Роберт Паркер - All Our Yesterdays

In the late summer the days were beginning to shorten, and Gus and Laura were staying later and later at their Tuesday meetings. The sun was already out of sight behind the huge Rowes Wharf Arch behind them, and the harbor had a slick, glassy look to it in the blue light of early evening. They were in the big glassed-in pagoda at water’s edge that served as a waiting room for the Harbor Ferry service. No one else was in there, and the emptiness seemed to insulate them from the people up at the outdoor café, or the people seated by the window in the hotel dining room.

“Since that first time at the Ritz,” Laura said, “how many meetings have we had to talk about our children?”

“Thirteen,” Gus said.

“And how many of them have we devoted to talking about the children?”

“Total? Half of the first one, I think.”

They were quiet, standing together looking out at the water in the empty vaulting space. The quiet seemed balmy to them.

“And the rest of the time we’ve talked about ourselves,” Laura said.

“Yes.”

“What do you want, Gus?”

“House on the river,” Gus said. “Some dogs.”

“What do you want from me?”

He turned and looked down at her. “I want whatever you will give me.”

She put her hands into the pockets of the light raincoat she was wearing. She turned slowly, pivoting on one spike heel, and slowly surveyed the pagoda.

“This must be the most romantic spot in Boston,” she said.

“Why I brought you,” Gus said.

Laura completed her pivot and stood very close to Gus.

“Good,” she said, and put her arms around him, and turned her face up toward him.

She heard him say, “Jesus,” very softly, and then he put his arms around her and kissed her and she closed her eyes and held his kiss and kissed him back and they stayed that way, swaying only slightly, for a long time.

With her mouth still touching his, Laura said, “Do you remember the first time we had drinks at the Ritz and we joked about eloping and you said you could get a room?”

“Yes.”

“Can you?”

“Would this place do?” Gus said, and nodded at the Boston Harbor Hotel that loomed above them.

“Yes.”

“I already got a room,” he said.

“How did you know?”

“I knew.”

It was a short walk to the hotel and a short elevator ride to the room. On the way Gus felt trembling inside him. He looked at his hand. It was steady. But he felt volitionless, as if he might suddenly sink to the floor. He took the key out and opened the door.

“I need to fluff up a little,” Laura said when they were in the room. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“I got no other plans,” Gus said.

Laura went into the bathroom and closed the door. Gus undressed slowly. He hung his clothes in the closet. He put his gun on the closet shelf, and lay down on the bed with the pillows propped and his hands behind his head. Their room was high up in the hotel, and from the bed all Gus could see through the window was the nearly dark sky. He waited, shivering invisibly.

Laura came out of the bathroom with no clothes on and shut the door behind her. She stood self-consciously at the foot of the bed. Gus smiled at her.

“Oh, boy,” he said.

“It’s kind of an old body,” she said, “to be showing all of it to someone.”

“I like it,” Gus said. It was difficult for him to speak.

Laura came to the bed and got on it with him and turned on her side and put her head on his chest.

“Grace told me when she went to New York with this man they went to a hotel room and did ‘everything.’”

Gus rubbed his hand between her shoulder blades in a small circular motion.

“Um-hm.”

“I didn’t really know what she meant by everything,” Laura said. “I had to ask.” Her mouth was very close to Gus’s face. “Do you know everything?”

“Probably,” Gus said.

“I’ve never done everything,” Laura said. “I’ve never done anything except, once in a great while, lie still in the dark with Tom on top of me until he was through.”

They lay quietly together, their faces close, looking at each other. Gus put his arms around her. They kissed. His hands moved over her body. She arched a little to make herself more available.

“Everything,” she murmured with her mouth against his.

“Sure,” Gus said.

Gus was carrying coffee in a paper cup as he walked across the hot top parking lot along the Charles River on Soldiers Field Road, with a homicide detective named Rafferty. He held it carefully so as not to spill it, and when he got to the body he stopped and took a sip.

“We wanted you to see this one, Captain,” Rafferty said. “MDC guy found her this morning, just like this.”

Rafferty gestured with his chin toward the uniformed MDC policeman standing with two homicide detectives. It was still early, barely eight o’clock, and overcast. Gus sipped more coffee. Behind him the sound of commuter traffic was steady, and out on the river a woman in a racing shell had stopped rowing, and was drifting, with the oars flat on the water, staring at the police activity on the shore. The form on the ground was covered with a pink blanket.

“The blanket there when he found her?” Gus said.

“Yes, sir. We checked her out — make sure it’s not a Malloy or an O’Brien — then put the blanket back like it was.” Gus lifted the blanket from the body. It was a young girl. Her head was on a small pillow. Her face was covered with dried blood. She was wearing a nightgown decorated with Winnie the Pooh characters. The nightgown was up around her waist. Tucked in her left arm was a teddy bear.

“I think she was shot in the back of the head,” Rafferty said. “And the bullet exited through her left cheek. She was probably shot someplace else and brought here. There’s no blood on the pillow or the blanket. But what’s funny is there’s none on the pajamas. Means someone dressed her long enough afterwards so that she’d stopped bleeding.”

Gus stared down at the girl.

“Another thing,” Rafferty said. “There’s, ah, abrasions on her ass, like somebody bit her.”

Gus felt as if everything in him had snapped shut.

“How old you think she is, Captain? Twelve, thirteen?”

Gus nodded. Very slowly took in air until he could breathe in no more. Then he let it out as slowly as he had inhaled.

“Soon as you get the ME’s report, you let me know.”

“Sure thing, Captain.”

Gus didn’t drive back to headquarters. He drove instead to a bank in Milton, just off the expressway, went into the safe deposit room, and got a large manila envelope out of his drawer. He got back in the car and drove back up the expressway to Morrissey Boulevard, past B.C. High School to Day Boulevard and along Day to Carson Beach, where he parked. He sat in the parked car for a time with the envelope unopened in his lap, staring across the empty beach at the lead-toned ocean rolling slowly in. Far out the gray sky merged invisibly with the gray ocean so that there seemed no horizon.

Gus drummed lightly with the fingers of his right hand on the top curve of the steering wheel. The waves on the beach were lethargic. They didn’t crest. There was no white showing; only the slow oily swell and decline as they trudged into shore and slid back out. The sky was low and getting darker. Soon it’s gonna rain, I can feel it. Soon it’s gonna rain, I can tell. Soon it’s gonna rain, and what are we gonna do?

He bent open the little butterfly closer on the envelope and took out a somewhat faded eight-by-ten glossy photograph in glassine envelope. He took the picture from the glassine envelope and stared at it. It was a picture of a young girl with blood on her face and a teddy bear in her arm. She too had been bitten. He put the picture back in its glassine envelope and back in the big manila envelope, and took some documents out. He read the medical examiner’s report, the investigating officer’s report. He read the confession. He put everything back in the manila envelope and reclosed the metal fastener. He put the envelope on the car seat beside him as the first fat raindrop splatted onto the windshield, then another one the size of a quarter, and then nothing, and then more, until it was raining hard. Gus sat drumming lightly on the steering wheel, staring straight ahead, as the rain sprawling across the windshield fused the outside world, and diminished reality to the interior of the car.