All Our Yesterdays

by Robert B. Parker

  Barry Levine broke off a small piece of cruller and ate it over the table.

  “The special prosecutor’s office can be annoying, but as long as we all remain steadfast, they can be frustrated. They can prove nothing.”

  He drank coffee carefully, savoring the swallow. He touched his lips again with the napkin.

  “Gus, on the other hand, knows most of our intimate secrets. And he can probably prove them.”

  “Gus, my God, why would he? He’d have to incriminate himself.”

  “Butchie’s theory is that Gus is crazy, and that he might do anything. He’s very supportive of his son.”

  Barry Levine leaned back in his small chair and stretched, arching his back. He shook his head.

  “You get older, you pay more and more for the time you put in at the health club,” he said.

  “You think he would confess,” Tom Winslow said, “—implicate me, us?”

  Barry Levine shrugged broadly.

  “You prepare for what your enemy is able to do, not what you think he will do,” he said.

  “Well, I mean, Jesus, can’t we do something to stop him?”

  “Butchie was hoping you’d talk some sense to him.”

  “Me? What can I say to him?”

  “Butchie thinks, and I must say I agree, that what you say and how you control him is largely your problem. Butchie, and rightly, I think, simply wants him controlled.”

  “But I can’t control Gus Sheridan. For God’s sake, he controls me.”

  “Butchie feels that you have a long family relationship, including his son and your daughter.”

  “They’re, ah, separated or whatever, right now,” Tom Winslow said.

  “Shame,” Barry Levine said. “But they have been together. The point is Butchie figures that there may be some basis for you and Gus to reason together. And Butchie would like you to try.”

  Tom Winslow was shaking his head.

  “I can’t—”

  “Tom,” Barry Levine said, “get real. Butchie isn’t making a suggestion, if you see what I mean. Butchie wants you to get Gus Sheridan under control.”

  “What if I can’t?”

  “Butchie is in business. If he were to control Gus in some more direct way, it would add to the difficulty of doing business in the current climate.”

  “Direct way?”

  Barry Levine was impatient. It was like talking to a child.

  “If Butchie kills him,” Barry Levine said. “It would solve the problem, but create others.”

  “Kill him?”

  “Yes, Tom. It’s part of the way Butchie does business. If he must. And he would not, of course, hesitate to kill you if it made sense to him. But right now it makes sense to him for you to talk with Gus.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Now I’m aware, as is Butchie, that you also do some business with Patrick Malloy. It is Butchie’s intention that Patrick will be out of business in a while, and all the business will be done with Butchie. Butchie is very businesslike.”

  Tom Winslow was rigid in his chair. There was no color in his face. And the corners of his mouth were pinched with anxiety as he watched Barry Levine finish his second cruller.

  “Unfortunately,” Barry Levine said, “Pat is somewhat less businesslike than Butchie. More given to impulse. Butchie suggests, and I concur, that you be careful of Pat.”

  As he spoke, Barry Levine unconsciously wiped the corners of his mouth with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand.

  “He’s impulsive,” Barry Levine said, “but he’s not stupid. It will occur to him that you and Gus know too much. And, being less businesslike …” Barry Levine spread his hands, and raised his eyebrows.

  Tom Winslow sat like a stone. Barry Levine smiled at him and stood.

  “Anyway,” he said, “it is important to you, I think, to get this situation under control before anything bad happens.”

  “To me?” Tom Winslow’s voice squeezed out thinly.

  “To all of us, Tom. To all of us.”

  Barry Levine nodded pleasantly, and turned and walked away toward the door that led to Boylston Place where, already, upscale young people were gathering for fun at outdoor tables, under bright umbrellas.

  Gus

  The first big leisurely raindrop hit the hot sidewalk near the small bandstand on the Tremont Street end of the Common and faded. And then another came and another more quickly, and soon it was raining.

  “This will not help the look I spent so much time putting on,” Laura Winslow said.

