Small Vices

Chapter 28

I had a problem. Obviously there was something wrong with the Ellis Alves case. I needed to keep plowing at that until it was passable. Also, obviously, somebody had hired the Gray Man to kill me. And I probably ought to do something about that. Except that I didn’t know what to do about that. I didn’t know who had hired the Gray Man and I didn’t know who the Gray Man was. Which made it hard to find him. The best I could do was to keep at the Ellis Alves case and assume that the Gray Man would find me, and that when he did, I could out-quick him.

That decided, I acted promptly. I drove across the river and picked up a green pepper and mushroom pizza from Bertucci’s in Harvard Square and took it to Susan’s house along with a bottle of Merlot. It was 5:30 and she was with her last patient of the day when I went in the front door. When I opened the front door, Pearl the Wonder Dog charged out of the library and capered about in the front hall. Her eyes had the slitty look they got when she’d been sleeping on a couch. I bent over and gave her a kiss. She was returning it wetly when she got a whiff of the pizza and redirected her affections toward it. I held it up out of her reach.

Lee Farrell appeared in the open door across the hall, his body partly concealed behind the half-open door. When he saw it was me, he stepped away from the door and shoved a Glock 9-mm. back into his belt holster, butt forward.

“I guess you’re okay,” he said.

“There’s some doubt about that,” I said. “But I’m no threat to Susan.”

Belson appeared behind Farrell. He was in his shirtsleeves, his gun holstered on his right hip. He was very lean with a narrow face, and a blue shadow of beard always showing no matter how recently he had shaved.

“That for us?” he said.

I went into the library and put the pizza on the sideboard, right beside two boxes of shotgun shells stacked one on top of the other. I didn’t bother to answer the question. Pearl came back in with me and sat in front of the sideboard and focused on the pizza.

“She’s been spending time down with us,” Farrell said, “while Susan’s working.”

“Case the guy breaks in carrying a pizza,” Belson said. “She’ll be on him like a barracuda.”

“How’s Lisa?” I said.

“She’s fine,” Belson said.

“How about you,” I said to Farrell. “How’s your love life?”

Farrell grinned.

“Most of the guys in the squad room are in love with me,” he said. “But I’m playing hard to get.”

“You heartbreaker,” I said. “Everything quiet around here.”

“Like a church,” Belson said. “Pearl spends most of the time on the couch. Patients come in and out. Nobody says a word. Nobody makes eye contact.”

“How do you know they’re all patients?” I said.

“We got a list of her appointments each day and a little description. Susan’s agreed to take no new patients until this is over, so she opens her door and sees an unfamiliar face, she hollers.”

“And you can hear her if she hollers?”

Belson looked at me as if I’d asked about the Easter Bunny.

“We did a couple dry runs,” he said. “You making any progress on this thing?”

“No.”

“No rush,” Belson said. “I’m here until it’s over.”

“Me too,” Farrell said. “When we’re on days, I get to watch Sally Jesse.”

“You gotta get me a straight partner,” Belson said. “I’m over there trying to read Soldier of Fortune magazine and he’s sitting in front of the tube saying, ‘Where did she get those shoes.’”

“Well, you saw them,” Farrell said. “Were they gauche or what?”

“See what I mean?” Belson said.

The door to Susan’s office opened and a young man came out buttoning up his loden coat. He didn’t look at us. He went straight out the front door and pulled it shut behind him. In about two more minutes Susan came out and saw me and came across the hall and put her arms around me and we kissed.

“How about her shoes?” Belson said.

“Cat’s ass,” Farrell said.

I picked up the pizza and the wine.

“We’re going upstairs to dine sumptuously before the fire,” I said, “and perhaps later who knows.”

Susan smiled.

“Actually I know,” she said.

“And?” Farrell said.

“And it’s none of your business,” Susan said.

“Talk about attitude,” Farrell said.

I went up with Susan and Pearl and the pizza. Susan put the pizza in a warm oven while I made a fire and opened the wine. In the old days, before Pearl, we would have sat on the couch to eat, but that was no longer possible, so we sat at Susan’s counter where we could still see the fire and the pizza was relatively secure, unless you left it unattended. Susan had changed from her dark conservative work dress to a pale lavender sweatsuit and thick white sweat socks. She had taken off her jewelry but left her makeup in place, and when she sat beside me at the counter I felt the little electrochemical charge of amazement that she always gave me. I had felt it the first time I’d ever seen her, in the guidance office, at Smithfield High School, more than twenty years ago. And I’d felt it, or a variation of it, every time I’d seen her since.

“How did it go in New York?” Susan said.

“Stapleton’s parents lied to me,” I said.

“Was it a lie that helps you?”

“Not yet. Except that I know that they’re lying.”

“Find out anything else?”

“They are white,” I said. “The kid’s adopted. His father said if they were going to adopt anyway they may as well save a little black baby from a life of depravity.”

“Oh, dear,” Susan said.

