Free Widow’s Walk by Robert B. Parker Page A

Roy.”
    “And you’re trying to clear Mary of a murder charge?”
    “Yes.”
    “And you are working for a law firm?”
    “Yes. Cone Oakes.”
    “Is there someone I could call?”
    “Sure.” I gave her Rita Fiore’s number.
    She said, “Excuse me,” called it and talked with Rita and hung up.
    “I needed to be sure,” she said.
    She got up and went around to her office door and spoke to the secretary. Then she came back and sat.
    “It’ll only be a minute,” she said. “Computers, you know, they’ve revolutionized record-keeping.”
    “I’m going to get one soon,” I said.
    “They’re here to stay,” she said.
    Her phone rang. She excused herself again and answered. While she talked I thought how schools always felt like schools when you went in them. Even full grown and far removed, when I went in one I felt the old hostility again. While Mrs. Graffino spoke on the phone, the secretary came in with several pages of printout and put them on Mrs. Graffino’s desk. She mouthed “thank you” to the secretary, pushed the printouts toward me, and nodded. I picked them up. Another list. About 1,200 names long. We never sleep.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
    I sat with Susan and Pearl on the front steps of her big Victorian house in Cambridge, where she had her office on the first floor and her home on the second. I drank some beer. Susan had a martini I’d made for her, which she would sip for maybe two hours and leave half finished. Pearl was abstaining. People went by and smiled at us. Occasionally someone would walk a dog past, and Pearl would give a disinterested bark. Otherwise we were quiet.
    “I should be wearing a sleeveless undershirt,” I said.
    “The notorious wife-beater undershirt,” Susan said.
    “Like Brando,” I said. “In Streetcar.”
    “Wasn’t he a wonderful actor?” Susan said.
    “No,” I said. “I always thought he seemed mannered and self-aware.”
    “Really?”
    “Can’t help it,” I said.
    “But he was so beautiful.”
    “Didn’t do much for me,” I said.
    A woman with shoulder-length gray hair walked by in hiking boots and short shorts. Her companion was tall and bald with a combover.
    “How you feeling?” I said to Susan.
    “Like I failed.”
    “The kid who killed himself?”
    “Yes. I’m supposed to prevent those things.”
    “Didn’t someone say something about the tyrannical ”supposed to’s“?”
    “Karen Horney,” Susan said. “The tyrannical shoulds.”
    A guy walked past wearing a seersucker suit and one of those long-billed boating caps. He had a tan mongrel on a leash. The mongrel was wearing a red kerchief.
    “Stylish,” I said.
    Susan nodded. Pearl lay between us on the top step with her head on her paws. The mongrel spotted Pearl and barked at her. Pearl’s hearing wasn’t much anymore. She glanced at the source of what must have been a dim sound, and growled a little without raising her head. Susan patted her absently.
    “My office was the only place he was safe,” Susan said. “His parents were appalled that he was gay. His schoolmates were cruel. He had no friends.”
    I didn’t say anything.
    “He could only be who he was in my office.”
    I nodded.
    “I couldn’t help him to change who he was. I couldn’t help him to accept who he was. All I could accomplish, finally, for a few hours a week, was to provide a temporary refuge.”
    “Not enough,” I said.
    “No.”
    My beer was gone. I got up and went to the kitchen and got a jar of olives and another beer. I was trying Heineken again. A blast from the past. Susan was having another micro sip of her martini when I came back and sat down beside her. It was still warm, in the evening. The air had begun to turn faintly blue as the darkness came toward us. There was no wind. I plunked a fresh olive into Susan’s martini. She smiled at me.
    “If they have something somewhere,” Susan said. “If they are loved at home. If they have a circle of friends. But if it’s no good at