KC said, “Burt,” in a strangled kind of voice. She didn’t look at Vincent.
Roth spoke softly and fast.
“This is kind of like an intervention, KC. People who care about you gathered together to help you get past a hard thing.”
“You care about me?”
“Of course. No false messages. Our life together is over, I believe. We each have another life to live. But I’ve known you most of my adult life. We share a child. Of course I care about you.”
She was trying so hard to pretend that Vincent wasn’t there that it made all her motions stiff as she avoided seeing him.
“I don’t even know that man,” she said looking at Hawk.
Hawk smiled at her. When he chose to he could look as warm and supportive as a cinnamon muffin.
“He’s with me,” I said. “We brought Vincent.”
When I said his name it was as if I had jabbed her with an electrode. She winced visibly and looked very hard at her ex-husband.
“What are you going to do?” she said.
“This man raped you, KC,” Burt Roth said quietly. “You are too important to let someone misuse you that way.”
“You know…?”
“I know he did, KC.”
“I never…” Vincent started.
Hawk put his hand on Vincent’s shoulder and said, “Shhh.”
Vincent seemed to freeze when Hawk spoke to him.
“You made a mistake with him, maybe,” Burt Roth said. “Everybody makes mistakes. You probably made one with me, too. But they are honorable mistakes. Mistakes made for love. The best kind of mistake to make.”
KC was staring at him as if she’d never seen him or anything quite like him. I wasn’t sure how much of what he was saying he believed, but he was saying it well.
“And I’m determined,” Roth went on, “that you will not have to suffer as you’ve suffered for making honest mistakes.”
“God,” KC said, “I have suffered.”
“And if we don’t put this creep where he belongs.” He nodded at Vincent and paused.
I admired how clever he was at avoiding specifics.
“If we don’t,” Roth said, “will he rape you again? Who else will he rape?”
He paused again, and looked steadily at KC.
“Maybe one day he’ll rape Jennifer,” Roth said softly.
KC made kind of a moan, and stepped back again and sat down on the edge of her couch as if her legs had given way. Again I believed her sincerity, without missing the contrived quality of it. Maybe she was simply an endless series of contrivances and when they had all been peeled away she could cease to exist.
I said, “Did Louis Vincent rape you, KC?”
She stared at Roth for a time as if I hadn’t spoken, then, for the first time, she looked at Vincent.
“Yes,” she said.
Behind her eyes hatred crackled, for a genuine moment, like heat lightning.
“Yes he did,” she said.
Vincent started to speak, looked at Hawk, and didn’t. His gaze shifted rapidly around the room, as if he could find a place to run. He couldn’t. I walked over to the end table beside the couch and picked up her phone and called Sgt. O’Connor. Roth sat down on the sofa beside KC. She put her hand out and he took it. Hawk looked at Roth and nodded his head once in approval. For Hawk that was the Croix de Guerre.
O’Connor came on the line.
“Spenser,” I said. “We have your rapist if you’d like to come up and get him.”
I hung up the phone and turned. Vincent was staring at me. Suddenly his eyeballs rolled back in their sockets and he fell backward. Hawk stepped aside and let him fall against the wall and slide to the floor. He lay on his back with his eyelids open over his white eyeballs and his mouth ajar. We all looked at him.
“Rapist appears a little vaporish,” Hawk said.
Faintly I could hear the police sirens coming our way.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
I met Robert Walters of Walt and Willie in the late afternoon at a gay bar in the South End near the Ballet.
“Well, the world’s straightest straight boy,” Walt said when I came in.
