I crossed the little footbridge over Storrow Drive and onto the Esplanade and turned west and strolled upriver. The narrow strip of parkland ran along the Boston side of the Charles River all the way out to Watertown and beyond. In good weather it was crowded with people walking and jogging and walking dogs and bicycling and Rollerblading and sunbathing. Today, except for a few people who owned intrepid dogs, the space was pretty much mine. Not everyone understood about a walk in the rain. Pearl, for instance, despite her great hunting lineage, would not walk in the rain. Even for a cookie.

Squeamish was actually the wrong word for my hesitation. I would have, in fact, loved to throw Louis Vincent off a bridge. But it seemed somehow the wrong thing to do, and while I tried not to get hung up on abstractions more than I had to, I couldn’t seem to get around this one. I could tell the cops he was the man, but as long as KC wouldn’t testify, what could we do that was legal? Hitting him hadn’t worked. I could hit him more, and harder. Which would be heartwarming, but if he was as obsessive as he seemed, it might merely wind him tighter. I needed KC to testify.

The racing crews in their eight-man shells were on the river, men’s teams and women’s teams, which meant, I supposed, that some of the shells were eight-woman shells, or that all of the shells were eight-person shells. The crew coaches, in motor-boats, hovered near them like sheepdogs. During rest periods the rowers slumped over their oars as if they were dead, letting the rain beat down on them without regard.

I thought about Susan’s analysis. KC’s refusal to identify Louis Vincent seemed to be as much about her ex-husband as it was about Louis Vincent.

At the B.U. Bridge I turned back, my collar up, my Braves hat pulled down over my eyes, liking the feel of the rain as it came down in a straight easy fall, watching the idea coalesce. By the time I got back to my place the idea was nearly complete, or as complete as it could be.

I stripped off my wet clothes and tossed them in the washer, took a hot shower, toweled off, and put on fresh clothes. Then I went to the kitchen. It was 5:20 in the evening. Time enough for the first drink of the day, maybe past time. I filled a pint glass with ice, put in two ounces of scotch, and filled it with soda. I took the first sip. The first sip wasn’t the best thing in the world, but it was in the top five. And trying to recapture the first sip is a reminder that maybe you really can’t go home again. I picked up the glass and inspected my food supply. It was embarrassingly similar to Susan’s. But there was a head of garlic and a can of black beans and some linguine and some biscuits left over from breakfast.

I put the biscuits in a low oven to warm. The coalescing idea unified and I knew what I was going to do. I drank a toast to my brain. Then I tucked a dish towel into my belt to make a little apron, the way my father used to, got out a knife and separated the garlic head into cloves and peeled the cloves. I cooked the garlic on low heat with some olive oil in a fry pan for a while, and while it was cooking I heated a large pot of water. When the water boiled I added a dash of olive oil and a little salt and put the linguine in. When the garlic cloves were soft I added some sherry, and as it began to cook down I opened the can of black beans and drained off the liquid and dumped them in with the sherry and olive oil and garlic and put a lid on the fry pan. I toasted my coalesced idea again and the glass was empty and I mixed another. It was still good, but it wasn’t the first one. The first one wouldn’t be available until tomorrow.

I sprinkled a little cilantro in among the black beans, garlic, olive oil, and sherry. When everything was cooked I tossed the black beans with the linguine and got out the biscuits and sat at my kitchen counter by myself and ate the pasta and sipped the scotch and soda and wondered if my plan would work. There was a lot I couldn’t control, but it was a better plan than any of the others, except maybe just shooting Louis Vincent. But since I didn’t think I should do that, and wouldn’t ask Hawk to do it, and had promised KC that Louis Vincent would bother her no more, and since I had had two scotch and sodas, it seemed a very fine plan indeed, with every chance of succeeding. Of course, a lot depended on Burton Roth. But he’d seemed a solid guy when I’d met him, and I had hopes. On the other hand, if I didn’t have hopes what the hell was I doing in this business. I could always make a fine living creating great suppers out of nothing.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Early spring had drifted into late spring and it was still raining the next morning. On my way to work, with my collar up and my hat pulled down, looking dashingly noir, I stopped into a store on Newbury Street called Bjoux, where I had been conspiring with the owner, a tall good-looking woman named Barbara Jordan, about a surprise birthday gift for Susan. Then I went to the office, and took time to clean up a few old business things still unresolved. I answered some mail, looked at my bank statements, and called a guy named Bill Poduska to ask him if he was going to charge me for helicopter services on a missing-child case I’d done last winter. I was hoping he might say it was pro bono, because the client hadn’t paid me, even though I’d gotten the kid back. Bill apparently knew that, because he said there was no charge. I said thank you. Then I made some coffee, looked out at the rain for a while. It was an especially good rain because there was thunder and lightning with it and that always gave the weather a kind of charged tension that I enjoyed.

After watching the lightning and counting the seconds until I heard the thunder and figuring out by doing that how far away the storm was, and wondering if that actually was accurate, and then wondering why I in fact cared, I decided I had stalled on my plan long enough and called Burton Roth with somewhat less confidence than I had felt after two drinks the night before. We talked for half an hour and I had been right after all. He understood the problem and was prepared to help me solve it. Never a doubt in my mind. I told Roth I’d get back to him, and hung up just before Hawk came in with raindrops still bearded on his lavender silk trench coat.

“Got a plan?” Hawk said. “Got a million,” I said. “Or are you talking about a workable plan?”

Hawk unbuttoned his coat and went and stood looking out my office window at the rain falling on the corner of Berkeley and Boylston.

“Bobby worried about his kid,” Hawk said.

“Even after he met me?” I said.

“Bobby don’t know about you.”

“I’m not so sure about me sometimes either.”

“I gave him my word,” Hawk said.

“Yeah. Thanks.”

“So what you got in mind?”

“Well, I was thinking about pitching it in and becoming a caterer – you know? Leftovers R Us. Come in, take whatever there is in the house, fix up a tasty meal?”

Hawk continued to stare at the rain through my window. I went over and stood beside him and looked down. Puddles had formed and the raindrops hitting the puddles made tiny eruptions. The lightning skidded along the arch of the sky and shortly afterward the thunder cracked. It was dandy.

“I’d target the WASP market,” I said.

Hawk nodded. The rain slithered in thick rivulets down the outside of my window. It diffused the lightning flash prismatically for a transitory moment.

“Be about a hundred million white guys in this country,” Hawk said as the electricity crackled in the sky, “I end up with you.”

“Talk about luck,” I said.

“Talk about,” Hawk said. “What we gonna do about Bobby’s kid?”

“Do what we always do,” I said. “Keep dragging on the end we got hold of, see what we pull out of the hole.”