“No, ma’am. Old Harv is just as bad, just as far into the sayings of his father and just as blind to what’s beyond them as Pam is.”
“Doesn’t he need therapy too?”
The oysters were outstanding. Very fresh, very young. “Yeah, I imagine. But I think she might be brighter, and have more guts. I don’t think he’s got the guts for therapy. Maybe not the brains either. But I’ve only seen him under stress. Maybe he’s better than he looks,” I said. “He loves her. Loves the crap out of her.”
“Maybe that’s just another saying of his father’s that he can’t go behind.”
“Maybe everything’s a saying. Maybe there isn’t anything but saying. You have to believe in something. Loving the crap out of someone isn’t the worst one.”
“Ah, you sweet talker you,” Susan said. “How elegantly you put it. Do you love the crap out of anyone?”
“You got it, sweetheart,” I said.
“Is that your Bogart impression again?”
“Yeah, I work on it in the car mirror driving back and forth between here and Boston and New Bedford.”
The oysters departed and the lobster came. While we worked on it I told Susan everything we had set up for next day. Few people can match Susan Silverman for lobster eating. She leaves no claw uncracked, no crevice unpried. And all the while she doesn’t get any on her and she doesn’t look savage.
I tend to hurt myself when I attack a baked stuffed lobster. So I normally get thermidor, or salad, or stew or whatever they offered that had been shelled for me.
When I got through talking Susan said, “It’s hard to keep it all in your head, isn’t it. So many things depend on so many other things. So much is unresolved and will remain so unless everything goes in sequence.”
“Yeah, it’s nervous-making.”
“You don’t seem nervous.”
“It’s what I do,” I said. “I’m good at it. It’ll probably work.”
“And if it doesn’t.”
“Then it’s a mess and I’ll have to think of something else. But I’ve done what I can. I try not to worry about things I can’t control.”
“And you assume if it breaks you can fix it, don’t you?”
“I guess so. Something like that. I’ve always been able to do most of what I needed to do.”
We each had a very good wild blueberry tart for dessert and retired to the bar for Irish coffee. On the ride back to the motel, Susan put her head back against the seat without the kerchief and let her hair blow about.
“Want to go look at the ocean,” I said. “Yes,” she said.
I drove down Sea Street to the beach and parked in the lot. It was late and there was no one there. Susan left her shoes in the car and we walked along the sand in the bright darkness with the ocean rolling in gently to our left. I took her hand and we walked in silence. Off somewhere to the right, inland, someone was playing an old Tommy Dorsey album and a vocal group was singing “Once in a while.” The sound in the late stillness drifted out across the water. Quaint and sort of old-fashioned now, and familiar.
“Want to swim,” I said.
We dropped our clothes in a heap on the beach and went into the ebony water and swam beside each other parallel to the shore perhaps a quarter of a mile. Susan was a strong swimmer and I didn’t have to slow down for her. I dropped back slightly so I could watch the white movement of her arms and shoulders as they sliced almost soundlessly through the water. We could still hear the stereo. A boy singer was doing “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” with a male vocal group for backing. Ahead of me Susan stopped and stood breast deep in the water. I stopped beside her and put my arms around her slick body. She was breathing deeply, though not badly out of breath, and I could feel her heart beating strongly against my chest. She kissed me and the salt taste of ocean mixed with the sweet taste of her lipstick. She pulled her head back and looked up at me with her hair plastered tight against her scalp. And the beads of sea water glistening on her face. Her teeth seemed very shiny to me, up close like that when she smiled.
“In the water?” she said.
“Never tried it in the water,” I said. My voice was hoarse again.
“I’ll drown,” she said and turned and dove toward the shore. I plunged after her and caught her at the tidal margin and we lay in the wet sand and made love while Frank Sinatra and the Pied Pipers sang “There Are Such Things” and the waves washed about our legs. By the time we had finished the late-night listener had put on an Artie Shaw album and we were listening to “Dancing in the Dark.” We were motionless for a bit, letting the waves flow over us. The tide seemed to be coming in. A wave larger than the ones before it broke over us, and for a moment we were underwater. We came up, both of us blowing water from our mouths, and looked at each other and began to laugh. “Deborah Kerr,” I said.
“Burt Lancaster,” she said.
“From here to eternity,” I said.
“That far, at least,” she said. And we snuggled in the wet sand with the sea breaking over us until our teeth began to chatter.
Chapter 25
We got dressed and went back to the motel and took a long hot shower together and ordered a bottle of Burgundy from room service and got into bed and sipped the wine and watched the late movie, Fort Apache, one of my favorites, and fell asleep.
In the morning we had breakfast in the room and when I left for Boston about eight-thirty, Susan was still in bed, drinking a cup of coffee and watching the Today program.
The Suffolk County Court House in Pemberton Square is a very large gray building that’s hard to see because it’s halfway up the east flank of Beacon Hill and the new Government Center buildings shield it from what I still call Bowdoin Square and Scollay Square. I parked down in Bowdoin Square in front of the Saltonstall State Office Building and walked up the hill to the courthouse.
Jim Clancy had an Errol Flynn mustache, and it looked funny because his face was round and shiny and his light hair had receded hastily from his forehead. Sylvia and McDermott were there already, along with a guy who looked like Ricardo Montalban and one who looked like a Fed. McDermott introduced me. Ricardo turned out in fact to be Bobby Santos who might someday be public safety commissioner. The Fed turned out to be a man named Klaus from Treasury.
“We’ll meet some people from Chelsea over there,” McDermott said. “We’ve already filled Bobby in, and we’re about to brief these gentlemen.”
McDermott was wearing a green T-shirt today, with a pocket over the left breast, and gray corduroy pants, and sandals. His gun was stuck in his belt under the T-shirt, just above his belt buckle, and bulged like a prosthetic device. Klaus, in a Palm Beach suit, white broadcloth shirt and polka dot bow tie, looked at him like a virus. He spoke to Sylvia.
“What’s Spenser’s role in this?”
Sylvia said, “Why not ask him?”
“I’m asking you,” Klaus said.
Sylvia looked at McDermott and raised his eyebrows. McDermott said, “Good heavens.”
“Did I ever explain to you,” Sylvia said to McDermott. “why faggots wear bow ties?”
I said to Klaus, “I’m the guy set it up. I’m the one knows the people and I’m the one that supervises the swap. I’m what you might call your key man.”
Clancy said, “Go ahead, McDermott. Lay it out for us, we want to get the arrangements set.”
McDermott lit a miserable-looking cigarette from the pack he kept in the pocket of his T-shirt.
“Well,” he said, “me and Jackie was sitting around the squad room one day, thinking about crime and stuff, it was kind of a slow day, and here comes this key man here.”
Klaus said, “For crissake, get on with it.”
Santos said, “Rich.”
McDermott said, “Yeah, yeah, okay, Bobby. I just don’t want to go too fast for the G-man.”