Back Story

by Robert B. Parker

  “I left in a dignified manner,” I said. “Bonnie or Bunny?”

  “Bonnie.”

  Hawk came back in with a bucket of ice and a nearly full bottle of Dewar’s Scotch. He put both on the coffee table near her.

  “Please,” she said, “let me go. My father will give you a lot of money and, honest to God, I won’t tell anybody.”

  Susan came in. We all waited while Pearl loped wildly around the room and jumped up on Susan, even when Susan asked her not to. Finally, she got calm enough for anyone to speak.

  “Here she is,” Susan said, looking at Bonnie.

  “Here she is,” I said.

  “Am I now an accessory to kidnapping.”

  “I would guess, yes,” I said.

  Bonnie drank some more Scotch. Susan’s arrival heartened her a little. The sisterhood is strong.

  “Who are you?” she said.

  “I’m Susan.”

  “What kind of place is this?”

  Susan smiled. “This is my home,” she said.

  “Why’d they bring me here?”

  “I would guess several reasons,” Susan said. “People would probably not think to look for you here. If they did, there are several men here with guns. And I think there was the thought that I might be helpful in talking with you.”

  Bonnie’s glass was empty. She added more Scotch.

  Susan looked at me. “That about right?”

  “On the money,” I said.

  “Talking to me?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “That’s all you want?”

  “I need to know some things,” I said.

  She drank some Scotch. Susan had sounded reasonable. Now I sounded reasonable. Hawk had brought her whisky. The whisky made her feel better.

  “Like what?” she said.

  “What happened to Abner Fancy?”

  I could see her throat tighten. She stared at me without speaking.

  “Shaka,” I said.

  Her voice had a squeezed sound when she spoke.

  “My fa . . . who?”

  “Your father?” I said.

  She shook her head.

  “Your father killed him, or had it done,” I said.

  “No.”

  “Bonnie,” Susan said. “Did your father kill Abner because of you?”

  Bonnie shook her head and drank some Scotch.

  “Because you had a liaison with a black man?”

  Bonnie kept shaking her head, her head down, looking at the floor.

  “Because you produced a mulatto child?”

  Bonnie’s head came up and her eyes widened.

  “Whom you gave away?” Susan said. “To Emily Gordon?”

  “You and your mother have been paying Barry Gordon cover-up money for years,” I said.

  “It was support,” she said. “For Daryl.”

  I nodded. Susan sat in an armchair across from Bonnie. I sat in front of her. Hawk leaned against the wall behind Susan, his arms folded across his chest, his eyes steady on Bonnie, his face without expression. Bonnie was still an okay-looking woman. She had spent too much time in the sun, and it had coarsened her skin. And she had spent too much time being Sonny’s daughter and Ziggy’s wife, and it had coarsened her soul. But I could see why Leon had considered her a hot little bitch.

  “Who killed her?” I said.

  “Who . . . ?”

  “Who killed Emily?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You do,” I said. “You were in the bank when it happened.”

  “I . . .” she drank some more Scotch. “I’m not going to talk about this.”

  “How about the white guy?”

  “White guy?”

  “In the bank?”

  “Rob,” she said. “He did it.”

  “Uh-huh? Where’s Rob now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Shaka killed him,” I said. “So that Rob wouldn’t talk.”

  She drank some Scotch and nodded enthusiastically. “Yes,” she said. “That’s what happened.”

  “Shaka shot Rob,” I said, “to keep Rob from confessing to the murder?”

  She nodded again. She wasn’t very bright, and the booze wasn’t making her brighter. I shook my head.

  “You killed her,” I said.

  “No,” she said.

  “Shaka was her lover. Rob was there on behalf of peace and love and an end to imperialist aggression. You used to be Shaka’s honey and he knocked you up, then he dumped you for Emily. You shot her to get Shaka back.”

  Bonnie dropped her head again and began to cry.

  “I can understand how that would feel,” Susan said to her. “You loved him, bore him a child. Did you give the child away because he’d leave you if you didn’t?”

  Bonnie nodded without looking up, still crying.

  “And then he took up with the woman who had the child.”

  Bonnie nodded again.

  “Was he suddenly interested in the child?”

  Nod. Susan smiled sadly.

  “How awful,” Susan said. “You gave away your child to be with Shaka, and the child became something that took him away from you.”

  Bonnie cried loudly now.

  “For crissake,” I said. “Lovers, children. You people passed each other around like Fritos.”

  “It was a different time,” Susan said gently.

  Bonnie raised her teary face and looked at Susan. “It was,” she said. “It was different. And I loved him so much, and that little Jew bitch took him away from me and she used my own kid to do it.”

  “And you had no other choice,” Susan said. “You had a gun and it was your chance.”

  “I loved him too much to let her have him.”

  “I understand,” Susan said.