“Yeah,” I said, “me too.”

“Anything else?”

“The Gray Man made a run at me,” I said.

Susan nodded.

“Tell me about it,” she said.

It seemed a shame that she had to know. It was bound to make her anxious. It certainly made me anxious. But a long time ago we’d agreed that neither of us would decide what the other one should know. I told her about it.

She was silent for a moment looking at me, breathing quietly, then she said, “He would not have expected you to charge him like that.”

“I don’t think he expected to miss,” I said.

“But he did, and you charged him, and now he knows a little more about you than he did.”

“And vice versa,” I said.

“What do you know about him,” she said.

“He’s not caught up in macho games,” I said. “He took a shot at me and it didn’t work out so he walked away from it. There’ll be another time, he’ll look for it. He’s not interested in who’s tougher. He’s interested in who’s dead.”

“What if you hadn’t seen the reflection off the scope?” Susan said. “Or thought it was just a birdwatcher?”

“Well, I know somebody’s out to kill me. I see a flash and dive for cover and it turns out to be some guy looking at a red-shafted flicker, the worst that happens is I’m embarrassed. If it’s a guy with a gun and I don’t dive for cover, I’m dead.”

“Can you go through life diving for cover every time you see a light reflection?”

“Depends on how long it takes to get this guy.”

Susan nodded slowly as I spoke. She picked up her glass and drank some Merlot, and put the glass back down slowly. Then she smiled slowly, although there didn’t seem much pleasure in the smile.

“You are a piece of work,” she said.

“Comely in every aspect,” I said.

“The Gray Man thinks he’s chasing you” — she shook her head once, briefly — “and you think you’re chasing him.”

“I am chasing him,” I said. “What I don’t want is for him to know it.”

Susan drank again. For her this was close to guzzling.

“Perhaps you should be the one they’re guarding ’round the clock,” she said.

I shook my head.

“No. He’s using the implied threat against you to distract me. As long as I’ve got you covered, that won’t work for him. I take it away from you and I will worry about you all the time, and he’ll have won that round.”

“Are you sure it’s not a macho thing with you?”

“No. But until he’s disposed of, I can’t do what I do and we can’t live the life we want to lead.”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry that what I do has spilled out all over you like this.”

“I have always known what you do,” she said. “I’m a consenting adult.”

“I could walk away from it,” I said. “I drop the Ellis Alves thing and all this goes away.”

She shook her head at once.

“No,” she said. “You can’t walk away from it. You are exactly suited by talent, by temperament, hell, by size, to do this odd thing that you do. You can’t do something else.”

“I can sing nearly all the love songs of the swing era,” I said.

“Only to me,” Susan said.

“You’re the only one I want to sing them to.”

“I’m the only one that would listen.”

She got up and went to the oven and took out the pizza. She slid it out of the box and onto a big glass platter with a gold trim around the rim. She took a big pair of scissors from a drawer and began to cut the pizza into individual slices. She put the platter on the counter between us and set out two smaller plates that matched the platter, and a knife, fork, and spoon for each of us.

“Flatware to eat pizza?” I said.

“Optional,” she said.

“When I’m alone I eat it from the box,” I said. “Standing up by the sink.”

“I have no doubt of that,” she said.

I picked up a slice. By the time I had finished it and washed it down with some wine, Susan had cut a small triangle off the tip of her slice and was conveying it to her mouth with a fork. I picked up another slice.

“You matter to me,” I said, “more than what I do, or who I am. If you need me to quit, I’ll quit.”

She shook her head again while she carefully chewed her pizza. When she had swallowed and sipped some wine and blotted her mouth with her napkin, she said, “Yes. You would. But you should not. You are an odd combination of violence and concern. You contain the violence very well, but it’s there, and I would be a fool, and you would be a fool, to think it was less a part of you than the concern.”

“You’re right,” I said. “Sometimes I wish you weren’t.”

“No need to wish I weren’t,” Susan said. “You know yourself. You understand your violence as well as you understand your capacity for kindness, maybe better.”

“Maybe it needs more understanding,” I said.

“Yes, it does,” Susan said. “Kindness is not dangerous. You have found a way to work and live which allows you to integrate the violence and the compassion. If you had no impulse to violence, your compassion wouldn’t be so admirable. If you had no compassion, your violence would be intolerable. You understand what I’m saying?”

“As long as I pay close attention,” I said.

“You are able to apply the impulse to violence in the service of compassion. Your profession allows you actually to exist at the point where vocation and avocation meet. Few people achieve that,” she said. “I would not have you change.”

I was quiet for a moment admiring the amount of time she had spent thinking about me. Even while I was doing this I was also thinking about how beautiful she was.

“Does this mean you love me?” I said.

She plucked a single julienne of green pepper from the top of the pizza and ate it slowly while she looked at my face thoughtfully. She didn’t say anything until she had swallowed the green pepper.

Then she said, “You bet your ass it does.”