The Lineup: The World's Greatest Crime Writers Tell the Inside Story of Their Greatest Detectives

SPENSER
BY ROBERT B. PARKER

Susan and I sat at a table in the Charles Square courtyard, having a drink in the late afternoon with Susan’s friend Amy Trent. It was one of those days in late June. The temperature was about 78. There were maybe three white clouds in the sky. The quiet breeze that drifted in from the river smelled fresher than I knew it to be.

“I’m trying to write a book,” Amy said. “The working title is Men Who Dare, a series of profiles of men who are strong and tough and do dangerous work. Mountain climbers, Navy Seals, policemen, firemen.”

“Amy needs a sample profile to submit with her proposal, in hopes of getting a contract and an advance,” Susan said. “I said you’d be perfect.”

“Amy’s looking for sexual splendor as well?” I said.

Amy smiled.

“Always,” she said. “Will you talk with me?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Okay, I have a bunch of questions written down,” Amy said. “You can answer them, dismiss them, respond to a question I didn’t ask, anything you want, I’m interested in what you’re like. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Susan, feel free to jump in any time,” Amy said. “You know him better than anyone.”

“Don’t rat me out,” I said, “about the sexual splendor.”

“Our secret,” Susan said.

Amy took a notebook out of her book bag and opened it. She was a professor at Harvard and, faced with that limitation, not bad looking. If she had dressed better, done her hair better, improved on her makeup, and worn more stylish glasses, she might have been good-looking… but then the faculty senate would probably have required her to wear a scarlet A on her dress.

She studied her notebook for a moment. I looked at Susan. She smiled. Zing went the strings of my heart. Then Amy took out a small tape recorder and put it on the table.

“Okay?” she said.

“Sure.”

She turned the recorder on.

“Okay,” Amy said. “Just to warm up a little. Why are you such a wise guy?”

“It’s a gift,” I said.

Susan frowned at me.

“If you’re going to do this,” Susan said, “you have to do it.”

“You didn’t tell me I had to be serious,” I said.

“Well, you do.”

Amy waited. She had a lot of kinetic intensity about her, but she knew how to keep it in check. I nodded.

“I seem to have an unavoidable capacity for seeing a thing and seeing beyond it at the same time.”

“Would you say that you have a heightened sense of irony?” Amy asked.

“I probably wouldn’t say it, but it’s probably true.”

“It is also,” Susan said, “a distancing technique. It keeps people and events from getting too close.”

“Except you,” I said.

She smiled again.

“Except me.”

“Besides Susan, are there things that can get through that ironic barrier?” Amy said.

“I don’t think so.”

“Because?”

“Because if they did,” I said, “I couldn’t do what I do.”

“But if you refuse to care… ” Amy said.

“I don’t refuse to care,” I said. “I refuse to let it control me.”

“How do you do that?”

“It’s a matter of perspective.”

“Meaning?”

“There’s a line from Auden,” I said. “‘The torturer’s horse scratches its innocent behind on a tree.’”

“A poem,” Amy said.

“‘Musée des Beaux Arts.’”

“Life goes on,” she said.

“Something like that,” I said. “Though not for everyone.”

“And you find that consoling?”

“I find it instructive.”

“Perspective,” Amy said.

I nodded.

Amy wasn’t reading her questions now. She seemed interested.

“In such a world,” she said, “do you have any absolutes?”

I nodded at Susan.

“Her,” I said.

“Love,” Amy said.

I shook my head.

“Her,” I said.

Amy frowned. Then she nodded.

“Yes,” she said. “I see.”

One point for Harvard. The waitress came by, and I had another beer and Susan had another white wine. Amy had more iced tea.

“So why do you do it?” she asked.

“What I do?”

“Yes.”

“Because I can.”

“That simple?”

“I’m pretty simple,” I said.

Amy looked at Susan. Susan smiled.

“He is,” Susan said. “And he isn’t. That will show itself if you talk with him enough. But I warn you, he’s almost never one thing.”

Amy nodded and braced herself with another slug of iced tea.

