

  Julie smiled maniacally.

  “Nice doggie,” she said, “Rosie’s a nice doggie.”

  “I wish to bite her also,” I said to Julie. “Where’s Michael senior?”

  “Off with the other two, this is just Mikey’s day.”

  “And a dandy one,” I said.

  Julie did something with her lips that might have been a smile, and shook her head quickly. The pony made a deposit on the lawn, and Julie left me to attend to that.

  A small boy who had apparently misunderstood the chocolate cake, and given himself a facial with it, came over with the little girl at whom Rosie had growled. The little girl hung back.

  “Does that dog bite?” he says.

  “Yes.” I said.

  “Bad dog,” the boy said.

  “She’s neither bad nor good,” I said. “She’s a dog.”

  “Huh?”

  I could feel the hair stiffen along Rosie’s back. Her taste was impeccable. Julie appeared from the garage with a snow shovel and a plastic bag.

  “Oh, look at Michael’s mommy,” I said. “Maybe you could help her shovel.”

  Both kids screamed in horror at the idea of shoveling pony poop. But they went on to watch.

  The guy in the clown suit said, “Okay, kids, who wants to ride Pepe the pony?”

  The kids hung back. One mother attempted to put her son on it, and he kicked and fought her until she gave up. Julie got her pony droppings into her green plastic bag and carried it over to the garage. The guy in the clown suit bent over and spoke to Michael in a voice that was apparently clownspeak.

  “How about the birthday boy, he gets the first ride.”

  “Don’t do that,” I said.

  But I was too late. The guy in the clown suit picked Michael up and plunked him on the animal. Michael was on the pony he feared, having been placed there by the clown he feared more. He screamed. It scared the pony, who bucked, which annoyed Rosie, who barked. I put Rosie down, held her leash in my left hand, stepped sideways toward the pony who was kicking his hind feet lethargically, and scooped Michael off with my right arm. Julie came out of the garage and across the lawn on a dead run. Michael was screaming, crying, and, incidentally, trying to kick me. Rosie was in full bark at the pony now, straining at her leash, thirty-one pounds of barely (and fortunately) restrained ferocity. Julie grabbed Michael away from me, and held him.

  “What happened, honey. What happened, Mommy’s here, what happened?”

  Michael cried harder, and hung onto his mother. The guy in the clown suit didn’t seem to have a good read on things. He was leaning down speaking in his clown voice to Michael.

  “What’s the matter? Is you scared of old Mister Bubbles?”

  “Be better if Mister Bubbles stepped back a little,” I said.

  Julie focused on me over Michael’s shoulder.

  “What happened?�
��

  “Mister Bubbles put Michael on the pony.”

  Julie stared at me, hugging Michael, patting his back. Rosie continued to bark at Pepe.

  “Mister Bubbles?”

  “The clown,” I said.

  “He put Michael on the horse?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Pepe the pony.”

  Julie turned her head slowly toward Mister Bubbles.

  “You dumb fuck,” she said.

  “Nice language,” Mister Bubbles said, “in front of the children.”

  “Fuck the children,” Julie said. “Take your fucking pony, and get the fuck out of here.”

  “Hey, lady, you hired me.”

  “Out,” she said, her voice soaring, “get the fuck out.”

  I got a hand on Mister Bubbles’s arm and led him away. Pepe the pony came with him. He took no notice of Rosie, whose barking had settled into a low steady growl.

  “She owe you any money?” I said.

  “She got no business talking to me like that,” he said.

  “I’m sure Pepe was shocked,” I said. “Have you been paid?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, pardner, then I think it’s time for you and Pepe to mosey on down the trail.”

  He wanted to say something cutting, but it’s hard to be cutting when you’re standing around in a rental clown suit, and I think he realized that. He gave it up and took Pepe and headed for his truck.

  When I put Rosie in the front seat of my car, and went back to the party, it was over. One of the mothers was explaining to Julie how Michael was just overtired, and everyone had really enjoyed it, and thanks for inviting us. Julie had disentangled Michael enough so that she could stand and say good-bye. He remained wrapped around her leg. There was a gathering of children, a strapping of car seats, a slamming of car doors and in a while it was just Michael and me and Julie. I went to Julie’s garage and got a trash barrel and brought it back and began to clean up the cake and ice cream and paper plates. Julie sat down on one of the folding chairs that tilted clumsily on the uneven lawn and began to cry.