Paper Doll (10 page)

“Burgin,” Grimes said. He continued to hold his head in his hands and stare at the floor between his feet.

Quirk looked at me. “Got any questions?” I shook my head. “Okay,” Quirk said.

We went to the door. Quirk paused and turned back to O’Dell and Grimes. A bruise was beginning to form on Grimes’s forearm where Quirk had hacked the gun free.

“Have a nice day,” Quirk said.

And we turned and left the room. Nobody said good-bye.

It was Sunday morning. We lay under one of Susan’s linen sheets with Susan’s head on my chest in the dead quiet house, listening to the sound of our breathing. I had my arm around her, and under the sheet she was resting the flat of her open hand lightly on my stomach.

“Hard abs,” Susan said, “for a man of your years.

“Only one of many virtues,” I said.

There was a big old windup Seth Thomas clock on Susan’s bureau. It ticked solidly in the quiet.

“One of us has to get up and let the baby in,” Susan said.

“Yes.”

The sun was shining off and on through the treetops outside Susan’s bedroom window and the shadows it cast made small patterns on the far wall. They were inconstant patterns, disappearing when a cloud passed and reappearing with the sun.

“Hawk came by and took me to dinner while you were gone,” Susan said.

“Un huh.”

“Fact, he came by several times,” Susan said.

“He likes you,” I said.

“And I swear I saw him outside my office a couple of times when I would walk a patient to the door.”

“Okay, Quirk asked him to keep an eye on you when I got busted in South Carolina. He knew something was up and he didn’t know what. Still doesn’t.”

“And Martin thought I’d be in danger?”

“He didn’t know. He was being careful.”

“So Hawk was there every day?”

“Or somebody, during the night too.”

“Somebody?”

“Maybe Vinnie Morris, maybe Henry, maybe somebody I don’t know.”

“Maybe someone should have told me.”

“Someone should have, but I’m the only one who knows how tough you are. They didn’t want to scare you.”

“And you think it’s all right now?”

“Yeah. With Quirk involved, and the Federal Attorneys in Boston and Columbia. The cat’s out of the bag, whatever cat it is. No point in trying to chase me away.”

“So I don’t need a guard?”

“No.”

“Wasn’t Vinnie Morris with Joe Broz?” Susan said.

“Yeah, but he quit him a while back, after Pearl and I were in the woods.”

Susan nodded. We were quiet for another while. Susan moved the flat of her hand in small circles on my stomach.

“One of us has to get up and let the baby in,” Susan said.

“Yes.”

The mutable patterns on the far wall disappeared again, and I could hear a rhythmic spatter of rain against the window glass.

Susan said, “I’d do it, but I’m stark naked.”

“I am too,” I said.

“No, you’re just naked,” Susan said. “Men are used to walking around naked.”

“Do you think stark naked is nakeder than naked?” I said.

“Absolutely,” Susan said.

She tossed the sheet off of her. “See?” she said.

I gazed at her stark nakedness for a while. “Of course,” I said and got up and opened the bedroom door.

Pearl rose in one movement from the rug outside the door and was on the bed in my place, with her head on my pillow, by the time I had closed the door and gotten back to the bed. I nudged her over a little with my hip and got in and wrestled my share of the sheet over me, and the three of us lay there with Pearl between us, on her stomach, her head on the pillow, her tail thumping, attempting to look at both of us simultaneously.

“Postcoital languor,” I said.

“First,” Susan said, “you tell me about South Carolina, and then we’ll go out and have a nice brunch.”

So I told her.

“And the woman in Nairobi really is Olivia Nelson?” Susan said.

“Yeah, guy from the American Embassy went over and talked with her. She’s the real thing. Fingerprints all the way back to her time in the Peace Corps, passport, marriage certificate, all of that.”

“Does she have any idea who the woman was that was killed?”

“Says no.”

Pearl squirmed around between us until she got herself head down under the covers, and curled into an irregular ball, taking up much more than a third of the bed.

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

She had her hand stretched out above the bulge Pearl made in the sheet, and she was holding my hand, similarly stretched. The rain spattered sporadically on the windowpane, but didn’t settle into a nice, steady rhythm.

“Talk to Farrell, report to Tripp, see what Quirk finds out.”

“He’s still in South Carolina?”

“Yeah, and Belson’s going to go down. They’ll talk with Jumper Jack, and with Jefferson, and they’ll try to get a handle on Cheryl Anne Rankin.”

“I’m glad you came back.”

“Quirk and Belson will get further, they’re official,” I said.

“There was a time,” Susan said, “when you’d have felt obliged to stay there and have a staredown with the Sheriff’s Department.”

