Crimson Joy (7 page)

Costa grinned. "You'll qualify," he said.

We went upstairs and along a corridor lined with tired yellow tiles.

Costa unlocked the door and we went into the range.

"Lovely," Susan said.

"Yeah, they don't waste much time on the range," Costa said.

The room looked like an afterthought, jammed into a forgotten space under a long stairwell. There was a small shooting table on which a coffee can full of brass had tipped over and spilled most of the cartridge casings on the floor. Costa walked down the narrow alley of the range and pinned a target onto the trolley with a clothespin. He set the target about fifteen feet away and walked back to the shooting table.

"As you can see, ma'am, the target consists of the silhouette of a man surrounded by increasingly concentric circles; the smallest circle, around the man's head and heart area, is worth ten points. The next circle is worth nine, and so on until the last circle, outside of which there is no score."

"Please call me Susan."

"Okay, Susan. In order to qualify for a license to carry firearms you have to score seventy, firing a maximum of thirty rounds."

"Fine," Susan said.

"Want to fire some for practice, Susan?"

"No, thank you."

I took the thirty-two out and laid it, pointing downrange, on the table beside her. We put on the earmuffs.

Costa said, "

"Cause Spenser and I go way back, I'm going to give you a little head start."

He took out his own gun, a nickel-plated .38 with a black rubber grip, settled into a two-hand shooting crouch, and put six shots inside the 10 circle. He and Susan walked down to look at the target.

"Why, I seem to be within ten points of qualifying already," she said.

Her smile was full of innocent amazement. Costa reloaded his gun.

"Here," he said, "use this one. It's all sighted in." It also shot the same size rounds as the bullet holes in the target. Susan caught on at once.

"Sure," she said. She picked up the gun, held it carefully in both hands, stood as I'd taught her to, cocked the gun with her right thumb, fired carefully, six shots, single action, and put all six inside the 7 circle. Then she put the thirty-eight back down on the shooter's table and waited while Costa went down to get the target.

"You forgot to yell, "Freeze, dirt bag."

" I said.

"Couldn't I say something else, like "It's all right, I'm a doctor'?" she said.

I shook my. head in disgust. "Don't you watch television?" I said.

Costa came back with the target and said, "That's good shooting, Susan.

You've qualified, no problem. Want to fire a few rounds just to get the feel of your weapon?"

Susan said, "No, thank you."

Costa turned to me. "Six rounds each?" he said. "For a case of beer?"

"Double action," I said. "Ten seconds to get all the shots off."

"Sure," Costa said, and picked up his gun, reloaded, and put six rounds into the new target in eight seconds. He dumped the brass, reloaded, put the gun on his hip, and went down to collect his target and hang a new one. I took my place, got out the Python, and when Costa said "Go."

I fired six rounds in seven seconds.

We both had all our shots in the kill zone, but Costa had four bull's-eyes and I had two.

"Budweiser," Costa said.

"Budweiser?"

"That's right," Costa said. "I drive a Chevy too."

"The heartbeat of America," I said. "I'll drop it off tomorrow."

As we left, Costa said, "Nice shooting, Susan. We'll expedite that permit; should have it by the time the beer arrives."

Walking to the car, Susan said, "I thought you were a good shot."

"I am a good shot," I said, "but Costa shoots every day."

Susan nodded. "I could have qualified without help, but I didn't want to take away his nice gesture."

"You always get it," I said.

"Now, let's go and get a cup of coffee and some cheesecake and decide what we think about the Red Rose business."

We drove over to Chelsea to sit at a Formica table in the Washington Deli. I had some cherry cheesecake and, in utter abandon, a cup of fresh-brewed coffee. Susan had decaff and plain cheesecake. I took a bite of mine and swallowed it, followed by a small sip of coffee, black.

"Ah, wilderness," I said.

"Isn't that supposed to involve a loaf of bread and a jug of wine?"

"And thou, sweets, don't forget thou."

She had a small bite of cheesecake, edging a narrow sliver off one corner of the wedge with her fork.

"The Red Rose killer should not be in therapy," Susan said. "The killings should be the relief he needs from pressure."

