Valediction Part 9

I pa.s.sed him my untouched plate.

"I got a date tonight," I said.

Hawk looked up and smiled a wide smile. "That's a start," he said.

I watched him put away my lunch. "How come you know this stuff," I said.

"Easy when it not happening to you," he said.

"It is not happening to a lot of people, but they don't know things you know."

"I know what I need to know, babe. Sort of a natural rhythm."

Linda Thomas was five minutes late. Early by the standard Susan had set. She was five foot five and black-haired with eyes that were neither green nor brown but both at different times. She was slim and small-breasted and big eyed with a wide mouth and, especially around the cheekbones, she looked a little like Susan. She was wearing a gray suit with a red print blouse and a kind of full bow at the neck that vaguely suggested a necktie. The print of the blouse was small.

"I'm wearing my power outfit," she said, and smiled and put out her hand. I stood and shook her hand and held her chair and she sat.

"Very professional," I said, "small-print blouse and all."

"Career," she said, "onward, upward. Tell me a little about yourself."

I did, and as I talked I discovered that I was telling her more about myself than I had expected to. And more about Susan and our estrangement. By seven o'clock in the stillbright summer evening we were sitting on the gra.s.s beside the swan boat pond in the Public Garden leaning our backs against each other as we talked, only very slightly drunk, watching somebody's German short-haired pointer hunt the area, scattering pigeons and treeing squirrels.

"Funny," Linda said, "having a drink with a detective I thought we'd spend the evening talking about crime and instead we spend it talking about love."

"Yes," I said. "I'm a little surprised at that myself."

"That you'd talk so much about love?" Linda said.

"That I'd talk so much about myself."

"You're very open," she said.

"Apparently. But enough about me. Let's talk about you. What do you think of me?"

She laughed. "I think that Susan is crazy."

"Or I am. Is there someone in your life?"

Linda said, "I'm separated from my second husband. Almost a year. We see each other and maybe it will work out. But I live alone right now. We've been married seven years."

"How old are you?" I said.

"Thirty-eight."

"Thank G.o.d," I said. "You look much younger than that."

"You don't care for youth?"

"From my vantage, babe, thirty-eight is youth. Much younger is childhood."

The feel of her sitting with me, our backs together, in the park, by the water, watching the dog, was righter than I could ever have imagined. I felt odd, as if there were something missing. As if I had set something down.

The pointer barreled past after a squirrel. I said, "Are you hungry? Would you care to eat something?"

"Yes," Linda said. "I have two steaks in my refrigerator. Come to my house and help me cook them."

"It's one of my best things," I said.

Linda lived in a condominium on Lewis Wharf. Which meant she had a good salary or big support payments. We walked to it as the evening settled. Crossing Tremont Street I took her hand, and when we got to the other side I kept it. She rested her head briefly against my shoulder. We stopped along the way and bought a bottle of Beaujolais. Linda's apartment was blond wood and exposed brick, and an all-electric kitchen with a builtin microwave oven. It was modern and bright and clean and surprisingly unhomey. Her stove was a Jenn-Air with a built-in grill that exhausted the smoke and Linda took two steaks out and put them on the grill.

"Can you make a salad?" she said.

"Wonderfully," I said.

Linda pointed to the refrigerator. "Please," she said. "After you fix us a drink."

She took a bottle of Scotch from the cabinet over the stove. It had a long funny Scotch name. "Single malt," she said. "On the rocks for me, with a twist."

I made two drinks and gave her one. The Scotch was remarkable. She took a sip and turned to the steaks. I began the salad. We moved easily about the small kitchen, not getting in each other's way although there was very little room.

The steaks sizzled on the grill. Linda turned from the stove and looked up at me. She was smaller than Susan and had to tilt her head more. She held her drink in her right hand. I looked down into her face, and her eyes were very dark and had a kind of swimming quality.

"This is very strange," she said. I nodded.

"Aside from looking across the street these years, I don't even know you and yet we somehow fit."

I nodded again. She raised her face toward me. I bent forward and kissed her. She opened her mouth and kissed me back, her body arching against me, her left hand pressing me against her while her right held the drink out. The kiss was long and openmouthed and she moved a little against me as we kissed. When we stopped she stayed against me and leaned her head back to look up at me.

She looked at me silently. "You're intense," she said.

I shrugged. "I'm just at the beginning of trying to figure out what I am."

"You're wonderful," Linda said, and put her face up and kissed me again.

We ate our steak and salad and French bread on a gla.s.s-topped table in front of the picture window looking out over Boston Harbor. It was dark now, but one could see ship lights occasionally, and the sense of ocean was inevitable and vast.

"What if Susan has another man?" Linda said.

"Painful," I said.

"Endurable?"

I sipped a little Beaujolais. "We'll see." She put her hand out toward me. I took it and we held hands silently, squeezing each other, my eyes looking directly into hers.

"I am committed to Susan," I said. My voice sounded rusty. "If I can rejoin her, I will."

"I know," Linda said.

