Manfred was working that year cutting hair in a barbershop on the ground floor of the Park Square Building. He was a small guy, with white-blond hair in a crew cut. Under his barber coat he had on a plaid flannel shirt and chino pants and brown penny-loafers with a high shine. It wasn’t a trendy shop. The only razor cut you got was if somebody nicked you while they were shaving your neck.
I sat in the waiting chair and read the Globe. There was an article on the city council debate over a bond issue. I read the first paragraph because Wayne Cosgrove had a byline, but even loyalty flagged by paragraph two.
There were four barbers working. One of them, a fat guy with an Elvis Presley pompadour sprayed into rigid stillness, said, “Next?”
I said, “No thanks. I’ll wait for him,” and pointed at Manfred.
He was cutting the hair of a white-haired man. He glanced toward me and then back at the man and then realized who I was and peeked at me in the mirror. I winked at him, and he jerked his eyes back down at the white hair in front of him.
In five minutes he finished up with Whitey and it was my turn. I stepped to the chair. Manfred said, “I’m sorry, sir, it’s my lunch hour, perhaps another barber … ?”
I gave him a big smile and put my arm around him. “That’s even better, Manfred. Actually I just wanted to have a good rap with you anyway. I’ll buy you lunch.”
“Well, actually, I was meeting somebody.”
“Swell, I’ll rap with them, too. Come on, Manfred. Long time no see.”
The barber with the pompadour was looking at us. Manfred slipped off his white barber coat, and we went together out the door of the shop. I took my coat from the rack as I went by.
In the corridor outside Manfred said, “God damn you, Spenser, you want to get me fired?”
“Manfred,” I said, “Manfred. How unkind. Un-Christian even. I came by to see you and buy you lunch.”
“Why don’t you just leave me alone?” he said.
“You still got any of those inflatable rubber nude girls you used to be dealing?”
We were walking along the arcade in the Park Square Building. The place had once been stylish and then gotten very unstylish and was now in renaissance. Manfred was looking at his feet as we walked.
“I was different then,” Manfred said. “I had not found Christ yet.”
“You, too?” I said.
“I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”
Near the St. James Avenue exit was a small stand that sold sandwiches. I stopped. “How about a sandwich and a cup of coffee, Manfred? On me, any kind. Yogurt too, and an apple if you’d like. My treat.”
“I’m not hungry,” he said.
“Okay by me,” I said. “Hope you don’t mind if I dine.”
“Why don’t you just go dine and stop bothering me?”
“I’ll just grab a sandwich here and we’ll stroll along, maybe cross the street to the bus terminal, see if any miscegenation is going on or anything.”
I bought a tuna on whole wheat, a Winesap apple, and a paper cup of black coffee. I put the apple in my pocket and ate the sandwich as we walked along. At the far end of the arcade, where the Park Square Cinema used to be, we stopped. I had finished my sandwich and was sipping my coffee.
“You still with the Klan, Manfred?”
“Certainly.”
“I heard you were regional manager or Grand High Imperial Alligator or whatever for Massachusetts.”
He nodded.
“Dynamite,” I said, “next step up is playing intermission piano at a child-abuse convention.”
“You’re a fool, like all the other liberals. Your race will be mongrelized; a culture that took ten thousand years and produced the greatest civilization in history will be lost. Drowned in a sea of half-breeds and savages. Only the Communists will gain.”
“Any culture that produced a creep like you, Manfred,” I said, “is due for improvement.”
“Dupe,” he said.
“But I didn’t come here to argue ethnic purity with you.”
“You’d lose,” he said.
“Probably,” I said. “You’re a professional bigot. You spend your life arguing it. You are an expert. It’s your profession. And it ain’t mine. I don’t spend two hours a month debating racial purity. But even if I lose the argument, I’ll win the fight afterwards.”
“And you people are always accusing us of violence,” Manfred said. He was standing very straight with his back against the wall near the barren area where the advertisements for the Cinema used to be. There was some color on his cheeks.
“You people?” I said. “Us? I’m talking about me and you. I’m not talking about us and about you people.”
“You don’t understand politics,” Manfred said. “You can’t change society talking about you and me!”
“Manfred, I would like to know something about a group of people as silly as you are. Calls itself RAM, which stands for Restore American Morality.”
“Why ask me?”
“Because you are the kind of small dogturd who hangs around groups like this one and talks about restoring morality. It probably helps you to feel like less of a dogturd.”
“I don’t know anything about RAM.”
“It is opposed to feminism and gay activism—probably in favor of God and racial purity. You must’ve heard about them?”
Manfred shook his head. He was looking at his feet again. I put my fist under his chin and raised it until he was looking at me. “I want to know about this group, Manfred,” I said.
“I promise you, I don’t know nothing about them,” Manfred said.
“Then you should be sure to find out about them, Manfred.”
He tried to twist his chin off my fist, but I increased the upward pressure a little and held him still.
“I don’t do your dirty work.”
“You do. You do anyone’s. You’re a piece of shit, and you do what you’re told. Just a matter of pressure,” I said.
His eyes shifted away from me. Several people coming out of the bank to my right paused and looked at us, and then moved hurriedly along.
