Now and Then s-35

by Robert B. Parker

  I came out of the spare room.

  “Detective Moira Mahoney,” she said.

  We shook hands and went into Susan’s offi ce. As always when Susan had a patient, the louvered blinds were half closed on both sets of windows so that no one could see in. Moira put her purse down, took off the hat and the long coat and the shades, and laid them on Susan’s couch. She didn’t really look like Susan. Few people do. But she was the same size and shape and general coloration.

  “You know the plan,” I said.

  “Quirk laid it out quite carefully,” she said.

  “Who drove you over,” I said.

  “Lee Farrell,” Moira said. “He’s going to wait outside.”

  “Alone?” I said.

  “Frank Belson is up the street in another car,” Moira said.

  “Good.”

  “Thanks for doing this, Detective,” Susan said.

  “Pleasure,” Moira said. “Got some coffee?”

  “Sit down,” I said. “I’ll get you some.”

  I got coffee from the spare room. When I came back, Moira was in the client chair and Susan was behind the desk.

  “You’ll need to stay here until eleven,” Susan said.

  “Sure,” Moira said.

  “Want a free shrink?” Susan said.

  Moira smiled.

  “Can I get a rain check for my husband,” she said. Susan laughed.

  “And how will you get home?” she said.

  “Somebody can drop me in Central Square,” Moira said. “I’m parked in the Cambridge Police lot.”

  “Will I see you later?” Susan said.

  “Nope. I’m just here for the head fake,” Moira said. “Then back to normal duty. I don’t even know where you’re going.”

  “Too bad,” Susan said. “A woman would be nice.”

  “You got Lee,” Moira said.

  “He’s been with me before,” Susan said. “I don’t find him womanly.”

  Moira smiled.

  “It’s Lee’s joke,” she said. “On the ride over here he said that’s why he always gets this duty.”

  “Lee’s pretty good at being gay,” I said.

  “The best,” Moira said.

  I stood at the front window looking out between the slanted louvers. After a time, Hawk came into the room. Moira looked at him like an aardvark at a termite mound.

  “You’re Hawk,” she said, “aren’t you.”

  “Yes, I am,” Hawk said.

  “I’ve heard about you.”

  “All true,” Hawk said.

  “If we finally bust you,” Moira said, “I hope I’m in on the collar.”

  “If you not,” Hawk said, “I have you paged.”

  Moira smiled.

  “Please,” she said.

  Hawk looked at me.

  “Car here,” Hawk said.

  “Farrell driving?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Any sign of Belson?”

  “Nope.”

  “There wouldn’t be,” I said. “He’ll be there. Vinnie and Chollo where they’re supposed to be.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Time for you to go out on the front porch and lounge on the railing and catch some air. When the woman comes out you pay her no attention.”

  “You already tole me that,” Hawk said.

  “Oh good,” I said. “You remembered.”

  Hawk went. I looked at my watch. Twelve minutes past eleven o’clock.

  “Okay, toots,” I said to Susan. “Get into your disguise.”

  She smiled and nodded and put on the long coat and the wraparound shades.

  Susan paused and looked around her offi ce for a moment.

  “It won’t be long,” I said.

  She nodded.

  “Be very, very careful,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  She put her arms around me and kissed me. I put the red hat on her head and tilted it over her face the way Moira had worn it coming in.

  “My hair,” Susan said.

  “You can fi x it when you get there,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “I can.”

  We looked at each other for a moment, then she turned and went out the door past Hawk, who ignored her, down the steps, and got into the passenger side of the green Toyota beside Farrell. They drove away. Hawk remained where he was taking the air happily. Not a care in the world. Seeing everything that moved on Linnaean Street.

  63.

  After a proper interval I drove Moira Mahoney up to Central Square and went on into Boston, parked on a hydrant on Beacon Street, and walked down across the Common to Locke-Ober’s on Winter Place. Epstein was at the bar in the foyer when I got there. He had a Gibson in front of him.

