Pastime (3 page)

The refrigerator was on, but nearly empty, and there was nothing perishable in it. There was no fruit in the bowl on the table. The strainer was out of the drain in the kitchen sink. There was no suitcase to be found in the house, which meant either that she had packed it and taken it with her or that she didn't have one. Paul didn't know if she had one, and he couldn't tell if any of her clothes were missing. There were very few cosmetics in the bathroom. There were eleven messages on her answering machine, three from Paul. I copied down the names and phone numbers that had been left.

Mostly they were first names only, and Paul didn't know who they were. But the phone numbers could lead to something. I couldn't find an address book.

"Did she have one?" I said.

"Yes. I know she did. She carried it around with her and she was always afraid of losing it."

"She work?"

"Yes. She sold real estate. Worked for a company called Chez Vous."

"Cute."

"Hey," Paul said. "We're in the suburbs. Cute is important out here."

"You New York kids are so jaded," I said. "Do you know where she met Rich?"

No.

"Probably a dating bar called Entre Nous," I said.

"Or Cherchez la Femme," Paul said.

"That betrays a preconception about dating bars," I said.

"I suppose it does," Paul said. "How about what you've found here? You have any conclusions ~to reach?"

"Everything here says that she left of her o~p accord," I said. "There's no mail piled up, which means she stopped it at the post office. There's n~ suitcase. Most people have one, which sugges* that she took it. There's a dearth of cosmetic, which suggests that she packed them. The house is neat, but not like no one's ever coming back. There are no perishables in the refrigerator, which suggests that she was planning to be gone for a while."

"Without telling me?"

"We agree that's she's not Mother Courage," I said.

"True."

"You want me to find where she went?"

"I feel like kind of a jerk," Paul said. "I wouldn't want the police involved."

"But you'd still like to know where she is," I said.

Paul nodded. "I think she'd have called, or written me a postcard, something."

"Sure," I said.

"Of course I want to think that," Paul said. "I don't want to think she went off and didn't think about me."

"Well, let's find out," I said.

"What will you do?"

"First we'll track down Rich. There must be people know his last name. If he's also not around we'll have a reasonable presumption."

"And then what?"

"We'll ask everyone we can find who knows either of them if they know where

Patty and Rich are.

"And if no one knows?"

"We check airlines, trains, local travel agencies, that stuff. We see if

Rich's car is missing. If it is we run a trace on his license number. If it's not missing we check the car rental agencies."

"And if none of that works?"

"Some of it will work," I said. "You keep asking enough questions and checking enough options, something will come up, and that will lead to something, and that will lead to something else. We'll be getting information in ways, and from people, that we don't even know about now."

"You can't be sure of that," Paul said.

"I've done this for a long time, Paul. It's a high probability. If you want to find someone, you can find them. Even if they don't want to be found."

Paul nodded. "And you're good at this," he said.

"Few better," I said.

"Few?"

"Actually, none," I said. "I was trying for humble."

"And failing," Paul said.

I went to Chez Vous, which was located next to an ice cream parlor behind a bookstore in a small shopping center on Massachusetts Avenue. Four desks, four swivel chairs, four phones, four side chairs, and a sofa with maplewood arms and a small floral print covering. The wall was decorated with flattering photos of the property available, and the floor was covered with a big braided rug in mostly blues and reds. Two of the desks were empty, a woman with blue-black hair and large greenrimmed glasses sat at one of the remaining desks speaking on the phone. She was speaking about a house that the office was listing and she was being enthusiastic. The other desk was occupied by a very slender blonde woman wearing a lot of clothes. Her white skirt reached her ankles, nearly covering her black-laced high-heeled boots.

Over the skirt she wore a longish ivory-colored tunic and a black leather belt with a huge buckle and a small crocheted beige sleeveless sweater, and a beige scarf at her neck, and ivory earrings that were carved in the shape of Japanese dolls, and rings on all her fingers, and a white bow in her hair.

"Hi, I'm Nancy," she said. "Can I help?"

I took a card out of my shirt pocket and gave it to her. It had my name on it, and my address and phone number and the word Investigator. Nothing else. Susan had said that a Tommy gun, with a fifty-round drum, spewing flame from the muzzle, was undignified.

"I'm representing Paul Giacomin, whose mother works here."

Nancy was still eyeballing the card. "Does this mean, like a Private

Investigator?"

I smiled winningly and nodded.

"Like a Private Eye?"

"The stuff that dreams are made of, sweetheart," I said.

The woman with the blue-black hair hung up the phone.

"Hey, PJ," Nancy said. "This is a Private Eye."

