Promised Land

by Robert B. Parker

  I took a shower and shaved and brushed my teeth with a fluoride toothpaste that tasted like Christmas candy. I put on my dark blue summer suit with brass buttons on the coat and vest, a pale blue oxford button-down shirt and a white tie with blue and gold stripes. Dark socks, black tassel loafers. I checked myself in the mirror. Clear-eyed, and splendid. I clipped my gun on under my coat. I really ought to get a dress gun sometime. A pearl handle perhaps, in a patent leather holster.

  “Stay close to me,” I said to Susan on the way out to the car. “The Hyannis Women’s Club may try to kidnap me and treat me as a sex object.”

  Susan put her arm through mine. “Death before dishonor,” she said.

  In the car Susan put a kerchief over her hair and I drove slowly with the top down to the inn. We had a Margarita in the bar and a table by the window where you could look out on the lake.

  We had a second Margarita while we looked at the menu. “No beer?” Susan asked.

  “Didn’t seem to go with the mood or the occasion,” I said. “I’ll have some with dinner.”

  I ordered raw oysters and lobster thermidor. Susan chose oysters and baked stuffed lobster.

  “It’s all falling into place, Suze,” I said. “I think I can do it.”

  “I hope so,” she said. “Have you seen Pam Shepard?”

  “Last night.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah, I slept in my apartment last night.”

  “Oh? How is she?”

  “Oh, nowhere near as good as you,” I said.

  “I don’t mean that. I mean how is her state of mind.”

  “Okay, I think you should talk with her. She’s screwed up pretty good, and I think she needs some kind of therapy.”

  “Why? You made a pass at her and she turned you down?”

  “Just talk with her. I figure you can direct her someplace good. She and her husband can’t agree on what she ought to be and she feels a lot of guilt about that.”

  Susan nodded. “Of course I’ll talk with her. When?”

  “After this is over, day after tomorrow it should be.”

  “I’ll be glad to.”

  “I didn’t make a pass at her.”

  “I didn’t ask,” Susan said.

  “It was a funny scene though. I mean we talked about it a lot. She’s not a fool, but she’s misled, maybe unadult, it’s hard to put my finger on it. She believes some very destructive things. What’s that Frost line, “He will not go behind his father’s saying’?”

  “‘Mending Wall,’ ”Susan said.

  “Yeah, she’s like that, like she never went beyond her mother’s sayings, or her father’s and when they didn’t work she still didn’t go beyond them. She just found someone with a new set of sayings, and never went beyond them.”

  “Rose and Jane?” Susan said.

  “You have a fine memory,” I said. “It helps make up for your real appearance.”

  “There’s a lot of women like that. I see a lot of them at school, and a lot of them at school parties. Wives of teachers and principals. I see a lot of them coming in with their daughters and I see a lot of daughters that will grow into that kind of woman.”

  “Frost was writing about a guy,” I said.

  “Yes, I know. I see.” The waitress brought our oysters. “It’s not just women, is it.”

  “No, ma’am. Old Harv is just as bad, just as far into the sayings of his father and just as blind to what’s beyond them as Pam is.”

  “Doesn’t he need therapy too?”

  The oysters were outstanding. Very fresh, very young. “Yeah, I imagine. But I think she might be brighter, and have more guts. I don’t think he’s got the guts for therapy. Maybe not the brains either. But I’ve only seen him under stress. Maybe he’s better than he looks,” I said. “He loves her. Loves the crap out of her.”

  “Maybe that’s just another saying of his father’s that he can’t go behind.”

  “Maybe everything’s a saying. Maybe there isn’t anything but saying. You have to believe in something. Loving the crap out of someone isn’t the worst one.”

  “Ah, you sweet talker you,” Susan said. “How elegantly you put it. Do you love the crap out of anyone?”

  “You got it, sweetheart,” I said.

  “Is that your Bogart impression again?”

  “Yeah, I work on it in the car mirror driving back and forth between here and Boston and New Bedford.”