"I know," I said.

"You said that. But that was before some guy went to a lot of trouble to put a red rose in your front hall."

"It doesn't mean one of my patients is the killer," Susan said.

"It means something," I said. "And it means something worrisome."

"Yes," Susan said. "I agree with that."

"The guy that left it either is or is not one of your patients," I said.

"Let's assume he is. Assuming he isn't asks for several more farfetched hypotheses than the assumption that he is."

"I don't like to think it."

Susan said.

"So what?" I said.

She smiled. "Yes, of course. Is there anything either of us knows better than the uselessness of deciding what you want to think." She took another nearly transparent sliver from her cheesecake and a sip of coffee.

"It is work where one encounters atypical people," she said. "Some of them can be frightening. If one is to do the work, one puts the fear aside."

"I know," I said.

"Yes." She smiled and put her hand on top of mine. "You would surely know about that."

My cheesecake was gone, and the cherries only a memory in my mouth. I finished my coffee.

"The bond of trust between therapist and patient is the fundament of the therapy. I cannot conspire, even with you, to identify and track any of them."

"If it is Red Rose," I said, "it's not just you that's at risk."

"I'm not sure I'm at risk at all," Susan said. "It is unlikely that he would change the object of his need suddenly to a white psychotherapist."

"It doesn't have to be sudden. Its manifestation would seem sudden, but he may have been changing slowly in therapy for the last year," I said.

Susan shrugged.

"And," I said, "you have explained to me how people like Red Rose are working with a private set of symbols. You may fit that symbolic scheme in some way, just as the black women did."

"Possibly," Susan said, "but it is still highly unlikely that a serial murderer would be in psychotherapy. People come to therapy when the pressure of their conflicting needs gets unbearable."

"Maybe the psychotherapy is part of the need," I said. "Maybe he needs the opportunity to talk about it."

"But he hasn't. I have no clients talking of serial murders."

"Maybe he's still talking about them so symbolically that you don't know it," I said. "Can a patient fool you?"

"Certainly," Susan said.

"Obviously it's not in his or her best interest to do so."

"He obviously has a need to be caught," I said. "The letter to Quirk, the tape to me."

"The tape to you may not be like the letter to Quirk," Susan said.

"Maybe not, but that makes it more likely that he's connected to you," I said. "Jealousy, or some such."

Susan made a noncommittal nod.

"Jack," I said to the counterman, "I need more coffee."

"Ted does the coffee," Jack said. "I do the celery tonic."

Ted poured some coffee and brought it out and set it down in front of me.

"Planning to stay up all night?" he said.

"Caution to the winds," I said. I put some cream in and some sugar. I had a theory about diluting the caffeine. Ted went back behind the counter.

"And," I said to Susan, "the red rose in your house. It almost got him caught."

"If it was he," Susan said.

"Coming to you might be part of the desire to get caught," I said.

"Or noticed," Susan said.

"And maybe if he gets too close to getting caught, or noticed," I said,

"he'll want to save himself by killing you."

Susan was looking at the paintings on the walls.

"This is the only deli I've ever been to that had art on the walls," she said.

I didn't say anything.

"It's possible," Susan said. She was looking full at me now and I could feel the weight of her will. "But I cannot act on the possibility. I need much more."

I looked back at her without comment. My chin was resting on top of my folded hands. Sigmund Spenser.

"I will," Susan said, "keep the gun in my desk drawer, and I will keep it on my bedside table at night." She pursed her lips a little bit and relaxed them. "And I will use it if I have to."

"Okay," I said. "I know you will. And I'm going to try and find out which one of your patients it is, and I won't tell you how I'm going to do it, because I don't know what will compromise your work and what won't."

Susan laughed without very much pleasure. "It's hard to say whether we're allies or adversaries in this," she said.

"We're allies in everything, pumpkin," I said. "It's just that we don't always go about it like other people."

"Good point," Susan said, and picked up her cup of cold coffee and drank it just as if it were hot.

I was in Susan's kitchen cleaning up breakfast when the phone rang. It was Quirk.

"Washburn's confessed," he said.