“There are several kinds of pressure, Manfred. I can come into work every day and harass you until they fire you. I can go wherever you go and tell them about how we busted you for possession of an inflatable lover, and how you sang like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to get off.” There was more color in his cheeks now. “Or,” I said, “I could punch your face into scrapple once a day until you had my information.”
With his teeth clenched from the pressure of my fist, Manfred said, “You miserable prick.” His whole face was red now. I increased the pressure and brought him up on his toes.
“Vilification,” I said. “You people are always vilifying us.” I let him go and stepped away from him. “I’ll be around tomorrow to see what you can tell me,” I said.
“Maybe I won’t be here,” he said.
“I know where you live, Manfred. I’ll find you.”
He was still standing very straight and stiff against the wall. His breath was hissing between his teeth. His eyes looked bright to me, feverish.
“Tomorrow, Manfred. I’ll be by tomorrow.”
18
I went out to Arlington Street and turned left and walked down to Boylston eating my Winesap apple. On Boylston Street there were lots of Christmas decorations and pictures of Santa Glaus and a light, pleasant snow falling. I wondered if Rachel Wallace could see the snow from where she was. Tis the season to be jolly. If I had stayed with her … I shook my head. Hard. No point to that. It probably wasn’t much more unpleasant to be kidnaped in the Christmas season than any other time. I hadn’t stayed with her. And thinking I should have wouldn’t help find her. Got to concentrate on the priority items, babe. Got to think about finding her. Automatically, as I went by Brentano’s, I stopped and looked in the window at the books. I didn’t have much hope for Manfred—he was mean and bigoted and stupid. Cosgrove was none of those things, but he w
as a working reporter on a liberal newspaper. Anything he found out, he’d have to stumble over. No one was going to tell him.
I finished my apple and dropped the core in a trash basket attached to a lamp post, I looked automatically in Malben’s window at the fancy food. Then I could cross and see what new Japanese food was being done at Hai Hai, then back this side and stare at the clothes in Louis, perhaps stop off at the Institute of Contemporary Art. Then I could go home and take a nap. Shit. I walked back to my office and got my car and drove to Belmont.
The snow wasn’t sticking as I went along Storrow Drive, and it was early afternoon with no traffic. On my right the Charles was very black and cold-looking. Along the river people jogged in their winter running clothes. A very popular model was longjohns under shorts, with a hooded sweatshirt and blue New Balance shoes with white trim. I preferred a cutoff sweatshirt over black turtleneck sweater, with blue warm-up pants to match the New Balance 32O’s. Diversity. It made America great.
I crossed the Charles to the Cambridge side near Mt. Auburn Hospital and drove through a slice of Cambridge through Watertown, out Belmont Street to Belmont. The snow was beginning to collect as I pulled into a Mobil station on Trapelo Road and got directions to the Belmont Police Station on Concord Avenue.
I explained to the desk sergeant who I was, and he got so excited at one point that he glanced up at me for a moment before he went back to writing in a spiral notebook.
“I’m looking for one of your patrol car people. Young guy, twenty-five, twenty-six. Five ten, hundred eighty pounds, very cocky, wears military decorations on his uniform blouse. Probably eats raw wolverine for breakfast.”
Without looking up the desk sergeant said, “That’d be Foley. Wise mouth.”
“Man’s gotta make his mark somehow,” I said. “Where do I find him?”
The sergeant looked at something official under the counter. “He’s cruising up near the reservoir,” he said. “I’ll have the dispatcher call him. You know the Friendly’s up on Trapelo?”
“Yeah, I passed it coming in,” I said.
“I’ll have him meet you in the parking lot there.”
I thanked him and went out and drove up to Friendly’s ice cream parlor. Five minutes after I got there, a Belmont cruiser pulled in and parked. I got out of my car in the steady snowfall and walked over to the cruiser and got in the back seat. Foley was driving. His partner was the same older cop with the pot belly, still slouched in the passenger seat with his hat over his eyes.
Foley shifted sideways and grinned at me over the seat. “So someone snatched your lez, huh?”
“How gracefully you put it,” I said.
“And you got no idea who, and you come out grabbing straws. You want me to ID the cluck you hit in the gut, don’t you?”
I said to the older cop, “How long you figure before he’s chief?”
The older cop ignored me.
“Am I right or wrong?”
“Right,” I said, “you know who he is?”
“Yeah, after we was all waltzing together over by the library that day, I took down his license number when he drove off, and I checked into him when I had time. Name’s English—Lawrence Turnbull English, Junior. Occupation, financial consultant. Means he don’t do nothing. Family’s got twelve, fifteen million bucks. He consults with their trust officer on how to spend it. That’s as much as he works. Spends a lot of time taking the steam, playing racquetball, and protecting democracy from the coons and the queers and the commies and the lower classes, and the libbers and like that.”
The old cop shifted a little in the front seat and said, “He’s got an IQ around eight, maybe ten.”
“Benny’s right,” Foley said. “He snatched that broad, he’d forget where he hid her.”
“Where’s he live?” I said.
Foley took a notebook out of his shirt pocket, ripped out a page, and handed it to me. “Watch your ass with him though. Remember, he’s a friend of the chiefs,” Foley said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks.”