“I’m too mature for that,” I said.

“It’s nice to see,” Susan said.

“But I will go back if I need to.”

“Of course,” Susan said. “Too much growth too soon would not be healthy.”

“It’s not just to prove I’m tough. The case may require it. I can’t do what I do if I can be chased out of a place by someone.”

Susan said, “A man who knows about such things once told me, in effect, `Anyone can be chased out of anyplace.”‘

“Was this guy also a miracle worker in the sack?” I said.

“No,” she said.

“What do you know about Stratton?” I said. “Anything I don’t?”

Farrell looked tired. He shook his head. “Just what I read in the papers, and if you’ve ever been involved in something the papers wrote up, you know better than to trust them.”

I nodded and dragged my phone closer and called Wayne Cosgrove at the Globe. He was in the office more now since they’d made him some sort of editor and he had a political column, with his picture at the top, that ran three days a week. When he answered, I punched up the speakerphone.

“You’re on speakerphone, Wayne, and there’s a cop with me named Lee Farrell but all of this is unofficial and won’t go any further.”

“You speaking for Farrell too?” Cosgrove said.

He had a Southern accent you could cut with a cotton hoe, although he’d left Mississippi at least thirty years ago, to come to Harvard on scholarship. I always assumed he kept the accent on purpose.

I looked at Farrell. He nodded. His eyes were red and seemed heavy, and his movements were slow.

“Yeah,” I said. “Farrell too.”

“Okay, pal, what do you need?”

“Talk to me about Senator Bob Stratton,” I said.

“Ahh, yes,” Cosgrove said. “Bobby Stratton. First off he’s a pretty good Senator. Good staff, good preparation, comes down pretty much on the right side of most issues-which is to say I agree with his politics. Got a lot of clout, especially inside the Beltway.”

“How about second off?” I said.

“Aside from being a pretty good Senator, he’s a fucking creep.”

“I hate it when the press is evasive,” I said.

“Yeah. He drinks too much. He’d fuck a snake if you’d hold it for him. I don’t think he steals, and I’m not even sure he’s mean. But he’s got too much. power, and he has no sense of, ah, of limitation. He can do whatever he wants because he wants to and it’s okay to do because he does it. He’s the kind of guy who gooses waitresses. You understand?”

“Money?” I said.

“Yeah, sure. They all got money. How they get elected.”

“Married?”

“To the girl on the wedding cake, two perfect children, a cocker spaniel, you know?”

“And a womanizer.”

“You bet,” Cosgrove said. “Far as I know, it’s trophy hunting. I don’t think he actually likes women at all.”

“You know of any connection between him and Olivia Nelson, the woman who got killed couple of months back in Louisburg Square?”

“Loudon Tripp’s wife,” Cosgrove said.

“Un huh.”

“I don’t know any connection with her, but she’s female-and Bobby is Bobby. Her husband probably knows Stratton.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s got money and contributes it to politicians.”

“Democratic politicians?” I said.

“Politics makes strange bedfellows,” Cosgrove said.

“I’d heard that,” I said.

“Trust me, I’m a columnist,” he said. “Why are you interested in Stratton?”

“Some people working for him tried to chase me off the Olivia Nelson case.”

“Probably fucking her, and afraid it’ll get out.”

“Doesn’t sound like the Olivia Nelson I’ve been sold, but say it was, and he was,” I said. “Is it that big a secret?”

“He’s probably going to be in the presidential primaries,” Cosgrove said. “Remember Gary Hart?”

“Ah ha,” I said.

“Ah ha?”

“You can say strange bedfellows, I can say ah ha.”

“I thought the cops washed that case off,” Cosgrove said. “Deranged slayer, random victim.”

“You been punching the file up,” I said, “while you’re talking to me.”

“Sure,” Cosgrove said. “I haven’t always been a fucking columnist. How come you’re investigating?”

“Her husband wouldn’t accept it. He hired me.”

“You got a theory?”

“No.”

“You make any progress?”

“No.”

“Off the record?”

“No.”

“So I tell you everything I know and you tell me shit,” Cosgrove said.

“Yes.”

We hung up.

Farrell and I looked at each other.

“You suppose she was sleeping with Stratton?” Farrell said.

I shrugged.

“I don’t even know who she is,” I said.

Farrell was silent. He nipped a little of the scotch. It was good scotch, Glenfiddich, single malt. We were drinking it in small measures from a couple of water glasses, which was all I had in the office. I was not fond of straight booze, but Glenfiddich was very tolerable.

“How is it at home?” I said.

“Home?”

“Quirk told me your lover is dying.”

Farrell nodded.

“How soon?” I said.

