Sudden Mischief (18 page)

"What was I supposed to do?" he said. "They send some gangster to hurt me and I have to shoot him and the cops are after me. And I'm desperate. And down on my luck, for cripes sake, and go to her for help and she won't help. She says she's going to tell."

"Tell the police?" Susan said gently.

"Yes. Because of him."

I knew he meant me. So did Susan.

"He kept coming around, and then the cops, and she was going to go there and tell on me."

"To the police?" Susan said. "She was going to the police?"

"Yes."

Tears had formed in Sterling's eyes.

"She was my wife, for cripes sake. She was supposed to help me."

"So you had to kill her?" Susan said.

"I was supposed to let her tell?"

"And the… tongue," Susan said.

"So they'd know."

The sound of his voice had lost all hint of the man from whom it came. It sounded like a drill bit binding in metal.

"They'd know what?"

"That she was going to tell on us, so I had to kill her. It was a, a symbol. So they'd know I was protecting all of us."

"They being Gavin and Wechsler?"

"'Course."

Susan looked at me.

"What did you use?" I said.

"My jackknife. My father always said a man was no better than the knife he carried. I always carry a good jackknife."

"And what did you do with it?"

"With what?"

"The tongue," I said.

"The thing in the sink, you know…" He made a grinding noise.

"Disposal," Susan said.

"Yuh, disposal." He gestured down, with his forefinger.

Susan stared at him for a moment with no expression on her face, then she turned and walked back and stood next to me. The counter was between Sterling and us. He looked a little dazed.

"What was I supposed to do," he said. "Everybody I turn to lets me down."

Susan took a deep breath and let it out and walked to the end of the counter and picked up the phone.

"No," Sterling said.

He put his right hand behind him, feeling for the gun in his back pocket. I brought mine up from beside my thigh and aimed it at the middle of his chest.

"Try to use the gun and I'll kill you," I said.

Sterling froze in mid gesture. He looked at Susan.

"Take the gun out slowly, hold it with your thumb and forefinger only, and put it on the counter in front of me. And step back away from it."

The thing in behind his eyes was seething now. He didn't want to give up the gun. He wanted to kill both of us and everyone else who wouldn't help him. But the thing didn't make him blind. Maybe he saw something in my eyes. Maybe he knew that shooting him would satisfy me in ways that few things could. Slowly and carefully he took the gun out and put it on the counter. It was a Targa.380. He still seemed dazed. I picked the gun up and stuck it in my belt.

"Susie," he said. "For God's sake, Susie."

Susan dialed 911.

"I'm not going to stay here," he said. "You can shoot me if you want."

I shook my head. And he turned and walked from the kitchen. I followed him. He went through the living room to the hall and out the apartment door, down the stairway, and out the front door of the building. The door swung shut and latched gently behind him. From the front hall window I watched him run in the late afternoon sunshine under the filtering trees, up Linnaean Street toward Mass Ave.

Susan came to stand beside me. She put her forehead against the wall beside the window and closed her eyes.

"My God," she said. "My God."

I stood beside her without touching her, and we stood like that until the cops came.

"What will happen to him?" Susan said.

"Brad? They'll catch him."

"You seem so sure."

"He's too dumb," I said. "He won't last long."

"Can they prove he did what you said he did?"

"Well, they've got his gun. It should match up with the slugs they took out of Cony Brown and Carla."

"How awful… the tongue especially."

"I know," I said. "Funny thing. It was supposed to reassure Gavin and Wechsler. I don't think Wechsler even noticed it had happened. This was mostly Gavin and Brad, I think. But Gavin took it as a threat. You know, keep quiet or this will happen to you. He was walking around with bodyguards."

"You don't think Wechsler was involved?"

"He was involved," I said, "but basically just to have his money laundered. I don't think he even knew the mechanics."

"Because of the way he acted when you confronted him?"

"Yes."

"And you trust your instincts?"

"Have to," I said. "Most of the actually important clues in this business are really how people are. If you can't read human behavior pretty good after a while, you never get very good at this."

