Mortal Stakes (22 page)

Maynard started to take him toward the door, his arm around Lester’s back.

“Bucky,” I said, “we agree about the tie? And how we got no further business?”

Maynard nodded. There was no color left in his face, just the slight smear of brown, drying blood on his lip.

“I want to go home, Bucky,” Lester mumbled, and Bucky said, “Yeah, yeah, Lester, we’ll go home.” And out they went.

Linda Rabb sat on the floor with her son and held him against her and put her face in his hair. They rocked back and forth slightly on the floor, and Marty Rabb and I stood awkwardly above them and said nothing at all. Finally I said, “Okay, Marty. I think we’ve done all there is to do.”

He put his hand out. “Thank you, Spenser, I guess. We were in a mess we couldn’t have gotten out of without you. I can’t say quite where we’re at now, but thank you for what you did. Including Lester. I think probably he’s too good at tae kwon dong or whatever it is for me.”

“He might have been too good for me if I hadn’t sucker-punched him first.”

We shook hands. Linda Rabb didn’t look up. I went out the front door. She didn’t say goodbye.

I never saw her again.

AND YOU KEPT HITTING him, Susan Silverman said.

We were sitting in a back booth in The Last Hurrah, looking at the menu and having the first drink of the evening.

Mine was a stein of Harp; hers, a vodka gimlet.

“It all seemed to bubble up inside me and explode. It wasn’t Lester; it was Doerr and Wally Hogg and me and the case and the way things worked out so everyone got hurt some. It all just exploded out of me, and I damn near killed the poor creep.”

“From what you say he probably earned the beating.”

“Yeah, he did. That’s not what bothers me. I’m what bothers me. I’m not supposed to do that.”

“I know, I’ve seen the big red S on your chest.”

“That ain’t all you seen, sweet patooti.”

“I know, but it’s all I remember.”

“Oh,” I said.

She smiled at me, that sunrise of a smile that colored her whole face and seemed to enliven her whole body. “Well, maybe I can remember something else if I think on it.”

“Perhaps a refresher course later on tonight,” I said.

“Perhaps.”

The waiter came and took our order, went away, and returned shortly with another beer for me.

“The irony is,” I said, “that Linda Rabb is married to one of the all-time greats of jockdom, and she’s being helped by me, with the red S on my chest and the gun in my pocket, and she’s the one that saves them. She’s the one, while us two stud ducks are standing around flexing, that does what had to be done. And it hurt and I couldn’t save them and her husband couldn’t save them. She saved herself and her husband.”

“Maynard has stopped the blackmail?”

“Sure, he had to. He had nothing to gain and everything to lose.” I drank some beer. The waiter brought us each a plate of oysters and a bottle of Chablis.

“The papers have been kind to Mrs. Rabb.”

“Yeah, pretty good. There’s been a lot of mail, some of it really ugly, but the club publicity people are handling it and she hasn’t had to read much of it.”

“How about Marty?”

“He went into the stands for some guy out in Minnesota and got a three-day suspension for it. Since then he’s kept his mouth shut, but you can tell it hurts.”

“And you?”

I shrugged. The waiter took away the empty oyster plates and put down two small crocks of crab and lobster stew.

“And you?” she said again.

“I killed two guys, and almost killed another one.”

“Killing those two was what made it possible for Linda Rabb to do what she did.”

“I know.”

“You’ve killed people before.”

“Yeah.”

“They would have killed you.”

“Yeah.”

“Then it had to be, didn’t it?”

“I set them up,” I said. “I got them up there to kill them.”

“Yes, and you walked in on them from the front, two of them to one of you, like a John Wayne movie. How many men do you think would have done that?”

I shook my head.

“Do you think they would have done it? They weren’t doing it. They were trying to ambush you. And if they’d succeeded, would they be agonizing about it now?”

I shook my head again.

“You’d have had to kill them,” Susan said. “Sometime.

Now it’s done. What does it matter how?”

“That’s the part that does matter. How. It’s the only part that matters.”

“Honor?” Susan said.