We finished eating our supper. The silence was not awkward. We cleared the dishes and Linda served Sambuca and coffee. We sat on the couch to drink it and Linda turned toward me and stared with her melting gaze at me and then pressed her mouth against mine.

I had never been with anyone like her. In her pa.s.sion and the wide openness of her abandon, she was breathtaking. Her power suit was in a heap on the floor, tangled with her lavender undergarments and my suit.

We made love--on the couch, and on the floor, at one point rolling against the coffee table and slopping our coffee and Sambuca onto the marble surface. Later we were beneath the gla.s.s-topped dinner table. Sometime later we went to bed.

Linda lay on her side, propped on an elbow, looking down at me as I lay on my back beside her.

"It would be absolutely idiotic," she said, "to be in love with you having just met this evening."

"I know," I said.

She said something that sounded like "ohhhh" and pressed her mouth against me again and we made love again. She cried out and dug her nails into my back. Sometimes we were crossways on the bed, and once we fell off and didn't pay any attention. Back in bed, long into the dwindling night, we fell asleep with our arms around each other. And I did something I had not done since Susan left. I slept.

CHAPTER 21.

I walked back from Linda's apartment in the hot morning feeling somehow encapsulated, as if a fine high keening surrounded me, and the pavement were undulant and somewhat insubstantial. The s.p.a.ce in which I moved seemed crystalline and empty. What I felt was shock. To feel for someone other than Susan what I had felt for Linda was so startling that the world seemed unlike the one I'd walked in yesterday morning. The Quincy Market area was nearly empty at that time of day. Newly scrubbed and shining, its shops and restaurants freshly open, full of promise. Hopeful.

In front of my apartment on Marlborough Street, Vinnie Morris was parked on a hydrant, the motor idling, the windows of his TransAm rolled up. He lowered one of them. "Get in," he said, "we'll have breakfast."

I got in the pa.s.senger side. Vinnie raised the window and the air-conditioning took care of what little warm air I had brought in with me.

"You look like you been out all night," Vinnie said. He was a medium-size man, very compact, very neat. He had a thick black mustache and he smelled of musk oil, though modestly.

"Yes," I said.

We drove around the Public Garden and down Charles Street. Vinnie jammed the TransAm up onto the sidewalk on the corner of Charles and Mt. Vernon streets and we went into the Paramount Restaurant. I ordered whole wheat toast, Vinnie ordered steak and eggs.

"Breakfast is important," Vinnie said.

I nodded. "Got to keep that cholesterol level up."

Vinnie said, "Aw, bulls.h.i.t."

We brought our food to a table, and sat.

I drank some coffee. The world still echoed strangely around me, and the intrusion of Vinnie, the intrusion of the world in which I worked and lived, was jarring.

Vinnie with a gun, Vinnie who spoke for Joe Broz, or kille for Joe Broz, was for me the ordinary, the workaday. I felt as if my footing were unsure as if the earth were slippery.

"You were asking about Mickey Paultz, Vinnie said. He drank some coffee and put th cup down. His movements were careful an economical and precise. His nails were manicured.

"Yes."

"Tell me a little about why you want to know."

"I'm looking into a religious group called the Reorganized Church of the Redemption. I noticed it has made a number of large low interest loans to the Paultz Construction Company."

Vinnie was watching me carefully. He nodded.

"After I had asked the head of this religious group about the loans, about where they got money for the loans, a couple of meanies came around and told me to b.u.t.t out, or else."

"Scared you right off, didn't they," Vinni said.

"They drove off in a car registered to Pault Construction."

"Don't mean Paultz is dirty," Vinnie said. "Maybe these guys were just a couple shovel operators on a slow day. Maybe Paultz is buddies with the church guy."

"These were hoods, Vinnie. And the thing is, the church shows no visible source of income. Where they get the money to lend Paultz?"

Vinnie cut into his steak. "The faithful?"

I shook my head. "No. They receive money from the church, not the other way around."

"Church pays them to be members?"

"A stipend, for work," I said. "So where's the money come from?"

Vinnie smiled his careful smile and chewed his steak. He ate in small bites, chewing thoroughly. He swallowed. "You have a theory," he said.

"I say Paultz is dirty, he's making dirt, money, and he's laundering it through the church."

Vinnie nodded. "Makes sense. He make money under the table, donates it anonymously to this church, they lend it back to him at a low rate. He invests it at a higher one, or uses it to build property and sells it at a profit and the money he gets is shiny clean. Maybe Joe will found a church."

Vinnie ate some more. I drank my coffee and ate half a piece of toast.

"Heroin," Vinnie said. I was quiet.

"Mickey Paultz processes most of the skag that gets sold in New England," Vinnie said.

"How nice for him," I said. "Where does he do the processing?"

"Warehouse on the construction lot."

"You folks do business with Mickey?"

"You want to do dope business, you do it with Mickey. We do, Tony Marcus does, Worcester, Providence."

"Would it break your heart if someone put Mickey away and left the business up for grabs?"

Vinnie smiled. "Nature hates a vacuum, buddy boy."