Now and Then

by Robert B. Parker

There was silence.

  Then Jordan said, “I love you.”

  “I love you too, my friend,” Perry said. “I love you very, very much.”

  Too many verys, I thought. Insincere. The door closed. She walked to the elevator. It went down. She got out. I could hear her heels on the concrete floor of the garage. Then I heard her stop.

  “I’ll take the bag,” Hawk said.

  “Don’t hurt me,” she said. “You can have the bag. I won’t give you any trouble. Just don’t hurt me.”

  “Car keys in the bag?”

  “Yes. Take the car if you want.”

  I heard Hawk rummage in the bag. His hand an inch from the transmitter.

  “You take the keys,” he said.

  I heard him walk away from her. In another moment he was out on the street. In another couple of moments he was in the car, the rain glistening on his shaven head. He plonked the bag in my lap, fastened his seat belt, and we drove away.

  Then I shut off the radio, took the bug out, and switched it off. I put the bug and the tape recorder in a gym bag in the backseat.

  “Easy,” Hawk said.

  “Thinking of taking it up?” I said. “Some sort of regular basis?”

  I took Jordan’s wallet out of her bag. There were two twenties, a driver’s license, a Concord College ID, and some credit cards.

  “Augment my income,” Hawk said.

  “You gave her back her car keys,” I said.

  “Gentleman Mugger,” Hawk said.

  There was a small emergency makeup kit in the bag, a small blue notebook, two ballpoint pens, an emery board, a packet of Kleenex, and a pair of reading glasses. The notebook was devoid of notes.

  “Want to split the forty dollars?” I said.

  “Split, hell,” Hawk said. “I done all the mugging.”

  I handed him the two twenties.

  “Fair’s fair,” I said.

  10 .

  Imailed Jordan Richmond’s wallet back to her, with an anonymous note saying I’d found it on the street. Then I called Doherty on his cell phone and said I needed to report, and he said he’d come to my office. He showed up ten minutes later wearing a camel-hair topcoat over a dark suit. He took the topcoat off when he came in and put it on Pearl’s couch, which stood against the far wall to the right of the office door. Pearl wasn’t visiting today, so the couch was empty.

  “Whaddya got,” he said.

  His shirt was very white. His tie was striped red and blue. His face looked stiff.

  “Your wife is having an affair,” I said.

  His face got stiffer.

  “You got proof?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Lemme see it.”

  “It’s a tape recording,” I said. “It’ll be hard to hear.”

  “Play it,” he said.

  “You don’t want to take my word?”

  “Play the tape,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “Okay,” I said. “First some background. She’s been seeing a man after work every night. She went to his apartment several nights. One night before she went I was able to slip a bug in her tote bag.”

  He sat motionless while I spoke. I had no way to know if he’d heard me.

  “Play it,” he said.

  “There’s a lot of silence and aimless noise on the tape,” I said.

  “I edited it out.”

  He stared at me. I took the tape recorder out of my desk drawer and put it on the desktop and pressed the play button.

  “I can’t wait to get naked. . . . Do you think we’re oversexed?”

  I stopped the tape.

  “Enough?” I said.

  “Play it all,” he said.

  “You know already what you wanted to know,” I said.

  “I want to know everything.”

  I pressed the play button again.

  “What if someone opened the elevator door? . . . We could say I was helping you look for your keys . . . A drink first? . . . Maybe a short one while I fl uff up . . .” The bag bumped on the fl oor . . . a sound that 38 might have been a shower . . . The sound of intimacy . . . Jordan screamed . . . and giggled . . . “What are you doing to me? . . . I think I should give you a blow job.”

  I shut it off.

  “That’s all there is,” I said.

  Doherty was rigid. His face was flushed. He looked past me out the window. His eyes fi lled.

  “ ‘I think I should give you a blow job,’ ” he said.

  “Hard to hear,” I said.

  “You ever hear anything like that?”

  “No.”

  “Then how the fuck do you know how hard it is?”

  “I’m guessing,” I said.

  “Who is he?”

  I expected the question. It was possible he’d go looking for Perry with a gun. It was possible he’d use the gun on himself. Or on his wife. I couldn’t make those judgments for him. He had a right to know.

  “Name’s Perry Alderson,” I said.

  “How’s she know him.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “What’s he do?” Doherty said. “He work there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  There were things I suspected about Perry, but they didn’t seem like things that Doherty had a right to know. At least until I knew.

  “Find out,” Doherty said.

  I nodded.

  “You going to be all right?” I said.

  “I don’t know.”

  He stood suddenly and walked past my desk and looked out my window.

  “What are you going to do?” I said.

  “I have no idea,” Doherty said. “I have absolutely no idea what to do.”

  His voice had thickened. His shoulders began to shake. He was crying. Without another word he turned from my window and left my office.

  I sat for a while after he left, looking at nothing, breathing deeply, trying to locate exactly what it was I was feeling.

  11 .

  It was about three in the afternoon. The rain had stopped, and the day was bright and not very warm when I walked down Cambridge Street to the Government Center Holiday Inn. I was meeting the special agent in charge of the Boston FBI office. His name was Epstein and he was at the bar with a Coke when I got there.

