“I promise you, I don’t know nothing about them,” Manfred said.
“Then you should be sure to find out about them, Manfred.”
He tried to twist his chin off my fist, but I increased the upward pressure a little and held him still.
“I don’t do your dirty work.”
“You do. You do anyone’s. You’re a piece of shit, and you do what you’re told. Just a matter of pressure,” I said.
His eyes shifted away from me. Several people coming out of the bank to my right paused and looked at us, and then moved hurriedly along.
“There are several kinds of pressure, Manfred. I can come into work every day and harass you until they fire you. I can go wherever you go and tell them about how we busted you for possession of an inflatable lover, and how you sang like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to get off.” There was more color in his cheeks now. “Or,” I said, “I could punch your face into scrapple once a day until you had my information.”
With his teeth clenched from the pressure of my fist, Manfred said, “You miserable prick.” His whole face was red now. I increased the pressure and brought him up on his toes.
“Vilification,” I said. “You people are always vilifying us.” I let him go and stepped away from him. “I’ll be around tomorrow to see what you can tell me,” I said.
“Maybe I won’t be here,” he said.
“I know where you live, Manfred. I’ll find you.”
He was still standing very straight and stiff against the wall. His breath was hissing between his teeth. His eyes looked bright to me, feverish.
“Tomorrow, Manfred. I’ll be by tomorrow.”
18
I went out to Arlington Street and turned left and walked down to Boylston eating my Winesap apple. On Boylston Street there were lots of Christmas decorations and pictures of Santa Glaus and a light, pleasant snow falling. I wondered if Rachel Wallace could see the snow from where she was. Tis the season to be jolly. If I had stayed with her … I shook my head. Hard. No point to that. It probably wasn’t much more unpleasant to be kidnaped in the Christmas season than any other time. I hadn’t stayed with her. And thinking I should have wouldn’t help find her. Got to concentrate on the priority items, babe. Got to think about finding her. Automatically, as I went by Brentano’s, I stopped and looked in the window at the books. I didn’t have much hope for Manfred—he was mean and bigoted and stupid. Cosgrove was none of those things, but he was a working reporter on a liberal newspaper. Anything he found out, he’d have to stumble over. No one was going to tell him.
I finished my apple and dropped the core in a trash basket attached to a lamp post, I looked automatically in Malben’s window at the fancy food. Then I could cross and see what new Japanese food was being done at Hai Hai, then back this side and stare at the clothes in Louis, perhaps stop off at the Institute of Contemporary Art. Then I could go home and take a nap. Shit. I walked back to my office and got my car and drove to Belmont.
The snow wasn’t sticking as I went along Storrow Drive, and it was early afternoon with no traffic. On my right the Charles was very black and cold-looking. Along the river people jogged in their winter running clothes. A very popular model was longjohns under shorts, with a hooded sweatshirt and blue New Balance shoes with white trim. I preferred a cutoff sweatshirt over black turtleneck sweater, with blue warm-up pants to match the New Balance 32O’s. Diversity. It made America great.
I crossed the Charles to the Cambridge side near Mt. Auburn Hospital and drove through a slice of Cambridge through Watertown, out Belmont Street to Belmont. The snow was beginning to collect as I pulled into a Mobil station on Trapelo Road and got directions to the Belmont Police Station on Concord Avenue.
I explained to the desk sergeant who I was, and he got so excited at one point that he glanced up at me for a moment before he went back to writing in a spiral notebook.
“I’m looking for one of your patrol car people. Young guy, twenty-five, twenty-six. Five ten, hundred eighty pounds, very cocky, wears military decorations on his uniform blouse. Probably eats raw wolverine for breakfast.”
Without looking up the desk sergeant said, “That’d be Foley. Wise mouth.”
“Man’s gotta make his mark somehow,” I said. “Where do I find him?”
The sergeant looked at something official under the counter. “He’s cruising up near the reservoir,” he said. “I’ll have the dispatcher call him. You know the Friendly’s up on Trapelo?”
“Yeah, I passed it coming in,” I said.
“I’ll have him meet you in the parking lot there.”
I thanked him and went out and drove up to Friendly’s ice cream parlor. Five minutes after I got there, a Belmont cruiser pulled in and parked. I got out of my car in the steady snowfall and walked over to the cruiser and got in the back seat. Foley was driving. His partner was the same older cop with the pot belly, still slouched in the passenger seat with his hat over his eyes.
Foley shifted sideways and grinned at me over the seat. “So someone snatched your lez, huh?”
“How gracefully you put it,” I said.
“And you got no idea who, and you come out grabbing straws. You want me to ID the cluck you hit in the gut, don’t you?”
I said to the older cop, “How long you figure before he’s chief?”
The older cop ignored me.
“Am I right or wrong?”
“Right,” I said, “you know who he is?”
“Yeah, after we was all waltzing together over by the library that day, I took down his license number when he drove off, and I checked into him when I had time. Name’s English—Lawrence Turnbull English, Junior. Occupation, financial consultant. Means he don’t do nothing. Family’s got twelve, fifteen million bucks. He consults with their trust officer on how to spend it. That’s as much as he works. Spends a lot of time taking the steam, playing racquetball, and protecting democracy from the coons and the queers and the commies and the lower classes, and the libbers and like that.”
The old cop shifted a little in the front seat and said, “He’s got an IQ around eight, maybe ten.”
“Benny’s right,” Foley said. “He snatched that broad, he’d forget where he hid her.”
“Where’s he live?” I said.
Foley took a notebook out of his shirt pocket, ripped out a page, and handed it to me. “Watch your ass with him though. Remember, he’s a friend of the chiefs,” Foley said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks.”
A plow rumbled by on Trapelo Road as I got out of the cruiser and went back to my car. The windows were opaque with snow, and I had to scrape them clean before I could drive. I went into the same Mobil station and got my tank filled and asked for directions to English’s house.
It was in a fancy part of Belmont. A rambling, gabled house that looked like one of those old nineteenth century resort hotels. Probably had a hunting preserve in the snow behind it. The plow had tossed up a small drift in front of the driveway, and I had to shove my car through it. The driveway was clear and circled up behind the house to a wide apron in front of a garage with four doors. To the right of the garage there was a back door. I disdained it. I went back around to the front door. A blow for the classless society. A young woman in a maid suit answered the bell. Black dress, little white apron, little hat—just like in the movies.
I said, “Is the master at home?”
She said, “Excuse me?”
I said, “Mr. English? Is he at home?”
“Who shall I say is calling, please?”
“Spenser,” I said, “representing Rachel Wallace. We met once, tell him, at the Belmont Library.”
The maid said, “Wait here, please,” and went off down the hall. She came back in about ninety seconds and said, “This way, please.”
We went down the hall and into a small pine-paneled room with a fire on the hearth and a lot of books on built-in shelves on either side of the fireplace. English was sitting in a red-and-gold wing chair near the fire, wearing an honest-to-God smoking jacket with black velvet lapels and smoking a meerschaum pipe. He had on black-rimmed glasses and a book by Harold Robbins was closed in his right hand, the forefinger keeping the place.