Crimson Joy s-15

by Robert B. Parker

  Felton was still on my side of it. A good sign. Here the boulders reached higher up the seawall and those near the top were dry and clear of seaweed. I went up onto the boulders more easily this time. My rhythm was in synch. Higher, above the wet line, I jumped from boulder to boulder, moving only a little slower than I had running on the beach.

  The big waves threw a little spray but most of it hit below me as the waves broke against the rocks. When we rounded the promontory and started down toward the beach again, Felton looked like he was starting to labor. He was scrambling on the rocks with hands and feet, and when he got close to the beach he half jumped and fell onto the sand. By the time I hit the beach, Felton was only seventy-five yards ahead and his pace had slowed. He turned again to look at me. I was picking up speed. And ahead a long, unbroken stretch of beach curved gradually along the seawall for a couple of miles at least. Better be in shape, Gordie. As I ran now there was a kind of music to it. Big wheel keep on turning. To my left the ocean stretched away into space with its illusion of empty freedom. Maybe Felton's last illusion as he fled along it. Infinitely open, and yet if we turned into it, we died. Proud Mary keep on burning. Ahead of me Felton stumbled and fell, sprawling forward on the sand. He was scrambling as he hit and was back up and running, but in the process he lost another ten yards and I kept pumping. Rolling on the seashore. Felton was running in a kind of rolling motion, heaving like a horse. His pace was uneven, and his arms were beginning to swing erratically. I closed to sixty yards. To fifty-five. To fifty. A half mile down the empty beach was the last promontory, surrounded by its jumble of sea washed boulders. Felton looked back at me again and looked to his right where the blank seawall cut him off from the street above. He hit a particularly soft spot in the sand and pitched forward, stumbling without falling. He looked back at me. His mouth was open and his chest was heaving. I could see him blowing his breath out like sprinters do when they get anaerobic. He almost stopped. Then he lunged ahead toward the rocks. By the time he reached them he'd widened the gap again by maybe five yards. He started up them. His arms and legs moved out of concert, as if they were separately controlled. He sprawled more than he climbed, scraping along the crusty rocks, heading not only up, but out, toward the sea. I was behind him, feeling almost airborne as I went up the rocks, flexible and elastic. The Amazing Spider Man. This was the highest cluster and the one that spilled farthest out into the water. Felton was laborious now, grappling over the rocks as he went seaward. He didn't look back. He seemed eminently intent on short-range goals. Get over this rock. Don't slip into that crevice. I came behind him. Slower now. Easy. He was no longer running away. I didn't know what he was doing, but he was going to a place where there was no other place to go. Another minute of gasping struggle and he made it. Whatever it was for him. He was surrounded on three sides by the sea, the tide on the way in, the water driven by the tide boiling among the boulders fifty feet below. He slumped against a big, flat boulder that had tilted, in another age, onto its side, so that its flat plane made an angle maybe 30 degrees off the vertical. His back was to the boulder, his legs braced wide in front of him, his arms by his sides, palms against the rock face. His breathing was harsh and desperate and complicated by the fact that he was crying.

  I walked along the sloping top of the boulders with the wind blowing strong in my face. Herring gulls roosting in the rocks flared up and circled and settled back down a bit further away. Finally I was six feet from Felton and I stopped. His face was streaked with tears and sweat. He had scratched himself on the rocks and there was blood on his hands and forearms and a little on his face. No sound came from him other than the agonized harmony of his sobbing attempts to get his breath.

  Riding above the other sounds, behind me, I could hear the high sound of sirens. Susan would have called the cops. It was a long way back, however. Out of the spray, off the rocks, on shore, where footing seemed more secure.

  "Hello, hare," I said.

  He looked at me and through me and beyond the rocks and shoreline. He was looking at things I'd never see, things maybe no one should have to see, and he gazed at them as his breath rasped in and out and the tears flowed down his face and his chest heaved.

  "We gotta go," I said.

  The sirens were still riding on the wind, but they were fewer, and already some of the police cars were on the park above the rocks, the blue lights turning, the radios making the flat noises police radios make. Mechanical voices speaking of life's darkest side. I didn't look. I knew what it looked like. I'd seen it too much, and seen lives driven into a corner too much, and done some of the driving too much.

  "Shoot me," Felton gasped.

  I shook my head.

