“You lead a charmed life, Parker, you know that? The order from the attorney general’s office was strictly hands off: you weren’t to be pursued for obstructing the investigation, no charges against you or your buddy for the deaths in Lubec. I mean, it’s not like you killed aid workers or nothing, but still.”
“I know,” I said sharply. I wanted the subject dropped. “So, you’ll have someone stop by?”
“Sure, no problem. I’ll do it myself, when I can. You think she’d agree to a panic button?”
I thought about it. It would probably require U.N.-level diplomatic skills, but I figured Rachel might eventually come around. “Probably. You got someone in mind to install it?”
“I know a guy. Give me a call when you’ve talked to her.”
I thanked him and rose to leave. I got about three steps when his voice stopped me.
“Hey, she doesn’t have any single friends, does she?”
“Yeah, I think so,” I replied, just before the ground crumbled beneath my feet and I realized what I had let myself in for. MacArthur’s face brightened as mine fell.
“Oh, no. What am I, a dating agency?”
“Hey, come on, it’s the least you can do.”
I shook my head. “I’ll ask. I can’t promise anything.”
I left MacArthur with a smile on his face.
A smile, and lots of frosting.
For the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon I did some wrap-ups on outstanding paperwork, billed two clients, then went over my meager notes on Cassie Blythe. I had spoken to her ex-boyfriend, her closest friends, and her work colleagues, as well as to the recruitment company she had gone to visit in Bangor on the day that she had disappeared. Her car was being serviced so she had taken the bus to Bangor, leaving the Greyhound depot at the corner of Congress and St. John at about 8 A.M. According to the police reports and Sundquist’s follow-ups, the driver recalled her and remembered exchanging a few words with her. She had spent an hour with the recruitment company in its offices at West Market Square, before browsing in BookMarcs bookstore. One of the staff remembered her asking about signed Stephen King books.
Then Cassie Blythe had disappeared. The return portion of her ticket was unused and there was no record of her using any other bus company or taking one of the commuter flights south. Her credit card and ATM card had not been used since the date of her disappearance. I was running out of people to chase down and I was getting nowhere.
It seemed like I wasn’t going to find Cassie Blythe, alive or dead.
The black Lexus pulled up outside the house shortly after three. I was upstairs at my computer, printing off the stories on Marianne Larousse’s murder. Most of them were pretty uninformative, except for one short piece in the State detailing the fact that Elliot Norton had taken over the defense of Atys Jones from the assistant public defender appointed to his case, a man named Laird Rhine. There had been no motion for substitution filed, which meant that Rhine had agreed with Elliot to step aside. In a short comment, Elliot told the journalist that, while Rhine was a fine lawyer, Jones stood a better chance with his own attorney than a time-pressed public defender. Rhine gave no comment. The piece was a couple of weeks old. I was printing if off just as the Lexus arrived.
The man who stepped from the passenger seat wore paint-stained Reebok sneakers, paint-stained blue jeans, and just to complete the ensemble, a paint-stained denim shirt. He looked like the runway model for a decorators’ convention, assuming that the decorators’ tastes veered toward five-six, semiretired gay burglars. Now that I thought of it, when I lived in the East Village there were any number of decorators whose tastes veered in that direction.
The driver of the car was at least a foot taller than his partner and was getting the last wear out of his summer wardrobe of oxblood loafers and a tan linen suit. His black skin shone in the sunlight, obscured only by the faintest growth of hair on his scalp and a circular beard around his pursed lips.
“Now, this place is a whole lot nicer than that other dump you called home,” said Louis when I went down to greet them.
“If you hated it so much, why did you bother visiting?”
“’Cause it got you pissed.”
I reached out to shake Louis’s hand and found a piece of Louis Vuitton luggage thrust into my palm.
“I don’t tip,” he said.
“I guessed that when I saw you were too cheap to fly up for the weekend.”
His eyebrow raised itself a fraction. “Hey, I work for you for free, I bring my own guns, and I pay for my own bullets. I can’t afford to take no plane up here.”
“You still carrying an arsenal in the trunk of your car?”
“Why, you need something?”
“No, but if your car is hit by lightning I’ll know where my lawn went.”
“Can’t be too careful. It’s a mean old world out there.”
“You know, there’s a name for people who believe the world is out to get them: ‘paranoid.’”
“Yeah, and there a name for people who don’t: ‘dead.’”
He swept past me to where Rachel waited and hugged her gently. Rachel was the only person Louis ever showed any real affection toward. I could only assume that he occasionally patted Angel on the head. After all, they’d been together for almost six years.
Angel appeared beside me. “I think he’s getting more charming as he gets older,” I told him.
“He was any less charming he’d have claws, eight legs and a sting on the end of his tail,” he replied.
“Wow, and he’s all yours.”
“Yeah, ain’t I the lucky one?”
Angel seemed to have grown suddenly older in the months since I had last seen him. There were pronounced lines around his eyes and mouth, and his black hair was now iced with gray. He even walked more slowly, as if afraid of the consequences of putting a foot wrong. I knew from Louis that he still endured a lot of pain with his back, where the preacher, Faulkner, had cut away a square of skin from between his shoulder blades and left him to bleed into an old tub. The transplants were taking but the scars hurt every time he moved. In addition, the two men were enduring a period of enforced separation. Angel’s direct involvement in the events leading up to Faulkner’s capture had inevitably drawn the attention of the law to him. He was now living in an apartment ten blocks away from Louis so that his partner did not fall within the ambit of their enquiries, since Louis’s past did not bear close examination by the forces of law and order. They were taking a chance even coming up here together, but it was Louis who had suggested it, and I was not about to argue with him. Maybe he felt that it would do Angel some good to be around other people who cared about him.
Angel guessed what I was thinking, because he smiled ruefully. “Not looking so good, am I?”
I smiled back. “You never looked good.”
“Oh yeah, I forgot. Let’s go inside. You’re making me feel like an invalid.”
I watched Rachel kiss him softly on the cheek and whisper something in his ear. For the first time since he had arrived, he laughed.
But when she looked over his shoulder at me, Rachel’s eyes were filled with sorrow for him.
We ate dinner in Katahdin, at the junction of Spring and High in Portland. Katahdin has mismatched furniture, eccentric decor, and feels like eating in somebody’s living room. Rachel and I love it. Unfortunately, so do a lot of other people, so we had to wait for a while at the cozy bar, listening to the locals who regularly eat there gossiping and chatting. Angel and Louis ordered a bottle of Kendall-Jackson chardonnay and I allowed myself a half glass. For a long time after the deaths of Jennifer and Susan I hadn’t touched alcohol. I had been in a bar on the night they died and had found a whole series of ways to torment myself for not being there when they needed me. Now I took an occasional beer and, on very special occasions, a glass of Flagstone wine at home. I didn’t miss drinking. My taste for alcohol had largely disappeared.