Now and Then s-35

by Robert B. Parker

  “I gotta go,” Red said. “Perry likes me to be around in case there’s any trouble.”

  I nodded. He stood.

  “You sucker punched me this time,” he said.

  “Well, for what it’s worth,” I said, “you take a good punch.”

  He looked at me for a moment.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Next time I’ll be a little more careful.”

  He turned and walked out of the café. I sat around for a little while, drinking coffee and appraising the coeds, trying to be one on whom nothing is lost.

  37.

  We were in Susan’s spare room. Vinnie was asleep on the couch.

  “Red did not look like so much to me,” Chollo said.

  “He’s big and strong,” I said. “But he doesn’t know how.”

  “Most people don’t know how,” Chollo said. “Guys his size don’t often need to.”

  “’Cept they run into somebody that do,” Hawk said. “You think he’s a shooter?”

  “Don’t know,” I said. “If I had to guess, I’d guess no. He sounds like a dope, except when he starts mouthing what Alderson taught him. Then he sounds like a parrot.”

  “How ’bout if Alderson tell him to?” Hawk said.

  “He might,” I said. “He thinks Alderson’s divine.”

  “So are we,” Hawk said. “And there be four of us.”

  Susan’s office door opened and a fiftyish woman in an anklelength black coat hurried out, not looking at anything. She went out the front door and down the steps and turned left toward Mass Ave without altering her gaze. Hanging around Susan so long, I’d learned that no eye contact was sort of de rigueur when departing from your shrink’s offi ce. Chollo watched her go.

  “You looking at that woman’s ass?” I said.

  “As I mature,” Chollo said, “my age limits loosen. We are very romantic, south of the border.”

  “Age got nothing to do with it,” Hawk said. “Only two kinds of music: good and bad.”

  “That would be Duke Ellington,” I said.

  Hawk nodded.

  “It would be,” Hawk said.

  “I’m a Desi Arnaz man, myself,” Chollo said.

  “ ‘Babalu’?” I said.

  “Exactly,” Chollo said. “How you going to top ‘Babalu’?

  Duke whatssis ever do ‘Babalu’?”

  “God, I hope not,” Hawk said.

  “You putting down the music of my people?” Chollo said.

  “Whenever I can,” Hawk said.

  As they talked neither one ever lost focus on Susan’s doorway.

  “You need to open your mind, my African friend. Bobby Horse, now he likes Kiowa music.”

  “What the hell is Kiowa music,” Hawk said.

  “You know. They got those pipes they play.”

  “You like it?”

  “I never heard it. But Bobby Horse, he say it’s great.”

  “Bobby Horse think he grew up in a damn teepee,” Hawk said.

  “Sí,” Chollo said. “And ride bareback on a pinto pony when he is still a baby. It is how he got his name.”

  “Only horse he ever saw he bet on,” Hawk said.

  “Bobby Horse is maybe a little romantic about being a Native American,” Chollo said. “But he fi ghts good.”

  “Yeah,” Hawk said. “He do.”

  Susan came out of her office and walked across the hall. She was wearing a black sweater today, over a white shirt. Her pants were banker’s gray and fit her very well. Her black boots had high heels. When she came into the room it seemed almost to reorganize about her. I felt what I always felt when she appeared, the oh-boy click in the center of my self.

  “Perry Alderson just called and asked for an appointment,” she said.

  38.

  We all thought about that for a while. At least

  Susan and I did. Vinnie continued to sleep. Hawk and Chollo were impassive, waiting for Susan and me. My first reaction was no! My second reaction was to find Alderson and break his back. My third reaction was the one I allowed out.

  “What are you going to do?” I said to Susan.

  She smiled.

  “Right reaction,” she said.

  “What other reaction could I have?” I said.

  “Oh heavens,” Susan said. “I’ve known you too long and too intimately . . .”

  “Please,” I said. “Not in front of my friends.”

  She smiled again.

  “The other reactions would have been about you,” she said.

  “Not always a bad thing,” I said. “Sometimes you and I are pretty inextricable.”

  “Yes, we are,” she said. “I told him I’d see him.”

  “Alone?” I said.

  “You know what I think about group sessions,” Susan said.

  “When?” I said.

  “Tuesday morning, at nine-fi fty.”

  “We got the weekend to rig the offi ce,” I said.

  “Rig?” Susan said.

  “Listening device, surveillance camera.”

  “No,” she said. “I cannot spy on a patient.”

  “Even one who means you ill?” I said.

  “We don’t know that yet,” she said.

  From the couch, with his eyes still closed, Vinnie said, “I can put in an alarm button. I used to do electrical work.”

  “Under the desk,” I said. “Where she can hit it with her knee?”

  Susan nodded.

  “That would be acceptable,” she said. “And I’ll have the gun you gave me. And you’ll all be here.”

  “Why are you seeing him?” I said.

  “It’s what I do,” Susan said. “He’s there. He’s of interest. I am interested.”

  “Doesn’t this present some ethical problems for you?” I said.

  “Many,” she said. “I plan to explain it to him.”