  "You know… what'll… happen me… in jail."

  I nodded.

  Felton looked down at the roiling water among the rocks.

  "If… I jump… you… stop me?"

  I shook my head. I looked down at the water.

  "Should take you a while to die, though," I said.

  Felton's breath was starting to come back. The crying hadn't stopped, but, because he could breathe a little easier, it didn't seem as frantic. He was looking at me now, his eyes a little more focused.

  "I'm crazy, you know?" he said.

  "Yes," I said.

  "They'll put me in Bridgewater or someplace," he said. "They'll help me."

  "Probably," I said. "I think they got seven hundred inmates and one shrink at Bridgewater. Might be a little different from the help you're used to."

  The spray was kicking higher as the tide rose. I was damp with it. My hair was flat to my skull, my face was wet. My breathing was nearly normal and my heart rate was back under a hundred and I felt the easy passage of blood in my veins. Couple of cold beers would be grand right now, maybe a friendly chat with someone who hadn't murdered four women.

  Behind me, from the park, someone with a bullhorn said, "This is the Lynn Police, do you need assistance?"

  I raised my hand without looking around and waved them away.

  "It was her," Felton said. "She made me like this. I had to be like this."

  I shrugged.

  "Come on," I said. "We gotta go."

  "I can't," Felton said.

  "I'll help you," I said.

  I stepped toward him and took his arms and pulled him from the rock. His legs gave way and he sagged. I slid my arms under his arms and around his back and held him up. He sagged toward me and buried his face in my chest and began to cry harder. His arms went around me and held me and he was saying something muffled against my chest. I listened harder.

  "Papa," he sobbed. "Papa."

  I held him there for a long time, feeling pity and revulsion in nearly equal parts, until two Lynn cops climbed out and the three of us brought him in.

  CHAPTER 33

  Susan was eating sushi in the new Suntory restaurant in Boston. She ate it with chopsticks, managing them as easily as I did the fork I'd had to request.

  "Jesus," I said, "that fish isn't even cooked."

  "Shall I send it back?" Susan said.

  I was having some vegetable tempura, and the house beer.

  "Best not to offend the chef," I said. "He's still got to cook my shrimp."

  "Okay," Susan said. "Then I'll choke it down."

  She took a small sip of saki. Then she gestured with the cup. "Marathon man," she said. And smiled.

  "The race goes not always to the swift," I said.

  "I've seen you shoot," Susan said. "You could have shot him as he ran."

  "Probably," I said. "Pretty sure I could have hit him when he climbed the rocks."

  "But you didn't," she said.

  I shrugged. Susan smiled a little wider.

  "I know why you didn't," she said.

  "Yeah?"

  I ate some more tempura, unashamedly, with my fork.

  "The first time you chased him he outran you and got away," Susan said.

  "Well, there was this fence," I said.
<
br />   "And this time," Susan said, "you were going to chase him and catch him."

  "To even it up?" I said. "Come, now. Doesn't that sound pretty childish?"

  "Absolutely," Susan said.

  "Smart-ass shrink," I said.

  Susan ate another morsel of sushi, looking satisfied. "Quirk and Belson back from vacation?" Susan said.

  "Yeah."

  "Any apologies?" Susan said.

  I grinned. "Not hardly," I said. "Everybody is reminding everybody else that they agreed with Quirk right along."

  "What about the man they accused?"

  "Washburn? They'll try him for the murder of his wife."

  "And Gordon Felton?"

  "I assume he'll plead insanity, the court will believe him, and he'll go to Bridgewater State Hospital. Where he will not be cured."

  "Well, without arguing about legal insanity, Felton probably couldn't not have done what he did," Susan said.

  "And yet," I said, "there's lots of people who grow up with the kind of problems Felton had and they don't go out and kill a bunch of women."

  "I don't know," Susan said. "I mean, I could say some competent-sounding thing about the infinite number of variables in the human circumstance, so that no two people in fact grow up with the same kinds of problems. But that's really only another way of saying "I don't know."

  "

  "Can he be cured?"

  "Not at Bridgewater," Susan said.

  "I know that," I said. "But under the right circumstances is he curable?"

  Susan took her last bite of sushi, and a swallow of saki. "Cure is probably the wrong word. He can be helped. He can probably be prevented from getting worse, maybe he can be relieved of the pressures that drive him to act out his pathology, maybe he can be redirected, so to speak, so that he acts out in less destructive ways."

