"You're just saying that."

Her smile remained polite as she left the glass room. I looked at Ronan. He had poured himself a little more coffee from his silver coffee carafe into his white bone china cup, and was adding a single cube of sugar with a small pair of silver tongs.

"You had no intention of telling me anything," I said. "Why did you agree to see me?"

Ronan made a thin lip movement that he probably thought was a smile.

"I like to get the measure of people," he said.

"And you think you can do it in this amount of time?"

"I believe I can," he said. "And I want them to get the measure of me."

"Sure," I said. "About five foot six. Right?"

"I have no interest in jokes, Spenser. Nor, frankly, any further interest in you. I have learned what I need to know. Granted, you, are physically imposing. You would probably make a good bouncer. But in any way that matters, you are a lightweight. I can reach into every crevice of this state. Should you become an irritant, I can have you squished like an insect. You are way out of your league here, and it would be in your best interest to recognize that."

"Squished?" I said.

Ronan didn't answer. He seemed entirely satisfied with his assessment of me and had nothing to add.

"You college professors are a tough bunch," I said.

Ronan smiled almost indulgently.

"I am at the moment associated with a university," he said. "But surely you know my career."

"Not as well as I will."

Ronan laughed out loud. "Well, really?" he said. "Was that a threat?"

"I guess so," I said. "You are, after all, an annoying little twerp."

I thought Ronan might have colored a little under his tan, but his voice revealed nothing. He stood.

"As I said, you would make a good bouncer. Let me show you the way out."

Driving back across the causeway toward the rest of Marblehead, I wondered what there was in a simple harassment suit to make Ronan lean on me so hard.

chapter six

I WAS WITH Susan. We were lying in bed at my apartment with my arm under her shoulders and her head on my chest. Pearl was in exile somewhere outside the bedroom door.

"One of us should probably get up and let the baby in," Susan said.

"Absolutely," I said.

We lay still.

"Well?" Susan said.

"I thought you were volunteering," I said.

"You're closest to the door."

"True," I said.

"And you're a guy," she said.

"That clinches it," I said.

I got up and opened the bedroom door. Pearl bounded into the room, gave me a sidelong look which might have been reproachful, and hopped up on the bed in my spot.

"This didn't work out exactly as I'd hoped," I said.

"She'll move," Susan said, and, in fact Pearl did. She moved huffily down to the foot of the bed and turned around three or four times and lay down. I put my arm back under Susan's shoulders. She put her head back on my chest. Pearl put her head on my right shinbone.

"My mother would never allow the dog anywhere but outside or in the kitchen," Susan said.

"Barbaric."

"I think that was a more general rule in those days," she said.

"How long have we been together?" I said.

"Roughly since the beginning of time," she said.

"Or longer," I said. "And I barely know where you grew up."

"Never seemed to matter."

"No," I said. "It didn't. I guess we kind of liked the sense of living in the immediate present."

"It was a way to symbolize that what happened before we met didn't matter."

"Yes," I said.

Outside my bedroom window, in the oblique bluish glare of the street lamps, I could see snow falling. It was falling lightly, a spring snow, the flakes spaced wide apart. It was the best kind of snow, because this far into March you knew it wouldn't last. Baseball season opened in nineteen days.

"So, you grew up in Swampscott," I said.

"Now it matters?" Susan said.

"It matters to you," I said.

She was quiet. With her forefinger she traced on my chest the outline of a bullet wound that I'd survived.

"I guess everyone has scars," Susan said. "Yours, at least, show."

"I got shot in the ass once in London," I said.

"I always suspected you were mooning the shooter," she said.

Outside the window the snowflakes were smaller, and coming faster, and straight down. Susan stopped tracing the scar on my chest and put her hand down flat over it.

"So, I grew up in Swampscott," Susan said.

"I knew that."

"My father was a pharmacist. Hirsch Drug on Humphrey Street. My mother was a housewife."

"No sisters or brothers," I said.

"They were childless until me. My father was forty-one when I was born. My mother was thirty-eight."

"How'd that happen?" I said.

"I don't think it was intentional," Susan said. "My mother never talked much about that kind of thing. Actually, my mother probably didn't know too much about that kind of thing."

"Being born late could work either way for you," I said.

She laughed, though I didn't hear humor in it.

"Actually it went both ways. My father was ecstatic. My mother was not."

"Feeling displaced?"

"I'm afraid so."

"Easy thing to feel," I said. "If she'd been the sole object of your father's affection for what, ten, fifteen years?"

"Eighteen."

"Then she is suddenly faced with competition at the precise moment when she is least able to compete."

"Because she's tired most of the time," Susan said. "Stuck home with the baby, and Papa comes home after a pleasant day at the drug store, plays with the baby for an hour and says `ain't it great.' "

"And your mother feels like there's something unwomanly about her because she doesn't think it's so great."

"In fact, she resents the baby," Susan said.

"Which makes her feel worse, which makes her resent the baby more."

"My God," Susan said, "I'm naked in bed with a sensitive male."

"Man of the nineties," I said.

"No matter how often," Susan said, "it is always surprising that you know the things you know."

"You hang around," I said, "you learn."

"Depends on who you hang around with," Susan said.

"I spend a lot of my life with people in trouble," I said. "I think some of them would have been in trouble if they'd been brought up by Mother Teresa, but a lot of them come from homes where the family didn't work right for them."

"We meet the same kinds of people, don't we."

"Except the kind you meet have managed to get themselves to a shrink."

"Unless they are a shrink," Susan said.

"Then they give themselves a referral," I said.

We were quiet. Enough snow had collected on Marlborough Street to reflect the street lights, and the darkness outside my bedroom window had become somewhat paler. Susan still had her hand flat over the pale scars on my chest.

Susan said, "We're skating very carefully on the surface here, aren't we."