Thin Air

by Robert B. Parker

Fogarty didn't hesitate a moment.

  "Absolutely not," he said.

  He'd have probably said that if there were a ransom note in there.

  "And you have no thoughts on the matter?"

  He shrugged in a worldly way.

  "Marriages sometimes flounder," he said.

  I nodded thoughtfully.

  She lay on the bed in the darkness and thought about her situation. Despite the eroding intensity of her fear, she was still all right. He had not touched her. And except for tying her up when he took her, he hadn't harmed her. She wasn't home. The ordinary life rhythms she had, perhaps for the first time in her life, established, were cacophonously disrupted, but she was still whole. She was still Lisa St. Claire. She thought of her husband. She knew he would find her. Sooner or later, no matter what, Frank would come. She missed him. She wanted more than she had ever wanted anything to see him. To see the door to this black room open and to see Frank walk through it. She had never been altogether sure she loved him. She liked sex with him. But she liked sex. If she were to be totally objective, she would probably say it wasn't better with Frank than others. With Luis, before, in fact, the wildness of it, the adventure of it, might have made sex with Luis a little better than sex with anyone. Frank had been the one she fled to after she fled Luis. And more than Luis, when she fled all that she had been. Frank had been calmness and stability and probably above all else safety. A tough cop. He would keep her secure. He would keep her whole. He would protect her from what she had been and from what she always feared she might be again. In his calmness and his clarity and his strength he was a stay against disintegration. It was ironic really, if she could detach herself, that the kidnapping had dispelled the last of the romantic vapors that had clung retrospectively to Luis. Now and then at breakfast in their upscale kitchen, quietly, ready to go to work, she would remember Luis and wonder if there might be something there that she shouldn't have abandoned-infinite possibility, maybe, music from beyond a distant hill, something like that. There had been an I-don't-give-a-damn excitement about Luis that Lisa occasionally remembered with nostalgia as she watched her husband eat the same breakfast he always ate. She liked him. He was good for her. But she had sometimes wondered, as her mind rolled over her life before him, if she had made a mistake. She knew she hadn't. She knew what Luis was, and even more, she knew what Luis represented for her. But often, in a sort of visceral way, she wondered about Luis. Now I do not, she thought. Now more than anything I have ever wanted, I want him to find me, and take me home. It was more than the corrosive fear that made her long for her husband. It was what he, was and what he represented-a life to be, lived, a connection to be nurtured, a full chance to be Lisa St. Claire. He'll come, she thought. He'll find me. And alone in the dark lying on the alien bed she cried for the first time since Luis took her.

  Chapter 9

  Rowena Leighton was small and slender and dark, with her dark hair pulled back in a French twist, and her big dark eyes made darker with mascara, and bigger by the lenses of her large round glasses. The glasses had blue and gold frames. She wore a loose yellow pants suit with a wide black belt, and black high-heeled shoes with laces and clunky heels like the Wicked Witch of the West used to wear. There were rings on most of her fingers, and large ornamental earrings in her ears. Her face was thin and her jaw line firm. Her lipstick was very loud and generously applied to a mouth that seemed as if, in its natural state, it would be kind of thin. It was an intense, intelligent face and at the moment it was nearly buried in a book titled Modes of Being: The Tactical Personae of Men and Women in the Modern World. Professor Leighton was carefully marking things with a yellow highlighter. I waited. She continued to mark. I smiled courteously and said, "My name is Spenser. I'm a detective, and I'm looking for Lisa St. Claire, who appears to be missing."

  She kept marking and I held the courteous smile until she finally looked up and saw it.

  Charmed by the smile she said, "Dean Fogarty called to say you might come by. What's this about Lisa?"

  "She a student of yours?" I said.

  "Yes. Very gifted."

  The office was cluttered with the detritus of scholarship. There were books piled everywhere, and manila folders spilling papers on the top of a long mission oak table under the windows. A Macintosh word processor sat on the corner of her desk, hooked to a laser printer on a small end table beside her.

