Looking for Rachel Wallace (13 page)

“I don’t know. Why do you care?”

“I don’t—I was just curious. Trying to be interested in your work, cookie.”

“It’s a woman’s role,” I said.

She said, “I spent the day talking to the parents of learning-disabled children.”

“Is that educatorese for dummies?”

“Oh, you sensitive devil. No, it isn’t. It’s kids with dyslexia, for instance—that sort of thing.”

“How were the parents?”

“Well, the first one wanted to know if this had to go on his record. The kid is in the eleventh grade and can’t really read.

“I said that I wasn’t sure what she meant about the record. And she said if it were on his record that the kid was dyslexic, wouldn’t that adversely affect his chances of going to a good college.”

“Least she’s got her priorities straight,” I said.

“And the next mother—the fathers don’t usually come—the next mother said it was our job to teach the kid, and she was sick of hearing excuses.”

I said, “I think I might have had a better time in the library.”

She said, “The coals look pretty good. Would you like to handle the steaks?”

“Where does it say that cooking steaks is man’s work?” I said.

Her eyes crinkled and her face brightened. “Right above the section on what sexual activity one can look forward to after steak and mushrooms.”

“I’ll get right on the steaks,” I said.

Susan went to work in the bright, new-snow suburban morning just before eight. I stayed and cleaned up last night’s dishes and made the bed and took a shower. There was no point banging heads with commuter traffic.

At eleven minutes after ten I walked into the arcade of the Park Square Building to talk with Manfred Roy. He wasn’t there. The head man at the barber shop told me that Manfred had called in sick and was probably home in bed.

I said, “He still living down on Commonwealth Avenue?”

The barber said, “I don’t know where he lives.”

I said, “Probably does. I’ll stop by and see how he is.”

The barber shrugged and went back to trimming a neat semi-circle around some guy’s ear. I went out and strolled down Berkeley Street two blocks to Commonwealth. When we had first put the arm on Manfred, he was living on the river side, near the corner of Dartmouth Street. I walked up the mall toward the address. The snow on the mall was still clean and fresh from the recent fall. The mall walkway had been cleared and people were walking their dogs along it. Three kids were playing Frisbee and drinking Miller’s beer out of clear glass bottles. A woman with a bull terrier walked by. The terrier had on a plaid doggie sweater and was straining at his leash. I thought his little piggie eyes looked very embarrassed, but that was probably anthropomorphism.

At the corner of Dartmouth Street I stopped and waited for the light. Across the street in front of Manfred’s apartment four men were sitting in a two-tone blue Pontiac Bonneville. One of them rolled down the window and yelled across the street, “Your name Spenser?”

“Yeah,” I said, “S-p-e-n-s-e-r, like the English poet.”

“We want to talk with you,” he said.

“Jesus,” I said, “I wish I’d thought of saying that.”

They piled out of the car. The guy that talked was tall and full of sharp corners, like he’d been assembled from Lego blocks. He had on a navy watch cap and a plaid lumberman’s jacket and brown pants that didn’t get to the tops of his black shoes. His coat sleeves were too short and his knobby wrists stuck out. His hands were very large with angular knuckles. His jaw moved steadily on something, and as he crossed the street he spat tobacco juice.

The other three were all heavy and looked like men who’d done heavy labor for a long time. The shortest of them had slightly bowed legs, and there was scar tissue thick around his eyes. His nose was thicker than it should have been. I had some of those symptoms myself, and I knew where he got them. Either he hadn’t quit as soon as I had or he’d lost more fights. His face looked like a catcher’s mitt.

The four of them gathered in front of me on the mall. “What are you doing around here?” the tall one said.

“I’m taking a species count on maggots,” I said. “With you four and Manfred I got five right off.”

The bow-legged pug said, “He’s a smart guy, George. Lemme straighten him out.”

George shook his head. He said to me, “You’re looking for trouble, you’re going to get it. We don’t want you bothering Manfred.”

“You in the Klan, too?” I said.

“We ain’t here to talk, pal,” George said.

“You must be in the Klan,” I said. “You’re a smooth talker and a slick dresser. Where’s Manfred—his mom won’t let him come out?”

The pug put his right hand flat on my chest and shoved me about two steps backwards. “Get out of here or we’ll stomp the shit out of you,” he said. He was slow. I hit him two left jabs and a right hook before he even got his hands up. He sat down in the snow.

