Looking for Rachel Wallace (18 page)

“Why would they have a thug like Mulready driving them around?”

Julie shrugged her shoulders. “Lawrence is all caught up in his Vigilance Committee. He gets into situations, I guess, where he feels he needs a bodyguard. I assume this Mulready is someone who would do that.”

“Not as well as he used to,” I said.

The waitress picked up my ten and brought back some change on a saucer.

“If they did take Rachel,” I said, “where would they keep her?”

“I don’t know.”

“Sure you do. If you were your brother and you had kidnaped Rachel Wallace, where would you keep her?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Spenser … ”

“Think,” I said. “Think about it. Humor me.”

“This is ridiculous.”

“I walked a half-mile through a blizzard because you asked me to,” I said. “I didn’t say it was ridiculous.”

She nodded. “The house,” she said.

The waitress came back and said, “Can I get you anything else?”

I shook my head. “We better vacate,” I said to Julie, “before she gets ugly.”

Julie nodded. We left the coffee shop and found an overstuffed loveseat in the lobby.

“Where in the house?” I said.

“Have you seen it?”

“Yeah. I was out there a few days ago.”

“Well, you know how big it is. There’s probably twenty rooms. There’s a great big cellar. There’s the chauffeur’s quarters over the garage and extra rooms in the attic.”

“Wouldn’t the servants notice?”

“They wouldn’t have to. The cook never leaves the kitchen, and the maid would have no reason to go into some parts of the house. We had only the cook and the maid when I was there.”

“And of course old Mingo.”

“They hired him after I left. I don’t know him.”

“Tell you what,” I said. “We’ll go back to my place. It’s just over on Marlborough Street, and we’ll draw a map of your brother’s house.”

“It’s my mother’s,” Julie said.

“Whoever,” I said. “We’ll make a map, and later on I’ll go take a look.”

“How will you do that?”

“First the map. Then the B-and-E plans. Come on.”

“I don’t know if I can make a map.”

“Sure you can. I’ll help and we’ll talk. You’ll remember.”

“And we’re going to your apartment?”

“Yes. It’s quite safe. I have a woman staying with me who’ll see that I don’t molest you. And on the walk down we’ll be too bundled up.”

“I didn’t mean that.”

“Okay, let’s go.”

We pushed out into the snow again. It seemed to be lessening, but the wind was whipping it around so much it was hard to tell. A half-block up Beacon Street Julie took my arm, and she hung on all the way up over the hill and down to Marlborough. Other than, two huge yellow pieces of snow equipment that clunked and waddled through the snow, we were all that moved.

When we got to my apartment, Susan was on the couch by the fire reading a book by Robert Coles. She wore a pair of jeans she’d left there two weeks ago and one of my gray T-shirts with the size, XL, printed in red letters on the front. It hung almost to her knees.

I introduced them and took Julie’s coat and hung it in the hall closet. As I went by the bathroom, I noticed Susan’s lingerie hanging on the shower rod to dry. It made me speculate about what was under the jeans, but I put it from me. I was working. I got a pad of lined yellow paper, legal size, from a drawer in the kitchen next to the phone and a small translucent plastic artist’s triangle and a black-ballpoint pen, and Julie and I sat at the counter in my kitchen for three hours and diagrammed her mother’s house—not only the rooms, but what was in them.

“I haven’t been there in a year,” she said at one point.

“I know, but people don’t usually rearrange the big pieces. The beds and sofas and stuff are usually where they’ve always been.”

We made an overall diagram of the house and then did each room on a separate sheet. I numbered all the rooms and keyed them to the separate sheets.

“Why do you want to know all this? Furniture and everything?”

“It’s good to know what you can. I’m not sure even what I’m up to. I’m just gathering information. There’s so much that I can’t know, and so many things I can’t predict, that I like to get everything I can in order so when the unpredictable stuff comes along I can concentrate on that.”

Susan made a large plate of ham sandwiches while we finished up our maps and we had them with coffee in front of the fire.

“You make a good fire for a broad,” I said to Susan.

“It’s easy,” Susan said, “I rubbed two dry sexists together.”

“This is a wonderful sandwich,” Julie said to Susan.

