A Catskill Eagle

by Robert B. Parker

  Susan greased the inside of a loaf pan, using one of those spray cans. She shook her head as she sprayed it. Then she put the can down and the loaf pan and turned and leaned her hips against the counter with her hands resting palm down on it. Her lower lip was very full. Her eyes were very blue and large.

  “He said no,” she said.

  The connection between us was palpable. It seemed almost to seal away the rest of the world, as if we were talking inside one of those sterile rooms that immune deficient children grow up in.

  “That simple,” she said. “I couldn’t do something he told me not to.”

  “What if you had?”

  “Gone away? Even though he’d said no?”

  “Yes. Would he or his people have prevented you?”

  I could see Susan’s top teeth, white against her tan, as she worried her lower lip. I drank some of my coffee.

  “No,” she said.

  She stirred her batter once and then poured it into her loaf pan, scraping the sides of the bowl to get it all.

  “That’s when I went back to Dr. Hilliard,” she said.

  “Back?”

  “Yes. I started seeing her not long after I left Boston. But Russell didn’t like it. He doesn’t approve of psychotherapy. So I stopped.”

  Susan held the loaf pan as she talked, as if she’d forgotten it.

  “But when I couldn’t go to New York, and I realized I couldn’t leave him and I couldn’t move in with Russell, and I knew that I couldn’t give you up, I went back to her.”

  She looked down at the loaf pan and stared at it for a moment, and then opened the oven and put the pan in and closed the door.

  “And Russell?” I said.

  “He was angry when he found out.”

  “And?”

  Susan shrugged. “Russell loves me. Whatever he may be elsewhere he has always been loving to me. I know you have other opinions of him, but…”

  “Both our opinions are rooted in our experience,” I said. “Both of them are true, it’s just that we’ve had different experiences.”

  She smiled at me again. “It can’t be pleasant for you to hear me tell you that he’s loving,” she said.

  “I can hear what is,” I said. “All of what is. Whatever it is.”

  Susan took a Cranshaw melon from the counter and began cutting it into crescents.

  “Dr. Hilliard has shown me that what I feel for Russell, and what he feels for me, is not simply affection. When I met him he appealed to me most because he was so entirely in love with me. Anything I wanted, anything I said. He was like a child. He just loved me to death.”

  “Sort of dangerous child,” I said.

  “Yes,” Susan said. “It was part of his appeal.”

  “The kind of love you deserved?”

  Susan nodded.

  “You found a way to both leave me,” I said, “and punish yourself for leaving me.”

  Susan scraped melon seeds from the fresh-cut crescents into the sink.

  “And Russell,” I said.

  “I’m older than he is,” Susan said.

  I nodded. Susan rinsed the seeds into the disposal with the spray attachment.

  “And I belonged, for lack of a better word, to another man,” she said.

  “Me,” I said.

  “Un huh.”

  “So what,” I said.

  “What other woman in his life would that describe?”

  I thought of Tyler Costigan sitting in her elegant Luke Front penthouse talking of Russell’s “fat little momma.”

  I drank a little more of my coffee. “Hello Jocasta,” I said.

  Susan nodded.

  “Dr. Hilliard convinced me that I needed to be alone, to experience myself, to stay away from you and to stay away from Russell.”

  “But you couldn’t quite manage on your own, so you called Hawk,” I said.

  “I was afraid,” Susan said. “I wasn’t sure Russell would let me. I think if I had told him I was going away he’d have done nothing to prevent me. But he wasn’t going to let anyone help me do it.”

  “So Hawk came,” I said.

  “And you know the rest,” Susan said. She placed each crescent on the chopping block and carefully cut the rind away.

  “Well, some of the rest,” I said.

  Susan nodded. She found some green seedless grapes in the refrigerator and rinsed them under the faucet in the sink and put them in a colander to drip dry.

  “I don’t understand it all yet either,” Susan said. “I need to get back to San Francisco and see Dr. Hilliard.”

  “Someone around here wouldn’t do it?” I said.

  “We’d have to start over,” Susan said. “No. I’m too far along with Dr. Hilliard to leave her now.” Susan took a wedge of Muenster cheese out of the refrigerator and began to slice it thin with a. big-bladed carving knife.

