Valediction

by Robert B. Parker

  The physical assets of the Bullies were worth less than 300,000 dollars. Their income, from interest on mortgage loans, was 315,000 dollars. If they had three and a half million out, that meant it was loaned at less than ten percent. That was five or six points below market. Of course maybe it wasn't when the loan was made. I got out my small yellow notebook. Time was I could remember everything. Now I had half glasses and a notebook. Next thing I'd have a midlife crisis. A pigeon landed on the ground near my feet and waddled around looking for a kernel of peanut among the littered shells in front of the bench. Why this is midlife crisis nor am I out of it. I looked at my notes. The loans were recent. Mortgage rates had not been under ten percent when the loans were made. The pigeon gave up on the peanut shells and flew away on undulating wing. I watched him go. What the printout didn't tell me, and what the notebook didn't tell me, and what Reverend Winston wouldn't tell me was where the Reorganized Church got three and a half million bucks to lend out in the first place.

  I took off my half glasses and put them back into hiding. Maybe I should have my sunglasses made prescription and I could wear them all the time and people would never know. They'd think I was cool.

  I stood and put on my nonprescription sunglasses and walked back toward my office. In the Public Garden I stopped an the little bridge and leaned on the railing and watched the swan boats move about on the pond and the ducks in solicitous formation cruising after the boats, waiting for peanuts. They could not be fooled by shells. I wondered how ducks knew so quickly the kernel from the husk. One of nature's miracles.

  When I got to my office there were two thugs waiting in the corridor. I've spent half my life with thugs. I know them when I see them. They were leaning against the wall in the corridor on the second floor near the elevator just down past my office door. I unlocked the office door and went in. I left the door open. The thugs came in behind me. I walked over and opened the window and turned around and looked at them. One of them had closed the door.

  The head thug was bald with squinty eyes and a longish fringe of hair in the back that lapped over the collar of his flowered shirt. There was a scar at the corner of his mouth as if someone had slashed it during a fight and the repair job had not been done by Michael DeBakey. The assistant thug was taller and in better shape. He had black hair in a crew cut and deepset eyes and long wiry forearms with blue dancing girls and twined snakes and daggers tattooed on them. There were four upper teeth missing in the front of his mouth and someone had somewhere in his life obviously deviated his septum.

  We looked at each other.

  "You guys in the Mormon ministry?" I said.

  "You Spenser?" the bald one said.

  "Mmm," I said.

  We looked at each other some more. A small objective part of me noticed, from the far upper right corner of my consciousness, that I felt almost nothing. A faint lassitude, maybe. No more. Blankness is all.

  "Look, you guys, I'm trying to get clammy with fear, and I can't. I know that disappoints you, and I'm sorry. I'm trying, but nothing seems to happen."

  The bald one said, "You got nothing to be afraid of if you do like we tell you."

  "Or if I don't," I said.

  "You do any more messing around with the Reorganized Church then you gonna end up bad dead," Bald said.

  I felt something. What I felt was d don't care. Just a little flash of I don't care, then it was gone and blackness came back.

  "You two going to do it?" I said.

  "You don't do what you're told, we'll do it."

  "You might want to take a number," I said. "There's a waiting list."

  "You think we're fucking around, asshole?"

  "It's the best you can do," I said.

  Bald looked at his partner. "Maybe he needs a sample of what we can do," he said. The partner nodded and looked mean. Bald looked back at me and found that I was pointing my gun at the little indentation in his upper lip, right below his nose. He stared at it.

  "Ordinary caliber thirty-eight slug," I said. "No liquid center, no cross-cut in the nose, no magnum load. Nothing special to worry about for a couple of toughies like you."

  Both men stared at me.

  "I don't suppose you feel like telling me who asked you to come over here and frighten me to death."

  They didn't say anything.

  "No, I figured you wouldn't. It's a corny question anyway."

  They didn't move.

  "It was good of you to show me what you can do. I don't mean to be ungrateful. But if you come back, I'll kill you."

