Valediction

by Robert B. Parker

  "Some bodyguard," I said.

  I left her there in the rain with the headlights shining on her and walked back.

  The still waters began to roil slightly. The pellucid silence began to clot. I became distinct from the lake.

  "Human voices wake us," I said, "and we drown."

  CHAPTER 45

  "What's he saying?" Linda said.

  "He's still drunk from anesthesia," a nurse said.

  "I want to get out of here," I said.

  "How long will he babble like that?" Linda said.

  "He's had a real jolt," the nurse said. "It will take a while. If you need me, ring that bell."

  "How long have I been in here?" I said.

  Linda patted my cheek. "Yes, honey, yes."

  My right side felt as if it had been scraped raw. I put my left hand out to Linda. She smiled and took it.

  "He's awake," she said.

  "Alive," I said.

  Linda leaned toward me, "What, love?"

  "Alive," I said.

  "Yes," she said. "Yes. Alive."

  "Hot damn."

  Linda leaned over and kissed me. "You are going to be fine," she said. "There's a policeman here."

  I turned my head carefully. Frank Belson was sitting on the window ledge in his shirt sleeves, his gun butt forward on his belt, a cold cigar in his mouth.

  "They won't let me smoke," he said.

  "They spoil everything," I said. "How long I been here?"

  I held Linda's hand as hard as I could. Which wasn't very hard.

  "Three days," Linda said. "You had no pulse when they brought you in."

  "They were worrying about brain death," Belson said, "but there was no way to tell."

  "You're darling to wake up to, Frank."

  "He's been here every day," Linda said. "He and another policeman and a man named Hawk."

  "Quirk?" I said. Belson nodded.

  "Marty's been curious about the three stiffs plus you." He grinned. "Almost four."

  I nodded. The nod was a mistake. It made my whole right side hurt.

  "We'll talk about it later," I said.

  Belson said, "Sure."

  "The girl dead too?"

  "Yeah. Somebody broke her neck. Hawk brought you in." Belson chewed the cold cigar butt into a better position in his mouth. "Hawk don't shed a lot of light on things."

  Linda's hand was motionless in mine. Her eyes were fixed on my face. This was the part she didn't like. The part Susan knew about and didn't like.

  "You okay?" I said to Linda.

  She took in a deep breath and let it out and nodded.

  "Susan know?" I said.

  "Paul was going to call her," Linda said. "Hawk said no. He said you'd decide when you woke up."

  I was slipping again. Sleep would feel a lot better than my right side. I let myself sleep and in a little while my side stopped hurting. I could feel Linda's hand in mine a long time after my side stopped hurting, well after I was otherwise asleep.

  The next time I woke up Linda was gone and so was Belson. Hawk was there and Paul. As I came out of the sleep I heard Paul's voice, softly.

  "No, like this, shuffle, ball, change. You see, shuffle, ball, change." I heard his feet move lightly on the hospital floor. "How can a man with your heritage not be able to tap-dance." I heard Hawk's gliding chuckle. "My ancestors busy eating missionaries, boy. We didn't have no time for no fucking shuffle ball change."

  "Well, you wanted me to show you."

  "That's before I knew you was going to do it better than me," Hawk said.

  "Hey," I said, "Heckle and Jeckle. Don't you realize there's a wounded man in here?"

  They appeared at the foot of the bed. Paul said, "How do you feel?"

  "Pretty good, I think. Where's Linda?"

  "Home, asleep," Hawk said. "She about ready to fall over."

  "How long have I been sleeping?" I said.

  "Day and a half," Paul said. "You woke up yesterday morning."

  "How bad am I?" I said to Hawk.

  "This the Easter season for you, babe," Hawk said. "You was dead when we brought you in."

  "I know, Belson told me."

  "But you gonna make it."

  I looked at Paul. He nodded. "You were in surgery for fifteen hours," he said. "You got a drain in your right side."

