I rinsed the glasses in the sink and got out the bottle and poured each of us a shot. I didn’t really want one, but he looked like he needed someone to drink with. It was a small sacrifice.
“First we went back over Cheryl Anne Rankin again,” Farrell said.
He held his whiskey in both hands, without drinking any.
“And we found nothing. No birth record, no public school record, no nothing. The woman who worked in the track kitchen is gone, all we got is that her name was Bertha. Nobody knows anything about her daughter. There’s no picture there like you describe, just one picture of Olivia Nelson with a horse, and nobody remembers another one.”
“Anyone talk to the black woman that worked there?”
“Yeah. Quirk talked with her while he was there. She doesn’t know anything at all. She probably knows less than that talking to a white Northern cop.”
“Who’s doing the rest of the investigating?”
“Alton County Sheriff’s Department,” Farrell said.
“You can count on them,” I said.
Farrell shrugged.
“Per diem’s scarce,” he said.
He was still holding the whiskey in both hands. He had yet to drink any.
“You hit one out, though, on Tripp,” he said. “He’s in hock. First time around we weren’t looking for it, and nobody volunteered. As far as we can find out this time, he has no cash, and his only assets are his home and automobile. He’s got no more credit. He’s a semester behind in tuition payments for each kid. His secretary hasn’t been paid in three months. She stays because she’s afraid to leave him alone.”
“What happened?” I said.
“We don’t know yet how he lost it, only that he did.”
“How about the family business?”
“He’s the family business. He managed the family stock portfolio. Apparently that’s all he did. It took him maybe a couple hours, and he’d stay there all day, pretending like he’s a regular businessman.”
“Secretary sure kept that to herself,” I said.
“She was protecting him. When we showed her we knew anyway, she was easy. Hell, it was like a relief for her; she couldn’t go on the rest of her life taking care of him for nothing.”
“What’s he say about this?”
“Denies everything absolutely,” Farrell said. “In the face of computer printouts and sworn statements. Says it’s preposterous.”
“He’s been denying a lot, I think.”
Farrell nodded and looked down at the whiskey still held undrunk in his two hands. He raised the glass with both hands and dropped his head and drank some, and when he looked up there were tears running down his face.
“Brian?” I said.
Farrell nodded.
“He died,” I said.
Farrell nodded again. He was struggling with his breathing.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Farrell drank the rest of his drink and put the glass down on the edge of the desk and buried his face in his hands. I sat quietly with him and didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything to say.
thirty-four
* * *
LEONARD BEALE HAD an office in Exchange Place, a huge black glass skyscraper that had been built behind the dwarfed façade of the old Boston Stock Exchange on State Street. Keeping the façade had been trumpeted by the developer as a concern for preservation. It resulted in a vast tax break for him.
“Loudon lost almost everything in October 1987, when the market took a header,” Beale said. “I wouldn’t, under normal circumstances, speak so frankly about a client’s situation. But Loudon . . .” Beale shook his head.
“He’s in trouble, isn’t he?” I said.
“Bad,” Beale said. “And it’s not just money.”
“I didn’t know brokers said things like ‘it’s not just money.’”
Beale grinned.
“Being a good broker is taking care of the whole client,” he said. “It’s a service business.”
Beale was square-built and shiny with a clean bald head, and a good suit. He looked like he probably played a lot of handball.
“He lost his money in ’87?” I said.
“Yeah. In truth, I didn’t help. I was one of a lot of people who couldn’t read the spin right. I didn’t think the market was going to dive. But mostly he lost it through inattention. He always insisted on managing the money himself. Gave him something to do, I suppose. Let him go to the office at nine in the morning, come home at five in the afternoon, have a cocktail, dine with the family. You know? Like Norman Rockwell. But he wasn’t much of a manager, and when the bottom fell out he was mostly on margin.”
“And had to come up with the cash,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Why was he on margin?” I said. “I thought the Tripp fortune was exhaustive.”
Beale shrugged and gazed out the window, across the Back Bay, toward the river. The sky was bright blue and patchy with white clouds. In the middle distance I could see Fenway Park, idiosyncratic, empty, and green.
“Are the Rockefellers on margin?” I said. “Harvard University?”
Beale’s gaze came slowly back to me.
“None of them was married to Olivia,” he said.
“She spent that much?”
“Somebody did. More than the capital generated.”
“So he began to erode the capital,” I said.
Beale nodded.
“The first sure sign of disaster for rich people,” he said. “Rich people don’t earn money. Their capital earns money. If they start snacking on the capital, there’s less income earned, and then, because they have less income, they take a bigger bite of capital, and there’s even less income, and, like that.”
“He tell you this?”