“Yes. Mr. Macho here gets the ham from someplace out in eastern New York State.”

“Millerton,” I said. “Cured with salt and molasses. Hickory-smoked, no nitrates.”

Julie looked at Susan. “Ah, what about that other matter?”

“The shadow?” I said.

She nodded.

“You can go home and let him spot you, and then I’ll take him off your back.”

“Home?”

“Sure. Once he lost you, if he’s really intent on staying with you, he’ll go and wait outside your home until you show up. What else can he do?”

“I guess nothing. He wouldn’t be there today, I wouldn’t think.”

“Unless he was there yesterday,” Susan said. “The governor’s been on TV. No cars allowed on the highway. No buses are running. No trains. Nothing coming into the city.”

“I don’t want to go home,” Julie said.

“Or you can stay hiding out for a while, but I’d like to know where to get you.”

She shook her head.

“Look, Julie,” I said. “You got choices, but they are not limitless. You are part of whatever happened to Rachel Wallace. I don’t know what part, but I’m not going to let go of you. I don’t have that much else. I need to be able to find you.”

She looked at me and at Susan, who was sipping her coffee from a big brown mug, holding it in both hands with her nose half-buried in the cup and her eyes on the fire. Julie nodded her head three times.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m in an apartment at one sixty-four Tremont. One of the girls at the agency is in Chicago, and she let me stay while she’s away. Fifth floor.”

“I’ll walk you over,” I said.

The day after the big blizzard was beautiful, the way it always is. The sun is shining its ass off, and the snow is still white, and no traffic is out, and people and dogs are walking everywhere and being friendly during shared duress.

Susan and I walked out to Boylston and up toward Mass. Ave. She had bought a funky-looking old raccoon coat with padded shoulders when we’d gone antiquing in New Hampshire in November, and she was wearing it with big furry boots and a woolen hat with a big pom-pom. She looked like a cross between Annette Funicello and Joan Crawford.

We’d been living together for two and a half days, and if I had known where Rachel Wallace was, I would have been having a very nice time. But I didn’t know where Rachel Wallace was, and what was worse, I had a suspicion where she might be, and I couldn’t get there. I had called Quirk and told him what I knew. He couldn’t move against a man of English’s clout without some probable cause, and we agreed I had none. I told him I didn’t know where Julie Wells was staying. He didn’t believe me, but the pressure of the snow emergency was distracting the whole department, and no one came over with a thumbscrew to interrogate me.

So Susan and I walked up Boylston Street to see if there was a store open where she could buy some underclothes and maybe a shirt or two, and I walked with her in a profound funk. All traffic was banned from all highways. No trains were moving.

Susan bought some very flossy-looking lingerie at Saks, and a pair of Levi’s and two blouses. We were back out on Boylston when she said, “Want to go home and model the undies?”

“I don’t think they’d fit me,” I said.

“I didn’t mean you,” she said.

I said, “God damn it, I’ll walk out there.”

“Where?”

“I’ll walk out to Belmont.”

“Just to avoid modeling the undies?”

I shook my head. “It’s what? Twelve, fifteen miles? Walk about three miles an hour. I’ll be there in four or five hours.”

“You’re sure she’s there?”

“No. But she might be, and if she is, it’s partly my fault. I have to look.”

“It’s a lot of other people’s fault much more than yours. Especially the people who took her.”

“I know, but if I’d been with her, they wouldn’t have taken her.”

Susan nodded.

“Why not call the Belmont Police?” she said.

“Same as with Quirk. They can’t just charge in there. They have to have a warrant. And there has to be some reasonable suspicion, and I don’t have anything to give them. And … I don’t know. They might screw it up.”

“Which means that you want to do it yourself.”

“Maybe.”

“Even if it endangers her?”

“I don’t want to endanger her. I trust me more than I trust anyone else. Her life is on the line here. I want me to be the one who’s in charge.”

“And because you have to even up with the people that took her,” Susan said, “you’re willing to go after her alone and risk the whole thing, including both your lives, because your honor has been tarnished, or you think it has.”

I shook my head. “I don’t want some Belmont cop in charge of this whose last bust was two ninth-graders with an ounce of Acapulco gold.”

