Looking for Rachel Wallace (10 page)

Cronin hung up the phone and looked at me. “Who are you?”

Ticknor said, “Mr. Spenser was hired to protect her. We thought he might be able to shed some light on the situation.”

“Sure did a hell of a job protecting,” Cronin said. “You know anything?”

“Not much,” I said.

“Didn’t figure you would. They want you around, okay by me, but don’t get in the way. You annoy me, and I’ll roast your ass.”

I looked at Belson. He grinned. “They’re turning them out tougher and tougher up the heights,” Belson said.

“This must be their supreme achievement,” I said. “They’ll never get one tougher than this.”

“Knock off the shit,” Cronin said. “Sergeant, you know this guy?”

“Oh, yes, sir, Mr. Cronin. I know him. You want me to shoot him?”

“What the hell is wrong with you, Belson? I asked you a simple question.”

“He’s all right,” Belson said. “He’ll be a help.”

“He better be,” Cronin said. “Spenser, I want you to give Sergeant Belson a rundown on anything you know about this case. Belson, if there’s anything worth it, get a formal statement.”

“Yeah, sure,” Belson said. “Get right on it.” He winked at me.

Cronin turned to Ticknor. “You’re in the word business. You recognize anything from the way it’s written, the prose style?”

“If it were a manuscript, we’d reject it,” Ticknor said. “Other than that I haven’t anything to say about it. I can’t possibly guess who wrote it.”

Cronin wasn’t really listening. He turned toward Forbes, the lawyer. “Is there a room around here where we can meet with the media people, Counselor?” He addressed Forbes almost like an equal; law-school training probably gave him an edge.

“Certainly,” Forbes said. “We’ve a nice conference room on the second floor that will do, I think.” He spoke to Ticknor. “I’ll take him to the Hamilton Room, John.”

“Good idea,” Ticknor said. Forbes led the way out. Cronin stopped at the door. “I want everything this guy knows, Sergeant. I want him empty when he leaves.”

I said to Belson, “I don’t want my face marked up.”

“Who could tell?” he said.

Cronin went out after Forbes.

I sat on the edge of Ticknor’s desk. “I hope he doesn’t go armed,” I said.

“Cronin?” Belson laughed. “He got out of law school in 1973, the year I first took the lieutenant’s exam. He thinks if he’s rough and tough, people won’t notice that he doesn’t know shit and just wants to get elected to public office.”

“He figures wrong,” Ticknor said. Belson raised his eyebrows approvingly. Ticknor was behind him and didn’t see.

I said to Ticknor, “How’d you get the letter?”

“Someone delivered it to the guard at the desk downstairs,” Ticknor said. He handed me the envelope. It was blank except for Ticknor’s name typed on the front.

“Description?”

Belson answered. “They get a hundred things a day delivered down there. Guard paid no attention. Can’t remember for sure even whether it was a man or a woman.”

“It’s not his fault,” Ticknor said. “We get all sorts of deliveries from the printers—galleys, pages, blues—as well as manuscripts from agents, authors, and readers, artwork, and half a dozen other kinds of material at the desk every day. Walt isn’t expected to pay attention to who brings it.”

I nodded. “Doesn’t matter. Probably someone hired a cabby to bring it in anyway, and descriptions don’t help much, even if they’re good ones.”

Belson nodded. “I already got somebody checking the cab companies for people who had things delivered here. But they could just as easy have delivered it themselves.”

“Should the press be in on this?” Ticknor said.

“I don’t think it does much harm,” I said. “And I don’t think you could keep them out of here if Cronin has any say. This sounds like an organization that wants publicity. They said nothing about keeping it from the press, just as they said nothing about keeping the police out.”

“I agree,” Belson said. “Most kidnapings have something about ‘don’t go to the police,’ but these political or social or whatever-the-hell-they-are kidnapings usually are after publicity. And anyway Cronin has already told the press so the question is—what? What word am I after?”

Ticknor said, “Academic. Hypothetical. Aimless. Too late. Merely conjectural.”

“Okay, any of those,” Belson said.

“So what do we do?” Ticknor said.

“Nothing much,” Belson said. “We sit. We wait. Some of us ask around on the street. We check with the FBI to see if they have anything on RAM. We have the paper analyzed and the ink, and learn nothing from either. In a while somebody will get in touch and tell us what they want.”

