Maynard got up and got Lester on his feet.
“Let’s get out of here,” Lester said.
Maynard started to take him toward the door, his arm around Lester’s back.
“Bucky,” I said, “we agree about the tie? And how we got no further business?”
Maynard nodded. There was no color left in his face, just the slight smear of brown, drying blood on his lip.
“I want to go home, Bucky,” Lester mumbled, and Bucky said, “Yeah, yeah, Lester, we’ll go home.” And out they went.
Linda Rabb sat on the floor with her son and held him against her and put her face in his hair. They rocked back and forth slightly on the floor, and Marty Rabb and I stood awkwardly above them and said nothing at all. Finally I said, “Okay, Marty. I think we’ve done all there is to do.”
He put his hand out. “Thank you, Spenser, I guess. We were in a mess we couldn’t have gotten out of without you. I can’t say quite where we’re at now, but thank you for what you did. Including Lester. I think probably he’s too good at tae kwon dong or whatever it is for me.”
“He might have been too good for me if I hadn’t sucker-punched him first.”
We shook hands. Linda Rabb didn’t look up. I went out the front door. She didn’t say goodbye.
I never saw her again.
CHAPTER THIRTY
AND YOU KEPT HITTING him, Susan Silverman said.
We were sitting in a back booth in The Last Hurrah, looking at the menu and having the first drink of the evening.
Mine was a stein of Harp; hers, a vodka gimlet.
“It all seemed to bubble up inside me and explode. It wasn’t Lester; it was Doerr and Wally Hogg and me and the case and the way things worked out so everyone got hurt some. It all just exploded out of me, and I damn near killed the poor creep.”
“From what you say he probably earned the beating.”
“Yeah, he did. That’s not what bothers me. I’m what bothers me. I’m not supposed to do that.”
“I know, I’ve seen the big red S on your chest.”
“That ain’t all you seen, sweet patooti.”
“I know, but it’s all I remember.”
“Oh,” I said.
She smiled at me, that sunrise of a smile that colored her whole face and seemed to enliven her whole body. “Well, maybe I can remember something else if I think on it.”
“Perhaps a refresher course later on tonight,” I said.
“Perhaps.”
The waiter came and took our order, went away, and returned shortly with another beer for me.
“The irony is,” I said, “that Linda Rabb is married to one of the all-time greats of jockdom, and she’s being helped by me, with the red S on my chest and the gun in my pocket, and she’s the one that saves them. She’s the one, while us two stud ducks are standing around flexing, that does what had to be done. And it hurt and I couldn’t save them and her husband couldn’t save them. She saved herself and her husband.”
“Maynard has stopped the blackmail?”
“Sure, he had to. He had nothing to gain and everything to lose.” I drank some beer. The waiter brought us each a plate of oysters and a bottle of Chablis.
“The papers have been kind to Mrs. Rabb.”
“Yeah, pretty good. There’s been a lot of mail, some of it really ugly, but the club publicity people are handling it and she hasn’t had to read much of it.”
“How about Marty?”
“He went into the stands for some guy out in Minnesota and got a three-day suspension for it. Since then he’s kept his mouth shut, but you can tell it hurts.”
“And you?”
I shrugged. The waiter took away the empty oyster plates and put down two small crocks of crab and lobster stew.
“And you?” she said again.
“I killed two guys, and almost killed another one.”
“Killing those two was what made it possible for Linda Rabb to do what she did.”
“I know.”
“You’ve killed people before.”
