“Have you been … did you … you don’t have the right to … ”
“I haven’t mentioned you to them. I did mention you to the cops, but only when I had to, quite recently.”
“Why did you have to?”
“Because I’m looking for Rachel, and I’ll do anything I have to to find her. When I figured out that you were Lawrence English’s sister, I thought it might be a clue. It might help them find her. They’re looking, too.”
“You think my brother—”
“I think he’s in this somewhere. His chauffeur hired two guys to run me and Rachel off the road one night in Lynn. Your brother organized a picket line when she spoke in Belmont. Your brother has said she’s an ungodly corruption or some such. And he’s the head of an organization of Ritz crackers that would be capable of such things.”
“I didn’t used to know I was gay,” she said. “I just thought I was not very affectionate. I got married. I felt guilty about being cold. I even did therapy. It didn’t work. I was not a loving person. We were divorced. He said I was like a wax apple. I looked wonderful, but there was nothing inside—no nourishment. I went to a support group meeting for people recently divorced, and I met a woman and cared for her, and we developed a relationship, and I found out I wasn’t empty. I could love. I could feel passion. It was maybe the moment in my life. We made love and I felt. I”—she looked out the window again, and I ate another piece of toast—“I reached orgasm. It was as if, as if … I don’t know what it was as if.”
“As if a guilty verdict had been overturned.”
She nodded. “Yes. Yes. I wasn’t bad. I wasn’t cold. I had been trying to love the wrong things.”
“But Mom and brother?”
“You’ve met them?”
“Brother,” I said. “Not yet Momma.”
“They could never understand. They could never accept it. It would be just the worst thing that could be for them. I wish for them—maybe for me, too—I wish it could have been different, but it can’t, and it’s better to be what I am than to be failing at what I am not. But they mustn’t ever know. That’s why I can’t go to the police. I can’t let them know. I don’t mind the rest of the world. It’s them. They can’t know. I don’t know what they would do.”
“Maybe they’d kidnap Rachel,” I said.
27
The waitress said, “May I get you anything else?”
I shook my head, so did Julie. The waitress put the check down, near me, and I put a ten down on top of it.
Julie said, “They wouldn’t. They couldn’t do that. They wouldn’t know what to do.”
“They could hire a consultant. Their chauffeur has done time. Name’s Mingo Mulready, believe it or not, and he would know what to do.”
“But they don’t know.”
“Maybe they don’t. Or maybe the guy that was following you around was your brother’s. You haven’t been living at home.”
“Spenser, I’m thirty years old.”
“Get along with the family?”
“No. They didn’t approve of my marriage. They didn’t approve of my divorce. They hated me going to Goucher. They hate me being a model. I couldn’t live with them.”
“They worry about you?”
She shrugged. Now that she was thinking, she wasn’t crying, and her face looked more coherent. “I suppose they did,” she said. “Lawrence likes to play father and man of the house, and Mother lets him. I guess they think I’m dissolute and weak and uncommitted—that kind of thing.”
“Why would they have a thug like Mulready driving them around?”
Julie shrugged her shoulders. “Lawrence is all caught up in his Vigilance Committee. He gets into situations, I guess, where he feels he needs a bodyguard. I assume this Mulready is someone who would do that.”
“Not as well as he used to,” I said.
The waitress picked up my ten and brought back some change on a saucer.
“If they did take Rachel,” I said, “where would they keep her?”
“I don’t know.”
“Sure you do. If you were your brother and you had kidnaped Rachel Wallace, where would you keep her?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Spenser … ”
“Think,” I said. “Think about it. Humor me.”
“This is ridiculous.”
“I walked a half-mile through a blizzard because you asked me to,” I said. “I didn’t say it was ridiculous.”
She nodded. “The house,” she said.
The waitress came back and said, “Can I get you anything else?”
I shook my head. “We better vacate,” I said to Julie, “before she gets ugly.”
Julie nodded. We left the coffee shop and found an overstuffed loveseat in the lobby.
“Where in the house?” I said.
“Have you seen it?”
“Yeah. I was out there a few days ago.”
“Well, you know how big it is. There’s probably twenty rooms. There’s a great big cellar. There’s the chauffeur’s quarters over the garage and extra rooms in the attic.”
“Wouldn’t the servants notice?”
“They wouldn’t have to. The cook never leaves the kitchen, and the maid would have no reason to go into some parts of the house. We had only the cook and the maid when I was there.”
“And of course old Mingo.”
“They hired him after I left. I don’t know him.”
“Tell you what,” I said. “We’ll go back to my place. It’s just over on Marlborough Street, and we’ll draw a map of your brother’s house.”
“It’s my mother’s,” Julie said.
“Whoever,” I said. “We’ll make a map, and later on I’ll go take a look.”
“How will you do that?”
“First the map. Then the B-and-E plans. Come on.”
“I don’t know if I can make a map.”
“Sure you can. I’ll help and we’ll talk. You’ll remember.”
“And we’re going to your apartment?”
“Yes. It’s quite safe. I have a woman staying with me who’ll see that I don’t molest you. And on the walk down we’ll be too bundled up.”
“I didn’t mean that.”
“Okay, let’s go.”
We pushed out into the snow again. It seemed to be lessening, but the wind was whipping it around so much it was hard to tell. A half-block up Beacon Street Julie took my arm, and she hung on all the way up over the hill and down to Marlborough. Other than, two huge yellow pieces of snow equipment that clunked and waddled through the snow, we were all that moved.
When we got to my apartment, Susan was on the couch by the fire reading a book by Robert Coles. She wore a pair of jeans she’d left there two weeks ago and one of my gray T-shirts with the size, XL, printed in red letters on the front. It hung almost to her knees.
I introduced them and took Julie’s coat and hung it in the hall closet. As I went by the bathroom, I noticed Susan’s lingerie hanging on the shower rod to dry. It made me speculate about what was under the jeans, but I put it from me. I was working. I got a pad of lined yellow paper, legal size, from a drawer in the kitchen next to the phone and a small translucent plastic artist’s triangle and a black-ballpoint pen, and Julie and I sat at the counter in my kitchen for three hours and diagrammed her mother’s house—not only the rooms, but what was in them.
“I haven’t been there in a year,” she said at one point.
“I know, but people don’t usually rearrange the big pieces. The beds and sofas and stuff are usually where they’ve always been.”
We made an overall diagram of the house and then did each room on a separate sheet. I numbered all the rooms and keyed them to the separate sheets.
“Why do you want to know all this? Furniture and everything?”
“It’s good to know what you can. I’m not sure even what I’m up to. I’m just gathering information. There’s so much that I can’t know, and so many things I can’t predict, that I like to get everything I can in order so when the unpredictable stuff comes along I can concentrate on that.”