“That’s all?” Ticknor was offended. He looked at me.

“I don’t like it either,” I said. “But that’s about all. Mostly we have to wait for contact. The more contact the better. The more in touch they are, the more we have to work on, the better chance we have to find them. And her.”

“But how can we be sure they’ll make contact?”

Belson answered. “You can’t. But you figure they will. They said they would. They did this for a reason. They want something. One of the things you can count on is that everybody wants something.” The cigar had burned down far enough now so that Belson had to tilt his head slightly to keep the smoke from getting in his eyes.

“But in the meantime—what about Rachel? My God, think how she must feel. Suppose they abuse her? We can’t just sit here and wait.”

Belson looked at me. I said, “We haven’t got anything else to do. There’s no profit in thinking about alternatives when you don’t have any. She’s a tough woman. She’ll do as well as anyone.”

“But alone,” Ticknor said, “with these maniacs … ”

“Think about something else,” Belson said. “Have you any idea who this group might be?”

Ticknor shook his head briskly, as if he had a fly in his ear. “No,” he said. “No. No idea at all. What do they call themselves? RAM?”

Belson nodded. “Anyone in the publishing community that you know of that has any hostility toward Ms. Wallace?”

“No, well, I mean, not like this. Rachel is abrasive and difficult, and she advocates things not everyone likes, but nothing that would cause a kidnaping.”

“Let us decide that. You just give me a list of everybody you can think of that didn’t like her, that argued with her, that disagreed with her.”

“My God, man, that would include half the reviewers in the country.”

“Take your time,” Belson said. He had a notebook out and leaned back in his chair.

“But, my God, Sergeant, I can’t just start listing names indiscriminately. I mean, I’ll be involving these people in the investigation of a capital crime.”

“Aren’t you the one was worried about how poor Rachel must be feeling?” Belson said.

I knew the conversation. I’d heard variations on it too many times. I said, “I’m going to go out and look for Rachel. Let me know when you hear from them.”

“I’m not authorized to employ you on this, Spenser,” Ticknor said.

Belson said, “Me either.” His thin face had the look of internal laughter.

“All part of the service,” I said.

I went out of Ticknor’s office, past two detectives questioning a secretary, into the elevator down to the street, and out to start looking.

The
Boston Globe
is in a building on Morrissey Boulevard which looks like the offspring of a warehouse and a suburban junior high school. It used to be on Washington Street in the middle of the city and looked like a newspaper building should. But that was back when the
Post
was still with us, and the
Daily Record
. Only yesterday. When the world was young.

It was the day after they took Rachel and snowing again. I was talking to Wayne Cosgrove in the city room about right-wing politics, on which he’d done a series three years earlier.

“I never heard of RAM,” he said. Cosgrove was thirty-five, with a blond beard. He had on wide-wale corduroy pants and a gray woolen shirt and a brown tweed jacket. His feet were up on the desk. On them he wore leather boots with rubber bottoms and yellow laces. A blue down parka with a hood hung on the back of his chair.

“God you look slick, Wayne,” I said. “You must have been a Nieman Fellow some time.”

“A year at Harvard,” he said, “picks up your taste like a bastard.” He’d grown up in Newport News, Virginia, and still had the sound of it when he talked.

“I can see that,” I said. “Why don’t you look in your files and see if you have anything on RAM?”

“Files,” Cosgrove said, “I don’t need to show no stinking files, gringo.” He told me once that he’d seen
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
four times at a revival house in Cambridge.

“You don’t have any files?”

He shrugged. “Some, but the good stuff is up here, in the old coconut. And there ain’t nothing on RAM. Doesn’t matter. Groups start up and fold all the time, like sub sandwich shops. Or they change the name, or a group splinters off from another one. If I had done that series day before yesterday, I might not have heard of RAM, and they might be this week’s biggie. When I did the series, most of the dippos were focused on busing. All the mackerel-snappers were afraid of the niggers’ fucking their daughters, and the only thing they could think of to prevent that was to keep the niggers away from their daughters. Don’t seem to speak too highly of their daughters’ self-control, but anyway if you wanted to get a group started, then you went over to Southie and yelled
nigger nigger
.”

He pronounced it
niggah
.

