Valediction s-11

by Robert B. Parker

  "Yes," I said.

  She gave it. "Are you going to be all right?" she said.

  "Depends," I said. "Depends an your definition of all right. And it depends on how our relationship works out."

  "When I left," Susan said, "it was not my intention to end the relationship. I have done what I wanted to do. I have gotten to be alone. Now I've just got to experience being alone for a while and see where it leads."

  As there often is on coast-to-coast calls, there were echoes of my voice and hers, and a kind of transmission delay so that our voices tended to overlap. The call was like air to a diver, and the transmission distortions were like kinks in the air hose.

  Susan said, "I'm in such a kind of tumbling series of changes that I hate to speak in absolutes. But I would be much less happy if you weren't in some sense part of my life."

  "Okay," I said.

  "Is this phone driving you crazy too?" she said.

  "I get an echo," I said.

  "Me too. Not a good time for a bad transmission."

  "No," I said. "When my energy levels get up high enough I may go down to AT&T and bust up some executive's bridgework."

  "Okay," she said. "I'm going to hang up now. I've been charging around since I got here, and I'm exhausted and I've been so worried about you I can't breathe."

  "I'm okay," I said. "I'm much better now that I've talked to you."

  "I'll talk to you soon," Susan said.

  "I love you," I said.

  "Yes," Susan said. And hung up.

  Paul was watching the Muppets on Channel Nine. I poured some Irish whiskey into a glass and went in and sat down and sipped the whiskey and told him about Susan's conversation.

  "That's encouraging," he said.

  "Yes."

  On the tube Floyd was singing a duet with Pearl Bailey.

  "You ought to date," Paul said.

  "How about I get a Qiana shirt and some gold chains and tight pants with no pockets . . ."

  "And a bulger," Paul said.

  "Yeah," I said, "and shoes with Cuban heels, and maybe have my hair styled and blowdried."

  "On the other hand," Paul said, "maybe you hadn't ought to date."

  CHAPTER 6

  I watched the Tommy Banks Dancers go through a series of tap steps. Paul was one, not featured but clearly a necessary member. The room was small and hot and shabby, on a second floor on Huntington Avenue over a liquor store that advertised 10,000 cases of ice-cold beer. The dancers glistened with sweat. Paul rehearsed in a pair of gray sweat pants held up by a blue and red belt and a red T-shirt that said Puma on the front. The sleeves had been cut off and the neck cut out so that it was little more than a sleeveless undershirt.

  Now that I knew Susan's phone number, I could easily find her address. On the other hand, if she wanted me to know her address, she'd tell me.

  The dancers took a break in the rehearsal and Tommy Banks came over to meet me. Paul came with him. Banks wore a pair of black knit dance pants and a net polo shirt cut off the way defensive backs on Southern college football teams cut them off so that the stomach is bare. He was shorter than Paul and stocky for a dancer and considerably older than Paul, nearly forty, probably. His hair was cut short and receded from his forehead.

  "Mr. Spenser," he said. "Nice of you to come over."

  We shook hands. Whatever his age and height, he was in shape. Fine little muscle patterns moved in Banks's flat stomach. We got some coffee from an automatic drip coffeemaker on a card table in one corner of the room next to the record player. The dancers lounged around smoking and drinking coffee and stretching.

  "How much has Paul filled you in," Banks said.

  "Just that one of your dancers is missing and you want me to find her."

  "Well"-Banks made a tight half smile-"that's the essence of it, isn't it."

  I nodded.

  "She's more than missing," Banks said. "She's been taken."

  Paul looked startled. I nodded again. "She's been taken by the Bullies."

  Paul looked more startled. "The religious group?" I said.

  "Yes," Banks said. "The Reorganized Church of the Redemption. You know about it, I assume."

  "I know that it exists, that its leader, pope, chief wizard, whatever they call him, is a guy named Bullard Winston who believes in the church militant."

  "Yes," Banks said. "They've taken Sherry."

  "By force?"

  "Yes."

  "You didn't tell me that," I said to Paul.

  "I didn't know it," Paul said.

