Widow’s Walk

by Robert B. Parker

  I nodded. Old Mary. Dumb as a flounder. As opposed to me, the brainy crimebuster, who seemed to be losing brain cells every day he was on this case.

  “If Nathan was gay, what do you suppose Mary did for a sex life?”

  Larson laughed again. Having committed to the conversation, he seemed to have jumped in feet first.

  “Some of us can go both ways,” he said.

  “Was Nathan one who could?”

  “I don’t think so,” Graff said, a little singsong in his voice.

  “So did Mary have any other possibilities for a sex life?”

  “I hope so,” Graff said.

  “And if she did, would you have any candidates?”

  “For fucking Mary?” Graff said. “Hard to narrow it down.”

  “She was promiscuous?”

  “Oh,” Graff said. “I don’t know, really. I was being facetious.”

  “So when you’re not being facetious,” I said, “who would be a good candidate to, ah, help Mary out.”

  “I’d say,” Larson almost giggled, “I’d say the fickle finger of suspicion points at Roy.”

  “Roy Levesque?” I said. “The former boyfriend?”

  “Maybe once and future,” Graff said.

  “Any dates and places?” I said.

  “No. Just a guess.”

  “Okay. You know anything about Smith’s banking business?”

  “No.” Larson was working on his fourth glass of Chablis. “That’s not the business he and I shared an interest in.”

  “Soldiers Field Development?” I said.

  Graff shook his head.

  I said, “Marvin Conroy? Felton Shawcross? Amy Peters? Jack DeRosa? Kevin McGonigle? Margaret McDermott?”

  “I don’t know any of those people,” he said. “Conroy and Shawcross sound familiar. They might have been on Mary’s invitation list. The others…” He shrugged, putting a lot into it.

  “You have any idea,” I said, “who killed Nathan Smith?”

  “None,” he said.

  He stood. So I stood.

  “Thanks for lunch,” he said. “I really do have to get back to the office.”

  We shook hands. I watched him go. I thought of Jay Gatsby. Somewhere back there, when he was a kid, Joey Bucci had invented just the kind of Larson Graff that a kid was likely to invent, and to that invention he was remaining faithful. I paid the check and when I left, Hawk eased off his bar stool and left with me. Which was comforting.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Hawk and I reported in to Rita Fiore. Actually I was reporting to Rita, Hawk was along to help keep me from getting shot. Rita didn’t mind. I knew she wouldn’t. Hawk fascinated her. Among other things he was male, which gave him a running start on fascinating Rita. “I think I want a raise,” I said.

  “And you don’t want to take it out in trade?” Rita said.

  “Perhaps my associate,” I said.

  Hawk smiled serenely.

  “You think?” Rita said.

  “One never knows,” Hawk said. “Do one.”

  “Keep me in mind,” Rita said, and to me, “Why do you need a raise?”

  “Wear and tear on my brain,” I said. “Every time I turn over a rock, there’s three more rocks.”

  “I’ll help you,” Rita said. “Tell me about it.”

  She sat back in her big leather swivel chair and crossed her admirable legs and listened, while I told her about it. As far as I could tell, when she slipped into her professional mode, she banished all thoughts of sexual excess.

  “Okay,” she said when I finished. “Obviously there’s something going on between Pequod Bank, and Soldiers Field Development, and Marvin Conroy.”

  “Yep.”

  “And there’s probably something going on among Larson Graff, and Mary Smith, and the boyfriend, whatsisname.”

  “Roy Levesque.”

  “And maybe Ann Kiley is in there somewhere.”

  “Or maybe she’s just Conroy’s girlfriend and loved not wisely but too well,” I said.

  “Don’t we all,” Rita said. She looked at Hawk. “Except maybe you,” she said.

  Hawk smiled at her. Rita swung her crossed leg thoughtfully. She was wearing a red suit with a just barely street-legal skirt. The suit went surprisingly well with her red hair.

  “You’ve got a bank and a development company in some sort of uncertain relationship,” I said. “That raise any flags?”

