Crimson Joy (18 page)

Behind me, from the park, someone with a bullhorn said, "This is the Lynn Police, do you need assistance?"

I raised my hand without looking around and waved them away.

"It was her," Felton said. "She made me like this. I had to be like this."

I shrugged.

"Come on," I said. "We gotta go."

"I can't," Felton said.

"I'll help you," I said.

I stepped toward him and took his arms and pulled him from the rock. His legs gave way and he sagged. I slid my arms under his arms and around his back and held him up. He sagged toward me and buried his face in my chest and began to cry harder. His arms went around me and held me and he was saying something muffled against my chest. I listened harder.

"Papa," he sobbed. "Papa."

I held him there for a long time, feeling pity and revulsion in nearly equal parts, until two Lynn cops climbed out and the three of us brought him in.

Susan was eating sushi in the new Suntory restaurant in Boston. She ate it with chopsticks, managing them as easily as I did the fork I'd had to request.

"Jesus," I said, "that fish isn't even cooked."

"Shall I send it back?" Susan said.

I was having some vegetable tempura, and the house beer.

"Best not to offend the chef," I said. "He's still got to cook my shrimp."

"Okay," Susan said. "Then I'll choke it down."

She took a small sip of saki. Then she gestured with the cup. "Marathon man," she said. And smiled.

"The race goes not always to the swift," I said.

"I've seen you shoot," Susan said. "You could have shot him as he ran."

"Probably," I said. "Pretty sure I could have hit him when he climbed the rocks."

"But you didn't," she said.

I shrugged. Susan smiled a little wider.

"I know why you didn't," she said.

"Yeah?"

I ate some more tempura, unashamedly, with my fork.

"The first time you chased him he outran you and got away," Susan said.

"Well, there was this fence," I said.

"And this time," Susan said, "you were going to chase him and catch him."

"To even it up?" I said. "Come, now. Doesn't that sound pretty childish?"

"Absolutely," Susan said.

"Smart-ass shrink," I said.

Susan ate another morsel of sushi, looking satisfied. "Quirk and Belson back from vacation?" Susan said.

"Yeah."

"Any apologies?" Susan said.

I grinned. "Not hardly," I said. "Everybody is reminding everybody else that they agreed with Quirk right along."

"What about the man they accused?"

"Washburn? They'll try him for the murder of his wife."

"And Gordon Felton?"

"I assume he'll plead insanity, the court will believe him, and he'll go to Bridgewater State Hospital. Where he will not be cured."

"Well, without arguing about legal insanity, Felton probably couldn't not have done what he did," Susan said.

"And yet," I said, "there's lots of people who grow up with the kind of problems Felton had and they don't go out and kill a bunch of women."

"I don't know," Susan said. "I mean, I could say some competent-sounding thing about the infinite number of variables in the human circumstance, so that no two people in fact grow up with the same kinds of problems. But that's really only another way of saying "I don't know."

"

"Can he be cured?"

"Not at Bridgewater," Susan said.

"I know that," I said. "But under the right circumstances is he curable?"

Susan took her last bite of sushi, and a swallow of saki. "Cure is probably the wrong word. He can be helped. He can probably be prevented from getting worse, maybe he can be relieved of the pressures that drive him to act out his pathology, maybe he can be redirected, so to speak, so that he acts out in less destructive ways."

"Is this going to be on the final?" I said.

"I know it sounds so shrinky, but it's the only real answer I have. The other thing that enters into the question of cure is, of course, the severity of what he does. If his pathology manifested itself by, say, stealing pantyhose off the clothesline, maybe you could say, yes, he can be cured. Because if you're wrong, the consequences are trivial. But how can anyone certify that when released he will not murder someone?

No, I certainly could not."

The waitress came and took our plates and brought us some shrimp tempura and steamed rice. She brought me another beer. When she was gone I said to Susan, "I feel kind of bad for Felton."

Susan said, "Yes."

"I feel even worse for the women he murdered."

"Yes," Susan said again. "How about his mother?"

"That's hard," I said.

"But not impossible," Susan said. "Think how desperately she's had to manipulate her life without any power but the uses of love."

"And all for naught," I said. "Her reputation will be smirched anyway."

"Cruel."

Susan said.

"Well, I never had a mother," I said. "Probably makes me insensitive."

"Probably," Susan said, "but you've got strong loins. It makes up for a lot."

I reached over and poured more saki from the warm bottle into the little saki cup.

"You know what I like about this whole business?" I said.

"Not much," Susan said.

"I liked you and me," I said.

Susan nodded.

"I always like you and me," I said, "but this time had such potential for us being a mutual pain in the ass that I especially admire us because we weren't."

"Yes," Susan said, "we were continuously in each other's way trying to do our business."

"And we didn't get mean about it," I said. "We were kind to each other all the time."

"Most of the time," Susan said.

"Close enough," I said.

Susan smiled at me and put her hand on top of mine as it rested on the table.

"It was a charged situation," she said. "You telling me what to do in my profession and me telling you what to do in yours. And both of us a little weird about our autonomy."

"Without endorsing the us," I said, "let me suggest a suitable reward for being so integrated."

"I do not want to go to Fenway Park and watch the Red Sox do anything."

Susan said.

"I had in mind exotic sexual congress," I said.

"With the Red Sox?"

"After last year, I think they're too clumsy," I said. "I was thinking that you deserve me, Foots Spenser."

"Yes," Susan said, "God help me, I'm afraid that's just what I deserve."

"So," I said, "shall we finish dinner, go back to your place, and make love?"

"Certainly," Susan said.

"With or without sweater?" I said.

There was a long, silent moment while Susan looked at me, straight on.

Her great dark eyes wide, her face wearing an odd expression that might have been a smile. Then she did something I've never seen her do.

Something, perhaps, that no one had ever seen her do.

She blushed. . It was hot in the cell. And the jail was loud, full of angry obscene shouts. He had never been in jail before. There was no light in the cell. He could see the bright lights in the hall that made long shadows. The smell was bad too. Urine, shit, steam pipes, body odor, cigarettes, fear. There was no one in the cell with him. This was an angry, frightened male world, dark and fetid and woman less Already they knew. Prisoners yelled at him when he came in. The blacks looked at him every step he took past them. He cried, lying on the bare mattress, his face in his arms. No one cared. No one. He was entirely alone. His aloneness ached in him, deep into his stomach and up his throat and along the backs of his arms. He felt weak and tiny. No one.

Nobody. No one… He remembered lying in his mother's bed… the last thing, the thing he hadn't told the shrink. His mother's body, naked, smelling a little like cooking, touching him. Her hand pressing, touching, the smell of white wine, his mother's sounds, voiceless, wordless sounds as she forced him against her. Into her. He sat up on the bed and took off his shirt. He knotted one sleeve around his neck and stood and walked to the cell door and put one foot on a crossbar and stepped up, holding himself by a forearm looped through the bars. He fumbled the other sleeve up through the bars and tied it to a crosspiece with his free hand, guided by the hand hooked through the bars. He snugged the sleeve tight so there was maybe a foot of play and turned, holding himself with both hands.

"I never told," he said. He heard the voice in the empty cell and heard it echo in the person less dark. "I never told, Momma," he said, and freed his feet from the crosspiece and let go with his hands…