  The oysters departed and the lobster came. While we worked on it I told Susan everything we had set up for next day. Few people can match Susan Silverman for lobster eating. She leaves no claw uncracked, no crevice unpried. And all the while she doesn’t get any on her and she doesn’t look savage.

  I tend to hurt myself when I attack a baked stuffed lobster. So I normally get thermidor, or salad, or stew or whatever they offered that had been shelled for me.

  When I got through talking Susan said, “It’s hard to keep it all in your head, isn’t it. So many things depend on so many other things. So much is unresolved and will remain so unless everything goes in sequence.”

  “Yeah, it’s nervous-making.”

  “You don’t seem nervous.”

  “It’s what I do,” I said. “I’m good at it. It’ll probably work.”

  “And if it doesn’t.”

  “Then it’s a mess and I’ll have to think of something else. But I’ve done what I can. I try not to worry about things I can’t control.”

  “And you assume if it breaks you can fix it, don’t you?”

  “I guess so. Something like that. I’ve always been able to do most of what I needed to do.”

  We each had a very good wild blueberry tart for dessert and retired to the bar for Irish coffee. On the ride back to the motel, Susan put her head back against the seat without the kerchief and let her hair blow about.

  “Want to go look at the ocean,” I said. “Yes,” she said.

  I drove down Sea Street to the beach and parked in the lot. It was late and there was no one there. Susan left her shoes in the car and we walked along the sand in the bright darkness with the ocean rolling in gently to our left. I took her hand and we walked in silence. Off somewhere to the right, inland, someone was playing an old Tommy Dorsey album and a vocal group was singing “Once in a while.” The sound in the late stillness drifted out across the water. Quaint and sort of old-fashioned now, and familiar.

  “Want to swim,” I said.

  We dropped our clothes in a heap on the beach and went into the ebony water and swam beside each other parallel to the shore perhaps a quarter of a mile. Susan was a strong swimmer and I didn’t have to slow down for her. I dropped back slightly so I could watch the white movement of her arms and shoulders as they sliced almost soundlessly through the water. We could still hear the stereo. A boy singer was doing “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” with a male vocal group for backing. Ahead of me Susan stopped and stood breast deep in the water. I stopped beside her and put my arms around her slick body. She was breathing deeply, though not badly out of breath, and I could feel her heart beating strongly against my chest. She kissed me and the salt taste of ocean mixed with the sweet taste of her lipstick. She pulled her head back and looked up at me with her hair plastered tight against her scalp. And the beads of sea water glistening on her face. Her teeth seemed very shiny to me, up close like that when she smiled.

  “In the water?” she said.

  “Never tried it in the water,” I said. My voice was hoarse again.

  “I’ll drown,” she said and turned and dove toward the shore. I plunged after her and caught her at the tidal margin and we lay in the wet sand and made love while Frank Sinatra and the Pied Pipers sang “There Are Such Things” and the waves washed about our legs. By the time we had finished the late-night listener had put on an Artie Shaw album and we were listening to “Dancing in the Dark.” We were motionless for a bit, letting the waves flow over us. The tide seemed to be coming in. A wave larger tha
n the ones before it broke over us, and for a moment we were underwater. We came up, both of us blowing water from our mouths, and looked at each other and began to laugh. “Deborah Kerr,” I said.

  “Burt Lancaster,” she said.

  “From here to eternity,” I said.

  “That far, at least,” she said. And we snuggled in the wet sand with the sea breaking over us until our teeth began to chatter.

  Chapter 25

  We got dressed and went back to the motel and took a long hot shower together and ordered a bottle of Burgundy from room service and got into bed and sipped the wine and watched the late movie, Fort Apache, one of my favorites, and fell asleep.

  In the morning we had breakfast in the room and when I left for Boston about eight-thirty, Susan was still in bed, drinking a cup of coffee and watching the Today program.

  The Suffolk County Court House in Pemberton Square is a very large gray building that’s hard to see because it’s halfway up the east flank of Beacon Hill and the new Government Center buildings shield it from what I still call Bowdoin Square and Scollay Square. I parked down in Bowdoin Square in front of the Saltonstall State Office Building and walked up the hill to the courthouse.

