Looking for Rachel Wallace (17 page)

“Perhaps madam would permit me to join her,” I said.

“Perhaps,” she said.

I sipped a little wine.

“And perhaps later on,” she said, “we might screw.”

I laughed halfway through a swallow of wine and choked and gasped and splattered the wine all over my shirt front.

“Or perhaps not,” she said.

“Don’t toy with me while I’m drinking,” I said, when I was breathing again. “Later on I may take you by force.”

“Woo-woo,” she said.

I served her some pasta with broccoli and some to myself. Outside it was snowing steadily. There was only one light on in the room; most of the light came from the fire, which was made of applewood and smelled sweet. The glow of the embers behind the steady low flame made the room faintly rosy. We were quiet. The flame hissed softly as it forced the last traces of sap from the logs. I wasn’t nearly as sore as I had been. The pasta tasted wonderful. The wine was cold. And Susan made my throat ache. If I could find Rachel Wallace, I might believe in God.

The sun that brief December day rose cheerlessly and invisibly over one hell of a lot of snow in the city of Boston. I looked at the alarm clock. Six AM. It was very still outside, the noise of a normal morning muffled by the snow. I was lying on my right side, my left arm over Susan’s bare shoulder. Her hair had come unpinned in the night and was in a wide tangle on the pillow. Her face was toward me and her eyes were closed. She slept with her mouth open slightly, and the smell of wine on her breath fluttered faintly across the pillow. I pushed up on one elbow and looked out the window. The snow was still coming—steadily and at a slant so I knew the wind was driving it. Without opening her eyes, Susan pulled me back down against her and shrugged the covers back up over us. She made a snuggling motion with her body and lay still. I said, “Would you like an early breakfast, or did you have another plan?”

She pressed her face into the hollow of my shoulder. “My nose is cold,” she said in a muffled voice.

“I’m your man,” I said. I ran my hand down the line of her body and patted her on the backside. She put her right hand in the small of my back and pressed a little harder against me.

“I had always thought,” she said, her face still pressed in my shoulder, “that men of your years had problems of sexual dysfunction.”

“Oh, we do,” I said. “I used to be twice as randy twenty years ago.”

“They must have kept you in a cage,” she said. She walked her fingers up my backbone, one vertebra at a time.

“Yeah,” I said, “but I could reach through the bars.”

“I bet you could,” she said, and with her eyes still closed she raised her head and kissed me with her mouth open.

It was nearly eight when I got up and took a shower.

Susan took hers while I made breakfast and built another fire. Then we sat in front of the fire and ate cornbread made with buttermilk, and wild-strawberry jam and drank coffee.

At nine fifteen, with the cornbread gone and the strawberry jam depleted and the
Globe
read and the
Today Show
finished, I called my answering service. Someone had left a telephone number for me to call.

I dialed it, and a woman answered on the first ring. I said, “This is Spenser. I have a message to call this number.”

She said, “Spenser, this is Julie Wells.”

I said, “Where are you?”

She said, “It doesn’t matter. I’ve got to see you.”

I said, “We’re in an old Mark Stevens movie.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I want to see you, too,” I said. “Where can I meet you?”

“There’s a snow emergency, you know.”

They never said that in the old Mark Stevens movies. “Name a place,” I said. “I’ll get there.”

“The coffee shop at the Parker House.”

“When?”

“Ten thirty.”

“See you then.”

“I don’t want anyone else to know I’m there, Spenser.”

“Then you say, ‘Make sure you’re not followed.’ And I say, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll be careful.’”

“Well, I don’t. I meant it.”

“Okay, kid. I’ll be there.”

We hung up. Susan was in the bathroom doing make-up. I stuck my head in and said, “I have to go out and work for a while.” She was doing something with a long thin pencilish-looking item to the corner of her mouth. She said, “Unh-huh,” and kept on doing it.

When Susan concentrates, she concentrates. I put on my white wide-wale corduroy pants, my dark-blue all-wool Pendleton shirt, and my Herman survivors. I put my gun in its hip holster on my belt; I got into my jacket, turned up the fleece collar, pulled on my watch cap, slipped on my gloves, and went forth into the storm.