  "And you teach a class in self-actualization?" I said.

  "A workshop, actually, for women in process," Professor Leighton said. "It's based on some of the transactional theories I've developed in my work."

  She gestured slightly with her head to indicate a cluster of five books on one shelf of her bookcase. They had been set aside and held upright by a pair of used bricks. I could see her name on the spine of each. I couldn't read the titles without turning my head parallel to the floor. That position is never my best look, so I passed on the titles.

  "Tell me about Lisa?" I said.

  "You're a detective?"

  "Yes."

  "A police detective?"

  "No, private."

  "Really? How fascinating. Have you always been a private detective?"

  "No, once I was a police detective."

  "And were you discharged?"

  "Yes."

  "Dishonestly?"

  "No, they felt I was rebellious."

  She leaned back in her chair and laughed. It was a real laugh.

  "I didn't know intellectuals did that," I said.

  "Laugh? Oh, I think real intellectuals do. Remember, life is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think."

  "Horace Walpole?" I said.

  "Oh my," she said. "A learned detective. Did you enjoy Dean Fogarty?"

  "Uneasy lies the head that wears a Deanship," I said.

  She laughed again.

  "Well, you are a delight. Yes, Dean Fogy, as we call him, has never taken himself lightly."

  "Was it Horace Walpole?" I said.

  "Oh hell, I don't know. I think it was. Certainly you're in the right century. How can I help you with Lisa?"

  "Did she have a friend in your class named Tiffany?"

  "Yes," Professor Leighton smiled. "Typhanie Hall. She spelled her first name T y-p-h-a-n-i-e. She wished to be an actress."

  "Talk to me about Lisa, what was she like, who her friends were."

  "Well, of course I am limited by the artificialities of the student-teacher relationship. Clearly she was a bright woman. Clearly she had damn good insights about human interaction-she may have had some psychotherapy. And clearly she was not very well educated. She was some sort of radio personality, so she'd learned how to speak smoothly and she was facile and charming and attractive, all of which might mislead one at first, but it became quickly apparent that she'd had little formal schooling."

  Professor Leighton smiled at me.

  "You would notice it promptly," she said.

  "I did," I said.

  "In some ways I would say she is the opposite of you. You speak like a hooligan, but you know a great deal."

  "I am a hooligan," I said. "I read a lot."

  "Apparently. Do you fear, ah, for lack of a better word, foul play? Or is she simply a wandering wife?"

  "You knew she was married?"

  "She wore a ring."

  "But she kept, whatever the proper phrase is now, the name she had when she was single," I said.

  "You can relax, Mister Spenser, I am not one of your bushy feminist theoreticians. I accept `maiden name' as a useful locution. In fact, I have always used my maiden name."

  "You're married?"

  "Thrice," she said with a smile. "None of them current. I guess I'm a bit rebellious myself."

  "Good you used the maiden name then," I said. "Be a Chinese fire drill to keep changing it every time."

  "Plan ahead," she said. "Is she in harm's way, or merely adventuring?"

  "I don't know," I said. "A few days after she disappeared, he
r husband was shot."

  "Did he survive?" Professor Leighton said.

  "Yes."

  "Is she a suspect?"

  "I don't suspect her. But I'm not trying to catch the shooter. I'm looking for Lisa."

  "Was it Luis?"

  "Was who Luis?" I said. Cagey.

  "Did she marry Luis Deleon?"

  "No. She married a Boston cop named Frank Belson. Who's Luis Deleon?"

  "He was a student of mine last year, in my evening seminar on Media and Identity. Lisa St. Claire was in that class as well. I believe they enrolled together. They were very friendly, intimately so."

  "You know this?"

  "I can't prove it. I know it."

  "By observation?"

  "By observation. They sat together, they giggled together like much younger people. They clung together in the hall during the break. They held hands. They whispered. I've been in love, or infatuated, or both many times. I know it when I see it."

  "Tell me about Luis," I said. "Is he Hispanic?"

