Thin Air

by Robert B. Parker

  Inside the church, in the back, there were three old women wearing black shawls over their heads. I had read somewhere that the Catholic church no longer required women to cover their heads when entering, but these did not look like women who would jump onto every new fad that came along. The women were saying the rosary, their lips moving silently, fingering the beads softly, sliding them along as they said the prayers. Down front a solitary old man in a black suit with no tie and his white shirt buttoned to the neck was sitting in the first pew. He didn't show any signs of prayer. He wasn't sleeping. He simply sat gazing straight ahead.

  As I walked down the aisle of the church, a middleaged priest in a black cassock came out of the sacristy and met me near the altar rail.

  "May I help you?" he said softly.

  He was a modest-sized guy, wiry and trim with white hair and a red face.

  "Is there someplace we can talk, Father?"

  The priest nodded.

  "Perhaps we can step out onto the front steps," he said, "so as not to disturb the worshipers."

  We walked back up the central aisle in the dim, candle-smelling church, and out into the thin early spring brightness. At the foot of the church stairs my car sat at the curb, a long scratch gleaming newly along the entire passenger side. The priest looked at it.

  "Your car?" he said.

  "Yes."

  "Welcome to San Juan Hill," the priest said. "Children on bicycles?"

  "Yes."

  "They like to do that," the priest said. "They particularly like to surround Anglo women, and when the car stops to beat them."

  "Because they like to?"

  "Because they like to."

  "Sure," I said. "I'm looking for a young man named Luis Deleon. He might be here in San Juan Hill."

  "Why are you looking for him?"

  "As a means to an end," I said. "There's a woman missing, I'm looking for her. I'm told she once had a relationship with Deleon."

  "Is this an Anglo woman?"

  "Yes."

  "You would not bother to look for a Latin woman."

  "I look for anyone I'm hired to look for."

  "You are not a policeman then?"

  "No. I'm a private detective."

  "And you have a gun," the priest said, "under your coat."

  "You're very observant, Father."

  "I have seen a lot of guns, my friend," the priest said.

  "Yes, I imagine you have," I said.

  The priest looked out over the gray and graffiti landscape of Proctor. Somewhere a car squealed its tires as it went at high speed around a corner. In the asphalt and chain-link playground across from the church, three kids sat against the wall smoking, and drinking from a wine bottle in a paper sack. A huge dirty gray cat, slouched so low that its belly dragged, padded out of the alley next to the church carrying a dead rat.

  "Not what I imagined when I left the seminary thirty years ago," the priest said. "Bright, fresh-scrubbed children gazing up at me, learning the word of God. Green lawn in front of the church, bean suppers in the basement, young couples getting married, solemn funerals for prosperous old people who had died quietly in their sleep."

  The priest looked at me.

  "I was supposed to live a life of reverence," he said. "I was supposed to visit suburban hospitals, where the staff knew and admired me, and give communion to people in flowery bed linens, with bows in their hair."

  "The ways of the Lord are often dark, but never pleasant, Father."

  "Who said that?"

  "Besides me? A guy named Reich, I think."

  "I don't know him. I hope he is not correct."

  "You know Deleon?" I said.

  "Yes."

  "You know where I can find him?"

  "No, I have not seen him since he was small. His mother used to bring him, then, but she was a desperate woman and one day she killed herself, God rest her soul. I never saw Luis again. But I hear things. I hear he has become an important person in San Juan Hill."

  The priest paused and looked at me.

  "And I hear he has become very dangerous."

  I nodded.

  "You should be careful if you plan to approach him," the priest said.

  "I'm fairly dangerous myself, Father."

  "Yes, you have the look. I have seen it far too often not to know it."

  "If you were me, Father, where would you look for Deleon?"

  "I don't know:"

  "Would any of your parishioners know?"

  "If they do, they would not tell me."

  "You're their priest."

  "Here I am not their priest. I am a gringo."

  I nodded. The priest was silent. I could hear a boom box playing somewhere.

