Now and Then s-35

by Robert B. Parker

  “In Erie?” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Nice memory,” I said.

  Zackis grinned.

  “Made me think of Perry Mason,” Zackis said. “I know a guy up there, want me to call him?”

  “More than you know,” I said.

  56.

  The cop in erie was named Tommy Remick.

  “Alderson had a charter boat,” he told me after Zackis handed me the phone. “Fishing. Sightseeing. That kind of thing. One morning it shows up empty, half aground near the marina where he kept it. No sign of him or anyone else. No evidence of foul play.”

  “When was this?”

  “September thirteenth, 1994,” Remick said.

  “Alderson got any next of kin?”

  “Ex-wife. Remarried. Lives in Stockton, California. Moved there around 1990 after she left Alderson. She hasn’t seen him since.”

  “Nobody else?” I said.

  “Nope. No kids. Parents dead. No siblings we can fi nd.”

  “How old would he be,” I said.

  “Born January 1957.”

  “So,” I said. “He’d be forty-eight now.”

  “You say so,” Remick answered. “I don’t do math.”

  “If he’s alive,” I said.

  “He isn’t,” Remick said. “Offi cially. It’s been ten years.”

  “Twelve,” I said.

  “I told you about my math,” Remick said.

  “How big a boat?” I said.

  “Another thing I don’t know nothing about,” Remick said.

  “Alderson lived on it. Was all he had. I think it slept four.”

  “So it was pretty big.”

  “You’re thinking it might have been too big for whoever ditched it on the shore?” Remick said.

  “Something like that,” I said.

  “If anyone ditched it,” Remick said. “Boat could have just been abandoned and drifted in there.”

  “Prevailing currents?”

  “Wouldn’t prevent it from drifting in there.”

  “When’s the last time anyone saw Alderson?”

  “On the tenth,” Remick said. “He was mopping the deck on his boat. Told the marina manager he had a charter that afternoon.”

  “Anyone see the charterees?” I said.

  “The people who hired him? No. Nobody saw him leave,”

  Remick said. “When the boat showed up empty we did a bigsearch-and-rescue thing. Boats. Planes. Coast guard went all over the lake. We never found anything.”

  “How far from shore was it aground?” I said.

  “Not far. Maybe twenty feet,” Remick said. “Anyone wanted to ditch it would have had no problem swimming to shore.”

  “Motor off?”

  “Yep,” Remick said. “Plenty of fuel left. Only thing odd was, there was no anchor.”

  “Did he normally carry one?”

  “They all do,” Remick said. “He was a charter guy. People would sometimes want to anchor and fish, or picnic, or look at sunsets. He should have had an anchor.”

  “Any theories on that?” I said.

  “If it’ll hold a boat,” Remick said, “it’ll hold a body.”

  “Maybe two,” I said.

  57.

  The trip home from Cleveland on Route 90 took me north along the lake, through Euclid and Ashtabula, Ohio, and right past Erie, Pennsylvania. I thought about stopping in and looking at the lake where, I suspected, Bradley Turner had undergone a lake change and become Perry Alderson. But I missed Susan too much. And Pearl. I was beginning to miss Hawk. And I needed to get home before I started to miss Vinnie.

  Cleveland to Buffalo was about three hours. Buffalo to Boston was longer than a trip to the moon on gossamer wings. It gave me plenty of time to catch up on my coffee, and think. The coffee was easier.

