Crimson Joy (8 page)

"Susan doesn't say absolutely that her guy can't be the guy, does she?"

Belson said.

"Shrinks don't say absolutely anything," I said.

"She think he'll come back?"

"Shrinks don't know what people are going to do. They only know why they did it," I said.

"Like cops," Quirk said.

"Except they don't usually know why they did it," I said.

"True," Quirk said. He picked up the picture of his dog from his desk and placed it half an inch closer to the pictures of his children. The rhomboid of sun across his desktop had shifted slightly toward me.

"We've got to know about this guy that left the rose for Susan," Quirk said.

"Yes," I said.

"Washburn was into his second aria for the brass when this guy dropped the rose," Belson said.

"So if he is Red Rose, who the hell is this guy?" Quirk said.

"And if Washburn isn't Red Rose," Belson said.

"Yes," I said.

The three of us sat quietly looking at nothing.

"It isn't Washburn," Quirk said.

I looked at Belson.

"Washburn did his wife," Belson said. "He didn't do the rest."

"Maybe."

I said.

"Probably," Quirk said.

"It ain't Washburn," Belson said. "Hawk with Susan?" Quirk said.

"Yeah."

"Good."

Washburn was famous by morning. His name was on the lips of Jane Pauley and his face was on the front page of everyone's morning paper. The mayor was on CNN congratulating the police commissioner, and the police commissioner was generously crediting hard work by the entire department. Six paragraphs into the front page story in the Globe was an allusion to Police Lieutenant Martin Quirk, the homicide commander, who expressed some reservations. In paragraph ten it was mentioned that a Boston private detective who had been working on the case with the police was unavailable for comment.

"I'm available," I said.

Susan was eating a piece of whole-wheat toast across her breakfast counter from me.

"Certainly to me," she said.

"Paper says I'm unavailable for comment," I said.

"They probably tried your office and you weren't there," she said.

"Lying bastards," I said.

"Well, aren't we surly this morning," Susan said.

"Everybody's got it solved," I said.

She had another bite of toast. I drank my coffee. Susan's hair was in curlers, her face was devoid of makeup. She wore white silk pajamas with a ruffle, and sleeping had wrinkled them. I stared at her.

"What's the matter?" she said when she caught me.

"I was just wondering why you still look beautiful," I said. "It must not be the makeup and the clothes. It must be you." She smiled. "Are you drinking at this hour of the morning?"

"You go to my head," I said, "like a sip of sparkling burgundy brew."

"I'm not going to do that," she said, "until after work."

I gnawed on my bagel. She looked at her watch. Susan was always running a little late. There seemed time to finish her toast.

"Any hints from your patients?" I said.

"No."

"If you knew who left the rose and were pretty sure he was Red Rose, would you share?"

"Red Rose has confessed," she said.

"Don't dodge the question."

She nodded, and bit the corner of her toast triangle.

"I guess I would," she said. "But I would have to be sure and it would be .. She shook her head and didn't finish the sentence. She tried a new one.

"I came late to this work," she said. "And the work, and my skill at it, makes me possible. It makes us possible, because I am more than the apple of your eye, however glad I am about being that too. I am valuable without you."

"True," I said. There was a bowl of Santa Rosa plums on the counter. I took one and polished it against my pants leg.

"I am rigidly defensive about it," she said.

I bit into the plum.

"To have my autonomy violated by the Red Rose business is nearly intolerable," she said. "And to have you or Hawk here watching over me" her face tightened as she said it "is very bitter."

"None of this is your fault," I said.

"Nor yours," she said. "But you must understand that it is like letting you into something that is mine. It is like giving away part of me, to have you question me about my patients."

"I don't want him to kill you," I said.

"I know," she said. "I don't want him to either. And I am less frightened with you here, or Hawk. But you must see that being frightened unless you're here, in the practice of my profession, is a terrible condition to be in for me."

"I know," I said.

"I know you know," Susan said. She smiled her big wide brilliant smile, the one that made you feel like life's focus. "I'm just kvetching."

