The Professional (4 page)

“I let myself love Beth,” he said.

“Opens you up a little,” I said. “Doesn’t it.”

“Chink in the armor,” he said. “But there it is. I’m fifty-eight. She’s thirty. I’m in good shape and all. But I’m almost twice her age.”

I went back to nodding.

“We were fine until I began to get a sense that she might be seeing somebody else. No real evidence, little stuff, mostly sort of a feeling. I guess if your wife is cheating on you, at some level, you know.”

“If you let yourself,” I said.

“After a while I let myself,” he said. “I put Zel on her, see what he could find out.”

“She doesn’t know Zel?” I said.

“No. She doesn’t know anything to do with my business.”

“Makes it easier,” I said.

“Zel’s good at things,” Chet said. “He tailed her and found out that she was seeing somebody and what his name was.” Chet shook his head. “If that’s his real name.”

“And you started looking into places she might have met him,” I said.

“Zel did, yeah. Health club, country club, restaurants, couple of stores on Newbury Street.”

“And he didn’t find Eisenhower,” I said. “But he established an, ah, relationship with various people to report if anything about Eisenhower surfaced. So when I showed up at Pinnacle Fitness, asking about him . . .”

“We heard about it,” Chet said. “And I asked Zel to check it out with you.”

“What’s your plan if you find Gary Eisenhower.”

“I’ll have him in for a talk,” Chet said.

“How far will you go?” I said.

“Do you mean will I kill him?” Chet said. “I don’t think that would get me where I want to get.”

“Which is?”

“With Beth, and nobody else.”

“And if you aced him, she’d suspect.”

“Wouldn’t you?” Chet said.

“You’re not the only aggrieved husband,” I said.

“But you’d be suspicious, wouldn’t you?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Have you spoken to your wife about any of this?”

“No.”

“Might be a good thing,” I said.

“Might be,” he said.

“But?”

“But I can’t,” he said. “I simply goddamn can’t.”

I nodded.

“The best moments in my life,” I said, “have come because I loved somebody.”

“Yeah,” he said.

“And the worst,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said.

I SAT IN THE client-membership offices with a young woman named Courtney and signed up for a six-month membership at Pinnacle Fitness. I didn’t see Margi from the client-services office. Though Courtney could have been Margi with a change of makeup. Then the client-training director took me to the client-training office to assess me physically. He took my blood pressure and pulse. He weighed me. And pronounced me fit. He turned me over to a personal trainer, an in-shape young man named Luke, who offered to help me learn the various pieces of equipment. I declined.

“I’ve worked out a lot,” I said. “I’ll be okay on my own.”

Luke nodded.

“I kind of figured that,” he said. “You need anything, give me a shout.”

I got a locker and a padlock. I didn’t really need one, except for the gun. I hated wearing a gun while working out. So I changed into some sweats and left the gun in the locker. If Margi spotted me from the client-services office and rushed me, I might be able to run for it.

I was limited in my workouts by the fact that I could use only equipment near the front window, where I could watch for Gary Eisenhower entering the lobby. Who kept not showing up every day.

Susan came with me for a guest workout one day. Everything she wore to work out in fit her exactly and matched perfectly. Her thick, dark hair was held in place by what must have been a designer headband. And her makeup was impeccable. She’d been doing a lot of power yoga lately, which made her even stronger and more supple than she already was. A lot of people looked at her.

“My,” Susan said, as she looked around Pinnacle Fitness. “You fit in here like a rhinoceros at a petting zoo.”

“I’m undercover,” I said, “disguised as a thug.”

“It’s very convincing,” Susan said. “You’re waiting for Gary Whosis to show up?”

“Yes.”

“How long do you plan to wait?”

“I have a six-month membership,” I said.

“You are a stubborn boy,” she said.

“I am.”

“Maybe I can help,” she said. “Show me the picture again.”

“It’s still censored,” I said.

“How too bad,” Susan said.

We worked out as long as we could stand to and then went to change. When I came dressed from the shower, through the front window of the gym I saw Zel and Boo come into the club lobby. I went out.

“Looking for somebody?” I said.

“Same as you,” Zel said.

Behind him, Boo was giving me the deadeye stare that was supposed to freeze my blood in my veins.

