The Professional

by Robert B. Parker

  “Come in,” Zel said. And nodded toward one of the empty chairs at the kitchen table. “Have a seat.”

  Boo was seated at the kitchen table, in his undershirt, reading The Herald. He stood when Zel let me in and left the room. Zel watched him go and put his hand out to stop me and stood between me and the door that Boo had left through. In a moment Boo returned with a gun.

  “Put it away, Boo,” Zel said.

  Boo pointed the gun at us.

  “Get out of the way,” he said to Zel.

  “Put it away,” Zel said, and walked slowly toward Boo, keeping himself between us.

  I focused on the gun in Boo’s hand. It was a semiautomatic, maybe a .40-caliber. The hammer was back. His finger was on the trigger. If I saw any sign of finger movement I would go down and roll. I adjusted slightly to keep Zel between us.

  “Get out of the way, Zel,” Boo said again.

  Zel took another step and reached out and took hold of the gun. Boo stared at him, his face squeezed tight, then let Zel take it. Zel eased the hammer down and put the gun in his hip pocket.

  “I do the gun work, Boo,” Zel said. “You know that.”

  Boo nodded slowly, then turned and left the room again. “He got another gun?” I said.

  “No,” Zel said. “He’s going in there to sulk.”

  “How bad is he?” I said.

  “In the head?” Zel said, and shrugged. “You saw him, he drops his hands when he fights. He always has.”

  “So he’s had his brain rattled.”

  “A lot,” Zel said.

  “Can he take care of himself?”

  “Not against a guy like you,” Zel said. “Amateurs, he does fine. He can still punch.”

  “I meant can he take care of himself in general,” I said. “You know, buy food, balance his checkbook, go to the dentist?”

  “I take care of him,” Zel said.

  “Been doing that long?”

  “Yeah.”

  We sat for a minute. Zel sat across the table from me, where he could watch the door to the room that Boo had gone to.

  “You got any work now that Jackson got aced?” I said.

  “Not right now, but I’m making some calls. People know me.”

  “Seen Mrs. Jackson at all?”

  “Not since her old man got whacked,” Zel said.

  “Know why Jackson got whacked?” I said.

  “No.”

  “Know who did it?”

  “No.”

  “Any suggestions?” I said.

  “How’d he get it,” Zel said. “I know he got shot, but cops wouldn’t tell me anything else.”

  “Two in the head,” I said. “One from about eight feet. One from about three inches.”

  “Proves it ain’t me. The one from eight feet woulda been enough.”

  “That a forty-caliber you took away from Boo?” I said.

  “Never noticed,” Zel said. “Jackson capped with a forty.”

  “Yep.”

  “Boo ain’t much of a shooter,” Zel said.

  “From eight feet you don’t have to be much of a shooter,” I said.

  “You any good?” Zel said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Know anybody better?”

  “Two guys,” I said. “Vinnie Morris, guy from L.A. named Chollo . . . maybe Hawk.”

  “That’s three,” Zel said.

  “So maybe three,” I said.

  “I hearda Vinnie Morris,” Zel said.

  “You as good as Vinnie,” I said.

  “Ain’t been determined,” Zel said.

  “How come you weren’t with Jackson when he got shot,” I said. “I sorta thought that was your job.”

  “Told us to take the day off,” Zel said. “Said he didn’t need us.”

  “Was Boo with you when Jackson was shot?” I said.

  “Boo’s always with me,” Zel said.

  “I’d swear that gun you took from Boo was a forty,” I said.

  Zel took it out and looked at it.

  “Nice call,” he said. “S-and-W forty-caliber.”

  “Yours?” I said.

  “They’re all mine,” Zel said. “I don’t want Boo carrying no gun.”

  “How many you got?” I said.

  “Six,” Zel said.

  “All of them clean as this one?” I said.

  “I keep them clean,” Zel said.

  “Tools of the trade,” I said.

  “Sure,” he said.

  I looked at the door to the room where Boo was sulking. “Too bad Boo never learned to keep his hands up,” I said.

  “Everybody tried,” Zel said. “But when the fight started, he could never remember. Even before he got hit, Boo wasn’t the brightest guy you’d meet.”

  I nodded. We sat again.

  “I hear anything useful,” Zel said, “I’ll give you a shout.”

  “Please do,” I said.

  Chapter49

  I SAT WITH ESTELLE at the café counter in Pinnacle Fitness. I had coffee, and Estelle drank green tea. I didn’t care. I was still bigger and stronger than she was. The hell with green tea.

  “Are you working on the murder case?” she said.

  “I am.”

  Estelle was wearing the tight black sweats and the tight white tank top that was apparently the Pinnacle trainer’s uniform.

  “Who hired you?”

  “I’m working on spec,” I said.

  She looked at me as if I might be odd.

  “Do the police have a suspect?” she said.

  “No.”

  “Have they had any success tracking the note?” she said. “You know, fingerprints? What machine it was written on? Kind of paper?”

  “You’ve been watching those crime-scene shows,” I said. “Haven’t you.”

  She smiled.