“No wonder your face got marked up so bad,” I said to him. “You got no reflexes.”

There was a small smear of blood at the base of the pug’s nostrils. He wiped the back of his hand across and climbed to his feet.

“You gonna get it now,” he said.

George made a grab at me, and I hit him in the throat. He rocked back. The other two jumped, and the three of us went down in the snow. Someone hit me on the side of the head. I got the heel of my hand under someone’s nose and rammed upward. The owner of the nose cried out in pain. George kicked me in the ribs with his steel-toed work shoes. I rolled away, stuck my fingers in someone’s eyes, and rolled up onto my feet. The pug hit me a good combination as I was moving past. If I’d been moving toward him, it would have put me down. One of them jumped on my back. I reached up, got hold of his hair, doubled over, and pulled with his momentum. He went over my shoulder and landed on his back on a park bench. The pug hit me on the side of the jaw and I stumbled. He hit me again, and I rolled away from it and lunged against George. He wrapped his arms around me and tried to hold me. I brought both fists up to the level of his ears and pounded them together with his head in between. He grunted and his grip relaxed. I broke free of him and someone hit me with something larger than a fist and the inside of my head got loud and red and I went down.

When I opened my eyes there were granules of snow on the lashes; they looked like magnified salt crystals. There was no sound and no movement. Then there was a snuffing sound. I rolled my eyes to the left, and over the small rim of snow I could see a black nose with slight pink outlinings. It snuffed at me. I shifted my head slightly and said, “
Uff
.” The nose pulled back. It was on one end of a dog, an apprehensive young Dalmatian that stood with its front legs stiffened and its hindquarters raised and its tail making uncertain wags.

Lifting my head was too hard. I put it back in the snow. The dog moved closer and snuffed at me again. I heard someone yell, “Digger!” The dog shuffled his feet uncertainly.

Someone yelled, “Digger!” again, and the dog moved away. I took a deep breath. It hurt my ribcage. I exhaled, inhaled again, inched my arms under me, and pushed myself up onto my hands and knees. My head swam. I felt my stomach tighten, and I threw up, which hurt the ribs some more. I stayed that way for a bit, on my hands and knees with my head hanging, like a winded horse. My eyes focused a little better. I could see the snow and the dog’s footprints, beyond them the legs of a park bench. I crawled over, got hold of it, and slowly got myself upright. Everything blurred for a minute, then came back into focus again. I inhaled some more and felt a little steadier. I looked around. The mall was empty. The Dalmatian was a long way down the mall now, walking with a man and woman. The snow where I stood was trampled and churned. There was a lot of blood spattered on the snow. Across the street in front of Manfred’s apartment the Pontiac was gone. I felt my mouth with my left hand. It was swollen, but no teeth were loose. My nose seemed okay, too.

I let go of the bench and took a step. My ribs were stiff and sore. My head ached. I had to wait for a moment while dizziness came and went. I touched the back of my head. It was swollen and wet with blood. I took a handful of snow from the bench seat and held it against the swollen part. Then I took another step, and another. I was under way. My apartment was three blocks away—one block to Marlborough Street, two blocks down toward the Public Garden. I figured I’d make it by sundown.

Actually I made it before sundown. It wasn’t quite noon when I let myself in and locked the door behind me. I took two aspirin with a glass of milk, made some black coffee, added a large shot of Irish whiskey and a teaspoon of sugar, and sipped it while I got undressed. I examined myself in the bathroom mirror. One eye was swollen and my lower lip was puffy. There was a seeping lump on the back of my head and a developing bruise that was going to be a lulu on my right side. But the ribs didn’t appear to be broken, and in fact there seemed to be nothing but surface damage. I took a long hot shower and put on clean clothes and had some more coffee and whiskey, and cooked myself two lambchops for lunch. I ate the lambchops with black bread, drank some more coffee with whiskey, and cleaned up the kitchen. I felt lousy but alive, and my fourth cup of whiskeyed coffee made me feel less lousy.

I looked into the bedroom at my bed and thought about lying down for a minute and decided not to. I took out my gun and spun the cylinder, made sure everything worked smoothly, put the gun back in my hip holster again, and went back out of my apartment.