"Like on television?" PJ said. Where Nancy was flat, PJ was curved. Where

Nancy was overdressed, PJ wore a sleeveless crimson blouse and gray slacks which fitted very smoothly over her sumptuous thighs. She had bare ankles and high-heeled red shoes. Around her left ankle was a gold chain.

"Just like television," I said. "Car chases, shootouts, beautiful broads. .."

"Which is where we come in," PJ said. She had on pale lipstick and small gold earrings. There were small laugh wrinkles around her eyes, and she looked altogether like more fun than was probably legal in Lexington.

"My point exactly," I said. "I'm trying to locate Patty Giacomin."

"For her son?" Nancy said.

"Yes. She's apparently gone, and he doesn't know where and he wants to."

"I don't blame him," PJ said.

"You know where she is?"

Both women shook their heads. "She hasn't been in for about ten days," PJ said.

"A week ago last Monday," Nancy said.

"Is that usual?"

"No. I mean, it's not like she's on salary. She doesn't come in, she doesn't get listings, she doesn't sell anything, she doesn't get commission," PJ said. "But usually she was in here three, four days a week-she was sort of part-time."

"Who runs the place?"

"I do," PJ said.

"Are you Chez or Vous?"

PJ grinned. "Is that awful, or what? No. My name's P. J. Garfield. PJ stands for Patty Jean. But with Patty Giacomin working here, it was easier to use PJ, saved confusion. I bought the place from the previous owner when she retired. Chez Vous was her idea. I didn't want to change the name."

"Either of you know Patty's boyfriend?" I said.

"Rich?" Nancy said.

"Rich what?"

Nancy looked at PJ. She shrugged.

"Rich…" PJ said. "Rich… she brought him to the Christmas party last year. An absolute hunk. Rich… Broderick, I think, something like that. Rich Broderick? Bachrach? Beaumont?"

"Beaumont," Nancy said.

"You sure?"

"Oh." She put her hand to her mouth. "No, god no, I'm not sure. I don't want anyone to get in trouble."

"How nice," I said. "Do we know where Rich lives?"

"Somewhere on the water," Nancy said. She looked at PJ.

PJ shrugged. "Could be. I frankly paid very little attention to him. He's not Patty's first boyfriend. And most of them are not, ah, mensches."

"What can you remember?" I said.

"Me?" Nancy said.

"Either of you. What did he look like? What didhe do for a living? What did he talk about? Did he like baseball, or horse racing, or sailboats? Was he married, separated, single, divorced? Did he have children? Did he have any physical handicap, any odd mannerisms, did he have an accent? Did he mention parents, brothers, sisters? Did he like dogs?"

PJ answered. "He was as tall as you, probably not as"-she searched for the word-"thick. Dark hair worn longish, good haircut"-her eyes crinkled"great buns."

"So we have that in common too," I said. Nancy looked at her desk.

"His clothes were expensive," PJ said. "And they fit him well. He's probably a good off-the-rack size."

"What size?"

"What size are you?" PJ said.

"Fifty," I said, "fifty-two, depends."

"He'd probably be a forty-four, maybe. He's more, ah, willowy."

"How grand for him," I said.

"I like husky men, myself," PJ said.

"Phew!"

"He didn't have an accent," Nancy said.

"You mean he talked like everyone else around here?"

"No. I mean he had no accent at all," Nancy said. "Like a radio announcer.

He didn't sound like he was from here. He didn't sound like he was from the

South, or from anywhere."

Nancy was maybe a little keener than she seemed.

"Good-looking guy?" I said.

Nancy nodded very vigorously. PJ noticed it and grinned.

"He was pretty as hell," she said. "Straight nose, dimple in his chin, kind of pouty lips, smoothshaven, though you could see that his beard is dark.

Kind of man that wears cologne, silk shorts."

Nancy got a little touch of pink on her cheekbones.

"Okay," I said. "The consensus is that his name is Rich Beaumont, or thereabouts, that he's six feet one, maybe a hundred eighty-five pounds, dark longish hair, well styled, good clothes, handsome, and particularly attractive to slender blonde women.

"What do you mean?" Nancy said.

"A wild guess," I said. "He speaks in an accentless way, and lives near the water."

"Hell," PJ said. "We knew more than we thought we did."

"Masterful questioning," I said, "brings it out. You have any thoughts at all about where Patty Giacomin might be?"

"No. Really," Nancy said, "I can't imagine."

"You find the boyfriend," PJ said, "you'll probably find her. Patty doesn't do much without a man. Usually not that good a man."

"Thank you," I said. "The kid's worried. If you hear anything, please call me."

"Certainly," Nancy said.

PJ grinned so that her eyes crinkled a little.

"You had lunch?" she said.