  "If you do not speak Spanish, no one in San Juan Hill will speak with you."

  "Even if they speak English?"

  "Even then."

  "How about Freddie Santiago?" I said.

  "He might speak to you, if he thought it served him. But he is not in San Juan Hill."

  "What would serve Santiago?" I said.

  The priest thought about my question.

  "There is no simple answer to that," he said. "Santiago is an evil man, of this there is no question. He is a criminal, almost surely a murderer. He deals in narcotics, in prostitutes, in gambling. He sells green cards. He controls much of what happens in the Hispanic community here, which is to say most of Proctor."

  "Except San Juan Hill," I said.

  "Except San Juan Hill."

  "So what's the no-simple part?"

  "He is not entirely, I think, a bad man. A poor person can get money or a job from Freddie Santiago. Wars among some of the youth gangs are settled by him. Paternity and alimony payments are often enforced by him. Every election he works very hard to get Hispanic people registered."

  "And he probably contributes to the Police Beneficent Association," I said.

  The priest smiled for a moment.

  "I think it is certain," he said, "that Freddie Santiago contributes generously to the police. Have you talked to them?"

  "I talked to the Chief of Detectives," I said.

  "He was Irish?" the priest said.

  "Yeah, Delaney."

  "They are all Irish," the priest said. "The police, the school superintendent, the mayor, all of the power structure. They are Irish and they speak English. And the city is Spanish and speaks Spanish."

  "You speak Spanish, Father?"

  "Haltingly at best," the priest said. "I can still say a Latin mass, but I have not been successful with the language of my flock. I assume the police weren't helpful to you."

  "They weren't."

  "If she's with Deleon… an Anglo woman with an Hispanic man… for the police here, it would mean she was irretrievably tainted."

  Six teenaged boys in baggy jeans and San Antonio Spurs warmup jackets swaggered by us on the sidewalk below. They looked up at us. It was not a friendly look.

  One of them said something in Spanish. They all laughed.

  "Did you understand what he said?" I asked the priest.

  "He said, in effect, `Look at the eunuch in his dress,"' the priest said. His red face held no expression. "I've heard it before."

  "If they would talk to me, is there enough English spoken in Proctor for me to ask questions and understand the answers?" I said.

  "They will not talk to you, and if they would, I do not think they could," the priest said.

  "But Freddie Santiago speaks English," I said.

  "Very well, I've heard. If you talk to him, be respectful, and very careful. He is a deadly adversary."

  "Wait'll he gets a load of me," I said. "How'd you end up here, Father, in the tail end of hell's half acre?"

  "A priest's duty is to serve where God sends him," he said.

  As he spoke, he was looking at the barren asphalt playground where the three kids were still drinking wine and smoking dope against the graffiti-covered handball wall.

  "And… I drink," he said.


  Chapter 13

  Quirk came into my office like he always does, like it was his, and don't argue about it. He was wearing a tan suit and a blue-striped shirt with a button-down collar and a khaki-colored knit tie. It was as springlike as the weather, which was soft and flowery with a slight breeze drifting in through the open window. He pulled one of my client chairs around and sat down and put one foot on my desk. "What have you got?" Quirk said.

  "There's a guy named Luis Deleon," I said.

  "Yeah."

  "He's an Hispanic guy from Proctor who Lisa met in a class at Merrimack State."

  "Un huh."

  "Apparently Lisa had a relationship with him, before she met Belson."

  "Un huh."

  "You been listening to her answering machine tapes?" I said.

  "Yeah. Guy has maybe a little Spanish accent, on the tape. Says he's going to stop by."

  "Could be Deleon," I said.

  "And?"

  "He lives in a section of Proctor called San Juan Hill," I said. "I've talked to some people. He's sort of a figure there. Wrong side of the law, I think. The way I hear it, Deleon may also be on the wrong side of the local Godfather, Freddie Santiago."

  "Santiago's got a lot of juice in Proctor," Quirk said. "You speak any Spanish?"

