Now and Then s-35

by Robert B. Parker

“So why wouldn’t you?” Hawk said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “We wouldn’t necessarily live together.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “There won’t be children,” I said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “We have no fi nancial reason to get married.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So, why would we get married?” I said.

  “’Cause you love each other more than I ever seen anybody love each other,” Hawk said.

  “Which we’ve done without being married,” I said.

  “Or even living together,” Hawk said.

  “We tried that,” I said.

  “I remember,” Hawk said. “Probably a good idea not to do that again.”

  “Yes.”

  I looked at my watch. It was three minutes after ten.

  “So what you going to do?” Hawk said.

  “We’ll talk about it some more. I guess if she wants it bad enough we’ll do it.”

  “You know why she want it?” Hawk said.

  “Not exactly,” I said.

  “You going to ask her?”

  “I thought maybe I should get it clear in my own head fi rst.”

  “How that going?” Hawk said.

  I shrugged.

  “You ever think about getting married?” I said.

  “No,” Hawk said.

  “Would you ever?” I said.

  “I don’t believe in much,” Hawk said.

  “And I do?” I said.

  “You a bear for symbols and shit,” Hawk said. “You think about what stuff means.”

  “And getting married means something.”

  “It do,” Hawk said.

  I walked past him out into the hall again and looked up the stairs at Chollo, and then out the front-door window at Vinnie. I turned and looked at Hawk and nodded my head slowly.

  “Yeah,” I said. “It do.”

  Then I went back in the spare room and stood near the door and waited.

  42.

  A fter approximately eighteen months, 11:40 rolled around and Susan’s office door opened. Alderson stepped into the hall and turned and shook Susan’s hand, as he had when he’d come in.

  “Susan,” he said. “Thank you so much. This has been one of the most remarkable hours I’ve ever spent.”

  Susan shook his hand and nodded.

  “Next Tuesday,” she said.

  “Same time, same place,” Alderson said.

  He turned for a moment and looked at me and smiled and turned back and went out the front door. Susan continued to stand in her office doorway. I went to the front window and watched him go down the steps and along the front walk and turn right and head back up Linnaean Street the way he had come.

  We gathered in the spare room. Hawk and I on straight chairs. Vinnie on the couch with his iPod. Vinnie didn’t care if Alderson was unusual. If he needed to be shot, Vinnie would shoot him. Otherwise Vinnie liked listening to his iPod. Chollo sat beside Vinnie on the couch. It was hard to tell what interested Chollo, but he always seemed to pay attention. Susan rested her good-looking butt on the edge of the conference table.

  “He’s a very unusual man,” Susan said.

  “You have a moment to share your thoughts?” I said.

  “I have all day,” Susan said. “I didn’t know how it would go, so I cleared my calendar after his visit.”

  “Didn’t want no patients around, case we had to kill him,”

  Hawk said.

  “Yes,” Susan said.

  Chollo smiled and nodded at her.

  “Thoughtful,” he said. “For a gringette.”

  “Is that a female gringo?” Susan said.

  “It is what we always said in my village.”

  “Village?” I said. “What village is that?”

  “Bel Air,” Chollo said. “Bobby Horse and me, we live in Bel Air with Mr. Del Rio.”

  “A hardscrabble life,” I said.

  “Sí.”

  We were quiet, everybody but Vinnie looking at Susan, waiting for her to tell us what she could. We knew she had allsorts of arcane shrink considerations hemming her in, so we didn’t know quite what to ask her.

  “Did you give him your disclaimer?” I said. “About me?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did that sit with him?”

  “He simply nodded,” Susan said.

  “No comment?”

  “None. Beyond the nod, it was as if I had not mentioned it,” she said. “He never referred to you in our conversation.”

  “He gave me one smile, when he was leaving,” I said.

  “Why do you suppose he did that?” Susan said.

  “To show that he saw me there, and I didn’t matter,” I said. She nodded.