  “She was gone, and the kid got sent back to Barry and it was me and Shaka again.”

  “And Daddy killed him,” I said.

  She dropped her drink on the floor. The noise made Pearl jump and slink in behind Susan’s chair. Susan put her hand back automatically and patted Pearl. Bonnie put her face in both hands and doubled over and began to rock back and forth, gasping for breath between the huge sobs that made her whole body shake.

  “And gave you to Ziggy,” I said.

  She couldn’t speak, but she nodded. We all sat. No one said anything.

  Finally I said, “We’ll send you home. When you are able to, call your father, and let me speak to him.”

  61

  I was on the front porch of Susan’s apartment when Sonny Karnofsky got out of the backseat of a black Mercedes sedan with tinted windows. Behind him was the Cadillac Escalade, also black and tinted. Menacing. Sonny stood alone next to his car and looked at me. On the porch behind me, Vinnie sat on the railing. Ty-Bop and Junior lounged in elaborate boredom next to him. Junior had a shotgun.

  I walked down the steps to the sidewalk, and Sonny crossed the yard toward me. He looked old and tired in the bright sunlight.

  “Where is she?” he said.

  “Inside.”

  “Bring her out,” he said.

  “No. You come in.”

  Sonny was silent. I waited.

  “Let me see her,” Sonny said.

  I nodded and waved my hand above my head. Susan’s front door opened and Hawk stood in the doorway with Bonnie. Sonny looked at her silently for what seemed a long time. It was a hot day, I realized. There was a persistent locust hum high up above us. The trees were still and full of substance in the windless heat.

  “What’s the deal?” Sonny said.

  “You come in. We talk. You and Bonnie leave and we’re square.”

  “What do we talk about.”

  “We got problems to resolve,” I said.

  Sonny was an ape. But he wasn’t stupid. And he loved his daughter. He had no leverage and he knew it. We went into Susan’s house and sat with Bonnie and Hawk in the downstairs study across from her office. Susan was downstairs. Bonnie didn’t sa
y anything, and after his first look Sonny didn’t look at her again. He focused on me and waited.

  “When Bonnie was eighteen,” I said to him, “you sent her to college so she’d get an education and become a lady and be something besides the daughter of a thug.”

  Sonny’s gaze was steady. The skin under his chin had sagged into a wattle, and his eyelids were so droopy that his eyes were slitted.

  “But she fell in with the wrong crowd and turned into a hippie and dropped out. She got involved with drugs and sex and revolution. She had a fling with a black man and had a baby. She gave the baby away to some other hippies named Emily and Barry Gordon. Later, she killed Emily during a bank robbery because she was jealous of her. Then she came back home in a panic.”

  Sonny’s chin rested on his chest. He had his hands folded across his stomach. There were liver spots. His eyes were expressionless beneath the drooping lids. It was like being stared at by a turtle.

  “Fortunately, the FBI had an informant involved in the bank robbery and didn’t want it known. So they buried it. The people in the bank didn’t see who did the shooting. The FBI informant was out in the getaway car. So only three people knew who shot Emily. Bonnie, a white guy named Rob, and a black con named Abner Fancy, who called himself Shaka.”

  “If it’s true, I know all this,” Sonny said. His voice sounded thick to me and kind of hoarse. “If it’s not true, why are you telling me?”

  “I want you to know what I know,” I said. “Rob, the white peacenik, got shot as a precautionary measure by Shaka. And you had Shaka killed because he was the only one who knew that Bonnie killed Emily.”

  Sonny seemed to drop his chin farther. But his gaze, now peering out from under his eyebrows, didn’t falter. With his head down, I could see his pale scalp through the thin, white hair on top.

  “And probably because he was a black ram, and he’d shtupped your white ewe.”

  “I don’t know what the white ewe shit is all about,” Sonny said. “But it don’t matter. If what you’re saying ain’t true, then we got nothing to talk about. But say it is, then what?”

  “That’s what we have to work out. You got a granddaughter who doesn’t know any of this and might not benefit from finding it out. She thinks she’s the daughter of Emily and Barry Gordon. If she does find this stuff out, she shouldn’t find it out in the context of her mother’s trial for the murder of her stepmother, and her grandfather’s trial for the murder of her father.”

  Bonnie sat completely still, staring at her father. It was a complicated look. Fear, dependence, maybe even affection, maybe some loathing, too.

  “You can prove this?”

  “That Bonnie killed Emily?” I said. “Hell, yes. But I don’t see why I have to.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Your daughter’s been safely installed with the lovely and charming Ziggy. If I could nail you with it I would, but that’s not likely. Nobody’s nailed you yet.”

  For a moment, Sonny almost looked pleased. But he recovered and gave me more of the flinty stare.

  “So here’s the deal. You see to it that no one bothers Susan, and I forget about Bonnie.”

