Crimson Joy

by Robert B. Parker

  "Rebecca Stimpson, MSW?"

  "Yes. She had been doing some marriage counseling with the Washburns and it was sort of delicate because of confidentiality. But, phrased just right, it's pretty clear that Ms. Stimpson, MSW, did not feel that the Washburns were on the road to reconciliation."

  "She have any views on Ray's potential for violence?"

  "Not really. She couldn't rule it out, but, as you know, predicting behavior is nearly impossible. Also, in truth Ms. Stimpson doesn't seem like a therapeutic heavyweight."

  "She has a master's in social work," I said.

  "Yes, and I believe in the value of fuller and more specialized training; but it's not her academic credentials; there are people with PhDs in psychology and M.D. psychiatrists who aren't therapeutic heavyweights either. It's temperament and, for lack of a better word, simple intelligence. Ms. Stimpson isn't very smart."

  "You trust her opinion on Washburn?"

  Susan sipped some more Diet Coke. She was tossing a salad composed of endive, julienne of red and yellow peppers, and arugula.

  "It's hard to see how she could have been totally misled. She saw them together once a week for several months."

  "So if she's not misled, then Ray was lying," I said.

  "Not necessarily," Susan said. "Some clients simply want something so badly, they believe it despite everything."

  "And if they are forced to see the truth?" I said.

  Susan shook her head. "Need is a powerhouse," she said.

  "So if the therapist is right…" I said.

  "Counselor," Susan said. "Not therapist. She wasn't doing therapy."

  I grinned. "Correct, just a test to see if you were listening. So if the counselor is right, Raymond is somewhat obsessed, or he is lying. Or the counselor is wrong and it's another Red Rose killing, or both. Or neither, and something we haven't any idea about is going on."

  "Fascinating work," Susan said.

  "Not unlike your own," I said.

  Susan put a loaf of fresh French bread on the table and the salad, served on two glass salad plates.

  "Metaphors for life," she said. "Your profession and mine."

  I sat at the table beside her.

  "You be Simone de Beauvoir," I said, "and I'll be Sartre and we'll consider defining life by living."

  Susan smiled and patted my hand with hers. She was still wearing the twisted bandana that she used to hold her hair back when she worked out.

  On most people I thought it hokey. It looked exactly right on her.

  "Eat your fucking salad," she said.

  We ate dinner and cleaned up and Susan settled in on the couch beside me to read the American Journal of Therapeutics. I watched the Braves and the Reds on cable.

  "It's Skip Carey and John Sterling," I said to Susan.

  "So?"

  "They have a four-man broadcast crew and they do radio and television and they rotate the crew so that the same two guys are never together, and I'm trying to figure out the pattern."

  Susan put her magazine down and looked at me silently.

  "Really?" she said.

  "And," I said, "there's a pattern within the patter in that each guy does some play-by-play and some color on both radio and television."

  Susan looked at me some more and breathed deeply and exhaled slowly and went back to her magazine.

  By the time the ball game ended Susan had fallen asleep with her magazine still open before her. I bent over and picked her up and carried her to bed and put her down on it. It woke her up and she gazed up at me with her big eyes.

  "What made you think I was sleepy?" she said.

  "I'm a trained investigator," I said.

  She smiled and made a kissing motion with her mouth. I bent over and kissed her goodnight and headed home. As I started down the stairs I heard the front door shut softly. I froze, listening. The front door should have been locked. I felt the adrenaline surge and I went down the stairs in a rush. The front door had been jimmied. I pulled it open. There was the hint of movement past one of the big shrubs in Susan's yard. I went over the porch railing and landed five feet below, next to the shrub. Something, probably a fist, hit me in the forehead.