  "They broke in," Banks said, "five of them, three men, two women, in berets and fatigue clothes. They had automatic weapons. One of them hit me with the butt of the weapon and knocked me down. I was half conscious. They grabbed Sherry, bound her, and took her away. I was able to get to the door in time to see them put her into the trunk of a car and drive away. Then I passed out."

  "And you didn't call the cops," I said. Banks shook his head. "I-I woke up and didn't know what to do and . . . I just walked around all night and came in the next day and said Sherry was missing."

  "Why no cops?"

  "I didn't want this turned into a media circus like Patty Hearst."

  I didn't say anything. Paul was quiet, standing a little to the side.

  "And . . . I didn't. . . you know how Patty Hearst's fiance was treated in the press."

  I nodded.

  "I was ashamed," he said. "I was ashamed that they were able to take her away from me and I didn't stop them."

  "Five people with automatic weapons," I said. "Hard to stop."

  "I could have died trying."

  "I'm not sure we'd be better off," I said.

  Banks shook his head as if he were trying to shake something off. "Well, anyway. The company has chipped in and I have a bit of money, and we wish to hire you to find her."

  "Okay," I said. "I'll need her picture." Banks went to get it. I looked at Paul. Paul shrugged. Banks came back with a manila folder in which was a publicity picture of a young woman and a typed resume, and a handwritten description on white paper lined with blue. I looked at it. Her name was Sherry Spellman and she was twenty years old.

  "She have much contact with the Bullies before," I said.

  "Oh, hell," Banks said, "she had a little, ah, flirtation I suppose you'd say, while she was in college, but . . ." He shook his head and made a dismissing shrug. I looked back down at her resume. She'd gone one year to Bard College, leaving two years ago. She'd been with Banks a year.

  "No calls," I said, "no ransom notes?" Banks shook his head.

  "Why did they take her?" I said.

  "To make her one of them," Banks said. "We can't let them do that."

  "No," I said. "I guess we can't."

  CHAPTER 7

  I called Martin Quirk at police headquarters and got the name of a priest who consulted to the department on oddball cults and religions.

  "Named Keneally," Quirk said. "Professor of Comparative Religion at B.C. Use my name."

  It had been a while since I'd been in my office. It was stuffy, and the warm city air coming through the open windows wasn't doing much to freshen it up. I looked out the window. The dark-haired art director in the ad agency across the street was conferring over her board with two colleagues. Too busy to look in my window. Probably resigning. Probably going to take a job in Miami doing bilingual dope ads.

  I called up Wayne Cosgrove at the Globe. "Who's your dance critic," I said.

  "Nancy Quentin," he said.

  "Would you speak to her about me and tell her I'll call her and invite her to lunch."

  "You seen Nancy?" Wayne said.

  "Business," I said. "I need some dance information."

  "Okay. Her extension is 2616. Call her in a half-hour or so. I'll have talked with her by then."

  "Unless she's out on assignment," I said.

  "Assignment? It's ten thirty in the morning. How many fucking dance recitals you see at ten thirty in the morning?"
>
  "Okay," I said. "I'll call her at eleven."

  I hung up and looked out my window some more. It was sunny. The art director and her colleagues had moved away from her board and out of sight somewhere back in the office across the street.

  At eleven I called Nancy Quentin.

  "A detective," she said. "Very exciting for us arts-and-leisure types."

  "I imagine so," I said. "Would you have lunch with me at the Ritz Cafe?"

  "Today?"

  "Yes."

  "I'll be there in an hour. How will I recognize you?"

  "I'll be in the lobby by the cafe looking out of place," I said.

  "See you there," she said, and hung up.

  I walked down Berkeley Street to my apartment on Marlborough and put on a tie and my blue blazer with the tattersall lining, and strolled up Arlington to the Ritz. They'd put up a second tower beside the hotel and filled it with condominium apartments that sold for a lot. The new building blended pretty well with the original. It didn't improve anything but it didn't look like a bad case of mange either. When I turned in through the revolving doors it was 11:40. Time for a drink.