  “What do you think?” I said.

  “First,” she said, “I am quite sure he’s fraudulent.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with him?” Hawk said.

  “Oh, there’s a great deal wrong with him, I’m sure,” Susan said. “But he’s not here seeking help with it.”

  “Shocking,” Chollo said.

  “Can you tell why he’s here?”

  “I would guess that he’s here to seduce me,” Susan said.

  “Him too?” I said.

  She smiled.

  “I think,” she said, “that the seduction, in this instance, is the means, not the purpose.”

  “The purpose being?”

  “To get control of you,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “Is there any chance that his visit to you was legit?” I said. She shrugged.

  “My business is pretty much like yours.” She glanced at the men in the room and smiled. “Minus the firepower. There are a lot of informed guesses made.”

  “And your informed guess is that he’s not seeking therapy,”

  I said.

  “Correct.”

  “So you may feel less constrained than you might otherwise feel to protect the privacy of the session.”

  She smiled again.

  “Correct,” she said. “To a point.”

  “How will you know when you reach the point,” I said.

  “I’ll know,” Susan said.

  “So what he talk ’bout,” Hawk said.

  “He was effusive,” Susan said, “when he came in. He’d heard so many wonderful things about me. He hadn’t expected anyone so attractive. He hoped he wouldn’t bore me.”

  Through the front window I could see an inconsequential fl urry of snow drift past.

  “I told him,” Susan said, “that people easily bored by others didn’t usually enter this profession, and perhaps he might tell me why he had come. He began by telling me about his father. There’s nothing unusual in that. Many people come and begin by telling me about their parents and assume I will see the problem and tell them what to do. It’s not very effective, but it’s common, and it’s often useful as kind of a warm-up, before the game starts.”

  “Did you believe what he told you?”

  “I don’t know if it was true or not,” she said. “He appeared to admire his father. And he feared he couldn’t live up to him.”

  “Not an unheard-of problem,” I said.

  “No, in fact,” Susan said, “it is so common that one is a little suspicious of it when it surfaces fully expressed, so to speak, ten minutes into your fi rst therapy session.”

  “You think he made it up?”

  “I have no idea. But he has certainly articulated it before.”

  “You think he’s seen a shrink before?” I said.

  “I would guess that he has,” Susan said. “He seems comfortable with it. He seemed to know how it worked. He’s not nervous. No uncomfortable jokes about the couch or all shrinks taking August off. He was very at ease, very articulate. And he had an agenda. He wasn’t uncertain. He knew where he wanted to go in the interview.”

  “How did he present his seductive side?” I said.

  Hawk looked at Chollo.
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  “You see how he ease in on that?” Hawk said.

  “More subtle than the plumed serpent,” Chollo said.

  “The plumed serpent live in Bel Air, too?” I said.

  “Sí.”

  “It was mostly attitude and body language,” Susan said.

  “Most women recognize it. The appraising look. The eye contact. The implication of specially shared knowledge. Taking any opportunity to flatter my appearance. You often say you can tell if a woman is, ah, compliant.”

  “I can.”

  “Same thing,” Susan said.

  “All men are compliant,” I said, “in your case. If they’re straight.”

  “In fact,” Susan said, “that’s not always so. But it was so here.”

  “Did he make a specifi c proposal.”

  “No. But he made an appointment for next Tuesday and he acted as if he were in for the long haul.”

  “The therapy or the seduction?” I said.

  “Both,” she said. “One being the means to the other.”

  “Levels within levels,” I said.

  “Pretend therapy,” Susan said, “in order to pretend seduction, so that he can get control of you, so that he can prevent you from whatever exactly it is he wants to prevent you from doing.”

  Chollo smiled.

  “I am not sure, señorita, that the seduction part is pretend,” he said. “It would be deceitful, but I believe he would be very happy to carry it off while he was at it.”

  “Why, Chollo,” Susan said. “How gallant.”