“So you do what you do because you can,” Amy said. “You’re good at it.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Do you like it?”

“Most of the time,” I said. “It allows me to live life on my own terms.”

“Aren’t there other jobs?” Amy said. “Ones that allow you to do that and don’t require you to carry a gun?”

“Not that many,” I said. “And almost none at which I’d be any good.”

“You say you want to live life on your own terms; what are they?”

“The terms?”

“Yes.”

I thought about it. As the afternoon moved along, more people were coming in for a drink. Maybe several. It was a relatively glamorous crowd for Cambridge. Few if any ankle-length skirts or sandals with socks. I looked at Susan.

“What are my terms?” I asked her.

“He’s being cute,” Susan said to Amy. “He understands himself very well, but he wants me to say it.”

“It’s pretty hard for me not to be cute,” I said.

Susan rolled her eyes slightly.

“He can learn, but he can’t be taught,” Susan said. “He can find his way, but he can’t take direction. He will do very difficult and dangerous things, but he cannot be ordered to do them. Voluntarily, he’s generous and compassionate and quite kind. But he cannot be compelled to it.”

“Autonomous,” Amy said.

“To a pathological extreme,” Susan said.

Amy checked her tape recorder. It appeared to be doing what it was supposed to.

“Can you get him to do things he doesn’t want to do?” Amy asked Susan.

“I’m doing this interview,” I said.

Neither of them paid me any attention.

“Up to a point,” Susan said.

“What is the point?” Amy said.

“I can’t change him,” Susan said. “I cannot make him cease to be who he is.”

“Would you want to?”

“I would prefer he didn’t risk his life,” Susan said. “In a sense he’s risking mine as well.”

“Because?” Amy said.

“I cannot imagine a life without him in it.”

“Do you try to change that?”

“No. It’s part of what he is,” Susan said. “He would not be him if he didn’t do what he does. And it’s the him he is that I cannot imagine life without.”

“Wow,” I said.

“The syntax is perhaps a little convoluted,” Susan said. “But so are you, Ducky.”

“You mean I’m not simple?” I said.

“You are and you aren’t,” Susan said.

“Oh,” I said. “Yeah.”

“I want to talk more about your relationship,” Amy said. “Since it’s come up. But I’m not sure I have yet gotten a solid handle on why you do what you do, which would be sort of the heart of my book.”

“There are a lot of problems which need to be solved,” I said, “and their solution takes the kinds of skills I have. But because of my extreme pathology, I can’t solve those problems in a structured context: police work, military, Harvard College. So I do it this way.”

“And,” Susan said, “you do it because it allows you to state who and what you are.”

“So who and what is he?” Amy said.

Susan shook her head.

“It has something to do with honor,” she said.

They both looked at me. I looked at Susan.

“‘I could not love thee, dear, so much,’” I said, “‘Lov’d I not honor more’?”

She smiled again.

“Oh, shut up,” she said.

“Which makes a nice segue,” Amy said, “back to your relationship. Why have you never married?”

Susan and I looked at each other.

“I don’t really like her that much,” I said.

“Yes, you do,” Amy said. “You’ve been together for years. You seem like the kind of people who would marry. Everyone says you are the two most connected people they’ve ever seen. Why not get married?”

I looked at Susan. She smiled and didn’t speak. I was, at least for the moment, on my own.

“What we have,” I said, “is a very… delicate… love affair. We are different at almost every level that doesn’t matter. We are very, ah, committed to our own point of view… and what we have is amazingly good. I guess we don’t want to mess with it.”

“Have you ever lived together?”

“We tried it once,” I said.

“And?”

“And all the differences that don’t really matter, mattered when they were contained in one space.”

“You travel together?”

“Sure,” I said. “And we spend nights together. But we don’t live together.”

Amy frowned.

“Do I hear you saying,” she asked, “that what you have is too precious to risk compromising it by getting married?”

“Yes,” I said.

Amy looked at Susan. Susan smiled and nodded. Amy looked back at me. I smiled.

