Widow’s Walk (19 page)

In the late afternoon I joined the south-bound commuter traffic and drove back to Milton. I parked on a shoulder on Route 138 about a half mile from the Trailside Museum, took my raincoat from the backseat and carried it with me as I walked on down to the parking lot. I was wearing a replica Boston Braves baseball cap, New Balance running shoes, jeans, a T-shirt, and a Browning 9mm semiautomatic pistol on my belt, with the T-shirt hanging out to be less conspicuous. I had two extra magazines in my hip pocket. There were only three or four cars in the parking lot when I got there. Graff’s BMW sat alone at the far end. I paid it no attention and started up one of the paths near the museum. It was hot and gray and the air was dense with the unculminated promise of heavy rain.

I went up the narrow trail for maybe 100 yards, turned left out of sight of the parking lot, and worked my way through the humid woods to a point above where Graff’s car was parked. I sat at the base of a large tree, put my back against it, and waited.

The last stragglers from the museum wandered into the parking lot and got in their cars and departed. Finally, Graff’s BMW was the only one left. As it grew dark, it grew no cooler. It seemed impossible that the atmosphere could still contain the rain that thickened it. In the woods there was the rustle and movement and sound that woods always seem to have. A few pretentious raindrops plopped onto the leaves in the treetops above me. There would be more. I stood and put on my raincoat. I took the Browning out of its holster and put it into the side pocket of the raincoat before I zipped the coat up. A few more raindrops pattered. The scatter was decreasing. Then they were steady. Then, as if the energy that held them had released, they cascaded joyously. I sat as stolidly as I could. Hunching my shoulders didn’t help.

It was hard to see my watch in the wet darkness, but I think it was ten minutes to nine when a car, maybe a Buick, with its headlights on, swung into the parking lot and drove in a circle around the lot before it parked near Graff’s BMW. The wipers stopped. The headlights went out.

I waited.

Nothing else happened. The car sat there three spaces away from the BMW. I stood and began to move through the woods, down the slope, fighting the tendency to slide on the wet hillside. I was almost to the edge of the parking lot when the door of the Buick opened and a piggish man got out. He had a trench coat belted tight and a soft wide-brimmed hat pulled down. He closed the car door and thrust his hands in his pockets and walked to Graff’s car. I was in the parking lot now, on the other side of the Buick away from the man and the BMW. I had the Browning out, and held it pointed down by my leg as I walked. I didn’t want the barrel to fill with rainwater. Whatever front had brought the rain with it was colliding with the front that had made it hot. Lightning appeared and thunder followed. The rain was hard and steady. Soon, there’d probably be a plague of locusts.

The man in the trench coat reached the side of Graff’s BMW and without pausing opened the driver’s side door with his left hand, took his right hand out of his pocket, and shot into the car as fast as he could pull the trigger, too fast for a clear count of the shots. Eight or ten was the best I could do. Then silence, the shots mixing with the thunderstorm and fading into the rain. I thought about DeRosa and his girlfriend, shot to pieces, but by someone who must have liked the work. With the car door open the interior light had come on. The man leaned in and looked at what was left of what he’d shot.

From the other side of the Buick, I said, “Nice shooting.”

The man reared up out of the driver’s side. As he did he took a second gun out of his left-hand pocket. It was bigger than the one in his right. The man was Shawcross.

“You just murdered a twenty-eight-dollar Inflate-a-mate,” I said.

He raised the gun in his right hand. I ducked behind the Buick. He fired and missed. Lightning jagged brilliantly above us and the thunder followed hard upon. Shawcross fired again and moved toward the back o the Buick. As he did, I moved toward the front. We were like the two legs of a carpenter’s compass. I stayed now, near the front, listening hard. I was aware of his movement at the other end of the car, but I couldn’t exactly see him. I could feel the charge in my nerve endings. My breathing was quick and shallow. I thought about how long we could circle the car like this in the thunderous downpour. I thought about dropping to the ground and shooting under the car at his feet. But it was a hell of a shot in the darkness, and if I missed it left me vulnerable to return fire, being flat down on the ground.

Straining hard I thought I could hear his feet shift on the gravel. He had a lot of shots left: five or six more in the nine, a full magazine in the other gun-which might have been a.45. I crouched at my end of the Buick, keeping myself behind the right front wheel in case he tried a shoot-the-foot trick. I was thinking so hard about Shawcross that I didn’t know anymore that it was raining. The thunder and lightning disappeared, too, and all there was was the vibrating connective between us, at either end of the car. I could hear his breath, quick and shallow, too. He jumped suddenly to one side and fired three more rounds from the nine. He was firing into the dark where he hoped I might be. Which was silly. Again nothing moved. Shawcross on his side, me on mine, just another kind of outdoor game. I thought about DeRosa again. With the storm blocked out and Shawcross crouching motionless at his end of the car, I felt as if I were encased in a crystal silence. I thought about Amy Peters. Enough!

