Joe shrugged. I looked at Vinnie. Vinnie was staring past us both, looking at the harbor. There was no expression on his face.
"No," I said. "I won't give Beaumont to Vinnie."
Joe sighed slowly.
"There's an option we ain't spoken of yet," he said. He was tired; the ain't had crept in past his self-consciousness. "We could whack you."
"Maybe you could whack me," I said. "It's been tried. But where would that get you? It'll attract the attention of people you'd rather not attract. A lot of people know what I'm working on."
"Hawk," Vinnie said.
"For one," I said. "And there'd be a homicide investigation."
"Quirk," Vinnie said, as if he were counting off a list.
"So you trade me for them," I said, "maybe some others."
My drink was gone. I didn't want another one. The room was full of harshness and pain and a bitterness that had been distilled by silence. I wanted to get out of there.
"It's my kid, Spenser," Broz said. He sounded as if his throat were closing.
"I'm in sort of the same position, Joe."
"He's got to get some respect," Broz said.
I didn't say anything. Gerry wasn't going to get respect. He couldn't earn it and Joe couldn't earn it for him. Joe was silent, his hands folded, looking at his thumbs. He seemed to have gone somewhere.
After a while Vinnie Morris said, "Okay, Spenser. That's it. We'll talk to you later."
I stood. Broz didn't look up. I turned and walked toward the door across the big office. Vinnie walked with me.
At the door I said to Vinnie, "If Gerry gets in my way I will walk over him."
"I know," Vinnie said. He looked back at Joe Broz. "But if you do, you know who Joe will send."
I nodded. I turned back and looked at Joe.
"Tough being the boss's son," I said.
Joe didn't answer. Vinnie held the door open. And I went out.
CHAPTER 21
PEARL didn't like the rain. She hung back when Susan and I took an after-dinner stroll, even when Susan pulled on her leash. And when we prevailed through superior strength, she kept turning and looking up at me, and pausing to jump up and put her forepaws on my chest and look at me as if to question my sanity.
"I heard that if you step on their back paws when they jump up like that, they learn not to," Susan said.
"Shhh," I said. "She'll hear you."
Susan had a big blue and white striped umbrella and she carried it so that it protected her and Pearl from the rain. Pearl didn't quite get it, and kept drifting out from under its protection and getting splattered and turning to look at me. I had on my leather trench coat and the replica
Boston Braves hat that Susan had ordered for me through the catalogue from
Manny's Baseball Land. It was black with a red visor and a red button.
There was a whiteB on it and when I wore it I looked very much like Nanny Fernandez.
"What will you do?" Susan said.
"I'll try to extract Patty Giacomin from the puzzle and leave the rest of it intact."
"And you won't warn Rich?"
"No need to warn him. He knows he's in trouble."
"But you won't try to save him?"
"No."
"Isn't that a little flinty?" Susan said.
"Yes."
"Officially, here in Cambridge," Susan said, "we're supposed to value all life."
"That's the official view here in Cambridge of people who will never have to act on it," I said.
"That is true of most of the official views here in Cambridge," Susan said.
"My business is with Patty-Paul really. Rich Beaumont had to know what he was getting himself into-and besides I seem to feel a little sorry for
Joe."
Pearl had wedged herself between my legs and Susan's, managing to stay mostly under her part of Susan's umbrella, and while she didn't seem happy, she was resigned. We turned the corner off Linnaean Street and walked along
Mass Avenue toward Harvard Square.
"You are the oddest combination," Susan said.
"Physical beauty matched with deep humility?"
"Aside from that," Susan said. "Except maybe for Hawk, you look at the world with fewer illusionsthan anyone I have ever known. And yet you ire as sentimental as you would be if the world were pretty-pretty."
"Which it isn't," I said.
"You cook a good chicken too," Susan said.
"Takes a tough man," I said, "to make a tender chicken."
"How come you cook so well?"
"It's a gift," I said.
"One not, apparently, bestowed on me."
"You do nice cornflakes," I said.
"Did you always cook?" she said.
Pearl darted out from under the umbrella long enough to snuffle the possible spoor of a fried chicken wing, near a trash barrel, then remembered the rain and ducked back in against my leg.
"Since I was small," I said.
As we passed Changsho Restaurant, Pearl's head went down and her ears pricked and her body elongated. She had found the lair of the chicken wings she'd been tracking earlier.
"Remember," I said, "there were no women. Just my father, my uncles, and me. So all the chores were done by men. There was no woman's work. There were no rules about what was woman's work. In our house all work was man's work. So I made beds and dusted and did laundry, and so did my father, and my uncles. And they took turns cooking."
We were past Changsho, Pearl looked back over her shoulder at it, but she kept pace with us and the protective umbrella. There was enough neon in this part of Mass Avenue so that the wet rain made it look pretty, reflecting the colors and fusing them on the wet pavement.
"I started when I was old enough to come home from school alone. I'd be hungry, so I'd make myself something to eat. First it was leftovers-stew, baked beans, meat loaf, whatever. And I'd heat them up. Then I graduated to cooking myself a hamburg, or making a club sandwich, and one day I wanted pie and there wasn't any so I made one."
"And the rest is history," Susan said.
A big MBTA bus pulled up at the stop beside us, the water streaming off its yellow flanks, the big wipers sweeping confidently back and forth across the broad windshield.
"Well, not entirely," I said. "The pie was edible, but a little odd. I didn't like to roll out the crust, so I just pressed overlapping scraps of dough into the bottom of the pie plate until I got a bottom crust."
"And the top crust?"
"Same thing."
The pneumatic doors of the bus closed with that soft, firm sound that they make and the bus ground into gear and plowed off through the rain.
"My father came home and had some and said it was pretty good and I should start sharing in the cooking. So I did."
"So all of you cooked?"
"Yeah, but no one was proprietary about it. It wasn't anyone's accomplishment, it was a way to get food in the proper condition to eat."
"Your father sounds as if he were comfortable with his ego," Susan said.
"He never felt the need to compete with me," I said. "He was always very willing for me to grow up. Ї
Pearl had located a discarded morsel of chewing gum on the pavement and was mouthing it vigorously. Apparently she found it unrewarding, because after a minute of ruminative mouthing she opened her jaws and let it drop out.
"There's something she won't eat," Susan said.
"I would have said there wasn't," I said.
We passed the corner of Shepard Street. Across Mass Avenue, on the corner of Wendell Street, the motel had changed names again.
"I got to shop some too," I said, "though mostly for things like milk and sugar. My father and my uncles had a vegetable garden they kept, and they all hunted, so there was lots of game. My father liked to come home after ten, twelve hours of carpentering and work in his garden. My uncles didn't care for the garden much, but they liked the fresh produce and they were too proud to take it without helping, so they'd be out there too. Took up most of the backyard. In the fall we'd put up a lot of it, and we'd smoke some game."
"Did you work in the garden?" Susan said.