Five Classic Spenser Mysteries (29 page)

“Good-bye,” I said and turned and walked away.

“Spenser,” Russell said.

I turned. He had a gun, a short automatic.

Grace said, “Rusty, you put that down.”

I still held my own gun. We stood ten feet apart.

“What would she say if you killed me?” Russell said.

Grace said, “Rusty.”

“I won’t kill you,” I said.

“She make you promise?” Russell said.

“I promised,” I said.

“Stop it,” Grace said. “You stop it right now. Rusty?”

“I didn’t,” he said.

I put the .357 back under my arm. “She needs both of us alive, so she can make the choice,” I said. “Unless she can choose she’s lost.”

Grace clapped her hands sharply, the way you do at a puppy. “Russell Costigan,” she said.

Russell held the gun in front of him at arm’s length and aimed over the barrel at me. Grace stood about five feet away, rocking slightly with her hands clutched over the back of her head. Russell moved the gun back and forth in a small arc.

“She chose already,” he said, moving his head very slightly to continue to sight over the moving gun barrel. “She told me in Mill River that she was going back to you.”

The gun was a Beretta, nine millimeter.

“She said she loved me, but she loved you more,” Russell said. The tinniness was gone from his voice. “She said the shrink had helped her, and that you had changed some.”

Peripherally I could see Grace stop rocking and stand motionless with her hands still on her head.

“I couldn’t let her leave,” he said.

I nodded.

“I got some of my old man’s people and had them watch her,” he said.

“Your father was opposed,” Grace said. She dropped her hands. “He wanted to let you work
this out yourself. But I said, ‘Jerry, he’s our son. If you love me you’ll do it.’ ”

The gun moved still in its small arc.

“They didn’t really prevent her,” he said. “But she was so fucked up …”

“Rusty.”

“… that she couldn’t oppose me alone. So she called the black guy. And we had a tap on the phone.” Russell shrugged. “And it got out of hand.”

“Hawk’s sort of quick,” I said.

Russell nodded.

“I wanted to get her away from you, and I wanted to get her away from the shrink.”

“She needs the shrink,” I said.

Russell nodded again. “I know,” he said. “She needs you too.”

The gun stopped moving and held motionless on me. “I love her,” he said. “As much as you do.”

“Yes,” I said.

“And she’s destroyed you,” Grace said. “She took you for all she could get and then wants to go back to this man who killed my Jerry.”

“If I kill you she’ll never forgive me,” he said.

“This man killed my Jerry,” Grace said. “You don’t have to be forgiven.”

“But I’ve lost her anyway,” Russell said, looking at me over the gun.

“There are plenty of girls, Rusty,” Grace said. “A boy with your looks and money. Come on.”

He turned his head toward his mother slowly, and the gun followed, arm still outstretched, until it pointed at her. Grace opened her mouth and no sound came out. No one moved for maybe ten seconds. Then Russell dropped his arm to his side and walked away into the dark with the gun hanging at his side. Grace and I watched him silently for a moment and then Grace rushed after him.

“Rusty,” she shrieked. “Wait for your mother.”

I walked back to town and got to the hotel at sunrise.

It was Sunday afternoon and snowing gently in Boston. there was an applewood fire going in the fireplace, and bread baking in the oven, and my apartment smelled like Plimoth Plantation. On television the Redskins were pasting the Giants. I stood at the front window and looked down at Marlborough Street as the snow began to accumulate. A brown and white taxicab pulled in off Arlington Street and parked and Susan got out and paid the driver and walked toward the front door carrying a lavender garment bag and a dark blue suitcase. I buzzed her in and in a minute she was at my door. I opened it and took her suitcase and put it on the floor behind the couch. She put the garment bag carefully over the back of the couch and turned and smiled at me.

“This is the way my grandmother’s house was supposed to smell,” she said.

“But it didn’t,” I said.

“No,” she said. “It smelled mostly of mothballs.”

“So I don’t remind you of your grandmother,” I said.

Susan came and put her arms around me and put her head against my chest.

“You don’t remind me of anyone,” she said. “I’ve never met anyone even a little like you.”

I held her lightly against me. “How’s your mental health?” I said.

