Small Vices

by Robert B. Parker

  Lee Farrell appeared in the open door across the hall, his body partly concealed behind the half-open door. When he saw it was me, he stepped away from the door and shoved a Glock 9-mm. back into his belt holster, butt forward.

  "I guess you're okay," he said.

  "There's some doubt about that," I said. "But I'm no threat to Susan."

  Belson appeared behind Farrell. He was in his shirtsleeves, his gun holstered on his right hip. He was very lean with a narrow face, and a blue shadow of beard always showing no matter how recently he had shaved.

  "That for us?" he said.

  I went into the library and put the pizza on the sideboard, right beside two boxes of shotgun shells stacked one on top of the other. I didn't bother to answer the question. Pearl came back in with me and sat in front of the sideboard and focused on the pizza.

  "She's been spending time down with us," Farrell said, "while Susan's working."

  "Case the guy breaks in carrying a pizza," Belson said. "She'll be on him like a barracuda."

  "How's Lisa?" I said.

  "She's fine," Belson said.

  "How about you," I said to Farrell. "How's your love life."

  Farrell grinned.

  "Most of the guys in the squad room are in love with me," he said. "But I'm playing hard to get."

  "You heartbreaker," I said. "Everything quiet around here."

  "Like a church," Belson said. "Pearl spends most of the time on the couch. Patients come in and out. Nobody says a word. Nobody makes eye contact."

  "How do you know they're all patients?" I said.

  "We got a list of her appointments each day and a little description. Susan's agreed to take no new patients until this is over, so she opens her door and sees an unfamiliar face, she hollers."

  "And you can hear her if she hollers?"

  Belson looked at me as if I'd asked about the Easter Bunny.

  "We did a couple dry runs," he said. "You making any progress on this thing?"

  "No."

  "No rush," Belson said. "I'm here until it's over."

  "Me too," Farrell said. "When we're on days, I get to watch Sally Jesse."

  "You gotta get me a straight partner," Belson said. "I'm over there trying to read Soldier of Fortune magazine and he's sitting in front of the tube saying, `Where did she get those shoes."'

  "Well, you saw them," Farrell said. "Were they gauche or what?"

  "See what I mean?" Belson said.

  The door to Susan's office opened and a young man came out buttoning up his loden coat. He didn't look at us. He went straight out the front door and pulled it shut behind him. In about two more minutes Susan came out and saw me and came across the hall and put her arms around me and we kissed.

  "How about her shoes?" Belson said.

  "Cat's ass," Farrell said.

  I picked up the pizza and the wine.

  "We're going upstairs to dine sumptuously before the fire," I said, "and perhaps later who knows."

  Susan smiled.

  "Actually I know," she said.

  "And?" Farrell said.

  "And it's none of your business," Susan said.

  "Talk about attitude," Farrell said.

  I went up with Susan and Pearl and the pizza. Susan put the pizza in a warm oven while I made a fire and opened the wine. In the old days, before Pearl, we would have sat on the couch to eat, but that was no longer possible, so we sat at Susan's counter where we could still see the fire and the pizza was relatively secure, unless you left it unattended. Susan had changed from her dark conservative work dress to a pale lavender sweatsuit and thick white sweat socks. She had taken off her jewelry but left her makeup in place, and when she sat beside me at the counter I felt the little electrochemical charge of amazement that she always gave me. I had felt it the first time I'd ever seen her, in the guidance office, at Smithfield High School, more than twenty years ago. And I'd felt it, or a variation of it, every time I'd seen her since.

  "How did it go in New York?" Susan said.

  "Stapleton's parents lied to me," I said.

  "Was it a lie that helps you?"

  "Not yet. Except that I know that they're lying."

  "Find out anything else?"

  "They are white," I said. "The kid's adopted. His father said if they were going to adopt anyway they may as well save a little black baby from a life of depravity."

  "Oh, dear," Susan said.

  "Yeah," I said, "me too."

  "Anything else?"

  "The Gray Man made a run at me," I said.

  Susan nodded.

  "Tell me about it," she said.

  It seemed a shame that she had to know. It was bound to make her anxious. It certainly made me anxious. But a long time ago we'd agreed that neither of us would decide what the other one should know. I told her about it.

  She was silent for a moment looking at me, breathing quietly, then she said, "He would not have expected you to charge him like that."

  "I don't think he expected to miss," I said.

  "But he did, and you charged him, and now he knows a little more about you than he did."

  "And vice versa," I said.

  "What do you know about him," she said.

  "He's not caught up in macho games," I said. "He took a shot at me and it didn't work out so he walked away from it. There'll be another time, he'll look for it. He's not interested in who's tougher. He's interested in who's dead."

  "What if you hadn't seen the reflection off the scope?" Susan said. "Or thought it was just a birdwatcher?"

  "Well, I know somebody's out to kill me. I see a flash and dive for cover and it turns out to be some guy looking at a red-shafted flicker, the worst that happens is I'm embarrassed. If it's a guy with a gun and I don't dive for cover, I'm dead."

  "Can you go through life diving for cover every time you see a light reflection?"

  "Depends on how long it takes to get this guy."