  “Bedraggled?” Gus said.

  “Think drowned rat,” Laura said.

  Gus took off his suit jacket and Laura draped it over her head and shoulders. He nodded toward the bandstand.

  “We could take cover,” he said.

  “Are we allowed up there?”

  “I’m a cop,” Gus said. “I’m the one does the allowing.”

  “Yes,” Laura said. “I forget.”

  The rain was coming hard enough to have wet Gus’s shirt by the time they reached the bandstand. They could smell the steamy scent of the rain hitting the still hot pavement of the walkways.

  Laura handed Gus’s coat to him.

  “No,” he-said, and draped it around her shoulders. “It’s getting cold.”

  “Your shirt is wet,” she said. “Won’t you be freezing?”

  “You ever see a cold whale?” Gus said.

  “You’re not fat. You’re a big man, and you are always pretending to be fat, but you’re not.”

  “Fatter than I used to be,” Gus said.

  With his coat off, Laura could see the gun on Gus’s hip. How strange to be Laura Winslow and to stand here sheltered from a downpour with a man who carried a gun. She shrugged the coat closer around her and held it in place with her folded arms. Gus was more than big, as she stood beside him. It wasn’t that he was tall. Tom was taller, in fact, but Gus was so wide. The sheer bulk of him was compelling. He seemed to loom beside her, his shirtsleeves tight over his upper arms. She shivered, as much from strangeness as from cold, and moved closer to him so that they touched at the shoulder.

  The top of the bandstand was rounded and it caused the rain to come straight down off it all around like a translucent curtain. She had the feeling of being inside a waterfall. There was a soundless shimmer of lightning, as there so often was in summer storms, and several seconds later the distant thunder.

  “Grace says that both she and Chris are seeing other people,” Laura said.

  “Un-huh.”

  “I guess that’s good for them?”

  “It would be bad for them not to,” Gus said.

  “Why?”

  “This way they’ll know,” Gus said.

  “An informed choice, so to speak,” Laura said.

  Gus nodded, watching the rain.

  “Tom is the only man I ever have slept with,” Laura said.

  Gus turned his head to look at her.

  “Not an informed choice,” he said.

  “No. Were you … had you any experience when you married Peggy?”

  Gus smiled. The lightning came soundlessly again, and Gus listened for the subsequent thunder before he answered.

  “In Tokyo, on R and R from Korea.”

  “Prostitutes.”

  Gus nodded.

  “So Peggy was the first, ah …”

  “American,” Gus said.

  “Amateur,” Laura said simultaneously.

  They laughed.

  “She was that, all right,” Gus said.

  They were quiet. The rain was hard. The thunder when it came was now hard on the heels of the lightning. Laura leaned her head against Gus’s shoulder. He put his arm around her.

  “Still is,” Gus said.

  Around them, through the rain, the trees on the Common glistened murkily. They were alone in a green-gray silence made more quiet by the downrush of the rain.

  Gus

  Tom Winslow was sitting stiffly on a bench
on the Mall on Commonwealth Avenue, near Berkeley Street, when Gus strolled four blocks down from Headquarters and sat beside him. Gus had some roasted peanuts he had bought in a brown paper bag and almost at once there were half a dozen pigeons around them. Gus offered the bag to Tom. Tom shook his head. Gus took a peanut from the bag and cracked it open. He dropped the shells on the ground and popped the nuts into his mouth. The pigeons ignored the shells.

  “Gus, I’m scared,” Tom said.

  “Things kind of closing in, Tom?”

  “Yes. On you too. Aren’t you scared?”

  Gus ate another peanut. He paid no attention to the pigeons that strutted anxiously around his feet.

  “I haven’t thought about it, Tommy. I don’t guess I am.”

  “Well, you’re a cop, you’re used to this kind of thing.”

  “That’s not really it, Tommy,” Gus said. “Cops get scared. It’s just that I don’t give a shit.”