“Well,” Amy said. “All righty then. Let me ease onto simpler ground here. A little history.”

“Okay,” I said.

“You were born in Laramie, Wyoming.”

“I was.”

“And your mother bore you, as it were, posthumously.”

“Yes,” I said. “She died, but they were able to save me.”

“So you never had a mother.”

“In any but a biological sense, no.”

“And your father brought you up?”

“My father and my two uncles.”

“You father’s brothers?”

“No,” I said. “They were my mother’s brothers.”

“Really?”

“It’s how my father met my mother. He was friends with her brothers.”

“You all lived in the same house?”

“Yes.”

“How was that?”

“Fine,” I said. “It didn’t seem unusual. It was just the way my family was.”

“What did they do?”

“Carpenters, hunting guides, raised a few cattle, broke some horses, used to ride bucking horses in rodeos, used to box for prize money around Wyoming and Montana at carnivals and smokers.”

“They sound like tough guys,” Amy said.

“They were tough guys,” I said.

“Were they tough with you?”

“No.”

“Did any of them marry?”

“They all went out with a lot of women,” I said. “My father never remarried. Both my uncles married, but not while I was living there.”

“So essentially you grew up in an all-male household,” Amy said.

“Yes.”

“What was the effect of that, do you think?”

“I suppose there must have been one,” I said. “But I haven’t got a glib answer for you. They made me feel valuable. They made me feel secure. They used to show up at every PTA meeting, all the time I was in school. All three of them, sitting in a row in the back. I’m told they made the teachers nervous.”

“Anything else about them?”

“They made me feel equal. I was expected to share the work of the household, which included the work of raising me. If I didn’t want to do something, they listened to me, and sometimes I didn’t have to do it and sometimes I did. But they were never dismissive. I was always a participant. And they were never unkind.”

I stopped and thought back about my family. It made me smile.

“Nobody much crossed them, though,” I said.

“Is Susan the fulfillment of a long deprivation?” Amy said.

I drank some beer.

“Absolutely,” I said. “But that would be true if I’d had a mother. The time I spent before I met Susan seems aimless.”

“They teach you to box?” Amy said.

“Yes. My uncle Nick, mostly. I fought some golden gloves and had some pro fights, and was looking like a comer. But I also got a football scholarship to Holy Cross, and so I went there to play football for a couple of years.”

“I don’t know much about football, but what position were you?”

“Strong safety,” I said. “And I ran back punts.”

“Were you good?”

“Yeah, but I didn’t like being coached, and college was boring, so I went back to boxing.”

“Was it boring because it was Catholic?” Amy said.

“No,” I said. “It was boring because it was college.”

“You sound scornful of college,” Amy said.

“I am.”

“But you’ve read a lot of books, I’m told. You quote poetry.”

“Self-educated,” I said.

“Remember what I told you about him,” Susan said.

“Were you a good boxer?”

“Not good enough,” I said. “While I was still fighting, I took the police exam and passed and decided to do that.”

“Were you good at that?”

“No, too many rules.”

“So you quit,” Amy said.

“I did,” I said. “I may be unemployable.”

“And became a private detective.”

I nodded.

“You met Hawk while you were boxing?”

“You know about Hawk,” I said.

“Susan introduced us,” Amy said.

“Whaddya think?” I said.

“He terrified me, and… excited me, I guess.”

“Me too,” I said.

“I don’t believe that for a minute,” Amy said. “Hawk told me you bailed him out of a difficult racial situation.”

“We conspired on that,” I said.

“Do you want to talk about Hawk?” Amy said.

“No. You’ll need to talk with him direct. Hawk is what he is.”

“Including your friend.”

“Yes.”

“Why are you so close?”

“We know the same things,” I said.

“Like fighting?”

“Like… if I were black and Hawk were white, then he’d be me and I’d be him.”

“Race makes the difference?”

“I grew up white in a white culture. Hawk grew up black in a white culture. When you’re marginalized, you become very practical.”

“Marginalized,” Susan said.

I shrugged modestly.

