Now and Then

by Robert B. Parker

  “He’s an FBI agent,” Susan said. “He carries a gun. He comes from a culture that puts some premium on machismo.”

  I took a sip of my scotch and soda. Perfect.

  “He’s pretty tough,” I said. “He’s willing to take the shortterm pain for long-term gain.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning it would be a source of great pleasure for him to shoot Alderson dead,” I said. “But it would probably ruin his life. And the satisfaction of remembering the shooting wouldn’t be enough to compensate.”

  “Goodness,” Susan said. “You’ve given this some thought.”

  “Yes,” I said. “He’ll move on.”

  It was a Friday night. Susan had just come upstairs from her last patient of the week. She was wearing one of her subdued shrink outfits, a dark suit with a white shirt. The kind of outfit that says, It’s about you, not about me. She took the suit jacket off and hung it on the back of a chair. I smiled. She wouldn’t look subdued in a flour sack. The best she could do was to barely avoid fl amboyant.

  “So it’s over as far as you’re concerned,” she said.

  “The case?”

  “Yes.”

  She got a bottle of Riesling from the refrigerator and poured some for herself, and came and sat at the other end of the couch from me, with her legs tucked up under her.

  “Not entirely,” I said. “I’d like to know what Jordan and Alderson are doing, and whether the FBI has been compromised.”

  “Patriotism?” she said.

  “I don’t want to see this guy lose his job, too,” I said.

  “Because of his wife.”

  “Because he told things he shouldn’t have told to a woman he thought loved him,” I said.

  “They’d fi re him for that?”

  “You bet,” I said.

  “Maybe she did love him,” Susan said.

  “Funny way to show it,” I said.

  “Maybe she was doing what she had to,” Susan said.

  “Maybe we all are, all the time,” I said. “But if you really believe that, there’s not much point to either of our jobs.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Even if it’s an act of self-deception, it’s one we need.”

  I smiled.

  “So we aren’t exactly free,” I said, “even to believe in free will?”

  She stuck her tongue out at me.

  “Oh, pooh,” she said. “It’s an academic game. We both believe in individual responsibility, and we both know it.”

  I smiled at her.

  “And if we didn’t before, we do now,” I said.

  Pearl had been asleep in the big leather wing chair across from us. She rose quite suddenly and came and stared at us.

  “Has Timmy fallen down a well?” I said.

  “It’s suppertime,” Susan said. “She wants Daddy to feed her.”

  “I would have said she was looking at you,” I said.

  “Did you go to Harvard?” Susan said.

  “No.”

  “Did I?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “She wants her daddy to feed her.”

  “Sure,” I said, “now that you’ve explained it.”

  I got up and went to the kitchen and gave her a bowlful of dog food and came back to the couch. Pearl ate noisily. Susan 69 looked at me over her wineglass. She had big eyes, which she made up artfully.

  “I hope you don’t get mired in Doherty’s issues,” she said.

  “I hope I don’t get mired in anything,” I said.

  “It wouldn’t be too hard to do with Doherty,” she said. Pearl finished her supper and came in and looked at us again. I got up and gave her a cookie for dessert. While I was up I got myself a second drink and brought it back to the couch.

  “Because of what happened to us twenty years ago?” I said.

  “What do you think?” Susan said.

  Pearl came in from the kitchen and wedged herself between us on the couch and put her head on Susan’s thigh.

  “I’ve thought of it,” I said. “It resonates.”

  “Want to talk about it?” Susan said.

  “Sex might make it better,” I said.

  “You think sex makes everything better,” Susan said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Susan said. “Let’s see.”

  18 .

  I was in the shower the next morning when Susan came in wearing La Perla lingerie.

  “Vinnie’s on the phone,” she said.

  I got out and toweled off a little.

  “You want to stand and admire my glistening body while I take the call?” I said.

  “No,” she said and handed me the cordless phone and departed.

  I said, “Yeah?”

  Vinnie began without preamble.

  “I follow the professor the other night to Alderson’s place. She don’t meet him for drinks. She goes straight there. I see Hawk there, scouting Alderson. Professor’s got a suitcase. She goes in. I wait. Hour later she comes out. Still got the suitcase. She gets in her car. Drives about a hundred feet to the hotel next door. Parks in the garage. Checks in to the hotel. I wait awhile. She don’t come out, so I go home. Hawk’s still there. This morning I’m there when she comes out of the hotel. No suitcase. Gets in her car, drives to the college. Parks in the lot, gets out and starts for her building. Guy walks up behind her and shoots her in the back of the head. I put one in him. Go over and check. She’s dead. He’s dead. I get back in the car and watch for a little while. Nothing happens. No one comes out for a look. I don’t hear no sirens. So I screw. I’m in the parking lot at Dunkin’ Donuts down near Fresh Pond Circle.”

  I was quiet for a minute. Pearl wandered in to admire my glistening body. I patted her head while I thought.

  “Any witnesses?” I said.

  “No.”

  “Anybody looking out a window,” I said, “maybe got your plate numbers?”

  “Plates are bogus,” Vinnie said. “I put on new ones before I called you.”

  “How long since the shooting?”

  “Hour, probably,” Vinnie said.

