Chapter 67

BOO CAME HOME about two-thirty this afternoon,” I said to Susan.

“You have someone watching?” she said.

“Vinnie,” I said. “And Hawk. Vinnie’s there now.”

We were in Susan’s living room, upstairs from her office. Susan usually had a glass of wine after her last patient, and when I could, I liked to join her. In honor of that, Susan had stocked some Sam Adams Winter Ale, which I was especially fond of, and I was having some while she sipped her wine.

“Did Gary wake up yet?” Susan said.

“He’s coming around, Belson says. But he’s still foggy.”

“What are you going to do about Boo?” Susan said.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You don’t want to turn him in,” Susan said.

“He’s not right in the head,” I said.

“And Beth exploited him,” Susan said.

“Yes.”

“You can’t let him go,” Susan said.

“I know.”

“So,” Susan said. “Basically you’re stalling.”

“I am,” I said.

“What do you hope will happen?” Susan said.

“Mostly I’m hoping you’ll stop asking me about it,” I said.

Susan looked at me silently for a moment.

Then she said, “Wow. This is really bothering you.”

“Yes.”

“And you don’t want to talk about it,” she said.

“No,” I said.

Susan stood and went to the kitchen. She got a second bottle of Winter Ale from the refrigerator, popped the cap, brought the bottle back, and set it on the coffee table in front of me. Then she kissed me on the top of the head and went back and sat down on the couch. Pearl, who was sleeping at the other end of the couch with her head hanging over the arm, raised her head up for a minute and looked at Susan, saw that there was no food forthcoming, and put her head back down.

“We won’t talk about Boo,” Susan said.

“Good,” I said.

“But we could talk about Beth and Estelle and Gary,” Susan said. “And their circle.”

“Sure,” I said.

“In one way or another, they all earned what happened to them,” Susan said.

“None of them earned getting murdered,” I said.

“Does anyone?” Susan said.

“Sometimes, maybe,” I said. “I don’t want to generalize.”

“No,” Susan said. “You almost never do. But at the heart of all this is their own behavior.”

“Especially Gary,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Boys just want to have fun,” I said.

“This boy exploited the pathologies of women,” Susan said.

“And it caught up with him,” I said.

“Pathologies are pathologies,” Susan said. “They don’t go away when you’re through using them.”

I nodded.

“Thing is,” I said. “He probably had no intention that any of this would happen.”

“No,” Susan said. “Probably not. He’s just careless. And he went around spreading his careless good times.”

“And making money at it.”

“Yes, that makes it a little worse,” Susan said. “But I suspect that was just a nice side effect.”

“Like a guy likes to go to the track,” I said. “He likes to hang around the paddock when the horses come out. He likes to look at them. Likes to handicap. Likes to watch them run. And if he happens to win some money, even better.”

“But if he doesn’t win, he still goes to the track,” Susan said.

“Yes.”

“Fun-loving Gary,” Susan said.

“And three people are dead,” I said.

Susan smiled sadly.

“And what do you think of your blue-eyed boy now?” she said.


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