  “That’s tempting,” I said.

  “The Coke?” Epstein said. “Bureau is really pissy about having the SAC drunk during business hours.”

  I ordered a scotch and soda. Epstein turned his glass slowly on the bar in front of him.

  “Sure,” Epstein said. “Rub my nose in it.”

  “What do you know about an organization called Last Hope?”

  Epstein stared at me.

  “What am I, Public Information?”

  Epstein didn’t look like too much. He was balding and kind of scrawny, and he wore round dark-rimmed glasses that looked sort of stark against his pale skin.

  “The bureau have any interest in them?” I said.

  My drink arrived.

  “As far as I know, the bureau never heard of them.”

  “Which means you never heard of them,” I said.

  “Same thing,” Epstein said. “But I’ll check.”

  “How about a guy named Alderson?”

  “Who he?” Epstein said.

  “He appears to be the head of Last Hope.”

  “Again,” Epstein said, “I’ll check, but as far as I know, we don’t know him or his outfit and we have no interest. Should we?”

  He continued to turn his half-drunk glass of Coke slowly on the bar in front of him, using just the tips of his fi ngers, watching the procedure as if it were interesting.

  “Don’t know yet,” I said.

  I took a drink. Epstein looked up and watched me sadly as I drank.

  “How about Operation Blue Squall?”

  The glass kept turning. Epstein continued to look at me sadly.

  “What about Blue Squall?” Epstein said.

  “I
understand it’s an anti-terrorism project,” I said. “Which is currently interested in an outfit called Freedom’s Front Line.”

  Epstein stopped turning his glass and sat back in the highbacked bar stool.

  “FFL,” Epstein said. “You want to tell me how you know about this stuff?”

  “I want to tell you some of it,” I said.

  “I may want all of it.”

  “Cross that when we come to it,” I said.

  Epstein nodded.

  “I’m working on a divorce case,” I said. “Husband thinks the wife is cheating on him, wants me to fi nd out if she is.”

  “Exciting work,” Epstein said.

  “Right up there with investigating subversives like Dr. King.”

  “Okay,” Epstein said. “Okay. We did do some work in Mississippi, too.”

  I nodded.

  “So I find out that the husband’s fears are justified, and for proof, I bug the love nest and listen to them.”

  The excitement of the turning Coke glass seemed to have waned for Epstein. His attention was on me with nearly physical force.

  “The lover is Alderson,” I said. “The husband appears to be one of your agents.”

  “Shit!” Epstein said. “Who?”

  I shook my head.

  Epstein was silent for a moment, then he took his cell phone off his belt and dialed a number.

  “Shauna?” he said. “It’s me. I’ve run into something and I won’t be back in the offi ce today . . . no, in the morning . . . tell him in the morning . . . thanks, babe.”

  He broke the connection and put the cell phone away. Then he signaled to the bartender and when she came pushed the Coke toward her.

  “Take this away,” he said. “Bring me an Absolut martini on the rocks with a twist.”

  We sat silently beside each other at the bar until the martini came. He looked at it for a moment, picked it up, and took a meaningful pull.

  “Better?” I said.

  “You have no idea,” he said.

  “I might,” I said.

  “I’m going to have to know who the agent is,” Epstein said.

  “He may be guilty of nothing but a bad marriage,” I said.

  “I have to know,” Epstein said.

  “Yes,” I said. “You do. But I won’t tell you until I know the deal.”

  “You can get jugged for contempt,” Epstein said, “until you tell me.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “But you won’t tell me anyway.”

  “No.”

  “Might put some pressure on the guy hired you,” Epstein said.

  “Might,” I said.

  “If he’s a stand-up guy,” Epstein said.

  “He might be.”

  Epstein drank some more of his martini. He looked affec tionately at the glass while he swallowed.

  “I have worked with you a couple times,” Epstein said, “and know you to be a big pain in my tuchis.”

  “Nice to be remembered,” I said.

  “You been a tough guy so long, you forgot how to be anything else.”

  “But sensitive,” I said.

  “My ass,” Epstein said.

  “Wow,” I said. “Two languages.”

  Epstein finished his drink and gestured for another. The bartender looked at me. I nodded.

  “What we got brewing here,” Epstein said, “is a fucking impasse.”

  “We do,” I said.

  “Which is not going to do either one of us any good,” Epstein said.

  “True,” I said.

  Our drinks came. We both allowed them to sit untouched for a dignifi ed moment. Then we both took a swallow.

  “You got any thoughts on how to resolve it?” Epstein said.

  “I do.”

  “Thought you might,” Epstein said. “Keep in mind that counterterrorism is not grab-ass. One of my agents gets compromised, people may die and some of them may not deserve to.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Your plan?” Epstein said.

  “I’ll fi nd out,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Everything, and I’ll keep you informed on anything you need to know.”

  “And you decide what I need to know?”

  “We’ll collaborate on that,” I said. “If I find that your agent is compromised, I’ll give him to you.”

  “I agree to that and the bureau finds out, I’ll be working the teller’s window at a drive-in bank in Brighton.”

