“My point exactly,” I said.
Behind us a train came in, an hour and a half late, from Washington, and people straggled wearily through the bright station.
“Okay,” Marcus said.
“Good,” I said. “One thing, though.”
Marcus waited.
“Kid named Major Johnson,” I said. “He’s going to have to go down.”
“Why?”
“Killed three children,” I said.
Marcus shrugged.
“Lots more where he came from,” Marcus said.
CHAPTER
37
Susan and I were eating blueberry pancakes and drinking coffee on Sunday morning. The sun was flooding in through the east window of the kitchen, and Susan looked like the Queen of Sheba in a white silk robe, with her black hair loose around her face.
Susan gave Pearl a forkful of pancake.
“Good for her,” Susan said. “Whole wheat, fresh fruit, a nice change of pace from bone meal and soy grits.”
“Almost anything would be,” I said.
“Are you going to put on a shirt,” Susan said, “before Jackie arrives?”
“Keep her from flinging herself on me?” I said.
“Sure,” Susan said. “Why is she coming over?”
“She didn’t say. Just that she needed to talk and would we be home.”
Pearl edged her nose under my elbow and pushed my arm.
“Of course,” I said.
I cut a wedge from my pancake stack and fed it to her.
“You think we might be spoiling this dog?” I said.
“Of course,” Susan said. “But how else will she learn to eat from the table?”
I looked down at Pearl. She was perfectly concentrated on the pancakes, her gaze shifting as one or the other of us ate.
“A canine American princess,” I said.
“Nothing wrong with that,” Susan said.
The doorbell rang and Susan got up to answer. I left my pancakes and went to the bedroom and put on a shirt. When I came back Pearl was still sitting gazing at my plate, but the plate was empty and clean. I looked at her. She looked back clear eyed and guilt free, alert for another opportunity.
“Ah yes,” I said, “a hunting dog.”
Susan came back with Jackie. I gave her a half hug and a kiss on the cheek. Pearl jumped around. Susan poured Jackie some coffee. Jackie declined pancakes. I had a few more.
“I’m sorry to intrude on your Sunday morning,” Jackie said. “But I have to talk about Hawk.”
I nodded.
“Puzzling, isn’t he,” Susan said.
Jackie shook her head.
“You know him,” she said to me. “You must know him better than anyone.”
I smiled encouragingly.
“I think I’m falling in love with him,” Jackie said.
Susan and I both smiled encouragingly.
“But I”—she searched for the right way to say it—“I can’t . . . he won’t . . .”
“You can’t get at him,” I said.
“Yes.”
Jackie was silent contemplating that, as if having found the right phrase for it, she could rethink it in some useful way.
“I mean, what’s not to like? He’s fun to be with. He’s funny. He knows stuff. He’s a dandy lover. . . . But I can’t seem to get at him.”
I ate some more pancake. I’d made them with buckwheat flour, and they were very tasty. Jackie was looking at me. I glanced at Susan. This was her area, and I was hoping she’d step in. She didn’t, she was looking at me too.
So was Pearl. But all Pearl wanted was food. Dogs are easy.
“Part of what Hawk is,” I said, “is that you can’t get at him. Erin Macklin thinks that’s the price he paid to get out.”
“Out of what?” Jackie said. “Being black? Being black’s hard on everybody. I don’t shut him out.”
Susan remained quiet. She looked like someone watching a good movie.
“Well,” I said, “if you’re a certain kind of guy—”
“Guy?” Jackie said. “Guy? Is that it? Some fucking arcane guy shit?”
“Jackie,” I said, “I didn’t come over to your place and say, ‘Let me explain Hawk to you.’”
She took a deep inhale and held it for a moment with her lips clamped together, then she let it out through her nose and nodded.
“Of course you didn’t,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m just very stressed.”
“Being in love with Hawk would be stressful,” I said.
“I don’t think I’m in love with him yet. But I will be soon, and I want to figure this out before it’s too late.”
I nodded. Susan watched.
“You were saying?” Jackie said.
“You have a sense of who you are,” I said. “And you’re determined to keep on being who you are, and maybe the only way you can keep on being who you are is to go inside, to be inaccessible. Especially, I would think, if you’re a black man. And more especially if you do the kind of work Hawk does.”
“So why do it?”
“Because he knows how,” I said. “It’s what he’s good at.”
“And that means he can’t love anybody,” Jackie said.
“It means you keep a little of yourself to yourself.”
“Why?” Jackie said.
“Suze,” I said, “you want to offer any interpretation?”
“No.”
I looked at Pearl. She appeared to be fantasizing about buckwheat pancakes.
“I don’t suppose,” I said, “that you’d settle for an eloquent shrug of the shoulders?”
“Not unless you’re willing to admit that you’ve gotten bogged down in your own bullshit and you don’t know how to get out,” Jackie said.
