Looking for Rachel Wallace

by Robert B. Parker

  When I opened my eyes there were granules of snow on the lashes; they looked like magnified salt crystals. There was no sound and no movement. Then there was a snuffing sound. I rolled my eyes to the left, and over the small rim of snow I could see a black nose with slight pink outlinings. It snuffed at me. I shifted my head slightly and said, “Uff.” The nose pulled back. It was on one end of a dog, an apprehensive young Dalmatian that stood with its front legs stiffened and its hindquarters raised and its tail making uncertain wags.

  Lifting my head was too hard. I put it back in the snow. The dog moved closer and snuffed at me again. I heard someone yell, “Digger!” The dog shuffled his feet uncertainly.

  Someone yelled, “Digger!” again, and the dog moved away. I took a deep breath. It hurt my ribcage. I exhaled, inhaled again, inched my arms under me, and pushed myself up onto my hands and knees. My head swam. I felt my stomach tighten, and I threw up, which hurt the ribs some more. I stayed that way for a bit, on my hands and knees with my head hanging, like a winded horse. My eyes focused a little better. I could see the snow and the dog’s footprints, beyond them the legs of a park bench. I crawled over, got hold of it, and slowly got myself upright. Everything blurred for a minute, then came back into focus again. I inhaled some more and felt a little steadier. I looked around. The mall was empty. The Dalmatian was a long way down the mall now, walking with a man and woman. The snow where I stood was trampled and churned. There was a lot of blood spattered on the snow. Across the street in front of Manfred’s apartment the Pontiac was gone. I felt my mouth with my left hand. It was swollen, but no teeth were loose. My nose seemed okay, too.

  I let go of the bench and took a step. My ribs were stiff and sore. My head ached. I had to wait for a moment while dizziness came and went. I touched the back of my head. It was swollen and wet with blood. I took a handful of snow from the bench seat and held it against the swollen part. Then I took another step, and another. I was under way. My apartment was three blocks away—one block to Marlborough Street, two blocks down toward the Public Garden. I figured I’d make it by sundown.

  Actually I made it before sundown. It wasn’t quite noon when I let myself in and locked the door behind me. I took two aspirin with a glass of milk, made some black coffee, added a large shot of Irish whiskey and a teaspoon of sugar, and sipped it while I got undressed. I examined myself in the bathroom mirror. One eye was swollen and my lower lip was puffy. There was a seeping lump on the back of my head and a developing bruise that was going to be a lulu on my right side. But the ribs didn’t appear to be broken, and in fact there seemed to be nothing but surface damage. I took a long hot shower and put on clean clothes and had some more coffee and whiskey, and cooked myself two lambchops for lunch. I ate the lambchops with black bread, drank some more coffee with whiskey, and cleaned up the kitchen. I felt lousy but alive, and my fourth cup of whiskeyed coffee made me feel less lousy.

  I looked into the bedroom at my bed and thought about lying down for a minute and decided not to. I took out my gun and spun the cylinder, made sure everything worked smoothly, put the gun back in my hip holster again, and went back out of my apartment.

  I walked the three blocks back to Manfred’s place a lot faster than I had walked from Manfred’s two hours earlier. I was not sprightly, but I was moving steadily along.

  21

  When I rang the bell Manfred’s mom came to the door. She was thin and small, wearing a straight striped dress and white sneakers with a hole cut in one of them to relieve pressure on a bunion. Her hair was short and looked as if it had been trimmed with a jackknife. Her face was small, and all the features were clustered in the middle of it. She wore no make-up.

  I said, “Good afternoon, ma’am. Is Manfred Roy here, please?”

  She looked at my face uneasily. “He’s having his lunch,” she said. Her voice was very deep.

  I stepped partway into the apartment and said, “I’ll be glad to wait, ma’am. Tell him I have some good news about Spenser.”

  She stood uncertainly in the doorway. I edged a little further into the apartment. She edged back a little.

  Manfred called from another room, “Who is it, Ma?”

  “Man says he has good news about Spenser,” she said. I smiled at her benignly. Old Mr. Friendly.

  Manfred appeared in the archway to my right. He had a napkin tucked in his belt and a small milk mustache on his upper lip. When he saw me, he stopped dead.

  “The good news is that I’m not badly hurt, good buddy,” I said. “Ain’t that swell?”

  Manfred backed up a step. “I don’t know nothing about that, Spenser.”

  “About what?” his mother said. I edged all the way past her.