Except for the snow, which still fell hard, the city was nearly motionless. There was no traffic. The streets were snow-covered, maybe two feet deep, and the snow had drifted in places high enough to bury a parked car. Arlington Street had been partially plowed, and the walking was easier. I turned right on Beacon and headed up the hill, leaning now into the wind and the snow. I pulled my watch cap down over my ears and forehead. It didn’t look rakish, but one must compromise occasionally with nature. An enormous yellow bulldozer with an enclosed cab and a plow blade approximately the size of Rhode Island came churning slowly down Beacon Street. There were no people and no dogs, just me and the bulldozer and the snow. When the bulldozer passed, I had to climb over a snowbank to get out of the way of the plow spill, but after it had passed, the walking was much better. I walked up the middle of Beacon Street with the old elegant brick houses on my left and the empty Common on my right. I could see the houses okay, but ten feet past the iron fence the Common disappeared into the haze of snow and strong wind.

At the top of the hill I could see the State House but not the gold dome. Nothing was open. It was downhill from there and a little easier. By the time I got to the Parker House, where Beacon ends at Tremont, I was cold and a little strange with the empty swirling silence in the middle of the city.

There were people hanging around in the lobby of the Parker House and the coffee shop on the Tremont Street side was nearly full. I spotted Julie Wells alone at a table for two by the window looking out at the snow.

She had on a silver ski parka which she’d unzipped but not removed; the hood was thrown back and the fur trim tangled with the edges of her hair. Underneath the parka she wore a white turtleneck sweater, and with her big gold earrings and her long eyelashes she looked like maybe 1.8 million. Susan was a two million.

I rolled my watch cap back up to rakish and then walked over and sat down across from her. The Parker House used to be Old Boston and kind of an institution. It had fallen on hard times and was now making a comeback, but the coffee shop with the window on Tremont Street was a good place. I unzipped my coat.

“Good morning,” I said.

She smiled without much pleasure and said, “I am glad to see you. I really didn’t know who else to call.”

“I hope you didn’t have to walk far,” I said. “Even an Olympic walker like myself experienced some moments of discomfort.”

Julie said, “There’s someone after me.”

I said, “I don’t blame him.”

She said, “There really is. I’ve seen him outside my apartment. He’s followed me to and from work.”

“You know the cops have been looking for you.”

“About Rachel?”

I nodded. The waitress came, and I ordered coffee and whole-wheat toast. There was a plate with most of an omelet still left on it in front of Julie Wells. The waitress went away.

“I know about the police,” she said. “I called the agency, and they said the police had been there, too. But they wouldn’t follow me around like that.”

I shrugged. “Why not tell the cops about this guy that’s following you. If it’s one of them, they’ll know. If it’s not, they can look into it.”

She shook her head.

“No cops?”

She shook her head again.

“Why not?”

She poked at the omelet with the tines of her fork, moving a scrap of egg around to the other side of the plate.

“You’re not just hiding out from the guy that’s following you?” I said.

“No.”

“You don’t want to talk with the cops either.”

She started to cry. Her shoulders shook a little, and her lower lip trembled a little, and some tears formed in her eyes. It was discreet crying though—nothing the other customers would notice.

“I don’t know what to do,” she said. “I don’t want to be involved in all of this. I want people to leave me alone.”

“You got any thoughts on where Rachel might be?” I said.

She blew her nose in a pink Kleenex and inhaled shakily.

“What shall I do?” she said to me. “I don’t know anyone else to ask.”

“You know where Rachel is?”

“No, of course not. How would I? We were friends, lovers if you’d rather, but we weren’t in love or anything. And if people—”

“You don’t want people to know that you’re a lesbian.”

She made a little shiver. “God, I hate the word. It’s so … clinical, like classifying an odd plant.”

“But you still don’t want it known?”

“Well, I’m not ashamed. You put it so baldly. I have made a life choice that’s not like yours, or some others, and I have no reason to be ashamed. It’s as natural as anyone else.”

“So why not talk with the cops? Don’t you want to find Rachel Wallace?”