  It wasn't a major league punch but it jarred me, and a figure burst from behind the bush and headed up Linnaean Street, toward Mass. Ave. I went after him with my chimes still ringing. I had run five miles a day for the last twenty years and planned to run him down. In a block, I hadn't closed the gap. He hurdled a waist-high fence on the corner of Aggassiz Street and cut across the lawn and turned up Aggassiz. I went over the fence after him and trailed my left leg and the fence caught it and I sprawled onto the lawn. He was up the little hill and rounding the corner on Lancaster by the time I got running again, and by the time I got to Lancaster, he was out of sight. I ran down to Mass. Ave., but I ran without enthusiasm because I knew he was gone. Mass. Ave. leading into Porter Square in Cambridge is busy in the evening, full of street life and traffic. The sprinter had disappeared into the crowd. He'd been dressed in dark clothing and had looked to be a little shorter than I. He was probably white. He was male. And he could jump a higher fence than I could. I walked back to Susan's place with the sweat trickling down my backbone and my pulse slowing. Probably the gun had slowed me down. It was a Colt Python and it probably weighed two or three pounds with a full load. Otherwise I'd have soared over the fence.

  Susan's front door was still ajar when I got there. I stepped into the front hall and closed it behind me. The house was silent. I turned on the hall light. On the hall table was a long, narrow white box. I opened it. Inside, cradled in green tissue paper, was a single long-stemmed red rose.

  "Jesus Christ," I said aloud in the empty hallway.

  CHAPTER 11

  When Susan woke up in the morning I was lying in bed beside her with my gun unholstered on the night table. She rolled over and looked at me silently.

  "I thought I heard you in the night," she said. Her eyes rested for a moment on the gun.

  "On my way out last night I almost caught someone who had broken into your front hallway and left a single red rose for you. I chased him but he got away." I saw no reason to discuss how I fell on my kisser trying to jump the fence. We were lying face-to-face on the bed, Susan's eyes wide and still a little unfocused from sleep.

  "You have a bruise on your forehead," she said.

  "He hit me from behind a bush," I said.

  "Could you identify him?"

  "No. It was dark, I only saw him from behind, and he was receding fast."

  "You know it was a man."

  "Yes. Pretty sure he was white, almost my height. Medium build, tending toward slender, I think."

  Susan stared at me some more without moving. Her eyes were focused now, the pupils shrinking as they adjusted to the morning.

  "So you came back and spent the night," she said.

  "Yes."

  "There are several explanations," Susan said.

  "True," I said. "It could be someone of your patients, for whatever his reasons."

  "It could be someone with a grudge against me," Susan said.

  "It could be the Red Rose killer, which could be a variation on number one, above," I said.

  "The Red Rose killer could be a patient of mine?"

  "Sure. He claims to be a cop. Cops are sort of your specialty."

  "Or."

  Susan said, "it could be directed at you. He knows you're working on this. He must therefore know that you and I are an item."

  "Or it could be someone with a grudge against me," I said.

  "Or it could be a copycat acting at random," Susan said.

  "Long shot," I said. "To hit you at random on a case I'm involved in."

  Susan nodded, and looked past me at the alarm clock.

  "My God," she said. "I've got my first appointment in an hour and a half."

  "That's too soon?" I said.

  She was up out of bed and heading for the bathroom.

  "Much,
" she said. And was into the bathroom. The door closed. I heard the shower go on. I got up, put my pants on, buckled my belt, put my gun in its holster, and went to the kitchen. I washed my face and hands and torso at the kitchen sink. Then I started water for coffee.

  I was drinking my second cup when Susan appeared in the kitchen, her hair in curlers and some makeup on. She poured hot water over a bag of herbal tea in her cup and let it sit for a minute, looking impatiently at it while it steeped.

  I said, "I know that it is nearly impossible to talk while you are performing the morning ablutions, but we have to think about your safety."

  Susan snatched the tea bag from the partially steeped tea. "I can't think about that now. I'm in my speeded-up movie mode, and you know what I'm like in that mode."

  "Yes," I said.

  She took her tea and went back to the bathroom. I sat at the glass brick counter in her kitchen and made two phone calls. One was to Henry Cimoli with a message for Hawk. The second one was to Martin Quirk.

  "Someone broke into Susan's front hall and left a single rose in a box, with tissue paper," I said. "I chased him and couldn't catch him. I didn't get a good look at him."