  They kept looking past the gun barrel at me.

  "Take a hike," I said, and they both turned, together, and left my office. I went and closed the door behind them and then with my gun still in my hand, hanging at my side pointing at the floor, I walked over to my window and looked out onto Boylston and Berkeley streets.

  In a moment they appeared on the corner and walked to the car that was illegally parked by the subway entrance. It was a white Chevy sedan. Bald got in on the driver's side and his partner got in the other and they drove away. As they did I wrote down their license number. A trained detective.

  CHAPTER 20

  Bald's white Chevy was registered to Paultz Construction Company. My finely honed investigative instincts began to sniff the aroma of rat. Bald and his partner were hoods. They didn't do construction and they didn't do Bible study. They did kneecaps. I'd seen too many guys like Bald and his partner to be wrong on that. And it meant that Paultz Construction was dirty. And it meant that the connection between Paultz and the Bullies was something that people wanted to keep secret. "So what?"

  Nobody had hired me to investigate anything like that. Tommy Banks had hired me to rescue his girlfriend and she didn't want to be rescued. I was just killing time. Killing time with Paultz Construction could get me killed. I don't care.

  Across the street my art director was back, bending over her board. She looked up as I looked at her and smiled and waved at me across the street. I waved back. She bent back to her work.

  I took the phone book off the window ledge where I kept it and looked up the number of the ad agency and dialed it and asked for the art director. I watched across the street as she picked up the phone and tucked it against her face with her left shoulder.

  "Linda Thomas." She continued to work on the board as she spoke.

  I said, "My name is Spenser, I'm across the street smiling a winning smile out my window."

  She looked over.

  "My God," she said. "It's like talking to a pen-pal."

  "Would you care to have a drink with me after work?" I said.

  "That would be lovely," she said. "Where and when?"

  "Ritz bar, this evening when you get through."

  "Five thirty," she said.

  "I'll meet you there," I said.

  She waved across the street again and we hung up. It would feel a bit silly to sit there the rest of the day looking across the street. I got up and went out. It was good weather and I had Susan's book. I went to the Public Garden and sat on a bench near the swan boat pond and read.

  A man and woman in their forties came and sat down on the grass near the pond under one of the willows. They had lunch in a big paper bag and shared it, leaning against the tree trunk, their shoulders touching. I dogeared my page and stood up and walked away, across the Public Garden, toward Arlington Street.

  Sherry Spellman didn't belong in an outfit that had connections with Bald and his friend. I couldn't spend the rest of my life reading in the park. I couldn't take her away from the church, but maybe I could take the church away from her. I had one end of someone's dirty laundry and I was going to pull it all out, it was a way to kill time. And it was better to kill time than have it kill me.

  From my office I called Marty Quirk. Neither he nor Belson had ever heard of the Paultz Construction Company.

  "They're dirty," I said. "I know it."

  "Lot of people are dirty. Because I'm a cop I'm supposed to
know every one of them?"

  "Another idol crumbles," I said.

  "I'll ask around. I hear anything, I'll let you know."

  "Thanks."

  "You okay?" Quirk said.

  "I don't know," I said. "I'm working on it."

  "You need something, you call me."

  "Yes."

  We hung up. I called Vinnie Morris.

  "What do you know about Paultz Construction Company?" I said.

  "Why ask me?" Vinnie said.

  "Because they're crooks and so are you. Figured you might have crossed paths."

  "Spenser," Vinnie said. "You got a big pair of balls. Last year Joe Broz and I discussed aceing you. Now you call me up and ask for a favor."

  "What are friends for, Vinnie?"

  Vinnie laughed a little. "I don't know a goddamned thing about the Paultz Construction Company."

  "Ask around," I said. "You hear anything, let me know."

  "Maybe."

  Hawk came into my office. I hung up the phone.

  I said, "Hawk."

  He said, "Want to eat? Or start drinking early?"

  "Eat," I said.

