Double Deuce

by Robert B. Parker

  “You can’t get at him,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  Jackie was silent contemplating that, as if having found the right phrase for it, she could rethink it in some useful way.

  “I mean, what’s not to like? He’s fun to be with. He’s funny. He knows stuff. He’s a dandy lover… But I can’t seem to get at him.”

  I ate some more pancake. I’d made them with buckwheat flour, and they were very tasty. Jackie was looking at me. I glanced at Susan. This was her area, and I was hoping she’d step in. She didn’t, she was looking at me too.

  So was Pearl. But all Pearl wanted was food. Dogs are easy.

  “Part of what Hawk is,” I said, “is that you can’t get at him. Erin Macklin thinks that’s the price he paid to get out.”

  “Out of what?” Jackie said. “Being black? Being black’s hard on everybody. I don’t shut him out.”

  Susan remained quiet. She looked like someone watching a good movie.

  “Well,” I said, “if you’re a certain kind of guy-”

  “Guy?” Jackie said. “Guy? Is that it? Some fucking arcane guy shit?”

  “Jackie,” I said, “I didn’t come over to your place and say, `Let me explain Hawk to you.”

  She took a deep inhale and held it for a moment with her lips clamped together, then she let it out through her nose and nodded.

  “Of course you didn’t,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m just very stressed.”

  “Being in love with Hawk would be stressful,” I said.

  “I don’t think I’m in love with him yet. But I will be soon, and I want to figure this out before it’s too late.”

  I nodded. Susan watched.

  “You were saying?” Jackie said.

  “You have a sense of who you are,” I said. “And you’re determined to keep on being who you are, and maybe the only way you can keep on being who you are is to go inside, to be inaccessible. Especially, I would think, if you’re a black man. And more especially if you do the kind of work Hawk does.”

  “So why do it?”

  “Because he knows how,” I said. “It’s what he’s good at.”

  “And that means he can’t love anybody,” Jackie said.

  “It means you keep a little of yourself to yourself.”

  “Why?” Jackie said.

  “Suze,” I said, “you want to offer any interpretation?”

  “No.”

  I looked at Pearl. She appeared to be fantasizing about buckwheat pancakes.

  “I don’t suppose,” I said, “that you’d settle for an eloquent shrug of the shoulders?”

  “Not unless you’re willing to admit that you’ve gotten bogged down in your own bullshit and you don’t know how to get out,” Jackie said.

  “It’s not bullshit,” I said. “But it is something one feels more than something one thinks about, and it’s hard to explain to someone who doesn’t live Hawk’s life.”

  “Like a woman?” I shook my head.

  “Hawk sometimes kills people. People sometimes try to kill him. Keeping yourself intact while you do that kind of work requires so much resolution that it has to be carefully protected.”

  “Even from someone who loves him?”

  “Especially,” I said.

  We were all silent.

  “This is probably as much of Hawk as I will ever get,” she said.

  “Probably,” I said.

  “I don’t think it’s enough,” Jackie said.

  “It might be,” Susan said, “if you can adjust your expectations.”

  Jackie looked at Susan and at me.

  “You’ve been lucky,” Jackie said. “I guess I’m envious.”

  Susan looked straight at me and I could feel the connection between us.

  “Luck has nothing to do with it,” Susan said.

  CHAPTER 38

  Hawk and I were sitting in my office in the late afternoon on a day that made you feel eternal. All the trees on the Common were budded. Early flowers bloomed in the Public Gardens, and the college kids littered the embankment along Storrow Drive, soaking up the rays behind BU. We’d been asking around after Major for a couple of weeks now. And the more we asked where he was, the more no one knew.

  “He’ll show up,” Hawk said.

  “He’s maybe killed three people,” I said. “Be good if we found him rather than the other way around.”

  “We’ll hear from him,” Hawk said. “He’s going to have to know.”

  “Know what you’ll do?”