I said, “How ya doin’, Boo?”

“Fuck you,” he said.

I nodded.

“You looking for Gary Eisenhower?” I said to Zel.

“Yep.”

“But you don’t know what he looks like,” I said. “So actually you swung by to see if I’d made any progress.”

“Yep,” Zel said.

“I haven’t,” I said.

“You know what he looks like?” Zel said.

“No,” I said.

“The hell you don’t,” Zel said. “You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t know.”

I shrugged.

“How about it, Zel,” Boo said. “Lemme go with him a little.”

Zel ignored him.

“We’re after the same thing,” Zel said. “Don’t see why we can’t cooperate.”

“What’s Boo after?” I said.

“Boo wants what I want,” Zel said.

“And you want?”

“What Chet tells me,” Zel said.

“Too many levels of command for me,” I said. “I think I’ll mosey along on this by myself.”

“Don’t mind if we mosey on along behind you,” Zel said.

“Nope.”

“What if you did mind?” Boo said. “What you gonna do?”

“Let’s wait until I mind,” I said.

Boo wanted so badly to prove he was tougher than I was that I felt almost bad for him.

“Two things, Boo,” Zel said. “One, it ain’t time for you to do your thing. And two, I ain’t so sure you can do it with him.”

“Like hell,” Boo said.

“Listen to Zel,” I said to Boo.

“See you around,” Zel said.

He jerked his head toward the elevator. Boo was still giving me the stare.

“Boo,” Zel said quietly. “We’re leaving.”

He walked to the elevator and pushed the button. Boo stared at me. The elevator arrived and the door slid open.

“Boo,” Zel said. “Now!”

Boo turned and went to the elevator. Zel followed him in. The door slid shut. I looked back toward the health club. Susan, showered, made up, coiffed, and in street clothes, was standing inside the big window holding a two-and-a-half-pound dumbbell. I went back inside the club.

“What was your plan?” I said.

“The ugly guy you were having a stare-off with,” Susan said.

“If things unraveled, I was going to run out and hit him with the dumbbell.”

“Appropriate choice of weapon,” I said.

“For either one of you,” Susan said.

I crooked my arm for her to take.

“Buy you a drink, Wonder Woman?” I said.

She took my arm.

“Maybe two,” she said.

I WENT EVERY DAY to Pinnacle Fitness. I had to be careful. If I improved my body further, the paparazzi would begin following me. So I worked out sparingly and spent a lot of time watching the snugly dressed young women, looking for exercise tips. I was in my second week at Pinnacle when one of the female trainers walked up to me and put her hand out.

“Hi,” she said. “I’m Estelle. Can I help you with your training?”

We shook hands. She had shiny black hair, worn long and straight. There was something faintly Asian-Pacific about her appearance, though it was too faint to tell me what.

“No, thanks,” I said. “I don’t think anyone can.”

She smiled warmly.

“I don’t believe that,” she said. “If you need anything, please let me know.”

I said, “Okay, Estelle.”

Since I’d joined no one had spoken to me like that. Why now? I glanced through the front window at the lobby. Across the lobby at the snack bar, a man wearing an ankle-length black overcoat was sipping a smoothie, the healthy devil. He had a short beard and aviator-style sunglasses, and a bright blue silk scarf hanging open around his neck. He didn’t seem to be paying attention. Estelle paid me no more attention, either. When he finished his smoothie, the guy in the overcoat left. Sleuthing makes you suspicious. The guy hadn’t been in the club. Had he really come up to the top floor of the building to drink a smoothie?

When I was through for the day, I took the elevator down and went out onto Tremont Street. The guy in the overcoat was sitting on a bench across the street at the edge of the Common, reading a newspaper, digesting his smoothie. He fit the physical description of Gary Eisenhower, as best I could tell. But the beard and the sunglasses made it a little hard to judge the face from this distance. If only his loins were blacked out with Magic Marker.