  “Especially the one with David Caruso.” She glanced at me sideways. “He’s hot.”

  “Hotter than myself?” I said.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “Of course.”

  She must have had a thing for slim, handsome guys. How shallow.

  “It was written on a computer,” I said. “Printed out on paper you can buy at any Staples. No fingerprints that mean anything.”

  “ ‘Mean anything’?”

  “Well, yours are on it, and Gary’s and Beth’s, and mine,” I said. “That’s because we handled it. There are no unaccounted-for prints.”

  “Oh.”

  She thought about it for a while.

  Then she said, “So how do you solve a crime like this?” “You don’t always,” I said.

  “But, I mean, how would you even go about it?” she said. “There’s, like, no clues.”

  “You talk to people,” I said. “You ask them questions. You listen to their answers. You compare what they said to what other people have said. You try to assess body language. You try to listen for tone.”

  “Is that what you’re doing now?” Estelle said.

  “Yes.”

  “How am I doing?” she said.

  “You’re not telling me anything, but it is sort of enjoyable to study your body language.”

  “Enjoyable?”

  “It’s a dandy body,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “You don’t really think I did it?” she said.

  “I don’t think,” I said. “I just ask questions and listen to answers and study bodies.”

  “I’ll bet you think,” Estelle said.

  “Mostly about sex and baseball,” I said. “How’s Beth?”

  “I am not interested in baseball,” she said, and looked at me sideways again.

  “Good to know,” I said. “How’s Beth?”

  Estelle’s face became serious.

  “Poor thing,” Estelle said. “She’s devastated.”

  I nodded.

  “Devastated,” I said.

  “Yes, to have your husband murdered?” Estelle said. “You don’t think tha
t’s devastating?”

  “Never had a husband,” I said.

  “She’s staying with us for a while,” Estelle said.

  “ ‘Us’?”

  “Me and Gary,” Estelle said.

  “You and Gary and Beth,” I said.

  “You have a problem with that?”

  I shook my head.

  “Not my problem,” I said.

  She frowned, though it seemed to me that she was careful that it be a pretty frown.

  “It’s nobody’s problem,” she said. “Unless you’re some kind of mossback puritan.”

  “Goddamn,” I said. “You’ve seen through my disguise.”

  Chapter50

  BETH AND GARY and Estelle?” Susan said.

  We were having coffee in her kitchen on a Monday morning, before she went to work.

  “So it seems,” I said.

  Susan was in her understated tailored suit, working attire that did its best to conceal the fact that she was gorgeous. Her makeup was quiet; her hair was neat. She wore very little jewelry. And she remained gorgeous.

  “If I weren’t a sophisticated psychotherapist with advanced degrees from Harvard, I might be faintly shocked,” she said.

  “They didn’t do three-ways in Swampscott?” I said.

  “When I was in high school,” Susan said, “I doubt that anyone in town knew what a three-way was.”

  “We’re not in high school anymore, Toto,” I said.

  “Did they know in Laramie?” Susan said. “When you were a kid?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Truly?” Susan said.

  “Two heifers and a seed bull,” I said.

  “I sometimes forget you’re a man of the West,” Susan said.

  “Howdy.”

  Susan smiled. She was eating half of a whole-wheat bagel. I settled for several cinnamon donuts.

  “Could you perform in a three-way?” Susan said.

  “Two women and me?”

  “For instance,” Susan said.

  “Maybe,” I said. “You?”

  “No,” Susan said. “How about two men and a woman?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Me, either,” Susan said.

  “So,” I said. “Lucky we found each other.”

  She smiled.

  “It has been my experience that at least one member of a threesome is uncomfortable with the deal,” Susan said.

  “So why do it?” I said.

  “To please one, or both, of the other partners,” Susan said. “To convince oneself of one’s liberation and openness, fear of being a prude.”

  “Vive la prudery,” I said.

  Susan nodded.

  “You think it can sometimes work?” I said.

  “Yes,” Susan said. “I think people can often successfully be in a functioning relationship with two other people. You know, that sort of traditional European thing. Husband, wife, and husband’s mistress . . . or wife’s lover . . . or all of the above.”

  “Ménage à trois?” I said.

  Susan shrugged.

  “That seems to be Gary and the girls,” I said.

  Susan nodded.

  “What do you think?” I said.

  “I would have more hope for it if there was some separation,” she said.

  “Gary lives with one and visits the other?” I said.

  “Or all three live separately,” Susan said. “Despite what people say, and even believe, if they are genuinely invested in someone, it is more difficult to share that person with another than they expect.”

  “So it works better if you don’t have to have your nose rubbed in it, so to speak,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think it’s healthy?” I said.

  “Healthy is harder to pin down than it seems,” Susan said.

  She had slid into her professional mode—probably the suit.

  “I know a number of people who maintain a happy and productive life with two partners, not under the same roof.”

  “Think it’ll work for Gary and friends?” I said.

  “There’s something exploitive going on there, I think,” Susan said.

  “I think so, too,” I said. “So?”

  “No,” Susan said.

  “Think we should try it?”