  “Can you sit tight until we get this thing settled with Jerry Costigan?”

  “I won’t sit tight,” Susan said. “I will help you settle it.”

  I nodded. “Yes,” I said. “That would be good.” I could smell the corn bread beginning to bake. Susan arranged her slices of cheese alternately on a large plate with her crescents of Cranshaw melon. She left the middle open.

  “I don’t know when I’ll be able to sleep with you,” she said.

  “Champagne’s as sweet,” I said, “whenever you drink it.”

  Susan put the green grapes in the center of the plate. Hawk came from the bedroom still wearing his Walkman, poured some more coffee in his cup, looked at each of us and went back in the bedroom. Susan poured the rest of the pot into my cup and made some more.

  “How are you going to find him?” she said.

  “Rachel Wallace is coming up later and we’re going to talk about that. She’s been doing research for me. It’s how we found him the first time.”

  “He’s an absolutely awful man,” Susan said. She opened the oven door and looked in carefully, studied the corn bread and then closed the door and straightened up.

  “And his wife is worse,” she said.

  “Russell’s wife said somewhat the same thing,” I said.

  “You’ve seen her?”

  “Yes,” I said. “She said Mrs. Costigan senior jerked her husband and son around any way she wanted.”

  Susan nodded. “I have never met Tyler. She must hate me.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “When Rachel Wallace comes,” Susan said, “I’ll sit in. Perhaps I can help by comparing notes with her.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Susan checked the oven. This time she took the corn bread out and sat it on a rack. She set out three plates and knives and forks and white paper napkins. She put a hot plate out on the counter too, and put the second pot of coffee on it. Then using potholders she inverted the loaf pan and gently eased the corn bread onto a platter and put it on the counter next to the coffee.

  “You’re willing to help me kill Russell’s father?” I said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “You understand why?” I said.

  “Partly,” Susan said. She walked to the door of the bedroom. “Breakfast,” she said to Hawk. He appeared in the door minus his Walkman.

  “Could y’all put it on a tray, missy, and bring it in to me?” he said.

  Susan smiled with all her warmth and force. “No,” she said.

  CHAPTER 41

  RACHEL WALLACE ARRIVED BY CAB AT TEN twenty in the morning carrying a big briefcase. She put her arms around Susan and kissed her on the cheek.

  “It is lovely to see you again,” she said. Susan nodded.

  “How are you,” Rachel Wallace said.

  “Better than I was,” Susan said.

  Rachel Wallace turned to me and said, “I have spent the entire summer studying Jerry Costigan. I suspect there is no one anywhere, including Mrs. Costigan, who knows him as I do.”

  “It’s for damn sure you’re ahead of our crack government intellig
ence team,” I said.

  “Government intelligence is an oxymoron,” Rachel Wallace said. “Have you coffee?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll need several cups, black. Quite strong.” She patted Susan’s arm. “It is good to see you here.”

  Susan smiled and nodded again. Rachel Wallace turned to Hawk and gave him both her hands.

  “You too,” she said. “It is good to see you here.” She gave him a sisterly kiss on the mouth.

  Hawk grinned. “You holding back,” he said.

  The phone rang and Hawk answered. I was pouring coffee into the filter.

  Hawk said, “Un huh?”

  Then said, “You got a place we can call back?”

  I stopped measuring out coffee and turned toward him.

  “Okay,” he said. “You call back in ten minutes. Got to talk with my man here.”

  Rachel and Susan turned to look at him and we all stood in that suspended way that people do waiting for someone to get off the phone.

  Hawk said, “Un huh,” again and hung up the phone.

  “So much for the safe house,” Hawk said. I waited.

  “Man say if we want to know something real important about finding Jerry Costigan we should meet with him,” Hawk said.

  “Have to talk with Ives about the security of his operation,” I said. “Where we supposed to meet him?”

  “Man didn’t say. Says he’ll call back in ten minutes,” Hawk said.

  I walked to the window and looked out. Without saying anything Susan got up and finished making the coffee. Below me Charlestown was going on undifferentiated.

