Robert B. Parker’s Someone to Watch Over Me

48

“That was fun,” Mattie said.

“Always a pleasure sitting around a crime scene in the hot sun.”

I had popped two cold beers from the mini-fridge in my office. We drank them in the air-conditioning early that evening and discussed how little we’d learned from the man I’d shot.

“You’d think he’d be more helpful,” Mattie said. “Bleeding on the ground like that.”

“I know,” I said. “The nerve.”

“What do we do next?”

“Sit around and wait for the guy to confess,” I said. “Quirk will call to tell us Steiner and Poppy Palmer have been arrested and all will be right in the world.”

“Bullshit.”

“Agreed,” I said.

“Guys like that never talk,” she said. “They lawyer up. I don’t care how they dress or where they’re from. They’re the same as Jack Flynn and Gerry Broz. A bunch of bozos with guns.”

“I like to consider myself a well-armed Emmett Kelly.”

“And who is Emmett Kelly?”

“The kind of guy who’d smash a peanut with a sledgehammer.”

“And in this scenario, Steiner is the peanut?”

“Listening to Susan theorize Steiner’s anatomical situation, most definitely.”

Mattie drank a little beer. And I realized this was the first time we’d shared a beer together. It reminded me of when I’d first shared a beer with Paul Giacomin. That seemed a long time ago, and Susan and I both missed him. Since he’d gotten married and moved to San Francisco, we didn’t talk as much as we once did.

I tried to make the beer go slowly. Somehow, no matter the substance, I drank all liquids at the same rate of speed. Be it brown liquor, cold beer, or ice-cold lemonade. It was my cross to bear.

“Chloe is scared shitless.”

“As she should be.”

“And her mother is a bitch,” she said. “Calling her own daughter a whore. Who does that?”

“How does she know her mom took a payoff?”

“She saw those guys at her house and heard them talking,” Mattie said. “Wasn’t even a lot. It was like two thousand bucks. Rita said they were talking millions in a lawsuit.”

“A bird in the hand.”

“Now we’re down to Amelia Lynch, Maria Tran, Haley Lagrasso, and the Bennett sisters.”

“And Carly Ly if we can find her,” I said. “Maybe Debbie Delgado?”

“Not a chance,” Mattie said. “She’s Poppy’s pimp.”

“Nice alliteration.”

I drank some beer, trying to be conscious to conserve. I drank a little more, the patterns of light from the bay window diminishing across the office floor. A slash of light across my Vermeer print, the girl at the piano taking the lesson.

“I’m sorry I ran out on Susan,” Mattie said. “I didn’t mean any disrespect.”

“None taken,” I said. “But I’m glad you called me.”

Mattie held her beer, touching the cold glass to her cheek. She seemed lost in thought, her Sox cap on the chair beside her, long red hair pulled back into a ponytail. Her pale freckled face fresh and eager but with much older and wiser green eyes.

“What does it feel like?” she said.

I waited. I drank some more beer and contemplated another. We had skipped lunch and by now nearly skipped dinner. It felt as if I’d been sitting around the stadium at Moakley Park for an eternity, taking questions from patrol officers and medics. At one point, some reporters arrived and set up their trucks and cameras. But they left soon after, disappointed there wasn’t a body under a sheet.

“To shoot someone.”

“If I were a carpenter, it would feel like swinging a hammer,” I said. “I don’t take pleasure in it. But I don’t brood on it, either.”

“Because they would have killed you.”

“And possibly you and Chloe.”

“That’s desperate,” Mattie said. “Steiner is crapping his pants.”

“It certainly appears that way,” I said. “He has much to lose. As do his many friends.”

I finished the beer and retrieved another. Mattie hadn’t had but two sips of her first. She’d spoken to me in the past about her mother and her mother’s mother and how alcohol had consumed them. Mattie said she loved her mother but never wanted to be like her.

The sunlight was gone. Berkeley Street was alive to unlucky folks just leaving their offices and lucky people headed out to dinner. I checked my watch, ready for us to drive back to Susan’s.

The phone rang. Not my cell but the old-fashioned landline that I just couldn’t quit.

“Where the hell have you been?” Rita said.

“At the track.”

“I’ve been calling you for the last two hours.”

I checked my cell. The ringer was off, and Rita spoke the truth.

“Maria Tran,” she said. “Remember her?”

“Carly Ly’s friend.”

“She showed up at my office,” she said. “I was in the middle of a major deposition. I guess she got bored and left. But she left me a note.”

“And?”

“She’s heard from Carly Ly,” Rita said.