Crimson Joy (16 page)

"What did you say about a sweater?" she said.

"I said it is wanton and shameless to make love while wearing a sweater."

"Yes," Susan said thoughtfully. "It is, isn't it." She smiled at me.

She said, "It's probably fairly shameless to lay around and drink Diet Coke wearing only a sweater."

"Yes," I said, "but a five-martini hangover thirst tends to humble even the best of us."

"Five?"

"Five."

"Good heavens," Susan said. She pulled her bare legs up toward her chest. "What time is it?"

"Four forty-five," I said. "The cocktail hour is at hand."

Susan shivered. She had her arms around her knees. "Maybe two aspirin," she said.

I got her some and she washed them down with the warm Diet Coke.

"We missed lunch," she said. "It was worth it, I think."

"Of course it was," Susan said. "But now I need food."

"The chicken awaits," I said.

"Well done?"

"I shut it off before I swept you away to sweatered passion," I said.

She smiled at me. "You would," she said. . time to disappear. He had his bag, all his stuff, time to go underground. He had a black turtleneck, black jeans, black running shoes. He adjusted the navy watch cap on his head. People would notice if he blacked his face. Two white guys had joined the black guy. They'd walked around the building and looked at all the entrances. Then the black guy left. The two white guys stayed outside. Sitting in a station wagon across from his building where they could see the front door and the side fire escape.

Dumb bastards thought they had him. Nothing in this place that would help them find him. Nothing in this place anyway. Like living in a fucking toilet stall. He went out the door and down the hall and opened the back window and dropped through it maybe four feet to a roof. He ran along the roof pasta window where a fat guy and his wife were on the couch watching TV and climbed the fire escape that ran up the wall of the next building. The roof door on the next building was open. Works every time. Going down the stairs in the next building, he felt the feeling in his stomach and groin. Like electricity. He had had his stuff, he was dressed for the night. Anything comes my way I can handle.

On the first floor he went to the back and out the door and down an alley, feeling the electricity in his legs, feeling the air running free into his chest. Then he was out on the next street and away in the darkness, fully equipped.

Susan cancelled her appointments again and sat with me in my office with Quirk, Belson, and Hawk.

"Best I can figure," Quirk said, "he went out a back window. There's a one-story addition on the back there and he must have dropped onto it and walked to the fire escape of the building next door. Then he went up, in the roof door, and down. There's a back door that leads out onto Cordis Street."

"Anything in the apartment?" I said.

"Would we search without a warrant?" Belson said.

"Yes," I said.

"Not a thing," Quirk said. "There's nothing there. A few clothes, a TV set, couple cans of tomato soup. Like no one really lived there."

"What will he do now?" I said to Susan.

"I don't know. Things will build in him. Pressure. There apy didn't stop him from murdering before, but .. She shook her head.

"Couldn't you have kept him in therapy until we nabbed him?" Quirk said.

"Been good if you hadn't lost him," Hawk said. He was leaning against the wall by my window.

Quirk snapped a look at him and held it and then nodded.

He said, to Susan, "Sorry, the question was out of line." Belson said,

"Lieutenant feels like a horse's ass, losing Felton. Me too."

Susan nodded.

"Might he go for you?" Quirk said.

"He might. I have mistreated him. He feels his mother mistreated him.

He would feel enormous rage. In the past when he felt it and couldn't express it directly, he would express it symbolically. How he would express his rage at me, I cannot say. Maybe he could do it directly, maybe he would have to deflect it onto something that symbolized me.

There's no way to know what the symbol would be."

"So we may have less handle on him than we did before," I said.

"Before, we could figure he'd try for a black woman in her forties. Now if it's you he's trying to punish…"

"I don't know," Susan said.

"His symbolism is private. He could attack me, he could…" She shook her head. "… anyone," she said.

"Okay," Quirk said. "We'll start looking for him. I'm still on vacation but I can reach a lot of cops who'll look for him too."

"You have a picture?" I said.

"Yeah, got it from the security firm."

"Susan's going to stay with me," I said. "He might turn up at her place."