  Certainly Alderson had once been Bradley Turner. Married to Anne Marie. Living in Laurel Heights. Taking some classes at Coyle State. Fooling around with a lot of the coeds, which was probably why he took the classes. No one had found any sign of paid employment, so he probably depended on his wife’s money, which seemed substantial: nice house, nice suburb. For whatever reason, maybe because she caught him fooling around, one day he had taken the missus on a cruise out of Erie and while out there had killed the wife and the boat guy, and, maybe, tied the bodies to the anchor and dumped them in the middle of the lake. It was a big lake. Then he had taken the boat back to shore and, either to avoid observation or because he didn’t know how to dock it, he had run it aground, swum to shore, gone back to his car, and driven off into the sunrise. Probably with Perry Alderson’s ID in his pocket. I stopped at a travel plaza near Batavia. Got gas, used the restroom, bought coffee and a nourishing cinnamon bun in the crowded food court, and went back to the thruway. The leisurely days when Howard Johnson’s was your host of the highways were but a quaint memory. So he gets back in his car, in his wet clothes, and drives on back home, like nothing happened. He takes all the money out of the bank. He’s smart. He doesn’t get greedy, try to sell the house, or the car. He drives the car up to Toledo, parks it in a mall, takes the bus back to Cleveland. He takes nothing from the house that might connect him to Bradley Turner. Then as Perry Alderson he goes to Cleveland, probably, gets a place to 251 live, and starts creating a new persona for himself. By 1996 he’s counseling people in shelters, and ten years later he’s a professor at Concord College, and a lecturer on matters of individual freedom. Is it a great country or what? That’s why he lied about his age, I thought. It wasn’t just vanity. Alderson was younger. Maybe he’d actually done, as Turner, the things he claimed to have done as Alderson. Or maybe his father had done them. Or maybe he’d made them up. Maybe he’d made the father up. He had, after all, made himself up.

  I stopped near Syracuse for more gas and coffee. The travel plaza was packed. It was a Thursday in early December. Where the hell was everyone going? More existentially, where the hell was I going. I took my coffee to the car and continued east. I was going home.

  58.

  The homecoming festivities were intense and extended, and Pearl was visibly annoyed at being shut out of Susan’s bedroom for so long. It was three o’clock in the morning when she was able to join us. Susan had a bottle of LaurentPerrier pink champagne, and we drank some of it, sitting up in bed, with Pearl sprawled between us.

  “Whew!” Susan said.

  “Whaddya think?” I said. “Love or lust.”

  “For us,” Susan said, “it’s a meaningless distinction.”

  “For everybody?”

  “If they’re lucky,” Susan said.

  “Like us.”

  “And they work at it,” Susan said.

  “Like us,” I said.

  “Sometimes it’s been hard work,” she said.

  “And sometimes no work at all,” I said.

  She nodded and sipped her champagne and looked at me over the rim of the glass. To be looked at by Susan, naked, with those eyes, over a glass of pink champagne, was all I knew on earth, and all I had to know.

  “What are you thinking?” she said.

  “Keats,” I said.

  She smiled.

  “Truth is beauty, beauty truth. . . ?” she said.

  “Something like that.”

  She kept smiling.

  “Only you,” she said. “After hours of carnal excess with the girl of your dreams . . . thinking about Keats.”

  “I’ll bet other people think of Keats,” I said.

  “Oh, I’m sure, probably right in this neighborhood . . .”

  “If carnal excess occurs in Cambridge,” I said.

  She ignored me.

  “But none of those thinking of Keats look like you,” she said.

  “Their loss,” I said.

  “And their companions’,” Susan said.

  Pearl rolled onto her side and stretched out full length, which took up a considerable amount of bed space. Probably revenge.

  “Do you know wh
at you’re going to do about Perry Alderson and all of that?” Susan said.

  “I’m thinking about it.”

  “Are you going to tell Epstein what you’ve learned?”

  “I’m thinking about it.”

  “Why wouldn’t you tell Epstein?” Susan said.

  “I’m thinking about it,” I said.

  “And you do not plan to discuss it with me tonight.”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  I filled my champagne glass and reached across Pearl to pour for Susan. She drank some. I drank some. We looked at each other. Pearl’s breathing was the only sound. Susan reached across the dog and traced one of the scars on my chest. There were several.

  “It’s just a scar,” she said. “Just a kind of physical memory.”

  “Yes.”

  “It doesn’t hurt,” she said.

