Pale Kings and Princes

I shrugged and looked at the sandwich shop across the street.

“You know that,” Susan said. “You know sometimes you’ll fail. You know sometimes you’ll be wrong. You know sometimes bad things will happen.”

I nodded.

“It happens in most work, but in your work the stakes are very high. People get killed.”

“Sometimes I kill them,” I said.

“And sometimes you save them.” Susan had turned full toward me and was holding both my hands.

“A little like your business,” I said.

Susan nodded. “A little.”

“I involved that kid,” I said.

“No,” Susan said. “He involved himself.”

“I should have figured he’d tell Esteva,” I said.

Susan stood so close to me that we touched from knee to chest. She pressed my hands in hers against her, just below her hips.

“Probably,” she said. “Probably you should have. You made a mistake. You’ll make more before you’re through. But you make fewer than most people I know. And no one makes them in better causes.”

“This mistake was mortal,” I said.

“Your work is mortal, your mistakes will be too.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Yeah,” Susan said. “And the mortal parts of it are what makes it work you’ll do. It’s what makes it matter. If it didn’t have mortal consequences it would bore you.”

“I don’t like to see people die,” I said.

“And you’ve saved some,” Susan said.

I nodded.

“You’re the one who said it to me.”

“What?”

“Death is the mother of beauty.”

“I didn’t think you were listening,” I said, and took my hands from hers and slid them up her back and held her against me in the cold night under the bright artificial light on the empty street.

24

We were in Susan’s living room having a cup of hot chocolate. There was a fire. We sat beside each other on the couch with our feet on the coffee table.

“Have you spoken to Hawk?” Susan said.

“Not yet,” I said.

“When will you?”

“Soon,” I said.

Susan turned her head and looked at me. “Aren’t you stubborn,” she said.

“But exciting sexually,” I said.

“Sometimes,” Susan said. “Are you planning to go this alone no matter what, just to prove you can?”

“No,” I said. “I’m going to ask you for help.”

Susan raised her eyebrows.

“Caroline Rogers is going to need help. There are two other women involved in all of this in ways I don’t understand, and I’m going to need help with them.”

“And you want me to cancel my appointments and trek out to Wheaton?”

“Well put,” I said.

“There are people here who need help,” Susan said. “Some of them need it very much.”

“I know,” I said.

We both drank some cocoa.

“Tell me about the other women,” Susan said.

“Juanita Olmo is a social worker who knew Eric Valdez,” I said.

“The reporter who was murdered to start with,” Susan said.

“Yes. She told me that Emmy Esteva was having an affair with Valdez.”

“Those are the other two women?”

“Yes. Juanita is probably a generation or so removed from Colombia. Emmy is more recent.”

“What is your problem with them?” Susan said.

“Things don’t mesh right,” I said. “Juanita tells me that Emmy was sleeping with Valdez — which gives Felipe a motive for killing Valdez and castrating him, just like Rogers contended. But Juanita insists that Esteva didn’t and wouldn’t. That Rogers did it. Apparently out of meanness. She says that Esteva is sort of a Colombian Horatio Alger and has beaten us Yankees at our own capitalism game — she specified my capitalistic game.”

Susan smiled.

“Further, she says that Emmy, Mrs. Alger, is his weakness. A slut, a tramp, a scarlet woman,” I said.

“Perhaps she has a passion for Esteva herself,” Susan said.

“More than perhaps, I would say.”

“We shrinks are reserved,” Susan said. “Perhaps, and appropriate, are as ferocious as we ever get.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But if she’s lusty for Esteva, then why does she tell me about Emmy and Valdez, thus incriminating the object of her lust. How appropriate is that?”

“People are not always appropriate.”

“Boy, it’s great working with a pro,” I said. “I asked her if maybe she had been sleeping with Valdez herself and she got a kind of loopy expression on her face and got up and went into the ladies’ room.”

“You thought she might be jealous of Emmy over Valdez,” Susan said.

“Yes, and maybe jealous of Emmy over Esteva too,” I said.

“It’s great working with a pro,” Susan said.

“And she hates Rogers,” I said.

“Why,” Susan said. “Was he hateful?”

“Seemed so to me. Maybe that’s all there is to it. But Caroline seems like a pretty solid person and she loved him.”

Susan shrugged. “That might be an overly romantic view of love.”

“Good people can love not-good people,” I said.

“Yes,” Susan said.

We were quiet for a moment. I held my cocoa in my left hand and massaged the back of her neck for a moment with my right hand.

“True,” I said.

“Perhaps she hated him because he was hateful, perhaps there’s another reason. It should be interesting to find out,” Susan said. “How do you think I can best help Caroline Rogers?”

“I don’t know. Two tragedies like this in sequence have got to do her damage. I don’t want to leave her to deal with the damage alone.”

“Perhaps she will want to deal with it alone.”