  Jim Clancy had an Errol Flynn mustache, and it looked funny because his face was round and shiny and his light hair had receded hastily from his forehead. Sylvia and McDermott were there already, along with a guy who looked like Ricardo Montalban and one who looked like a Fed. McDermott introduced me. Ricardo turned out in fact to be Bobby Santos who might someday be public safety commissioner. The Fed turned out to be a man named Klaus from Treasury.

  “We’ll meet some people from Chelsea over there,” McDermott said. “We’ve already filled Bobby in, and we’re about to brief these gentlemen.”

  McDermott was wearing a green T-shirt today, with a pocket over the left breast, and gray corduroy pants, and sandals. His gun was stuck in his belt under the T-shirt, just above his belt buckle, and bulged like a prosthetic device. Klaus, in a Palm Beach suit, white broadcloth shirt and polka dot bow tie, looked at him like a virus. He spoke to Sylvia.

  “What’s Spenser’s role in this?”

  Sylvia said, “Why not ask him?”

  “I’m asking you,” Klaus said.

  Sylvia looked at McDermott and raised his eyebrows. McDermott said, “Good heavens.”

  “Did I ever explain to you,” Sylvia said to McDermott, “why faggots wear bow ties?”

  I said to Klaus, “I’m the guy set it up. I’m the one knows the people and I’m the one that supervises the swap. I’m what you might call your key man.”

  Clancy said, “Go ahead, McDermott. Lay it out for us, we want to get the arrangements set.”

  McDermott lit a miserable-looking cigarette from the pack he kept in the pocket of his T-shirt.

  “Well,” he said, “me and Jackie was sitting around the squad room one day, thinking about crime and stuff, it was kind of a slow day, and here comes this key man here.”

  Klaus said, “For crissake, get on with it.”

  Santos said, “Rich.”

  McDermott said, “Yeah, yeah, okay, Bobby. I just don’t want to go too fast for the G-man.”

  “Say it all, Rich,” Santos said.

  He did. The plan called for two vans, produce trucks, with Sylvia, McDermott, Santos, Linhares, Klaus and several Chelsea cops and two Staties from Clancy’s staff to arrive in the area about five-thirty, park at a couple of unloading docks, one on one side and one on the other side of the restaurant, and await developments. When the time was right I’d signal by putting both hands in my hip pockets, and “Like locusts,” McDermott said, “me and Jackie and J. Edgar over here will be on’em.”

  Clancy opened a manila folder on his desk and handed around 8 x 10 glossy mug shots of King Powers. “That’s Powers,” Clancy said. “We have him on file.”

  “The two women,” I said, “I’ll have to describe.” And I did. Klaus took notes, Sylvia cleaned his fingers with the small blade of a pocketknife. The others just sat and looked at me. When I got through, Klaus said, “Good descriptions, Spenser.”

  McDermott and Sylvia looked at each other. Tomorrow it would be good if they were in one truck and Klaus was in another.

  Clancy said, “Okay, any questions.”

  Santos said, “Warrants?”

  Clancy said, “That’s in the works, we’ll have them ready for tomorrow.”

  Santos said, “How about entrapment.”

  “What entrapment,” Sylvia said. “We got a tip from an informant that an illegal gun sale was going down, we staked it out and we were lucky.”

  Clancy nodded. “It should be clean, all we’re arranging is the stakeout. We had nothing to do with Spenser doublecrossing them.”

  “One of my people’s going to be there, Pam Shepard. You’ll probably have to pick her up. If you do, keep her separate from the others and give her to me as soon as the others are taken away.”

  “Who in hell are you talking to, Spenser,” Klaus said. “You sound like you’re in charge of the operation.”

  McDermott said, “Operation, Jackie. That’s what we’re in, an operation.”

  Clancy said, “We agreed, Clyde. We trade the broad and her husband for Powers and the libbers.”

  “Clyde?” Sylvia said to McDermott.

  “Clyde Klaus?” McDermott’s face was beautiful with pleasure.

