“Maybe she showed a little class,” I said, “and looked away.”
“I seem to recall her barking at a very critical juncture.”
“For heaven’s sake,” I said. “I thought that was you.”
Susan giggled into my shoulder where she was resting her head.
“You yanked me right over the counter,” she said.
“I didn’t yank,” I said. “I swept.”
“And spilled the wine and broke the wineglass.”
“Seemed worth it at the time,” I said.
“Usually I like to undress and hang my clothes up neatly.”
“So why didn’t you resist?” I said.
“And miss all the fun?”
“Of course not.”
“When do you think you’ll talk about Alton?”
“Pretty soon,” I said. “I just have to give it a little time.”
Susan nodded and kissed me lightly on the mouth.
“Let’s leap up,” she said. “And guzzle some polenta.”
“Guzzle?”
“Sure.”
“We gourmets usually say savor,” I said.
Susan nodded and got off the couch and got her clothes rearranged. Then she looked at me and smiled and shook her head.
“Right over the goddamned counter,” she said.
chapter forty-three
THE RAIN HAD come up the coast behind me. It had traveled more slowly than I had and arrived in Boston only this morning, when Susan and I, with still the taste of polenta and chicken and Alsatian wine, went to a memorial service for Farrell’s lover, whose name had been Brian, in a white Unitarian church in Cambridge. Farrell was there, looking sleepless. And the dead man’s parents were there. The mother, stiff with tranquilizers and pale with grief, leaned heavily on her husband, a burly man with a large gray moustache. He looked puzzled, as much as anything, as he held his wife up.
Susan and I sat near the back of the small plain church, while the minister blathered. It was probably not his fault that he blathered. Ministers are expected to speak as if death were not the final emperor. But it came out, as it usually did, blather. Farrell sat with a guy that looked like him, and a woman and two small children. Brian’s mother and father sat across the aisle.
There were maybe eight other people in the church. I didn’t recognize any of them except Quirk, who stood in the back, his hands folded calmly in front of him, his face without expression. The church doors stood open and the gray rain came bleakly down on the black street. Susan held my hand.
After the service, Farrell came out of the church and introduced us to the guy that looked like him. It was his brother. The woman was his brother’s wife, and the kids were Farrell’s nephews.
“My mother and father wouldn’t come,” he said.
“How too bad for them,” Susan said.
Quirk came to stand beside us.
“Thank you for coming, Lieutenant,” Farrell said.
“Sure,” Quirk said.
Farrell moved on with his brother on one side and his sister-in-law on the other. His nephews, small and quiet, frightened by death, probably, each held a parental hand.
“Tough,” Quirk said. “You back from another visit to South Carolina?”
We were standing under an overhang out of the cold rain, which came grimly down.
“Yeah.”
“You got anything?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Quirk frowned.
“What the hell does that mean?” he said.
“Means I don’t know yet.”
Quirk looked at Susan. She smiled like Mona Lisa.
“Christ,” Quirk said to her. “You get better every time I see you.”
“Thank you, Martin,” she said. He looked back at me.
“Call me when you know,” he said, and turned his raincoat collar up and went down the steps to an unmarked police car and drove away. I turned up my collar too, and took Susan’s hand, and walked down the steps and away from the church in the rain, which was cold and hard and without respite.
chapter forty-four
THE MORNING WAS overcast, and hardlooking. I was in my office, thinking about Jefferson, and feeling like Hamlet, but older, when Farrell came in carrying two coffees in a white paper bag. He took them out, handed me one, and sat down.
“It bother you that Stratton was so interested in this case?” he said.
“He wants to be President,” I said.
“And all he was trying to cover up was adultery?”
I shrugged.
“The cover-up was more dangerous to him than what he was trying to cover up,” Farrell said.
“Guys like Stratton don’t think that way. They think about fixing, about putting a new spin on it, about reorganizing it so it comes out their way.”
“He stole most of the Tripps’ money,” Farrell said.
I sat back in my chair.
“Why do you know that and I don’t?” I said.
Farrell was carefully prying the plastic cap off his paper coffee cup, holding it away from him so it wouldn’t spill on him. He got the cover off and blew on the coffee gently for a moment, and then took a swallow. His face was still tight with grief, but there was also a hint of self-satisfaction.
“You been thinking about who killed the woman,” Farrell said. “I been thinking about other stuff like Stratton, like what the hell happened to all that money. Everybody says Mrs. Tripp spent it all, but on what? It’s hard to go through that kind of money at Bloomingdale’s.”
“So you chased Tripp’s expenditures,” I said.
“Yeah. Checks written by him, or her. They had a joint account. His didn’t show us anything unusual. He kept writing them even when there was no money. But you already knew that.”
“Mine bounced,” I said.
“There’s a clue,” Farrell said. He drank some more coffee. “Her checks were more interesting.”
“I didn’t see any of hers when I looked at his checkbook,” I said. “But she’d been dead awhile, probably hadn’t written any.”
“Good point,” Farrell said. “I went back about five years.”
“Tripp didn’t object?”
Farrell shook his head. “Didn’t talk to him,” he said. “I went through the bank’s records. She wrote regular, like monthly, large checks to an organization called The Better Government Coalition, which is located in a post office box in Cambridge, and headed by a guy named Windsor Freedman. We’re having a little trouble locating Windsor. He lists his address as University Green on Mt. Auburn Street. It’s a condo complex, and nobody there ever heard of him. But the Mass. Secretary of State’s office lists The Better Government Coalition as a subsidiary of The American Democratic Imperative in D.C. And the president of that operation is a guy named Mal Chapin.”
Farrell paused to drink coffee. He looked at me while he swallowed.
“I know that name,” I said.
“So did Quirk,” Farrell said. “You remember where you heard it?”
“Motel room in Alton, South Carolina,” I said. “Mal Chapin is in Stratton’s office.”
“Pretty good,” Farrell said. “Of course I mentioned that Quirk knew it too; that was a clue.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m excited. Usually when I get a clue, I trip over it, and skin my knee.”
“Quirk’s talking with somebody in the FBI, see about getting one of their accountants to check out The Democratic Imperative, see what they do with their money.”
“You figure it supports Stratton.”
“Sure,” Farrell said. “A charity with no offices, wholly owned by another charity, with no offices, headed by a guy works for Stratton. What do you think we’ll find out?”
“That it supports Stratton,” I said.
“That’s what we’ll find out,” Farrell said. “Maybe there’s a motive in it. Maybe Olivia Nelson knew what was going on and they had a lover’s quarrel and she was going to blow the whistle on him.”