  “There’s no reason anyone should think we would care about where Jerry Costigan is,” I said.

  “Less Ives’s people let it out,” Hawk said.

  “Must have,” I said. “Guy knew we were here, had the phone number, knew we were looking for Costigan. Had to be from Ives’s people.”

  “They could fuck up a beach party,” Hawk said. He looked at Rachel Wallace and made a slight apologetic head motion. She smiled and shook her head, it-doesn’t-matter.

  “It’s a trap,” Susan said from the kitchen.

  “Probably,” I said.

  “Question is,” Hawk said, “who going to trap whom?”

  “Whom?” I said.

  “Whom,” Hawk said.

  “We’ll meet him,” I said.

  “Is that wise,” Rachel Wallace said.

  “Might as well get it over with,” I said. “We’re compromised here. And the people setting the trap, assuming it’s a trap, might still be able to tell us something really important about finding Jerry Costigan.”

  “If they don’t kill you,” Susan said. She was putting coffee cups, fresh from the dishwasher, onto a tray.

  “Always with that caveat,” I said. “But they haven’t yet, and good people have tried.”

  “I know,” Susan said. “But in this case it would be my fault.”

  “Susan,” Hawk said, “we let somebody kill us, it our fault.”

  “You know what I mean,” Susan said.

  Rachel Wallace said, “It’s the way they live. If it weren’t your situation, it would be someone else’s. A few years ago it was mine.”

  Susan nodded without speaking. But there was something in her face. I walked from the window, around the counter, and put my arms around her. She pressed her face into my neck and neither of us said anything.

  The phone rang. Hawk picked it up and listened.

  I murmured to Susan, “Sure we’re in this particolar thing because of things that you did. But that’s not why you did them.”

  On the phone Hawk said, “Sure.”

  “You did what you had to do,” I said. “The year before you left wasn’t good. So you did something to change it.”

  Hawk said, “We be there.”

  “I did nothing,” I said. “You took the step. Maybe not the best step. But a better step than I took. You do the best you can and you deal with the consequences. It’s all there is.”

  Hawk said, “Un huh,” and put the phone back in the cradle.

  Susan rubbed her face against my neck.

  “Fish pier at noon,” Hawk said.

  I let Susan go and walked back into the living room.

  “This place is no good anymore,” I said. I looked at Susan. “Would Russell try to take you back?”

  “He’d want me back. He may think you’ve taken me.”

  “Would he force you?”

  “No. But his father would.”

  “So it could be to juke us away from you so they can take you back.”

  Hawk said, “Yes.”

  “What does Russell think you want,” I said.

  “Time to be with myself and become someone who can decide for herself.”

  “He understand that?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Me either,” I said.

  “Now not the time,” Hawk said.

  I nodded and went to the phone and dialed Martin Quirk.

  “I need to put two women in a safe place,” I said. “One of them is Susan.”

  “Congratulations,” Quirk said. “What about the government safe house in Charlestown?”

  “Not safe anymore. Some of Ives’s people appear to have talked. Maybe Ives himself, for all I know.”

  “Tsk, tsk,” Quirk said. “How quick.”

  “Next half hour,” I said.

  “Belson will come by in a car in about ten minutes.

  “Where will he take them?”

  “He and I will figure that out after he picks them up,” Quirk said.

  “Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “Oh shit,” Quirk said. “No need for thanks. The entire City of Boston Police Department is at your disposal. We’ve decided to give up crime-stopping altogether.”

  “Probably just as well,” I said. “You weren’t making that much progress anyway.”

  “And you, hot shot?”

  “Less,” I said.

  CHAPTER 42

  THE FISH PIER FINGERS OUT INTO BOSTON HARbor about opposite Logan Airport. You get to it by going out Northern Avenue past Pier Four, which squats at the harbor edge like some vaguely Mayan temple to expense accounts, and is to restaurants what the Grand Canyon is to valleys. Most of Northern Ave. is seedy and barren with piers in various stages of disrepute and warehouses designed for function rather than beauty. There were a number of seafood restaurants in addition to Pier Four, and just before you got to one of them, Jimmy’s Harborside, you found the fish pier.