She clasped her hands together and pressed the knuckles against her mouth. Tears formed again. “Oh, God, poor Rachel. Do you think she’s alive?”

The waitress brought my toast and coffee.

When she left, I said, “I don’t have any way to know. I have to assume she is, because to assume she isn’t leaves me nothing to do.”

“And you’re looking for her?”

“I’m looking for her.”

“If I knew anything that would help, I’d say so. But what good will it do Rachel to have my name smeared in the papers? To have the people at the model agency—”

“I don’t know what good,” I said. “I don’t know what you know. I don’t know why someone is following you, or was—I assume you’ve lost him.”

She nodded. “I got away from him on the subway.”

“So who would he be? Why would he follow you? It’s an awful big coincidence that Rachel is taken and then someone follows you.”

“I don’t know, I don’t know anything. What if they want to kidnap me? I don’t know what to do.” She stared out the window at the empty snow-covered street.

“Why not stay with your mother and brother?” I said.

She looked back at me slowly. I ate a triangle of toast.

“What do you know about my mother and brother?”

“I know their names and I know their politics and I know their attitude toward Rachel Wallace, and I can guess their attitude toward you if they knew that you and Rachel were lovers.”

“Have you been … did you … you don’t have the right to … ”

“I haven’t mentioned you to them. I did mention you to the cops, but only when I had to, quite recently.”

“Why did you have to?”

“Because I’m looking for Rachel, and I’ll do anything I have to to find her. When I figured out that you were Lawrence English’s sister, I thought it might be a clue. It might help them find her. They’re looking, too.”

“You think my brother—”

“I think he’s in this somewhere. His chauffeur hired two guys to run me and Rachel off the road one night in Lynn. Your brother organized a picket line when she spoke in Belmont. Your brother has said she’s an ungodly corruption or some such. And he’s the head of an organization of Ritz crackers that would be capable of such things.”

“I didn’t used to know I was gay,” she said. “I just thought I was not very affectionate. I got married. I felt guilty about being cold. I even did therapy. It didn’t work. I was not a loving person. We were divorced. He said I was like a wax apple. I looked wonderful, but there was nothing inside—no nourishment. I went to a support group meeting for people recently divorced, and I met a woman and cared for her, and we developed a relationship, and I found out I wasn’t empty. I could love. I could feel passion. It was maybe the moment in my life. We made love and I felt. I”—she looked out the window again, and I ate another piece of toast—“I reached orgasm. It was as if, as if … I don’t know what it was as if.”

“As if a guilty verdict had been overturned.”

She nodded. “Yes. Yes. I wasn’t bad. I wasn’t cold. I had been trying to love the wrong things.”

“But Mom and brother?”

“You’ve met them?”

“Brother,” I said. “Not yet Momma.”

“They could never understand. They could never accept it. It would be just the worst thing that could be for them. I wish for them—maybe for me, too—I wish it could have been different, but it can’t, and it’s better to be what I am than to be failing at what I am not. But they mustn’t ever know. That’s why I can’t go to the police. I can’t let them know. I don’t mind the rest of the world. It’s them. They can’t know. I don’t know what they would do.”

“Maybe they’d kidnap Rachel,” I said.

The waitress said, “May I get you anything else?”

I shook my head, so did Julie. The waitress put the check down, near me, and I put a ten down on top of it.

Julie said, “They wouldn’t. They couldn’t do that. They wouldn’t know what to do.”

“They could hire a consultant. Their chauffeur has done time. Name’s Mingo Mulready, believe it or not, and he would know what to do.”

“But they don’t know.”

“Maybe they don’t. Or maybe the guy that was following you around was your brother’s. You haven’t been living at home.”

“Spenser, I’m thirty years old.”

“Get along with the family?”

“No. They didn’t approve of my marriage. They didn’t approve of my divorce. They hated me going to Goucher. They hate me being a model. I couldn’t live with them.”

“They worry about you?”

She shrugged. Now that she was thinking, she wasn’t crying, and her face looked more coherent. “I suppose they did,” she said. “Lawrence likes to play father and man of the house, and Mother lets him. I guess they think I’m dissolute and weak and uncommitted—that kind of thing.”