Small Vices Part 32

"Yes," Susan said finally, "you will. Which is the way you should do it."

Pearl got off the bed and went purposefully to the kitchen, where I could hear her lapping water from her dish.

"Have you noticed that I have no clothes on," Susan said.

"This was brought to my attention quite forcefully," I said. "About an hour ago."

Susan ran her forefinger along the line of my bicep. "I suppose, since you've been wounded, and since you are not as young as you were when we first met, that bringing it forcefully to your attention again would be too much."

"Probably," I said. "On the other hand, it seems a shame to waste all that nudity. Maybe we should fumble around a little and see what develops."

Susan reached over and closed the bedroom door.

"Pearl won't like being shut out," I said.

"It'll only be for a little while."

"Maybe it'll be a long while," I said.

"One can only hope."

I heard Pearl return to the closed door and snuffle a little, and sigh and lie down against it. She seemed to have figured out that there were times when we had to be alone. And accepted it philosophically.

"Well, for heaven's sake," Susan whispered. "Something seems to be developing already."

"Strong," I said. "Like a bull."

Susan giggled a little bit.

"The resemblance ends there," she said.

Chapter 44.

I TALKED WITH Ellis Alves again, alone, in a small conference room on the thirty-second floor at Cone, Oakes and Baldwin. He was as hostile and interior as he had been the last time. I remembered what Hawk had said: You in for life, hope will kill you. There was nothing on the conference table except a water carafe and some paper cups stacked upside down. Ellis paid no attention to it. He stood motionless, silhouetted against the bright picture window with the early fall light filling the room.

"Where's Hawk?" Alves said.

"Elsewhere," I said. "I have some things to tell you."

He didn't say anything. He simply waited, standing on the other side of the small conference table, for what I might have to say. I imagined in prison you learn to wait.

"I know you didn't kill Melissa Henderson," I said.

Alves waited.

"I can't prove it yet, but I will."

Alves waited.

"You interested in what I know?" I said.

"No."

"You're going to get out," I said.

Alves stood without speaking or moving.

"You got any questions?"

"No."

"Okay, then that's all I got to say."

"Make you feel better?" Alves said.

"No. I just figured you ought to know you're going to get out pretty soon, so you wouldn't do something dumb in the interim."

"Yeah," Alves said.

"Don't try to escape. Don't get into a fight. Don't break any rules. n.o.body much wants you to get out, so don't give them an excuse to keep you."

Alves didn't say anything. He was looking at me, but I felt no contact. It was like exchanging stares with a statue.

"You got anything else you want to say before I get the guards?"

"No."

"Okay."

I got up and started for the door.

Behind me, Alves said, "How long it going to take?"

"I don't know, weeks probably, maybe days. I need to make somebody confess."

"What happens they don't?"

"I'll force it," I said.

"Been almost a year," Alves said. "How come you still doing this?"

"I was hired to do this."

"What happens to me, somethin' happen to you?"

"Hawk will finish it," I said.

We stood looking at each other for a minute.

"Couple n.i.g.g.e.rs fighting the system," Alves said.

"Couple n.i.g.g.e.rs and the biggest law firm in Boston," I said.

Alves walked stiffly over to the window and looked out at Boston Harbor.

"I ain't counting on nothing," Alves said.

"Best way to be," I said.

Alves nodded once, his eyes flat and meaningless, his face empty.

"Yeah," he said. "It is."

I knocked on the door and the guards opened it. "All done," I said.

They went past me into the conference room and I walked out to the corridor and punched the b.u.t.ton on the elevator. It arrived in time, and I got in it with mail room clerks and young female secretaries and a couple of suits, and down we went.

I stopped in the lobby for a minute and watched the people hurrying freely about. They would have taken Ellis down in the service elevator and out the back. In an hour he'd be back in the joint, looking at life; his only chance to get out in the hands of a white guy he neither knew nor trusted...

breeding/lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/memory and desire... If you're a lifer, hope will kill you...

Was I mixing up my poets? At least no one was calling me the hyacinth girl.

