Robert Parker - Family Honor

“Yeah. There’s already been some skirmishing,” Brian said. “The micks and the dagos. OCU says the dagos are from Providence.”

“Except for Cathal Kragan.”

“He’s not from Providence?”

“He lives in Swampscott, and Cathal Kragan is an Irish name.”

“Hire a guy who knows the turf, I guess,” Brian said.

“Whatever,” I said. “There’s a good motive in the connection between Patton, Kragan, and Antonioni.”

“You know they’re connected.”

“I have testimony that Kragan and Antonioni came to Patton’s house together,” I said.

Brian was quiet for a time. We had our feet up on the coffee table. And we both stared into the fire while he was being quiet.

“There’s one crime here,” he said after a while. “The murder of Kevin Humphries. And you can’t tie Kragan to it, or Antonioni.”

“No,” I said. “I can’t. There is the matter of two men coming to my house and trying to kill me.”

“You can’t tie Kragan to that either,” Brian said. “Only thing we had was testimony from Bucko Meehan, and he’s dead.”

“True.”

“So you know a lot, but you can’t prove much.”

“Yet,” I said.

“And the murder of the plumber isn’t even in my district.”

“Also true.”

“We need to think about all of this,” Brian said.

His arm was around me. I had pushed tightly in against him, with my head on his chest.

“What should we do while we’re thinking?” I said.

“Hell, Sunny, I don’t know.”

“Maybe we should have sex again,” I said.

“Why didn’t I think of that,” he said, and put his hand under the tail of the borrowed shirt. Our conversation was somewhat more exclamatory for a while, and then we were quiet and after a while we were still and I had his shirt back on, and the couch was back together, and he was pouring us some more wine. In the fireplace, the fire settled in on itself. I looked around the high-ceilinged nineteenth-century room.

“This is a very comfy house,” I said.

“A remnant of my marriage,” he said to me.

“Are there any others?” I said.

“Like kids? No. She took off with the man of her dreams before we ever got to kids.”

“Does it still bother you?” I said.

He shook his head.

“The other guy thing bothered me for a while, but when I got over that I realized I was lucky to be rid of her.”

“Is she still with the other guy?”

Brian laughed.

“She’s gone through three more men of her dreams,” he said. “Since then. I don’t know how many of them she married.”

“Has there been anyone since?” I said.

“For me?”

“Yes.”

“One every Saturday night,” Brian said. “None serious before now.”

“Now?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know how serious this one ought to be,” I said.

“You’re not available?”

“I’m divorced,” I said. “I’m available for this. But I don’t know if I’m available for more than this.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know if I’m really free of my ex-husband.”

“I could help you get free,” Brian said. “If he’s giving you trouble.”

“No. Richie is very decent about things. I don’t know if I’m emotionally free of him. I don’t even know if I want to be.”

“So why’d you get divorced? His idea?”

“No. I left him.”

“Because?”

“Do you know who my ex-husband is?”

“I know who his father is, and his uncles. That the reason?”

“One of them.”

“He wouldn’t give it up for you?”

“No.”

“I would have.”

“Would you?”

“Absolutely.”

“Would you stop being a cop?”

“Yes.”

“And be what?”

Brian started to speak and stopped and thought about it. As he thought about it he began to nod slowly.

“That’s the question, isn’t it,” he said finally.

“Richie was never able to answer it,” I said. “I’m not sure I gave him enough time.”

“And be what,” Brian said softly. “That your only issue?”

“No. I always felt as if I were being squeezed to death.”

“That’s never fun,” Brian said. “My ploy would be probably not to do that.”

I smiled and put my head on his chest again.

“Yes. That would be the right ploy,” I said.

We were quiet. Brian smelled of soap and cologne, and a hint of new perspiration after a vigorous evening. The fire was quiet in the narrow fireplace. I stared at it. All of a sudden I found myself saying something that I hadn’t known until I said it.

“If I can work it out so that I can be with Richie,” I murmured, “I will.”

I felt Brian stiffen a little. But he didn’t pull away. I felt his hand pat my shoulder lightly.

“We’ll see,” he said as he patted. “We’ll have to see.”

Rosie and I were in one of Rosie’s favorite spots, a bench beside the swan boat lagoon in the Boston Public Garden. It was kind of late in the fall for sitting on a bench outside, but they hadn’t drained the lagoon for winter yet, or put the swan boats away. Rosie could make eye contact with a dozen squirrels, and at least that many ducks, and not have to risk actually attacking them because she was on her leash. I liked to sit there when I felt stifled by things, as I did today. There was something about being outside in the sunlight with the dog that made my head clear. Rosie sat beside me. I had her leash looped over my wrist, but she seemed perfectly content leaning against me and focusing on the wildlife, her head moving fractionally as the squirrels hopped and the ducks glided, through whatever field of vision her black watermelon-seed eyes provided.

Brian was no more. He hadn’t said it, and I hadn’t. But I knew. He might be around for a time, if I changed my mind, but Brian’s interests would be directed elsewhere. Which was healthy of him. I remembered the moment with Richie, too.

It was Julie’s night out every Thursday. Michael took the kids, and Julie and I and sometimes Spike, on the rare occasion when our plans appealed to him, would go to an art exhibit or a book signing or maybe a musical evening at the Longy School in Cambridge, stuff that I found mostly boring, and Spike usually found insufferable, but stuff which reassured Julie that she was still an intellectual who had not been lobotomized by marriage and children. It was Spike’s view that this grim dedication to what he called intellectual boot camp would lobotomize us all, but though less often than I, he went with her because, less intensely than I, he loved Julie. This night, after a particularly grueling poetry reading in the basement of a church in the Back Bay, the three of us went to the Ritz bar and ordered martinis as an antidote to the stale cheese and warm white wine we had desperately ingested at the church. The relief we all felt was nearly tactile, though Julie wouldn’t admit it, and we didn’t press the point because we were kind. But the martinis went down really well, and the sum of it was that I came home to find Richie standing in the driveway with the dog’s leash in his hands. The dog was inside. To this day I don’t remember why he had it.

“Where have you been,” Richie said.

As he spoke, he snapped the dog’s leash tight between his hands and let it loose and snapped it tight.

“Out with my friends,” I said.

“You’re supposed to be home here with me,” he said.

The leash snapped tight and loosened. I doubt that Richie was even aware of what he was doing. He was ferociously contained and when he was very angry it squeezed out around his containment in odd ways.