  “No.”

  “It did,” she said.

  “True.”

  “But now it doesn’t.”

  “Are we getting metaphorical?” I said.

  She smiled again and nodded.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “This, what we have,” I said, “is an earned relationship. Of course there would be scars.”

  “And the time when we were separated? When I was with somebody else?”

  “That’s a big scar,” I said. “But it’s also when we both did the most to earn what we’ve got.”

  “You truly know that?” she said.

  “I do. I’ve never liked it much, but I know what we got from it.”

  She continued to trace the scar on my chest. Then she looked at me again. Her eyes were luminous.

  “No pain, no gain,” she said.

  59.

  "You got enough,” Hawk said. “You give what you got to Epstein and he can run Bradley Turner down. They good at big searches.”

  “I know,” I said.

  Susan was working. We were in the spare room. Chollo was asleep on the couch. Vinnie was listening to his iPod and doing something with the trigger sear of a Rugar brush gun. Hawk and I were sipping coffee and watching Susan’s door.

  “Hell, with what you got, and they work with the Cleveland cops, sooner or later, they gonna fi nd something,” Hawk said.

  “Erie too,” I said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Makes sense,” I said.

  “And then we can stop hanging round here, watching Vinnie clean the weapons,” Hawk said.

  “I know it,” I said.

  “So,” Hawk said. “You going to see Epstein today?”

  “Not today,” I said.

  “When?” Hawk said.

  “I’m thinking about it,” I said.

  Hawk nodded. Today’s snack special was raspberry turnovers in a cardboard box. Hawk stood and walked over to the table and selected a turnover from the box. He looked at me. I nodded. He selected another one and came back and handed it to me, and sat down with his. In silence we ate our turnovers and drank our coffee and looked at Susan’s door. Vinnie got the sear and trigger reassembled and flexed the trigger gently and nodded to himself and continued with the reassembly.

  “Russell Costigan,” Hawk said.

  “Russell Costigan,” I said.

  “Guy Susan ran off with back then.”

  “I know who he is,” I said.

  “We both know, this about him.”

  I shrugged.

  “We both know you couldn’t kill him like you wanted,”

  Hawk said.

  “Wouldn’t have taken me where I wanted to go,” I said.

  “So you sat on it,” Hawk said. “But it didn’t go away; and now here’s Doherty. Wife runs off with someone turns out to be a bad man, and this time it gets him, and her, killed.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Maybe I’m just looking for justice,” I said.

  “Maybe you looking for revenge,” Hawk said.

  “Maybe they’re the same thing.”

  “Now you thinking like me,” Hawk said.

  “Uh-oh.”

  “So we both know Alderson did them, or had them done. Whyn’t you just shoot him and get it done?”

  “Because I’m not like you,” I said.

  “Tha’s right,” Hawk said.

  I looked at him. He smiled.

  “I need to get him the right way,” I said.

  “Tha’s right,” Hawk said.

  “Lemme think about it,” I said.

  60.

  I stayed with the rest of the posse in a state of high readiness while Susan had her fifty-minute hour with Alderson or Turner or whoever he really was. When they were through and he had uneventfully gone, she came into the spare room. She was in her understated, for Susan, shrink garb. Today it was a dark blue velvet blazer over designer jeans.

  “Anything?” I said.

  “Interesting,” she said. “Nothing that can’t wait. I have my next client in a minute.”

  “Can you give me a one-sentence slug line, on ‘interesting’?”

  “I think there’s some kind of masturbatory mental sex going on,” she said.

  Vinnie turned his head to look at her. Chollo smiled. Hawk showed nothing. Which was what Hawk always showed.

  “In whose mind,” I said.

  Susan grinned at me.

  “I have a Harvard Ph.D.,” she said.

  “So, only in his mind,” I said.

  “Exactly,” Susan said.

  “You think he’s still trying to seduce you?” I said.

  “I think he thinks he has.”

  “Which is why he keeps coming?” I said.

