Now and then - By Robert B. Parker Page 0,56

went. I looked at my watch. Twelve minutes past eleven o’clock.

“Okay, toots,” I said to Susan. “Get into your disguise.”

She smiled and nodded and put on the long coat and the wraparound shades.

Susan paused and looked around her offi ce for a moment.

“It won’t be long,” I said.

She nodded.

“Be very, very careful,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

She put her arms around me and kissed me. I put the red hat on her head and tilted it over her face the way Moira had worn it coming in.

“My hair,” Susan said.

“You can fi x it when you get there,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “I can.”

We looked at each other for a moment, then she turned and went out the door past Hawk, who ignored her, down the steps, and got into the passenger side of the green Toyota beside Farrell. They drove away. Hawk remained where he was taking the air happily. Not a care in the world. Seeing everything that moved on Linnaean Street.

63.

After a proper interval I drove Moira Mahoney up to Central Square and went on into Boston, parked on a hydrant on Beacon Street, and walked down across the Common to Locke-Ober’s on Winter Place. Epstein was at the bar in the foyer when I got there. He had a Gibson in front of him.

“Nice to see you again,” he said.

“Always seems too long,” I said. “Doesn’t it.”

“Yeah. What have you got?”

“You’re ahead of me,” I said. “Lemme get a drink.”

He nodded. I ordered. The bartender brought it. It was a quiet afternoon at Locke’s bar. Later, people would come in and have a cocktail while waiting to be seated, but at 5:10 in the afternoon there was only one guy, reading the Wall Street Jour- nal and nursing a Gibson.

“You got anything?” I said.

“We’ve gotten a look at Alderson’s finances,” Epstein said.

“He’s got about a hundred and forty thousand in a money market. No checking account. No savings.”

“Better than I’m doing,” I said.

“True,” Epstein said.

He poked the pickled onion around in the bottom of his glass.

“Odd that there’s no checking account,” I said.

“True,” Epstein said.

He got the onion just where he wanted it in his glass and sipped a little of the drink.

“The bothersome thing,” he said, “is that the only activity in the account is at the end of each month, when his paycheck from Concord gets automatically deposited.”

“How long?”

“Account was opened with a thousand dollars two years ago,”

Epstein said. “He has not withdrawn anything, which is why it’s up to a hundred and forty thousand.”

“So what’s he live on?”

Epstein shook his head.

“Speaker’s fees?” I said.

“Most of those gigs are free,” Epstein said. “Very few pay much.”

“And he’s got an expensive condo, and a nice car, and he employs a driver.”

“So where’s it come from?” Epstein said.

“Is that a rhetorical question?”

“Sadly, so far,” Epstein said, “no.”

“I have a theory,” I said. “But first let me give you what I know.”

“I like a case when people start saying know instead of think, ”

Epstein said.

He gestured for another drink. The bartender brought it and looked at me. I shook my head. I didn’t mind getting drunk with Susan, but I didn’t want to show up that way. Epstein poured his still uneaten onion into the new drink and the bartender took away the empty glass.

“His name isn’t, or wasn’t, Perry Alderson,” I said. “It was Bradley Turner.”

“That his original name?” Epstein said.

“Don’t know,” I said. “Probably.”

“Probably is better than maybe, ” Epstein said. “Where’d he get the name, obit notice?”

“Better than that,” I said. “He killed the original Perry Alderson.”

Epstein drank some of his Gibson.

“Just to steal the name?” he said.

“No, it was involved with killing his own wife, the late Anne Marie Turner.”

“You prove any of this?” Epstein said.

“You will,” I said. “I’ll give you enough stuff to investigate. It’ll be only a matter of time.”

Epstein turned in his stool so that his back was against the bar. He held his Gibson in both hands in front of him.

“Go,” he said.

I gave him everything I had, except the part about Alderson having mental sex with Susan. It took a while, and Epstein didn’t interrupt me once. He sipped his drink carefully. Otherwise he just sat and listened and didn’t move. As I talked, the bar began to fill. Men in suits, mostly. A lot of them pols down from the state house, just across the Common. When I fi nished, Epstein took a last drink from his Gibson, and held it in his mouth for a moment