“Sooner the better,” Farrell said. “Final stages. Weighs about eighty pounds.”

“He at home?”

Farrell shook his head. “Hospice,” he said.

His words were effortful. As if there weren’t many left.

“How are you?” I said.

“I feel like shit,” Farrell said.

I nodded. We both drank some scotch.

“You drinking much?” I said.

“Some.”

“Any help?”

“Not much.”

“Hard,” I said.

Farrell looked up at me and his voice was flat.

“You got no fucking idea,” he said.

“Probably not,” I said.

“You got a girlfriend,” he said. “Right?”

“Susan,” I said.

“If she were dying people would feel bad for you.”

“More than they would, probably, if she were a guy.”

“You got that right,” Farrell said.

“I know,” I said. “Makes it harder. What’s his name?”

“Brian. Why?”

“He ought to have a name,” I said.

Farrell finished his scotch and leaned forward and took the bottle off the desk and poured another splash into the water glass.

“You can tell almost right away if people have a problem with it or not,” he said. “You don’t. You don’t really care if I’m straight or gay, do you?”

“Got nothing to do with me,” I said.

“Got nothing to do with lots of people, but they seem to think it does,” Farrell said.

“Probably makes them feel important,” I said. “You been tested?”

“Yeah. So far, I’m all right-we were pretty careful.”

“Feel like a betrayal?” I said. “That you’re not dying too?”

Farrell stared at the whiskey in the bottom of the glass. He swished it around a little, then took it all in a swallow.

“Yes,” he said.

He poured some more scotch. I held out my glass and he poured a little in mine too. We sat quietly in the darkening room and sipped the whiskey.

“Can you work?” I said.

“Not much,” he said.

“I don’t blame you.”

Now Henry had a Marketing Director, and a Fitness Director, and a Membership Coordinator, and an Accountant, and a Personal Manager, and the club looked sort of like Zsa Zsa Gabor’s hair salon; but Henry still looked like a clenched fist, and he still kept the boxing room where only he and I and Hawk ever worked out.

“Every move a picture,” I said.

Hawk did some variations, changed speeds a couple of times.

“Never seen an Irish guy could do this,” he said.

“Racism,” I said. “We never got the chance to dance for pennies.”

Hawk grinned. He was working out in boxing shorts and high shoes. He was shirtless and his upper body and shaved head gleamed with sweat like polished onyx.

“Susan need watching anymore?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Who’d you use?”

“Me, mostly. Henry sat in once in a while, and Belson did one shift.”

“Belson?”

Hawk nodded. From the rhythm of the rope, I knew that “Sweet Georgia Brown” was playing in the back of Hawk’s head.

“She caught on,” I said.

“Never thought she wasn’t smart,” Hawk said. “But I wasn’t trying hard as I could.”

“Know anything about the case?” I said.

“Nope, Quirk just called and said Susan needed minding.”

I nodded and went to work on the heavy bag, circled it, keeping my head bobbing, punching in flurries-different combinations. It wasn’t like the real thing. But it helped to groove the movements so that when you did the real thing, muscle memory took over. Hawk played various shuffle rhythms on the speed bag, and occasionally we would switch. Neither of us spoke, but when we switched, we did it in sync so that the patter of the speed bag never paused and the body bag combinations kept their pattern. We kept it up as long as we could and then sat in the steam room and took a shower and went to Henry’s office where there was beer in a refrigerator.

Henry was stocking Catamount Gold these days and I had a cap off a bottle, and my feet up. Hawk sat beside me, and I talked a little about the Olivia Nelson case. Through Henry’s window, the surface of the harbor was slick, and the waves had a dark, glossy look to them. The ferry plowed through the waves from Rowe’s Wharf, heading for Logan Airport.

“You know anything about Robert Stratton, the Senator?” I said.

“Nope.”

Hawk was wearing jeans and cowboy boots and a white silk shirt. He had the big.44 magnum that he used tucked under his left arm in what appeared to be a snakeskin shoulder holster.

“Know anything about a woman named Olivia Nelson?” I said.

“Nope.”

“Me either,” I said.

“I was you,” Hawk said, “and I had to go back down there to South Carolina, I’d talk to some of our black brothers and sisters. They work in the houses of a lotta white folks, see things, hear things, ‘cause the white folks think they don’t count.”

“If they’ll talk to me,” I said.

“Just tell them you a white liberal from Boston. They be grateful for the chance,” Hawk said.

“And, also, I’m a great Michael Jackson fan,” I said.

Hawk looked at me for a long time. He said, “Best keep that to yourself.”

Then we both sat quietly, and drank beer, and looked at the evening settle in over the water.