"Neither Quirk nor Belson believes the confession," I said.

"It exonerates the police," Susan said. "Washburn, according to the news, isn't a cop."

"Yeah, and it gives them a black criminal, which shuts up all the talk about racism, and it keeps the general public from screaming for an arrest. There's a lot of reasons to believe him."

"Except?"

"Except the gun is wrong and the rope is wrong and there's no semen and he's black, so how come he kept finding his victims in places a white guy would find them and how come he took this long to get to his wife?"

"I could speculate on the wife part," Susan said.

"Sure," I said. "But the fact remains that there's a lot of holes, and two very experienced homicide investigators don't believe him."

"A man like Washburn might in fact kill his wife and be so overcome at the guilt of it that he would do this," Susan said.

"Confess to a whole series of crimes?" I said.

"More. He might emulate the criminal in the crime, become him, in a manner of speaking. It would be a way of dramatizing how horrible a crime he was contemplating, and it would, maybe, distance him from it enough so that he could carry it out."

"So his grief and all would be genuine," I said.

"Absolutely. He's done something more horrible than any of his questioners can imagine. Of course he's overcome. And he must be punished on a scale equal to the horribleness. He must not only be a murderer, he must be a fiend, as it were, a noted serial killer."

"So you don't believe his confession either," I said.

"I neither believe nor disbelieve. I could make a scenario for belief too. I'm only trying to give you possibilities in an area I know."

Susan said. "If you decide finally that he's innocent or guilty, I will believe you," she said. "I know what I know, and I know what you know.

In this you know more."

I finished my plum, and got up and walked around the counter to the other side and gave her a kiss on the mouth.

"Thank you," I said.

"You're welcome."

She looked at her watch.

"Jesus Christ," she said. "I have twenty minutes until my first appointment."

"Try not to trample me," I said, and got out of the way.

Quirk called me while Susan was speeding around the apartment.

"Hawk coming over?" he said.

"Yes, at ten."

"Stay there with him. Belson and I are coming by," Quirk said.

"Sure," I said.

As I was hanging up, Susan stopped momentarily in front of me, gave me a kiss on the mouth, and sped to the front door. She looked like a fast sunrise.

"Beep beep," I said.

"I'll call you later," she said, and was gone.

Hawk arrived at ten, Quirk and Belson right behind him.

Hawk said, "This a coincidence, or are you guys after me?"

Quirk shook his head and closed the door behind him and said, "We need help."

Hawk's face broke into a wide smile. "Y'all finally facing up to that," he said.

Belson rummaged around the kitchen until he found a saucer that would serve as an ashtray. Quirk went into the kitchen behind him and carefully shook the water from his raincoat onto the tile floor. Then he hung it from a rack Susan had by the back porch door. Belson started back into the living room with his ashtray.

"Frank," Quirk said, and nodded at the coat.

Belson said, "Yeah," and came back into the kitchen and hung his raincoat up beside Quirk's. Hawk draped his leather jacket over the back of a kitchen chair. Without the jacket the ivory butt of his gun glared at us from under his arm. He wore extra rounds in a pocket on the back of his belt.

Belson glanced around the apartment with its careful clutter of objets dart, lace, silk, crystal, and velvet. There was a huge crimson fan spread on one wall of the den.

"It's you," Belson said to me.

"Yeah," I said. "I'm looking to buy a paisley gun." Quirk said, "Belson and I are on vacation."

The cold spring rain was sharp and insistent on the front windows.

"Perfect weather for it," I said.

"Commissioner insisted," Quirk said.

"I noticed in the paper you were expressing reservations," I said.

"Yeah, I did it again on Jimmy Winston's show last night," Quirk said.

"Mobilizing public opinion," Hawk murmured.

"Something," Quirk said. "Anyway, this morning I got put on vacation status, extended. Frank joined me. Some kind of gesture, I guess."

"I been working hard, boss, you know that," Belson said.

Quirk nodded.

"So they are committed to Washburn," I said.

"Yeah," Quirk said.

