The Professional (18 page)

“I’m shocked,” I said.

“Yeah, I was surprised it took a week,” Tony said. “Said she wanted somebody to ace her old man and could I help.”

“And you said?”

“No.”

“How’d she take that?”

“Not well. She say after all we meant to each other. And I say, ‘I got nothing against your old man.’ And she said, ‘But don’t you love me?’ And I say no. And we go on like that. And finally I have Arnold take her out and drive her home.”

“Give her a referral?”

“Hell, no,” Tony said. “I put some people down, will again. But I did it ’cause it needed to be done. Not ’cause some broad bops me for a week.”

“She have any other candidates?” I said.

“To pull the trigger for her?” Tony said. “There must have been one.”

“But you have no idea?” I said.

“None.”

“You have any sense that Eisenhower was involved?”

“Nope.”

“Or that he wasn’t?” I said.

“Nope.”

I nodded. We were quiet. Ty-Bop had stopped looking at the picture of Pearl and was now, as best I could determine, looking at nothing I could identify. Tony picked up his hat, put it on, stood, and buttoned up his coat.

“You owe me,” he said.

“But who keeps track,” I said.

“Me,” Tony said.

He nodded at Ty-Bop, who went out of the office first. Tony followed. They didn’t close the door behind them. But that was okay. It created sort of a welcoming image. I was a friendly guy. Might be good for business.

VINNIE MORRIS WAS a middle-sized ordinary-looking guy who could shoot the tail off a buffalo nickel from fifty yards. We weren’t exactly friends, but I’d known him since he walked behind Joe Broz, and while he wasn’t all that much fun, he was good at what he did. He kept his word. And he didn’t say much.

We were in my car, parked at a hydrant on Beacon Street beside the Public Garden, across the street from where Beth lived with Gary Eisenhower.

“Her name’s Beth Jackson,” I said. “We’ll sit here and watch. If she comes out and gets in a car, we’ll tail her. If she comes out and starts walking, you’ll tail her.”

“’Cause she knows you,” Vinnie said.

“Yes.”

Vinnie nodded.

“And that’s it?” he said. “You want me to follow this broad around, tell you what I see?”

“Yep.”

“I don’t have to clip her?”

“No,” I said.

“I don’t like to clip no broad, I don’t have to,” Vinnie said.

“You won’t have to,” I said.

He looked at her picture.

“Nice head,” he said.

“Yep.”

“How long we gonna do this?” Vinnie said.

“Don’t know.”

“She takes a car and I just ride around with you,” Vinnie said.

“Correct,” I said.

“Okay,” he said.

“You care why we’re tailing her?” I said.

“Nope.”

One of Vinnie’s great charms was that he had no interest in any information he didn’t need. We sat with Beth for several days. Mostly she walked. So mostly I stayed in the car and Vinnie hoofed it.

“She goes to Newbury Street,” Vinnie said. “Meets different broads. They shop. They have lunch. Today it was in the café at Louis.”

“Must be an adventure for you,” I said.

“Yeah. I thought Louis was a men’s store.”

“All genders,” I said.

“You buy stuff there?”

“Don’t have my size,” I said.

“Got my size,” Vinnie said.

“See anything you like?” I said.

“Most of it looks kinda funny,” Vinnie said.

“That’s called stylish,” I said.

“Not by me,” Vinnie said.

“She spot you?”

Vinnie stared at me.

“Nobody spots me, I don’t want to be spotted,” Vinnie said.

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” I said.

We did that for most of a week, with Vinnie doing all the legwork and me twaddling in the car. On a white, dripping, above-freezing Friday in late February, I called it quits.

“You stick with her till I call you off,” I said to Vinnie. “Or you can’t stand it anymore. You don’t need me. She’s obviously a walking girl.”

“I won’t get sick of it,” Vinnie said. “I like looking at her ass.”

“Motivation is good,” I said.

Vinnie got out of the car, and I drove home.

GARY EISENHOWER came to see me. I was in my office with my feet up, listening to some Anita O’Day songs on my office computer and thinking lightly.

“Who’s the broad singing,” Gary said when he came in.

“Anita O’Day,” I said.

“I need to talk,” he said.