  “If you can make change,” I said. “I was never good making change.”

  “When you say everything, do you include Blue Squall?”

  “Not unless I bump into it,” I said. “I’ll investigate my client, his wife, and her lover.”

  “Perry Alderson,” Epstein said.

  I hadn’t mentioned Alderson’s fi rst name.

  “Yep.”

  “Last Hope,” Epstein said.

  “Yep.”

  “We’ll look into it from that end,” Epstein said.

  “Maybe we’ll meet in the middle,” I said.

  “We fuck this up,” Epstein said, “and I go down in flames.”

  I shrugged.

  “Think of it as a blaze of glory,” I said.

  “And if I do,” Epstein said, “I’ll take you with me.”

  “No pain, no gain,” I said.

  12 .

  Isat at the counter and sipped a scotch and soda, tall glass, a lot of ice, to support the two I’d had with Epstein. I liked to drink alone in the quiet room. This was widely held to be the hallmark of a problem drinker, but since I rarely drank too much, and since I could drink or not drink as circumstance dictated, I was able to relax about it, and have a couple of drinks alone, and have a good time.

  Susan was in New York overnight for a conference and Pearl was visiting me. I had fed her when I got home, and taken her out, and now she was on her couch looking at me without censure. Pearl II was a solid brown German shorthaired pointer like her predecessor. Thanks to the magic of selective breeding, she was, in fact, very much like Pearl I, which was sort of the idea. A way to manage mortality a little. She loved Susan and me, and running, and food, and maybe Hawk, but it was never clear to me in what order. I raised my glass to her.

  “Here’s looking at you, yellow eyes,” I said.

  She thumped her short tail a couple of times.

  “Epstein is not being entirely open,” I said.

  Pearl settled her head on the arm of the couch so that she could look at me without the effort of raising her head. Her eyes weren’t really yellow, they were more golden, or topaz. But Here’s looking at you, topaz eyes didn’t have the same ring.

  “He knew who Perry Alderson was.” I took a drink. “And I bet he knows what Last Hope is.”

  Pearl II was almost five now. She had been with us long enough so that the transition had become nearly seamless. It was diffi cult to remember which Pearl had done what with us.

  “And he sure as hell is going to look into both of them.”

  My drink was gone. I got up and made another one.

  “Epstein’s also going to nose around quietly and see if he can fi nd out which agent is having problems with his wife.”

  I wondered why I didn’t just dump it all in Epstein’s lap. The bureau has its ups and downs, but Epstein was an up. And he had resources. Far more than I did.

  “The poor bastard,” I said.

  Pearl gazed at me blankly.

  “Doherty,” I said.

  Pearl lapped her muzzle once.

  “Adultery happens,” I said. “Hell, it happened to me.”

  I drank again.

  “’Cept we weren’t exactly married, so I guess technically it wasn’t adultery.”

  It sounded to me as if maybe technically came out as tenichly. Fortunately Pearl didn’t know the difference, and had she known, she wouldn’t have cared anyway.

  “But that was a long time ago,” I said.

  Pea
rl seemed to have lost interest. She shifted onto her back with her feet up and her head lolling over the edge of the couch.

  “Even before Pearl the First,” I said.

  I got up and found a lamb shank in the meat keeper. I put it in a casserole dish with some carrots and onions and some small red potatoes. I sprinkled in some oregano and a splash of white wine, put the cover on, and slid it into the oven at 350. I set the timer for an hour, made myself another drink, and took it with me while I walked to my front window and looked down at Marlborough Street. It was empty. But not very dark. The streetlights had an effect and it was still early enough in the evening for the lights to be on in front windows and that brightened things as well. I liked the look of it, of the light spilling domestically from front windows while people ate late supper together and maybe shared a bottle of wine.

  “She’ll be home tomorrow,” I said to Pearl.

  The recent winds had shaken some of the leaves loose from the trees. The trees weren’t bare yet. But they were in the process. There was an occasional wind still stirring and, now and then, it scattered some of the leaves along the sidewalk. It made me think of a poem. I looked back at Pearl, whose position was 49 such that her ample jowls had fallen away from her rather signifi cant teeth. It had been a long time ago, more than twenty years, since Susan had gone off for a time. In the long run the episode had been good for us both. And we had healed stronger at the break. That was then, this is now. That was us, not Mr. and Mrs. Doherty.

  “A thing is what it is, and not something else,” I said aloud in the rich silence of my apartment.

  I looked out at Marlborough Street for a while. At the wedge of the Public Garden I could see across Arlington Street. I sipped my drink. I rarely got drunk. But rarely is not never. Then I looked back at Pearl, who was now asleep.

  “Or maybe it is Margaret that I mourn for,” I said to her.

  13 .

  Imet ives in a place called Cornwall’s in Kenmore Square, where they had approximately four hundred billion kinds of beer on draft. I couldn’t try them all, so I settled on my favorite, Blue Moon Belgian White Ale. Ives had something dark and strong-smelling which I couldn’t identify.

  “Well, Lochinvar,” Ives said. “What maiden are we rescuing this time?”

  “I’m interested in what you know about an organization called Last Hope.”