  “About you and me?”

  “Yes.”

  “He knows that now,” I said. “Why do you think he’s coming to see you?”

  “That would be one of the things I’d hope to discover,” she said. “I certainly won’t discover anything by turning him away.”

  “No,” I said.

  “At least while he’s here, we know where he is,” she said.

  “Will you rat him out if you learn something?” I said.

  “That’s not always considered good therapeutic practice,” she said.

  “But . . .” I said.

  “I will warn him that I have some allegiance to the law,” she said.

  “Good,” I said. “As far as he knows, I’m a sleazy gumshoe trying to blackmail him for fi fty grand. That works for me.”

  “I won’t tell,” Susan said.

  “Okay,” I said. “Just remember he’s here in order to use you to get me to give him the tapes.”

  “Probably,” Susan said.

  “But if he’s going to try to leverage you,” I said, “it’s better that he do it here, where we can control the situation.”

  “If your scenario is correct,” Susan said, “might he want to hold me hostage until he gets the tapes?”

  “Yes.”

  “So killing me is not at the moment in his best interest,” she said.

  “No.”

  “And you guys will prevent him from kidnapping me.”

  “Yes.”

  “So we’ll give it a try,” Susan said. “See what develops.”

  I nodded. Susan looked around the room at the four of us, and smiled.

  “Security arrangements seem impressive,” she said. Hawk said, “You ain’t seen nothing yet. Wait’ll Tuesday morning.”

  Susan looked at her watch.

  “I have a client,” she said.

  “Who might not benefit therapeutically,” I said, “from fi nding you hanging out with gunsels and thugs.”

  “This is true,” Susan said and turned back to her offi ce.

  “Inextricable?” Chollo said to me when she was gone.

  “Sí,
” I said.

  39.

  Susan came from the shower into the bedroom, with a towel wrapped modestly around her. I was in bed. Pearl had settled expansively in next to me.

  “Did you know I was a cheerleader at Swampscott High?” she said.

  “I seem to remember that,” I said.

  “Sis boom bah,” she said, and dropped the towel and jumped in the air, and said, “Rah, rah, rah.”

  “They like that at Swampscott High?” I said.

  “The football team did,” she said.

  “The whole team?” I said.

  “No, of course not,” Susan said. “Varsity only. No jayvees.”

  Pearl was banished to the living room with a chew toy while Susan and I explored the matter of cheerleading. When she was eventually readmitted, she found a spot on the other side of Susan, and settled down to work on what was left of the chew toy.

  “She used to squirm right in between us,” I said.

  “She’s learned to respect our space,” Susan said.

  “Our baby’s all grown up,” I said.

  “Yes,” Susan said.

  We lay quietly together in the stillness of the bedroom, listening to Pearl work on her chew toy.

  “Aren’t there supposed to be strings playing softly in the background,” I said, “while we lie here together?”

  “Pretend,” Susan said.

  I nodded, and closed my eyes and was quiet.

  After a while I said, “It’s not working. It sounds like Pearl gnawing on a bully stick.”

  “Won’t that do?” Susan said.

  “Yes,” I said. “It will.”

  I had my arm around her shoulder. She had her head against my neck.

  “Postcoital languor,” she said, “is almost as good as inducing it.”

  “Almost,” I said.

  We were quiet. Pearl chewed. I could feel Susan’s chest move as she breathed.

  “I wonder if we should get married,” Susan said.

  After a moment I said, “Didn’t we already try that?”

  “No,” she said. “We tried living together. Which was something of a disappointment.”

  “True,” I said.

  “But we didn’t try marriage.”

  “I gather you don’t see marriage as requiring cohabitation?”

  I said.

  “No.”

  “It is often the case,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “So we’d continue to live as we do,” I said.

  “I guess,” she said.

  “But we’d be married,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “And the advantage of that is . . . ?”

  She rubbed her head a little against the place where my neck joined my shoulder.

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “I thought we might discuss it, see what we thought.”

  I was quiet. Pearl had finished her bully stick and was having a post-prandial nap. The room was very quiet.

  “People of our generation,” I said, “who feel about each other the way we feel, usually get married.”

  “Yes,” Susan said.

  “Would it make you happier?” I said.

  “No . . .”

  “But?”

  “I guess I would feel somehow more . . . complete,” she said.

  “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe I would, too.”

  We were quiet. My arm was around Susan. I rubbed her shoulder.

  She said, “There are no rules, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Regardless of how we arrange it,” Susan said, “we will love each other at least until we die.”

  “I know.”

  “So if we marry or if we don’t, it will not change who we are and what we feel.”

  “I know.”

  “But . . . ?”

  “But there’s something or other ceremonial in marriage that somehow or other matters,” I said.

  “I knew you’d get it,” she said.

  “If we decide to do it,” I said, “there ought to be an interesting group at the reception.”

  40.

  Iwas in epstein’s office. I had brought a bag of donuts and he supplied some really awful coffee.

  “You make the coffee?” I said.

  “Shauna,” he said. “My assistant.”