  Susan nodded slowly as I spoke. She picked up her glass and drank some Merlot, and put the glass back down slowly. Then she smiled slowly, although there didn't seem much pleasure in the smile.

  "You are a piece of work," she said.

  "Comely in every aspect," I said.

  "The Gray Man thinks he's chasing you"-she shook her head once, briefly-"and you think you're chasing him."

  "I am chasing him," I said. "What I don't want is for him to know it."

  Susan drank again. For her this was close to guzzling.

  "Perhaps you should be the one they're guarding 'round the clock," she said.

  I shook my head.

  "No. He's using the implied threat against you to distract me. As long as I've got you covered, that won't work for him. I take it away from you and I will worry about you all the time, and he'll have won that round."

  "Are you sure it's not a macho thing with you?"

  "No. But until he's disposed of, I can't do what I do and we can't live the life we want to lead."

  "Yes."

  "I'm sorry that what I do has spilled out all over you like this."

  "I have always known what you do," she said. "I'm a consenting adult."

  "I could walk away from it," I said. "I drop the Ellis Alves thing and all this goes away."

  She shook her head at once.

  "No," she said. "You can't walk away from it. You are exactly suited by talent, by temperament, hell, by size, to do this odd thing that you do. You can't do something else."

  "I can sing nearly all the love songs of the swing era," I said.

  "Only to me," Susan said.

  "You're the only one I want to sing them to."

  "I'm the only one that would listen."

  She got up and went to the oven and took out the pizza. She slid it out of the box and onto a big glass platter with a gold trim around the rim. She took a big pair of scissors from a drawer and began to cut the pizza into individual slices. She put the platter on the counter between us and set out two smaller plates that ma
tched the platter, and a knife, fork, and spoon for each of us.

  "Flatware to eat pizza?" I said.

  "Optional," she said.

  "When I'm alone I eat it from the box," I said. "Standing up by the sink."

  "I have no doubt of that," she said.

  I picked up a slice. By the time I had finished it and washed it down with some wine, Susan had cut a small triangle off the tip of her slice and was conveying it to her mouth with a fork. I picked up another slice.

  "You matter to me," I said, "more than what I do, or who I am. If you need me to quit, I'll quit."

  She shook her head again while she carefully chewed her pizza. When she had swallowed and sipped some wine and blotted her mouth with her napkin, she said, "Yes. You would. But you should not. You are an odd combination of violence and concern. You contain the violence very well, but it's there, and I would be a fool, and you would be a fool, to think it was less a part of you than the concern."

  "You're right," I said. "Sometimes I wish you weren't."

  "No need to wish I weren't," Susan said. "You know yourself. You understand your violence as well as you understand your capacity for kindness, maybe better."

  "Maybe it needs more understanding," I said.

  "Yes, it does," Susan said. "Kindness is not dangerous. You have found a way to work and live which allows you to integrate the violence and the compassion. If you had no impulse to violence, your compassion wouldn't be so admirable. If you had no compassion, your violence would be intolerable. You understand what I'm saying?"

  "As long as I pay close attention," I said.

  "You are able to apply the impulse to violence in the service of compassion. Your profession allows you actually to exist at the point where vocation and avocation meet. Few people achieve that," she said. "I would not have you change."

  I was quiet for a moment admiring the amount of time she had spent thinking about me. Even while I was doing this I was also thinking about how beautiful she was.

  "Does this mean you love me?" I said.

  She plucked a single julienne of green pepper from the top of the pizza and ate it slowly while she looked at my face thoughtfully. She didn't say anything until she had swallowed the green pepper.

  Then she said, "You bet your ass it does."

  Chapter 29

  IT WAS TIME to talk with the eyewitnesses again. Glenda seemed a better bet than Hunt, so I went up to Andover in the middle of a cold, sunny afternoon and parked on Main Street out front of the Healthfleet Fitness Center. I was wearing a Navy surplus peacoat and a black Chicago White Sox baseball cap, and when I snuck a peek at myself in a store window I thought I looked both dashing and ominous. Up and down Main Street, Andover, there was no sign of the Gray Man, which didn't, of course, mean that he wasn't there. Healthfleet was up a flight of stairs above a coffee shop and a medical supply store. Inside the entrance was the usual desk manned by the usual upbeat teenybopper in designer sweats and a ponytail who urged everybody as they checked in to have a great workout. I'd never figured out why cheerfulness and exercise were so tightly linked in everybody's marketing system, but it was the official attitude in all health clubs. Made me think fondly of the old boxing gyms that I had trained in where people came to work hard, and concentrated on it. On the wall by the desk was some sort of motivational gimmick with credit given for hours on the treadmill, and a bar graph showing people's various progress. The main workout space was banked with windows over the street and mirrors around the other walls. It was a bright room with some shiny weight-training machinery lined up in front of the windows and an exercise floor behind it. I could see Glenda at that end of the room wearing painfully tight black shorts and a bright green halter top. She was leading a class of women who stepped on and off of a plastic step to the throb of rock music while Glenda yelled, "Aaand over, aaaand back, aaand nine, eight, seven… aaand take it on down." The Gray Man was nowhere in the room.