“Isn’t that a technique that was developed regionally?”

“Ahhh, yes,” Cosgrove said. “Folks down home used to campaign for office on that issue, whilst you folks up north was just a tsk-tsking at us and sending in the feds. Fearful racism there was, in the South, in those days.”

“Didn’t I hear you were involved in freedom riding, voter registration, and Communist subversion in Mississippi some years back?”

“I had a northern granddaddy,” Cosgrove said. “Musta come through on a gene.”

“So where are all the people in this town who used to stand around chanting
never
and throwing rocks at children?”

Cosgrove said, “Most of them are saying, ‘Well, hardly ever.’ But I know what you’re after. Yeah, I’d say some of them, having found out that a lot of the niggers don’t want to fuck their daughters, are now sweating that the faggots will bugger their sons and are getting up a group to throw rocks at fairies.”

“Any special candidates?”

Cosgrove shrugged, “Aw, shit, I don’t know, buddy. You know as well as I do that the hub of any ultra-right-wing piece of business in this metropolitan area is Fix Farrell. For Christ’s sake, he’s probably anti-Eskimo.”

“Yeah, I know about Farrell, but I figure a guy like him wouldn’t involve himself in a thing like this.”

“ ‘Cause he’s on the city council?” Cosgrove said. “How the hell old are you?”

“I don’t argue he’s honest, I just argue he doesn’t need this kind of action. I figure a guy like him benefits from people like Rachel Wallace. Gives him someone to be against. Farrell wouldn’t want her kidnaped and her book suppressed. He’d want her around selling it at the top of her lungs so he could denounce her and promulgate plans to thwart her.”

Cosgrove tapped his teeth with the eraser end of a yellow pencil. “Not bad,” he said. “You probably got a pretty good picture of Fix at that.”

“You think he might have any thoughts on who I should look into?”

Cosgrove shook his head very quickly. “No soap. Farrell’s never going to rat on a possible vote—and anybody opposed to a gay feminist activist can’t be all bad in Fix’s book.”

“You think the RAM people would trust him?” I said.

“How the fuck would I know?” Cosgrove said. “Jesus, Spenser, you are a plugger, I’ll say that for you.”

“Hell of a bodyguard, too,” I said.

Cosgrove shrugged. “I’ll ask around; I’ll talk it up in the city room. I hear anything, I’ll
give
you a buzz.”

“Thank you,” I said, and left.

I knew a guy who was in the Ku Klux Klan. His name was Manfred Roy, and I had helped bust him once, when I was on the cops, for possession of pornographic materials. It was a while ago, when possession of pornographic materials was more serious business than it is now. And Manfred had weaseled on the guy he bought it from and the friends who were with him when he bought it, and we dropped the charges against him and his name never got in the papers. He lived with his mother, and she would have been disappointed in him if she had known. After I left the cops, I kept track of Manfred. How many people do you know that actually belong to the Ku Klux Klan? You find one, you don’t lose him.

Manfred was working that year cutting hair in a barbershop on the ground floor of the Park Square Building. He was a small guy, with white-blond hair in a crew cut. Under his barber coat he had on a plaid flannel shirt and chino pants and brown penny-loafers with a high shine. It wasn’t a trendy shop. The only razor cut you got was if somebody nicked you while they were shaving your neck.

I sat in the waiting chair and read the
Globe
. There was an article on the city council debate over a bond issue. I read the first paragraph because Wayne Cosgrove had a byline, but even loyalty flagged by paragraph two.

There were four barbers working. One of them, a fat guy with an Elvis Presley pompadour sprayed into rigid stillness, said, “Next?”

I said, “No thanks. I’ll wait for him,” and pointed at Manfred.

He was cutting the hair of a white-haired man. He glanced toward me and then back at the man and then realized who I was and peeked at me in the mirror. I winked at him, and he jerked his eyes back down at the white hair in front of him.

In five minutes he finished up with Whitey and it was my turn. I stepped to the chair. Manfred said, “I’m sorry, sir, it’s my lunch hour, perhaps another barber … ?”

I gave him a big smile and put my arm around him. “That’s even better, Manfred. Actually I just wanted to have a good rap with you anyway. I’ll buy you lunch.”

“Well, actually, I was meeting somebody.”