My office door opened, Reilly came out, carrying his ugly briefcase.
"Files are open. Bill's on your desk," he said and walked off down the corridor.
"Nice talking to you," Hawk murmured.
We went back into the office and I sat down at my computer. I put in the hard disk copy I had made and clicked open a folder marked "Addresses." It blossomed before me as if kissed by a summer rain. Susan's address was there, and mine, and Carla Quagliozzi and someone named Lisa Coolidge, who may or may not have been worried about being another notch on Brad's gun, and a number of people whose names meant nothing to me. And Richard Gavin.
"I go see Carla Quagliozzi," I said to Hawk, who was still leaning back in my chair with his feet up and his eyes closed. Hawk could sit motionless, as far as I knew, for days.
"She's the president of Civil Streets. And Richard Gavin shows up and leans on me. I get a list of directors of Civil Streets from the AG's office and Richard is on it. We open up Sterling's address book and there's Richard."
"Say what he does?" Hawk said.
"Apparently he's a lawyer."
"Oh good," Hawk said.
"Yeah, not many of them around," I said.
I went back to the computer. Jeanette Ronan was there and all the other women who were alleging sexual harassment. There was a woman named Buffy, no last name, there were a number of women. I took some notes.
When I finished with the addresses, I closed them and opened a folder titled "Finance." Some of it was simple. There was a list of names under the heading: Monthly Nut. The name Buffy was listed and beside it $5,000/mo.
Cask and Carafe, $600/mo.
Matorian Realty, $1,100/mo.
Import Credit, $575/mo.
DePaul Federal, $4,000/mo.
Foxwood School, $22,000/year.
Then there was a notation, "Galapalooza-see blue disk."
"So why would he bother to lock this information," I said.
"What's a blue disk?" Hawk said.
"No idea," I said.
"Maybe stuff on blue disk was on this disk once," Hawk said. "And he coded it. Then later on he change it onto the blue disk and didn't take the code off."
"Be nice if we had the blue disk," I said.
"Be nice if we had lunch," Hawk said.
"Well, hell," I said. "There's something we can find."
And we did.
chapter twenty-five
SUSAN AND I went up to Essex and had some fried clams at a place called Farnham's. We got the clams, and some onion rings to go, and ate them in the car looking out over the tidal marshes toward Ipswich Bay. It was still raining. And it was cold enough to leave the car running and the heater on low. I had brought with me some Blue Moon Belgian White Ale in a cooler, and a jar of tartar sauce. Farnham's sold beer and they gave you little cups of tartar sauce for free. But Blue Moon Belgian White was a little exotic for Farnham's, and it always took too many little cups for the proper clam-to-tartar-sauce ratio. Susan watched me as I arranged the tartar sauce and the Belgian White, to be ready at hand.
"You don't leave much to chance, do you?" she said.
"Proper provisioning is the mark of a good eater," I said.
I had a large order of clams. Susan had chosen the small. We shared an order of rings. Sharing with Susan was always good because she consumed slowly and not too much. We ate for a time in silence. The evening had darkened and the windshield wipers were off so that we couldn't see much of the scenery and what we could see was blurred. But the lights from the clam shack made dark crystal patterns out of the rain that sluiced on the windshield, and the steady sound of the rain made the dark interior of the car seem like the perfect refuge.
"Police have any leads on Brad," Susan said.
"Not that they are sharing with me."
"Were we going to share those onion rings?" Susan said.
"Of course," I said. "I was only picking out the fattening ones to save you."
"And so fast," Susan said.
"Just doing my job, little lady."
I got the right amount of tartar sauce on a clam and put it in my mouth.
"Brad always had to be a success," Susan said.
I chewed my clam.
"No, it's not quite that," Susan said.
She was staring out at the barely discernible tidal marshes, her profile lit by the lights from the clam shack.
"He always had to be perceived as a success," she said.
"You would have helped," I said.
"Or he thought I would," she said.
I ate another clam.
"Could he really have shot someone?" she said.
It seemed a rhetorical question to me. Even if it wasn't, I decided to treat it like one. I examined my clams and my tartar sauce to make sure I wasn't getting disproportionately ahead in one area or the other.
"You think?" she said.
"I don't know, Suze. I barely know him."
"Hell, I probably don't know him any better," Susan said.
She ate half a clam, no tartar sauce. She said she hated tartar sauce. She had always hated tartar sauce, and no amount of psychotherapy had ever succeeded in changing her.
"I was married to him a lifetime ago," Susan said. "One of the common problems I run into in the shrink business is the assumption that people are always what they were. That time and experience haven't changed them."
"It's the basis of reunions," I said.
"Reunions are normally a fund-raising device," Susan said, "contrived by the sponsoring institution to exploit that delusion."
"And it makes you mad as hell," I said.
"I suppose so," Susan said. "It stunts people's growth."
"Mind if I have another ring?" I said.
"Speaking of growth… No, go ahead. I won't be able to eat my share anyway."
"Could the Brad you were married to have shot somebody?"
"I always thought he was weak," Susan said. "He covered it. He was big, he played football. He became more Harvard than the Hasty Pudding Club-of which he was a member, by the way."
"Lucky duck," I said.
"But he didn't seem to have any real inner resources. You couldn't trust his word. You couldn't count on him. One reason I didn't want children is that I couldn't imagine him being a good father. I couldn't imagine him working at whatever job he had to because his kids needed to be fed. I couldn't imagine him actually being a man. I would have said he didn't have the courage to shoot someone."
"Doesn't necessarily take courage," I said. "Weakness would do. Fear. Desperation."
"Yes," Susan said, "of course."
She smiled. I could tell she was smiling as much from the sound of her voice as I could from the look of her face in the rain-dimmed car. It didn't sound like a happy smile.
"Did he have a gun when you knew him?" I said.
"I don't think so, but it would have been a nice accessory for his self-esteem."
"Which was a little shaky," I said.
"Yes."
"Was he in the army?"
"No."
"Does the name Buffy mean anything to you?"
"I think she was my successor," Susan said.
"Carla Quagliozzi?"
"No. Brad's been married several times; I only knew the next woman. But you must understand that the Brad I knew needed to be with a woman. Since many women would find him initially attractive, but finally insufficient, I imagine there have been quite a few."
"His parents alive?"
"No."
"You mentioned a sister, went to Bryn Mawr."
"Yes, Nancy."
"Know where she is?"
"Bedford. She's married to a dentist."
"Know her married name."
"Ginsberg."
"I guess she's not trying to pass," I said.
Susan didn't comment. She ate a clam instead.
"Any other family," I said.
"He has children," Susan said, "from other marriages. I don't know anything about them."
We finished our supper. I got out and emptied the clam cartons and other debris into the trash barrel. The rain seemed a little harder now, and the wet smell of it mingled with the strong smell of the salt marsh. I stood for a minute and smelled it, and felt the rain, and looked at the swamp water, its obsidian surface dappled by the rain. Then I took a deep breath and got back in the car.