I walked over to the parking garage where they'd found Tommy Miller's body and got in my car and headed for New York.

Chapter 45.

PATRICIA UTLEY HAD moved uptown. She had a townhouse on Sixty-fifth Street between Park and Madison with an etched gla.s.s front door, which I noticed had been covered with a thick sheet of clear Lexan. On either side of the entrance there were little pillars, like the entrance to some sort of Greco-Roman shrine. Steven opened the door. He was still black and well set up, still moved with a light springiness. His short hair had started to gray. In keeping with the times, he had turned in his white coat and was wearing a blue blazer. He recognized me, though the recognition didn't overpower him.

"Mister Spenser," he said.

"h.e.l.lo, Steven," I said. "Is Mrs. Utley in?"

Steven stepped back from the door so I could come in.

"Come into the library," he said, "while I find out if she can see you."

The room was in the front of the house. There was a clean fireplace with a green marble hearth on the left wall. The big arched windows looked out onto Sixty-fifth Street. There were filigreed metal inserts on the inside of each, which effectively barred someone from breaking in. I sat on a big ha.s.sock covered in green leather. All of the furniture was leather covered in green or a kind of off blue. The walls were paneled in oak, and the whole room looked exactly like the library of someone who never read but watched Masterpiece Theater a lot. There was a bookcase on either side of the cold fireplace. She seemed to have moved all her books up from Thirty-seventh Street. I remembered some of them: The Complete Works of Charles d.i.c.kens, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Longfellow: Complete Poetical and Prose Works, The Outline of History, The Canterbury Tales. They didn't look as if they'd been taken down and thumbed through fondly in the twenty years since I first saw them.

Patricia Utley herself, when she came into the room, didn't look like she'd been thumbed through much either. She was as pulled together as she always was. Her hair was maybe a little brighter, and thus a little less credible, blonder than it had been when I'd first met her. It was short and full but it didn't look lacquered. There were crow's-feet at her eyes, and only the subtlest hint of lines at the corners of her mouth. She was small, trim, stylish in a black pantsuit with a white blouse. The blouse had a low neck line, and a short rope of pearls lay against her skin above it. Her gla.s.ses were big and round and black-rimmed. I had no idea what age she was, but whatever it was she looked good. She put her hand out as she walked across the room. I stood and took her hand. She leaned gracefully forward and kissed me cheek.

"Still a detective?" she said.

"Yes," I said. "Still a madam?"

"Yes, and a fabulously successful one, if I may say so."

"As the move uptown would suggest," I said.

"My previous home was not impoverished," she said.

"No, it wasn't."

"Would you like a gla.s.s of sherry?" she said. "A real drink?"

"No, thank you," I said. "Just some talk."

"I hope you won't mind if I have a gla.s.s."

"Not at all."

She walked to a small sideboard between the big windows and poured herself a pony of sherry from a cut-gla.s.s decanter, and turned, standing in front of the window so the light silhouetted her.

"So what stray are you looking for this time?" she said.

"Maybe I just dropped in to say hi," I said. "Maybe I miss you."

"I'm sure you do," Patricia Utley said. "But I do know that in the past, whenever you have come to see me you were looking for someone's little lost lamb."

"More like a wolf this time," I said.

"Really?"

"Guy named Rugar, he's been hired to kill me, and he almost did."

"I would have thought that would be hard to do."

"He didn't succeed," I said.

The library door opened and Steven came in with what appeared to be a black and white aardvark on a leash. The aardvark had a bright red choke collar around his neck. His lost-and-found tag dangled from one of the loops on the collar. The tag was bright red also, and heart shaped.

"She's had her walk," Steven said. "And the maid says she was very good."

He leaned over and unsnapped the leash and the aardvark dashed over to Patricia Utley and wagged its tail. Astonishingly, Patricia Utley went to her knees and put her face down where the aardvark could lap it. It wasn't a very big aardvark. Maybe it was too small to be an aardvark.

"Did you have a lovely tinky tinky?" Patricia Utley said.