Family Honor

by Robert B. Parker

  “Well, fuck her,” she said. “I hate her anyway.”

  God, was I in over my head. I took in some more air. Rosie heard me and gave me a look. I smiled at her. It had been simpler when she was all I had to worry about.

  “Yes,” I said. “You probably do. And I don’t see why you shouldn’t. But you probably feel other things, too.”

  “Like what?”

  “Loneliness, rejection, disappointment, fear.”

  “I don’t feel anything,” she said. “I’m fine.”

  “Sort of like when you were having sex with strangers in the backseat of a car,” I said.

  “Hey, I did what I had to do.”

  “I know. And because you had to, you tended to close down all your feelings so it wouldn’t seem so awful. I’m not a shrink. I can’t deal with that part of you, all I’m saying is don’t close down on this.”

  She shrugged.

  “When this is over . . .” I said.

  “What?”

  “This situation. When we’ve solved these problems and don’t have to hide out here with Spike, I’m going to ask you to see a good psychiatrist.”

  “I already did that with Marguerite.”

  “No. I mean a real one that knows what he or she is doing.”

  “You don’t think Marguerite knew what she was doing?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I talked with her. I believe she’s a fraud.”

  “Oh, they’re all frauds anyway, aren’t they?”

  “No. My friend Julie is a therapist.”

  “You want me to see her?”

  “No. She’d be the first to tell you she wasn’t right for you. But she can find us someone.”

  “You think I’m crazy?”

  “I think you’ve had more to handle than a kid can handle alone. Hell, that anyone could handle alone. You need somebody to help you with it.”

  “You’re helping me.”

  “Yes, but unlike Marguerite, I know my limitations.”

  “I don’t want anyone else.”

  “We don’t have to deal with it now, but when this is over you are going to need somebody else.”

  “Instead of you?”

  Whoops. Of course she’s scared. I should have foreseen it.

  “No, not instead, in addition to. I’m permanent.”

  Rosie got impatient on the floor by Millicent’s feet, and jumped up and put her forepaws in Millicent’s lap and scanned the table for food. Still looking at me, Millicent patted Rosie’s head. I could see the tears form in Millicent’s eyes, then she put her head down against Rosie’s and put her arms around Rosie and stayed that way while she waited for the tears to clear. I didn’t say anything. Rosie didn’t quite get the deal. She was still glancing sidelong at the table, her tail wagging, submitting graciously, but with no great pleasure, to the tears and the embrace.

  CHAPTER 47

  Brian Kelly had a three-story brick town house on First Street in South Boston. We were sitting together in postcoital languor, on the couch in his narrow, bow-windowed front room, with a fire in the small fireplace, and some red wine, talking business. I wore one of Brian’s shirts, which came about to my knees. Brian was wearing tartan plaid boxers. We were both barefoot.

  “Here’s what I think I know,” I said.

  “And think you can can prove?” Brian said.

  “Don’t be so picky,” I said. “I know that Betty Patton was having sex with the plumber, Kevin Humphries, who had been doing some work for them.”

  “How come that never happens to cops,” Brian said.

  “It does.”

  “Oh, you and me?”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “I know Betty posed for very explicit pictures of her relationship with Kevin, and I assume that he got hold of the pictures and blackmailed her with them. She told Kragan, and Kragan killed Humphries.”

  “You’ve seen the pictures,” Brian said.

  “Un huh.”

  “And you have the kid’s testimony on the conversation she overheard between her mother and Kragan.”

  “Un huh.”

  “We know the guy she saw with her mother is Kragan.”

  “Pretty likely.”

  “Pretty likely? I can’t wait to go in an tell some assistant DA that it’s ‘pretty likely’”

  “So don’t, wait until I get more.”

  Brian leaned forward and poured a little more wine into each of our glasses.

  “I know that Brock Patton is running for governor, and that a big campaign contributor is Albert Antonioni from Rhode Island. Do you know him?”

  “I know Antonioni,” Brian said.

  “So I figure that if these pictures surfaced, the Patton gubernatorial campaign would suffer a setback.”

  “Depends how the First Lady looks in the buff,” Brian said.

  “Would you like to see the pictures?”

  “You bet.”

  “Because they’re evidence?”

  “Sure.”

  “Men,” I said.

  Brian smiled.

  “Antonioni is not backing somebody for governor of Massachusetts because he’s concerned with good government,” Brian said.

  “True.”

  “He’s investing in something that will pay off in the long term.”

  “It would be in anyone’s interest to own the governor,” I said.

  “Especially if you’re trying to reestablish an Italian presence among the wiseguys in Boston.”

  “Which somebody is,” I said.

  “Yeah. There’s already been some skirmishing,” Brian said. “The micks and the dagos. OCU says the dagos are from Providence.”

  “Except for Cathal Kragan.”

  “He’s not from Providence?”