  “Cops should be there,” I said.

  “Sooner or later,” Vinnie said.

  Pearl heard Susan moving around in the kitchen and hustled out of the bathroom to investigate. You could never be certain someone wouldn’t give you a second breakfast.

  “Recognize the shooter?” I said.

  “No. Little guy. Five-six, five-seven, skinny. Dark hair cut short. Maroon sweatsuit. Cheap black running shoes.”

  “Don’t be a fashion snob,” I said.

  “Don’t matter anyway,” Vinnie said. “He won’t be using them.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Eat a few donuts, drink some coffee. I’ll get back to you.”

  I walked into the bedroom and sat on the bed. Susan had made it already. My gun lying on the bedside table looked very much out of place. I had dried off so that my body no longer glistened. Susan would have to settle for quiet beauty. I dialed Hawk’s cell phone.

  “What’s up with Alderson?” I said.

  “In his hole,” Hawk said. “Been there since yesterday afternoon.”

  “People in or out?” I said.

  “Not that I can tell.”

  “Somebody aced Jordan Richmond,” I said.

  “And?” Hawk said.

  “Vinnie killed him.”

  “That’d be Vinnie,” Hawk said.

  I told him what I knew.

  “Vinnie got a whole assortment of license plates,” Hawk said. He laughed softly. “Clip-ons.”

  “Good to be prepared,” I said.

  “’Specially being Vinnie,” Hawk said. “Cops going to connect you to this.”

  “I know.”

  Susan came into the room fully dressed and saw me still naked sitting on the bed. She covered her eyes.

  “Ick,” she said.

  “You got an alibi?” Hawk said.

  “I do,” I said. “I was
seeing my shrink.”

  19.

  Epstein came nondescriptly into my office and sat in a client chair.

  “Coffee?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  I took a clean coffee cup from my desk drawer and handed it to him and pointed at the coffeemaker on top of my file cabinet. Epstein got up and helped himself.

  When he sat down again he said, “Three days ago the wife of one of my agents got shot to death in the parking lot of Concord College.”

  I nodded.

  “She used her maiden name, Jordan Richmond,” Epstein said.

  “In her circles I think they say birth name, ” I said.

  “In her circles there aren’t any maidens,” Epstein said.

  “Another man, whom we can’t identify, was killed with her, and Ms. Richmond’s husband, Dennis Doherty, is missing.”

  I nodded.

  “Thing is,” Epstein said, “Ms. Richmond was killed with a Russian-made nine-millimeter which was found at the scene. The guy who was killed with her was done by a nine too, but not the same one.”

  I nodded.

  “The Russian piece had the dead guy’s fingerprints on it,”

  Epstein said. “Powder residue on his right hand and forearm.”

  “So he shot her,” I said.

  “Probably.”

  “Who shot him?” I said.

  “Don’t know.”

  “And you can’t ID the guy shot her?”

  “Nope. No fingerprints in the system. No DNA in the system. Nothing on him. No driver’s license. Didn’t have a wallet. Didn’t have any money. No car. No subway tokens.”

  “So how’d he get there?”

  “Exactly,” Epstein said.

  “And how was he going to get away?”

  “We speculate somebody delivered him and was waiting to pick him up when something went wrong. So the pickup scooted.”

  “Maybe he was the other shooter,” I said.

  “Guy aces Ms. Richmond and his partner aces him?”

  “They were pretty careful that he have no identity,” I said.

  “We talked to everyone at the college who knew Ms. Richmond,” Epstein said.

  “Good thinking,” I said.

  “Seems she was keeping company with a guy named

  Alderson.”

  “Whoops,” I said.

  Epstein sipped his coffee and waited.

  “Okay,” I said. “Dennis Doherty hired me to find out if his wife was having an affair. She was. I told him.”

  “And he believed you,” Epstein said.

  “I had audiotapes of her and Alderson in, ah, flagrante.”

  “And he believed those.”

  “Yes.”

  Epstein grimaced.

  “He listened?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hard to hear,” Epstein said.

  “It was,” I said.

  “How did he react?”

  “Like he’d been gutted, wanted to kill the guy.”

  “Not his wife?”

  “No,” I said. “He wouldn’t kill his wife.”

  “Because?”

  “He loved her.”

  “Lotta guys kill the woman that cheated on them,” Epstein said.

  “Not if they love them,” I said.

  Epstein looked at me, thoughtfully. Then he shook his head slowly.

  “You actually believe that,” he said.

  “You don’t kill someone you love,” I said.

  Epstein shrugged.

  “Besides,” I said. “Looks like you know who killed the woman.”

  “Doesn’t mean Doherty didn’t contract him.”

  “You think he did?”

  “No,” Epstein said. “Doherty was much too straight ahead. He was going to kill her he’d have done it himself.”

  I nodded.

  “He had it under control last time I saw him,” I said. “Said he wouldn’t kill the guy either. Said he wouldn’t let them flush his life.”

  “You think it was real?” Epstein said.

  “We talked about it. He’ll go to his grave wishing he’d put a couple into Alderson. But he’ll know he was right not to.”

  Epstein gave me the long thoughtful look again, but he didn’t comment.

