Pale Kings and Princes by Robert B. Parker Page A

with a lot of people?"
    "Yes." The word came out of Juanita in a hissing intense whisper. The cigarette went briefly to her lips.
    "Who besides Valdez?" Juanita shook her head. "You don't know any besides Valdez?" She shook her head again.
    "If you don't know any but Valdez how do you know she sleeps around?"
    "I know," Juanita hissed.
    "How?" I said.
    "I know," she hissed again.
    "You ever sleep with Valdez?" I said.
    Her face changed. Her eyes widened, her mouth went into a humorless lopsided smile. "I don't want to talk with you anymore," she said brightly.
    "I don't blame you," I said. "But there's dead people involved. There's somebody killing people around here. I need to find out who it is."
    The smile got brighter and more lopsided. Her voice had a chirpy quality.
    "You get out of here right now," she said gaily, "or I'll call hospital security."
    "My God," I said.
    "I mean it," she said. "You get out of here this minute."
    I wanted to stay. She was like a cable stretched too tight and beginning to fray. I wanted to stick around and see what unraveled.
    "Emmy was sleeping with your boy friend?" I said.
    Juanita's grin got more lopsided. The whites of her widened eyes gleamed. She stood up from her desk and walked stiffly around and past me and out the door. I stood and went after her. She went fifty feet down the corridor and into the ladies' room. I stopped in the corridor outside. A nurse came down the corridor from the other direction and went in the ladies' room too. I hesitated and then turned away. Some taboos are unbreakable.
     
     

Chapter 16

     
     
    I was having a cup of coffee at the counter in Wally's Lunch when Lundquist came in, the winter sun glinting off the polished leather of his holster as he opened the door. He sat down beside me.
    "Cup of tea, please," he said to Wally. Wally scowled. Lundquist smiled at him. "I know it's more trouble than coffee," he said, "but I just like it better. Little lemon too, please." Wally got to work on the tea.
    "Rogers was shot twice in the head from behind with a forty-one-caliber firearm," he said. "We assume it was a revolver because we didn't find any brass, though the perpetrator could have cleaned up afterwards."
    "Forty-one caliber?" I said.
    "Yeah, an oddball," Lundquist said.
    "How many of those are registered?" I said. The tea came. Lundquist squeezed the wedge of lemon into the cup, jiggled the tea bag a little, studying the color. Then he took the bag out and set it soggily into his saucer. "Sugar, please," he said. I passed the cup of sugar packets to him. He opened two at once, lining them up and ripping off the tops. Then he poured the sugar in his tea and stirred it carefully.
    "There are no forty-one-caliber guns registered in the state," he said.
    "Anything else?"
    "There might be some tire tracks behind Rogers's car. But so what? Place is out of the way but people park there. Ground was frozen. There's not enough for a cast."
    Lundquist picked his cup up and blew softly over the surface and then sipped some tea. He made a face, and shook his head slightly. "Not good," he said. "Water wasn't hot enough and it was a mass-market teabag."
    "Suppose Wally's got a tea cozy back there someplace?" I said.
    Lundquist smiled and shook his head. "Mrs. Rogers says her husband left the house that morning and went off to work like he does every day. She says that's the last she saw him. He never came home. She wasn't all that worried, she says, because he was often out late on police business. Sometimes all night."
    "In Wheaton, Mass.?" I said.
    "I thought about that myself," Lundquist said. "M.E. figures he was shot sometime in the early evening, but the cold weather complicates it, and it would be nice to know the last time he ate."
    Lundquist drank some more of his tea. Wally came down the counter and put a bill in front of us, and went away.
    "So he went up there probably in the early evening, after dark, and met somebody he knew and they sat in the car