Double Play

by Robert B. Parker

  “Sure,” Burke said.

  “I love them,” Lauren said. “They’re so . . . cheap.”

  Burke felt himself clench. His breath was quick and shallow. He thought of Bloody Ridge. She stood before him, her arms above her head, her face turned up, the rain making her naked skin slick.

  Without looking down she said, “Would you like to fuck me? Here? On the wet ground? In the rain?”

  Burke’s throat had narrowed. It was hard to squeeze his voice out past it. He took the .45 out and laid it on the rock close at hand, under the umbrella. He took a deep breath and eased the air out slowly.

  Then he said, “Yes.”

  Bobby

  I felt very American during the war. I played Paul Robeson’s recording of “Ballad for Americans” often, listening closely so I could remember the lyrics . . . “In ’76 the sky was red/With thunder rumbling overhead.”

  There were soap operas on the radio in the daytime for the women, and adventure serials in the late afternoon so boys could listen to Jack Armstrong and Captain Midnight and Hop Harrigan. I never thought much about it then, but girls probably listened too.

  But in the evening we all listened to Jack, Doc, and Reggie on I Love a Mystery. We listened to Jack Benny and Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. We listened to the Shadow. All of us. Children, adults. Once a week, the Lux Radio Theater dramatized popular movies with name actors. Lux presents Hollywood. My memory is that Cecil B. DeMille was the host. He talked in elocution English that had no region. The announcer referred to him as Mr. DeMille.

  The Fitch Bandwagon . . . don’t despair, use your head, save your hair, use Fitch Shampoo. Duffy’s Tavern . . . Archie the manager speaking, Duffy ain’t here. Wistful Vista. Allen’s Alley. The Green Hornet and Cato. Steve Wilson and Loreli Kilbourne of the Illustrated Press . . . freedom of the press is a flaming sword, use it wisely, hold it high, guard it well.

  We all shared the same love songs, by the same singers. Crosby and Sinatra. Dinah Shore and Dick Haymes. Bob Eberly. Helen O’Connell. Vera Lynn. The Ink Spots. Jo Stafford.

  We all believed in love.

  LIFE magazine appeared every Monday. It was the unifying force of my childhood. Big format. Pictures. Text. LIFE covered everything. Or seemed to. LIFE was there when it happened and it not only told you what happened but explained it, placed it in context. LIFE wrote about sorority parties and medieval princes and labor strikes and Italian peasants and football games in Michigan. It covered the war in China between Chiang and the Communists. It covered hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee. It covered debutante cotillions, managing to get some careful shots of pretty girls getting dressed and making up. It covered the Broadway stage. It had a regular feature called “LIFE Goes to the Movies” that encapsulated a current feature, telling an abbreviated version of the story in pictures and captions. Life presents Hollywood.

  LIFE covered the White House and the Congress and big labor and big business. It covered the New York Philharmonic, and life in small Midwestern towns and the urban renewal of Omaha, and proceedings in the British House of Commons, and exploration of the South Pole, all with the measured certainty of an insider. It had access. It was there. It understood.

  And always, at the heart of its coverage, shaping every attitude it espoused and certainly every attitude I learned from it, LIFE offered the vision of a robust and pleasant life lived in a bountiful and beautiful land. A fundamental part of that life was marriage, and the clean and happy sex that went along with it. It was the culminating purpose of any boyhood to marry a fresh and bouncy young white woman with good thighs who bathed often and had a great smile . . . and settle down and never roam and make the San Fernando Valley my home.

  I looked forward to LIFE’s arrival each week.

  13.

  THEY ATE BREAKFAST together in Burke’s apartment at 3:20 in the afternoon. Lauren’s clothes hung drying in the bathroom. She wore one of Burke’s dress shirts.

  “Your room is very neat,” Lauren said.

  “Yes.”

  “And all those books.”

  “I’ve had a lot of free time,” Burke said.

  Lauren put down her coffee cup and put a cigarette in her mouth. Burke leaned forward and lit it for her.