  Rita nodded. “I’ll talk with Abner Grove,” she said. “He’s our tax and finance guy. See what he can find out.”

  “It may not help your client,” I said.

  “If I am going to put up the best defense I can, I need to know as much as I can. I’m not obliged to use it all. What you can do is come at this from the other end.”

  “Mary, Larson, and Roy,” I said.

  “Sounds like a singing group.”

  “Maybe it will be,” I said.

  “So you start from your end, and we’ll start from ours, and maybe we’ll meet in the middle.”

  “Or maybe we won’t,” I said.

  “Coincidences do exist.”

  “They do,” I said.

  “You think they exist in this case?”

  “No.”

  Rita eyed Hawk, who appeared to be thinking of faraway places. I knew he wasn’t. Hawk always knew everything that was going on around him.

  “What do you think about coincidence,” Rita said to him.

  “Hard to prepare for,” Hawk said.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  Hawk and I drove down to Franklin in Hawk’s Jaguar. “Figure you show up in a decent ride,” Hawk said, “they be impressed and tell you everything.”

  “You bet,” I said. “That’s how it usually works.”

  We found Roy Levesque at the lumberyard where he worked. He wore jeans and work boots and a plaid shirt that hung outside his pants.

  “Whaddya want,” Levesque said.

  The yard was loud with the sound of a band saw, and busy with trucks loading lumber and Sheetrock.

  “See the car I came in?” I said.

  “I don’t give a fuck what car you came in,” Roy said.

  I looked at Hawk. He shrugged.

  “When’s the last time you saw Mary Smith?” I said.

  “Mary who?”

  I sighed.

  “Mary Toricelli,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Why not?” I said.

  “I don’t know when I seen her, all right?”

  “Not all right,” I said. “I’ve been told you and she are still intimate.”

  “Huh?”

  “He mean you and she still fucking,” Hawk said gently. “He just talk kind of funny.”

  “Hey,” Levesque said. “That’s no way to talk about somebody.”

  “Just trying to find a language you’re comfortable with,” I said. “What about you and Mary?”

  “Who told you that?”

  “People who know,” I said.

  “So if they know so fucking much, how come you’re asking me?”

  “I like to confirm at the source.”

  “Huh?”

  “He mean ask the one fucking her,” Hawk said.

  “Hey, pal, watch your freaking mouth,” Levesque said.

  Hawk looked at me. “Pal,” he said.

  I nodded. “Limited vocabulary,” I said. “I’m sure he meant no harm.”

  “Hey, I’m trying to work here,” Levesque said. “You guys are on private property.”

  “Oh my,” Hawk said.

  Levesque glanced at Hawk. Hawk made him uneasy.

  “My boss sees me talking like this, I could get fired.”

  I looked around. We were near the corner of a big corrugated-metal lumber shed.

  I said to Levesque, “Let’s go around the corner then.”

  Hawk took hold of his left arm and I his right and we moved him pretty quickly around the corner so we were standing out of sight between t
he back of the warehouse and a hill full of weeds. We banged him hard against the back of the shed, and stepped back.

  “What’s going on with you and Mary,” I said.

  Levesque put his hand under his shirttail and came out with a gun. It was a squat black semiautomatic.

  “You motherfuckers get away from me,” he said.

  Hawk smiled. “You not saying it right,” he said. “Correct pronunciation be muthafuckas.”

  The gun wasn’t cocked. On a semiautomatic you have to cock it for the first shot.

  “Look at me,” I said.

  He looked and Hawk took the gun out of his hand. Hawk is very quick.

  “Don’t see so many of these,” Hawk said. “Forty-caliber.”

  “Forty?”

  “Yep.”

  “For crissake,” I said.

  I put my hand out. Hawk gave me the gun and as he did, Levesque turned and ran.

  “You want him?” Hawk said.

  I shook my head. I was looking at the gun.

  “Nathan Smith was killed with a forty-caliber slug,” I said.

  “There’s more than one forty-caliber around,” Hawk said.