  “Who would the other guy be?” Susan said.

  “Woman,” I said.

  “We can’t even decide who’d have the extra lover,” Susan said.

  I nodded.

  “How about neither?” I said.

  Susan sipped her coffee, and put down her cup, and carefully blotted her lips with her napkin. The she looked at me and smiled widely. I put my right hand up, and she high-fived me.

  “There you go,” she said.

  Chapter51

  BELSON AND I sat in Belson’s car outside a Dunkin’ Donuts on Gallivan Boulevard, drinking coffee and browsing a box of assorted donuts. I preferred the plain ones. Belson liked the ones with strawberry frosting and sprinkles.

  “What kind of sissy eats strawberry-frosted donuts?” I said.

  “With jimmies,” Belson said.

  “I had too much respect for you,” I said, “even to mention the jimmies.”

  “Thanks,” Belson said. “My poetic side.”

  “Um,” I said.

  “You know that Jackson’s widow has moved in with your boy Goran?”

  “And his girlfriend,” I said.

  “What the fuck is that about?” Belson said.

  “Love?” I said.

  Belson looked at me as if I had just spit up.

  “They did the will,” Belson said. “She is now worth eighty million, seven hundred, and twenty-three bucks.”

  “More or less,” I said.

  “That’s the number they gave me,” Belson said. “I assume it’s rounded to the nearest dollar.”

  “Might explain why Estelle and Gary have welcomed her into their home,” I said.

  “But why does she want to go?” Belson said.

  “Why do most people do anything?” I said.

  “Love or money, or variations on either,” Belson said.

  “She don’t seem to need money,” I said.

  “So we’re back to love,” Belson said.

  “But you don’t like it,” I said.

  “I don’t see that broad doing anything for love,” Belson said.

  “You don’t like Beth?” I said.

  “I think she killed her husband,” Belson said.

  “Not herself,” I said.

  “No, but there’s people who’ll do anything you need if you have money.”

  “She didn’t have it until her husband died,” I said.

  “So maybe she got a trusting hit guy,” Belson said.

  “Like who?” I said.

  Belson shrugged.

  “Don’t know any trusting hit guys,” he said.

  We were quiet. Belson ate the last strawberry-frosted.

  “Love and money,” he said.

  “Or sex and money,” I said.

  “Same thing,” Belson said.

  “You think they took it out in trade?” I said.

  “It’s what she’s got,” Belson said.

  “And it’s gotten her this far,” I said.

  “So it’s a theory,” Belson said.

  He found a chocolate-cream donut under a cinnamon one, and took it out from under and dusted off the accidental cinnamon and took a careful bite. The donut had a squishy filling, and Belson was very neat.

  “She know anybody would kill somebody?” Belson said.

  “Her husband did,” I said. “She probably met some. She knew Boo and Zel.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind,” Belson said.

  “Doesn’t explain why she’s living with Gary and Estelle,” I said.

  “Nope,” Belson said.

  I located the cinnamon donut that Belson had put aside in favor of chocolate cream. We ate silently for a moment.

  �
�We don’t have any idea what we’re doing,” I said.

  “No,” Belson said. “We don’t seem to.”

  Chapter52

  I OPENED THE BPD FOLDER on Beth. She had been born Elizabeth Boudreau in a shabby little town on the Merrimack River, east of Proctor. She was thirty-six. In the month she graduated from Tarbridge High School, she married a guy name Boley LaBonte, and divorced him a year later.

  Nobody was paying me to do anything. On the other hand, no one was paying me to do nothing, either. Business was slow. I was nosy. And I had kind of a bad feeling about this long-running mess I’d wandered into and hadn’t done a hell of a lot to improve. So I got my car from the alley where I had a deal with the meter maids, and headed north from Boston on a very nice February day with the temperature above freezing and stuff melting gently.

  You enter Tarbridge on a two-lane highway from the south. The town is basically three unpainted cinder-block buildings and a red light. A few clapboard houses, some with paint, dwindle away from the cinder block. Up a hill past the red light, maybe a half-mile away, stood a regal-looking redbrick high school. The fact that Tarbridge had a municipal identity was stretching it a bit. That it had a high school was jaw-dropping. It had to be a regional school. But why they had located a regional high school in Tarbridge could only have to do with available land, or, of course, graft.

  The town clerk was a fat woman with a red face and a tight perm. She had her offices in a trailer attached to one of the cinder-block buildings. The plastic nameplate on her desk said she was Mrs. Estevia Root.

  I handed her my card, and she studied it through some pink-rimmed glasses with rhinestones on them, which hung around her neck on what appeared to be a cut-down shoelace.

  “What do ya wanna see Mrs. Boudreau for?” the clerk said.

  “I’m investigating a case,” I said. “In Boston.”

  “Boston?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What the hell are you doing up here?”

  “Just background stuff,” I said. “Where would I find Mrs. Boudreau.”

  “Probably in her kitchen, where she usually is.”

  “And where is the kitchen located?”

  “Back of the house,” Estevia said.

  I nodded happily.

  “And the house?” I said.