I crossed with the light and headed on down across the Common. Overcoat fell in behind me, at a distance. Even if I hadn’t started thinking about him in the health club lobby, I would have made him when he started tailing me. His elaborate lack of interest in me was classic overacting. We crossed Charles Street to the Public Garden. It was late afternoon and already dark in the Back Bay. The Public Garden was full of people walking away from work. I angled left through the Public Garden, crossed at Arlington, and went up Boylston Street toward my office. The guy in the overcoat trailed along. I went in the Boylston Street entrance of my building and walked up a flight to my office. Overcoat lingered outside.

In my office I took off my leather jacket, put on my baseball hat and a black raincoat, and went down the back stairs, into the alley, and out onto Berkeley to the corner of Boylston. Overcoat was where I thought he’d be, in the lobby of my building, looking at the tenant directory.

I crossed Boylston Street and stood looking in the window of a Starbucks coffee shop. In the reflection I saw him come out of the building. He headed across Boylston on Berkeley Street toward the river. I tailed him down Berkeley, across Newbury, across Commonwealth Ave, to Beacon Street. He turned right, crossed Arlington, and turned into a low apartment building on the river side of Beacon Street, where it was still flat before Beacon Hill began to rise toward the State House. I stood across the street behind the black iron fence where it turned the corner at Arlington Street. In another minute or so, the lights went on in the second-floor front.

It was raining lightly; there was a mild wind. I felt like a real private eye, standing in the dark, in the city, with my collar pulled up and my hat pulled down. After a while, I walked across to the doorway of the apartment building and read the names under the doorbells. The second floor was E. Herzog.

I lived only a couple of blocks from E. Herzog, so I turned back into the light rain and walked home.

Gee whiz, I thought, who can you trust.

I TAILED HIM for the next couple of days. I thought it might make some sense to see if I could learn anything. And in truth, I was probably showing off a little. When he’d try to tail me, I spotted him at once. I was behind him for the rest of the week and he never knew it. I couldn’t wait to tell Susan.

The next day, Wednesday, I called Martin Quirk and asked him if he could run the names Gary Eisenhower and E. Herzog for me.

“You want me to come by and iron yours shirts, too?”

“I know you,” I said. “You’d use too much starch.”

“I find anything,” Quirk said, “I’ll let you know.”

I spent the rest of Wednesday hanging around Newbury Street, where Gary shopped with a woman I didn’t know in a series of shops that didn’t have my size. Thursday was spent mostly in the lobby of The Langham Hotel, where Gary spent the afternoon in a room with one woman, and much of the evening in the same room with a different woman. Neither was a client.

Friday I spent the morning outside a boutique hotel near the State House, while Gary spent it in the hotel with a date, not one of my clients. Gary didn’t let a lot of grass grow, I had to give him that.

Friday afternoon he did some shopping in Copley Place. I didn’t like Copley Place. It was a large mall in the middle of the city, with a lot of marble and high-end shops, anchored at either end by a large hotel. One could come to the hotel and shop in the mall, and never go outside. The drawback was that inside the mall you had no way to know if you were in Chicago, or Houston, or East Lansing, Michigan.

Gary seemed to like it okay. He bought a cashmere topcoat and a twelve-thousand-dollar suit, and a pair of imported shoes, the price of which I didn’t catch. Then he went to one of the hotel bars and had drinks with Estelle, the friendly trainer. They spoke at length and quite intensely, and laughed quite often, and when he left her he kissed her good-bye. Then, carrying his purchases, he headed out of Copley Place and on down Boylston Street.

I drifted along behind him as he walked down Boylston from Copley Place. There was a lot of foot traffic in the late afternoon, and I closed it up a little. He turned at Arlington Street, as I had expected, but then he crossed into the Public Garden and walked toward the little bridge that arched over the Swan Boats. Halfway across the bridge he stopped and leaned on the railing and looked down at the still water. The romantic devil just liked to be on the bridge. I understood that. I did, too. The Swan Boats were in dry dock for the winter. But the pond hadn’t been drained yet. When I reached him I stopped and leaned on the bridge railing, too. He kept staring at the water.

I said, “Gary Eisenhower, I presume?”

He looked up as if he was startled. Then he began to smile.

“Goddamn,” he said. “You’re pretty good.”

“Everyone says so.”

“How’d you know it was me?” he said.

“Got a picture,” I said.

“How the hell . . . ?”

“A woman took it while you were sleeping.”