  “I know,” I said. “Still, most people don’t own one. Most people buy thirty-eights or comnines.”

  “If he bought it,” Hawk said.

  “Still a large coincidence,” I said. “Smith’s killed by a sort of unusual gun and one of the principals turns up with a gun that’s the same kind of sort of unusual.”

  “Gonna take it to Quirk,” Hawk said.

  “I am.”

  “Then we know,” Hawk said.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  I had a picture of Marvin Conroy that Rita had gotten me from the Pequod Bank. Race Witherspoon and I took the picture down to Nellie’s and showed it to the third-floor bartender, whose name was Rick. The place was nearly empty. Two or three guys sat around at separate tables, and a party of four were drinking tequila sunrises at a round table near the stairs. Rick was a tall thin guy with his thinning hair cut very short. He wore round eyeglasses with gold frames. There was a blue-and-red sea serpent tattooed on his left forearm. He looked at the picture of Conroy for a while, then looked at Race.

  “He’s cool,” race said.

  I smiled in a cool way. Rick studied me for a minute.

  “Yeah, he was in here.”

  “You remember him?”

  “Yeah, sure. He was a straight guy, and he was asking me about Nathan Smith. And he had attitude.”

  “How could you tell he was straight?” I said.

  Rick looked at me and snorted.

  “Oh,” I said. “That’s how. What did you tell him?”

  “I told him I didn’t know Nathan Smith.”

  “He press you?”

  “Yes.”

  “He say what he wanted?”

  “No. I thought he might be some detective Smith’s wife hired.”

  “Why?”

  “Some of the men who come in here, they’re married and their wives are starting to wonder about them.”

  “He ask about Nathan’s sex life?”

  Rick shook his head. “Just wanted to know if he came in here often.”

  “If he came here often,” Race said, “you wouldn’t have to ask about his sex life. It’s why people come here often.”

  “Looking for young men,” I said.

  “The younger the better.”

  “So if you knew Smith came here often, you’d surmise he was gay.”

  Rick looked at me. “And you’d probably know the Pope was Catholic,” he said.

  “He talk with anybody else?” I said.

  “He tried.”

  “And?”

  “Nobody here is going to talk with a guy like that.”

  “He hang around?” I said.

  “Yeah. I got off work early one night,” Rick said, “and I saw him outside.”

  “What was he doing?”

  “Just sitting in his car outside the club. Another car went by in the other direction and the headlights shined on him.”

  “Was Nathan Smith here the night this guy was outside?” I said.

  “I don’t know… yes he was. Because I thought, ”I wonder if he’s waiting for Nathan.“”

  “Which he was,” Race said.

  I nodded. “And whom he probably saw,” I said.

  “So he knew he was queer,” Race said.

  “Conroy must have had some reason to think Smith was queer,” I said. “Otherwise why would he come here?”

  “And why here?” Race said. “Why not visit all the many gay places, the come-what-may places?”

  “Maybe he did.”

  “We can ask,” Race said.

  “You know them all?”

  “Known them all already,” Race said, “known them all.”

  “Strayhorn,” I said, “and Eliot in the same conversation.”

  “I’m not just another pretty face,” Race said.

  We spent the next eight hours moving from gay bar to gay bar. No one else had encountered Marvin Conroy that they could remember. Near midnight we sat at the bar of a place in the South End called Ramrod and drank beer.

  “So Conroy had an idea what he’d find out before he went to Nellie’s,” I said.

  “Apparently,” Race said. “He doesn’t seem to have gone anywhere else.”

  “Have we missed any?”

  “None that a guy like Conroy would have known about,” Race said.

  “So who told him?” I said.

  “Am I a detective,” Race said.

  “I’m beginning to wonder the same thing about me,” I said.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  Quirk called me in the morning, at home, while I was still lying in bed thinking about orange juice. “The gun you gave me killed Nathan Smith,” Quirk said.

  “Better to be lucky than good,” I said.

