Widow’s Walk by Robert B. Parker Page B

a few more peanuts, and determined to eat no more. The waitress brought me a second beer. Susan took in a milligram of her drink.
    “You know what makes me love you?” she said.
    “My manliness?”
    She smiled.
    “You haven’t tried to talk me out of feeling guilty,” she said.
    “Be aimless,” I said.
    “Yes. But not everyone would know that.”
    “It’s a gift,” I said.
    I could almost see Susan decide that she had been down as much as she was prepared to be.
    “Tell me about what’s going on in that case you’re working on for Rita.”
    “It keeps spreading out on me,” I said. “The more I investigate, the more I learn. And the more I learn, the more I don’t know what’s going on.”
    “That happens to me often in therapy,” Susan said. “I know something’s in there in the dark and I keep groping for it.”
    “That would be me,” I said. “Groping.”
    “What do you know?”
    “I know that Smith is dead. I know that I talked to a woman at his bank and she got fired and now she’s dead.”
    “How did she die?”
    “Appears to be suicide,” I said.
    “But?”
    “But she had just been to a lawyer about a gender discrimination lawsuit against the bank,” I said.
    “So why would she be making long-range plans just before killing herself?”
    “Yes.”
    “It happens sometimes,” Susan said. “It is an attempt to convince themselves of the future.”
    I shrugged and had a Brazil nut that I plucked out from among the remaining peanuts. One Brazil nut wouldn’t hurt anything.
    “The bank was a family-owned business, until Marvin Conroy came aboard. He fired the woman for incompetence. And he doesn’t want to talk with me. I know that some people from Soldiers Field Development Limited are interested in what I’m doing and want me to stop doing it. I talked with Smith’s broker and was assaulted shortly thereafter.”
    “Assaulted?”
    “Yeah. They weren’t very good at it.”
    “That’s nice,” Susan said.
    “DeRosa, the guy that says Mary Smith wanted him to kill her husband, is represented by Ann Kiley, Bobby Kiley’s daughter.”
    “The defense lawyer?”
    “Yes. The firm is Kiley and Harbaugh, but it’s really Kiley and Kiley. Father and daughter.”
    “That’s sort of charming,” Susan said.
    “It is,” I said. “But why is a firm like that representing a stiff like DeRosa?”
    “Social conscience?”
    “You bet,” I said. “And then we have Mary Smith herself. She still seems to have a relationship of some sort with an old high school boyfriend who is evasive when asked about it.”
    “By you.”
    “By me.”
    “And what did he say?”
    “As I recall,” I said, “he told me to ”shove fucking off.“”
    “She must have been attracted to him by his silver tongue,” Susan said. “What does Mary say?”
    “You’d have to talk with Mary to understand,” I said.
    “Why? What’s she like?”
    I found another Brazil nut in the dish, and a cashew. I ate both of them. I hadn’t seen the cashew before.
    “She’s a living testament to the power of dumb.”
    “Meaning?”
    “Meaning you ask her something and she seems too dumb to answer it. You can’t catch her in contradictions because she doesn’t seem aware of them even after they’re pointed out.”
    “Seems kind of smart to me,” Susan said.
    “I don’t think so,” I said. “I think she knows she’s dumb and sort of uses it.”
    “Maximizing her potential,” Susan said. “Anything else bothering you?”
    “Yeah. Nathan Smith. He was unmarried until he married Mary, in his fifties. According to Mary, he was a friend and helper to a number of young men, both prior to and during his marriage to her.”
    “If he were gay, would he have hidden it? This is not a closeted age.”
    “Old Yankee family. President of the family bank.”
    “Still,” Susan said.
    “Remember your patient,” I said.
    “He was a boy. And he was very troubled.”
    “Nathan Smith was once a boy.”
    Susan