  I sat at the bar and had an Irish whiskey on the rocks with a twist and ate some peanuts and sipped the drink. I looked at my watch. Eleven fifty. Almost nine o'clock in San Francisco. At 11:55 I finished the drink and walked out into the lobby. A big hard-looking guy with gray hair and a large stomach was going up the curving rose-carpeted stairway toward the dining room. He paused on the stairs and looked at me and nodded.

  "Callahan," I said. "Still got that roll of dimes?"

  He smiled and nodded. "Business or pleasure?" he said to me.

  "Lunch with a client," I said. "Nothing to do with the house."

  Callahan nodded again, pleasantly. "Enjoy," he said.

  I went and stood outside the cafe, near the desk, and waited. At ten past noon a woman about the size of the Gadsden Purchase came up to me and said, "Mr. Spenser."

  I said yes and she said she was Nancy Quentin and I said, "Shall we to the cafe?" and in we went.

  The cafe at the Ritz would be the coffee shop in another hotel, but here it really was a cafe. The food was good, the service elegant, the menu brief but interesting. It was a ground-floor room and there were windows to sit by. In the evening a young woman in a gown played the harp.

  The waiter asked if we'd like a cocktail. Nancy had Campari and soda. I had another Irish whiskey.

  Nancy looked over at me. "You're right," she said. "You do look out of place."

  "And I'm wearing a Brooks Brothers tie too."

  "It's not enough," she said.

  "I went to the Harvard commencement this year."

  "That would help," she said. "But only if you were still wearing your little Harvard commencement badge."

  "Yeah. I thought about it but was afraid I'd get caught. People would start asking me smart questions and they'd find out I'd never been."

  "Yes," she said. "That is a danger."

  She was a very large-boned, tall woman, and she had managed to keep her weight up. She was probably fifty-five and wore a loosefitting dress with a small gray print in it, and a large straw hat. For her to find a loose-fitting dress was something of a triumph, I thought. She wore a lot of makeup, badly applied. There was lipstick on her teeth. If she'd been a dancer, it must have been in Fantasia.

  "At the commencement, people were asking really tough ones," I said. "Who's your broker? Where can I get a deal on Volvo station wagons, that kind of stuff. I felt really humble."

  She laughed. "I went to Wellesley," she said. "I could have answered those questions easily."

  "And now you write for the Globe? My God."

  "Yes, plucky of me, I think."

  The waiter took our order. I had lobster salad. Nancy had the minute steak. We had another round of drinks as well.

  "What can you tell me about a dancer named Tommy Banks," I said.

  "Ah-ha," Nancy said, "enough with the small talk."

  "Yes," I said, "off with the clothes."

  She smiled again. "Tommy Banks," she said. Outside our window, on Newbury Street, a man and woman were walking an Afghan hound. The woman's arm was through the man's. He was much taller than she was and occasionally she banged her head against his upper arm as they walked, then looked up at him and laughed about something. Maybe the dog. It's hard not to laugh at an Afghan hound.

  "Tommy Banks," Nancy said. "If commitment were all it took, he'd have been Nureyev, or Fred Astaire."

  "Talent?"

  "Are you a baseball fan, Spenser?"

  "Yes."

  "His desire is Cooperstown. His talent is Pawtucket."

  I nodded.

  "He was in New York for a while, studied with Cunningham, danced as a chorus boy with some actress in a one-woman show, Debbie Reynolds, I think-you know, the star and four dancers who serve as context. He formed a tap company of his own, and got some grant money and did a few colleges and Summerthing kinds of appearances, Citicorp Center at noon, that kind of stuff; and then he packed it in and came back to Boston. I believe he felt New York commercialism was stifling. Here he has a school, and a company that instructs at the school and is drawn from it and he works at expanding the tap-dance form."

  "Is he being successful?"

  She smiled. The waiter brought my lobster salad and Nancy's steak. Susan would have had only an appetizer. Probably smoked salmon. Maybe one glass of white wine, which she wouldn't finish. Nancy ordered a beer. I joined her.