  "No," I said.

  "You know where this guy Deleon is?"

  "No. San Juan Hill someplace, but we don't have an address yet."

  "We probably ought to get one," Quirk said.

  "She may not be with him."

  "Sure," Quirk said. "But it's the best lead you got. What are you waiting for?"

  "If Lisa's with Deleon, voluntarily or involuntarily, we need to go a little careful."

  "Yeah."

  We were quiet. The spring air drifted in through the window and ruffled the newspaper on my desk.

  "I'll see what we got on Deleon," Quirk said, "if anything."

  "Maybe you should check out Lisa's background, a little."

  "We have, a little," Quirk said.

  "And?"

  "Goes back a couple years," Quirk said, "without anything unusual-and then nothing. It's like she didn't exist prior to 1990."

  "How hard did you look?"

  "Hard enough. We lifted some prints from the house that are probably hers. We're waiting to hear."

  "What about her references and stuff at the radio station?"

  "Checked them," Quirk said. "They never heard of her."

  "Previous employment, all that?"

  "Fake."

  "Academic credits when she entered Merrimack State?"

  "None required. It's open enrollment, continuing education."

  "Might explain the everything-started-the-night-we-met deal she had with Belson," I said.

  "Might," Quirk said.

  "Anybody named Vaughn crop up while you were looking?"

  "Yeah, I saw that on the calendar pad," Quirk said. "Whoever he is, I haven't found him."

  "You got anything on the shooting?"

  "One of the neighbors is a nurse. Husband's a gastroenterologist at Brigham. She was coming home from Faulkner Hospital after work, says she saw a yellow van parked by the pond a little before the shooting. Said she noticed it because of how it was kind of ugly for the neighborhood."

  "She didn't get a plate number."

  "'Course not. Doesn't know what kind of van or what year. Just an ugly yellow van."

  "Anything on the bullets?"

  "They were nine millimeter Remingtons, we found the brass."

  "That narrows it down," I said.

  "Yeah," Quirk said. "In Proctor they sell them in vending machines."

  "You think it's connected to Lisa?"

  "Yeah."

  "Doesn't have to be," I said.

  "That's right, what do you think it's connected to?"

  "Lisa," I said. "Let me know when you get something on the prints."

  "Sure," Quirk said.

  The slim gray-haired woman with the young face came into the room and took away the dishes. There was a single silver streak in her hair. She was dressed in jeans and a pink sweatshirt. She neither looked at Lisa nor spoke. She was careful not to look at the glowing video monitors where the tapes ran their endless loops. As the woman left, Lisa could see past her into the hallway outside the door, where a man in a flowered shirt open over his undershirt leaned on the wall. She could see the butt of a handgun stuck into his belt, to the right of the buckle. The door closed. She heard the key turn. Then silence, except for the soft electronic hum of the monitors. She walked about the room. She went into the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. She was wearing a safari outfit today, like Deborah Kerr in King Solomon's Mines. He had chosen it, and she didn't argue. She had decided soon after she was captured that she wouldn't fight the small battles. He wanted her to dress up like the movies, it would do her no harm. She was waiting for the big battle. She would have only one chance and she didn't want to squander it. She couldn't do it yet because it would do her no good to hit him and flee when an armed guard stood outside the door. The less trouble she gave him, the more he might be careless. And maybe once the door would be unlocked. Maybe once there would be no armed guard. And if the door were always locked and the guard always there and the chance never materialized?… Frank would come, sooner or later, he'd show up. She knew that. And knowing something certain was a handhold on sanity. She smoothed her hair back from her forehead and looked at herself in the mirror. She looked like she always looked. It was probably a truth about tragedy, she thought, while the tragedy is going on people look pretty much the way they looked when it wasn't. She turned and walked back into the bedroom. The monitors were looping the tape of her kidnapping, herself lying bound on the floor in the back of his van. She paid them no attention. She was hardly aware of the monitors at all. They had become so much a part of her limited landscape that they were barely tangible.

