Pale Kings and Princes

by Robert B. Parker

  "Tell me, Brett," his mother said. "You don't have to say it loud. You can whisper if you want to, just whisper it to me."

  Brett nodded.

  She put her ear close to his mouth and he whispered. She nodded.

  "Okay," she said. "I'll tell Mr. Spenser, but I'll whisper too."

  She walked over to me and whispered in my ear. "Esteva."

  "Jesus Christ," I whispered back.

  Chapter 22

  I was sitting in the front seat of Lundquist's State Police cruiser parked in the lot behind the library. The Navy Colt was in a paper bag on the floor of the rental Mustang parked next to us.

  "This is going to be a little tricky," I said. Lundquist nodded.

  "I may have the weapon that killed Rogers, and I need to get it tested against the bullets they took out of him to see if in fact it's the gun."

  "No problem," Lundquist said.

  It was a gorgeous winter day. Bright sun bouncing around off the snow, just warm enough for eaves to drip.

  "Well, maybe not," I said. "The thing is that I don't want to tell you where I got it."

  Lundquist nodded. "I can see where that might be a problem," he said.

  "Say it turns out to be the gun, and it's going to be major-league coincidence if it doesn't, you're going to want to know whose gun it is, and if I tell you that I'll have to tell you how I know it's his and if I tell you that I'll have to tell you things I don't want to tell you."

  "But now that we know you've got it," Lundquist said, "we can sort of insist."

  "True," I said.

  "And you know how hard we can insist when we feel like insisting."

  "Also true," I said. "On the other hand, you've only got my word that I've got it, and if I retract, what have you got?"

  "There's that," Lundquist said. "We could squeeze you a little."

  "Un huh."

  "But I got the feeling you been squeezed before."

  "Un huh."

  "So," Lundquist said, "you got a plan?"

  "I give you the piece," I said. "You find out if it killed Rogers and tell me, and we go from there."

  "Go where," Lundquist said.

  "Where we can," I said. "There's stuff that has to be worked out."

  "Like what?"

  I shook my head.

  Lundquist looked out at the little park off to his left in front of the library. He drummed his thick pale fingers gently on the top of the steering wheel.

  "I don't see where I'm worse off than I was," he said.

  I got out of the cruiser and opened my car door and took the gun out in its paper bag and got back in the cruiser and handed the gun to Lundquist. He opened it and looked in.

  "Fingerprints?" he said.

  "No," I said. "I wiped it."

  "Swell," Lundquist said.

  "Told you it was tricky," I said.

  Lundquist nodded. "I think I'll keep this pretty much to myself," he said.

  "Me too," I said.

  I got out of the cruiser. Lundquist put the gun on the seat beside him, still in the paper bag, and put the car in gear and drove away. I watched him pull out into North Street and turn down the hill toward Main Street. Then I got back in the Mustang and sat.

  Ballistics would prove that the Navy Colt had killed Bailey Rogers. A second .41 in the small circle I was snooping in was too big a coincidence. It meant that Esteva killed Rogers, or had it done. But that wasn't a bolt from the blue and it would still be hard to prove. The gun wasn't registered and there'd be no way to connect it to Esteva except through Brett's testimony. But that would open up the kid's connection with Esteva and the kid was not in shape for that. I wasn't sure what he was in shape for. His mother was in no shape for that either. So if I kept the blanket pulled up over Brett, what did I have. A reasonable and unprovable certainty that Esteva killed Rogers. If I'd never heard of Brett I would have had a reasonable and unprovable guess that Esteva killed Rogers. I could probably nail Esteva on the coke business, but again not without Brett. And I couldn't use Brett. Without Brett, Esteva was safe.

  "Jesus Christ."

  I got out of the car and went into the library.

  There was a pale young woman with glasses at the desk.

  "Is Mrs. Rogers here," I said.

  "She's in the office," the pale woman said. "Left of the card catalogues."

  I went to the office. Caroline Rogers was sitting at a library table with a card-file drawer on the table in front of her. She looked up when I came in and her eyes widened.