  “They are talking about killing us,” Tom said. “You don’t give a shit about that?”

  Gus shrugged. “Who’s ‘they’?” he said.

  “Barry Levine, representing Butchie. He said I better control you.”

  “You can’t control me, Tommy. You explain that to him?”

  “Yes, but he said I had to. He said Pat Malloy might kill me, and he implied Butchie would too if he had to.”

  Gus nodded thoughtfully.

  “Well, what do you have to say about that?”

  “Yeah. They might kill you. Butchie will do it when he thinks it will be better for business to kill you than to let you live. Patrick will kill you when he gets mad enough.”

  “Jesus, Gus. You got me into this. He said you threatened Butchie with a gun.”

  “Got his attention,” Gus said.

  “Even if they don’t kill me. What if it all comes out? You put me in bed with these people, Gus. What if it breaks open and everything comes out? You go down too.”

  “I told you before, Tommy, I don’t give a shit. And you are one of the things I don’t give a shit about most.”

  Tom’s face got red and he started to cry.

  “Gus, Jesus. For God sakes, if you don’t care about me. I got a wife. I got two kids. My daughter and your son are still close. I mean, I know they broke up. But they still see each other. They may get together again. Gus, I haven’t done you any harm. I’ve done what you said. You’ve got to get me out of this. Gus, please.”

  Gus looked at Tommy with the same absent stare with which he had ignored the pigeons. He ate another peanut. Then he crumpled the bag, stood, walked to a trash container, and deposited the bag.

  “Gus,” Tommy said.

  “You’re on your own, Tommy.”

  The tears were wet on Tom’s face.

  “Gus,” he said again.

  “Might be a smart thing for you to go tell everything to Chris. Then everyone goes down, and nobody’s got hold of your balls anymore.”

  “You too, Gus,” Tom said. His voice was thick with crying. “You’d go down too.”

  Gus shrugged.

  “So fucking what?”

  Gus turned away and started back up Berkeley Street. “You’re the Sheridan version of original sin, Tommy.”

  Behind him the pigeons, deprived of peanuts, flew up briefly and settled on undulating wings to forage near the trash barrel.

  Tommy

  This time as he came up the hidden path toward the secret house he felt as if he were swollen from the inside and the pressure would make him burst.

  She wasn’t at the door when he arrived and he let himself in. The house was a mess. Where was she? Christ, of all times for her not to be here. He felt the inner self pressing harder on him. It made the blood pound behind his eyes. He called to her. She didn’t answer. He went to the bedroom and found her. She was naked, lying flat on the bed, smiling. Her small new breasts pointed straight up.

  “She should have been waiting,” he said.

  “I thought I’d give Tommy a surprise,” she said, and giggled. Waiting.

  He stared at her nakedness. His throat felt closed, as if the air could barely force its way through the dwindling passage. She put her thumb in her mouth and turned it slowly, sucking it in imitation of something she had seen on television.

  “Roll over onto your stomach,” he said.

  His voice rasped as if he were speaking through an imperfect mechanical device. In their time together she had learned to do what he told her. She lay perfectly still facedown on the bed, her arms by her sides. over her for a moment looking at her little girl’s back, and then he took his father’s old Walther P38 automatic pistol from a drawer in the bedside table, and thumbed back the hammer, and put the muzzle just behind her right ear without touching her and closed his eyes and pulled the trigger.

  Gus

  In the late summer the days were beginning to shorten, and Gus and Laura were staying later and later at their Tuesday meetings. The sun was already out of sight behind the huge Rowes Wharf Arch behind them, and the harbor had a slick, glassy look to it in the blue light of early evening. They were in the big glassed-in pagoda at water’s edge that served as a waiting room for the Harbor Ferry service. No one else was in there, and the emptiness seemed to insulate them from the people up at the outdoor café, or the people seated by the window in the hotel dining room.

  “Since that first time at the Ritz,” Laura said, “how many meetings have we had to talk about our children?”