I walked the three blocks back to Manfred’s place a lot faster than I had walked from Manfred’s two hours earlier. I was not sprightly, but I was moving steadily along.

When I rang the bell Manfred’s mom came to the door. She was thin and small, wearing a straight striped dress and white sneakers with a hole cut in one of them to relieve pressure on a bunion. Her hair was short and looked as if it had been trimmed with a jackknife. Her face was small, and all the features were clustered in the middle of it. She wore no make-up.

I said, “Good afternoon, ma’am. Is Manfred Roy here, please?”

She looked at my face uneasily. “He’s having his lunch,” she said. Her voice was very deep.

I stepped partway into the apartment and said, “I’ll be glad to wait, ma’am. Tell him I have some good news about Spenser.”

She stood uncertainly in the doorway. I edged a little further into the apartment. She edged back a little.

Manfred called from another room, “Who is it, Ma?”

“Man says he has good news about Spenser,” she said. I smiled at her benignly. Old Mr. Friendly.

Manfred appeared in the archway to my right. He had a napkin tucked in his belt and a small milk mustache on his upper lip. When he saw me, he stopped dead.

“The good news is that I’m not badly hurt, good buddy,” I said. “Ain’t that swell?”

Manfred backed up a step. “I don’t know nothing about that, Spenser.”

“About what?” his mother said. I edged all the way past her.

“About what, Manfred?” I said. His mom still stood with one hand on the doorknob.

“I didn’t have nothing to do with you getting beat up.”

“I’ll not be able to say the same about you, Manfred.”

Mrs. Roy said, “What do you want here? You said you had good news. You lied to get in here.”

“True,” I said. “I did lie. But if I hadn’t lied, sort of, then you wouldn’t have let me in, and I’d have had to kick in your door. I figured the lie was cheaper.”

“Don’t you threaten my mother,” Manfred said.

“No, I won’t. It’s you I came to threaten, Manfred.”

Mrs. Roy said, “Manfred, I’m going for the police,” and started out into the hall.

“No, Ma. Don’t do that,” Manfred said. Mrs. Roy stopped in the hall and looked back in at him. Her eyes were sick.

“Why shouldn’t I go to the police, Manfred?”

“They wouldn’t understand,” Manfred said. “He’d lie to them. They’d believe him. I’d get in trouble.”

“Are you from the niggers?” she said to me.

“I represent a woman named Rachel Wallace, Mrs. Roy. She was kidnaped. I think your son knows something about it. I spoke to him about it yesterday and said I’d come visit him today. This morning four men who knew my name and recognized me on sight were parked in a car outside your apartment. When I arrived, they beat me up.”

Mrs. Roy’s eyes looked sicker—a sickness that must have gone back a long way. A lifetime of hearing hints that her son wasn’t right. That he didn’t get along. That he was in trouble or around it. A lifetime of odd people coming to the door and Manfred hustling in and out and not saying exactly what was up. A lifetime sickness of repressing the almost-sure knowledge that your firstborn was very wrong.

“I didn’t have nothing to do with that, Ma. I don’t know nothing about a kidnaping. Spenser just likes to come and push me around. He knows I don’t like his nigger friends. Well, some of my friends don’t like him pushing me around.”

“My boy had nothing to do with any of that,” Mrs. Roy said. Her voice was guttural with tension.

“Then you ought to call the cops, Mrs. Roy. I’m trespassing. And I won’t leave.”

Mrs. Roy didn’t move. She stood with one foot in the hall and one foot in the apartment.

Manfred turned suddenly and ran back through the archway. I went after him. To the left was the kitchen, to the right a short corridor with two doors off it. Manfred went through the nearest one, and when I reached him, he had a short automatic pistol halfway out of the drawer of a bedside table. With the heel of my right fist I banged the drawer shut on his hand. He cried out once. I took the back of his shirt with my left hand and yanked him back toward me and into the hall, spinning him across my body and slamming him against the wall opposite the bedroom door. Then I took the gun out of the drawer. It was a Mauser *HSc, a 7.65mm pistol that German pilots used to carry in World War II.

I took the clip out, ran the action back to make sure there was nothing in the chamber, and slipped the pistol in my hip pocket.

Manfred stood against the wall sucking on the bruised fingers of his right hand. His mother had come down the hall and stood beside him, her hands at her side. “What did he take from you?” she said to Manfred.