  I nodded very carefully. "I figured that was what that was."

  And then I faded out again. And woke up in daylight again with a frizz-headed doctor looking at me.

  "I just want you to know," I said, "that I'm opposed to socialized medicine."

  "Me too," he said. "My name is McCafferty, I did most of the work on your thoracic cavity when they brought you in here."

  "Too late now, but I think my health insurance lapsed," I said.

  He smiled. "We'll find a way," he said. "Do you want the details of what happened to you medically?"

  "Sure."

  "First, I've never seen anyone as dead as you were come back. You are one tough specimen."

  "But gentle of heart," I said.

  "Yes. Well, you took two bullets. Thirty-eight caliber. One went in here." He touched my right side lightly, and for the next ten minutes told me in graphic detail what had happened to my thoracic cavity as a result of being hit with two .38-caliber bullets.

  "And there's nothing permanent'?"

  He shook his head. "As far as I can tell, there is no permanently disabling condition. In two or three months you'll be as good as you ever were."

  "I was hoping for better," I said.

  "Settle for what you were," he said. "It was what enabled you to survive. Tell you the truth, I didn't think you'd make it either. The black man who brought you in was the only one. He said you'd come back."

  "I was a long ways away," I said. "Thank you."

  McCafferty smiled. "My pleasure," he said.

  I closed my eyes, and began to drift. I could feel McCafferty still there. I half opened my eyes and he was looking down at me.

  "Interesting," he said half aloud. "Interesting as hell."

  I closed my eyes again and drifted away.

  CHAPTER 46

  Linda came when she could. I was sitting up having some beef broth when she came an her lunch hour. The drain was still in my side, but most of the raw feeling was gone, and the IV apparatus was unhooked. She kissed me as hard as my condition permitted.

  "Have you talked with Susan yet?" she said.

  "No. She called and Paul told her I was out of town."

  "Why don't you tell her?"

  "Because she'd come," I said. "She'd come because she'd feel I needed her, not because she simply wanted to be with me."

  "And that won't do?"

  "No. When she wants to see me just because she wants to, not because I've been shot, or she might lose me, or she's afraid of something in her life, then I will want to see her."

  "She will," Linda said.

  "We'll see."

  "She will. I would." I held her hand.

  "I don't know what will become of us if that happens," I said.

  "You mean we might not be able to be lovers?"

  "Maybe not," I said. "I don't know. I can't say for sure. But maybe not."

  Linda began to cry. As she cried she talked. "For crissake," she said. "She's screwing another guy, she walked out and left you, and won't even tell you where she is. She hasn't even explained why she left exactly."

  "She doesn't know," I said. "Exactly."

  "So how long, for crissake, will you wait for her. What does she have to do to make you give it up?"

  I put my soup down, and tried to keep my breathing easy.

  "There's no deadline," I said. "And no conditions."

  "So the fact we love each other and might be happy together and she's banging some guy in California, or maybe several, that doesn't mean anything. If she comes back, you chase right home to her?"

  "I don't know," I said. "I don't know who she'll be or who I'll be, or what will c
ome out of this. I'm saying only that I can't promise. You've known that since we started."

  "And you won't give up," she said.

  I shook my head. Linda put her hands over her face.

  I reached out from the bed, but I couldn't reach her. Her eyes were red and her face was puffy when she lifted her head from her hands.

  "What kind of a man accepts that," she said. "Allows a woman to treat him that way and keeps hanging on."

  "My kind," I said. "It's why I wouldn't die. I'm going to see this through. I'm going to find out how it comes out. I love you, Linda. But I . . ." It was hard to say.

  The room was quiet. Linda and I looked at each other. While the hospital went about its routine we stayed poised on this silent epicenter. Then Linda stood and bent over the bed and put her cheek against mine.

  "God, you're strong," she said. "No wonder they couldn't kill you."

  I stroked her hip with my left hand. "What will become of us," she murmured as she rubbed her cheek slowly up and down against mine.