  “I too am compliant,” Chollo said.

  Susan smiled a wide smile.

  “I knew that,” she said.

  43.

  Susan had dinner with three women friends at the

  Bristol Lounge in the Four Seasons Hotel. Vinnie and Chollo had the evening off. Hawk and I sat at the bar and nursed one beer each, and watched out for Susan.

  “What the two gunslingers doing?” Hawk said.

  “Vinnie is showing Chollo the town,” I said.

  “How you like to be seeing the town with Vinnie?” Hawk said.

  “Not fun like with you and me,” I said.

  Hawk looked at his half-drunk glass of beer getting warm and fl at in front of him.

  “What could be more fun than you and me?” Hawk said.

  “Swapping jokes with Don Trump?” I said.

  “Well, yeah,” Hawk said. “That would be more fun.”

  Susan stood and said something to her friends. I slid off the bar stool. She turned and strolled toward the ladies’ room. Several people, men and women, turned and looked at her. In her understated shrink uniform she was stunning. Out with friends, she was flamboyantly so. I caught up with her at the ladies’ room door.

  “Here’s what I want you to do,” I said. “You go in and look around and come back and report to me. Is there a window? Is there another way in or out? Who else is in there? If you are not back out here in one minute from the time you go in, I’m coming in after you.”

  “One minute?”

  “Plenty of time to do what I ask.”

  “Isn’t this a little overproduced?” she said.

  “Better too much than too little,” I said.

  She nodded.

  “Okay,” she said, “here I go.”

  As she went in, I looked at my watch. It took her twenty-eight seconds to reconnoiter and report.

  “No one else is in here. There are two full toilet stalls. Floor to ceiling. Both doors are ajar. There is neither a window nor another way in or out.”

  I nodded.

  “Can you get everything done in there in five minutes?” I said. “Including standing in front of the mirror and poking at your hair?”

  “If I must,” she said.

  “After fi ve minutes,” I said, “I come in.”

  “If there are too many more rules and ultimatums I may not be able to go,” she said.

  I smiled and bowed her back into the ladies’ room. Two women came by a minute and sixteen seconds later. They looked at me in mild askance as I leaned against the wall beside the door. I shrugged and smiled. They went past me in silence and entered the ladies’ room. Two minutes later Susan came out.

  “I didn’t even look in the mirror,” she said. “Just washed my hands and came right out.”

  “I don’t believe you,” I said.

  She smiled.

  “I didn’t look very long,” she said.

  She walked back to her table and sat down. I walked on to the bar.

  “Fella wanted your seat,” Hawk said. “I told him it was taken.”

  “He give you a hard time?” I said.

  Hawk smiled. I nodded.

  “Probably thought he was brave to ask,” I said.

  “Was,” Hawk said.

  We sat looking at the handsome room, full of handsome people, most of whom were handsomely dressed. No one appeared dangerous, which didn’t mean that nobody was. Especially us.

  “Susan mentioned that Perry Alderson seemed to have some experience with psychotherapy,” I said.

  “She did,” Hawk said.

  “Red told me that he met Perry when he was down and out in Cleveland and Perry did some street counseling,” I said.

  “He say who Perry worked for?” Hawk said.

  “No.”

  “FBI got any info on him in Cleveland?” Hawk said.

  “No. “

  “Don’t mean there is no info,” Hawk said.

  “It don’t,” I said.

  “Do mean somebody got to go get it,” Hawk said.

  “It do,” I said.

  We both watched Susan in animated conversation with three other women. They were all attractive women, but they all seemed pallid in Susan’s penumbra.

  “Here’s how I fi gure,” Hawk said.

  “Uh-huh?”

  “You a detective and I’m not. I don’t detect as well as you. Could be a detective, a course, if I wanted. But I don’t. On the other hand I can bust somebody’s ass, ’bout as well as you, maybe better.”