I turned Anita off and swiveled my full attention to him.

“Go,” I said.

He sat in one of my client chairs.

“I . . .”

He shifted a little and crossed one leg over the other.

“I . . . I feel really bad,” he said. “About Estelle.”

I nodded.

“And I . . . I . . . I got no one else to talk to about it,” he said.

“Happy to be the one,” I said.

“I mean, I been with Estelle for, like, ten years,” Gary said.

“Long time,” I said.

“I . . . I cared about her.”

“Through all the philandering” I said.

“Sure, I told you. She liked it, too. We were in that together.”

I nodded.

“For crissake, who would want to kill Estelle,” Gary said.

I shook my head. I wanted to go where he wanted to. I suspected he was circling it. He shifted in his chair and crossed his legs in the other direction. He tapped out a little drumbeat on his thighs for a moment.

“The thing is,” he said. “The thing that kills me is . . . did I do something to cause this?”

I looked interested.

“I mean,” he said, “did I, like . . . did I bring her into contact with someone who would kill her?”

I waited. He didn’t say anything else. I waited some more. He interlocked his fingers and worked his hands back and forth. Clarice Richardson had been wrong, I thought. Gary was not devoid of something like a moral or ethical sense. Whatever it quite was, it was nagging at him now. He looked at me. The sense had apparently taken him as far as it was going to. Probably wasn’t a very robust sense to begin with.

“I mean, why would someone kill her?” he said again.

“Money,” I said. “Love and the stuff that goes with it.”

“What stuff?” he said.

“Passion, jealousy, and hate,” I said.

“Estelle didn’t like Beth living with us,” Gary said.

I nodded.

“I mean, she did at first,” he said. “You know, she liked the money, and the truth of it is, she liked the three-way for a while.”

“And you said you liked it okay,” I said.

He smiled briefly, and for a moment the old Gary shone through.

“Hell,” he said. “I like everything.”

“Beth like the three-way?” I said.

He looked startled.

“Beth?” he said.

“Uh-huh.”

“She never said she didn’t,” he said.

“So why didn’t Estelle like Beth living there?” I said.

“I don’t know,” Gary said. “I mean, women are a pretty weird species.”

“One of the two weirdest,” I said.

Gary looked blank. Then he kind of shook it off.

“Anyway, Estelle started saying stuff like Beth was getting too bossy, and how we couldn’t get any privacy.”

“She say that to Beth?”

“I don’t think so,” Gary said. “She said it to me quite a bit toward the end. But I never heard her talk to Beth about it.”

“You say anything to Beth?” I said.

“Me? No. I learned a long time ago to stay out of a catfight.”

“You think Beth might have killed Estelle so she could have you to herself?” I said.

“We was at the big Community Servings event, at the Langham,” Gary said. “Cops told us when she died. Beth couldn’ta done it.”

He said it too fast. Like he’d rehearsed it.

“The Hotel Langham affair your idea?” I said.

“Me? No. Beth wanted to go. Said she knew a lotta people went to it. Said she wanted them to see her boyfriend.”

“You say anything about being Estelle’s boyfriend?”

“Hell,” Gary said. And there was no bravado in his voice.

“I’m everybody’s boyfriend.”

“And Estelle’s dead,” I said.

Gary didn’t speak. He nodded his head slowly, and as he did, tears began to well in his eyes.

HAWK CAME TO MY PLACE to babysit Pearl, and Susan went with me to New York for fun. We stopped for a tongue sandwich at Rein’s deli on the way down. I made several amusing tongue remarks while we ate, which Susan said were disgusting. That night we stayed uptown at The Carlyle, had dinner at Café Boulud, and went to bed before midnight.

I was prepared for several hours of wild abandon when I got into bed. But by the time Susan got through with her nocturnal ablutions, I had nodded off. I woke up in the morning with Susan’s head on my chest. I shifted a little so I could look at her. She opened her eyes and we looked at each other. She moved a little so we were facing.

“You’ve always been an early riser,” Susan said.

“Is that a double entendre?” I said.

“I think so,” Susan said.

“Shall we take advantage of it?” I said.

“Right after we shower and brush our teeth,” Susan said.

“By then it may be too late,” I said.