“Yeah,” I said. The waiter came and took the crocks and returned with scrod for Susan and steak for me. We ate a little.

“I am not making fun,” Susan said, “but aren’t you older and wiser than that?”

I shook my head. “Nope. Neither is Rabb. I know what’s killing him. It’s killing me too. The code didn’t work.”

“The code,” Susan said.

“Yeah, jock ethic, honor, code, whatever. It didn’t cover this situation.”

“Can’t it be adjusted?”

“Then it’s not a code anymore. See, being a person is kind of random and arbitrary business. You may have noticed that. And you need to believe in something to keep it from being too random and arbitrary to handle. Some people take religion, or success, or patriotism, or family, but for a lot of guys those things don’t work. A guy like me. I don’t have religion or family, that sort of thing. So you accept some system of order, and you stick to it. For Rabb it’s playing ball.

You give it all you got and you play hurt and you don’t complain and so on and if you’re good you win and the better you are the more you win so the more you win the more you prove you’re good. But for Rabb it’s also taking care of the wife and kid, and the two systems came into conflict. He couldn’t be true to both. And now he’s compromised and he’ll never have the same sense of self he had before.”

“And you, Spenser?”

“Me too, I guess. I don’t know if there is even a name for the system I’ve chosen, but it has to do with honor. And honor is behavior for its own reason. You know?”

“Who has it,” Susan said, “he that died a Wednesday?”

“Yeah, sure, I know that too. But all I have is how I act. It’s the only system I fit into. Whatever the hell I am is based in part on not doing things I don’t think I should do. Or don’t want to do. That’s why I couldn’t last with the cops.

That’s the difference between me and Martin Quirk.”

“Perhaps Quirk has simply chosen a different system,” Susan said.

“Yeah. I think he has. You’re catching on.”

“And,” Susan said, “two moral imperatives in your system are never to allow innocents to be victimized and never to kill people except involuntarily. Perhaps the words aren’t quite the right ones, but that’s the idea, isn’t it?”

I nodded.

“And,” she said, “this time you couldn’t obey both those imperatives. You had to violate one.”

I nodded again.

“I understand,” she said.

We ate for a bit in silence.

“I can’t make it better,” she said.

“No,” I said. “You can’t.”

We ate the rest of the entree in silence.

The waiter brought coffee. “You will live a little diminished, won’t you?” she said.

“Well, I got a small sniff of my own mortality. I guess everyone does once in a while. I don’t know if that’s diminishment or not. Maybe it’s got to do with being human.”

She looked at me over her coffee cup. “I think maybe it has to do with that,” she said.

I didn’t feel good, but I felt better. The waiter brought the check.

Outside on Tremont Street, Susan put her arm through mine. It was a warm night and there were stars out.

We walked down toward the Common.

“Spenser,” she said, “you are a classic case for the feminist movement. A captive of the male mystique, and all that.

And I want to say, for God’s sake, you fool, outgrow all that Hemingwayesque nonsense. And yet…” She leaned her head against my shoulder as she spoke. “And yet I’m not sure you’re wrong. I’m not sure but what you are exactly what you ought to be. What I am sure of is I’d care for you less if killing those people didn’t bother you.”

At Park Street we crossed to the Common and walked down the long walk toward the Public Garden. The swan boats were docked for the night. We crossed Arlington onto Marlborough Street and turned in at my apartment. We went up in silence. Her arm still through mine. I opened the door and she went in ahead of me. Inside the door, with the lights still out, I put my arms around her and said, “Suze, I think I can work you into my system.”

“Enough with the love talk,” she said. “Off with the clothes.”

The End

ROBERT B. PARKER is the author of twenty-three books. Since his first Spenser novel, The Godwulf Manuscript, he has had numerous bestsellers, including Pale Kings and Princes, Crimson Joy, Valediction, A Catskill Eagle and Taming a SeaHorse; Poodle Springs, his best-selling collaboration with Raymond Chandler; and the more recent Stardust and Playmates. Mr. Parker currently lives in Boston with his wife, Joan.