  “Thirteen,” Gus said.

  “And how many of them have we devoted to talking about the children?”

  “Total? Half of the first one, I think.”

  They were quiet, standing together looking out at the water in the empty vaulting space. The quiet seemed balmy to them.

  “And the rest of the time we’ve talked about ourselves,” Laura said.

  “Yes.”

  “What do you want, Gus?”

  “House on the river,” Gus said. “Some dogs.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  He turned and looked down at her. “I want whatever you will give me.”

  She put her hands into the pockets of the light raincoat she was wearing. She turned slowly, pivoting on one spike heel, and slowly surveyed the pagoda.

  “This must be the most romantic spot in Boston,” she said.

  “Why I brought you,” Gus said.

  Laura completed her pivot and stood very close to Gus.

  “Good,” she said, and put her arms around him, and turned her face up toward him.

  She heard him say, “Jesus,” very softly, and then he put his arms around her and kissed her and she closed her eyes and held his kiss and kissed him back and they stayed that way, swaying only slightly, for a long time.

  With her mouth still touching his, Laura said, “Do you remember the first time we had drinks at the Ritz and we joked about eloping and you said you could get a room?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you?”

  “Would this place do?” Gus said, and nodded at the Boston Harbor Hotel that loomed above them.

  “Yes.”

  “I already got a room,” he said.

  “How did you know?”

  “I knew.”

  It was a short walk to the hotel and a short elevator ride to the room. On the way Gus felt trembling inside him. He looked at his hand. It was steady. But he felt volitionless, as if he might suddenly sink to the floor. He took the key out and opened the door.

  “I need to fluff up a little,” Laura said when they were in the room. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  “I got no other plans,” Gus said.

  Laura went into the bathroom and closed the door. Gus undressed slowly. He hung his clothes in the closet. He put his gun on the closet shelf, and lay down on the bed with the pillows propped and his hands behind his head. Their room was high up in the hotel, and from the bed all Gus could see through the window was the nearly dark sky. He waited, shivering inv
isibly.

  Laura came out of the bathroom with no clothes on and shut the door behind her. She stood self-consciously at the foot of the bed. Gus smiled at her.

  “Oh, boy,” he said.

  “It’s kind of an old body,” she said, “to be showing all of it to someone.”

  “I like it,” Gus said. It was difficult for him to speak.

  Laura came to the bed and got on it with him and turned on her side and put her head on his chest.

  “Grace told me when she went to New York with this man they went to a hotel room and did ‘everything.’”

  Gus rubbed his hand between her shoulder blades in a small circular motion.

  “Um-hm.”

  “I didn’t really know what she meant by everything,” Laura said. “I had to ask.” Her mouth was very close to Gus’s face. “Do you know everything?”

  “Probably,” Gus said.

  “I’ve never done everything,” Laura said. “I’ve never done anything except, once in a great while, lie still in the dark with Tom on top of me until he was through.”

  They lay quietly together, their faces close, looking at each other. Gus put his arms around her. They kissed. His hands moved over her body. She arched a little to make herself more available.

  “Everything,” she murmured with her mouth against his.

  “Sure,” Gus said.

  Gus

  Gus was carrying coffee in a paper cup as he walked across the hot top parking lot along the Charles River on Soldiers Field Road, with a homicide detective named Rafferty. He held it carefully so as not to spill it, and when he got to the body he stopped and took a sip.

  “We wanted you to see this one, Captain,” Rafferty said. “MDC guy found her this morning, just like this.”

  Rafferty gestured with his chin toward the uniformed MDC policeman standing with two homicide detectives. It was still early, barely eight o’clock, and overcast. Gus sipped more coffee. Behind him the sound of commuter traffic was steady, and out on the river a woman in a racing shell had stopped rowing, and was drifting, with the oars flat on the water, staring at the police activity on the shore. The form on the ground was covered with a pink blanket.