  “Good to be both,” Quirk said. “Franklin cops picked up Levesque last night. Belson and I are going out to talk with him. Want to ride along?”

  “Yes.”

  “Be out front of your place in half an hour.”

  I had time for orange juice and a shower. As I went out my front door I was thinking of coffee. Belson was driving. Quirk sat up front beside him. I got in the back. Quirk handed me a cup of coffee over the seat back. Salvation.

  “Where’s Hawk?”

  “I figured I’d be safe with you guys,” I said.

  “Serve and protect,” Quirk said.

  “You got anything on DeRosa yet?”

  “Nope. Slugs came from two different guns. Nine-millimeter and forty-five. Both guns shot both people. Often.”

  “How many rounds?”

  “Twenty-seven.”

  “Sure did want them dead,” I said.

  “Maybe they liked the work,” Belson said.

  “Maybe he had two guns,” I said.

  “Whichever,” Belson said.

  I drank my coffee.

  We talked to Levesque in a cell at the Franklin Police Station. He didn’t think he was tough anymore. He sat on the bunk in jeans and an undershirt, no belt and no shoelaces, hunched forward, his forearms resting limply against his thighs, his hands dangling. Quirk stood in front of him, hands in his pockets, all the time in the world. Belson leaned on one wall. I leaned on the other. A Franklin cop stood outside the cell, with a guy from the Norfolk County DA’S office.

  Quirk said, “You know who I am, Roy?”

  He sounded friendly. Levesque nodded.

  “You know why you’re here?”

  “Something about a gun,” Levesque mumbled.

  Quirk nodded at me.

  “This good citizen took a gun away from you that was used to kill a man in Boston.”

  “I didn’t kill no one.”

  “I believe you, Roy. And I know Sergeant Belson believes you, and I’m pretty sure Mr. Spenser believes you. But I’m not positive that the assistant DA believes you. And I’m not
sure a judge and jury would believe you, and I’m not so sure but that you might go down for it.”

  “Honest to God, sir, I didn’t kill nobody.”

  Quirk nodded thoughtfully and hit Levesque with his open hand hard, across the face. Quirk is a big man. Levesque rocked back and almost fell. He put both hands up on top of his head and tried to hide behind his forearms.

  “Don’t lie to me,” Quirk said to Levesque without emotion.

  Belson said, “Captain.”

  The assistant DA, whose name was Santoro, said, “Captain, Jesus Christ.”

  Quirk ignored them. He said, “Tell me about the gun, Roy.”

  Levesque kept his arms up, protecting his face.

  “I don’t know anything,” he said.

  Quirk smiled and leaned forward and slapped Levesque hard on the back of the head. Levesque moved his hands to try to protect himself and doubled up, his elbows touching his knees.

  Santoro said, “Captain, we can’t have that. I don’t know what you do in Boston, but in Norfolk County, we can’t have that.”

  Quirk paid no attention. He said, “Tell me about the gun, Roy.”

  The Franklin cop said, “I don’t want to be a part of this.”

  “You’re right,” Santoro said. “I don’t either.”

  They both turned and walked down the corridor.

  “I’m sorry, Captain,” Belson said. “No disrespect, but I can’t watch this.”

  “Me either,” I said.

  Quirk said nothing. Levesque huddled on his bunk. Belson and I went out of the cell and closed the door. I saw Levesque hunch his shoulders up a little tighter. I followed Belson down the hallway.

  “Coffee in the squad room,” the Franklin cop said.

  We went in. Santoro was there already, sitting at the end of a Formica table with a cup of coffee. Belson and I got some and sat at the table with him. He had gotten the last donut. The empty box sat evocatively on the table.

  “I hear you know Rita Fiore,” Santoro said.

  “You work for the Norfolk DA when she was there?” I said.

  Santoro looked reminiscent. “I did,” he said.

  “I’m working for her now,” I said.

  “Getting any fringe benefits?” Santoro said.

  “Rita and I are friends,” I said with dignity.

  “And Rita’s got no enemies,” Santoro said.