  The pier was lined on either side with fish-packing facilities that were undergoing restoration. The brick was getting sandblasted, the trim was getting painted. Two shirtless body-builders were retarring a section of the roof, and pausing every few minutes for a pose-off. There were probably going to be ferns hanging in macrame holders by next tourist season.

  At the end of the pier was a building called the New England Fish Exchange, Members and Captains Only. It formed the dead end of the wharf, enclosing the long courtyard and blocking off the view of the harbor. In this interior courtyard, trucks and forklifts and tourists mingled with seagulls and food wrappers and the smell of dead fish and diesel fuel and the No Name restaurant where fish were frying. Water from melting ice formed puddles near the packing companies and stood stagnant, luminous with oil slick.

  Behind the pier buildings, the fishing boats were tied to the pier, tossing on the baleful harbor water, rusted and dirty-looking with arcane equipment for dragging and trawling, and other things that a landling couldn’t identify. After the noise and movement of the interior courtyard, this outback strip along the ocean was silent and almost empty of life. A crew member hosed down one of the trawlers, two guys in rubber boots and dirty white T-shirts sat on the edge of the pier eating fried fish from a paper container and drinking something from large paper cups. Across the harbor, planes sat waiting on the taxiways at Logan.

  Hawk and I stood ne
ar the land end of the pier, looking down the length of the pier behind the buildings.

  “If I were doing this I’d come in by boat,” I said. Hawk nodded. He was looking, in a relaxed way, everywhere.

  “Behind the Exchange Building, right?”

  “Un huh.”

  “So they could come in from the harbor, do it, go back down into the boat and be gone before we hit the pier.”

  “If they could get a boat,” Hawk said.

  “Costigan can get a boat,” I said.

  Hawk nodded again, his eyes moving along the roof line of the row of buildings nearest us. “And they only have to go over behind the next pier and get out and into a car and make good their, uh, escape.”

  “You eloquent bastard,” I said.

  “Be the best way,” Hawk said.

  I nodded. “Okay,” I said. “We got about a half hour. Let’s go next door to Commonwealth Pier and reconnoiter.”

  “Reconnoiter?” Hawk said.

  “If you can say `make good their escape,‘ I can say reconnoiter.”

  “True,” Hawk said.

  We went back through the short parking lot in front of the fish pier and walked maybe a hundred yards to the Commonwealth Pier Building, which had recently been an exhibition hall and was now being converted to some kind of computer center. The noise from the power tools was loud, and the rubble of interior demolition made it hard going. Workers in yellow hard hats moved about and a couple stared at us as we walked through hard hatless, but no one bothered us. The huge interior of the building was nearly gutted. A small yellow front-end loader was scooping rubble into a container to be skidded out to a truck. At the end of the pier we could look through the window openings in the gutted building and get a clear view of the fish pier behind the Fish Exchange. There were a lot of white seagulls with gray wings, and a few brown seagulls, the color of sparrows. There was nobody else.

  “You figure they know what we look like,” Hawk said.

  “Probably got descriptions. Maybe pictures. Costigan owns Mill River and they had pictures of us.”

  “Or maybe they just got orders to blast every handsome black man they see with an ugly honkie.”

  “We’d be safe,” I said.

  An open-topped Art Deco speedboat with a very large outboard engine idled slowly past us and edged in toward the fish pier. It was a new boat, with very raked-back lines and a metalliclooking gray paint job with red trim. There were four men in it. The guy steering wore a white captain’s hat. The other three were Oriental, wearing nondescript black pants and matching black T-shirts. The guy in the white hat brought the boat to a gentle idle beside the fish pier, on the outside harbor edge, behind the Exchange, eight feet below the surface of the pier, and tied up to a rusted metal ladder that reached almost to the water line. The three Orientals went up the ladder, almost it seemed without touching it. One of them stood in the center of the dock, moving his head back and forth. He carried a blue gym bag. The other two took a place at opposite corners of the Exchange Building. Below, the speedboat idled quietly, and the guy in the white hat leaned on the steering wheel with his folded arms and gazed out toward the open sea. I looked at my watch. They were fifteen minutes early.