  “He lives in Swampscott, and Cathal Kragan is an Irish name.”

  “Hire a guy who knows the turf, I guess,” Brian said.

  “Whatever,” I said. “There’s a good motive in the connection between Patton, Kragan, and Antonioni.”

  “You know they’re connected.”

  “I have testimony that Kragan and Antonioni came to Patton’s house together,” I said.

  Brian was quiet for a time. We had our feet up on the coffee table. And we both stared into the fire while he was being quiet.

  “There’s one crime here,” he said after a while. “The murder of Kevin Humphries. And you can’t tie Kragan to it, or Antonioni.”

  “No,” I said. “I can’t. There is the matter of two men coming to my house and trying to kill me.”

  “You can’t tie Kragan to that either,” Brian said. “Only thing we had was testimony from Bucko Meehan, and he’s dead.”

  “True.”

  “So you know a lot, but you can’t prove much.”

  “Yet,” I said.

  “And the murder of the plumber isn’t even in my district.”

  “Also true.”

  “We need to think about all of this,” Brian said.

  His arm was around me. I had pushed tightly in against him, with my head on his chest.

  “What should we do while we’re thinking?” I said.

  “Hell, Sunny, I don’t know.”

  “Maybe we should have sex again,” I said.

  “Why didn’t I think of that,” he said, and put his hand under the tail of the borrowed shirt. Our conversation was somewhat more exclamatory for a while, and then we were quiet and after a while we were still and I had his shirt back on, and the couch was back together, and he was pouring us some more wine. In the fireplace, the fire settled in on itself. I looked around the hig
h-ceilinged nineteenth-century room.

  “This is a very comfy house,” I said.

  “A remnant of my marriage,” he said to me.

  “Are there any others?” I said.

  “Like kids? No. She took off with the man of her dreams before we ever got to kids.”

  “Does it still bother you?” I said.

  He shook his head.

  “The other guy thing bothered me for a while, but when I got over that I realized I was lucky to be rid of her.”

  “Is she still with the other guy?”

  Brian laughed.

  “She’s gone through three more men of her dreams,” he said. “Since then. I don’t know how many of them she married.”

  “Has there been anyone since?” I said.

  “For me?”

  “Yes.”

  “One every Saturday night,” Brian said. “None serious before now.”

  “Now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t know how serious this one ought to be,” I said.

  “You’re not available?”

  “I’m divorced,” I said. “I’m available for this. But I don’t know if I’m available for more than this.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know if I’m really free of my ex-husband.”

  “I could help you get free,” Brian said. “If he’s giving you trouble.”

  “No. Richie is very decent about things. I don’t know if I’m emotionally free of him. I don’t even know if I want to be.”

  “So why’d you get divorced? His idea?”

  “No. I left him.”

  “Because?”

  “Do you know who my ex-husband is?”

  “I know who his father is, and his uncles. That the reason?”

  “One of them.”

  “He wouldn’t give it up for you?”

  “No.”

  “I would have.”

  “Would you?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Would you stop being a cop?”

  “Yes.”

  “And be what?”

  Brian started to speak and stopped and thought about it. As he thought about it he began to nod slowly.

  “That’s the question, isn’t it,” he said finally.

  “Richie was never able to answer it,” I said. “I’m not sure I gave him enough time.”

  “And be what,” Brian said softly. “That your only issue?”

  “No. I always felt as if I were being squeezed to death.”

  “That’s never fun,” Brian said. “My ploy would be probably not to do that.”

  I smiled and put my head on his chest again.

  “Yes. That would be the right ploy,” I said.

  We were quiet. Brian smelled of soap and cologne, and a hint of new perspiration after a vigorous evening. The fire was quiet in the narrow fireplace. I stared at it. All of a sudden I found myself saying something that I hadn’t known until I said it.

  “If I can work it out so that I can be with Richie,” I murmured, “I will.”

  I felt Brian stiffen a little. But he didn’t pull away. I felt his hand pat my shoulder lightly.

  “We’ll see,” he said as he patted. “We’ll have to see.”

  CHAPTER 48

  Rosie and I were in one of Rosie’s favorite spots, a bench beside the swan boat lagoon in the Boston Public Garden. It was kind of late in the fall for sitting on a bench outside, but they hadn’t drained the lagoon for winter yet, or put the swan boats away. Rosie could make eye contact with a dozen squirrels, and at least that many ducks, and not have to risk actually attacking them because she was on her leash. I liked to sit there when I felt stifled by things, as I did today. There was something about being outside in the sunlight with the dog that made my head clear. Rosie sat beside me. I had her leash looped over my wrist, but she seemed perfectly content leaning against me and focusing on the wildlife, her head moving fractionally as the squirrels hopped and the ducks glided, through whatever field of vision her black watermelon-seed eyes provided.