  “He has not forgotten that he wants to use me against you.”

  “But the tail has begun to wag the dog?”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  “And the fact that he has to walk past us when he arrives?”

  I said.

  “Half the fun,” Chollo said.

  We all looked at him.

  “You are his enemy,” Chollo said. “If he can walk past you on his way to having mind sex with the señorita . . .”

  “Ay, caramba,” I said.

  Chollo smiled.

  “Sí,” he said.

  All of us stared at Chollo. Except Vinnie, who might have been sleeping, or might have been listening to his iPod, or both.

  “How you know that?” Hawk said.

  “It is a trick we hot-blooded Latins often play in my village,”

  Chollo said.

  “There’s probably a lot of that going on where you live,”

  I said.

  “Mucho,” Chollo said.

  “And part of my charm, for him,” Susan said, “is that he gets to strut past you and have his imaginary way with me, and strut back out, under, so to speak, my protection . . .”

  She looked at her watch.

  “You have other charms,” I said as she started across the hall.

  She turned and her smile gleamed with possibility.

  “And don’t you forget it,” she said.

  61.

  Behind captain quirk’s desk in the kind of new offices of the Homicide Unit was a picture of a very young Ted Williams, in a Minneapolis Millers uniform. He was beautiful. Nineteen years old then, and it was all ahead of him.

  “I need a safe house for Susan,” I said.

  “And you think I’m a general contractor?” Quirk said.

  “Three, four days,” I said, “keep her safe. At least four guys.”

  “You and Hawk aren’t enough?”

  “And Vinnie,” I said. “And a guy from LA named Chollo.”

  “The four of you?” Quirk said. “Not enough?”

  “We have something we have to do,” I said.

  “Legal?”

  “No.”

  “So you want me to aid and abet you,” Quirk said, “in an illegal action, by protecting your girlfriend at taxpayers’ expense while you’re doing it.”

  “Yeah.”

  Quirk sat quietly
for a moment. His thick hands rested motionless on his desk. His nails were manicured. His shirt was very white and very starched. He had on a dark blue tie with maroon stripes. A brown/black corduroy jacket hung neatly on a hanger on the coatrack in the corner.

  “You get a Tommy point for balls,” Quirk said fi nally. I nodded. We sat.

  “Susan know about this yet?” he said.

  “No.”

  “Because if you can’t get her covered you can’t do what you want to do,” Quirk said.

  “That’s right.”

  “So fi rst you gotta fi nd out if I’ll buy in,” Quirk said.

  “Yes.”

  “Got to do with the deal you’re working on with Epstein?”

  “Yes.”

  “So?”

  “Don’t trust them,” I said.

  “He’s pretty good,” Quirk said. “Don’t let the appearance fool you.”

  “I know. It’s not him I don’t trust. I don’t know what his troops are like.”

  Quirk nodded.

  “Susan’s in real danger,” Quirk said. “You wouldn’t ask me if she weren’t.”

  I nodded. Again we were quiet.

  “I can’t assign people,” Quirk said.

  I waited.

  “But I can probably get a couple volunteers. Frank Belson will do it. Lee Farrell.”

  “Need at least four,” I said.

  Quirk shook his head.

  “Settle for three,” he said.

  “The third being. . . ?”

  “Me,” Quirk said. “After offi ce hours.”

  I nodded.

  “Two guys, and you, make four anyway,” I said.

  “’Specially if the other two are Belson and Farrell,” Quirk said.

  “I owe you,” I said.

  “You do, but I probably owe you, too,” Quirk said. “And I remember what you did for Frank when his wife was missing. You got a plan?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do.”

  62.

  A t 10:48 on Monday morning a guy in a green Toyota dropped off a woman in front of Susan’s home. The woman wore a red snap-brim hat and sunglasses and a long black coat. She came up the front steps and into the front hall. Susan came to the offi ce door to greet her.

  “I’m Susan Silverman,” she said.