  "You got the box?"

  "Yeah, and the rose and the paper. I'll bet there's no prints on it."

  "I'll bet you're right," Quirk said. "But we'll try. Can you bring it over?"

  "No," I said. "I'm not leaving her alone."

  "May be just one of the fruitcakes she treats," Quirk said.

  "Still not leaving her alone," I said.

  "Yeah. Okay, I'll send somebody over. If it's one of her fruitcakes, there might be prints."

  I hung up and sipped my second cup. Instant coffee has much less caffeine than ground coffee; two cups of instant was practically none. I put the water on to heat for a third cup.

  Susan's phone rang. It was separate from the office phone. I picked it up and said, "Hello." Hawk's voice said, "Susan?" I said, "Nobody likes a minority smart-ass."

  "True," Hawk said. "What you need?" I told him about the rose intruder.

  Hawk said, "And he punched you in the head and you chased him and he got away? Was he a brother?"

  "I don't think so," I said.

  "You let a white guy run away from you?"

  "What do you want from me," I said. "I'm a white guy too."

  "Yeah, you so funky sometimes I forget. I'll come over in case we have to chase him again."

  At two minutes to eight Susan appeared wearing a salt and-pepper-tweed jacket over a black turtleneck. She had on a full black skirt and black shoes with a short heel.

  "You are more beautiful than a bird dog on point," I said.

  "And damned near as smart," Susan said. "I know we have to talk more.

  But I simply can't right now. I know you can't leave me unprotected, but I cannot have you or Hawk lounging in my waiting room when the patients come."

  "I'm going to get your front door fixed and then one of us will be around, but we won't be in the way and we won't scare the patients."

  "Yes," she said. She kissed me. I patted her on the fanny and she was out and down to her office as her first patient arrived. I heard her say "Come along" as I stood at the top of the stairs out of sight.

  CHAPTER 12

  A carpenter named Shutt came over and replaced Susan's jimmied front door. I gave Susan my S&W .32 to keep in her desk drawer, and Hawk and I took turns lingering at the top of Susan's stairs while she conducted business. There are few things more boring than standing around at the top of a stairwell out of sight.

  When Susan got through that night I took her down to Cambridge Police Headquarters to get her a pistol permit. The gun guy was a bear-shaped Tac cop who'd served two tours in Vietnam and did some gunsmithing on the side.

  "Can she shoot?" he said.

  "Taught her myself," I said.

  "I was afraid of that." The cop's name was Steve Costa. "Let's go up to the range, ma'am. Have you fire some rounds to qualify."

  "What if I don't qualify?" Susan said.

  Costa grinned. "You'll qualify," he said.

  We went upstairs and along a corridor lined with tired yellow tiles.

  Costa unlocked the door and we went into the range.

  "Lovely," Susan said.

  "Yeah, they don't waste much time on the range," Costa said.

  The room looked like an afterthought, jammed into a forgotten space under a long stairwell. There was a small shooting table on which a coffee can full of brass had tipped over and spilled most of the cartridge casings on the floor. Costa walked down the narrow alley of the range and pinned a target onto the trolley with a clothespin. He set the target about fifteen feet away and walked back to the shooting table.

  "As you can see, ma'am, the target consists of the silhouette of a man surrounded by increasingly concentric circles; the smallest circle, around the man's head and heart area, is worth ten points. The next circle is worth nine, and so on until the last circle, outside of which there is no score."

  "Please call me Susan."

  "Okay, Susan. In order to qualify for a license to carry firearms you have to score seventy, firing a maximum of thirty rounds."

  "Fine," Susan said.

  "Want to fire some for practice, Susan?"

  "No, thank you."

  I took the thirty-two out and laid it, pointing downrange, on the table beside her. We put on the earmuffs.

  Costa said, "

  "Cause Spenser and I go way back, I'm going to give you a little head start."

  He took out his own gun, a nickel-plated .38 with a black rubber grip, settled into a two-hand shooting crouch, and put six shots inside the 10 circle. He and Susan walked down to look at the target.