  “I could kill you,” Sonny said.

  “And Martin Quirk gets this whole story,” I said. “You know Quirk?”

  “I know him.”

  “Anything happens to Susan, he gets the whole story.”

  “I agree to this and Bonnie walks,” Sonny said.

  “She does,” I said. “Ziggy is punishment enough.”

  Sonny looked at his daughter. His look was probably as complicated as hers had been, but Sonny was used to not showing much, and it was hard to tell.

  “Daddy?” Bonnie said in the kind of plaintive little girl voice that only a woman in her late fifties could actually produce.

  Sonny nodded slowly to himself. He looked at Bonnie some more. Then he looked at me.

  “Deal,” he said and stood up.

  He looked at his daughter again. “Come on,” he said.

  She looked at me. I made a be-my-guest gesture with my hand. She hesitated another moment, glanced at Hawk, and stood.

  “Before you go,” I said. “Just an idle question?”

  Sonny stood and waited.

  “Evan Malone,” I said. “The FBI guy, retired in New Hampshire.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You know where he is?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Will I ever find him?”

  “No.”

  I nodded. Hawk reached over and opened the study door. Sonny looked at his daughter and jerked his head.

  “Have a nice life,” I said.

  And the Karnofskys walked out.

  62

  I was sitting on the top step of the front porch, watching people walk by on Linnaean Street, with Susan next to me and Hawk on the other side of her. I was drinking Blue Moon Belgian White Ale from the bottle. Susan and Hawk sipped Iron Horse champagne from proper crystal. Taste varies. A woman with long, straight hair and no makeup walked by in a formless ankle-length tan floral-print dress. Pearl the Wonder Dog II bounded about inside Susan’s front fence, deciding on a basis none of us understood whom to bark at ferociously and whom to ignore. She decided to bark at the woman in the dress.

  “Why has she decided to bark at her?” I said. “I think it’s the dress,” Susan said

  “I say it the whole look,” Hawk said.

  “That’s the Cambridge look,” Susan said.

  “If that’s the Cambridge look,” I said, “what do they think of your look?”

  “They think I’m a ho,” Susan said.

  Pearl stood with her forefeet on the top of the fence, glaring alertly down the street in the direction the woman had gone. The fur was stiff between her shoulder blades.

  “Maybe the bodyguards were superfluous,” I said.

  “Everybody like Ty-Bop and Junior hanging on your front porch?” Hawk said.

  “This is a very liberal community,” Susan said.

  “So how many people cross the street when they pass by your house?” Hawk said.

  “Everybody.”

  Hawk smiled and sipped some champagne. He looked at me. “Now lemme see I got you straight,” he said. “You and me shoot up almost anybody that move in eastern Massachusetts, so’s we can find out who killed Emily Gordon.”

  “We did,” I said.

  Hawk nodded thoughtfully.

  “ ’Cause you promise Paul and Daryl you would.”

  “Yes.”

  “Even though Daryl tell you she don’t want you to no more.”

  “She did say that.”

  “And then you finally find out who done it, and you make a deal with her and her old man and you let her go.”

  “You want to spend the rest of your life guarding Susan?” I said.

  “Depends what else I got goin’,” Hawk said. “But I get your point. You going to tell Daryl?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “If they wasn’t a threat to Susan, would you have busted Sonny’s daughter?”

  I thought about that for a moment.

  “He wouldn’t have,” Susan said.

  “Tha’s right,” Hawk said.

  Pearl bounded up onto the porch and squeezed in between me and Susan and sat down and lapped the top of my beer bottle.

  “It’s cool,” I said, “having people answer their own questions for me. Saves thinking.”

  “Which be a good thing in your case,” Hawk said. “Being as how you got so little to spare.”

  “Fine,” I said. “And why did I stay on the case?”

  “It like sex,” Hawk said. “Don’t want to pull out ’fore you finished.”

  “Rich imagery,” I said.

  “He’s right, though,” Susan said. “You can’t quit early.”

  “You should know,” I said.

  “I do,” she said. “You have no way to know until you get to the end, what the end is going to be.”

  “You
sound like Yogi Berra.”

  “When you get to the end, then you decide. But you have to get to the end. You have to know how it will turn out.”

  “Because?” I said.

  “Because it’s how you are,” Susan said.

  “Which is?”

  “Weird,” Hawk said.

  I looked at Susan. “More or less,” she said.

  I drank some beer. Hawk poured some more champagne for himself and Susan. Pearl lapped some champagne out of Susan’s glass and shook her head and sneezed.

  “Now that we’ve settled that,” I said, “maybe we could return to the subject of pulling out.”

  Susan looked at me and smiled her wonderfulness-with-a-touch-of-evil smile.

  “Or perhaps, later on, the reverse,” she said.