  “About what, Manfred?” I said. His mom still stood with one hand on the doorknob.

  “I didn’t have nothing to do with you getting beat up.”

  “I’ll not be able to say the same about you, Manfred.”

  Mrs. Roy said, “What do you want here? You said you had good news. You lied to get in here.”

  “True,” I said. “I did lie. But if I hadn’t lied, sort of, then you wouldn’t have let me in, and I’d have had to kick in your door. I figured the lie was cheaper.”

  “Don’t you threaten my mother,” Manfred said.

  “No, I won’t. It’s you I came to threaten, Manfred.”

  Mrs. Roy said, “Manfred, I’m going for the police,” and started out into the hall.

  “No, Ma. Don’t do that,” Manfred said. Mrs. Roy stopped in the hall and looked back in at him. Her eyes were sick.

  “Why shouldn’t I go to the police, Manfred?”

  “They wouldn’t understand,” Manfred said. “He’d lie to them. They’d believe him. I’d get in trouble.”

  “Are you from the niggers?” she said to me.

  “I represent a woman named Rachel Wallace, Mrs. Roy. She was kidnaped. I think your son knows something about it. I spoke to him about it yesterday and said I’d come visit him today. This morning four men who knew my name and recognized me on sight were parked in a car outside your apartment. When I arrived, they beat me up.”

  Mrs. Roy’s eyes looked sicker—a sickness that must have gone back a long way. A lifetime of hearing hints that her son wasn’t right. That he didn’t get along. That he was in trouble or around it. A lifetime of odd people coming to the door and Manfred hustling in and out and not saying exactly what was up. A lifetime sickness of repressing the almost-sure knowledge that your firstborn was very wrong.

  “I didn’t have nothing to do with that, Ma. I don’t know nothing about a kidnaping. Spenser just likes to come and push me around. He knows I don’t like his nigger friends. Well, some of my friends don’t like him pushing me around.”

  “My boy had nothing to do with any of that,” Mrs. Roy said. Her voice was guttural with tension.

  “Then you ought to call the cops, Mrs. Roy. I’m trespassing. And I won’t leave.”

  Mrs. Roy didn’t move. She stood with one foot in the hall and one foot in the apartment.

  Manfred turned suddenly and ran back through the archway. I went after him. To the left was the kitchen, to the right a short corridor with two doors off it. Manfred went through the nearest one, and when I reached him, he had a short automatic pistol halfway out of the drawer of a bedside table. With the heel of my right fist I banged the drawer shut on his hand. He cried out once. I took the back of his shirt with my left hand and yanked him back toward me and into the hall, spinning him across my body and slamming him against the wall opposite the bedroom door. Then I took the gun out of the drawer. It was a Mauser *HSc, a 7.65mm pistol that German pilots used to carry in World War II.

  I took the clip out, ran the action back to make sure there was nothing in the chamber, and slipped the pistol in my hip pocket.

  Manfred stood against the wall sucking on the bruised fingers of his right hand. His mother had come down the hall and stood beside him, her hands at her side. “What did he t
ake from you?” she said to Manfred.

  I took the pistol out. “This, Mrs. Roy. It was in a drawer beside the bed.”

  “It’s for protection, Ma.”

  “You got a license for this, Manfred?”

  “Course I do.”

  “Lemme see it.”

  “I don’t have to show you. You’re not on the cops no more.”

  “You don’t have a permit do you, Manfred?” I smiled a big smile. “You know what the Massachusetts handgun law says?”

  “I got a license.”

  “The Massachusetts handgun law provides that anyone convicted of the possession of an unlicensed handgun gets a mandatory one-year jail sentence. Sentence may not be suspended nor parole granted. That’s a year in the joint, Manfred.”

  “Manfred, do you have a license?” his mother said. He shook his head. All four fingers of his bruised right hand were in his mouth and he sucked at them. Mrs. Roy looked at me. “Don’t tell,” she said.

  “Ever been in the joint, Manfred?”

  With his fingers still in his mouth Manfred shook his head.

  “They do a lot of bad stuff up there, Manfred. Lot of homosexuality. Lot of hatred. Small blond guys tend to be in demand.”

  “Don’t tell,” his mother said. She had moved between me and Manfred. Manfred’s eyes were squeezed nearly shut. There were tears in the corners.

  I smiled my nice big smile at his mother. Old Mr. Friendly. Here’s how your kid’s going to get raped in the slammer, ma’am.