"Can't," I said. "I got a dog in the car."

"An actual dog or is that an unkind euphemism?"

"An actual dog, named Pearl. Can euphemisms be unkind?"

"I don't know. There's always dinner? Or are you married?"

"Well, I have a friend."

"Don't they all," PJ said. "Too bad. We'd have had fun."

"Yeah," I said. "We would have in fact."

I went out of Chez Vous, and went back to the car.

"I thought you were Susan's dog," I said.

She made no response.

Back in my office she guzzled down some water from a bowl placed for that purpose by Paul.

"Did you know that they drink by curling their tongue backwards?" I said.

"Under?"

"How exciting," Paul said. "Thank you for sharing that with me."

"How'd you do on the phone?"

"Not very well," he said. "No one knew where she was. Some of the calls were from real estate customers who don't know anything about her. One woman said she was my mother's best friend. I figure she's worth a visit."

"She know anything?"

"She was late for aerobics, she said. But I could call later."

"Better to visit," I said. "Where is she?"

"Lives in Concord. She gave me the address."

"Okay. I'll run out and have a talk with her," I said.

"I'll go with you."

"No need to."

"Yes," Paul said. "There is a need to."

"Okay."

"You took care of everything when I was fifteen," he said. "I'm not fifteen now. I need to do part of this."

"Sure," I said. Paul's presence would make it harder. People would be less frank about Patty in front of her son. But he wasn't fifteen anymore and it was his mother. Pearl had gotten herself up onto the narrow client's chair and was curled precariously, mouthing the yellow tennis ball she'd tracked down on a walk in Cambridge. Her eyes followed every movement I made. I got her leash and snapped it on and took her to the car and drove her and Paul to Concord.

Most of the way up Route 2 she had her head on my left shoulder, her nose out the open window, sampling the wind.

"It is not entirely clear," I said to Paul, "why I am bringing this hound with me everywhere I go."

"Cathexis," Paul said.

"I knew you'd know."

"What did they say about my mother?" he said.

"The people at Chez Vous?"

"Oui. "

"They had no real idea where she might be."

"I know, you told me that. But what did they say?"

"They said she worked, usually, three or four days a week, on commission.

That she had brought Rich to a Christmas party last year and that he was very good looking."

"That all?"

"They didn't exactly say, but made it quite clear that they thought that your mother's choices of men were often ill-advised."

"Many men?"

"They suggested that she needed to be with a man, and that if we found Rich we'd find her."

"Did they talk about her need to be with men?"

"Not a lot. They seemed to record it as a fact of your mother's nature that she wasn't likely to go very far, very often, without the company of a man."

"That could get you in trouble," Paul said.

I nodded. We left Route 2, onto 2A, which was the old Revolutionary War road, where the embattled farmers sniped at the redcoats from behind the fieldstone walls. We passed historic houses-the Wayside, the Alcott

House-all the way into Concord center.

Not all of the historical places in Massachusetts look the way you'd like them to. But Concord does. It has overarching trees, spacious colonial homes, a green, a clean little downtown made mostly of red brick, a rambling white clapboard inn that looks as if stagecoaches should still be stopping there. There are the historic sights, the academy, the river where one can rent a canoe and spend a day of transcendental paddling, as Susan and I had occasionally done, pausing to picnic one day almost beneath the rude bridge that arched the flood.

The address we wanted was a recycled jelly factory in downtown Concord.

They'd sandblasted the brick and cleaned up the clock tower and gutted the interior and built blond-wood-with-white-walls condominium apartments inside. Out back was a big parking lot. A hopeful sales office was still open on the first floor of the building.

The woman's name was Caitlin Moore. She answered the bell in a pink spandex leotard, white sneakers, and a pink sweatband. She was built like the cheerleaders of my youth, chunky, bouncy, not very tall. Her extremely blonde hair was caught into a ponytail. She had on green eye shadow and false eyelashes and whitish lip gloss, which made her look a little spectral.

"Hi," she said, friendly. "I'm Caitlin. You must be Paul, who I talked with on the phone."

Paul said he was, and introduced me.

"You're a detective?"

"Yes."

"Could I see something?"

"Sure." I gave her my license, she looked at it for a moment, then went to a bleached oak table and got a pair of half-glasses and put them on and came back looking further at my license. "Well," she said. "A hard man is good to find."

She smiled. I smiled. Paul smiled.

"Come on in," Caitlin said. "Want some coffee? All I got is instant, but I can microwave it in no time."

