Susan made a large plate of ham sandwiches while we finished up our maps and we had them with coffee in front of the fire.
“You make a good fire for a broad,” I said to Susan.
“It’s easy,” Susan said, “I rubbed two dry sexists together.”
“This is a wonderful sandwich,” Julie said to Susan.
“Yes. Mr. Macho here gets the ham from someplace out in eastern New York State.”
“Millerton,” I said. “Cured with salt and molasses. Hickory-smoked, no nitrates.”
Julie looked at Susan. “Ah, what about that other matter?”
“The shadow?” I said.
She nodded.
“You can go home and let him spot you, and then I’ll take him off your back.”
“Home?”
“Sure. Once he lost you, if he’s really intent on staying with you, he’ll go and wait outside your home until you show up. What else can he do?”
“I guess nothing. He wouldn’t be there today, I wouldn’t think.”
“Unless he was there yesterday,” Susan said. “The governor’s been on TV. No cars allowed on the highway. No buses are running. No trains. Nothing coming into the city.”
“I don’t want to go home,” Julie said.
“Or you can stay hiding out for a while, but I’d like to know where to get you.”
She shook her head.
“Look, Julie,” I said. “You got choices, but they are not limitless. You are part of whatever happened to Rachel Wallace. I don’t know what part, but I’m not going to let go of you. I don’t have that much else. I need to be able to find you.”
She looked at me and at Susan, who was sipping her coffee from a big brown mug, holding it in both hands with her nose half-buried in the cup and her eyes on the fire. Julie nodded her head three times.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m in an apartment at one sixty-four Tremont. One of the girls at the agency is in Chicago, and she let me stay while she’s away. Fifth floor.”
“I’ll walk you over,” I said.
28
The day after the big blizzard was beautiful, the way it always is. The sun is shining its ass off, and the snow is still white, and no traffic is out, and people and dogs are walking everywhere and being friendly during shared duress.
Susan and I walked out to Boylston and up toward Mass. Ave. She had bought a funky-looking old raccoon coat with padded shoulders when we’d gone antiquing in New Hampshire in November, and she was wearing it with big furry boots and a woolen hat with a big pom-pom. She looked like a cross between Annette Funicello and Joan Crawford.
We’d been living together for two and a half days, and if I had known where Rachel Wallace was, I would have been having a very nice time. But I didn’t know where Rachel Wallace was, and what was worse, I had a suspicion where she might be, and I couldn’t get there. I had called Quirk and told him what I knew. He couldn’t move against a man of English’s clout without some probable cause, and we agreed I had none. I told him I didn’t know where Julie Wells was staying. He didn’t believe me, but the pressure of the snow emergency was distracting the whole department, and no one came over with a thumbscrew to interrogate me.
So Susan and I walked up Boylston Street to see if there was a store open where she could buy some underclothes and maybe a shirt or two, and I walked with her in a profound funk. All traffic was banned from all highways. No trains were moving.
Susan bought some very flossy-looking lingerie at Saks, and a pair of Levi’s and two blouses. We were back out on Boylston when she said, “Want to go home and model the undies?”
“I don’t think they’d fit me,” I said.
“I didn’t mean you,” she said.
I said, “God damn it, I’ll walk out there.”
“Where?”
“I’ll walk out to Belmont.”
“Just to avoid modeling the undies?”
I shook my head. “It’s what? Twelve, fifteen miles? Walk about three miles an hour. I’ll be there in four or five hours.”
“You’re sure she’s there?”
“No. But she might be, and if she is, it’s partly my fault. I have to look.”
“It’s a lot of other people’s fault much more than yours. Especially the people who took her.”
“I know, but if I’d been with her, they wouldn’t have taken her.”
Susan nodded.
“Why not call the Belmont Police?” she said.
“Same as with Quirk. They can’t just charge in there. They have to have a warrant. And there has to be some reasonable suspicion, and I don’t have anything to give them. And … I don’t know. They might screw it up.”
“Which means that you want to do it yourself.”
“Maybe.”
“Even if it endangers her?”
“I don’t want to endanger her. I trust me more than I trust anyone else. Her life is on the line here. I want me to be the one who’s in charge.”
“And because you have to even up with the people that took her,” Susan said, “you’re willing to go after her alone and risk the whole thing, including both your lives, because your honor has been tarnished, or you think it has.”
I shook my head. “I don’t want some Belmont cop in charge of this whose last bust was two ninth-graders with an ounce of Acapulco gold.”
“And Quirk or Frank Belson can’t go because they don’t have jurisdiction, and they don’t have a warrant and all of the above?”
I nodded.
We turned the corner onto Arlington and walked along in the middle of the bright street, like a scene from Currier and Ives.
“Why don’t you find Hawk and have him go with you?”
I shook my head.
“Why not?”
“I’m going alone.”
“I thought you would. What if something happens to you?”
“Like what?”
“Like suppose you sneak in there and someone shoots you. If you’re right, you are dealing with people capable of that.”
“Then you tell Quirk everything you know. And tell Hawk to find Rachel Wallace for me.”
“I don’t even know how to get in touch with Hawk. Do I call that health club on the waterfront?”
“If something happens to me, Hawk will show up and see if you need anything.”
We were on the corner of Marlborough Street. Susan stopped and looked at me. “You know that so certainly?”
“Yes.”
She shook her head and kept shaking it. “You people are like members of a religion or a cult. You have little rituals and patterns you observe that nobody else understands.”
“What people?”
“People like you. Hawk, Quirk, that state policeman you met when the boy was kidnaped.”
“Healy.”
“Yes, Healy. The little trainer at the Harbor Health Club. All of you. You’re as complexly programmed as male wildebeests, and you have no common sense at all.”
“Wildebeests?” I said.
“Or Siamese fighting fish.”
“I prefer to think lion, panther maybe.”
We walked to my apartment. “I suppose,” Susan said, “we could settle for ox. Not as strong but nearly as smart.”
Susan went to the apartment. I went to the basement and got some more firewood from the storage area and carried an armful up the back stairs. It was early afternoon. We had lunch. We watched the news. The travel ban was still with us.
“At least wait until morning,” Susan said. “Get an early start.”
“And until then?”
“We can read by the fire.”
“When that gets boring, I was thinking we could make shadow pictures on the wall. Ever see my rooster?”
Susan said, “I’ve never heard it called that.” I put my arm around her shoulder and squeezed her against me and we began to giggle. We spent the rest of the day before the fire on the couch. Mostly we read.