The Professional - By Robert B. Parker Page 0,50

his fingers and worked his hands back and forth. Clarice Richardson had been wrong, I thought. Gary was not devoid of something like a moral or ethical sense. Whatever it quite was, it was nagging at him now. He looked at me. The sense had apparently taken him as far as it was going to. Probably wasn’t a very robust sense to begin with.

“I mean, why would someone kill her?” he said again.

“Money,” I said. “Love and the stuff that goes with it.”

“What stuff?” he said.

“Passion, jealousy, and hate,” I said.

“Estelle didn’t like Beth living with us,” Gary said.

I nodded.

“I mean, she did at first,” he said. “You know, she liked the money, and the truth of it is, she liked the three-way for a while.”

“And you said you liked it okay,” I said.

He smiled briefly, and for a moment the old Gary shone through.

“Hell,” he said. “I like everything.”

“Beth like the three-way?” I said.

He looked startled.

“Beth?” he said.

“Uh-huh.”

“She never said she didn’t,” he said.

“So why didn’t Estelle like Beth living there?” I said.

“I don’t know,” Gary said. “I mean, women are a pretty weird species.”

“One of the two weirdest,” I said.

Gary looked blank. Then he kind of shook it off.

“Anyway, Estelle started saying stuff like Beth was getting too bossy, and how we couldn’t get any privacy.”

“She say that to Beth?”

“I don’t think so,” Gary said. “She said it to me quite a bit toward the end. But I never heard her talk to Beth about it.”

“You say anything to Beth?” I said.

“Me? No. I learned a long time ago to stay out of a catfight.”

“You think Beth might have killed Estelle so she could have you to herself?” I said.

“We was at the big Community Servings event, at the Langham,” Gary said. “Cops told us when she died. Beth couldn’ta done it.”

He said it too fast. Like he’d rehearsed it.

“The Hotel Langham affair your idea?” I said.

“Me? No. Beth wanted to go. Said she knew a lotta people went to it. Said she wanted them to see her boyfriend.”

“You say anything about being Estelle’s boyfriend?”

“Hell,” Gary said. And there was no bravado in his voice.

“I’m everybody’s boyfriend.”

“And Estelle’s dead,” I said.

Gary didn’t speak. He nodded his head slowly, and as he did, tears began to well in his eyes.

Chapter60

HAWK CAME TO MY PLACE to babysit Pearl, and Susan went with me to New York for fun. We stopped for a tongue sandwich at Rein’s deli on the way down. I made several amusing tongue remarks while we ate, which Susan said were disgusting. That night we stayed uptown at The Carlyle, had dinner at Café Boulud, and went to bed before midnight.

I was prepared for several hours of wild abandon when I got into bed. But by the time Susan got through with her nocturnal ablutions, I had nodded off. I woke up in the morning with Susan’s head on my chest. I shifted a little so I could look at her. She opened her eyes and we looked at each other. She moved a little so we were facing.

“You’ve always been an early riser,” Susan said.

“Is that a double entendre?” I said.

“I think so,” Susan said.

“Shall we take advantage of it?” I said.

“Right after we shower and brush our teeth,” Susan said.

“By then it may be too late,” I said.

She smiled. And got out of bed.

“Not you and me, big boy,” she said. “For us it’s never too late.”

“How come you sleep in sweatpants and a T-shirt?” I said.

She smiled again.

“So that when I take them off,” she said, “the contrast makes me look really good.”

“It works,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, and went into the bathroom and turned on the shower.

A half-hour later we were both back in bed, clean of body and mouth. When Susan made love she went deep inside someplace. She didn’t withdraw. It was just the intensity of her focus that rendered everything except the lovemaking irrelevant. I liked to look at her then, her eyes closed, her face perfectly still, calm in contrast to what we both were feeling and doing. The event was busy enough so I couldn’t look for very long, but when we were done and I was looking down at her, after a time she opened her eyes and looked at me and I could see her slowly refocusing, swimming back to the surface from wherever she had been. It was always a moment like no other.

“You lookin’ at me,” Susan said in a surprisingly good De Niro