  Instead, he said, “They been having trouble for long?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Or maybe they had, but he refused to know it.”

  “So this would have come as a shock.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I gather you weren’t tailing the broad any longer,” Epstein said.

  “No,” I said, “I wasn’t.”

  “You give Dennis the audiotape you played for him?” Epstein said.

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t remember it being inventoried,” he said.

  “You’ve tossed his place?”

  “We’ve looked around,” Epstein said. “We’ll look again.”

  He got up and went to the fi le cabinet and got more coffee.

  “Got any thoughts on whether he got compromised?” Epstein said.

  “Nothing I didn’t tell you at the Holiday Inn bar,” I said.

  “Anything about Alderson?” Epstein said.

  I shook my head.

  “Wasn’t that interested in Alderson,” I said. “I was hired to be interested in Jordan Richmond.”

  “You got any idea why she got killed?” Epstein said.

  “No.”

  “Or who the killer was?”

  “No.”

  “Or if somebody hired him?”

  I shook my head just for a change of pace. It was as if Epstein was running down a checklist in his head.

  “And if somebody did hire him,” Epstein said, “who that might be?”

  “Nope.”

  “Or where Dennis Doherty is?”

  “Not a clue,” I said.

  “Sadly,” Epstein said, “me either.”

  20.

  It had been an odd fall. It rained every day for about six weeks, and now, two weeks before Thanksgiving, it was sunny, and temperate enough to sit on a bench in the Public Garden and have lunch. Some of the trees were leafless, but many of them still had a full complement. Yellow mostly, with some red and now and then some green.

  “You should drop Alderson for the moment,” I said to Hawk.

  “Epstein will be all over him.”

  Hawk nodded. He ate a small plastic forkful of curried chicken salad from his plastic takeout dish.

  “For the moment?” he said.

  “We might want to revisit him later,” I said. “Depends on developments.”

  “Why not just leave it be?” Vinnie said. “You got nobody paying you.”

  Vinnie had a meatball sub which, because his movements were so precise, he was able to eat without getting any on his shirt. I could get chewing gum on my shirt.

  “Spenser don’t leave things be,” Hawk said. “You know that.”

  “Why don’t he?” Vinnie said.

  “I don’t know,” Hawk said.

  He looked at me.

  “Why don’t you?” he said.

  “Something buried in my deep past,” I said.

  “What?” Vinnie said.

  “That mean he don’t know either,” Hawk said. “But I promise you he ain’t gonna let this alone.”

  “You know that,” Vinnie said.

  “Ah do,” Hawk said.

  “How you know.”

  “He gonna think she died on his watch.”

  “He wasn’t even there,” Vinnie said. “Fuck, if you want to talk about that, she died on my watch.”

  “That bother you?” Hawk said.

  “Bother? No.” Vinnie was puzzled. “I wasn’t protecting her. . . . I nailed the guy clipped her.”

  “He’s different than us,” Hawk said.

  “Could you guys discuss me on your own time?”

  “’Course not,” Hawk said.

  I laughed.

  “The gu
y you clipped,” I said to Vinnie. “How did he get there?”

  “No car?” Vinnie said.

  “No car,” I said. “No car keys. FBI and the Cambridge cops went through every car parked in the lot or on the street. Identifi ed all the owners. None of them was your guy.”

  Vinnie shrugged and took another precise drip-free bite of his sandwich.

  “Subway.”

  “No wallet. No money. No tokens. No pass. Even if he used a token to get there. How does he leave?”

  Vinnie chewed thoughtfully for a moment.

  When he was through he said, “You don’t want to hit somebody like that and have nowhere to go.”

  Hawk nodded.

  “Crowded area, maybe,” Vinnie said. “You pop the mark and mingle with the crowd. But not here. Nobody’s gonna hit somebody in the bright morning and plan to stroll away in Kendall Square.”

  “Don’t like to depend on no subway either,” Hawk said.

  “Be a driver,” Vinnie said.

  “See anybody?”

  “No,” Vinnie said. “Wasn’t looking for anybody.”

  “Untraceable piece,” Hawk said. “No ID, no money, no means of transportation.”

  “Had to have a driver,” Vinnie said. “When he saw the shooter go down, driver took off.”

  “Somebody going to a lot of trouble, keep him a secret,”

  Hawk said. “Case he got caught.”

  “How could they be sure he wouldn’t talk, if he got caught?”

  I said.

  None of us knew.

  “So you going to chase this thing?” Vinnie said.

  “Probably,” I said.

  “You know why?” Vinnie said.

  “Because I can’t sing and dance,” I said.

  21.

  Epstein called me from his car.

  “Doherty’s dead,” Epstein said. “Want to ride along?”

  I did.

  There were a couple of cruisers, and a couple of unmarked cars and a coroner’s wagon parked near the water behind UMass, Boston. Doherty was not recognizable, a sodden something wedged in among some boulders. Frank Belson was there.

  “Been in the water awhile,” he said. “Hard to say where he went in.”

  “Cause of death?” Epstein said.

  “Have to wait till they open him up,” Belson said. “Body’s been banging against rocks and things.”

  “Any estimate when?”