"We'll cover that," Quirk said. "How about the ex wife I looked at Hawk.

"Be happy to watch her," Hawk said. "

"Less you want me for backup."

"No," I said. "I'll stay close to Susan."

Hawk looked at Susan. "You be careful," he said. "You need me, you call Henry." Susan smiled. "Yes," she said. "Thank you."

Hawk went out with Belson and Quirk.

My office was quiet.

"What do we do?" Susan said.

"Zee muzzer," I said. "We stake out zee muzzer."

"You think he'll go see his mother?" Susan said.

"Hadn't he transferred a lot of his feelings for her onto you?"

"Yes."

"So maybe if he deflects his rage, he'll deflect it at her. Possible?"

I said.

"Possible," Susan said.

"Besides," I said, "I'm pretty sure he won't come here."

I was driving a black Jeep that year, with a hard top and all sorts of accessories that would have made the one I drove in Korea blush. Susan and I parked up the street a little from Felton's mother's house on the shore drive opposite King's Beach in Swampscott. She had the first floor of a three-story house that had gone condo when everything else had.

"Gun in your purse?" I said to Susan.

"Yes," she said.

"Purse unzipped?"

"Yes."

"Good," I said. I had my gun in a shoulder holster under my Red Sox warm-up jacket. I had the jacket unsnapped. The weather was mid-fifties and sunny. I shut the motor off on the Jeep and sat with the window half open and the smell of the ocean coming in.

"Is this in the bodyguard manual?" Susan said. "Take woman you're protecting to look for the man you're protecting her from?"

"I thought you were protecting me," I said.

"From what?"

"From becoming so swollen with seed that I burst," I said.

"I do what I can," Susan said.

It was bright morning. Young women with small children, older women with small dogs, and now and then an old man with a cane walked along the ocean front, which stretched for several miles through Swampscott and Lynn and out along the causeway to Nahant. The street ran along the seawall. A sidewalk bordered the street and an iron fence bordered the sidewalk. Past the fence was a ten-foot drop to the beach and the ocean that rolled in from Portugal. An oil tanker moved imperceptibly along the horizon from Boston Harbor, not long out of Chelsea Creek.

"I can't leave you alone, and I have to find Felton. So we do it together," I said.

"I know," Susan said. "If it weren't so deadly, I'd kind of like it.

Makes me feel like Lois Lane."

"Well, you're with the right guy," I said.

In my rearview mirror I saw Felton. He turned the corner from Monument Avenue and headed along the shore drive on my side of the street, carrying a small blue gym bag. He was dressed all in black and looked like an extra in a Rambo movie.

"Felton," I said. "He'll walk right past you, lean over and kiss me."

Susan had great reflexes. She was leaning across from her seat and her face covered mine as Felton went past on the sidewalk beside the Jeep. I could see him with one eye through Susan's hair. He was watchful in the exaggerated way of a kid playing war. He walked past us and turned in at his mother's house.

"Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good," I said to Susan.

Susan sat back up in the seat, looking toward Felton. "What now?"

"I don't know," I said. "What's his mother like? If he confesses, will she help him?"

"I have only his perception of her. If it's accurate, she will be solely interested in how to prevent damage to herself. If helping him would hush it up, she'd help. If turning him in would make her safe, she'd do that. Her concern with others' opinion of her seems nearly paralyzing, in her son's report of it."

"Why would he be here?" I said.

"I don't know."

"Is he likely to be especially vulnerable in front of his mother?"

"Yes," Susan said.

"Okay," I said. "He's clearly dressed up in his battle gear. He looks like the Hollywood version of a cat burglar."

Susan was watching with me as Felton went to his mother's house and went in the front door.

"He's got his gym bag. Maybe he's got clean socks and a toothbrush in there. But maybe he's got rope and tape and a thirty-eight caliber gun," I said. "If we caught him with the murder gun, we'd have him."

"It would be good to have hard evidence," Susan said.

"It would be intensely stupid to walk around carrying the murder weapon, knowing there's people after him," I said.