  I told the kid at the desk that I was here to see Glenda Baker, and I'd wait until she was through. There was a small waiting area in front of the desk, a low sofa, and a bentwood coffee table. And a long coat rack, mostly filled, on the wall by the door. I took off my coat and hung it on the rack and sat on the sofa with my feet on the coffee table and my hat on. The teenybopper eyed my gun covertly. She'd probably have told me to have a great shoot if she'd seen it when I came in.

  When Glenda's class ended she started across the room toward the waiting area carrying a big bottle of Evian water and taking healthful sips from it as she walked. She went straight to the coat rack without paying any attention to me.

  I said, "Hello, Glenda."

  She stopped and smiled and said "Hello" vaguely.

  "Spenser," I said. "The sleuth."

  "Oh, hello."

  "May I buy you a cup of coffee?" I said.

  If she saw the gun, she was too well bred to pay it any mind.

  She smiled without much enthusiasm. "Well, sure, okay."

  "Good."

  "Let me change and grab a quick shower," she said. "Ten minutes."

  "No hurry," I said.

  She went to the locker room, and I passed the time counting the number of women in spandex who should not have been wearing spandex. By the time Glenda came back out of the locker room in an ankle-length camel's hair coat and high boots, the count was up to All.

  "For crissake," I said. "It really was ten minutes."

  Glenda smiled faintly. She smelled of expensive soap and maybe a hint of even more expensive perfume. I stood and held the door for her. As we left, I said to the receptionist, "Have a great front desk."

  She smiled even more faintly than Glenda.

  It was always a pleasure to go into a coffee shop on a cold day and smell the coffee and the bacon and feel the warmth. We sat in the back in a wooden booth with blue checkered paper place mats on it. I started to slide in opposite Glenda.

  "Sit beside me," she said. "It will be easier to talk."

  Glenda slid in, I sat beside her, and a waitress with a white apron over jeans and a green sweater came over and asked if we wanted coffee. We did. The waitress poured it while we glanced at the menu. Since I had to stay alert for the Gray Man, I felt that caffeinated was a health necessity. In fact, it seemed to me that I'd best have more than one cup.

  They were out of donuts but there were corn muffins and I ordered a couple. Glenda had decaf, black, and an order of whole wheat toast, no butter. I hung my jacket on a hook on the corner of the booth. Glenda kept her coat on.

  "How many classes a day do you teach?" I said.

  "Varies. Today I just had the one."

  "Where'd you learn to do this stuff."

  "I was a sports and recreation major at college," she said. "After I got married, I took a certification course."

  "Better than sitting around the house reading Vogue?"

  "I'm a very physical person," Glenda said.

  "I could tell that," I said. "Is your husband equally physical?"

  "Hunt is more business oriented," Glenda said.

  The waitress brought the toast and the corn muffins and freshened the coffee.

  "That's decaf?" Glenda said.

  "Yes, ma'am," the waitress said. "You can always tell by the green handle on the pot."

  Glenda seemed not to have heard her. She was half turned in the corner of the booth, looking at me. Her gaze had that mile long quality that politicians had-the eyes were on me, but the focus was somewhere else.

  "So the aerobics teaching is a nice outlet for you," I said.

  "There are better outlets," Glenda said absently.

  "Un huh."

  "But to tell you the truth, we can use the money. Hunt's not making a very big salary."

  "Doesn't his family run the business?"

  "Yes, and they are cheap as hell. I tell him they're exploiting him simply because he is family and they can get away with it."

  "Well," I said, "someday it'll be his, I suppose, and then he c
an exploit somebody."

  "Someday is a long way off," Glenda said.

  "And you have to pass the time somehow," I said.

  The mile-long stare disappeared, and her gaze suddenly focused very concretely on me.

  "You are very understanding," she said.

  I dropped my eyes a little and shrugged.

  "Part of the job," I said.

  "Am I part of the job, too?" she said. "Is that why you wanted to see me again?"

  I finished my second corn muffin. She was looking at me in such sharp focus that I sort of missed the mile-long stare.

  "I thought so when I drove up here," I said.

  "And now?"

  As we talked, she had been completely still, moving only to drink her black coffee. Her dry toast lay untouched on the paper plate in front of her.

  "I'm glad I came."

  She smiled. There was nothing faraway in the smile. It was smiled at me, and it was full of charge and specificity.

  "There are a few questions I need to ask," I said as if it were an afterthought, or maybe something to be got out of the way before we got to more serious business.

  "Yes," she said, "but let's go to my place. Hunt's at work and we can relax. Talk more privately."

  "Sure," I said. "You have a car?"

  She smiled the penetrating smile.

  "I'll ride with you," she said.

  I paid the check and we went to my car. No one took a shot at me. The car was as I'd left it. Neither of us said much as we drove down the hill to Glenda's condominium. The building was silent. Apparently everyone who lived in The Trevanion worked. The heels of my rubber-soled running shoes sounded loud on the marble floors. I felt as if I ought to tiptoe. Glenda unlocked the door to her place and I followed her in and closed it behind me. One of them was a neat housekeeper. The place looked as if it were ready for company. Maybe it was always ready for company.