"Not surprising," I said.

"He confessed to being the Red Rose killer," Quirk said.

I didn't say anything for a minute.

"Yeah," Quirk said, "me too."

"It's bullshit," I said.

"I think he did his wife," Quirk said. "I don't believe the rest."

"What's the chain of command think?"

"Chain of command is so happy to have an arrest, they'd buy Daisy Duck for it if they had a confession," Quirk said.

"What about the guy that left the rose with Susan?" I said.

"Nobody cares about him, they don't want to hear about him," Quirk said.

"You're sticking close?"

"For the moment," I said. "Hawk's coming by around ten."

"When he gets there, come over to my office," Quirk said.

I put the dishes in the dishwasher and wiped off the counter and sat to read the Globe. They didn't have it yet. But they would. The TV people would get it first probably, but everyone would have it soon and another ring would be added to the circus.

Hawk strolled in at 9:59. He was always on time. In fact he always did everything he said he'd do. He was carrying a gym bag.

"Cops got a confession," I said.

Hawk put the gym bag on the counter in the kitchen.

"Quirk like it?" Hawk said.

"No," I said.

"Tell him about the guy ran away from you the other night?"

"Yeah."

"How Susan going to deal with it?"

"She's got a thirty-two in the desk drawer and you or me sitting around up here."

"No names?"

"No."

Hawk nodded. He opened his gym bag and took out some audio tapes, a paperback copy of Common Ground, and a copy of Ring magazine. He put the tapes in a neat pile beside Susan's stereo, put Common Ground on the coffee table next to the couch, took his gun out of the shoulder holster and placed it beside Common Ground, and settled back on the couch with Ring.

"You going to see Quirk?" he said.

"Yeah. You know where everything is?"

"Un huh."

It was one of those deceptive days in April when it seems like spring and the wind is a velvet conceit on the lingering reality of winter. I parked on Berkeley Street by a sign that said POLICE VEHICLES ONLY and went up to Quirk's office. Belson was there.

"Washburn has it all about right," Quirk said when I sat down. "The rope's a little different. Always before it was cotton. This time it's that plastic stuff you have to melt the ends when you cut it. But the tape's the same, the way she's tied is the same. She was shot the same way. But there's no semen."

"Same gun?"

"No. Same caliber, but not the same gun."

"It was all in the papers," Belson said. "I checked, everything tape, way the rope was wound, caliber gun, how she was shot, all of it. Anyone could know."

"You do the questioning?" I said to Quirk.

"Me and Frank and twenty others. It's hard to conduct a good interrogation in a case like this."

I nodded. "Everybody that outranks you has to get in on it and maybe claim he broke the case."

"Place was like a fucking cake sale," Belson said. "The fucking commissioner was there, a guy from the mayor's office."

"They told him what to say," I said.

"Sure," Belson said. He took his cigar out of his mouth and looked at it for a moment and threw it hard into the wastebasket.

"What about the rope being wrong, and the gun being different, and no semen?"

Quirk grinned. "Guy from the mayor's office says it proves he's the one. Says if he was a copycat he'd have got it right. Says because it was his wife he couldn't ejaculate."

"The gun too?"

"Says he probably got rid of it to cover himself and got another one."

Quirk said.

"Can't be a dope and work in the mayor's office," I said. "What about Washburn?"

"Managed a hamburger joint over on Huntington Ave. No connection with the cops, no record of a registered gun except the murder weapon. No previous record, except one DWI."

"What did he do with the previous gun?" I said.

"Took a cruise on the Jazz Boat, dropped it over the middle of the harbor."

"He know you?"

Quirk shook his head. "Nope. Says he looked up my address after he saw my name in the paper, but he forgot it."

"Why'd he claim to be a cop?"

"Wanted to confuse us," Belson said.

We were quiet in the room. There was an elongated rectangle of sun sprawling across Quirk's nearly empty desk. On the desk was a picture of Quirk's wife, three children, and dog. There was a desk clock that told you the time all over the world. It was never clear why Quirk wanted to know. Quirk was leaning back in his swivel chair, sucking on his lower lip.