"But human behavior doesn't get you a conviction. You have to have hard evidence."

"True," I said. "But the behavior tells you where to look, or, sometimes, what to manufacture."

"Manufacture?"

"Cops do it. I'm not saying it's right, but they know somebody did a thing and can't prove it, so they manufacture something that will prove it."

"If they catch Brad, do you think he'll implicate Gavin and Wechsler?"

"You saw him tonight. He'd implicate his mother," I said.

"And if they don't catch him? Can you prove anything against the other two?"

I smiled. It was my moment. I took a small blue computer disk out of my shirt pocket and held it up.

"It was in your bedroom, under some sweaters," I said. "I knew he'd have it with him, and if he didn't have it in his pocket, it had to be here someplace."

"When did you find it?"

"While you were freeing Pearl from the office," I said.

"And you didn't give it to the police?"

"I want to look at it first," I said. "If it's what I think it is, I'll give it to them tomorrow."

"And if it is what you think it is, it will convict them."

"Yes," I said.

I put the disk back in my shirt pocket.

"So you've got them all," Susan said.

"I think so," I said.

Susan raised her glass and I touched the rim of mine to hers. We were quiet. The blue light had darkened as the evening drifted toward night. The whisky made my stomach warm. I could feel myself loosen slowly. Sometimes the only way I knew I was tense was feeling not tense afterwards. Susan took a short drink of whisky and let it slide down her throat and looked at me with her eyes simultaneously dark and bright. I wondered how she did that.

"You were careful of me when Brad was here," Susan said.

She had a finger of whisky in the bottom of a short thick glass and she swirled it a little as she talked.

"Yeah?"

"You stepped back as much as you could," she said. "You let me do it."

"Who better?" I said.

"You know what I mean. You didn't demean me by protecting me."

"This wasn't about me," I said.

"Well, the thing is, of course, that it was about you too. It was about what a fool I was to think I could help Brad. And, of course, my idea of helping him was to ask you to do it."

I took two ice cubes from a bowl on the counter and dropped them into my glass and splashed a swallow or so of whisky on it. I looked at Susan's glass and she shook her head.

"I like it when I can help you," I said.

"But to ask you to help my ex-husband, whom, since you have the most normal emotional responses of anyone I know, you'd have preferred to drown…" She shook her head. "Did you want to shoot him when you had the chance?"

"You bet," I said.

"You could have shot him when he reached for his gun. It would have been self-defense. No one, me included, could have faulted you."

"I know."

"So why didn't you?"

"If I shot everybody I wanted to," I said, "I'd go broke buying ammunition."

Susan swished her whisky some more and took a sip of it and held the glass up and looked at the early evening light through it. Then she put it back on the counter.

"So why didn't you?" she said.

"Well, I try not to kill people I don't have to," I said.

"I understand that. But I have also seen you very aggressive with people who have only been mildly disrespectful to me. There was none of that here."

"No."

"You stayed out of it as much as you could."

"Yes."

"Because the only way for me to come out of this without feeling like a perfect jerk was to confront him myself, and be the one to decide what to do."

"I think perfect jerk is a bit harsh."

She shook her head impatiently. "And you let me do that as much as you could, knowing he had already killed two people."

"Seemed a good idea at the time," I said.

"But how do you know? How can you know things like that? A man like you."

I loved her seriousness. I loved that she was serious about me. And that we were talking intensely about me. I was having a very good time.

"I learned a lot of what I know from you," I said.

"That's a lovely thing to say."

"It's true," I said.

"And I've learned a great deal from you. " she said.

"We stick with each other long enough, and we may get smart as hell," I said.

Susan reached out with her left hand and took hold of mine. We sat across from each other and held hands and drank our whisky. It was dark now. I could barely see her across from me. But I could feel her intangible energy.

After a while Susan said, "Even if we don't."

And after another while I said, "Even if."

And then we were perfectly quiet, nearly invisible in the dark.