“Are you?” she said.
“No more than you are, shrink girl.”
She smiled and sipped her wine.
She said, “We both uncover secrets, I guess.”
“And chase after hidden truths,” I said.
“And people are often better for it,” she said.
“But not always.”
“No,” she said. “Not always.”
We ate our plum soup happily and sipped our wine.
“You don’t like divorce cases, do you?” she said.
“Make me feel like a Peeping Tom,” I said.
Susan smiled, which is a luminous sight.
“Is that different than a private eye?” she said.
“I hope so,” I said.
“You feel intrepid, chasing bad guys,” Susan said.
“Yes.”
“And sleazy, chasing errant mates.”
“Yes.”
“But you do it,” she said.
“It’s work.”
“It’s good work,” Susan said. “The pain of emotional loss is intense.”
“I recall,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “We both do. Half my practice comes from people like that.”
“Despite similarities, our practices are not identical.”
“Mine requires less muscle,” she said. “But the point is, you can rescue people in different ways. Leaping tall buildings at a single bound is not the only way.”
“I know,” I said.
“Which is why you’ll work divorce cases,” she said, “even though they make you feel sleazy.”
“Heroism has its downside,” I said.
“It has its upside too,” Susan said.
Susan’s eyes had a small glitter.
“Speaking of which . . .” I said.
“Could we maybe fi nish dinner?” she said.
“Of course,” I said. “The upside is patient.”
“And frequent,” Susan said.
3.
Iknew Doherty’s name and address. It would not be very hard to find out more about him. He had not, however, hired me to find out anything about him. So I decided to find out about his wife.
Concord College was not in Concord. It was in Cambridge. Three recent high-rise buildings with a lot of windows, just across the Longfellow Bridge in Kendall Square. A software tycoon with a streak of vestigial hippie-ness had endowed the place with a sum larger than the GNP of several small countries. And the college, perhaps respectful of its financial base, was an exfoliating swamp of unusual ideas. It cost about $40,000 a year to go there.
I went into Foss Hall, which was the middle high-rise, and up to the fourth floor. Aside from my adulthood, I was too neat to be mistaken for a student. Most of them wore very sloppy clothes that had cost a lot. Chronologically, I could have passed for faculty, but once again the neatness factor gave me away. The faculty was no neater than the students, but their clothes had cost less. Hoping to pass anyway, I was carrying a green book bag. Deep cover.
According to the schedule Doherty had given me, Jordan Richmond’s office was in room 425, and her office hours began in ten minutes. I strolled past the office. It had an oak door with a window. There was no one in there. I wandered past the door and stopped to study a bulletin board, beyond the next offi ce. Crush Imperialism . . . Film Festivaclass="underline" Jean-Luc Godard . . . Stop the Murders for Oil . . . Roommate Wanted, M or F . . . Wage Peace . . . No Wel- fare for the Wealthy . . . Keg Party at MIT . . . African-American conference . . . Concordian Lecture Series: “Apollonian Despair in the Poetry of Sara Teasdale” . . . Equal Work, Equal Wage . . . Gay & Lesbian Coalition . . . Intelligent Design Is Neither . . . Maybe it wasn’t such a hothouse of new ideas. Except for Apollonian Despair. As I studied the notices, Jordan Richmond strolled past me down the hall toward her offi ce.
Her picture didn’t do her justice. There was a time in my life when I would have thought that admiring the butt of a fifty-one-year-old woman was exploiting the elderly. I had not entertained that conceit in some years, but if I had, Jordan Richmond would have ended it. She had brown hair with blond highlights. By the standards of her colleagues she appeared to 12 be vastly overdressed. Glimpsed covertly as she passed, she seemed to be wearing makeup. She had on black pants and a jacket with a faint chalk stripe. Under the jacket was a pink tee. By the sound they made on the hard floor, I could tell she was wearing heels.
I hung around the hallway, trying to look inconspicuous, until she finished her office hours at 4:30 and, carrying a black leather briefcase, she headed out of the building. I went with her. We stood so close in the elevator that I could smell her perfume. On the street we turned right and she went into the Marriott hotel. I took a baseball cap out of my book bag and put it on. Spenser, master of disguise. Then I put the book bag in a trash basket out front, waited for a moment, and went in after her. She was in the lobby bar. At a table with a man. I sat with my hat on, at the far end of the bar, where it turned. It put her back to me, and I could look at her companion. He appeared to be tall. His mustache and goatee were neatly trimmed. His nose was strong. His dark eyes were deep-set. His dark hair was curly and short with touches of gray. He wore an expensive dark suit with a white shirt and a blue silk tie. He was sipping a martini. As soon as she was seated he spoke to the waitress. She took his order and brought Jordan a martini. Jordan picked it up and gestured with it at the man. He raised his glass and they touched rims. I ordered a beer. The bartender put down a dish of nuts. I ate some so as not to hurt his feelings.
Jordan and her companion gave some evidence that Doherty’s fears were not groundless. They sat close together. She touched him often, putting a hand on his forearm, or on his shoulder.
Once, laughing, she leaned forward so that their foreheads touched. All his movements were languid, not as if he was tired, more as if he was happily relaxed about everything. And very pleased to be him.
They had two drinks. He paid the check. They got up and went out. I left too much money on the bar and went after them. They walked back to Concord College together. Got into a Honda Prelude in the parking lot and drove out. I was parked down Main Street a way. By the time I got to my car they were out of sight. So instead I went over the Longfellow Bridge and drove down to Milton.
It took about a half hour to get to Brant Island Road. I parked on the corner with a view of the house where Dennis and Jordan lived. It was a white garrison colonial, with green shutters. The lights were on. There was a Ford Crown Vic in the driveway. At ten after eleven Jordan pulled the Prelude into the driveway next to the Crown Vic. She got out, straightened her pants a little, fluffed her hair for a moment, then took her briefcase from the car, closed the car door, and walked carefully to the house.
4.
It does sound kind of affair-y,” Susan said.
“I saw them together,” I said. “It’s an affair. But it’s not proof of an affair.”
“I know,” Susan said. “Will you say anything to the husband?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “It would just be my opinion.”
“You want to offer him certainty?”
“I think until I can prove it, he’ll refuse to believe it,” I said.
Susan nodded.
“Hard to know, sometimes, what’s best,” she said.
“How about the truth?” I said.
She smiled.
“That’s often effective,” she said.
We were sharing sweet-and-sour pork for supper at P. F. Chang’s in Park Square. Unless you think that sharing means equal portions for both. In which case, I was having sweet-andsour pork, and Susan was having a couple of bites.
“But I don’t know,” I said, “at this stage of things, if I would have wanted to know without certainty.”