Rough Weather - By Robert B. Parker Page 0,35

while, the rest was silence . . . of a sort.

By the time we were finished it had gotten dark, and the ocean was visible mostly as the white foam of the beached waves showed in the moonlight. As soon as we were through making love, Susan squirmed under the covers and pulled them up to her chin.

“Um,” she said.

“I couldn’t agree more,” I said.

“We left the shades open,” Susan said.

“So we did,” I said.

“What if someone had passed by?”

“Might have been instructive for them,” I said.

We lay quietly for a time. Only the ocean moved in the darkness outside our window. My gun was on the bedside table.

Susan looked at it.

“There it is,” she said.

“My gun?” I said.

“Our constant companion,” Susan said.

“Better to have it and not need it . . .” I said.

“I know,” Susan said. “I know all that.”

“Part of the business,” I said.

“I know that, too,” Susan said.

“You have a gun,” I said.

“Yes,” Susan said.

“You’d use it if you had to,” I said.

“I would.”

We lay quietly, listening to the ocean.

After a while, I said, “I believe the cocktail hour is upon us.”

“In a minute,” Susan said.

She rolled over against me and put her arms around me and pressed her face against my chest. We stayed that way for a time. Then Susan let go and rolled over and bounced out of bed.

“I’ll be ready in ten minutes,” she said.

“You will not,” I said.

“Will too,” she said.

It actually took her forty-eight minutes. But it was well worth the wait.

37

While I was examining the well-dressed young women passing below me on Berkeley Street, the phone rang. Still looking out my window, I picked it up and said “Hello.”

“I’m in Franklin Park,” Quirk said to me on the phone. “Near White Stadium. You might want to drop by.”

“Okay,” I said, and hung up.

It was a very nice fall day, more October than November, and a lot of the people walking by were coatless. I watched one especially attractive woman walk across Boylston Street and into Louis’s before I put on a leather jacket to cover my gun, and went downstairs to get my car.

It was easy to find Quirk. I could have probably located him from an orbiting spacecraft. There were half a dozen cruisers, some with the lights still rotating, at least two unmarked police cars, an ambulance, the coroner’s truck, yellow tape, flashbulbs, an amplitude of gawkers, and a couple of television news trucks at the edge of the scene. A uniformed cop stopped me after I parked behind one of the TV trucks and got out.

“Crime scene, bud,” he said. “Got business here?”

“Quirk asked me to come by,” I said.

The cop nodded and turned and yelled.

“Captain?”

Quirk looked over, saw me, nodded his head, and gestured me toward him. The patrolman who had stopped me grinned, and gestured me in with a big sweep while he pretended to lift a velvet rope.

“Right this way, sir.”

I walked over to Quirk, who was standing with a detective I didn’t know, looking down at a body covered with a tarp.

“Know anybody named Leonard Rezendes?” Quirk said.

“Know a Leonard works for Tony Marcus,” I said. “Don’t think I ever knew his last name.”

Quirk nodded.

“He’s had several. But Rezendes is what’s on his driver’s license.”

Quirk bent down and turned back the tarp. It was hard to be sure because his head had been shot up pretty good, but it seemed to be the Leonard I knew.

“I think that’s him,” I said.

“It is,” Quirk said. “Some kids called nine-one-one couple hours ago.”

“They around?” I said.

“They wouldn’t give a name, and there was no one here when we arrived,” Quirk said. “I got a guy canvassing the crowd.”

“Doesn’t appear to be accidental,” I said.

“Wow!” said Quirk.

“I’m a detective,” I said. “It comes pretty easy.”

“At least four rounds to the head,” Quirk said. “Probably forties. We found four shell casings.”

“So he was done here.”

“Unless they brought the casings and threw them around to fool us,” Quirk said.

“Boy, you must be a detective, too,” I said.

“And a captain,” Quirk said. “Lot of blood on the ground.”

“Hard to fake that,” I said.

“Yeah,” Quirk said, and grinned. “We assume he was killed here.”

“See?” I said.

“Leonard was Rugar’s connection to Tony,” Quirk said.

“Yes.”

“You think it got him killed?”

“Something did,” I said.

“His wallet’s still in his pants,” Quirk said. “Seven hundred dollars. His Rolex is still there; somebody told me it was worth about twenty thousand dollars.”

“For a watch?” I said.

Quirk shrugged.

“Wasn’t a robbery,” Quirk said.

“Four in the back of