Part 32 (2/2)

”Hawk will finish it,” I said.

We stood looking at each other for a minute.

”Couple n.i.g.g.e.rs fighting the system,” Alves said.

”Couple n.i.g.g.e.rs and the biggest law firm in Boston,” I said.

Alves walked stiffly over to the window and looked out at Boston Harbor.

”I ain't counting on nothing,” Alves said.

”Best way to be,” I said.

Alves nodded once, his eyes flat and meaningless, his face empty.

”Yeah,” he said. ”It is.”

I knocked on the door and the guards opened it. ”All done,” I said.

They went past me into the conference room and I walked out to the corridor and punched the b.u.t.ton on the elevator. It arrived in time, and I got in it with mail room clerks and young female secretaries and a couple of suits, and down we went.

I stopped in the lobby for a minute and watched the people hurrying freely about. They would have taken Ellis down in the service elevator and out the back. In an hour he'd be back in the joint, looking at life; his only chance to get out in the hands of a white guy he neither knew nor trusted...

breeding/lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/memory and desire... If you're a lifer, hope will kill you...

Was I mixing up my poets? At least no one was calling me the hyacinth girl.

I walked over to the parking garage where they'd found Tommy Miller's body and got in my car and headed for New York.

Chapter 45.

PATRICIA UTLEY HAD moved uptown. She had a townhouse on Sixty-fifth Street between Park and Madison with an etched gla.s.s front door, which I noticed had been covered with a thick sheet of clear Lexan. On either side of the entrance there were little pillars, like the entrance to some sort of Greco-Roman shrine. Steven opened the door. He was still black and well set up, still moved with a light springiness. His short hair had started to gray. In keeping with the times, he had turned in his white coat and was wearing a blue blazer. He recognized me, though the recognition didn't overpower him.

”Mister Spenser,” he said.

”h.e.l.lo, Steven,” I said. ”Is Mrs. Utley in?”

Steven stepped back from the door so I could come in.

”Come into the library,” he said, ”while I find out if she can see you.”

The room was in the front of the house. There was a clean fireplace with a green marble hearth on the left wall. The big arched windows looked out onto Sixty-fifth Street. There were filigreed metal inserts on the inside of each, which effectively barred someone from breaking in. I sat on a big ha.s.sock covered in green leather. All of the furniture was leather covered in green or a kind of off blue. The walls were paneled in oak, and the whole room looked exactly like the library of someone who never read but watched Masterpiece Theater a lot. There was a bookcase on either side of the cold fireplace. She seemed to have moved all her books up from Thirty-seventh Street. I remembered some of them: The Complete Works of Charles d.i.c.kens, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Longfellow: Complete Poetical and Prose Works, The Outline of History, The Canterbury Tales. They didn't look as if they'd been taken down and thumbed through fondly in the twenty years since I first saw them.

Patricia Utley herself, when she came into the room, didn't look like she'd been thumbed through much either. She was as pulled together as she always was. Her hair was maybe a little brighter, and thus a little less credible, blonder than it had been when I'd first met her. It was short and full but it didn't look lacquered. There were crow's-feet at her eyes, and only the subtlest hint of lines at the corners of her mouth. She was small, trim, stylish in a black pantsuit with a white blouse. The blouse had a low neck line, and a short rope of pearls lay against her skin above it. Her gla.s.ses were big and round and black-rimmed. I had no idea what age she was, but whatever it was she looked good. She put her hand out as she walked across the room. I stood and took her hand. She leaned gracefully forward and kissed me cheek.

”Still a detective?” she said.

”Yes,” I said. ”Still a madam?”

”Yes, and a fabulously successful one, if I may say so.”

”As the move uptown would suggest,” I said.

”My previous home was not impoverished,” she said.

”No, it wasn't.”

”Would you like a gla.s.s of sherry?” she said. ”A real drink?”

”No, thank you,” I said. ”Just some talk.”

”I hope you won't mind if I have a gla.s.s.”

”Not at all.”

She walked to a small sideboard between the big windows and poured herself a pony of sherry from a cut-gla.s.s decanter, and turned, standing in front of the window so the light silhouetted her.

”So what stray are you looking for this time?” she said.

”Maybe I just dropped in to say hi,” I said. ”Maybe I miss you.”

”I'm sure you do,” Patricia Utley said. ”But I do know that in the past, whenever you have come to see me you were looking for someone's little lost lamb.”

”More like a wolf this time,” I said.

”Really?”

”Guy named Rugar, he's been hired to kill me, and he almost did.”

”I would have thought that would be hard to do.”

”He didn't succeed,” I said.

The library door opened and Steven came in with what appeared to be a black and white aardvark on a leash. The aardvark had a bright red choke collar around his neck. His lost-and-found tag dangled from one of the loops on the collar. The tag was bright red also, and heart shaped.

”She's had her walk,” Steven said. ”And the maid says she was very good.”

He leaned over and unsnapped the leash and the aardvark dashed over to Patricia Utley and wagged its tail. Astonis.h.i.+ngly, Patricia Utley went to her knees and put her face down where the aardvark could lap it. It wasn't a very big aardvark. Maybe it was too small to be an aardvark.

”Did you have a lovely tinky tinky?” Patricia Utley said.

<script>