“No,” Beale said. “He wouldn’t say shit if he had a mouthful. As far as he was concerned, she was perfect. The kids were perfect. Christ, the son is an arrogant little thug, but Loudon acts like he’s fucking Tom Sawyer. Buys the kid out of every consequence his behavior entails. Or did.”
“And the daughter?”
“Don’t know. No news is probably good news. Loudon never had much to say about her, so she probably didn’t get in much trouble.”
“And he’s been economically strapped since 1987?”
“Broke,” Beale said. “Getting broker.”
“What are they living on?” I said. “They’ve got two kids in college, a mansion on the Hill, fancy office. How are they doing that?”
Beale shook his head.
“Margin,” he said.
thirty-five
* * *
“IT’S SIMPLY NOT so,” Loudon Tripp said.
“So why is everyone telling me otherwise?” I said.
“I can’t imagine,” Tripp said.
“Your secretary hasn’t been paid her salary,” I said.
“Of course she has.”
He took his checkbook from its place on the left-hand corner of the desk and opened it up and showed me the neat entries for Ann Summers.
“And the check you gave me bounced,” I said.
He turned immediately to the entry for my check.
“No,” he said. “It’s right here. Everything is quite in order.”
“There’s no running balance,” I said.
“Everything is in order,” Tripp said again.
“Do you know that your wife was unfaithful?” I said.
“By God, Spenser,” he said, “that’s enough.”
His voice was full of sternness but empty of passion.
“I fear that I have made a mistake with you, and it is time to rectify it.”
“Which means I’m fired,” I said.
“Mr. Tripp,” I said. “Your wife was not what she appeared to be, not even who she said she was. Your life is not what you say it is. There’s something really wrong here.”
“Good day, Mr. Spenser. Please send me a bill for your services through”—he looked at his watch—“through today,” he said.
“And you’ll pay it with a rubber check,” I said. “And enter it carefully and not keep a balance so you won’t have to know it’s rubber.”
“Good day, Mr. Spenser!”
I was at a loss. It was like talking to a section of the polar ice cap. I got up and went out, and closed the door behind me.
“He’s crazy,” I said to Ann Summers.
She shook her head sadly.
“Why didn’t you tell me about him right off?”
“I don’t know. He’s, he’s such a sweet man. And it seemed gradual, and he seemed so sure everything was all right, and . . .”
She spread her hands.
“Even when you weren’t getting paid?” I said.
“I felt sorry, no, not that, quite, I felt . . . embarrassed for him. I didn’t want anyone to know. I didn’t want him to know that I knew.”
“Anything else you haven’t told me?” I said.
She shook her head. We were quiet for a while. Then she spoke.
“What are you going to do?” she said.
“I’m going to find out,” I said. “I’m going to keep tugging at my end of it until I find out.”
She looked at me for a long time. I didn’t have anything to say. Neither did she. Finally she nodded slowly. In its solemnity, her face was quite beautiful.
“Yes,” she said. “You will, won’t you.”
thirty-six
* * *
WILLIAMS COLLEGE WAS located in Williamstown, in the far northwest corner of Massachusetts. The ride out was more than three hours whether you went on the Mass. Pike or Route 2. On the one hand, if you got behind some tourist in the two-lane stretches of Route 2, the trip became interminable. On the other hand, Route 2 was better-looking than the Mass. Pike and there was not a single Roy Rogers restaurant the whole way.
Susan and I had a reservation in Williamstown at a place called The Orchards where they served home-baked pie, and we could have a fire in the bedroom. While I talked with the Tripp children, Susan would visit the Clark Museum.
We drove out on Route 2. Susan had a new car, one of those Japanese things she favored that were shaped like a parsnip, and mostly engine. This one was green. She let me drive, which was good. When she drove, I tended to squeeze my eyes tight shut in terror, which would cause me to miss most of the scenery that we had taken Route 2 to see in the first place.
I met Chip and Meredith Tripp in the bar of a restaurant called the River House, which, in the middle of the day, was nearly empty. Chip and I each had a beer. Meredith had a diet Coke. Chip was cooler than kiwi sorbet, with his baggy pants, and purple Williams warm-up jacket, his hat on backwards, and his green sunglasses hanging around his neck. Meredith was in a plaid skirt and black turtleneck and cowboy boots. As before, she had on too much makeup.
“I need to talk with you about your mother,” I said.
Chip glowered. Meredith looked carefully at the tabletop.
“What I will tell you can be confirmed in most of its particulars, by the police. So we shouldn’t waste a lot of time arguing about whether what I say is true.”
“So you say, Peeper.”
Peeper. I took a deep breath and began.
“First of all, it is almost certain that your mother was not in fact Olivia Nelson.”
Meredith’s eyes refocused on the wall past my chair and got very wide.
Her brother said, “You’re full of shit.”