“It’s not bullshit,” I said. “But it is something one feels more than something one thinks about, and it’s hard to explain to someone who doesn’t live Hawk’s life.”
“Like a woman?”
I shook my head.
“Hawk sometimes kills people. People sometimes try to kill him. Keeping yourself intact while you do that kind of work requires so much resolution that it has to be carefully protected.”
“Even from someone who loves him?”
“Especially,” I said.
We were all silent.
“This is probably as much of Hawk as I will ever get,” she said.
“Probably,” I said.
“I don’t think it’s enough,” Jackie said.
“It might be,” Susan said, “if you can adjust your expectations.”
Jackie looked at Susan and at me.
“You’ve been lucky,” Jackie said. “I guess I’m envious.”
Susan looked straight at me and I could feel the connection between us.
“Luck has nothing to do with it,” Susan said.
CHAPTER
38
Hawk and I were sitting in my office in the late afternoon on a day that made you feel eternal. All the trees on the Common were budded. Early flowers bloomed in the Public Gardens, and the college kids littered the embankment along Storrow Drive, soaking up the rays behind BU.
We’d been asking around after Major for a couple of weeks now. And the more we asked where he was, the more no one knew.
“He’ll show up,” Hawk said.
“He’s maybe killed three people,” I said. “Be good if we found him rather than the other way around.”
“We’ll hear from him,” Hawk said. “He’s going to have to know.”
“Know what you’ll do?”
“What I’ll do, and what he’ll do when I do it,” Ha
wk said.
“You’ve given him a lot of slack,” I said. “I’ve seen you be quite abrupt with people who were a lot less annoying than Major is.”
“Kind of want to see what he’ll do too,” Hawk said.
“I sort of guessed that you might,” I said.
“We’ll hear from him,” Hawk said.
And we did.
The phone rang just after six, when the sun had pretty well departed, but it was still bright daylight.
“Got a message for Hawk,” the voice said. It was Major.
“Sure,” I said. “He’s here.”
I clicked onto speakerphone.
Hawk said, “Go ahead.”
“This Hawk?” Major said.
“Un huh.”
“You know who this is?”
“Un huh.”
“You can’t prove I done those people,” Major said, “can you?”
“You got something to say, say it.”
“Maybe I didn’t do them.”
“Un huh.”
“That all you say?”
Hawk made no response at all.
“You been looking for me,” Major said.
“Un huh.”
“You can’t find me.”
“Yet,” Hawk said.
“You never find me ’less I want you to.”
Again Hawk was silent.
“You find me, you can’t do nothing. You got no evidence.”
“I know you did it,” Hawk said.
“You think I done it.”
Hawk was silent.
“So what you do, you find me?”
Hawk didn’t say anything.
“What you think you do?”
More silence.
“Can’t do shit, man.”
“Un huh.”
The speaker buzzed softly in the silence. Hawk was leaning his hips against the edge of my desk, arms folded. He looked like he might be waiting for a bus.
“You still there?” Major said.
“Sure.”
“Want to meet me?”
“Sure.”
“You know the stadium in the Fenway? By Park Drive?” Major said.
“Un huh.”
“Be there, five A.M.”
“Tomorrow,” Hawk said.
Again the scratchy silence lingered on the speakerphone, and then Major hung up. I hit the speakerphone button and broke the connection. Hawk looked over at me and grinned.
“Think he’s alone?” I said.
“No. They won’t leave him.”
“Even when Tony Marcus says to?”
“We crate Major and they’ll go,” Hawk said. “But they won’t leave him there.”
“And they will probably bother us while we’re trying to crate him,” I said.
“Only twenty of them,” Hawk said.
“Against you and me?” I said. “I like our odds.”
Hawk shrugged.
We were quiet for a while, listening to the traffic sounds wisp in through the window.
“We don’t know he did it,” I said.
“You hear him say he didn’t?” Hawk said.
“Haven’t heard him say he did,” I said. “Exactly.”
“How you feel ’bout the Easter bunny?” Hawk said.
“Maybe Major’s just profiling,” I said. “Makes him feel important, being a suspect.”
“We see him tomorrow,” Hawk said. “We ask him.”
CHAPTER
39
Hawk was gone and I sat in my office without turning the lights on and looked at the flossy new building across the street. The whole thing at Double Deuce was rolling faster than it should.
Hawk’s scenario—and I knew he believed it—made good enough sense. Tallboy had welshed on a drug deal and Major had shot Tallboy’s girlfriend and probably by accident the little girl. Then, when Tallboy had felt obliged to revenge it, he wasn’t good enough and Major had snuffed him too. Nothing wrong with that. Things like that happened.
I got up and stood looking out the window with my arms folded. So what was bothering me?
One thing was that I figured that tomorrow would escalate, and Hawk would kill Major. Somebody probably would, sooner or later. But I wasn’t sure it should be us.