  “What I’ll do, and what he’ll do when I do it,” Hawk said.

  “You’ve given him a lot of slack,” I said. “I’ve seen you be quite abrupt with people who were a lot less annoying than Major is.”

  “Kind of want to see what he’ll do too,” Hawk said.

  “I sort of guessed that you might,” I said.

  “We’ll hear from him,” Hawk said.

  And we did.

  The phone rang just after six, when the sun had pretty well departed, but it was still bright daylight.

  “Got a message for Hawk,” the voice said. It was Major.

  “Sure,” I said. “He’s here.” I clicked onto speakerphone.

  Hawk said, “Go ahead.”

  “This Hawk?” Major said.

  “Un huh.”

  “You know who this is?”

  “Un huh.”

  “You can’t prove I done those people,” Major said, “can you?”

  “You got something to say, say it.”

  “Maybe I didn’t do them.”

  “Un huh.”

  “That all you say?”

  Hawk made no response at all.

  “You been looking for me,” Major said.

  “Un huh.”

  “You can’t find me.”

  “Yet,” Hawk said.

  “You never find me ‘less I want you to.”

  Again Hawk was silent.

  “You find me, you can’t do nothing. You got no evidence.”

  “I know you did it,” Hawk said.

  “You think I done it.”

  Hawk was silent.

  “So what you do, you find me?” Hawk didn’t say anything. “What you think you do?” More silence.

  “Can’t do shit, man.”

  “Un huh.”

  The speaker buzzed softly in the silence. Hawk was leaning his hips against the edge of my desk, arms folded. He looked like he might be waiting for a bus.

  “You still there?” Major said.

  “Sure.”

  “Want to meet me?”

  “Sure.”

  “You know the stadium in the Fenway? By Park Drive?” Major said.

  “Un huh.”

  “Be there, five A.M.”

  “Tomorrow,” Hawk said.

  Again the scratchy silence lingered on the speakerphone, and then Major hung up. I hit the speakerphone button and broke the connection. Hawk looked over at me and grinned.

  “Think he’s alone?” I said.

  “No. They won’t leave him.”

  “Even when Tony Marcus says to?”

  “We crate Major and they’ll go,” Hawk said. “But they won’t leave him there.”

  “And they will probably bother us while we’re trying to crate him,” I said.

  “Only twenty of them,” Hawk said.

  “Against you and me?” I said. “I like our odds.”

  Hawk shrugged.

  We were quiet for a while, listening to the traffic sound wisp in through the window.

  “We don’t know he did it,” I said.

  “You hear him say he didn’t?” Hawk said.

  “Haven’t heard him say he did,” I said. “Exactly.”

  “How you feel ‘bout the Easter bunny?” Hawk said.

  “Maybe Major’s just profiling,” I said. “Makes him feel important, being a suspect.”

  “We see him tomorrow,” Hawk said. “We ask him.”

  CHAPTER 39

&n
bsp; Hawk was gone and I sat in my office without turning the lights on and looked at the flossy new building across the street. The whole thing at Double Deuce was rolling faster than it should. Hawk’s scenario-and I knew he believed it-made good enough sense. Tallboy had welshed on a drug deal and Major had shot Tallboy’s girlfriend and probably by accident the little girl. Then, when Tallboy had felt obliged to revenge it, he wasn’t good enough and Major had snuffed him too. Nothing wrong with that. Things like that happened.

  I got up and stood looking out the window with my arms folded. So what was bothering me? One thing was that I figured that tomorrow would escalate, and Hawk would kill Major. Somebody probably would, sooner or later. But I wasn’t sure it should be us.

  Another thing was that it didn’t seem like Major’s style. He was a show-off. If Tallboy was holding out, Major would face him off in front of an audience. And he’d brag about it. Just as he’d bragged that Tony Marcus was his supplier. And if there was a murder or two in any deal where Tony Marcus was part of the mix, why wouldn’t you wonder about him?