A plow rumbled by on Trapelo Road as I got out of the cruiser and went back to my car. The windows were opaque with snow, and I had to scrape them clean before I could drive. I went into the same Mobil station and got my tank filled and asked for directions to English’s house.
It was in a fancy part of Belmont. A rambling, gabled house that looked like one of those old nineteenth century resort hotels. Probably had a hunting preserve in the snow behind it. The plow had tossed up a small drift in front of the driveway, and I had to shove my car through it. The driveway was clear and circled up behind the house to a wide apron in front of a garage with four doors. To the right of the garage there was a back door. I disdained it. I went back around to the front door. A blow for the classless society. A young woman in a maid suit answered the bell. Black dress, little white apron, little hat—just like in the movies.
I said, “Is the master at home?”
She said, “Excuse me?”
I said, “Mr. English? Is he at home?”
“Who shall I say is calling, please?”
“Spenser,” I said, “representing Rachel Wallace. We met once, tell him, at the Belmont Library.”
The maid said, “Wait here, please,” and went off down the hall. She came back in about ninety seconds and said, “This way, please.”
We went down the hall and into a small pine-paneled room with a fire on the hearth and a lot of books on built-in shelves on either side of the fireplace. English was sitting in a red-and-gold wing chair near the fire, wearing an honest-to-God smoking jacket with black velvet lapels and smoking a meerschaum pipe. He had on black-rimmed glasses and a book by Harold Robbins was closed in his right hand, the forefinger keeping the place.
He stood up as I came in but did not put out his hand—probably didn’t want to lose his place. He said, “What do you want, Mr. Spenser?”
“As you may know, Rachel Wallace was kidnaped yesterday.”
“I heard that on the news,” he said. We still stood.
“I’m looking for her.”
“Yes?”
“Can you help?”
“How on earth could I help?” English said. “What have I to do with her?”
“You picketed her speech at the library. You called her a bulldyke. As I recall, you said you’d ‘never let her win’ or something quite close to that.”
“I deny saying any such thing,” English said. “I exercised my Constitutional right of free speech by picketing. I made no threats whatsoever. You assaulted me.”
So he hadn’t forgotten.
“We don’t have to be mad at each other, Mr. English. We can do this easy.”
“I wish to do nothing with you. It is preposterous that you’d think I knew anything about a crime.”
“On the other hand,” I said, “we can do it the other way. We can talk this all over with the Boston cops. There’s a sergeant named Belson there who’ll be able to choke back the terror he feels when you mention your friend, the chief. He’d feel duty bound to drag your tail over to Berkeley Street and ask you about the reports that you’d threatened Rachel Wallace before witnesses. If you annoyed him, he might even feel it necessary to hold you overnight in the tank with the winos and fags and riffraff.”
“My attorney—” English said.
“Oh yeah,” I said, “Belson just panics when an attorney shows up. Sometimes he gets so nervous, he forgets where he put the client. And the attorney has to chase all over the metropolitan area with his writ, looking into assorted pens and tanks and getting puke on his Chesterfield overcoat to see if he can find his client.”
English opened his mouth and closed it and didn’t say anything.
I went and sat in his red-and-gold wing chair. “How’d you know Rachel Wallace was going to be at the library?” I said.
“It was advertised in the local paper,” he said.
“Who organized the protest?”
“Well, the com
mittee had a meeting.”
“What committee?”
“The vigilance committee.”
“I bet I know your motto,” I said.
“Eternal vigilance—” he said.
“I know,” I said. “I know. Who is the head of the committee?”
“I am chairman.”
“Gee, and still so humble,” I said.
“Spenser, I do not find you funny,” he said.
“Puts you in excellent company,” I said. “Could you account for your movements since Monday night at nine o’clock if someone asked you?”
“Of course I could. I resent being asked.”
“Go ahead,” I said.
“Go ahead what?”
“Go ahead and account for your movements since nine o’clock Monday night.”
“I certainly will not. I have no obligation to tell you anything.”
“We already did this once, Lawrence. Tell me, tell Belson—I don’t care.”
“I have absolutely nothing to hide.”
“Funny how I knew you’d say that. Too bad to waste it on me though. It’ll dazzle the cops.”
“Well, I don’t,” he said. “I don’t have anything to hide. I was at a committee meeting from seven thirty Monday night until eleven fifteen. Then I came straight home to bed.”
“Anybody see you come home?”
“My mother, several of the servants.”
“And the next day?”
“I was at Old Colony Trust at nine fifteen, I left there at eleven, played racquetball at the club, then lunched at the club. I returned home after lunch, arrived here at three fifteen. I read until dinner. After dinner—”
“Okay, enough. I’ll check on all of this, of course. Who’d you play racquetball with?”
“I simply will not involve my friends in this. I will not have you badgering and insulting them.”
I let that go. He’d fight that one. He didn’t want his friends at the club to know he was being investigated, and a guy like English will dig in to protect his reputation. Besides I could check it easily. The club and the committee, too.
“Badger?” I said. “Insult? Lawrence, how unkind. I am clearly not of your social class, but I am not without grace.”
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