  “Is there anyone you should call,” Burke said, “tell them you’re all right?”

  “Daddy is used to me not coming home,” Lauren said.

  “And your mother?”

  “She doesn’t care,” Lauren said. “Mostly she’s drunk.”

  Burke lit himself a cigarette. The first one of the day, with coffee, was still a good moment.

  “Are we going to talk about last night?” Burke said.

  “You one of those guys likes talking about it afterwards?” Lauren said.

  “I like to know what the hell went on.”

  “I think the term is sexual intercourse,” Lauren said.

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re irresistible?”

  “It wasn’t about me,” Burke said.

  “Why does it have to be about anything?” she said.

  “You’re not the first woman I slept with,” Burke said. “But you’re the first one I slept with who stripped naked in a public park, and did it on the ground in the rain.”

  “Well, aren’t we conventional.”

  “One minute you can’t stand me, the next we’re fucking in the rain.”

  “Must you be coarse.”

  “You like coarse.”

  “Oh, you know me so well?”

  “Tell me about Louis,” Burke said.

  “I have.”

  “Tell me more,” he said.

  “Do you have any aspirin?” Lauren said.

  Burke got her some. She took three tablets and washed them down with coffee.

  “Louis,” she said.

  She paused and took a deep breath. There were dust motes, Burke noticed, drifting in the light where the afternoon sun shone through the window.

  “Louis is what happens when money and power combine with weakness and cruelty.”

  “The money and power come from his father,” Burke said.

  “Yes.”

  She gestured at her cup.

  “Pot’s on the counter,” Burke said.

  “I have a terrible headache,” she said. “Please be a darling.”

  “Of course you have a headache, you drank a pint of gin.”

  She closed her eyes and shuddered.

  “Please,” she said.

  Burke got the coffee and poured her some. Then he sat back down across the table from her and waited.

  “Louis likes to cause pain,” Lauren said after a time.

  Burke didn’t say anything.

  “Physical pain,” Lauren said. “Emotional pain. Psychological pain. It makes him hot.”

  “So why’d you go out with him?”

  “I . . . I . . . guess I like pain,” she said.

  “So how come you left him.”

  “I guess I don’t like it . . . too.”

  “Does he want you back?”

  “I don’t know. He may get excited just . . . stalking me.”

  “And the guys with him?”

  “I’d guess he’s afraid of you.”

  “Does he like that too?”

  “Being afraid of you?”

  “Yeah,” Burke said. “It happens.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How do you feel about him, now?”

  “The same.”

  “You like pain and you don’t?”

  “Yes. I know it’s sick. Louis was making me sicker.”

  She sniped out her cigarette and took out another. Burke lit it for her. She drank some more coffee.

  “I . . . this is weird. I never told anybody anything like this before.”

  Burke leaned back and hunched his shoulders to relax them.

  “That’s okay,” he said. “I never heard anything like this before.”

  Laur
en inhaled deeply and let the smoke out slowly so it drifted in the air in front of her face.

  “Maybe last night had something to do with that,” she said.

  “Maybe,” Burke said.

  14.

  THEY WERE IN HARLEM at the Plantation. When Herb Jeffries finished singing “Flamingo,” Lauren leaned across the table and said they were leaving.

  “There’s always just a mob coming out at the end of the show,” she said as they walked out onto Lenox Avenue. The white bouncer held the door and looked at Lauren’s backside as she went by. Burke smiled without showing it.

  There are things you can count on, he thought.

  They turned uptown and walked to 147th Street where Burke had parked on a hydrant. When he got a ticket, he gave it to Julius and it went away. As they turned onto 147th Street, halfway up the block they could see the black Cadillac, double-parked next to Burke’s car. It would have to move before they could get out. Louis Boucicault was leaning on the right front fender of Burke’s car, smoking a cigarillo. He had on a black cashmere topcoat with raglan sleeves and a military collar. The coat was unbuttoned. The collar was turned up, and a white silk scarf was draped around it. The same two thugs that they’d seen in the Village were standing near the back of Burke’s car. One of them still wore his scally cap. The other man was bareheaded with a crew cut. Both of them wore their overcoats buttoned. Burke heard something that sounded like a tiny squeal from Lauren.