“I’m all right,” she said. “Nobody’s a hundred percent. But I’m in the high nineties.”

“You through seeing Dr. Hilliard?”

“Yes, at least for now. Maybe forever.”

“And we don’t have to get the children off the streets?” I said.

She shook her head against my chest. “I may get occasionally restless,” she said, “during the time of full moon, but I don’t think I’m a danger to anyone.”

“Russell?” I said.

“I saw him once, right after Boise. He came to my condo in Mill River and we said good-bye. And he left, and I haven’t seen him or heard from him.”

“He going to run the family business?” I said.

“I hope not,” Susan said.

“Maybe he’ll go back to his wife,” I said. “He has before.”

“I hope he does. I hope he doesn’t destroy himself. His life has been …” She shook her head again. “I don’t want to talk about that relationship anymore.”

“Okay,” I said. “How about this one? How are we doing?”

“We are doing very well,” she said. She raised her face and I kissed her. When we stopped kissing she said, with her face still very close to mine, “Are you okay? Is anyone going to arrest you?”

“Not for Mill River,” I said. Our lips brushed lightly as we spoke. “Ives actually fixed it.”

Behind me on the television Dick Stockton described John Riggins running twenty yards for a score.

Susan kissed me again. It was not a sisterly kiss.

“I have flown six hours,” she murmured with her mouth against mine. “I need to take a bath, fluff up my body a little.”

“Un huh.”

“And then maybe we might make love,” she murmured.

“Un huh”

“And drink champagne.”

“Un huh.”

“And make love again.”

“I take it we are together again,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Forever?” I said.

“Yes,” Susan said. “Forever.”

“Go run your bath,” I said.

It was evening and the snow had stopped. The bread was cooling on a rack in the kitchen and my fire continued to warm the apartment. Susan and I lay naked in bed together drinking Domaine Chandon Blanc de Noirs from narrow fluted glasses and holding hands.

“How did you know I’d have champagne handy?” I said.

“You would be prepared,” she said.

The bedroom door was open to the living room. I held the champagne glass away from me and looked at the pink amber tone of it in the diffuse light of the fire.

“Hawk sent us a case of this stuff,” I said. “It’s good, isn’t it.”

“Lovely,” Susan said. “You have some new scars.”

“I’ll say.”

“New physical scars,” Susan said. “Here.” She traced the healed bullet wounds in my chest.

“A young woman shot me,” I said, “last year.”

“And you never told me?”

“No need,” I said.

“Was it bad?”

“Yes,” I said. “Almost killed me.”

Susan put her head against my shoulder. Her glass was empty. I reached the champagne bottle from the floor beside the bed and poured more. It had to be done carefully and a little at a time to keep it from bubbling over. Susan watched.

“It’s like us,” she said.

“The champagne?”

“You have to pour it so carefully. It’s like our lovemaking. Careful, gentle, delicate, being careful not to spill over.”

I nodded. “It’s sort of like the first time.”

“It is the first time,” Susan said. “These two people, the people we are now, have never made love before.”

“But will again,” I said.

Susan smiled. “Practice makes perfect,” she said. We drank.

“Or nearly perfect,” I said.

“Hell,” Susan said, “we’re that now.”

The urban renewers had struck again. They’d evicted me, a fortune-teller, and a bookie from the corner of Mass. Ave. and Boylston, moved in with sandblasters and bleached oak and plant hangers, and last I looked appeared to be turning the place into a Marin County whorehouse. I moved down Boylston Street to the corner of Berkeley, second floor. I was half a block from Brooks Brothers and right over a bank. I felt at home. In the bank they did the same kind of stuff the fortune-teller and the bookie had done. But they dressed better.

I was standing in the window of my office looking out at a soft rainy January day with the temperature in the high fifties and no sign of snow. To the right across Boylston I could see Bonwit Teller. To the left Police Headquarters. In Bonwit’s windows there were mannequins wearing tight leather clothes and chains. Police headquarters leaned more to Dacron. In the window bay of the advertising agency across the street a young black-haired woman in high-waisted gray trousers leaned over a drawing board. Her back was toward the window.