  "Yes, from Proctor, and like many Hispanics in Proctor, I fear he is very poor. The college runs an outreach program for the disadvantaged, as they like to call them. It sets aside a certain number of scholarships for the community and Luis took advantage of one of them."

  "How old?"

  "Luis? A bit younger than Lisa, perhaps, say twenty-six, twenty-seven."

  "Does he have an accent?"

  "Not very much, enough to discern, but nothing to impede communication."

  "What else?" I said.

  "Luis, like Lisa, was very bright, but very uneducated. Most of what he knew that was germane to my classroom, he learned from television and movies. I am not entirely sure he knew where film ended and life began."

  "`Germane to my classroom'?" I said. "Why the qualifier?"

  "Because I have some sense that he knows many things about life in the Proctor barrio that I cannot even dream of."

  "Is he in any of your classes this year?"

  "No. I'm a visiting professor here so I can do some postdoctoral study at Brandeis. This is my one class of the semester."

  "He still enrolled at the college?"

  "I don't know. Dean Fogy can tell you. I don't believe he was entirely comfortable in an Anglo academic setting, even this one."

  "He ever come around to see Lisa before class or after?"

  "Not this year."

  "Any observations you've made on Luis you'd like to share?"

  "In some ways he was quite formidable. Very tall. Athletic looking."

  "How tall?"

  "Unusually tall. Taller by several inches than you. Though not perhaps as thick. How tall are you?"

  "Six one."

  She looked at me appraisingly for a moment.

  "He was probably six feet four or five," she said. "Very intense, full of machismo. I know that is said of many Latin men, but Luis did tend to strut."

  She leaned back a little and closed her big eyes behind her huge glasses and thought for a moment.

  "And yet he was also very innocent," she said. "He believed in absolutes, in the kind of world you see in television movies. Good is always good. Bad is always bad. Nothing is very complicated, and what is once is forever. He imagined the kind of life that one would imagine if one grew up staring at television. No experience seemed to shake that imaginative conceit."

  "You wouldn't know where he lives?"

  "No, I'm sorry. I guess I'll have to refer you once again to dear Dean Fogy. The college must have an address."

  "Anyone named Vaughn in Lisa's class?"

  "Not that I recall."

  "You know anyone named Vaughn?"

  She smiled.

  "There was a baseball player named Arky Vaughn," she said.

  "Yes there was," I said. "Pirates and Dodgers. Probably not our man."

  "Horace Walpole and Arky Vaughn," she said. "I am impressed."

  I gave her my card.

  "If there's anything else that you think of, no matter how inconsequential, please call me."

  "I'll be pleased to," she said.

  I started for the door and stopped and turned back. "I have met a number of professors," I said. "And none of them were notable for honesty, humor, lack of pretense, and ability to observe. What the hell are you doing here?"

  She smiled at me for a moment and then said, "I came for the waters."

  "There are no waters here," I said.

  "I was misinformed," she said.

  Chapter 10

  The dean had given me Typhanie Hall's address, which was in Cambridge, and Luis Deleon's, which was, improbably, in Marblehead. Cambridge was closer, and I had a suspicion that Marblehead was going to be a waste of time, so here I was with an appointment to see Typhanie on a bright sunny morning. Crocuses were up, and the Harvard students were out in all their infinite variety. I waited in my car on Brattle Street while two Episcopalian women wearing big hats and Nike running shoes paused in the middle of the road to discuss human rights. I wanted to run them over. Cambridge was the jay-walking capital of the world, and I felt the only way to get control of the situation would be to kill a few. I was, however, wary of the Cambridge Police, so I blew my horn instead. The ladies looked up and glared at me. One, wearing purple stockings and sandals, gave me the finger. I didn't like where the Lisa St. Claire thing was going, but I wasn't in charge of where it went. So when the ladies got out of the way, I parked near Longfellow Park under a sign that said Resident Parking Only, and found Typhanie Hall's address, down. a side street, near Mt. Auburn.