  Brian was no more. He hadn’t said it, and I hadn’t. But I knew. He might be around for a time, if I changed my mind, but Brian’s interests would be directed elsewhere. Which was healthy of him. I remembered the moment with Richie, too.

  It was Julie’s night out every Thursday. Michael took the kids, and Julie and I and sometimes Spike, on the rare occasion when our plans appealed to him, would go to an art exhibit or a book signing or maybe a musical evening at the Longy School in Cambridge, stuff that I found mostly boring, and Spike usually found insufferable, but stuff which reassured Julie that she was still an intellectual who had not been lobotomized by marriage and children. It was Spike’s view that this grim dedication to what he called intellectual boot camp would lobotomize us all, but though less often than I, he went with her because, less intensely than I, he loved Julie. This night, after a particularly grueling poetry reading in the basement of a church in the Back Bay, the three of us went to the Ritz bar and ordered martinis as an antidote to the stale cheese and warm white wine we had desperately ingested at the church. The relief we all felt was nearly tactile, though Julie wouldn’t admit it, and we didn’t press the point because we were kind. But the martinis went down really well, and the sum of it was that I came home to find Richie standing in the driveway with the dog’s leash in his hands. The dog was inside. To this day I don’t remember why he had it.

  “Where have you been,” Richie said.

  As he spoke, he snapped the dog’s leash tight between his hands and let it loose and snapped it tight.

  “Out with my friends,” I said.

  “You’re supposed to be home here with me,” he said.

  The leash snapped tight and loosened. I doubt that Richie was even aware of what he was doing. He was ferociously contained and when he was very angry it squeezed out around his containment in odd ways.

  “Every minute,” I said.

  Snap.

  “I’ve been waiting for three hours.”

  The leash snapped. Did he want to snap it around my neck? No. Richie would never hurt me.

  “I have the right,” I said, in the dignified way that you can achieve only if you’re drunk, “to be with my friends when I want to be.”

  “And I have the right to have you come home when you’re expected and not make me think about whether it’s time to call the cops or not.”

  “Oh, don’t be so silly,” I said.

  “To worry about you is silly?”

  “I can take care of myself.”

  “To want you with me is silly?”

  “No. But if you do it too much it’s . . .” I couldn’t think of a word . . . then it came . . . “suffocating.”

  Richie stretched the leash as tight as he could, as if he were trying to pull it apart.

  “Suffocating? Loving you and wanting you with me is suffocating?”

  Had I been sober, maybe I would have modified it. It wasn’t quite what I meant. But it never is in fights like that. And I wasn’t sober.

  “Yes!”

  Richie shook his head like a horse beset by flies.

  “All I ask is that I may love you and you love me back.”

  “And you define love, and you judge the terms in which I love you back? And if I don’t love you in the same way you think you love me, I get yelled at?”

  “I’m talking about the way I feel,” Richie said.

  “And I’m talking about the way I feel. Why do we have to feel exactly alike? Why can’t you feel your way, and I feel my way?”

  “All I want is to be loved the way I love,” Richie said. He was snapping the leash again.

  “Well, maybe
you can’t have that.”

  “That’s what marriage is,” he said.

  “Maybe you married the wrong woman, then.”

  “Yeah,” Richie said, “maybe I did.”

  Still holding the leash he walked away from me down the driveway and disappeared into the dark. When he came back I was in bed, and I pretended to be asleep.

  Beside me, Rosie spotted another dog on the other side of the lagoon, and jumped down barking and snarling and gargling, just as if she would really attack it if I let her, which she wouldn’t. But it was a dazzling display, and several pedestrians stepped hurriedly out of her way as she strained on the leash.

  “At least I know you don’t want to strangle me with it,” I said, and got up and steered her back toward Boylston Street.

  CHAPTER 49

  Richie and Spike had never been easy with each other. The only thing they had in common was me. So it was a little strained around Spike’s kitchen table a little after midnight. Millicent was in the den watching television. Rosie was on the floor between me and Richie, with her head resting on my left foot. There was fruit and cheese and some crackers and some wine on the table.

  “You keep some tough hours, Sunny,” Richie said.

  He put a small wedge of blue cheese on each of two crackers, fed one to Rosie and ate the other.

  “It’s the only time I could get us all together,” I said.

  “Why do you want to?” Spike said.

  “Because I need help.”

  “What’ve you been getting?” Spike said. “We’ve gone to the mattresses in my house, we’re baby-sitting your client.”

  “I know. I’m grateful.”

  “Good,” Spike said.

  “What do you need?” Richie said.

  “There’s a man named Cathal Kragan,” I said. “You know about him.”

  They both nodded.

  “There’s a man named Albert Antonioni. Do you know about him?”

  “Not the Italian director,” Spike said.

  “No.”

  “From Providence?” Richie said.

  “Yes.”

  “We know him.”

  “What’s that,” Spike said, “the royal we?”