  “I hope she’s good at other things,” I said.

  “Nearly everything else,” Epstein said. “These donuts kosher?”

  “No,” I said.

  Epstein nodded and took a bite.

  “We looked into everywhere that Alderson was supposed to have worked his magic,” he said after he’d swallowed. “Nobody ever heard of him. No record of him at Kent State. No record of any affiliation with the Weathermen, or the SDS, Peter, Paul and Mary. Nobody. Nothing.”

  “Maybe he’s not a hero of the revolution,” I said.

  “If he’s really forty-eight,” Epstein said, “the revolution was over by the time he was old enough to be heroic.”

  “Maybe he lied about his age,” I said.

  “Why would he do that if he’s claiming to be a major fi gure in things that were mostly over by, what, 1975?”

  “We were out of Vietnam by then,” I said.

  “So if he’s going to insist he’s a hero of the era, why not claim the right age?”

  “Vanity, maybe,” I said.

  “He wants us to think he’s young?”

  “Women,” I said. “He likes women, and he may be so used to lying about his age to women that he does it instinctively.”

  “So,” Epstein said. “He’s either lying about his age or about his history.”

  “Or both,” I said.

  “And it appears that he has also killed two people, one of them an FBI agent,” Epstein said.

  “And he’s working very hard to get that audiotape.”

  “Which isn’t all that incriminating,” Epstein said. “I don’t think what’s on that tape could even get us an arrest warrant.”

  “But it would cause you to investigate him,” I said.

  “It has,” Epstein said. “And we got nothing.”

  “Except that he’s not what he says he is,” I said. “Or maybe who he says he is.”

  “Is that worth the risk of killing an FBI agent?” Epstein said.

  “Apparently.”

  Epstein nodded. We were quiet for a time.

  “There’s something else,” Epstein said.

  “There’s a lot else,” I said.

  Epstein finished a donut and drank a little coffee and made a face.

  “You’re right about the coffee,” he said. “I’m going to have to do something about it.”

  “It’s nice to have a manageable problem,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Epstein said, “gives me the illusion of competence.”

  “So, where does a guy like Alderson get a hit man like the one who killed Jordan Richmond?” I said.

  “Red?”

  I shook my head.

  “Red’s a lummox,” I said. “He’s big and strong and idolworships Alderson, or what he thinks Alderson is, but he’s not a guy to arrange some murders.”

  “So who?”

  “And why?”

  We each took a second donut.

  “We don’t know,” I said.

  “Good point,” Epstein said. “Why don’t you work that out, and I’ll deal with the coffee issue.”

  41.

  Tuesday was a clear, brisk day with just the barest possibility of snow lingering at its edges. The alarm system was installed and working under Susan’s desk. Susan’s offi ce was on a corner and there were windows facing Linnaean Street, and windows on the side facing the driveway. Vinnie was in a parked car on Linnaean Street where he could see both sets of windows and the front door. Chollo was on the second floor, sitting on the top step of the front stairs. Hawk and I were in the spare room with the door open. Hawk leaned in the open doorway. I stood in the front window. I wanted Alderson to know
we were around.

  At quarter to ten, Perry Alderson, wearing a black pinstriped double-breasted overcoat, strolled down Linnaean Street and turned into Susan’s front walk. If he saw me in the window he gave no sign. He came up Susan’s steps and opened her front door and looked around her big front hall. Susan came to the offi ce door when he entered, and said, “Come in please.”

  Alderson gave her a big smile and put out his hand.

  “Dr. Silverman,” he said. “What a pleasure. I’m Perry Al derson.”

  Susan shook his hand. Alderson was completely focused on her. If he saw Chollo on the stairs, or Hawk in the doorway, he reacted no more than he had to seeing me in the window, if he’d seen me in the window. They went into Susan’s office and closed the door.

  Hawk was motionless in the doorway where he was supposed to be. The alarm bell we had rigged was molly-anchored onto the wall next to the door. I looked at my watch. It was nine minutes to ten. Under normal circumstances Alderson would come out at twenty to eleven. I went out into the hallway. Chollo was where he was supposed to be. I looked through the cut-glass window in the front door. Vinnie was where he was supposed to be. I wasn’t. I was supposed to be in the office with Susan. I walked back into the waiting room. Hawk had not moved. I looked out the front window. Vinnie hadn’t moved. I could go back out in the hallway and see that Chollo hadn’t moved. My options were limitless. I looked at my watch. It was now six minutes to ten.

  “Susan asked me the other night if I thought we should get married,” I said.

  Hawk continued to look at the offi ce door.

  “How you feel ’bout that?” Hawk said.

  He was dressed for business: jeans, ornate sneakers, a black sleeveless T-shirt. The big .44 Magnum revolver he favored was in a holster on his right hip. Even in repose the muscles in his arms seemed to strain against his black skin.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You love her,” Hawk said. “More than I ever seen anybody love anything.”

  “True,” I said.

  Outside, the bright brisk day had gotten grayer, and the hint of snow had become a suggestion.