“I don’t know. I seen her when I seen her.”
“You anything more than friends?”
“What’s that mean?”
“You intimate?”
“You mean did I fuck her?”
“Yes.”
“What if I did?”
“More power to you,” I said.
“I didn’t say I fucked her. I just said what if I did?”
“Sure,” I said.
“I don’t want to get mixed up in some freaking murder case, you know?”
“I know,” I said. “She date anyone else besides you?”
“No… I don’t know… I never said I dated her.”
“But you did.”
“I don’t have to talk with you, pal.”
“Of course you don’t,” I said. “You know anybody she might have been dating?”
“I got nothing else to say.”
“What a shame,” I said.
“So just shove fucking off, pal.”
“You bet,” I said. “How’d you feel about her marrying Nathan Smith?”
He tapped me on the chest with a long forefinger. “I told you once to take a walk. I’m not telling you again.”
“Actually you told me to ”shove fucking off.“ You didn’t say anything about taking a walk.”
Roy looked a little confused. But he was a tough guy, wasn’t he? He changed the jabbing finger into a flat hand on my chest and shoved. I didn’t move. There was no point to this. He wasn’t going to talk to me anymore. I was just being stubborn.
Roy said, “You don’t want to fuck with me, pal.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re real close to a lot of trouble.”
“You?” I said.
“Yeah. Me.”
“Roy, you couldn’t cause me trouble if you had a bulldozer.”
Roy was maybe an inch taller than I was, but ten pounds lighter. He thought about it. But he didn’t do it. Instead he said, “Ahh,” and dismissed me with a hand gesture and turned back toward the house.
“We’ll talk again,” I said.
He kept going.
As I went back to my car I saw the nose of the Explorer around the corner on a side street. I thought about going over and grabbing one of the shadows. But that was just irritation. It wouldn’t produce anything good.
Nothing else had.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Susan had decided we should ride bikes. So we rented a couple, to see how we liked it, and set out.
“We’ll just ride along the river a little ways,” Susan had said. “And then we can sit and have our little lunch, and then ride back. It’ll be fun.”
“Did you know that bike riding is a threat to male fertility?” I said.
“That doesn’t matter.”
“How about a threat to potency?”
“That would matter,” Susan said.
We rode past the Harvard Business School on the Boston side of the river, heading into town. The balance was still a little shaky, but I knew it would come. There wasn’t room on the trail to ride beside each other. Bikes coming in the other direction couldn’t get by. So I trailed along behind her, admiring her butt in its spandex tights. It was not fun. I hadn’t ridden a bicycle since I was a kid in Wyoming, and after five minutes on this one I was glad I hadn’t. We went over the Weeks footbridge to the Cambridge side again, and stopped and sat on benches near the Harvard women’s boathouse. Susan took a brown paper bag out of her backpack and began to set out finger sandwiches.
“There,” Susan said. “Was that fun?”