  Klaus’s face flushed slightly.

  “Clyde Klaus.” McDermott and Sylvia spoke in unison, their voices breaking on the very edge of a giggle.

  Santos said, “You two clowns wanna knock off the horseshit. We got serious work to do here. Cruz got you detached to me on this thing, you know. You listen to what I tell you.”

  Sylvia and McDermott forced their faces into solemnity behind which the giggles still smirked.

  “Anything else?” Clancy said. He turned his head in a half circle, covering all of us, one at a time. “Okay, let’s go look at the site.”

  “I’ll skip that one,” I said. “I’ll take a look at it later. But if any of the bad persons got it under what Klaus would call surveillance I don’t want to be spotted with a group of strange, fuzzy-looking men.”

  “And if they see you looking it over on your own,” Santos said, “they’ll assume you’re just careful. Like they are. Yeah. Good idea.”

  “You know the place?” Clancy said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, the Chelsea people are going to be under command of a lieutenant named Kaplan if you want to check on something over there.”

  I nodded. “Thanks, Clancy, nice to have met you gentlemen. See you tomorrow.” I went out of Clancy’s office. With the door ajar I reached back in with my right hand, gave it the thumbs-up gesture and said, “Good hunting, Clyde,” and left. Behind me I could hear Sylvia and McDermott giggling again, now openly. Klaus said, “Listen,” as I dosed the door.

  Outside I bought two hot dogs and a bottle of cream soda from a street vendor and ate sitting by the fountain in City Hall Plaza. A lot of women employed in the Government Center buildings were lunching also on the plaza and I ranked them in the order of general desirability. I was down to sixteenth when my lunch was finished and I had to go to work. I’d have ranked the top twenty-five in that time normally, but there was a three-way tie for seventh and I lost a great deal of time trying to resolve it.

  Chelsea is a shabby town, beloved by its residents, across the Mystic River from Boston. There was a scatter of junk dealers, rag merchants and wholesale tire outlets, a large weedy open area where a huge fire had swallowed half the city, leaving what must be the world’s largest vacant lot. On the northwest edge of the city where it abuts Everett is the New England Produce Center, one of two big market terminals on the fringes of Boston that funnel most of the food into the city. It was an ungainly place, next door to the Everett oil farm, but it sports a restaurant housed in an old railroad car. I pulled my car in by the restaurant and went in. It bother
ed me a little, as I sat at the counter and looked out at it, that my car seemed to integrate so aptly with me surroundings.

  I had a piece of custard pie and a cup of black coffee and looked things over. It was a largely idle gesture. There was no way I could know where the swap would take place. There wasn’t a hell of a lot for me to gain by surveying the scene. I had to depend on the buttons to show up, like they would when I put my hands in my hip pockets.

  The restaurant wasn’t very busy, more empty than full, and I glanced around to see if anyone was casing me. Or looked suspicious. No one was polishing a machine gun, no one was picking his teeth with a switchblade, no one was paying me any attention at all. I was used to it. I sometimes went days when people paid no attention to me at all. The bottom crust on my custard pie was soggy. I paid the bill and left.

  I drove back into Boston through Everett and Charlestown. The elevated had been dismantled in Charlestown and City Square looked strangely naked and vulnerable without it. Like someone without his accustomed eyeglasses. They could have left it up and hung plants from it.

  For reasons that have never been clear to me the midday traffic in Boston is as bad as the commuter traffic and it took me nearly thirty-five minutes to get to my apartment. Pam Shepard let me in looking neat but stir-crazy.

  “I was just having a cup of soup,” she said. “Want some?”

  “I ate lunch,” I said, “but I’ll sit with you and have a cup of coffee while you eat. We’re going to have to spend another night together.”

  “And?”

  “And then I think we’ll have it whipped. Then I think you can go home.”

  We sat at my counter and she had her tomato soup and I had a cup of instant coffee.

  “Home,” she said. “My God, that seems so far away.”

  “Homesick?”

  “Oh, yes, very much. But … I don’t know. I don’t know about going home. I mean, what has changed since I left.”