  Hawk was wearing a pink suit with a pale blue shirt and a pink and blue small-dotted tie. A blue show handkerchief was tucked into his breast pocket and his head gleamed in the sun. As we walked along Berkeley Street no one made any comment on his appearance. No one seemed to think a pink suit was sissy.

  We turned up Newbury. "How about Acapulco," I said. "Mexican cuisine."

  "Tex-Mex," Hawk said. "I like it."

  "It's no Lucy's El Adobe," I said.

  "On the other hand," Hawk said, "it's no Guadala Harry's either."

  We went up Newbury Street past the galleries and boutiques and stores that sold Danish modern waterbeds.

  "You know anything about Paultz Construction Company?" I said.

  "Nope."

  "Two people driving a Paultz company car came by and told me that if I don't stop looking into the Reorganized Church of the Redemption, they would punch my ticket for me."

  Hawk smiled happily. "You faint or anything?"

  "Almost, but I managed to get my gun out and point it at them."

  "So they decided not to do it right then."

  "True," I said.

  Acapulco is a small informal restaurant downstairs on Newbury Street that serves decent Mexican food and splendid Carta Blanca beer. We went in. People stared covertly at Hawk.

  "The Reorganized Church has loaned the Paultz Construction Company three and a half million in construction mortgages," I said. "What does that sound like to you?"

  "That sounds like laundering money," Hawk said.

  "Yes."

  "I'll see what I can find out about Paultz," Hawk said. "There's people talk with me that don't talk with you."

  "There's bad taste everywhere," I said.

  "You going to keep doing it."

  "Yes. I don't like that kid being involved in something like this."

  "Sherry?"

  "Yes."

  Hawk smiled again. "Thought you wouldn't," he said. "What kind of shape you in?"

  I shrugged. Hawk drank some Dos Equis beer.

  "People trying to kill you, you got be able to concentrate."

  I nodded.

  "You care if somebody blow you away?"

  I watched the bubbles rise in my beer glass. "No," I said.

  Hawk nodded. The waitress brought us our food. Hawk ordered another Dos Equis. The waitress looked at me. I shook my head. She went away. The room was half empty and not very noisy. I could feel the weight of Hawk's impassive stare. The waitress brought him his beer. He poured half of it into his glass and watched the head form and then drank a swallow and put the glass down.

  Looking at Hawk, I knew why he frightened people. The force in his dark eyes was intensified by the absence of any expression.

  "You better move on from there," Hawk said. "See a shrink, read a book, join a church, talk with me. I don't give a fuck how you do it. That your problem. But you don't move on, you gonna get flushed."

  I sat motionless and didn't want my food. The beer was going flat in my glass.

  "And something I won't do is try to explain to Susan how I let that happen." Hawk said. "Or Paul."

  I nodded.

  Hawk said, "You want your lunch?"

  "No."

  "Hand it over here," Hawk said.

  I passed him my untouched plate.

  "I got a date tonight," I said.

  Hawk looked up and smiled a wide smile. "That's a start," he said.

  I watched him put away my lunch. "How come you know this stuff," I said.

  "Easy when it not happening to you," he said.

  "It is not happening to a lot of people, but they don't know things you know."

  "I know what I need to know, babe. Sort of a natural rhythm."

  Linda Thomas was five minutes late. Early by the standard Susan had set. She was five foot five and black-haired with eyes that were neither green nor brown but both at different times. She was slim and small-breasted and big eyed with a wide mouth and, especially around the cheekbones, she looked a little like Susan. She was wearing a gray suit with a red print blouse and a kind of full bow at the neck that vaguely suggested a necktie. The print of the blouse was small.

  "I'm wearing my power outfit," she said, and smiled and put out her hand. I stood and shook her hand and held her chair and she sat.

  "Very professional," I said, "small-print blouse and all."

  "Career," she said, "onward, upward. Tell me a little about yourself."