  “Stop here for a minute,” Burke said to her.

  She stopped and he stepped behind her and, momentarily shielded by her, he took out the big GI .45 and held it in his right hand. Then he stepped out from behind her, putting his right hand against the small of her back.

  “Okay,” Burke said. “Walk.”

  He could hear her breathing. The dark old brownstones were blank and unseeing while the alien white people passed. Lauren was making small sounds. At a higher volume she had sounded the same way in the rain. They stopped ten feet from their car, Burke’s right arm still around her waist.

  “The tough guy and the lady,” Louis said.

  With his thumb and the first two fingers, he took the cigarillo out of his mouth and held it in his right hand. There was a full moon, and with the streetlights, it brightened the scene so clearly that Burke could see that Louis’s pupils were very small.

  “What do you want, Louis?” Lauren said.

  She didn’t sound frightened but her syllable stress was all wrong, like a bad calypso singer.

  “She fucked you yet, Burke?”

  Burke neither spoke nor moved.

  “Better than you,” Lauren said.

  The guy with the crew cut glanced at his partner. They both grinned. Louis looked back and saw them.

  “You lying bitch,” Louis said. “You begged me for more.”

  His voice seemed to be pitched higher than Burke remembered. Lauren walked suddenly toward Louis. Burke let the gun hand drop behind the skirts of his topcoat. Lauren slapped Louis across the face with her right hand and then with her left, back and forth. He stepped back against the car and caught his balance. His face was fish-belly white except for the red marks on each cheek where she’d hit him. He made a sort of whining sound, like a dog in pain, then he jammed the lit end of the cigarillo into Lauren’s face. She screamed and jumped away, her hands pressed to her face, and doubled over.

  “Uh,” she said, “uh.”

  Burke took the .45 from behind his right leg and carefully shot both the bodyguards. The guy with the crew cut first. The shots were like rolling thunder in the dead empty street. Then Burke aimed the gun carefully at Louis Boucicault’s left eye and stepped close to him until the gun barrel pressed against the eyeball.

  “Put snow on the burn,” Burke said to Lauren.

  He patted Louis down, found a pearl-handled .22 derringer in the left pocket of his topcoat, and threw it into the street. Lauren scooped a handful of snow from the plow spill in the gutter. Burke looked thoughtfully at Louis for a moment, the gun still pressing against Louis’s left eyeball. No one moved on 147th Street.

  “Don’t,” Louis said. “Please. Don’t.”

  “Shall I kill him?” Burke said to Lauren.

  She was crouching beside the car now, holding the dirty snow against her cheek.

  “Make him beg,” she said.

  “And then kill him?” Burke said.

  Lauren didn’t answer.

  “Please,” Louis said again. “Don’t. Please.”

  It was almost as if he were chanting.

  “Kill him? Yes or no,” Burke said.

  Lauren still didn’t speak. Burke suddenly took the gun away from Louis and put it in the pocket of his coat.

  “Oh God,” Louis said. “Oh God, thank you. Thank you.”

  Burke hit him with a left hook and knocked him back against the car. Then he hit him with a right hook. And left, and right. The punches were heavy and professional and they came fast. Louis covered his head with his arms and started to cry. Lauren crouched by the car making her little squealy noises again.

  Then it was over. Louis had slid down the side of the car to the sidewalk and his head flopped limply against Burke’s car. Burke looked at him for a moment and then walked around and looked in the window of the Cadillac on the driver’s side. The keys were in the ignition. Burke got in and started the Caddy up and pulled it forward a couple of car lengths. Then he got out, and reached down and took Lauren’s arm, got her on her feet, pushed Louis out of the way, and put Lauren in his car and drove her away.

