“She prob’ly was,” he said. “She look like me.”
He looked back toward the wine again. I reached under the front seat and brought out a bottle of Glenfiddich Single Malt Scotch Whiskey. It’s handy to have around, because there are times when it is a better bribe than money.
“Try a little of this,” I said.
Tallboy stared at it and then took the bottle and swallowed some.
“Damn,” he said, “that is some juke, man. That is some bad beverage.”
“You know who killed her?” I said.
His eyes slid away from mine and he took another pull on the Glenfiddich. Then he looked back at me and his eyes were tearing. He was drunker than I thought and the scotch was moving him along.
“Sure you do. But you don’t care. You want them to get away with it.”
He shifted his gaze to Erin. “That ain’t so, Miss Macklin.”
“I know,” she said. “I know you don’t want them to get away with it.” She put her hand over the back of the seat and he took it and she held his hand. The tears were running down his face now. I was quiet. We waited. He drank again.
“Nine my fucking baby,” he said. “Motherfuckers.”
“Who?” Erin said.
“Motherfucking Hobarts.” He was mumbling. I had to listen hard. “Dealing some classic for them and I a little short, I gonna pay them. I just a little short that minute. And motherfuckers nine my little girl.”
“You sure?” I said.
“Who else it gonna be?” Tallboy said.
“You know which Hobart?” I said.
He shook his head.
“It ain’t over,” he said. “We gon take care of business. Can’t fuck with us and ride.” His head had sunk to his chest. He was talking into the bottle… and out of it. “Can’t dis a Dillard and ride, man.”
I looked at Erin and gestured with my head. “Thank you, Tallboy,” she said. “You know how to call me up, don’t you?”
Tallboy nodded.
“If you want to talk about this any more, you call me,” she said.
“Yass, Miss Macklin.”
Tallboy lurched out of the car holding the bottle of Glenfiddich. He held it up in one hand and waved it at the rest of the posse.
“Fine,” he said and started to say something else, and didn’t seem able to and lurched on into the garage, out of the rain.
I slid the car into gear and pulled away. “He isn’t even tough,” I said.
“Of course he isn’t,” Erin said. “He tries, but he’s not.”
“Tough is the only way to survive in here,” I said.
“I know,” Erin said. “Some of them are tougher than one would think possible… and some of them aren’t.”
CHAPTER 33
Erin and Hawk and I were nibbling at some Irish whiskey in my office. It was dark in the Back Bay. The rain had stopped, but everything was still wet and the streets gleamed blackly when I looked out the window.
“Say the Hobarts did it is saying Major did it,” Hawk said.
“If Tallboy’s right,” I said.
“Tallboy will never testify,” Erin said.
“No need,” Hawk said.
“Spenser said something like that,” Erin said. “I asked him if he might take action of his own. He said he might.”
Hawk smiled. He drank some whiskey. And rolled it a little on his tongue and swallowed. Then he stood and went to the sink in the corner and added a little tap water. He stood while he sampled it, nodded to himself, and came back to his chair.
Erin said, “What would you consider appropriate action?”
“We could kill him,” Hawk said. Erin looked at me.
“You?” she said.
“Somebody is going to,” I said.
“I don’t think you would,” she said, “simply execute him yourself.”
I let that slide. There was nothing there for me. She looked back at Hawk.
“You feel no sympathy for these kids, do you,” she said.
Hawk looked friendly but puzzled.
“Got nothing to do with sympathy,” Hawk said. “Got to do with work. Work I do you kill people sometimes. Major seems as good a person to kill as anybody.”
“When you were twenty,” Erin said, “you probably weren’t so different from Major.”
“Am now,” Hawk said. He drank another swallow of whiskey.
Erin was holding her whiskey glass in both hands. She stared into it quietly for a moment.
“You got out,” she said. “You were no better off than Major, probably, and you got out.”
Hawk looked at her pleasantly.
“Now you are a free man,” Erin said. “Autonomous, sure of yourself, unashamed, unafraid. Nobody’s nigger.”
Hawk listened politely. He seemed interested. “And you’ve paid a terrible price,” she said.
“Worth the cost,” Hawk said.
“I know what you’re like,” she said. “I see young men who, were they stronger, or braver, or smarter, would grow up to be like you. Young men who have put away feelings. Who make a kind of Thoreauvian virtue out of stripping their emotional lives to the necessities.”
“Probably seem a good idea at the time,” Hawk said.
“Of course it does,” Erin said. “It is probably what they must do to live. But what a tragedy, to put aside, in order to live, the things that make it worth anything to live.”
“Worse,” Hawk said, “if you do that and don’t live anyway.”
“Yes,” Erin said.
We all sat for a while nursing the whiskey, listening to the damp traffic sounds from Berkeley Street, where it crosses Boylston. Erin was still staring down into her glass. When she raised her head, I could see that her eyes were moist.
“It’s not just Major that you mourn for,” I said.
She shook her head silently.
“If Hawk talked about things like this, which he doesn’t, he might say that you misread him. That what you see as the absence of emotion is something rather more like calm.”
“Calm?” I nodded.
“I worse than Major,” Hawk said quietly. “And I got better, and I got out, and I got out by myself.”
“And that makes you calm?”
“I know I can trust me,” Hawk said.
“And you’d kill Major?”
“Don’t know if I will, know I could.”
“And you wouldn’t mind,” Erin said. “I can’t understand that.”
Erin’s glance rested on Hawk. She wasn’t staring at her whiskey now.
“I can’t understand that.”
“I know,” Hawk said.
“I don’t want to understand that,” Erin said.
“I know that too,” Hawk said.
CHAPTER 34
The rain had paused, but it was still overcast, and cold for spring, when Hawk pulled his Jaguar into the quadrangle in front of Double Deuce. He stopped. In front of us, on the wet blacktop where we normally parked, was a body. Hawk let the car idle while we got out and looked. It was Tallboy, lying on his back, his mouth ajar, his eyes staring up at the rainclouds, one leg doubled under the other. No need to feel for a pulse, he was stiff with death. Hawk and I both knew it.
“Know him?” Hawk said.
“Name was Tallboy,” I said. “He was Devona Jefferson’s boyfriend and maybe the baby’s father.”
“You just talked to him.”
“Yeah.”
“So he here for us.”
“Yeah.”
Hawk nodded. He looked slowly around the project. Nothing moved. He looked back down at Tallboy.
“Don’t seem too tall,” he said.
“He liked the big beer cans,” I said.
Hawk nodded some more, still looking almost absently at the boy’s body. His clothes were wet, which meant he’d been left here while it was still raining. There was a dark patch of blood on the front of his sweatshirt, in the middle of his chest.
“Ain’t no trash can fire,” Hawk said.
He was surveying the project again.
“He told me he was going to even up for his girlfriend,” I said. “He was drunk.”
“Probably drunk when he tried,” Hawk said, his eyes moving carefully over the silent buildings.