  I said, "Where's Brett?"

  "He's at work," she said. "We both thought it best not to stay home and brood."

  "Call him, can you?"

  "Of course I can. Why should I?"

  "If Esteva finds out that we know about him and the gun," I said.

  Caroline stared at me. "Oh, God," she said. "Brett would never tell."

  "Let's just call him," I said.

  She swung around in her chair and picked up the phone from the desk behind her. She dialed and waited.

  "Brett Rogers, please."

  She waited. There was a small coffee maker on a stand past the table with a pot of coffee almost boiled away on one of the burners. It made a harsh odor.

  "He isn't?" Caroline said. "You're sure. Thank you."

  She hung up. And turned in her chair. And looked at me.

  "They said he's not there. That he didn't come to work." She picked up the receiver again and punched out another number. She waited. I went over and removed the coffeepot from the burner. She hung up the phone. "No answer," she said. "I'm going home."

  "I'll drive you," I said.

  She started to speak and then didn't. Her coat was on a hanger on the coatrack inside the office door. I held it for her while she slipped her arms through and then we were on our way. I spun the Mustang's wheels on the hard frozen ground in the parking lot and the back end fishtailed a little as I pulled out onto North Street. Caroline was silent for the ten minutes it took to drive to her house. I didn't have anything to say either.

  I was beside her when she put her key into the front door and opened it. I pushed in ahead of her when I smelled the cordite through the open door. The living room was as neat and chintzy as it had been yesterday, except that in the middle of it, on the hand-braided rug, Brett Rogers was facedown with blood already blackening the back of his cotton flannel shirt. I went to a knee beside him and felt for a pulse. There was none. His skin was cold to the touch. I looked up at Caroline. She was standing in the open doorway with her hands at her sides, the door key in her hand, her face without expression and very pale. I shifted my body to try and block her view of the kid. As I did she slowly sank to her knees in the entryway, and settled back so she was sitting on her feet. And she began to scream. I scrambled over beside her and put my arms around her. She was as stiff and unyielding as a lawn chair and her scream was formless and guttural, as if it was torn loose from inside her. I rubbed her back in small aimless circles with my right hand. There was nothing to say.

  Chapter 23

  I drove the eighty miles from Wheaton to Cambridge and was in Susan's waiting room when her last patient finished. She came out of her office with the patient and saw me sitting in the green leather chair reading a copy of The New Yorker. She smiled at me. The patient was a sturdy woman in chino trousers carrying a maroon backpack.

  Susan said, "Good-bye, Ms. Lewis, I'll see you on Thursday."

  Ms. Lewis nodded and did not look at me and went out. Susan slid the bolt in the outer door after her and came back and plunked herself down on my lap.

  "You've come to the right place," she said. "I can help you."

  I grinned and we kissed each other. "Do you have a diagnosis?" I said.

  "Fucking crazy," Susan said.

  "Never mind the technical jargon," I said. "Is there hope?"

  "Our best chance is maintenance," Susan said. "I don't think we can plan on improvement."

  I put my head against her
chest. Her perfume smelled expensive. I could feel her heart pulsing.

  "You okay?" Susan said.

  "I don't know," I said. "I need to eat dinner and talk."

  "I am supposed to have dinner with Patti Greiff," Susan said.

  I nodded.

  "I'm meeting her at the Harvest," Susan said. "Want to join us and afterwards, you and I can talk?"

  "Sure."

  It was dark on Brattle Street and the lights of the American Rep Theatre gleamed happily through the wide glass windows. The windows of the croissant shop were steamy and the display windows of Crate and Barrel in the Design Research Building were full of colorful knickknacks and elegant folding chairs. We turned in through the courtyard of the Design Research Building and walked to the end where the Harvest Restaurant nestled in the far left corner. Susan was holding my hand.

  It was cold and Susan was wearing her silver fox fur with the red fox collar turned up. There was something about the mingle of cologne and fur and cold air that made her seem even more beautiful than she usually seemed. We were quiet as we walked.