  15.

  THEY LAY NAKED in bed together in Burke’s apartment, smoking, and listening to Martin Block. He lay on his back. Lauren lay on her side looking at the scars across his chest and stomach.

  “Are those all bullets?” she said.

  “Some is surgery,” Burke said.

  “Did it hurt?”

  Burke was silent for a time thinking about her question. Lauren rested her left cheek against his right shoulder and looked at him from very close up.

  “Would you rather not talk about it?” she said.

  “Hurt’s not the right word,” Burke said.

  “What is?”

  “When you first get it, you feel like you’ve been hit but there’s no big pain right away. And if you’re lucky the medics get there and fill you full of morphine and it kind of smoothes you out for a while, and then it’s like going into a bad tunnel and nothing makes much sense.”

  “Were you in the hospital for a long time?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was that awful?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want to talk about that?”

  “The funny thing,” Burke said, “is I don’t mind talking about getting shot. But I mind talking about the hospital.”

  Lauren was quiet. The blue cigarette smoke drifted toward the ceiling.

  “You killed two men last night,” Lauren said after a while.

  “Yes.”

  “You were protecting me.”

  “Yes.”

  “So why didn’t you shoot Louis?”

  “You didn’t want me to.”

  “I mean before. Why did you shoot those other men first.”

  “They were dangerous.”

  “And Louis wasn’t?”

  “Not like that,” Burke said.

  “How does it feel?”

  “Doesn’t feel like anything,” Burke said.

  “Did you like beating up Louis?”

  “Seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  “Was it like you think shooting your wife’s boyfriend would be?”

  “Ex-wife,” Burke said.

  “Of course,” Lauren said. “Was that what it felt like?”

  Burke didn’t answer.

  “Was it?” Lauren said.

  Again Burke paused.

  Then he said, “No. It wasn’t like that.”

  On the radio, Buddy Clark was singing “Linda.” They listened to it
. Lauren finished her cigarette and snubbed it carelessly in the ashtray by the bedside, so that it wasn’t completely out, and a small acrid twist of smoke rose from it still. Burke leaned across her and put his cigarette out in the ashtray, and then put Lauren’s out completely.

  “What do you think Louis will do?” Lauren said.

  “Hard to say.”

  “Do you think he’ll try to get even?”

  “Maybe,” Burke said. “Maybe not. Maybe it’s the first time anyone ever rubbed his nose in it.”

  “Which means?”

  “Maybe he’s learned something.”

  Lauren moistened her lower lip with the tip of her tongue.

  “I think he’ll try to get even.”

  Burke shrugged.

  “That’s up to him,” Burke said.

  “Do you care?” Lauren said.

  Burke almost smiled.

  “No more than usual,” he said.

  “It frightens me,” Lauren said.

  “Un huh.”

  “And maybe . . . I don’t know . . . titillates me?”

  “Un huh.”

  “But you’ll be protecting me.”

  “Un huh.”

  “You won’t let him hurt me.”

  “No.”

  “Or you.”

  “No.”

  “I care about you.”

  Burke didn’t say anything. He fumbled another Camel from the pack on the bedside table and lit it and lay on his back smoking.

  “I do care about you, you know,” Lauren said.

  “Sure,” Burke said.

  “I care about myself a little,” Lauren said. “As long as you’re with me, Louis can’t get me. Can’t get me in any way.”

  “Any way?”

  “I don’t need him,” Lauren said, “when I’m with you.”

  On the radio Martin Block was signing off. Burke inhaled deeply and let the smoke out slowly, watching it rise.

  It’s make believe ballroom time, the hour of sweet romance. It’s make believe ballroom time, come on children let’s dance.

  PENTIMENTO

  Burke didn’t know how much of what he remembered was based on things he’d heard spoken or hinted at, and how much was sheer fantasy which had ripened beneath the ceaseless scrutiny of his imagination. Whatever it was it was detailed and exact.