“And Quirk or Frank Belson can’t go because they don’t have jurisdiction, and they don’t have a warrant and all of the above?”

I nodded.

We turned the corner onto Arlington and walked along in the middle of the bright street, like a scene from Currier and Ives.

“Why don’t you find Hawk and have him go with you?”

I shook my head.

“Why not?”

“I’m going alone.”

“I thought you would. What if something happens to you?”

“Like what?”

“Like suppose you sneak in there and someone shoots you. If you’re right, you are dealing with people capable of that.”

“Then you tell Quirk everything you know. And tell Hawk to find Rachel Wallace for me.”

“I don’t even know how to get in touch with Hawk. Do I call that health club on the waterfront?”

“If something happens to me, Hawk will show up and see if you need anything.”

We were on the corner of Marlborough Street. Susan stopped and looked at me. “You know that so certainly?”

“Yes.”

She shook her head and kept shaking it. “You people are like members of a religion or a cult. You have little rituals and patterns you observe that nobody else understands.”

“What people?”

“People like you. Hawk, Quirk, that state policeman you met when the boy was kidnaped.”

“Healy.”

“Yes, Healy. The little trainer at the Harbor Health Club. All of you. You’re as complexly programmed as male wildebeests, and you have no common sense at all.”

“Wildebeests?” I said.

“Or Siamese fighting fish.”

“I prefer to think
lion
,
panther
maybe.”

We walked to my apartment. “I suppose,” Susan said, “we could settle for ox. Not as strong but nearly as smart.”

Susan went to the apartment. I went to the basement and got some more firewood from the storage area and carried an armful up the back stairs. It was early afternoon. We had lunch. We watched the news. The travel ban was still with us.

“At least wait until morning,” Susan said. “Get an early start.”

“And until then?”

“We can read by the fire.”

“When that gets boring, I was thinking we could make shadow pictures on the wall. Ever see my rooster?”

Susan said, “I’ve never heard it called that.” I put my arm around her shoulder and squeezed her against me and we began to giggle. We spent the rest of the day before the fire on the couch. Mostly we read.

By seven thirty the next morning I was on the road. I had a flashlight in my hip pocket, a short prying tool stuck in my belt, my packet of floor plans in my shirt pocket, and my usual jackknife and gun. Susan kissed me goodbye without getting up, and I left without hearing any more wildebeest remarks. I walked up Marlborough to the Mass. Ave. Bridge along a quiet and narrow lane, one plow-blade wide, with the snow head-high on either side of me. Below the bridge the Charles was frozen and solid white. No sign of the river. Memorial Drive had one lane cleared in either direction, and I turned west. I had learned to walk some years ago at government expense when I had walked from Pusan to the Yalu River and then back. I moved right along. After the first mile or so I had a nice rhythm and even felt just a trickle of sweat along the line of my backbone.

It was shorter than I thought. I was on Trapelo Road in Belmont by ten forty-five. By eleven I was standing two houses away from the English place, across the street. Now if I found Rachel Wallace, I wouldn’t have to walk back. The cops would drive me. Maybe.

The house was three stories high. Across the front was a wide veranda. A long wing came off the back, and at the end of the wing there was a carriage house with a little pointed cupola on top. Mingo probably parked the family Caddies in the carriage house. There was a back door, which led through a back hall into the kitchen, according to Julie. Off the back hall there were back stairs. The veranda turned one corner and ran back along the short side of the house, the one without the wing. Big french doors opened out onto the library, where I’d talked with English before. The yard wasn’t as big as you’d expect with a house like that. Last century when they’d built the house there was plenty of land, so no one had wanted it. Now there wasn’t and they did. The neighbor’s house was maybe fifty feet away on one side, a street was ten feet away on the other, and the backyard was maybe a hundred feet deep. A chain-link fence surrounded the property, except in front, where there was a stone wall, broken by the driveway. There was no sign of the driveway now and very little of the fence in the high snow. It took me nearly two and a half hours of clambering about through snowbanks and side streets to get all of the layout of the grounds and to look at the house from all sides. When I got through, I was sweaty underneath my jacket, and the shoulder rig I was wearing chafed under my left arm. I figured it was better than walking ten miles with the gun jiggling in a hip holster.