I stepped back a little from the front of the car, got a running start, jumped up on the hood of the Buick. Two steps to the roof. On the roof. Shot straight down at Shawcross. Four shots. Point-blank. He was probably dead before the second round went in. I stood on the roof of the car looking down at him and felt the rain again. And saw the lightning. And heard the thunder.

“You son of a bitch,” I said.

“You know,” I said after a particularly successful encounter, “you never say thank you.”

“For showing me a good time?”

“Well, yes.”

“Gee,” Susan said with her head against my shoulder. “I was sort of proud of my own contribution.”

“Which was not inconsiderable,” I said.

“And which may never be made again if this conversation continues.”

We were quiet. Pearl was old enough and deaf enough so that she could be asked to lie on the floor during these encounters and would do so without curiosity. Now, however, when we were in, as it were, phase two, she had gotten herself up slowly and was standing by the bed with her nose two inches from my ear, waiting to be boosted up. I rolled off the bed and boosted her up. She turned several times around and settled arthritically in between us with a big sigh.

“This makes postcoital snuggling something of a problem,” I said.

“Thank God,” Susan said. But she slid her hand under Pearl’s neck and rested it on top of mine.

“So, how ‘bout them Sox,” I said.

“Would you like to debrief,” Susan said, “about the Smith business.”

“Larson Graff was so grateful that I took Shawcross out for him that he told me more than I ever wanted to know.”

“He did put Smith and his wife together?”

“Yes. He knew Mary from high school. He knew Smith from the closet. He knew Smith needed a beard, and he knew Mary was stupid and avaricious. So was her boyfriend, so the three of them figured out that she could be Smith’s beard, continue to see Levesque, and among them skim some of Smith’s money. Unfortunately they came head-to-head, unfortunate phrase, with some people more avaricious, less stupid, and much more brutal, who were after the same thing.”

“Shawcross and company.”

“Yep. Shawcross was looking for a banker to squeeze and Larson Graff knew it and supplied Smith.”

“Closet boy.”

“Yeah.”

“How did Shawcross know Graff?”

“Graff did some legitimate publicity party work for Shawcross after Shawcross came to town and was establishing his legitimacy.”

“Did Shawcross kill Nathan Smith?”

“Did or had it done.”

“And the others?”

“Same answer. He apparently killed DeRosa and his girlfriend personally. The guns he had with him when I shot him are the same guns that killed them.”

Lying on her back Susan put one leg up in the air and straightened it like a ballet dancer and looked at it. I looked at it, too.

“According to Rita’s financial guy a scheme like the one that Shawcross was running on Pequod Bank was good for maybe a hundred million dollars.”

Susan was still looking at her leg.

“Would you pay that much to see me naked?” Susan said.

“I don’t have to,” I said. “But it is money that a lot of people would kill for and Shawcross was one of them. Conroy, too, I guess, though I don’t think he actually pulled a trigger.”

“Maybe I should charge,” Susan said.

“Per view?” I said.

“Un-huh.”

“Can I run a tab?” I said.

She put her leg down and turned her head and smiled at me.

“Yes, you can,” she said.

Susan drew a small circle with her fingertips on the back of my hand.

“So what will happen to them?” she said.

“Mary Smith and Levesque have probably done more crime than we know. But, based on what we know, I doubt that either of them will do any time. Conroy’s going to jail.”

“That’s sort of too bad.”

“That’s just sentimental,” I said. “He was part of a scheme that got half a dozen people killed.”

“Yes, but Ann Kiley loved him and he loved her enough to get himself caught.”

“Ann who?”

“Kiley,” Susan said and paused. “Oh,” she said. “You’re going to keep her out of it.”

“Yes.”

“Because she loved not wisely but too well?”

“Yeah. That’s one thing.”

“What else?” Susan said.

“Her father loves her,” I said.

Susan looked at me for a while. I looked back. It was like looking into my own soul.

“Now who’s sentimental,” she said.

I nodded.

“Do you think we could get Pearl to move?” I said.

“Sure,” Susan said. “I’ll bribe her with a cookie.”

“Okay.”

Susan got up, elegantly stark naked, and went to the kitchen and returned with a dog biscuit, which she waved under Pearl’s nose. Pearl perked, and tracked the cookie to the foot of the bed, where Susan helped her down. She settled onto the floor with her cookie and Susan jumped back onto the bed.

“Now what?”

“I owe you about a thousand dollars’ worth of nude looks,” I said.

“Maybe we can work out a payment schedule.”

“I could maybe bop your rear molars out,” I said.

Susan smiled at me. “Well,” she said, “since you put it so nicely.”

Surprisingly, her molars remained stable… though I think they might have loosened a little.