"Guess we ain't as close as you said we was?" Dwayne said.
"Close enough to go down the shit chute together, buddy boy."
Dwayne took a long step and was directly in front of Deegan. Deegan tipped his head back to look up at him. "And don't think I'm scared of you, jumbo. The bigger you are the better target you make."
Deegan stood up unhurriedly. "I'm walking," he said.
From the doorway Hawk looked at me. Deegan stepped around Dwayne.
Madelaine said, "Bobby?"
"You gonna shoot," Deegan said to me, "start now."
I shook my head.
"I got more than I hoped for already," I said.
Hawk stepped aside and Deegan walked out the door.
30
"WHERE you suppose he's going?" Hawk said.
"Probably down to the Marriott and sit in the lobby," I said.
"Embarrassing to stomp out and stand around outside on the street," Hawk said. Madelaine was looking at us in her living room as if we didn't have tenure.
"You're in this, Madelaine," I said. "When Bobby goes you're going too."
She shook her head.
"Yes," I said. "You are the yenta in this thing. You knew Dwayne was a good prospect. He couldn't read. He needed money. He trusted you."
"I can read stuff," Dwayne said.
"You knew Bobby had money from knocking over that OTB parlor. You knew he was looking to do something with it, put it somewhere would give him a nice return, account for his affluence."
"I had nothing to do with that holdup," Madelaine said.
"But you knew it took place," I said.
"I . . ." She looked around the room and her eyes rested on Susan. "Can't you make him leave me alone?" she said.
"I can't make him do anything," Susan said. "It would be easiest if you told him."
"Genie's out of the bottle now, Mad," I said. "No corking it up. Sooner or later it's all going to get said."
She shook her head.
"You in this with Bobby, ain't you, Dr. Roth?" Dwayne said.
She kept shaking her head.
"Get out," she said. "Get out of my house."
I looked at Dwayne.
"You ready to tell me about it?"
He looked at Chantel and then at Madelaine. His eyes moved to Hawk and to Susan.
"I got to think," he said.
I started to speak. Out of Dwayne's view Susan shook her head. I stopped and then started again.
"Okay, Dwayne," I said.
Dwayne looked around the room again. Then he put his hand out and Chantel took it, and they left, walking past a motionless Hawk at the door.
Hawk looked at me. I nodded and he trailed behind them. If Deegan had been a danger before, he'd be a lot worse now.
"Are you going to leave?" Madelaine said. Her voice came out in a breathy rush. "Are you going to get out?"
I looked at her for maybe seven seconds. "Sure," I said, and we left.
In the car I said to Susan, "Time to let Dwayne rest a little?"
"Yes," she said. "He'll come around. But he's giving up a male authority figure and it's hard for him. He needs a little time to find a new one."
"Be better if he didn't need one," I said.
"He's what," Susan said, "twenty-one, twenty-two?"
"Okay," I said.
"I watched him as all that went on," Susan said. "He looked at Deegan or you all the time we were there. One or the other of you. He was continuously aware of both of you and of the way either of you reacted to anything."
We were headed down Commonwealth Ave., past the Marriott and the canoe rental landing toward 128 and the Mass. Pike interchange.
"Deegan made a mistake when he threatened Chantel," I said.
"Yes," Susan said, "he did. And that's an encouraging sign. That his need for the young woman is strong enough to offset his need far the male authority figure."
"Might be something a little more than need," I said.
Susan turned her startling Technicolor smile on me.
"Love?"
"Maybe," I said.
"If love is more than need," Susan said, "or obsession or other pathological manifestations."
"You babes are such flighty romantics," I said.
I was looping around the complicated cloverleaf at the junction of Routes 30, 128, and 90. "Is it love that made you go this way?" Susan said. "Because I think it's shorter?"
"No. This is stubbornness. I wish to prove to you that it's longer."
I dropped thirty-five cents into the automatic toll hopper and headed in the turnpike extension toward Boston.
"Love is what makes me care whether you know which way is shorter," I said.
She put her hand lightly on my thigh. I dropped my right hand on top of it and drove with my left.
"Professionally," Susan said, "I'm not at all sure that love, as such, is not simply a complex of human impulses: need, identification, possessiveness, fear of loneliness, impulse to replicate the family from which you sprang, sexual desire, anger, the desire to punish, the desire to be punished."
I didn't say anything. The Cherokee had tinted glass and with the windows closed the interior was quiet and cool. There weren't many cars out on a Sunday midday in late March, and the hum of the car's passage was all there was for sound.
"On the other hand . . ." I said.
"On the other hand I love you so much I could swoon," Susan said.
"Swoon?"
"Swoon."
"And the fact that Dwayne feels swoonie over Chantel," I said, "means he's capable of forming healthier attachments than the one with Deegan."
"I only said I was swoonie over you," Susan said. "I can't speak for Dwayne or Chantel. But the rest of it is right."
"Chantel says he needs white approval," I said.
"Yes, so a white male authority figure may even be more important to him than it would be to some," Susan said.
"What do you recommend?"
"Let Chantel work on him," Susan said. "Let him think about what's happened to him, and let him come to it himself. You don't want him to feel pushed or he's very likely to clam up and if you push him hard enough you can push him right back to Deegan. Deegan says things Dwayne likes to hear. You keep telling him unpleasant stuff."
"I keep telling him to grow up," I said.
"And that he's risking jail, and that he can't read, and that he should testify against a man who makes Dwayne feel like he's more important than oxygen," Susan said.
"Are you suggesting he doesn't enjoy that?"
"Only a suggestion," Susan said.
We went off at the Allston/Cambridge exit and wove through the silliest exit ever devised to Soldiers Field Road.
I looked at my watch. Susan glanced at hers and then turned to look out at the red brick Harvard buildings.
"Two minutes faster than my way," I said. She turned and smiled at me a smile of infinite sweetness.
"Shut up," I said.
31
I was in Lt. Martin Quirk's office at Homicide. Quirk was there, and Frank Belson, and a young cop from Walford named Stuart Delaney, a former state cop named LeMaster, who was the Chief of the Taft U. police, and a guy from the Middlesex D.A.'s office named Arlett. Quirk was sitting square in his chair behind his desk, his forearms resting on the desktop, his thick hands motionless on his blotter. Belson sat in a straight chair, tipped back against the wall to Quirk's left, smoking a cheap narrow cigar, with his hat on and tilted down over his forehead. The rest of us ranged in straight chairs in a semicircle facing Quirk. Quirk was looking at me.
"Why, you are perhaps asking yourself," Quirk said to me, "did Lt. Quirk invite me to his office at this time with these other gentlemen?"
"I assumed you were holding a crime stoppers seminar and wanted me to lecture," I said.
"Well, that's close," Quirk said. "Actually these gentlemen all wish to learn from you what the fuck is going on with Dwayne Woodcock?"
"So where do you come in?" I said.
"Because the Walford police asked me to pick you up and hold you for them, and I thought it might make more sense if we all got together and shared our thoughts on this matter."