  “Nice to see you again,” he said.

  “Always seems too long,” I said. “Doesn’t it.”

  “Yeah. What have you got?”

  “You’re ahead of me,” I said. “Lemme get a drink.”

  He nodded. I ordered. The bartender brought it. It was a quiet afternoon at Locke’s bar. Later, people would come in and have a cocktail while waiting to be seated, but at 5:10 in the afternoon there was only one guy, reading the Wall Street Jour- nal and nursing a Gibson.

  “You got anything?” I said.

  “We’ve gotten a look at Alderson’s finances,” Epstein said.

  “He’s got about a hundred and forty thousand in a money market. No checking account. No savings.”

  “Better than I’m doing,” I said.

  “True,” Epstein said.

  He poked the pickled onion around in the bottom of his glass.

  “Odd that there’s no checking account,” I said.

  “True,” Epstein said.

  He got the onion just where he wanted it in his glass and sipped a little of the drink.

  “The bothersome thing,” he said, “is that the only activity in the account is at the end of each month, when his paycheck from Concord gets automatically deposited.”

  “How long?”

  “Account was opened with a thousand dollars two years ago,”

  Epstein said. “He has not withdrawn anything, which is why it’s up to a hundred and forty thousand.”

  “So what’s he live on?”

  Epstein shook his head.

  “Speaker’s fees?” I said.

  “Most of those gigs are free,” Epstein said. “Very few pay much.”

  “And he’s got an expensive condo, and a nice car, and he employs a driver.”

  “So where’s it come from?” Epstein said.

  “Is that a rhetorical question?”

  “Sadly, so far,” Epstein said, “no.”

  “I have a theory,” I said. “But first let me give you what I know.”

  “I like a case when people start saying know instead of think, ”

  Epstein said.

  He gestured for another drink. The bartender brought it and looked at me. I shook my head. I didn’t mind getting drunk with Susan, but I didn’t want to show up that way. Epstein poured his still uneaten onion into the new drink and the bartender took away the empty glass.

  “His name isn’t, or wasn’t, Perry Alderson,” I said. “It was Bradley Turner.”

  “That his original name?” Epstein said.

  “Don’t know,” I said. “Probably.”

  “Probably is better than maybe, ” Epstein said. “Where’d he get the name, obit notice?”

  “Better than that,” I said. “He killed the original Perry Alderson.”

  Epstein drank some of his Gibson.

  “Just to steal the name?” he said.

  “No, it was involved with killing his own wife, the late Anne Marie Turner.”

  “You prove any of this?” Epstein said.

  “You will,” I said. “I’ll give you enough stuff to investigate. It’ll be only a matter of time.”

  Epstein turned in his stool so that his back was against the bar. He held his G
ibson in both hands in front of him.

  “Go,” he said.

  I gave him everything I had, except the part about Alderson having mental sex with Susan. It took a while, and Epstein didn’t interrupt me once. He sipped his drink carefully. Otherwise he just sat and listened and didn’t move. As I talked, the bar began to fill. Men in suits, mostly. A lot of them pols down from the state house, just across the Common. When I fi nished, Epstein took a last drink from his Gibson, and held it in his mouth for a moment before swallowing. Then he tipped the glass up and his head back, and got the two onions, which he chewed and swallowed.

  “So he’s old enough in fact,” Epstein said when the onions were gone, “to have been in all that counterculture boogaloo that he claims.”

  “Probably,” I said.

  “It’s an area the bureau covered exhaustively,” Epstein said.

  “Because they were such a threat to national security,”

  I said.

  “You know it,” Epstein said. “They were giving aid and comfort, for God’s sake, to our enemies.”

  “Who were?”

  Epstein grinned.

  “I forget,” he said.

  “I think it was the commies,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah,” Epstein said. “Them.”

  “Eternal vigilance,” I said.

