Pale Kings and Princes

23

I drove the eighty miles from Wheaton to Cambridge and was in Susan’s waiting room when her last patient finished. She came out of her office with the patient and saw me sitting in the green leather chair reading a copy of The New Yorker. She smiled at me. The patient was a sturdy woman in chino trousers carrying a maroon backpack.

Susan said, “Good-bye, Ms. Lewis, I’ll see you on Thursday.”

Ms. Lewis nodded and did not look at me and went out. Susan slid the bolt in the outer door after her and came back and plunked herself down on my lap.

“You’ve come to the right place,” she said. “I can help you.”

I grinned and we kissed each other.

“Do you have a diagnosis?” I said.

“Fucking crazy,” Susan said.

“Never mind the technical jargon,” I said. “Is there hope?”

“Our best chance is maintenance,” Susan said. “I don’t think we can plan on improvement.”

I put my head against her chest. Her perfume smelled expensive. I could feel her heart pulsing.

“You okay?” Susan said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I need to eat dinner and talk.”

“I am supposed to have dinner with Patti Greiff,” Susan said.

I nodded.

“I’m meeting her at the Harvest,” Susan said. “Want to join us and afterwards, you and I can talk?”

“Sure.”

It was dark on Brattle Street and the lights of the American Rep Theatre gleamed happily through the wide glass windows. The windows of the croissant shop were steamy and the display windows of Crate and Barrel in the Design Research Building were full of colorful knickknacks and elegant folding chairs. We turned in through the courtyard of the Design Research Building and walked to the end where the Harvest Restaurant nestled in the far left corner. Susan was holding my hand.

It was cold and Susan was wearing her silver fox fur with the red fox collar turned up. There was something about the mingle of cologne and fur and cold air that made her seem even more beautiful than she usually seemed. We were quiet as we walked.

It was warm and noisy in the Harvest. To the left the bar was crowded with people who hoped to meet each other. Ahead of us a stunning blond-haired woman waved at us from a booth. She wore a wide-brimmed gray felt hat. Her black-and-white-checked coat was open and thrown back off her shoulders.

“There’s Patti,” Susan said.

“I’ll say.”

We slid into the booth across from Patti. And Susan introduced us.

“The BF?” Patti said.

“Isn’t he adorable?” Susan said.

“Hunkus Americanus,” Patti said. She cocked her head. “Maybe a little bit scary-looking.”

“It’s my steely blue stare,” I said. “I can’t help it.”

Dinner passed easily. Patti and Susan had been friends for a long time, and I spent much of the evening at the periphery of their interest. When dinner was over, Patti took the check.

“I’ve waited years to meet you,” she said. “Let me celebrate by paying.”

We left the Harvest. Outside Patti gave Susan a squeeze.

“Take care,” she said. “It was lovely to meet him.”

“He’s happy to have met you too,” I said.

“He’s quieter than I’d have guessed,” Patti said.

“Yes,” Susan said. “He is.”

Patti went to her car. Susan and I walked through Harvard Square. We held hands. Our breath hung in the air. In a recessed doorway a young man played guitar and sang into a microphone, a single speaker set up, and beside it the guitar case open for donations.

“You are quieter than I’d have guessed,” Susan said.

“I know. It’s why I came home.”

“Yes. We are each other’s home, aren’t we?”

“It’s bad in Wheaton,” I said.

Susan was quiet.

“There’s a woman whose husband was murdered and then a few days later her son was murdered.”

“Part of the drug business?”

“Probably,” I said. “The thing is, I probably caused both killings.”

“How?”

“Doing what I do,” I said. “Poking, pushing, following, looking.”

“And?”

“The woman’s husband was the police chief.”

“Rogers,” Susan said. She probably lost the key to something about once a month, but in human matters she never forgot anything.

“Yes. His kid worked for Esteva and when things weren’t happening I followed him.”

Across the intersection of Brattle and Mass. Avenue the out-of-town newsstand was still open and still busy. We turned up Mass. Ave.

“He picked up a load of coke in Maine and you hijacked it,” Susan said.

“Yes.”

“And you went to ask him about it.”

“Yes, and he pulled a gun on me,” I said. “And his mother took it away from him. It was a forty-one Navy Colt. The same caliber that killed his father.”

“Umph,” Susan said.

“And I asked him where he got it and he wouldn’t tell and we pressed him and he said Esteva gave it to him.”

“Why would Esteva...?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “So I took the gun and four rounds to a state cop I know and had him check it ballistically without saying where I got it.”

“He was willing to do that?”

“For the moment,” I said. “And then it struck me that Brett was all that I had on Esteva. The only connection and if Esteva had any idea that Brett had told about the gun...”

“Why would Brett tell him?”

“Because the kid was slow, and because he had something for Esteva. He looked up to him. If he was scared and confused he’d have gone to Esteva. That’s what I didn’t think of.”

“And you went looking for him and found him dead.”

I nodded. We stopped at the corner of Church Street. “His mother was with me,” I said.

We had turned down Church Street, our shoulders touching, her hand in mine. It was late enough so much of the street life had departed and the streets were brightly lit and clear and cold.

“She screamed all the time until she was so hoarse that the screaming was a whisper, and then the cops came, and an ambulance, and we got her to the hospital and one of the ER doctors gave her a shot and knocked her out.”

“How terrible for you,” Susan said.

“For her,” I said.

“Yes, but I don’t love her.”

“If I’d stayed out of it that kid would be alive, maybe his old man too, and Caroline Rogers wouldn’t be under sedation in the hospital.”

We had stopped outside the Swiss watchmaker’s on Church Street.

“You know better,” Susan said.

“I do?”

“You know that you can’t predict and you can’t expect that you should have predicted. You do the best you can, as decently as you can, and you accept the consequences.”

I shrugged and looked at the sandwich shop across the street.

“You know that,” Susan said. “You know sometimes you’ll fail. You know sometimes you’ll be wrong. You know sometimes bad things will happen.”

I nodded.

“It happens in most work, but in your work the stakes are very high. People get killed.”

“Sometimes I kill them,” I said.

“And sometimes you save them.” Susan had turned full toward me and was holding both my hands.

“A little like your business,” I said.

Susan nodded. “A little.”

“I involved that kid,” I said.

“No,” Susan said. “He involved himself.”

“I should have figured he’d tell Esteva,” I said.

Susan stood so close to me that we touched from knee to chest. She pressed my hands in hers against her, just below her hips.

“Probably,” she said. “Probably you should have. You made a mistake. You’ll make more before you’re through. But you make fewer than most people I know. And no one makes them in better causes.”

“This mistake was mortal,” I said.

“Your work is mortal, your mistakes will be too.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Yeah,” Susan said. “And the mortal parts of it are what makes it work you’ll do. It’s what makes it matter. If it didn’t have mortal consequences it would bore you.”

“I don’t like to see people die,” I said.

“And you’ve saved some,” Susan said.

I nodded.

“You’re the one who said it to me.”

“What?”

“Death is the mother of beauty.”

“I didn’t think you were listening,” I said, and took my hands from hers and slid them up her back and held her against me in the cold night under the bright artificial light on the empty street.