  I continued to stroke her hip. "I don't know," I said. "The past is painful, maybe even fraudulent, the future is uncertain, maybe scary. What we have is a continuing present, honey. I think we should do what we can with that."

  She shook her head against me. "I don't think so," she said.

  CHAPTER 47

  It was a big morning for me. I didn't drink any coffee. A doctor and two nurses came in and removed the drain from my side. And an hour later Rita Fiori came in to visit me. And she wore a green tailored suit with a frilly white collar spilling out at the throat.

  "Mind if I smoke," she said.

  "Not at all," I said. "Want to hear about how I quit in 1968 and haven't had a puff since and don't miss it?"

  "Only if you promise to explain in great and graphic detail to me how bad it is for my health and how my lungs must look. I always enjoy that."

  She took some Tareyton 100's out of her purse and stuck one into her mouth and lit it with a Cricket lighter and took a big drag and blew it out away from me.

  "For crissake," she said, "I don't even enjoy it." She sat, crossed her legs, and put her cigarette back into her mouth while she rummaged in her purse. She was wearing white stockings. It was the current look and I hoped it would pass quickly. Her shoes had three-inch heels.

  "We've been trying to figure out what happened with Paultz and Winston and the Spellman kid."

  "Sherry," I said.

  "Yeah." Rita took another drag and looked down at her notebook. I looked at her legs. "We had a bunch of questions and no answers so we checked back and we pieced together and sometimes we guessed. But the best we can get looks a little like this. Winston was the brains of the thing. How he and Paultz got together we don't know. There aren't many of them around to tell us." Rita looked at me directly.

  I nodded. "Maybe there's some truth to the story he told me," I said.

  "Maybe. Anyway, they did get together and it was a natural match. Winston had missions in Turkey, in Southeast Asia, places where they can raise opium poppies. He had missionaries who could mule the raw heroin into here. Paultz had a market and he had a system for cutting and packaging and getting it into retail hands."

  "Was Winston doing this from the beginning?" I said.

  "I don't think so," Rita said. She recrossed her legs and showed me some thigh in the process. I was pleased. "He probably started it because of religious belief and desire for power and position, and the chance to manipulate people." She shrugged. "You know. And then it came along. We don't know how, either. Maybe a local mission head started dealing small and Winston found out and saw the potential. Maybe it was Paultz's idea." She shook her head and shrugged again.

  "Anyway," she said, "Winston would sell the heroin to Paultz and then lend money back to Paultz's construction company at a little below market rates. It gave the church a nice clean income--earnings from loans to a large construction firm. It gave Paultz a way to account for his income-loans to his construction company from an established church."

  "A kind of double wash," I said.

  "Yep," Rita said, "reciprocal laundering. There's still more to that part and some of it is quite fancy. The accountants will be able to give you some of the more elegant nuances later. But that's the gross outline of it."

  "Gross outlines are about all I can handle," I said. "Elegant nuances would be beyond me."

  "Watching you charge around on this one, I'm inclined to believe you," Rita said.

  "I was distracted," I said.

  Rita nodded. Her cigarette was out and she got another from the pack and lit it. "That's what Quirk told me." She made a dismissive wiggle with the hand holding the cigarette. "Be that as it may. You had it backwards when you brought Winston into that meeting. And we bought it. We all thought Paultz was running Winston when in fact Winston was running Paultz."

  "And when I started to find the connection between them," I said, "he figured a way to dump Paultz and get out from under and keep the heroin business in exchange for backing away from the church and maybe a short jail term."

  "Yes, as long as he could kill Paultz before Paultz told his side. We figure Paultz went for the trust deal to stall until he found out what Winston was up to."

  "At which point he'd have killed Winston," I said.

  Rita smiled. "Yes. It was pretty much a two man swindle. Each was the only one that could connect the other one."

  "Which brings us to Sherry," I said.