  I did, and as I talked I discovered that I was telling her more about myself than I had expected to. And more about Susan and our estrangement. By seven o'clock in the stillbright summer evening we were sitting on the grass beside the swan boat pond in the Public Garden leaning our backs against each other as we talked, only very slightly drunk, watching somebody's German short-haired pointer hunt the area, scattering pigeons and treeing squirrels.

  "Funny," Linda said, "having a drink with a detective I thought we'd spend the evening talking about crime and instead we spend it talking about love."

  "Yes," I said. "I'm a little surprised at that myself."

  "That you'd talk so much about love?" Linda said.

  "That I'd talk so much about myself."

  "You're very open," she said.

  "Apparently. But enough about me. Let's talk about you. What do you think of me?"

  She laughed. "I think that Susan is crazy."

  "Or I am. Is there someone in your life?"

  Linda said, "I'm separated from my second husband. Almost a year. We see each other and maybe it will work out. But I live alone right now. We've been married seven years."

  "How old are you?" I said.

  "Thirty-eight."

  "Thank God," I said. "You look much younger than that."

  "You don't care for youth?"

  "From my vantage, babe, thirty-eight is youth. Much younger is childhood."

  The feel of her sitting with me, our backs together, in the park, by the water, watching the dog, was righter than I could ever have imagined. I felt odd, as if there were something missing. As if I had set something down.

  The pointer barreled past after a squirrel. I said, "Are you hungry? Would you care to eat something?"

  "Yes," Linda said. "I have two steaks in my refrigerator. Come to my house and help me cook them."

  "It's one of my best things," I said.

  Linda lived in a condominium on Lewis Wharf. Which meant she had a good salary or big support payments. We walked to it as the evening settled. Crossing Tremont Street I took her hand, and when we got to the other side I kept it. She rested her head briefly against my shoulder. We stopped along the way and bought a bottle of Beaujolais. Linda's apartment was blond wood and exposed brick, and an all-electric kitchen with a builtin microwave oven. It was modern and bright and clean and surprisingly unhomey. Her stove was a Jenn-Air
with a built-in grill that exhausted the smoke and Linda took two steaks out and put them on the grill.

  "Can you make a salad?" she said.

  "Wonderfully," I said.

  Linda pointed to the refrigerator. "Please," she said. "After you fix us a drink."

  She took a bottle of Scotch from the cabinet over the stove. It had a long funny Scotch name. "Single malt," she said. "On the rocks for me, with a twist."

  I made two drinks and gave her one. The Scotch was remarkable. She took a sip and turned to the steaks. I began the salad. We moved easily about the small kitchen, not getting in each other's way although there was very little room.

  The steaks sizzled on the grill. Linda turned from the stove and looked up at me. She was smaller than Susan and had to tilt her head more. She held her drink in her right hand. I looked down into her face, and her eyes were very dark and had a kind of swimming quality.

  "This is very strange," she said. I nodded.

  "Aside from looking across the street these years, I don't even know you and yet we somehow fit."

  I nodded again. She raised her face toward me. I bent forward and kissed her. She opened her mouth and kissed me back, her body arching against me, her left hand pressing me against her while her right held the drink out. The kiss was long and openmouthed and she moved a little against me as we kissed. When we stopped she stayed against me and leaned her head back to look up at me.

  She looked at me silently. "You're intense," she said.

  I shrugged. "I'm just at the beginning of trying to figure out what I am."

  "You're wonderful," Linda said, and put her face up and kissed me again.

  We ate our steak and salad and French bread on a glass-topped table in front of the picture window looking out over Boston Harbor. It was dark now, but one could see ship lights occasionally, and the sense of ocean was inevitable and vast.

  "What if Susan has another man?" Linda said.

  "Painful," I said.

  "Endurable?"

  I sipped a little Beaujolais. "We'll see." She put her hand out toward me. I took it and we held hands silently, squeezing each other, my eyes looking directly into hers.

  "I am committed to Susan," I said. My voice sounded rusty. "If I can rejoin her, I will."