  It was warm and noisy in the Harvest. To the left the bar was crowded with people who hoped to meet each other. Ahead of us a stunning blond-haired woman waved at us from a booth. She wore a wide-brimmed gray felt hat. Her black-and-white-checked coat was open and thrown back off her shoulders.

  "There's Patti," Susan said.

  "I'll say."

  We slid into the booth across from Patti. And Susan introduced us.

  "The BF?" Patti said.

  "Isn't he adorable?" Susan said.

  "Hunkus Americanus," Patti said. She cocked her head. "Maybe a little bit scary-looking."

  "It's my steely blue stare," I said. "I can't help it."

  Dinner passed easily. Patti and Susan had been friends for a long time, and I spent much of the evening at the periphery of their interest. When dinner was over, Patti took the check.

  "I've waited years to meet you," she said. "Let me celebrate by paying."

  We left the Harvest. Outside Patti gave Susan a squeeze.

  "Take care," she said. "It was lovely to meet him."

  "He's happy to have met you too," I said.

  "He's quieter than I'd have guessed," Patti said.

  "Yes," Susan said. "He is."

  Patti went to her car. Susan and I walked through Harvard Square. We held hands. Our breath hung in the air. In a recessed doorway a young man played guitar and sang into a microphone, a single speaker set up, and beside it the guitar case open for donations.

  "You are quieter than I'd have guessed," Susan said.

  "I know. It's why I came home."

  "Yes. We are each other's home, aren't we?"

  "It's bad in Wheaton," I said.

  Susan was quiet.

  "There's a woman whose husband was murdered and then a few days later her son was murdered."

  "Part of the drug business?"

  "Probably," I said. "The thing is, I probably caused both killings."

  "How?"

  "Doing what I do," I said. "Poking, pushing, following, looking."

  "And?"

  "The woman's husband was the police chief."

  "Rogers," Susan said. She probably lost the key to something about once a month, but in human matters she never forgot anything.

  "Yes. His kid worked for Esteva and when things weren't happening I followed him."

  Across the intersection of Brattle and Mass. Avenue the out-of-town newsstand was still open and still busy. We turned up Mass. Ave.

  "He picked up a load of coke in Maine and you hijacked it," Susan said.

  "Yes."

  "And you went to ask him about it."

  "Yes, and he pulled a gun on me," I said. "And his mother took it away from him. It was a forty-one Navy Colt. The same caliber that killed his father."

  "Umph," Susan said.

  "And I asked him where he got it and he wouldn't tell and we pressed him and he said Esteva gave it to him."

  "And sometimes you save them." Susan had turned full toward me and was holding both my hands.

  "A little like your business," I said.

  Susan nodded. "A little."

  "I involved that kid," I said.

  "No," Susan said. "He involved himself."

  "I should have figured he'd tell Esteva," I said.

  Susan stood so close to me that we touched from knee to chest. She pressed my hands in hers against her, just below her hips.

  "Probably," she said. "Probably you should have. You made a mistake. You'll make more before you're through. But you make fewer than most people I know. And no one makes them in better causes."

  "This mistake was mortal," I said.

  "Your work is mortal, your mistakes will be too."

  "Yeah," I said.

  "Yeah," Susan said. "And the mortal parts of it are what makes it work you'll do. It's what makes it matter. If it didn't have mortal consequences it would bore you."

  "I don't like to see people die," I said.

  "And you've saved some," Susan said. I nodded. "You're the one who said it to me."

  ''What?"

  "Death is the mother of beauty."

  "I didn't think you were listening," I said, and took my hands from hers and slid them up her back and held her against me in the cold night under the bright artificial light on the empty street.

  Chapter 24

  We were in Susan's living room having a cup of hot chocolate. There was a fire. We sat beside each other on the couch with our feet on the coffee table.

  "Have you spoken to Hawk?" Susan said.

  "Not yet," I said.

  "When will you?"

  "Soon," I said.