  “Sure,” Epstein said. “Anyway, if he ain’t in our files, he didn’t exist in the sixties. Can you write down names and places and dates?”

  “Everybody but one,” I said. “I implied to the PI that I wouldn’t give him to you.”

  “Professional courtesy?” Epstein said.

  “Actually I threatened him with you if he wouldn’t talk to me.”

  Epstein nodded.

  “Do I need him?” Epstein said.

  “I don’t think you will,” I said. “He’s solid enough. But if you do need him to make your case, I’ll give him to you.”

  Epstein nodded.

  “Your word’s good,” he said.

  “Mostly,” I said.

  Epstein smiled slightly.

  “I think you should put a tail on Alderson,” I said. “Open or not, that’s up to you. But this thing is going to blossom pretty soon, I think, and we wouldn’t want Alderson to disappear again.”

  Epstein nodded.

  “You got plans you’re not sharing with me?” he said.

  “I do,” I said.

  Epstein thought about that for a moment and then shrugged.

  “So far so good,” he said.

  64.

  On tuesday morning at 9:50 Alderson came strolling into Susan’s office and found me there, with my arms crossed, leaning my hips against the front of Susan’s desk.

  “What are you doing?” he said.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Where’s Susan? Dr. Silverman.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “I have an appointment,” he said.

  I said nothing.

  “All right. I don’t know what game you are playing but I haven’t the time nor the patience.”

  He started to turn.

  “Wait a minute,” I said and stood up.

  He turned back toward me and I hit him with a left hook. It was the left hook I’d been working on with Hawk for years. The left hook that if I’d had it as a kid Joe Walcott would never have beaten me. The left hook I’d been saving for a special occasion. It was a lollapalooza. I felt all of me go into the hook. I felt it up my arm and into my chest and shoulder and back. I felt it in my soul. It was almost like ejaculation.

  Alderson staggered back against the wall to the right of the door and sank to a sitting position. He wasn’t out, but bells were ringing. His eyes were unfocused. He felt sort of feebly around on the floor as if he were trying to locate where he was. I went back to the desk and leaned my hips on it again and folded my arms, and waited. Slowly his eyes refocused. He stared at me. And in his stare I saw for the first time the furtive reptilian glitter of his soul.

  “You used to be Bradley Turner,” I said. “You killed your wife and a charter boat captain named Perry Alderson and stole his identity. You are employed by an outfit called FFL to acquire information.”

  The reptilian gaze didn’t waver.

  “So the price of silence has now gone up,” I said. He didn’t say anything.

  “I want one million dollars by tomorrow, in cash, or all of this goes to the FBI.”

  He kept looking at me as he slowly got his feet under him and slid upright against the wall.

  “We had a standoff,” I said. “What I had would cause suspicion but you could have survived it. Now you can’t. If the Feds don’t bust you fi rst, the FFL will kill you to cover its tracks.”

  “Is Dr. Silverman aware of this?” he said.

  “Tomorrow,” I said.

  “I’d like to know if she was merely a part of your plot against me,” he said.

  “I don’t care what you’d like,” I said. “You need to deliver the money by tomorrow. You want to set a time and place, I’ll be here.”

  I thought for a moment that he might bite me. But he didn’t. He gathered himself and straightened his shoulders and after a moment of venomous staring, he turned and left the office. In the hall, Hawk opened the door for him, and closed it after him. I walked to the spare room and watched as Alderson walked up Linnaean Street toward Garden.

  “You want it all, don’t you,” Hawk said.

  “All,” I said. “Alderson, FFL, anybody who surfaces along the way.”

  “You think he’ll come up with the million?”

  “No.”

  “You think he going to make a date to deliver,” Hawk said,

  “and show up with some shooters?”

  “I do.”

  “And we gonna be ready for them?”

  “We are,” I said.

  Hawk grinned.

  “And maybe we be lucky,” Hawk said. “And Alderson show up with the shooters and you got to kill him?”