  “So I should go to Cleveland,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m not buying the equality-of-ass-busting argument,” I said. “But you are certainly in the top two.”

  “We know that one of us be the best,” Hawk said. “Just don’t agree on who.”

  “You have to be with her every day, all day, every night, all night. You can never be any further away from her than you areright now. Vinnie and Chollo do wonderful work. But they are backup. You’re the one.”

  “I know,” Hawk said.

  We both looked at her. She finished a story with her arms out and raised toward the ceiling. The table burst into laughter. Hawk smiled.

  “I’ll stay as close as you do,” he said.

  “Almost as close,” I said.

  “Almost make all the difference,” Hawk said. “Don’t it?”

  “It does,” I said. “But I suppose if I were truly enlightened I’d say that would all be pretty much up to her.”

  “But you not that enlightened,” Hawk said.

  “No,” I said.

  “Me either,” Hawk said.

  We were quiet again, watching the table of women. Women seemed so much more at ease in social groups than men did. Men were okay in project groups, where they had a common goal and vocabulary. Sports teams. Combat units. Construction crews. Guarding Susan. But six guys all dressed up having dinner together was usually a sorrowful sight.

  “I know we talked ’bout it before,” Hawk said. “And I know you not going to go for it. But . . . any one of us, Vinnie, Chollo, me, be happy to clip Alderson for you. Chollo could do it and be back in Bel Air for cocktails before the cops found the body.”

  “I gotta do it,” I said.

  “Clip him?”

  “No, I gotta even this up.”

  “Nothing says even like two in the head,” Hawk said.

  “Not my style.”

 
; “’Less you has to,” Hawk said.

  I nodded.

  “I’ve had to,” I said. “So far, not this time.”

  “This ain’t just about Doherty,” Hawk said.

  “Whatever it’s about,” I said, “I’m going to clear it.”

  “It about Susan and the guy she took off with two hundred years ago,” Hawk said.

  “Whatever it’s about,” I said, “I’m going to clear it.”

  44.

  It took two hours to fly to Cleveland, and thirteen hours to drive there. I drove. Route 90 all the way. There is nothing to equal a long boring drive alone for clearing the head. And mine needed clearing. Out the Mass Pike. Through the Berkshires. Onto the New York Thruway. Through Buffalo. Down along the eastern shore of Lake Erie. Through Erie. To Cleveland. It was dark when I got there, and my head was so clear as to be empty. I checked in, unpacked, went to the bar and had a sandwich and a couple of beers, went back up to my room, and, exhausted from the excitement, went to bed.

  In the morning I went out and looked for Red’s shelter. I had a list of shelter addresses I’d gotten by phone Monday, from the Department of Public Health. Epstein had supplied head shots of Red and of Alderson, blown up and enhanced, from surveillance photos. I was wearing a Red Sox hat to be provocative, and a leather jacket to be warm. I was alert. I had a gun. I was everything a slick Boston private eye should be when patrolling the street shelters in Cleveland.

  I liked Cleveland. It was no longer the mistake on the lake, when the river caught fire, and so did the mayor. There was a new ballpark, and a new arena. The downtown was alive. The flats were more so. There had always been a kind of magisterial, real city architectural dignity about Cleveland. It was still dignifi ed, but now it was also lively. Where I was looking, however, the liveliness, if any, was chemically induced. Mostly there was torpor. Except for the people who staffed the shelters. They seemed sincere and sufficient. Though most of them seemed sort of tired, too. My third day in Cleveland was bright and hard cold, with a wind off the lake. In mid-afternoon, some distance out Euclid Avenue, in the basement of a dingy church that might once have been a furniture store, I found a shelter where a staffer recognized Red when I showed his picture. Her name was Cora. Black. Kind. Tired. Pretty tough.

  “I don’t know his real name,” she said. “We called him Red. He was a kid, really, big as he was. There was something forlorn about him. Did he make it?”