Another thing was that it didn’t seem like Major’s style. He was a show-off. If Tallboy was holding out, Major would face him off in front of an audience. And he’d brag about it. Just as he’d bragged that Tony Marcus was his supplier. And if there was a murder or two in any deal where Tony Marcus was part of the mix, why wouldn’t you wonder about him?
I stood looking out the window and wondered about Tony for a while. It didn’t lead me anywhere. Below me on Berkeley Street a man walked three greyhounds on a tripartite leash. There was some sort of organization in town that arranged adoptions for overaged racing dogs. Maybe I should consider a career change.
We would meet Major in the morning. I knew Hawk well enough to know that he wouldn’t waver on that. I didn’t know him well enough to know why he wouldn’t. There was something about Major. There was something going on between them that didn’t include me. He’d go whether I went with him or not, and I couldn’t let him go alone.
The guy with the greyhounds turned the corner on Stuart Street and headed toward Copley Square. I watched until they disappeared behind the old Hancock Building.
“Well,” I said aloud to no one, “better do something.”
And since I couldn’t think of anything else to do, I got in my car and drove to Double Deuce.
There was a light showing in the window of the second-floor apartment that Hawk and I had rousted. I went up the dark stairs and along the sad corridor toward the light that showed under the partly sprung door. I felt my whiteness more than I had when I’d come with Hawk. Then we’d been chasing something. Now I was an intruder from a land as alien to these kids as Tasmania.
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly and knocked. The sounds of the room stopped and the light went out. I heard a shuffle of footsteps and then a voice said through the closed door:
“Yo?”
The voice had a soft rasp. It was probably Goodyear.
“Spenser,” I said. “Alone.”
“What you want?”
“Talk.”
“ ’Bout what?”
“Saving Major’s ass,” I said.
“He ain’t here.”
“You’ll do,” I said. “I don’t have a lot of time.”
I could hear some whispering, then the door lock slid back and the door opened and I walked into the dark room.
CHAPTER
40
When I got home it was nearly 8:30 and the Braves and the Dodgers were on cable. Susan was in the kitchen. There was a bottle of Krug Rosé Champagne in a crystal ice bucket on the counter and two fluted glasses. Susan was wearing a suit the pale green-gold color of spring foliage. It was an odd color, but it went wonderfully with her dark hair. The suit had a very short skirt, too. Pearl was on the couch that occupied most of the far wall in front of the big picture window, where, if you were there at the right time, you could look at the sunset. Now there was only darkness. She cavorted about for a moment to greet me and then went back to her couch.
I looked at the champagne.
“Does this bode well for me?” I said. “Or are you having company?”
“It’s to sip while we talk,” Susan said. “If you’ll open it.”
I did and carefully poured two glasses. I gave one to her. She touched its rim to mine and said, “To us.”
“I’ll drink to that,” I said. And we did.
I looked
down at her legs, much of which were showing under the short skirt.
“Great wheels,” I said.
“Thank you,” she said. “I’m afraid I’ve been a goddamned fool.”
“Anything’s possible,” I said.
We each drank a little more champagne.
“First, to state the obvious, I love you.”
“Yes,” I said. “I know that.”
“Second, and I’m afraid about as obvious, I do better with other people’s childhoods than I do with my own.”
“Don’t we all,” I said.
“I was brought up in a well-related suburb by affluent parents. My father went to business, my mother stayed home with the children. My father’s consuming passion was business; my mother’s was homemaking. I was expected to marry a man who went to business and loved it, to stay home with the children, and make a home.”
I didn’t say anything. Pearl lay still on the couch, her back legs stretched straight out, her head on her front paws, motionless except for her eyes, which watched us carefully.
“And I did,” Susan said. She drank another swallow of champagne, and put the glass back on the counter and looked into the glass where the bubbles drifted toward the surface.
“Except that the marriage was awful and there were no children, and I got divorced and had to work and met you.”
“ ’Bye-’bye, Miss American Pie,” I said.
Susan smiled.
“Most of the rest you know,” she said. “We both know. When I left Sunnybrook Farm I left with a vengeance—the job, then the Ph.D., moving to the city. Part of your charm at first was that you were so unsuburban. You were dangerous, you were your own and not someone else’s. And you gave me room.”
I poured some more champagne in her glass, carefully, so it wouldn’t foam up and overflow.
“But always I was failing. I wasn’t keeping house, I wasn’t raising children. I wasn’t doing it right. It’s one of the reasons I left you.”
“For a while,” I said.
“And it’s the reason I wanted you to live with me.”
“Not because I am cuter than a bug’s ear?”
“That too,” Susan said. “But mostly I wanted to pretend to be what I had never been.”
“Which is to say, your mother,” I said.
Susan smiled again.
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