  "Successful?" Nancy said. "No, not very. I can applaud his attempt to enlarge the narrative possibilities of tap, but his actual innovations are less successful than the conception, if you follow what I'm saying. Are you familiar with dance?"

  "A little," I said. "I have a friend who dances."

  "In some ways Tommy would be best in an academic setting where his experiments wouldn't have to be self-supporting. His imagination is limited."

  "Do you know about him as a person?"

  "Not very much. We've met but I don't know him well. I know he's very driven by an ambition that overleaps his skills. He is, I believe, a very tough disciplinarian with his dancers, and people in the business don't like him very much."

  "How about one of his dancers, Sherry Spellman?"

  Nancy shook her head. "No. I don't know her."

  I had finished my lobster salad and my beer. Three whiskies and a beer at midday and I was feeling mushy. Nancy ate the last of her steak. "Why are you interested in all this?" she said.

  "Off the record?" I'd always wanted to say that to a reporter.

  "Deep background," Nancy said.

  "Sherry's missing. Banks claims she was kidnapped by the Reorganized Church of the Redemption."

  Nancy raised her eyebrows. "The Bullies kidnapped her?"

  "That's what Banks said."

  "You sound skeptical," she said.

  "Not really skeptical, it's a deep-seated habit I've developed from spending the last twenty years talking with people who speak with forked tongue."

  "Cynical," she said.

  "More than that. The story doesn't make a lot of sense. First of all, it sounds just like the Hearst kidnapping, and second, Banks never called the cops. Says he doesn't want a media circus like the Hearst case."

  "That may be the definition of ego," Nancy said. "Imagining yourself worthy of a media circus. The Hearsts maybe, but Tommy Banks?"

  "I know. He also said he was ashamed that he hadn't died trying to save her."

  She shrugged. "More convincing. I believe he has some kind of belt in karate. But . . ." Nancy shrugged and widened her eyes.

  "Five people with automatic weapons-doesn't make much difference what kind of belt you have."

  "I would think not," Nancy said.

  The waiter took our dessert order. Nancy had apple pie and cheese. I had black coffee.

  "Why would they take her," Nancy said.

  "Banks says they want to make her one of the
m."

  "Aggressive proselytizing," Nancy said. "But why her, why not me, or you? You look like you might be hard, but you see what I'm asking."

  "Banks said she'd been involved before. `A brief flirtation when she was in college,' he said."

  "And once a Bullie, always a Bullie?"

  "I don't know. That's my next stop. I'm consulting a specialist on fruitcakes."

  "Fruitcakes? How unsympathetic a view of religion," Nancy said.

  There was a small swallow of beer left in my glass. I drank it.

  "Malt does more than Milton can," I said, "to justify God's ways to man."

  CHAPTER 8

  The priest was an arrogant one, full of his own knowledge and the pleasures of his impending salvation. But he knew a lot about the Reorganized Church of the Redemption and if I had to suffer a certain amount of foolishness to get the information, I could smile and smile and be agnostic.

  "The Bullies," he said, "are a macho subspecies of Christianity. They believe in the concept of Christian soldiers and worship the Christ who scourged the moneylenders from the temple, not He who suffered His own crucifixion."

  I smiled and nodded. We were in Father Keneally's office at B.C., a big corner room in one of the handsome graystone buildings on the Quadrangle. On the walls there were pictures of Keneally with Cardinal Cushing, with a couple of former governors, and standing with an arm around the shoulders of a football player named Fred Smerlas. Smerlas was enormous and Keneally was not and the gesture looked strained. The opposite wall was covered with books on shelves and as Keneally talked I had no reason to doubt that he'd read them all.

  "Would they kidnap somebody?"

  Keneally raised his eyebrows. He was small and neat with an expensive black summer priest suit, and pink healthy-looking skin and crisp white hair cut short. He smelled of bay rum and his nails appeared to have been manicured. A decanter of wine, maybe port, stood on the windowsill and the afternoon sun slanting through it made a purple gleam on the beige Oriental rug that covered the office floor.

  "Kidnapping is not part of most Christian rituals," he said.

  I wanted to sigh. It was the kind of answer he'd give.