  I stood looking out the window and wondered about Tony for a while. It didn’t lead me anywhere. Below me on Berkeley Street a man walked three greyhounds on a tripartite leash. There was some sort of organization in town that arranged adoptions for overaged racing dogs. Maybe I should consider a career change.

  We would meet Major in the morning. I knew Hawk well enough to know that he wouldn’t waver on that. I didn’t know him well enough to know why he wouldn’t. There was something about Major. There was something going on between them that didn’t include me. He’d go whether I went with him or not, and I couldn’t let him go alone.

  The guy with the greyhounds turned the corner on Stuart Street and headed toward Copley Square. I watched until they disappeared behind the old Hancock Building.

  “Well,” I said aloud to no one, “better do something.”

  And since I couldn’t think of anything else to do, I got in my car and drove to Double Deuce. There was a light showing in the window of the second-floor apartment that Hawk and I had rousted. I went up the dark stairs and along the sad corridor toward the light that showed under the partly sprung door. I felt my whiteness more than I had when I’d come with Hawk. Then we’d been chasing something. Now I was an intruder from a land as alien to these kids as Tasmania.

  I took a deep breath and let it out slowly and knocked. The sounds of the room stopped and the light went out. I heard a shuffle of footsteps and then a voice said through the closed door:

  “Yo?”

  The voice had a soft rasp. It was probably Goodyear.

  “Spenser,” I said. “Alone.”

  “What you want?”

  “Talk.”

  “‘Bout what?”

  “Saving Major’s ass,” I said.

  “He ain’t here.”

  “You’ll do,” I said. “I don’t have a lot of time.” I could hear some whispering, then the door lock slid back and the door opened and I walked into the dark room.

  CHAPTER 40

  When I got home it was nearly 8:30 and the Braves and the Dodgers were on cable. Susan was in the kitchen. There was a bottle of Krug Rose Champagne in a crystal ice bucket on the counter and two fluted glasses. Susan was wearing a suit the pale green-gold color of spring foliage. It was an odd color, but it went wonderfully with her dark hair. The suit had a very short skirt, too. Pearl was on the couch which occupied most of the far wall in front of the big picture window, where, if you were there at the right time, you could look at the sunset. Now there was only darkness. She cavorted about for a moment to greet me and then went back to her couch. I looked at the champagne.

  “Does this bode well for me?” I said. “Or are you having company?”

  “It’s to sip while we talk,” Susan said. “If you’ll open it.”

  I did and carefully poured two glasses. I gave one to her. She touched its rim to mine and said, “To us.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” I said. And we did.

  I looked down at her legs, much of which were showing under the short skirt.

  “Great wheels,” I said.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I’m afraid I’ve been goddamned fool.”

  “Anything’s possible,” I said.

  We each drank a little more champagne. “First, to state the obvious, I love you.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I know that.”

  “Second, and I’m afraid about as obvious, I do better with other people’s childhoods than I do with my own.”

  “Don’t we all,” I said.

  “I was brought up in a well-related suburb by affluent parents. My father went to business, my mother stayed home with the children. My father’s consuming passion was business; my mother’s was homemaking. I was expected to marry a man who went to business and loved it, to stay home with the children, and make a home.”

  I didn’t say anything. Pearl lay still on the couch, her back legs stretched straight out, her head on her front paws, motionless except for her eyes, which watched us carefully.

  “And I did,” Susan said. She drank another swallow of champagne, and put the glass back on the counter and looked into the glass where the bubbles drifted toward the surface.

  “Except that the marriage was awful and there were no children, and I got divorced and had to work and met you.”

  “‘Bye-’bye, Miss American Pie,” I said.

  Susan smiled.

  “Most of the rest you know,” she said. “We both know. When I left Sunnybrook Farm I left with a vengeance the job, then the Ph.D., moving to the city. Part of your charm at first was that you were so unsuburban. You were dangerous, you were your own and not someone else’s. And you gave me room.”