  Typhanie had an apartment with a side entrance on the first floor of a large yellow Victorian house. When she let me in she was wearing aquamarine spandex tights and an oversized navy blue tee shirt. Her bright yellow hair was pulled back and held in place with one of those frilly elastic dinguses designed for the purpose. A long pony tail spilled down her back. She had on a lot of eye shadow, and her nails were long and brilliant red. Like, wow!

  "Do you have any word on Lisa?" she said when I was in and seated on a big hassock in her blond wood living room.

  "Not really," I said. "You?"

  "No. I'm worried to death about her. Ordinarily we talk nearly every day."

  "You have no idea where she might go?"

  "Maybe her dad," Typhanie said. "She always talked about visiting her dad."

  "You know where her dad might be?"

  "No."

  "You know his name?"

  "No."

  "Is his last name St. Claire?"

  "I don't know. She always said she wanted to find him, but she would never talk about him. Would you like some coffee? Or tea?"

  "No thanks."

  A big yellow cat came around the corner and sniffed at my foot and then rubbed himself along my leg.

  "That's Chekov," she said. "He's usually not that friendly with strangers. You must be special. You don't mind if I have some coffee, do you?"

  I shook my head.

  "I'm just not anything at all without several cups in the morning to get my motor revved."

  Her motor seemed sufficiently revved to me, but I had just met her and didn't know what kind of rev she was capable of. I waited while she went to the kitchen and came back with her coffee in a large white mug. The mug had a picture of Einstein on the side.

  "You've known Lisa for a long time?" I said.

  The yellow cat lay on his back on the floor by my foot and looked at me with his oval yellow eyes nearly shut. I rubbed his ribs with the toe of my shoe a little and he purred.

  "Oh yes, we met last fall, at the Cambridge Center Adult Ed center. We both love taking classes. Both of us love a good time, and we hit it right off. Would you like some Perrier or some spring water?"

  "No thank you. Did she date a lot?"

  "Oh yes. We both did. I'm not one of those grim feminists. I love men."

  "You're not?" I said.

  Typhanie smiled brilliantly.

  "She go with anyone in particu
lar?"

  "Well, she was dating Luis. But Lisa wasn't ready to settle down, in those days. She was looking for a good time."

  "Until she met Belson," I said.

  "Yes, then it was time."

  "Why?"

  "Why?"

  I realized I couldn't move too swiftly with Typhanie.

  "Yeah, why was it time?" I said.

  "Who knows? There's a time for everything, you know? Before then it wasn't time. Then it was."

  "Of course," I said.

  "I really believe that," Typhanie said. "Don't you? That timing is pretty much everything in life? And Frank came along at the right time for Lisa, and pow!"

  The cat on the floor had turned onto its side and stretched itself as long as it could get. It reached up with one paw and batted at my pants leg.

  "What made it the right time?" I said.

  "Who can say? The relationship with Luis wasn't going the way she wanted, and then here came this older man, you know? A safe harbor in a storm."

  "Luis Deleon?" I said.

  "Yes." Typhanie gave me what she must have thought was a wicked smile. "Her Latin lover."

  "She was going with him when she met Belson?"

  "Yes."

  "Tell me about him."

  "Well, he's beautiful. He's Hispanic, from Proctor. She met him in a night class at Merrimack State. Lisa was taking some courses there, nights, you know. She didn't want to always be a disc jockey."

  "And they were, ah, lovers?"

  "Oh baby, you better believe it. They were a continuing explosion. Everything was passionate like you dream about, you know, like in the movies. Flowers and candy and champagne and midnight suppers and, well, I shouldn't be telling tales out of school, but, honey, they were hot."

  "Sex?"

  "Everywhere, all the time, according to Lisa."

  "How nice," I said. "So what happened? How come she ended up with Frank Belson?"

  "I don't know. It was awful sudden. I know that Luis was pushing her to marry him."

  "And she didn't want to?" Typhanie shook her head. "Why not?" I said.

  "I don't know, really. I mean, he was younger than she was, and he was, you know, Hispanic, and I don't know what kind of job he had. But boy, he was compelling. Looks. Charm."