Looking for Rachel Wallace (21 page)

“Rachel,” I said, “how could I respect anyone who didn’t disapprove of me?”

She got up from the dinner table and walked softly and carefully around to my side and kissed me, holding my face in her hands. Then she turned and went to my bedroom and went to sleep on my bed.

We just got the table cleared when the cops came.

They were with us a long time: the chief of the Belmont force and two other Belmont cops; a man from the Middlesex DA’s office; Cronin, the twerp from the Suffolk DA’s office; Quirk and Belson.

Cronin wanted to roust Rachel out of bed, and I told him if he did, I would put him in the hospital. He told Quirk to arrest me, and Quirk told him if he couldn’t be quiet, he’d have to wait in the car. Cronin’s face turned the color of a Christmas poinsettia, and he started to say something, and Quirk looked at him for a minute, and he shut up.

We agreed that I could give them a statement and that they would wait until morning to take a statement from Rachel Wallace. It was late when they left. Cronin gave me a hard look and said he’d remember me. I suggested that his mind wasn’t that good. Susan said she was very pleased to have met everyone and hoped they’d have a Merry Christmas. Quirk gave her hand a small squeeze, Belson blew smoke at me, and everyone left.

In the living room Susan and I sat on the couch. The fire was barely alive, a few coals glowing in the gray ash.

“We’ve spent a lot of time here the last few days,” Susan said.

“There are worse places,” I said.

“In fact,” Susan said, “there aren’t too many better.”

“We may spend a lot more time here, because she’s in our bed.”

“The final sacrifice,” Susan said.

“We could think of ways to make the best of it,” I said.

“You had to kill two people today,” Susan said.

“Yeah.”

“Bother you?”

“Yeah.”

“Want to talk about it?”

“No.”

“Sometimes people need to get feelings out,” Susan said.

“Perhaps I could express them sexually,” I said.

“Well, since it’s for therapy,” Susan said. “But you’ll have to be very quiet. We don’t want to wake Rachel up.”

“With half a quart of bourbon in her?” I said.

“Well, it would be embarrassing.”

“Okay, you’ll have to control your tendency to break out with cries of
atta boy
then.”

“I’ll do my best,” she said. “Merry Christmas.”

Much later we heard Rachel cry out in her sleep, and I got off the couch and went in and sat on the bed beside her, and she took my hand and held it until nearly dawn.

ROBERT B. PARKER lives north of Boston with his wife, Joan, and their two sons, David and Daniel. This is his seventh novel. His fourth,
Promised Land
, won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for the best novel of 1976.