Robert Parker - The Professional

“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.

I SPENT THE NIGHTwith Susan, which improved my frame of mind, as it always did. She had early clients, so I was in my office at eight thirty-five the next morning. Neither Hawk nor Vinnie had seen any sign of Boo since he’d arrived home yesterday.

I was pouring my second cup of coffee when Quirk came into my office and shut the door behind him.

“Coffee?” I said.

“Yeah,” Quirk said.

He took off his overcoat and folded it carefully over the arm of Pearl’s sofa, then came and sat in a chair opposite my desk. I gave him a cup of coffee and went around my desk and sat down.

“Gary Eisenhower’s awake,” Quirk said.

“Uh-huh.”

“He don’t remember a thing,” Quirk said.

“Who hit him?” I said. “Nothing?”

“He remembers the front doorbell,” Quirk said, “and opening the door.”

“That’s it?”

“So far,” Quirk said. “Doctors tell me it may come, may not. I guess he took a couple good shots to the head and probably hit the back of his head when he fell.”

“Repeated blunt-force trauma,” I said.

“You been watching those doctor shows,” Quirk said.

“How else I gonna learn?” I said.

“Best any of us can figure,” Quirk said. “It was a fist.”

“Big fist,” I said.

“And somebody who knew how to punch,” Quirk said.

“How about Beth?” I said, just to be saying something.

“Same with the broad,” Quirk said. “Apparently, she was punched to death.”

“So you’re looking for a guy knows how to punch,” I said.

“You know how to punch,” Quirk said.

“I do,” I said. “On the other hand, so do you.”

Quirk smiled slightly.

“And it wasn’t either of us,” Quirk said.

“No,” I said.

“I figure,” Quirk said, “guy didn’t set out to kill anyone. Even guys who can fight don’t normally set out to kill somebody with their hands.”

“You figure he’d have brought a weapon,” I said.

“I do.”

I nodded.

“Confident guy,” Quirk said. “Kicks in the door on some broad’s apartment where she lives with her boyfriend, and apparently doesn’t even bring a weapon.”

“Or too mad to think,” I said.

“What would he be so mad about?”

“What are they usually so mad about?” I said.

“Crime of passion?” Quirk said.

“Lot of that going around,” I said.

Quirk nodded. He finished his coffee and got up and poured himself some more. He added sugar and condensed milk and took it back to his chair.

“Frank thinks you’re not giving us everything,” Quirk said.

“How unkind of Frank,” I said.

“Yeah, sure,” Quirk said. “You giving us everything?”

I drank some coffee and leaned back a little in my chair.

“You and me?” I said.

“You see anybody else here?” Quirk said.

“No,” I said. “I’m not giving you everything.”

“You know who killed her, don’t you,” Quirk said.

“Yes,” I said.

“And you’re holding that back why?” Quirk said.

“I’m not quite sure. But I won’t tell you yet.”

“I’m not sure the law lets you decide that,” Quirk said.

“Sure,” I said. “I know. You can bust me for interfering with an investigation, or some such, and take me downtown, and Rita Fiore will be along in an hour or so to get me out.”

“You might be a little worse for wear,” Quirk said.

“I might,” I said.

“But we wouldn’t have learned anything,” Quirk said.

“True.”

“When you gonna tell me?” Quirk said.

“Soon,” I said.

Quirk nodded slowly.

“I known you a long time,” Quirk said. “You are what you are.”

I shrugged.

“Killer gets away,” Quirk said, “because you stalled me, I’ll come down on you as hard as I can.”

“Which is quite hard,” I said.

Quirk nodded.

“It is,” he said, and stood and left my office.

I swiveled my chair around and looked out my window. It was bright and cold. Baseball was little more than a month away. The windows in the high-rises across the street were blank today, reflecting the morning light so that I couldn’t see through any of them.

It seemed simple enough. Boo had killed three people. I knew it. I tell Quirk. Quirk busts him. Case closed.

So why not?

I don’t know.

I sat and looked up at the blue sky and across at the blank windows for a long time. A woman I’d once cared about had worked in anadvertising agency over there. Sometimes, when the sun came at them from a different angle, I could see through the windows across the street and watch her moving about her office. Agency was gone now. Maybe the whole building was gone, replaced by a new one. It was hard to remember.

I WAS STILL LOOKINGat the blank windows and the hard, blue sky an hour later when the door opened behind me. I turned my chair. It was Zel. He closed the door behind him and came to my desk and stood. He didn’t take his coat off.

“I’m leaving town,” he said.