“Did either of you ever meet any of your mother’s family?”
“They’re dead, asshole,” Chip said. “How are we going to meet them?”
I inhaled again, slowly.
“I’ll take that as no,” I said and looked at Meredith. She nodded, her head down.
“Have you ever heard of anyone named Cheryl Anne Rankin?”
Chip just stared at me. Meredith shook her head.
“Do you know that your father is encountering financial difficulty?” I said.
“Like what?” Chip said.
“He’s broke,” I said.
“Bullshit,” Chip said.
I nodded slowly for a minute, and inhaled carefully again.
“Did you know that your mother was promiscuous?” I said.
“You son of a bitch,” Chip said.
He stood up.
“On your feet,” he said.
I didn’t move.
“Hard to hear,” I said. “I don’t blame you. But it has to be contemplated.”
“Are you gonna stand up, you yellow bastard, or am I going to have to drag you out of your chair?”
“Don’t touch me,” I said.
And Chip heard something in my voice. It made him hesitate.
I tried to keep my voice steady.
“I am going to find out how your mother died, and the only way I can is to keep going around and asking people questions. Often they don’t like it. I’m used to that. I do it anyway. Sometimes they get mad and want to fight me, like you.”
I paused and kept my eyes on his.
“That’s a mistake,” I said.
“You think so,” he said.
“You’re an amateur wrestler,” I said. “I’m a professional thug.”
Meredith put her hand on Chip’s arm, without looking at him.
“Come on, Chip,” she said. There was almost no affect in her voice.
“I’m not going to sit around and let him talk about her that way.”
“Please, Chip. Let him . . .” Her voice trailed away.
I waited. He glared at me for a moment, then slammed his chair in against the table.
“Fuck you,” he said to me and turned and left.
Meredith and I were quiet. She made an embarrassed laugh, though there was nothing funny.
“Chippy’s so bogus, sometimes,” she said.
I waited. She laughed again, an extraneous laugh, something to punctuate the silence.
“You know about your mother?” I said.
“Dr. Faye says we all do and won’t admit it. Not about her being somebody else, but the other . . .”
I nodded.
“Daddy would be up in his room with the TV on,” Meredith said in her small flat voice. “Chip was at college. And she would come home; I could tell she’d been drinking. Her lipstick would be a little bit smeared, maybe, and her mouth would have that sort of red chapped look around it, the way it gets after people have been kissing. And I would say, ‘You’re having an affair.’”
“And?”
“And she would say, ‘Don’t ask me that.’
“And I would say, ‘Don’t lie to me.’”
I leaned forward a little trying to hear her. She had her hands folded tightly in front of her on the tabletop and her eyes were fastened on them.
“And her eyes would get teary and she would shake her head. And she’d say, ‘Oh, Mere, you’re so young.’ And she would shake her head and cry without, you know, boo-hooing, just talking with the tears running down her face, and she’d say something about ‘life is probably a lie,’ and then she’d put her arms around me and hug me and pat my hair and cry some more.”
“Hard on you.”
“When I came to school,
” she said, “I was having trouble, you know, adjusting. And I talked with Jane Burgess, my advisor, and she got me an appointment with Dr. Faye.”
“He’s a psychiatrist?”
“Yes.” The word was almost nonexistent, squeezed out in the smallest of voices. Her Barbie doll face, devoid of character lines, showed no sign of the adult struggle she was waging. It remained placid, hidden behind the affectless makeup.
“Know anything about money?” I said.
“Sometimes they’d fight. She said if he couldn’t get money, she would. She knew where to get some.”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing. He’d just go upstairs and turn on the television.”
“What would she say?”
“She’d go out.”
“You don’t know what her plan was? For money?”
“She always just said she knew where to get it.”
“How long did you live like this?”
“I don’t know. All the time, I guess. Dr. Faye says I didn’t buy the family myth.”
I put a hand out and patted her folded fists. She got very rigid when I did that, but she didn’t pull away.
“Stick with Dr. Faye,” I said. “I’ll work on the other stuff.”
Susan and I were in the dining room at The Orchards, Susan wearing tight black pants and a plaid jacket, her eyes clear, her makeup perfect.
“There’s a beard burn on your chin,” I said.
“Perhaps if you were to shave more carefully,” Susan said.
“You didn’t give me time,” I said. “Besides, there are many people who would consider it a badge of honor.”
“Name two,” Susan said.
“Don’t be so literal,” I said.
There were fresh rolls in the bread basket, and the waitress had promised to find me a piece of pie for breakfast. We were at a window by the terrace and the sun washed in across our linen tablecloth. I drank some coffee.
“It is a lot better,” I said, “to be you and me than to be most people.”
Susan smiled.
“Yes, it is,” she said. “Especially better than being one of the Tripps.”
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