  "Dear little Sherry," Rita said. "Twenty years old, the soul of piety and love. She jerked you clowns around like trout."

  "It's not that simple," I said.

  "Why isn't it," Rita said.

  "Because it isn't. Hell, nothing is, not really. She killed Paultz. Winston asked her to and she did and by that point it probably didn't bother her. But she wasn't just a girl who'd shoot someone. She loved Winston, I think. And she loved Tommy Banks."

  "Wouldn't it be pretty to think so," Rita said.

  "Christ, a literate prosecutor," I said.

  "Literate and sexy," she said.

  "They're all sexy," I said. "It's the literate that makes you special."

  "She did it all for love?" Rita said.

  "No, I don't know if she even knew what she did it all for. But she was a kid looking for a place. She tried dancing and religion. She tried loving Tommy and Winston. Paul says she wrote poetry. She wanted to be something that mattered or that was exciting or that wasn't ordinary. Under different circumstances she'd be taking courses at the Adult Ed Center in Cambridge, and working on a play."

  Rita sucked in the corners of her mouth and shook her head.

  "Or she might have gone to law school," I said. "And when the money and the power of the dope deal came along it hooked her. She wouldn't give it up and she wouldn't stop being powerful and rich and she would do anything not to go back to writing poetry and trying to dance and thinking about religion and so she shot Paultz and then when Winston wouldn't tell the truth even to save her she turned on him and finally on me. I was all that was left to keep her from her place."

  "Maybe," Rita said. "Or maybe she was a conniving little bitch that bamboozled all of you."

  "She'd never have spent as much time with Tommy as she did. She'd have latched on to Winston and stayed. But she didn't, she vacillated. She came back to Tommy, then went back to Winston, why would she try and be with Tommy if she was simply after money and power?"

  "And Paultz didn't know anything about her?"

  "No reason he should," I said. "And a lot of reason, once Winston was backing away from the church, that he shouldn't. Maybe Winston always knew he might need a straw. Maybe he kept her relationship with him secret so he could use her when he needed her."

  "How about Banks," Rita said. "What made him suspicious all of a sudden?"

  "Jealousy. He may have known her better than he could admit. He may have always known she was bitchier than she acted. But until he lost her and couldn't get her b
ack, he didn't care. I think he started following her simply for a way to keep in contact. Knowledge is power, you know, and if he could spy her out and follow her around and know what she was doing . . . It was like he still had some control. I don't think he was suspicious about the heroin deal. I think he just stumbled on it and decided to use it as a way to get her back. It's all he ever really wanted. To have her and control her and, you know, own her."

  "Ain't love grand," Rita said.

  "So what happens to the Bullies?"

  "Norfolk County doesn't care," Rita said. "Unless they get back in the skag business again. They got a nice trust fund, I understand, and doubtless a new and charismatic leader will emerge to help them spend it."

  "Ah, Rita, so young, so cynical," I said.

  "But literate," she said. "And sexy."

  "Perhaps," I said, "when I get out of here I should buy you a drink and discuss books with you."

  "Good thought," she said. "Keep in mind, too, when you get out of here, that Joe Broz will not be among your boosters. He wanted Winston's source and he got nothing. It will annoy him."

  "A day is not wasted if you've annoyed Joe Broz," I said.

  "Well, be a little careful," she said. "At least until we've had our drink."

  "And had a literate discussion," I said.

  "Literate and sexy," she said.

  "Yes."

  CHAPTER 48

  It was nearly ten at night in Boston when I called Susan in San Francisco.

  "How are you," she said. Her voice still small with pain. "Paul said you were out of town."

  "I'm good," I said. "How are you?"

  "I'm . . . I'm not good," she said. "I'm in therapy."

  "That should help," I said. "In a while at least."

  "Yes," she said. The pause seemed longer on the open phone line. "I . . . how bad has it been about my friend?" she said.

  "Worst thing that ever happened to me," I said.