'And most of the time you accept it. In fact most of the time you enjoy it, except when you have one of these little sentimental spasms.'
'Thanks,' I said.
'I needed that.'
We walked quietly for a bit. Pearl spotted a couple of sparrows and went into her bird dog stalk, head extended, body tense, each step infinitely deliberate as she seemed to steadily elongate toward the birds until they flew away. As they rose in the air Pearl looked back at me expectantly.
'Bang,' I said.
Pearl returned to the Zagnut hunt.
'Of course,' Susan said, 'I love you for having the little spasms of sentimentality.'
'I know,' I said.
'That's why I have them.'
Pearl paused to roll vigorously on an earthworm which had gotten squashed on the sidewalk, probably the victim of a reckless Rollerblader.
'Ick,' Susan said as Pearl rolled.
'Why do they do that?'
'I don't know,' I said.
'Dogs are sometimes mysterious,' Susan said.
The small sailboats that people rented from the public boat club bobbed not very gracefully around the basin where the river widened behind the dam. They had small sails and flat bottoms and the people in them were mostly amateurs, but the scatter of white sails on the blue-gray river looked nice anyway. On the other side MIT stretched along Memorial Drive, its gray stone buildings and its domes looking technical and serious.
'I also have a connection between Gino Fish and Julius Ventura,' I said.
Pearl got through with the worm and got up and shook herself and proceeded. We went with her.
'Who's Gino Fish,' Susan said.
'Sort of filled the number-one slot,' I said, 'when Joe Broz got old.'
'Broz retired?'
'Not really, but his kid's a bust, and Vinnie left him, and he's about seventy, and his heart's not in it anymore.'
'And where does Shirley's father rank in all of this?'
'If it weren't for Gino, he'd have Broz's slot,' I said.
'He might get it anyway. He's ambitious.'
'So what's the connection?'
'Gino's guy Marty Anaheim had some people following me.'
'And you're sure it's about Whatsisname, Shirley's father?'
'Better than that,' I said.
'Hawk and I braced Marty and he asked if Julius hired us to do anything with Anthony Meeker.'
'Why are they interested?'
'I 'Don't know.'
'What would you speculate?'
'Money.'
Susan smiled.
'That would always be a reasonable guess, wouldn't it,' she said.
'Yes.'
'And the other guess would probably be sex,' Susan said.
'So young,' I said, 'so beautiful, and yet so cynical.'
CHAPTER 10
There were maybe a dozen places in the phone book with the word Starlight in their name. I eliminated places which wouldn't employ waitresses, like Starlight Video, or the Starlight Laundry, and narrowed it down to The Starlight Lounge in Lynn, and a roadhouse called Starlight Memories on the beach in Salisbury. I took the wedding picture of Anthony and Shirley with me and went to check out the waitresses.
The Starlight Lounge was closest, out at a traffic circle near Lynn Beach where the causeway to Nahant branched off. It had been built after the war and was called the Redwood: a lot of glass windows, a lot of exposed pine stained red, the kind of restaurant that sold fried clams and hamburgers and frapps before the fast food franchises were invented and put them out of business. After that for a while it had been a bait and tackle place, and then it was a place that sold ceramic lawn statues, and then a pizza joint, and then, for a long time, an abandoned building except for a month in the winter when Christmas trees were sold out of the parking lot.
