Francis Ronan was having coffee. He put his cup down on the mahogany coffee table and got up from his brown leather arm chair. A copy of the New York Times lay open on the floor beside the chair.
"Mr. Spenser," Jeanette said, "my husband, Francis Ronan."
Ronan was obviously older than his wife, but not much bigger. I put out my hand. Ronan didn't really shake hands. He simply handed you his and allowed you to squeeze it for a moment. He was a thin guy with a bald head and a deep tan. I was running into a lot of tans lately. I tried not to look pallid.
"Coffee?" Ronan said.
"That would be nice," I said.
"Jeanette," Ronan said, and his wife stepped around to the coffee table and poured some coffee from a silver pitcher into a white bone china cup.
"Cream and sugar?"
I said yes and she put some of each into the cup and handed it to me. Apparently I was expected to drink it myself. Ronan nodded at another brown leather chair across from him, and I sat. Jeanette Ronan took a chair to her husband's left. Unless she had a special deal with God, she obviously worked out a lot. And effectively. Ronan studied me over his coffee cup for a time. He wore glasses and it made his eyes seem bigger than they were, though it would have been hard for them to be smaller.
I think I was supposed to shift uneasily in my chair under Ronan's gaze, but I had been gazed at by a lot of people, and I was able to remain calm. I drank some coffee. It was good coffee. Ronan would have good coffee. Below us I could hear the surf. It sounded just right. Ronan would have quality surf. And fine cigars. And a grand home. And the best brandy. And a slick-looking wife. And some dandy white bone china cups to stare over. Finally he took a sip and put the cup down.
"Well," Ronan said. "Go ahead."
"I was hoping to talk with Mrs. Ronan about her sexual harassment suit against Brad Sterling," I said.
"Go ahead."
"Tell me about the sexual harassment," I said.
She smiled courteously and looked at her husband.
"Mrs. Ronan would prefer not to go over that again," Ronan said.
"Did he touch you?" I said.
"You are impertinent, sir," Ronan said.
"That's widely acknowledged," I said.
"It is not a quality I admire."
"What can you tell me about your relationship with Brad Sterling?" I said to Jeanette.
She shook her head before the question was even finished.
"I had no… "
"I am afraid this interview is over," Ronan said.
"Hard to tell," I said.
"Jeanette, perhaps you can excuse yourself," Ronan said.
She smiled and nodded. She stood. I stood. Ronan remained seated. She put out her hand. I took it. It was much firmer and warmer than her husband's.
"Nice to have met you, Mr. Spenser," she said.
"You're just saying that."
Her smile remained polite as she left the glass room. I looked at Ronan. He had poured himself a little more coffee from his silver coffee carafe into his white bone china cup, and was adding a single cube of sugar with a small pair of silver tongs.
"You had no intention of telling me anything," I said. "Why did you agree to see me?"
Ronan made a thin lip movement that he probably thought was a smile.
"I like to get the measure of people," he said.
"And you think you can do it in this amount of time?"
"I believe I can," he said. "And I want them to get the measure of me."
"Sure," I said. "About five foot six. Right?"
"I have no interest in jokes, Spenser. Nor, frankly, any further interest in you. I have learned what I need to know. Granted, you, are physically imposing. You would probably make a good bouncer. But in any way that matters, you are a lightweight. I can reach into every crevice of this state. Should you become an irritant, I can have you squished like an insect. You are way out of your league here, and it would be in your best interest to recognize that."
"Squished?" I said.
Ronan didn't answer. He seemed entirely satisfied with his assessment of me and had nothing to add.
"You college professors are a tough bunch," I said.
Ronan smiled almost indulgently.
"I am at the moment associated with a university," he said. "But surely you know my career."
"Not as well as I will."
Ronan laughed out loud. "Well, really?" he said. "Was that a threat?"
"I guess so," I said. "You are, after all, an annoying little twerp."
I thought Ronan might have colored a little under his tan, but his voice revealed nothing. He stood.
"As I said, you would make a good bouncer. Let me show you the way out."
Driving back across the causeway toward the rest of Marblehead, I wondered what there was in a simple harassment suit to make Ronan lean on me so hard.
chapter six
I WAS WITH Susan. We were lying in bed at my apartment with my arm under her shoulders and her head on my chest. Pearl was in exile somewhere outside the bedroom door.
"One of us should probably get up and let the baby in," Susan said.
"Absolutely," I said.
We lay still.
"Well?" Susan said.
"I thought you were volunteering," I said.
"You're closest to the door."
"True," I said.
"And you're a guy," she said.
"That clinches it," I said.
I got up and opened the bedroom door. Pearl bounded into the room, gave me a sidelong look which might have been reproachful, and hopped up on the bed in my spot.
"This didn't work out exactly as I'd hoped," I said.
"She'll move," Susan said, and, in fact Pearl did. She moved huffily down to the foot of the bed and turned around three or four times and lay down. I put my arm back under Susan's shoulders. She put her head back on my chest. Pearl put her head on my right shinbone.
"My mother would never allow the dog anywhere but outside or in the kitchen," Susan said.
"Barbaric."
"I think that was a more general rule in those days," she said.
"How long have we been together?" I said.
"Roughly since the beginning of time," she said.
"Or longer," I said. "And I barely know where you grew up."
"Never seemed to matter."
"No," I said. "It didn't. I guess we kind of liked the sense of living in the immediate present."
"It was a way to symbolize that what happened before we met didn't matter."
"Yes," I said.
Outside my bedroom window, in the oblique bluish glare of the street lamps, I could see snow falling. It was falling lightly, a spring snow, the flakes spaced wide apart. It was the best kind of snow, because this far into March you knew it wouldn't last. Baseball season opened in nineteen days.
"So, you grew up in Swampscott," I said.
"Now it matters?" Susan said.
"It matters to you," I said.
She was quiet. With her forefinger she traced on my chest the outline of a bullet wound that I'd survived.
"I guess everyone has scars," Susan said. "Yours, at least, show."
"I got shot in the ass once in London," I said.
"I always suspected you were mooning the shooter," she said.
Outside the window the snowflakes were smaller, and coming faster, and straight down. Susan stopped tracing the scar on my chest and put her hand down flat over it.
"So, I grew up in Swampscott," Susan said.
"I knew that."
"My father was a pharmacist. Hirsch Drug on Humphrey Street. My mother was a housewife."
"No sisters or brothers," I said.
"They were childless until me. My father was forty-one when I was born. My mother was thirty-eight."
"How'd that happen?" I said.
"I don't think it was intentional," Susan said. "My mother never talked much about that kind of thing. Actually, my mother probably didn't know too much about that kind of thing."
"Being born late could work either way for you," I said.
She laughed, though I didn't hear humor in it.
"Actually it went both ways. My father was ecstatic. My mother was not."