  Behind her she heard the key in the door lock, and then he came into the room.

  "Chiquita, " he said. "You look just as I'd hoped. Turn around, please. All the way around. Now walk toward me. Yes. It is just as I'd hoped."

  He was wearing a loose-fitting white shirt, with big sleeves. The shirt was open at the neck and unbuttoned halfway to his waist. He wore tan riding breeches and high cordovan-colored riding boots. She tried to remember the movie poster he was modeling. Lives of a Bengal Lancer? Elephant Walk? She couldn't remember. But she knew that he coordinated what he would wear with the way he dressed her. He would lay out her clothes before he left her the night before, if it was night. She never knew. When he came in the next day, if it was the next day, he would be costumed to match. His very own, anatomically correct mannequin, she thought as she modeled her outfit. He smiled at her and put out his arm, crooked, as if for a promenade. "Come, querida, I have a treat for you."

  She remained unmoving, not sure what he wanted.

  "Come, come," he said. "We will take a little walk. It is time the queen toured her realm."

  She walked slowly to him, and put her hand on his arm lightly. And they turned and walked out the door.

  Chapter 14

  I took off my tool belt and hung it on a nail on one of the bare studs in the torn-out living room of the old farm house we were rehabbing in Concord, Mass., about three miles from the rude bridge that arched the flood. It was lunchtime. Susan had gone out and bought us some smoked turkey sandwiches on homemade oatmeal bread at Sally Ann's Food Shop. Now she was back and we sat out at our picnic table on the snow-melt marshy grass in the yard and ate them, and drank Sally Ann's special decaf blend from large paper cups. "I don't know why you kvetch so about decaffeinated coffee," Susan said. "I think it tastes perfectly fine."

  Pearl the Wonder Dog hopped up onto the picnic table and stared at my sandwich from very close range.

  I broke off a piece and gave it to her. It disappeared at once and she resumed the stare.

  "You lack credibility, Suze," I said.
"You could live on air and kisses sweeter than wine."

  Susan gave half her sandwich to Pearl.

  "This is true," Susan said. "But I still can't tell the difference."

  Pearl stared at my sandwich some more, her eyes shifting as I took a bite.

  "You know, when I was a kid," I said, "neither my father nor my uncles would let the dog up on the dining room table. Not even Christmas."

  "How old fashioned," Susan said.

  It was one of the first warm days of the year, and the sun was very satisfying as it seeped through my tee shirt. I took one final bite of the sandwich and gave the rest to Pearl. It was big enough to be taken someplace, so Pearl jumped off the table and went into the house with it. Susan looked at me with something which, in a lesser woman, would have been a smirk.

  "It's the gimlet eye," I said. "I get worn down."

  "Anyone would," she said. "How is Frank?"

  "I guess he's going to make it, but he's still in intensive, still full of hop and drifting in and out. And they still don't know when he'll walk."

  "Are you making any progress finding Lisa St. Claire?"

  "I've found an old boyfriend," I said.

  "Cherchez l'homme," Susan said.

  "Maybe. He's an Hispanic guy from Proctor named Luis Deleon. He might be the one on her answering machine that might have had an accent and said he'd stop by later. I played the tape for Lisa's friend Typhanie-with a y and a ph-and she couldn't say for sure, but it might be him. He's apparently the guy Lisa was with before Belson."

  "And you think she might be with him?"

  "I don't know. Awful lot of might-be's. But I don't have anyplace else to look, so I'll look there."

  "I hope she's not with someone," Susan said.

  "Yeah. But, in a sense, if she is, Belson will know she's not dead, and he'll know what he has to fight."

  "The voice of experience."

  "Disappearance is terrifying," I said. "Whether me or him is painful, but it's clear."

  "And you've not spoken with Frank about this?"

  "Mostly he doesn't know what day it is," I said. "But even if he did, what's to talk about?"

  "One would assume if you were looking for a man's wife, you would want to talk with him about it if possible. If only to offer him emotional support."