"It would be a way to be caught," Susan said.

"If he wants to be," I said.

"Part of him wants to be," Susan said. "It's probably what brought him to therapy. And caused him to write and make the phone calls."

"And come here, to his mother's, in the light of the midday sun," I said. "Let's go in."

"And then what?"

"We'll see what develops," I said.

"Do we have the right, in front of his mother?"

"Suze, up to now I've played mostly your game. But now we're in my park. Now we do it my way," I said.

"Because?"

"Because I know more about this than you do. Because this is what /

I do."

Susan was silent for a moment, looking at Felton's mother's house.

"And maybe," I said, "he's come with the rope and the gun for his mother."

Susan nodded slowly and opened the door on her side.

The front door opened into a small hallway with tan figured wallpaper.

Stairs led straight up to the second floor. To the right was a small dining room with a mahogany table, two corner cabinets. To the left was a living room that ran the depth of the house and was papered in beige with large red flowers. Felton sat toward the back in a bright red velvet wing chair. His mother sat on the sofa, which was covered with a floral throw.

"Well, who's this?" Mrs. Felton said. She was a sharp faced little woman, her hair tightly permed and colored a honey-brown. She had on a gray-green dress and green high-heeled shoes.

"My name is Spenser, Mrs. Felton. And this is Dr. Silverman."

Mrs. Felton frowned a little at the Dr. Silverman. Doctors were male.

And Silverman sounded Jewish. Felton was absolutely motionless in his chair. The gym bag was on the floor at his feet. He looked at a point in space somewhere between me and Susan.

"What do you want?" Mrs. Felton said. "You should have knocked."

"Do you know what your son's been up to, Mrs. Felton?" I said. Soaping windows? Peeking in the girls' locker room, putting a tack on the teacher's chair? Her face got hard and the lines became immobile and her eyes slitted. She turned toward Felton.

"What does he mean, Gordon? What have you done now?"

Felton remained rigid and still and not looking at any of us. "Nothing."

Felton said. "I don't know them."

"Dr. Silverman is your son's psychotherapist," I said.

The lines in her face deepened and the face got icy.

"Psych ?" she said.

"Psychotherapist," I said. "Dr. Silverman is a psychologist. She had been treating your son."

Mrs. Felton's features were so pinched that they seemed centered in her face.

"What did he say?"

"About you?" I smiled. "It's pretty long to summarize."

"Gordon, what have you been telling about me?"

Felton maintained his rigidity.

"I don't hold with all that psycho logic business. Most of those doctors are crazier than the patients."

"Surely, you would know," I said.

We all waited. The silence was very forceful. I had no idea where I was going. I just wanted us all together there in a stressful environment for as long as I could keep us. If I pushed too hard, Felton would probably bolt. If I searched his bag too soon and found clean socks and a toothbrush, it would score one for Felton, and I didn't want his psyche scoring any. If I came right out and told his mother what he was, she might faint, or throw a wingding, or simply deny it and order us out. That too would prop Felton up.

We were still standing just inside the living room, me forward, Susan slightly back of me. There was a back door from the living room, which probably led to the kitchen. But Felton would have to get up from his chair and go around it to reach the kitchen. Probably a back door out from the kitchen. If he could make it before I stopped him, I'd lost more steps than I thought I had.

"Gordon," Mrs. Felton said. "Just what is this business?"

"Nothing."

Felton said. His voice was flat, and nearly lost somewhere back in his throat.

"Well, I'll tell you one thing," Mrs. Felton said. "No boy had a better mother. I never left him for a minute. I was always there when there was trouble. I stood on my head for this boy all his life."

I looked at Felton.

"That right, boy?"

Felton seemed to come back from wherever he was. He looked away from the fixed point in space and refocused on Susan.

"See," he said. "See what she's like?"

"Gordon," his mother said, "what on earth are you saying? Don't you dare speak to me that way."

Felton was still looking at Susan.

"Was I speaking to her?" he said. "No, I was speaking to you. But she says I shouldn't speak to her that way."