  I poured some more champagne in her glass, carefully, so it wouldn’t foam up and overflow.

  “But always I was failing. I wasn’t keeping house, I wasn’t raising children. I wasn’t doing it right. It’s one of the reasons I left you.”

  “For a while,” I said.

  “And it’s the reason I wanted you to live with me.

  “Not because I am cuter than a bug’s ear?”

  “That too,” Susan said. “But mostly I wanted to pretend to be what I had never been.”

  “Which is to say, your mother,” I said.

  Susan smiled again.

  “I’ll bet you can claim the thickest neck of any Freudian in the country,” she said.

  “I’m not sure that’s a challenge,” I said. “Joyce Brothers is probably second.”

  “And I strong-armed you into moving in, and it hasn’t been any fun at all.”

  “Except maybe last Sunday morning after I let Pearl out,” I said.

  “Except for that.”

  We were quiet while we each had some more champagne.

  “So what’s your plan?” I said.

  “I think we should live separately,” Susan said. “Don’t misunderstand me. I think we should continue to live intimately, and monogamously… but not quite so proximate.”

  “Proximate,” I said.

  Susan laughed, though only a little.

  “Yes,” she said, “proximate. I do, after all, have a Ph.D. from Harvard.”

  “Nothing to be ashamed of,” I said.

  “How do you feel about it, living apart again?” Susan said.

  “I agree with your analysis and share your conclusion.”

  “You don’t mind?”

  “No, I like it.”

  “It’ll be the way it was.”

  “Maybe better,” I said. “You won’t be wishing we could live together.”

  “Where will you go?” Susan said.

  “I kept my apartment,” I said.

  Susan widened her eyes at me.

  “Did you really?” she said.

  I nodded and drank some more champagne and offered to pour some more in her glass; she shook her head, still looking at me.

  “Not quite a ringing endors
ement of the original move,” she said.

  I couldn’t think of an answer to that, so I kept quiet. I have rarely regretted keeping quiet. I promised myself to work on it.

  “You knew I was a goddamned fool,” she said.

  “I knew it was important to you. I trusted you to work it out.”

  She reached out and patted my hand.

  “I did not make a mistake in you,” she said.

  “No,” I said, “you didn’t.”

  The doorbell rang.

  Susan said, “I wanted a last supper as roommates.”

  She smiled a wide genuine smile.

  “But I’ve abandoned, pretense. It’s the Chinese place in Inman Square that delivers.”

  I raised my champagne glass. “A votre sante,” I said.

  Susan went down and brought up the food in a big white paper sack and put it on top of the refrigerator where Pearl couldn’t reach it.

  “Before we dine,” Susan said, “I thought we might wish to screw our brains out.”

  “Kind of a salute to freedom,” I said.

  “Exactly,” Susan said.

  CHAPTER 41

  The Fenway is part of what Frederick Law Olmsted called the emerald necklace when he designed it in the nineteenth century-an uninterrupted stretch of green space following the Charles River and branching off along the Muddy River to Jamaica Pond, and continuing, with modest interference from the city, to Franklin Park and the Arboretum. It was a democratic green space and it remained pleasant through demographic shifts which moved the necklace in and out of bad neighborhoods. Along the Park Drive section of the Fenway the neighborhood was what the urban planners probably called transitional. There were apartments full of nurses and graduate students along Park Drive, and across the Fenway there was the proud rear end of the Museum of Fine Arts. Simmons College was on a stretch of Fenway, and Northeastern University was a block away and just up the street was Harvard Medical School. But the Fenway itself was a kind of Riviera for both black and Hispanic gangs taking occasional leave from their duties in the ghetto. And they didn’t have to go far. The ghetto spread sullenly beyond the Museum and behind the University. The stadium at the southwest end of the Fenway midsection was dense with gang graffiti.