  “I’m going to roll this up,” I said. “I have to kill him, I will.”

  “You already ratted him out to Epstein,” Hawk said.

  “Double coverage,” I said. “I don’t want to wait for them. Until it’s done Susan can’t live her life.”

  “You, me, Vinnie, and Chollo,” Hawk said. “You need anybody else? Maybe Tony give us some people.”

  “We’ll be enough,” I said.

  “Hell, you and me enough, babe,” Hawk said. “Everybody else just lighten the load.”

  “There’s a lot on the line here,” I said. “I think I’ll stick with the old favorites.”

  65.

  In the event that Alderson and company didn’t bother to make an appointment, I went to sleep on top of Susan’s bed with all my clothes on. At 2:12 Hawk came in and woke me.

  “They here,” he said.

  I rolled out of bed. Put the Browning on my hip, stuffed two extra magazines into my pocket, and followed Hawk downstairs. We went into the spare room. There were no lights on. Chollo stood at one side of the front window looking out through the open louvered shutters. In Susan’s office, at that front window, I could see Vinnie dimly in the ambient light from the street. Vinnie had an assault rifl e.

  “Chollo taking a little tour,” Hawk said. “Spotted them.”

  “They make you?” I said.

  “I am more stealthy than the Mexican jaguar,” Chollo said. He continued to look out the window as he spoke.

  “So they didn’t make you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said.

  “They arrived in a van,” Chollo said. “No markings. I count six. They have all been seeing many movies, I think. Black clothes, faces blackened.”

  “I like the look,” Hawk said.

  “Guns?” I said.

  “Handguns, of course,” Chollo said. “I spotted at least one automatic weapon. An Uzi, I believe.”

  “Where are they now?” I said.


  “Around the house,” Chollo said.

  “They don’t know that Susan’s not here,” I said. “And they need to get us both.”

  “Doors are locked,” Hawk said.

  “But not impenetrable,” I said.

  “How nice,” Hawk said.

  “Two ways for them to go,” I said. “Back stairs up to the porch off Susan’s kitchen, or through the front hall here and up the front stairs.”

  “I’d do both,” Hawk said.

  “Yes,” I said. “Me too. Chollo, you and Vinnie take upstairs. Off the kitchen. Hawk and I will lie in the weeds down here.”

  Vinnie had already started up the stairs.

  “I want one of them alive,” I said.

  Chollo smiled.

  “Play it safe,” Chollo said. “You get one alive. We get one alive. You don’t need two, I’ll shoot one.”

  “Fine,” I said. “You see any sign of Alderson?”

  “Sadly no,” Chollo said, and followed Vinnie up the stairs.

  “They have jaguars in Mexico?” Hawk said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Why don’t you take Susan’s office. They come through here, we’ll catch them between us.”

  “Okay,” Hawk said. “But shoot careful. I don’t want you to shoot me.”

  “You shoot,” I said. “I’m going to grab one.”

  66.

  In susan’s spare room, where I stood, with the louvers closed, the silence merged with the darkness, so that each seemed more intense than it otherwise would have. The dim nocturnal glow of streetlamps, moon, and stars drifted in through the glass panels in the front door, and made things faintly visible in the hallway. But Hawk, ten feet away from me in Susan’s offi ce, was perfectly invisible.

  The darkness was thick and close.

  I was holding a sawed-off baseball bat. A Manny Ramirez model. I kept my 9mm Browning on my hip, with a full magazine and a round in the chamber. No sound came from upstairs where Chollo waited with Vinnie. No sound came from Susan’s office where Hawk waited with his big .44 Mag in a shoulder holster, holding a sawed-off, twelve-gauge doublebarreled shotgun. I went to the front window and looked out through the shutter. Nothing moved on the street. No traffic. No cars with the headlights on and the heater going while the driver listened to late-night radio in the warm car. No couples coming home from a late party, holding hands, looking forward to intimacy. The quiet was stifl ing.