  "Is this going to be on the final?" I said.

  "I know it sounds so shrinky, but it's the only real answer I have. The other thing that enters into the question of cure is, of course, the severity of what he does. If his pathology manifested itself by, say, stealing pantyhose off the clothesline, maybe you could say, yes, he can be cured. Because if you're wrong, the consequences are trivial. But how can anyone certify that when released he will not murder someone?

  No, I certainly could not."

  The waitress came and took our plates and brought us some shrimp tempura and steamed rice. She brought me another beer. When she was gone I said to Susan, "I feel kind of bad for Felton."

  Susan said, "Yes."

  "I feel even worse for the women he murdered."

  "Yes," Susan said again. "How about his mother?"

  "That's hard," I said.

  "But not impossible," Susan said. "Think how desperately she's had to manipulate her life without any power but the uses of love."

  "And all for naught," I said. "Her reputation will be smirched anyway."

  "Cruel."

  Susan said.

  "Well, I never had a mother," I said. "Probably makes me insensitive."

  "Probably," Susan said, "but you've got strong loins. It makes up for a lot."

  I reached over and poured more saki from the warm bottle into the little saki cup.

  "You know what I like about this whole business?" I said.

  "Not much," Susan said.

  "I liked you and me," I said.

  Susan nodded.

  "I always like you and me," I said, "but this time had such potential for us being a mutual pain in the ass that I especially admire us because we weren't."

  "Yes," Susan said, "we were continuously in each other's way trying to do our business."

  "And we didn't get mean about it," I said. "We were kind to each other all the time."

  "Most of the time," Susan said.

  "Close enough," I said.

  Susan smiled at me and put her hand on top of mine as it rested on the table.

  "It was a charged situation," she said. "You telling me what to do in my profession and me telling you what to do in yours. And both of us a little weird about our autonomy."

  "Without endorsing the us," I said, "let me suggest a suitable reward for being so integrated."

  "I do not want to go to Fenway Park and watch the Red Sox do anything."

  Susan said.

  "I had in mind exotic sexual congress," I said.

  "With the Red Sox?"

  "After last year, I think they're too clumsy," I said. "I was thinking that you deserve me, Foots Spenser."

  "Yes," Susan said, "God help me, I'm afraid that's just what I deserve."

  "So," I said, "shall we finish dinner, go back to your place, and make love?"

  "Certainly," Susan said.

  "With or without sweater?" I said.

  There was a long, silent moment while Susan looked at me, straight on.

  Her great dark eyes wide, her face wearing an odd expression that might have been a smile. Then she did something I've never seen her do.

  Something, perhaps, that no one had ever seen her do.

  She blushed. . It was hot in the cell. And the jail was loud, full of angry obscene shouts. He had never been in jail before. There was no light in the cell. He could see the bright lights in the hall that made long shadows. The smell was bad too. Urine, shit, steam pipes, body odor, cigarettes, fear. There was no one in the cell with him. This was an angry, frightened male world, dark and fetid and woman less Already they knew. Prisoners yelled at him when he came in. The blacks looked at him every step he took past them. He cried, lying on the bare mattress, his face in his arms. No one cared. No one. He was entirely alone. His aloneness ached in him, deep into his stomach and up his throat and along the backs of his arms. He felt weak and tiny. No one.

  Nobody. No one… He remembered lying in his mother's bed… the last thing, the thing he hadn't told the shrink. His mother's body, naked, smelling a little like cooking, touching him. Her hand pressing, touching, the smell of white wine, his mother's sounds, voiceless, wordless sounds as she forced him against her. Into her. He sat up on the bed and took off his shirt. He knotted one sleeve around his neck and stood and walked to the cell door and put one foot on a crossbar and stepped up, holding himself by a forearm looped through the bars. He fumbled the other sleeve up through the bars and tied it to a crosspiece with his free hand, guided by the hand hooked through the bars. He snugged the sleeve tight so there was maybe a foot of play and turned, holding himself with both hands.

  "I never told," he said. He heard the voice in the empty cell and heard it echo in the person less dark. "I never told, Momma," he said, and freed his feet from the crosspiece and let go with his hands…

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  Robert B Parker

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