  "Why, I seem to be within ten points of qualifying already," she said.

  Her smile was full of innocent amazement. Costa reloaded his gun.

  "Here," he said, "use this one. It's all sighted in." It also shot the same size rounds as the bullet holes in the target. Susan caught on at once.

  "Sure," she said. She picked up the gun, held it carefully in both hands, stood as I'd taught her to, cocked the gun with her right thumb, fired carefully, six shots, single action, and put all six inside the 7 circle. Then she put the thirty-eight back down on the shooter's table and waited while Costa went down to get the target.

  "You forgot to yell, "Freeze, dirt bag."

  " I said.

  "Couldn't I say something else, like "It's all right, I'm a doctor'?" she said.

  I shook my. head in disgust. "Don't you watch television?" I said.

  Costa came back with the target and said, "That's good shooting, Susan.

  You've qualified, no problem. Want to fire a few rounds just to get the feel of your weapon?"

  Susan said, "No, thank you."

  Costa turned to me. "Six rounds each?" he said. "For a case of beer?"

  "Double action," I said. "Ten seconds to get all the shots off."

  "Sure," Costa said, and picked up his gun, reloaded, and put six rounds into the new target in eight seconds. He dumped the brass, reloaded, put the gun on his hip, and went down to collect his target and hang a new one. I took my place, got out the Python, and when Costa said "Go."

  I fired six rounds in seven seconds.

  We both had all our shots in the kill zone, but Costa had four bull's-eyes and I had two.

  "Budweiser," Costa said.

  "Budweiser?"

  "That's right," Costa said. "I drive a Chevy too."

  "The heartbeat of America," I said. "I'll drop it off tomorrow."

  As we left, Costa said, "Nice shooting, Susan. We'll expedite that permit; should have it by the time the beer arrives."

  Walking to the car, Susan said, "I thought you were a good shot."

  "I am a good shot," I said, "but Costa shoots every day."

  Susan nodded. "I could have qualified without help, but I didn't want to take away his nice gesture."

  "You always get it
," I said.

  "Now, let's go and get a cup of coffee and some cheesecake and decide what we think about the Red Rose business."

  We drove over to Chelsea to sit at a Formica table in the Washington Deli. I had some cherry cheesecake and, in utter abandon, a cup of fresh-brewed coffee. Susan had decaff and plain cheesecake. I took a bite of mine and swallowed it, followed by a small sip of coffee, black.

  "Ah, wilderness," I said.

  "Isn't that supposed to involve a loaf of bread and a jug of wine?"

  "And thou, sweets, don't forget thou."

  She had a small bite of cheesecake, edging a narrow sliver off one corner of the wedge with her fork.

  "The Red Rose killer should not be in therapy," Susan said. "The killings should be the relief he needs from pressure."

  "I know," I said.

  "You said that. But that was before some guy went to a lot of trouble to put a red rose in your front hall."

  "It doesn't mean one of my patients is the killer," Susan said.

  "It means something," I said. "And it means something worrisome."

  "Yes," Susan said. "I agree with that."

  "The guy that left it either is or is not one of your patients," I said.

  "Let's assume he is. Assuming he isn't asks for several more farfetched hypotheses than the assumption that he is."

  "I don't like to think it."

  Susan said.

  "So what?" I said.

  She smiled. "Yes, of course. Is there anything either of us knows better than the uselessness of deciding what you want to think." She took another nearly transparent sliver from her cheesecake and a sip of coffee.

  "It is work where one encounters atypical people," she said. "Some of them can be frightening. If one is to do the work, one puts the fear aside."

  "I know," I said.

  "Yes." She smiled and put her hand on top of mine. "You would surely know about that."

  My cheesecake was gone, and the cherries only a memory in my mouth. I finished my coffee.

  "The bond of trust between therapist and patient is the fundament of the therapy. I cannot conspire, even with you, to identify and track any of them."

  "If it is Red Rose," I said, "it's not just you that's at risk."