“Like us.”
“And they work at it,” Susan said.
“Like us,” I said.
“Sometimes it’s been hard work,” she said.
“And sometimes no work at all,” I said.
She nodded and sipped her champagne and looked at me over the rim of the glass. To be looked at by Susan, naked, with those eyes, over a glass of pink champagne, was all I knew on earth, and all I had to know.
“What are you thinking?” she said.
“Keats,” I said.
She smiled.
“Truth is beauty, beauty truth. . . ?” she said.
“Something like that.”
She kept smiling.
“Only you,” she said. “After hours of carnal excess with the girl of your dreams . . . thinking about Keats.”
“I’ll bet other people think of Keats,” I said.
“Oh, I’m sure, probably right in this neighborhood . . .”
“If carnal excess occurs in Cambridge,” I said.
She ignored me.
“But none of those thinking of Keats look like you,” she said.
“Their loss,” I said.
“And their companions’,” Susan said.
Pearl rolled onto her side and stretched out full length, which took up a considerable amount of bed space. Probably revenge.
“Do you know what you’re going to do about Perry Alderson and all of that?” Susan said.
“I’m thinking about it.”
“Are you going to tell Epstein what you’ve learned?”
“I’m thinking about it.”
“Why wouldn’t you tell Epstein?” Susan said.
“I’m thinking about it,” I said.
“And you do not plan to discuss it with me tonight.”
“Exactly,” I said.
I filled my champagne glass and reached across Pearl to pour for Susan. She drank some. I drank some. We looked at each other. Pearl’s breathing was the only sound. Susan reached across the dog and traced one of the scars on my chest. There were several.
“It’s just a scar,” she said. “Just a kind of physical memory.”
“Yes.”
“It doesn’t hurt,” she said.
“No.”
“It did,” she said.
“True.”
“But now it doesn’t.”
“Are we getting metaphorical?” I said.
She smiled again and nodded.
“Yes,” she said.
“This, what we have,” I said, “is an earned relationship. Of course there would be scars.”
“And the time when we were separated? When I was with somebody else?”
“That’s a big scar,” I said. “But it’s also when we both did the most to earn what we’ve got.”
“You truly know that?” she said.
“I do. I’ve never liked it much, but I know what we got from it.”
She continued to trace the scar on my chest. Then she looked at me again. Her eyes were luminous.
“No pain, no gain,” she said.
59.
"You got enough,” Hawk said. “You give what you got to Epstein and he can run Bradley Turner down. They good at big searches.”
“I know,” I said.
Susan was working. We were in the spare room. Chollo was asleep on the couch. Vinnie was listening to his iPod and doing something with the trigger sear of a Rugar brush gun. Hawk and I were sipping coffee and watching Susan’s door.
“Hell, with what you got, and they work with the Cleveland cops, sooner or later, they gonna fi nd something,” Hawk said.
“Erie too,” I said.
“Uh-huh.”
“Makes sense,” I said.
“And then we can stop hanging round here, watching Vinnie clean the weapons,” Hawk said.
“I know it,” I said.
“So,” Hawk said. “You going to see Epstein today?”
“Not today,” I said.
“When?” Hawk said.
“I’m thinking about it,” I said.
Hawk nodded. Today’s snack special was raspberry turnovers in a cardboard box. Hawk stood and walked over to the table and selected a turnover from the box. He looked at me. I nodded. He selected another one and came back and handed it to me, and sat down with his. In silence we ate our turnovers and drank our coffee and looked at Susan’s door. Vinnie got the sear and trigger reassembled and flexed the trigger gently and nodded to himself and continued with the reassembly.
“Russell Costigan,” Hawk said.
“Russell Costigan,” I said.
“Guy Susan ran off with back then.”
“I know who he is,” I said.
“We both know, this about him.”
I shrugged.
“We both know you couldn’t kill him like you wanted,”
Hawk said.
“Wouldn’t have taken me where I wanted to go,” I said.
“So you sat on it,” Hawk said. “But it didn’t go away; and now here’s Doherty. Wife runs off with someone turns out to be a bad man, and this time it gets him, and her, killed.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Maybe I’m just looking for justice,” I said.
“Maybe you looking for revenge,” Hawk said.
“Maybe they’re the same thing.”
“Now you thinking like me,” Hawk said.
“Uh-oh.”
“So we both know Alderson did them, or had them done. Whyn’t you just shoot him and get it done?”
“Because I’m not like you,” I said.
“Tha’s right,” Hawk said.
I looked at him. He smiled.
“I need to get him the right way,” I said.
“Tha’s right,” Hawk said.
“Lemme think about it,” I said.
60.
I stayed with the rest of the posse in a state of high readiness while Susan had her fifty-minute hour with Alderson or Turner or whoever he really was. When they were through and he had uneventfully gone, she came into the spare room. She was in her understated, for Susan, shrink garb. Today it was a dark blue velvet blazer over designer jeans.
“Anything?” I said.
“Interesting,” she said. “Nothing that can’t wait. I have my next client in a minute.”
“Can you give me a one-sentence slug line, on ‘interesting’?”
“I think there’s some kind of masturbatory mental sex going on,” she said.
Vinnie turned his head to look at her. Chollo smiled. Hawk showed nothing. Which was what Hawk always showed.
“In whose mind,” I said.
Susan grinned at me.
“I have a Harvard Ph.D.,” she said.
“So, only in his mind,” I said.
“Exactly,” Susan said.
“You think he’s still trying to seduce you?” I said.
“I think he thinks he has.”
“Which is why he keeps coming?” I said.
“He has not forgotten that he wants to use me against you.”
“But the tail has begun to wag the dog?”
“Maybe,” she said.
“And the fact that he has to walk past us when he arrives?”
I said.
“Half the fun,” Chollo said.
We all looked at him.
“You are his enemy,” Chollo said. “If he can walk past you on his way to having mind sex with the señorita . . .”
“Ay, caramba,” I said.
Chollo smiled.
“Sí,” he said.
All of us stared at Chollo. Except Vinnie, who might have been sleeping, or might have been listening to his iPod, or both.
“How you know that?” Hawk said.
“It is a trick we hot-blooded Latins often play in my village,”
Chollo said.
“There’s probably a lot of that going on where you live,”
I said.
“Mucho,” Chollo said.
“And part of my charm, for him,” Susan said, “is that he gets to strut past you and have his imaginary way with me, and strut back out, under, so to speak, my protection . . .”
She looked at her watch.
“You have other charms,” I said as she started across the hall.
She turned and her smile gleamed with possibility.