"Means they figure his story will hold up," Hawk said.

"He's pretty steady on that," Quirk said.

"It's the only thing he is steady on," Belson said. "Everything else, he's only got one oar in the water."

"He'd have to be," I said. I told them Susan's hypothesis.

"It's the only way he can think about what he did," Hawk said. "He probably won't slide on it."

Belson looked at Hawk, and shook his head.

"Whatever his reasons," Quirk said, "I agree he won't waffle on the confession."

"So," I said. "If the real Red Rose is smart, he'll stop killing people for a while and walk away from this without anybody laying a glove on him."

Quirk nodded.

"If he can," Hawk said.

"If he can," Quirk said, "and he's a cop; he can be working in my department, talking with me every day for all I know."

"And if he can't, then he'll kill some more women," I said.

We were auiet. Belson knocked some of the accumu lated ash of his cigar into Susan's bright red saucer that matched the bright red fan on the wall, that picked up one of the colors in her Oriental rug, that reflected in its design the shape of the mirror in the hall, that balanced the architectural detail over the archway to the bedroom. The ash didn't match anything.

"We need to find out about this guy left the rose for Susan," Quirk said.

"I been giving that some thought," I said.

"You have a plan?" Quirk said.

"Yeah, we got to do this right," I said. "But the thing to do is stake out Susan's office and identify every one of her patients who could have been the guy I chased."

"Susan won't cooperate?" Belson said.

"No," I said.

"Even to save her own ass?" Belson said.

"Life," I said.

"Yeah, sorry."

"No."

"Doesn't make sense," Belson said.

"To you," Hawk said. "Make sense to Susan."

Belson looked at Hawk again, held the look for a moment, then nodded.

"How long will it take?" Quirk said.

"Should be a week or so; most patients come once or twice a week," I said. "It's the best I can think of."

Quirk nodded.

"Got to be careful," I said. "Some patient leaves psychotherapy and finds a cop following…"

"I know," Quirk said. "We can't fuck these people up."

"Susan catch us and we got trouble," Hawk said.

"I know that too," Quirk said.

"Okay," I said. "We watch. First patient arrives at nine and the last patient leaves at six. If they drive, we can get the license numbers.

If they walk, we can follow them."

"And one of us is always here with Susan," Quirk said.

"Yeah."

"Can you see from here?" Quirk said. He walked to the window.

"Not well enough. We have to be outside."

Hawk looked out the window. It was dark and the rain was steady.

"Outside the place to be," he said, "on your vacation." . They thought it was somebody else. A schwartze. Some wife killer who'd faked it and made it look like he'd done them all. Talk about lucky. All he had to do was stop and they'd fry the schwartze and he'd be safe. Could he stop? Jesus, would he miss it. What a loss. What a hole in his life.

It was what he did. The planning, the stalking, the catching, the escaping, it organized him. Who was he without it? What should he do?

If he could talk with her about it? But if she knew, she'd tell. He couldn't see her anymore. But he wanted her to know.

"Come in," she said.

The rain sheeted down along the window behind the tropical fish tank.

The fish seemed restless. Water and water. He sat in his usual seat.

He felt full of his need for her to know. But she'd tell. He knew she'd tell her boyfriend.

"When I was little, I was very close to my mother," he said. She nodded.

"I could tell her anything. "It's all right, "she say, "I'm your mother.""

She made a tiny rolling motion with her forefinger to encourage him on.

"I told her everything."

She had on a brown glen plaid suit today, with a white blouse.

"I remember when I was a little kid, maybe third grade, I, ah, messed my pants."

She nodded; no reaction, no disgust, no amusement. He could still feel the hot embarrassment of it.

"They called my mother and she came and got me and she was nice about it and said it could happen to anyone. And I got to go home with her and I asked her not to tell and she promised she wouldn't…

"One of her friends was there, and when I came downstairs from taking a bath the friend teased me about it."

"So she had told," she said.

He nodded. "I…" He stopped and swallowed. He seemed unable to speak.