“I’m with Harvard grads,” I said. “I’m showing off a little.”

“Talk a bit more about the effect of marginalization,” Amy said.

“You have less room to maneuver about what’s right or wrong,” I said. “Mostly what’s right is what works. Your view becomes pretty up-close.”

“It makes him immoral?”

“No, Hawk is moral,” I said. “His word is good. He does nothing gratuitously. It’s just that his morality is more results oriented. He does what needs to be done without agonizing over it before or after.”

“You agonize?”

“Too strong,” I said. “I probably think about it more than Hawk. And right may have a more abstract component for me.”

“Is that a good thing?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

Amy sat for a moment, contemplating the slowly turning tape in her recorder.

“Do you trust him?” she said.

“Absolutely.”

Again Amy thought for a while.

Finally she said, “I guess I don’t entirely understand.”

I shrugged.

“Best I can do,” I said.

“Susan?” Amy said.

“He admires people who can do things.” She smiled. “Hawk can do things.”

Amy nodded. It was moving on toward supper time. I looked around at the now crowded and lively courtyard. Even though we were right in the heart of Cambridge, there was a heartening absence of Birkenstocks.

“Okay,” Amy said. “Let’s talk about you and Susan again.”

“What is this?” I said. “Men and Women Who Dare?”

Amy smiled.

“I think maybe I can’t understand you without understanding you in her context,” Amy said.

“Probably,” I said.

“How did you meet?”

“I was working on a case, missing teenage boy, up in Smithfield. She was the school guidance counselor. I questioned her about the boy, and she was immediately taken with me.”

Susan rolled her eyes.

“What’s your version?” Amy asked Susan.

“He was working on a case, missing teenage boy, up in Smithfield,” Susan said. “I was the school guidance counselor. He questioned me about the boy and was immediately taken with me.”

“There seems a disparity here,” Amy said.

“Just say we were taken with each other,” Susan said.

“And you’ve been together ever since?”

“Except for when we weren’t,” I said.

“Can you talk about that?” Amy said.

“Nope.”

Amy looked at Susan. Susan shook her head.

“We aren’t who we were,” Susan said. “We’d be talking about people who no longer exist.”

I could see Amy thinking about how to go further with this. I could see her decide to give it up.

“You were married before,” she said to Susan.

“Yes.”

“And divorced.”

“Yes.”

“How do you feel about that?” Amy asked me.

“I don’t,” I said.

“Don’t feel anything about it?”

“Correct.”

“No jealousy, anything?” Amy said.

I shook my head.

“A famous shrink,” I said, “once remarked, ‘We aren’t who we were.’”

“You can put the past aside that easily?” Amy said.

I think she disapproved.

“Not easily,” I said.

Susan said, “It’s quite effortful.”

“But you do it?”

Susan and I said yes at the same time.

“Earlier,” Amy said to me, “you said something like I don’t refuse to care; I refuse to let it control me. Now you say that with effort you can put the past behind you. You, actually both of you, seem to place a premium on, what, will?”

“Yes,” I said.

“First you need to understand why you do things that aren’t in your best interest,” Susan said. “Then, armed with that understanding, you have to stop doing them.”

“And that would be a matter of will,” Amy said.

“Yes. Given a reasonable level of acumen,” Susan said, “most people can be brought to understand their behavior. The hard thing is getting them to change it.”

“But some people can change?”

“Yes.”

“And you changed?”

“Both of us,” Susan said.

“Obviously,” Amy said. “Susan, you’ve had psychotherapy.”

“Of course,” Susan said.

Amy looked at me.

“Have you ever had psychotherapy?” she asked.

I looked at Susan.

“Every day,” I said.

“Any formal therapy?”

“No.”

“What would be unacceptable behavior?” Amy said. “A, ah, deal-breaker, so to speak.”

“An ongoing intimate relationship with someone else,” I said.

“Susan?” Amy said.

“That,” Susan said.

“What about a brief and casual dalliance?” Amy said.

“What did you have in mind?” I said.