Paul and I declined. Caitlin led us into her sitting room, her prominent little butt waggling ahead of us as we followed her. With its bleached woodwork and stark white walls and ceiling, and anodized combination windows, the room was standard condo modern. It appeared to have been furnished by Betsy Ross. There was an old maple standup desk, an antique pine harvest table, a pine thumbback rocker, a coffee table made from a cobbler's bench. It went with the room the way Liberace goes with Faust.

"I love early American," she said as we sat down. Paul and me on the sofa.

Caitlin on the thumbback rocker, where she crossed both legs under her.

"When I got divorced I made the bastard give me all the furniture."

"Great," I said.

"You're my mother's best friend?" Paul said.

"Oh, absolutely," Caitlin said. "Patty and I are like twins. She's always talking about you."

"What does she say?"

"She talks about how successful you are. You're in the movies, I think?"

"I'm a dancer in New York," Paul said. "I was on screen for a minute and twenty-six seconds in a film about American Dance that played on PBS."

"Yuh, I knew it was something like that. Anyway, we been really close ever since we were in aerobics together at Sweats Plus. Something about us, you know, we just hit it off. Both been divorced and all. I don't have any kids, but, well, we knew something about pain, and recovery."

"Know her current boyfriend?" I said.

"I introduced them."

"Tell us a little about him," Paul said.

"He's a real doll. Friend of my brother's. I knew Patty was looking to go out, and I knew Rich was single. So I…" Caitlin spread her hands and shrugged. "They really connected, you know, right from the start. It was something. You worried about her? Maybe she and Rich just went off, they were crazy like that, I don't mean anything bad about your mom, Paul, she was just ready for fun anytime. I bet they just went off somewhere for a while on the spur.

"They have a place they usually go?" I said.

"Oh, they'd go anywhere. I don't know. Miami, Atlantic City, Club Med. You name it."

"What's Rich's last name?" Paul said.

"Beaumont. Rich Beaumont." She pronounced it with the stress on the last syllable.

"Where's he live?" I said.

"Over in Revere someplace, I think. On the water. I think he's got a condo on the beach."

"Got an address?"

"No, not really. I don't think I ever knew it exactly."

"Phone number?"

Caitlin smiled and spread her hands. "I'd always meet him through my brother."

"Can we talk with your brother?" Paul said.

"Marty? I don't know what Marty can tell you." "How's your brother know

Rich?"

"I don't know, they play handball together. Double date. I think they did some business sometime."

"What's Rich's business?"

"Consultant."

"You know what he consults in?"

"No, just some kind of consulting business."

"What's your brother do?"

"Marty's a paving contractor. Hot top, you know, that stuff."

"And his last name?" I said.

"Martinelli."

"Martin Martinelli?" I said.

"Yeah. My mother was a lunatic. How about Caitlin Martinelli? My old lady was nuts."

"What was it like being my mother's friend?" Paul said.

"Huh?"

"What's she like?"

"You're her kid," Caitlin said. "You should know-better than anybody."

"I should but I don't. What does she care about?" The question was too hard for Caitlin. She frowned. "What did she care about?"

"Yeah."

Caitlin lifted her shoulders. "Ah…" Caitlin waved her hands vaguely.

"She, ah. She liked aerobics. You know she cared about her body, and how she looked. And she knew a lot about makeup."

Paul nodded.

Caitlin had a thread to follow out of her confusion. She tumbled on. "And fun," Caitlin said. "Patty loved to have fun."

Paul nodded again.

"Who were her other close friends?" I said.

"I don't really know her other friends… She had a friend named Sonny, was a traffic reporter, you know, from a helicopter."

"Man or woman?" I said.

"Woman."

"She have a last name?"

"Oh, sure. I mean, doesn't everybody? I don't know it, though. Just Sonny."

"Know the station she reported for?"

Caitlin shook her head.

"We'd like to talk with your brother," I said. "Could you give us an address?"

Caitlin looked flustered. "Gee, I don't know. Marty won't be too thrilled.

Marty's a very private guy. Very successful businessman, very private."

"I know his name," I said. "I know his business. I can find him. Will he like me finding him, asking around about him?"

"God, no. Listen. I'll give you his work address. That way you won't be bothering him at home."

"Sure," I said.

She gave me an address on the Revere Beach Parkway in Everett.

"Did she ever talk about my father?" Paul said.

"Her ex-? What's-his-name, Mel? Sure did. She called him a cheap sonovabitch every chance she could. Excuse me, I know he's your dad and all."

"That's okay," Paul said. "I can hear whatever there is to hear. I need to hear it."

"Well, don't worry about her. I'm sure she's off someplace with Rich having a ball. Your mother is a fun lady!"

"You don't think she might go someplace without Rich?" Paul said.

Caitlin looked startled. "No," she said. "Of course not. What fun is it alone?"