  Susan turned her head and looked at me. "Aren't you stubborn," she said.

  "But exciting sexually," I said.

  "Sometimes," Susan said. "Are you planning to go this alone no matter what, just to prove you can?"

  "No," I said. "I'm going to ask you for help." Susan raised her eyebrows.

  "Caroline Rogers is going to need help. There are two other women involved in all of this in ways I don't understand, and I'm going to need help with them."

  "And you want me to cancel my appointments and trek out to Wheaton?"

  "Well put," I said.

  "There are people here who need help," Susan said. "Some of them need it very much."

  "I know," I said.

  We both drank some cocoa.

  "Tell me about the other women," Susan said.

  "Juanita Olmo is a social worker who knew Eric Valdez," I said.

  "The reporter who was murdered to start with," Susan said.

  "Yes. She told me that Emmy Esteva was having an affair with Valdez."

  "Those are the other two women?"

  "Yes. Juanita is probably a generation or so removed from Colombia. Emmy is more recent."

  "What is your problem with them?" Susan said.

  "Things don't mesh right," I said. "Juanita tells me that Emmy was sleeping with Valdez-which gives Felipe a motive for killing Valdez and castrating him, just like Rogers contended. But Juanita insists that Esteva didn't and wouldn't. That Rogers did it. Apparently out of meanness. She says that Esteva is sort of a Colombian Horatio Alger and has beaten us Yankees at our own capitalism game-she specified my capitalistic game." Susan smiled.

  "Further, she says that Emmy, Mrs. Alger, is his weakness. A slut, a tramp, a scarlet woman," I said.

  "Perhaps she has a passion for Esteva herself," Susan said.

  "More than perhaps, I would say."

  "We shrinks are reserved," Susan said. "Perhaps, and appropriate, are as ferocious as we ever get."

  "Yeah," I said. "But if she's lusty for Esteva, then why does she tell me about Emmy and Valdez, thus incriminating the object of her lust. How appropriate is that?"

  "People are not always appropriate."

  "Boy, it's great working with a pro," I said. "I asked her if maybe she had been sleeping wi
th Valdez herself and she got a kind of loopy expression on her face and got up and went into the ladies' room."

  "You thought she might be jealous of Emmy over Valdez," Susan said.

  "Yes, and maybe jealous of Emmy over Esteva too," I said.

  "It's great working with a pro," Susan said.

  "And she hates Rogers," I said.

  "Why," Susan said. "Was he hateful?"

  "Seemed so to me. Maybe that's all there is to it. But Caroline seems like a pretty solid person and she loved him."

  Susan shrugged. "That might be an overly romantic view of love."

  "Good people can love not-good people," I said,

  "Yes," Susan said.

  We were quiet for a moment. I held my cocoa in my left hand and massaged the back of her neck for a moment with my right hand. "True," I said.

  "Perhaps she hated him because he was hateful, perhaps there's another reason. It should be interesting to find out," Susan said. "How do you think I can best help Caroline Rogers?"

  "I don't know. Two tragedies like this in sequence have got to do her damage. I don't want to leave her to deal with the damage alone."

  "Perhaps she will want to deal with it alone."

  I shrugged. "If you were around to consult on her and Emmy and Juanita . . ."

  "And?" Susan said.

  "And to help me cope with my sexual energy," I said.

  "Getting a little edgy staying out in Wheaton alone so long, are we?" Susan said.

  "Maybe," I said.

  She drank the rest of her cocoa.

  "Okay," she said. "Here's the deal, big guy. I'll try to reorganize my schedule, which will take me a day or two, and then I'll come out and join you."

  "Ah," I said.

  "On two conditions," Susan said. "One, that me never eat again in the motel diningroom . . ."

  I nodded.

  "And, two," Susan said, "you call Hawk tonorrow and ask him to join you."

  "And if he refuses?" I said.

  "I'll call him."

  "Done," I said. "It is great working with a pro."

  Susan turned toward me and put her mouth lightly against mine and said, "You ain't seen nothing yet."