She smiled. And got out of bed.

“Not you and me, big boy,” she said. “For us it’s never too late.”

“How come you sleep in sweatpants and a T-shirt?” I said.

She smiled again.

“So that when I take them off,” she said, “the contrast makes me look really good.”

“It works,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, and went into the bathroom and turned on the shower.

A half-hour later we were both back in bed, clean of body and mouth. When Susan made love she went deep inside someplace. She didn’t withdraw. It was just the intensity of her focus that rendered everything except the lovemaking irrelevant. I liked to look at her then, her eyes closed, her face perfectly still, calm in contrast to what we both were feeling and doing. The event was busy enough so I couldn’t look for very long, but when we were done and I was looking down at her, after a time she opened her eyes and looked at me and I could see her slowly refocusing, swimming back to the surface from wherever she had been. It was always a moment like no other.

“You lookin’ at me,” Susan said in a surprisingly good De Niro impression.

“Sex is a complicated thing,” I said.

Susan widened her eyes.

“Wow,” she said.

“It enhances love,” I said. “But not as much as love enhances it.”

“You’ve noticed that,” Susan said.

“I have.”

“And you may be particularly aware of that interplay these days,” Susan said. “Because of this business with Gary Eisenhower and the women.”

“I would guess,” I said.

Susan and I stayed in eye lock, another moment, then. She smiled.

“Perhaps,” she said, “if you would get your two-hundred-something pounds off of my body, I could breathe and we could discuss it over breakfast.”

“You were breathing good a little while ago,” I said.

“Gasping,” Susan said.

“In awe?” I said.

“For breath,” she said.

I eased off her and lay on my back beside her, and she put her head on my shoulder.

“I mean, the old jokes are all true. The worst sex I ever had was very good. But I have never had a sexual experience to compare to making love with you.”

“Jewesses are hot,” Susan said.

“You are beautiful, and in shape, and skillful, and enthusiastic. But I have been with many other women who fit that description close enough. But nothing to compare with you.”

Susan turned her head so that she could look at me.

“There’s a saying I read someplace, that appetite is the best sauce,” she said.

“Meaning it’s not just what you are, it’s what I feel you are,” I said.

“I would guess,” she said, “in truth, that it is finally about what and who we are.”

I nodded.

“It’s what Gary Eisenhower and his women don’t understand, and probably never will,” I said.

“It is probably life’s essence,” Susan said.

I nodded.

“Maybe children, too,” I said.

“Maybe,” Susan said. “But we’re not going to have any.”

“This’ll have to do,” I said.

“It does very well,” she said.

She kissed me. I kissed her back.

“I’m thinking pancakes for breakfast,” she said.

WE HAD PANCAKES for breakfast and walked down through Central park to Bergdorf and Barneys, where Susan shopped and I trailed along to watch her hold stuff up, and admire her and, occasionally, some of the other female shoppers. In the next couple of days, we strolled through the little zoo in Central Park. We had dinner at the Four Seasons and walked through Rockefeller Center and Grand Central Station, which I always liked to do in New York. We experienced life’s essence several times before we went home.

Life’s essence never disappoints.

It was a Wednesday morning when I got back to my office. There was a call on my answering machine from Vinnie.

“Call me,” he said. “I might have something.”

I called him on his cell phone.

“Where are you?” I said.

“In the Public Garden,” he said, “watching her house.”

“What’s up?” I said.

“Nothing at the moment, but Monday she had a, like, a incident with a guy.”

“Tell me,” I said.

“Guy’s waiting outside her house when she comes back from her health club. I’m trailing along behind, looking at her ass, and he, like, stops her as she starts up her steps. Puts his hand on her arm. She slaps it away. He says something. She says something. He puts his hand on her arm again. She shoves him away and runs up the steps into her house. He stands down at the foot of the stairs for a long time and looks at her front door. I’m up the street thinking if he tries to go in after her do I shoot him. But he didn’t. After a while he walked away.”

“It wasn’t a friendly exchange,” I said.

“No.”

“You recognize the guy?”

“No, but he wasn’t her type, that’s for sure.”

“What’d he look like?” I said.

“Big guy, ’bout your size, but, you know, he was walking on his heels.”