Sudden Mischief

by Robert B. Parker

  "But human behavior doesn't get you a conviction. You have to have hard evidence."

  "True," I said. "But the behavior tells you where to look, or, sometimes, what to manufacture."

  "Manufacture?"

  "Cops do it. I'm not saying it's right, but they know somebody did a thing and can't prove it, so they manufacture something that will prove it."

  "If they catch Brad, do you think he'll implicate Gavin and Wechsler?"

  "You saw him tonight. He'd implicate his mother," I said.

  "And if they don't catch him? Can you prove anything against the other two?"

  I smiled. It was my moment. I took a small blue computer disk out of my shirt pocket and held it up.

  "It was in your bedroom, under some sweaters," I said. "I knew he'd have it with him, and if he didn't have it in his pocket, it had to be here someplace."

  "When did you find it?"

  "While you were freeing Pearl from the office," I said.

  "And you didn't give it to the police?"

  "I want to look at it first," I said. "If it's what I think it is, I'll give it to them tomorrow."

  "And if it is what you think it is, it will convict them."

  "Yes," I said.

  I put the disk back in my shirt pocket.

  "So you've got them all," Susan said.

  "I think so," I said.

  Susan raised her glass and I touched the rim of mine to hers. We were quiet. The blue light had darkened as the evening drifted toward night. The whisky made my stomach warm. I could feel myself loosen slowly. Sometimes the only way I knew I was tense was feeling not tense afterwards. Susan took a short drink of whisky and let it slide down her throat and looked at me with her eyes simultaneously dark and bright. I wondered how she did that.

  "You were careful of me when Brad was here," Susan said.

  She had a finger of whisky in the bottom of a short thick glass and she swirled it a little as she talked.

  "Yeah?"

  "You stepped back as much as you could," she said. "You let me do it."

  "Who better?" I said.

  "You know what I mean. You didn't demean me by protecting me."

  "This wasn't about me," I said.

  "Well, the thing is, of course, that it was about you too. It was about what a fool I was to think I could help Brad. And, of course, my idea of helping him was to ask you to do it."

  I took two ice cubes from a bowl on the counter and dropped them into my glass and splashed a swallow or so of whisky on it. I looked at Susan's glass and she shook her head.

  "I like it when I can help you," I said.

  "But to ask you to help my ex-husband, whom, since you have the most normal emotional responses of anyone I know, you'd have preferred to drown…" She shook her head. "Did you want to shoot him when you had the chance?"

  "You bet," I said.

  "You could have shot him when he reached for his gun. It would have been self-defense. No one, me included, could have faulted you."

  "I know."

  "So why didn't you?"

  "If I shot everybody I wanted to," I said, "I'd go broke buying ammunition."

  Susan swished her whisky some more and took a sip of it and held the glass up and looked at the early evening light through it. Then she put it back on the counter.

  "So why didn't you?" she said.

  "Well, I try not to kill people I don't have to," I said.

  "I understand that. But I have also seen you very aggressive with people who have only been mildly disrespectful to me. There was none of that here."

  "No."

  "You stayed out of it as much as you could."

  "Yes."

  "Because the only way for me to come out of this without feeling like a perfect jerk was to confront him myself, and be the one to decide what to do."

  "I think perfect jerk is a bit harsh."

  She shook her head impatiently. "And you let me do that as much as you could, knowing he had already killed two people."

  "Seemed a good idea at the time," I said.

  "But how do you know? How can you know things like that? A man like you."

  I loved her seriousness. I loved that she was serious about me. And that we were talking intensely about me. I was having a very good time.

  "I learned a lot of what I know from you," I said.

  "That's a lovely thing to say."

  "It's true," I said.

  "And I've learned a great deal from you. " she said.

  "We stick with each other long enough, and we may get smart as hell," I said.

  Susan reached out with her left hand and took hold of mine. We sat across from each other and held hands and drank our whisky. It was dark now. I could barely see her across from me. But I could feel her intangible energy.

  After a while Susan said, "Even if we don't."

  And after another while I said, "Even if."

  And then we were perfectly quiet, nearly invisible in the dark.