I think she blushed, though it may have been the angle of the late-afternoon sun. She studied her notebook for a moment, made a little mark in it, and put it down. Then she stopped the recorder, took out the tape, put in a new tape, and started it.

“How about hopes and dreams?” Amy said.

“I’m in favor of them,” I said.

Amy shook her head in a faint gesture of annoyance, as if she were shaking off a fly.

“Is there,” she said, “anything you wanted to accomplish that you haven’t?”

“No,” I said. “I am everything I wanted to be. I’ve done everything I ever wanted to do.”

“Nothing else left to do?” Amy said.

“Let no fate misunderstand me and snatch me away too soon,” I said.

“Another poem,” Amy said.

“Frost,” I said. “More or less. I would be pleased to live this life and do what I do and be with her forever. But I have no need to improve on it.”

“My god,” Amy said, “a happy man.”

“Love and work,” I said. “Love and work.”

“Freud,” Amy said. “Right?”

“I believe so,” I said. “Though he didn’t say it to me personally.”

Amy looked at her notebook again and made another small mark. While she was doing that I managed to snag the waitress for another beer. Susan declined a refill, and I don’t think Amy even noticed the opportunity. Probably just so much iced tea you can drink.

Amy looked up from her notebook.

“What would you do if you couldn’t do this?” Amy said, and smiled. “Whatever this might be exactly.”

“I would think about international superstar, or maybe retiring to stud,” I said. “But if those answers didn’t satisfy you, I guess I’d say I could be a carpenter. I like to make things. I know how to do it. I could be pretty much self-directed if I took the right job.”

“And if you took the wrong job?”

“I’d quit.”

“Like you did the police?”

“Yes.”

“Yet you have friends who are policemen.”

“They’re good at their work, and they probably don’t have an extreme pathology,” I said. “They can work in a context where I can’t.”

“A man needs to know his limitations,” Amy said.

“He does.”

The waitress brought me my beer, and I asked her for the check.

“Oh, no,” Amy said. “This is on me.”

“Okay,” I said. “Bring her the check.”

The waitress produced it on the spot and put it facedown on the table.

“I have a sense that the interview is winding down,” Amy said.

“Me too,” I said.

“Just indulge me on one more subject.”

“Sure.”

Amy took out a credit card and put it on top of the check. Then she turned back to me.

“Does anything frighten you?” she asked.

“Of course.”

“What?”

“Same things that frighten most people,” I said. “Death, loss, pain, failure.”

“And how do you overcome those fears?”

“Same way most people do.”

“Willpower?”

“I suppose.”

“But you voluntarily chose to do things that involve the danger of death, pain, failure, and loss,” Amy said.

“True.”

“What’s up with that?”

I smiled.

“I figure those are part of the deal,” I said. “If I’m going to do what I do, I have to get around those fears.”

Amy waited. I didn’t have anything else to say. So I didn’t say anything. After an appropriate wait, Amy looked at Susan.

“One of the things you have to keep in mind is that he doesn’t expect to fail. And that diminishes the other dangers,” Susan said. “He knows intellectually he could be killed. But I think, deep down, he doesn’t think anyone can do it.”

Amy looked at me and raised her eyebrows.

“You’re that confident?” she said.

“So far, so good.”

“So,” Amy said. “Let’s say you are facing a man with a gun. Do you feel fear?”

“Yes.”

“What do you do about it?”

“Ignore it.”

“And you are able to?”

“Yes,” I said. “Otherwise I couldn’t do what I do.”

“How much does confidence enable you to do that?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I know I can shoot. I know I’m quick. And like anybody who used to fight, I’m pretty sure I can win one in the street.”

“And that’s what gives you confidence?”

“Some,” I said.

“I think,” Susan said, “that what gives him the most confidence is that he knows he can overcome his fear.”

“He has confidence in his confidence, sort of,” Amy said.

“He is convinced,” Susan said, “that he can do what he has to do.”

“And you believe that about him too?” Amy said.

Susan looked at me and smiled.

“So far, so good,” Susan said.