  “Maybe we can work something out,” I said. “See, I’m looking for Rachel Wallace. If you gave me any help on that, I’d give you back your Mauser and speak no ill of you to the fuzz.”

  I was looking at Manfred but I was talking for his mother, too.

  “I don’t know nothing about it,” Manfred mumbled around his fingers. He seemed to have shrunk in on himself, as if his stomach hurt.

  I shook my head sadly. “Talk to him, Mrs. Roy. I don’t want to have to put him away. I’m sure you need him here to look after you.”

  Mrs. Roy’s face was chalky, and the lines around her mouth and eyes were slightly reddened. She was beginning to breathe hard, as if she’d been running. Her mouth was open a bit, and I noticed that her front teeth were gone.

  “You do what he says, Manfred. You help this man like he says.” She didn’t look at Manfred as she talked. She stood between him and me and looked at me.

  I didn’t say anything. None of us did. We stood nearly still in the small hallway. Manfred snuffed a little. Some pipes knocked.

  Still looking at me, with Manfred behind her, Mrs. Roy said, “God damn you to hell, you little bastard, you do what this man says. You’re in trouble. You’ve always been in trouble. Thirty years old and you still live with your mother and never go out of the house except to those crazy meetings. Whyn’t you leave the niggers alone? Whyn’t you let the government take care of them? Whyn’t you get a good job or get an education or get a woman or get the hell out the house once in awhile, and not get in trouble? Now this man’s going to put you in jail unless you do what he says, and you better the hell damn well goddamned do it.” She was crying by the time she got halfway through, and her ugly little face looked a lot worse.

  And Manfred was crying. “Ma,” he said.

  I smiled as hard as I could, my big friendly smile. The Yuletide spirit. ‘Tis the season to be jolly.

  “All my life,” she said. Now she was sobbing, and she turned and put her arms around him. “All my rotten goddamn life I’ve been saddled with you and you’ve been queer and awful and I’ve worried all about you by myself and no man in the house.”

  “Ma,” Manfred said, and they both cried full out.

  I felt awful.

  “I’m looking for Rachel Wallace,” I said. “I’m going to find her. Anything that I need to do, I’ll do.”

  “Ma,” Manfred said. “Don’t, Ma. I’ll do what he says. Ma, don’t.”

  I crossed my arms and leaned on the doorjamb and looked at Manfred. It was not easy to do. I wanted to cry, too.

  “What do you want me to do, Spenser?”

  “I want to sit down and have you tell me anything you’ve heard or can guess or have imagined about who might have taken Rachel Wallace.”

  “I’ll try to help, but I don’t know nothing.”

  “We’ll work on that. Get it together, and we’ll sit down and talk. Mrs. Roy, maybe you could make us some coffee.”

  She nodded. The three of us walked back down the hall. Me last. Mrs. Roy went to the kitchen. Manfred and I went to the living room. The furniture was brightly colored imitation velvet with a lot of antimacassars on the arms. The antimacassars were the kind you buy in Woolworth’s, not the kind anyone ever made at home. There was a big new color TV set in one corner of the room.

  I sat in one of the bright fuzzy chairs. It was the color of a Santa Claus suit. Manfred stood in the archway. He still had his napkin tucked into his belt.

  “What you want to know?” he said.

  “Who do you think took Rachel Wallace?” I said. “And where do you think she is?”

  “Honest to God, Spenser, I got no idea.”

  “What is the most anti-feminist group you know of?”

  “Anti-feminist?”

  “Yeah. Who hates women’s lib the most?”

  “I don’t know about any group like that.”

  “What do you know about RAM, which stands for Restore American Morality?” I said. I could hear Manfred’s mom in the kitchen messing with cookware.

  “I never heard of it.”

  “How about the Belmont Vigilance Committee?”

  “Oh, sure, that’s Mr. English’s group. We coordinated some of the forced-busing tactics with them.”

  “You know English?”

  “Oh, yes. Very wealthy, very important man. He worked closely with us.”

  “How tough is he?”

  “He will not retreat in the face of moral decay and godless Communism.”

  “Manfred, don’t make a speech at me—I’m too old to listen to horseshit. I want to know if he’s got the balls to kidnap someone, or if he’s crazy enough. Or if he’s got the contacts to have someone do it.”

  “Mr. English wouldn’t hesitate to do the right thing,” Manfred said.

  “Would he know how to arrange a kidnaping?” I said. “And don’t give me all that canned tripe in the answer.”

  Manfred nodded.

  “Who would do it for him?” I said.

  Manfred shook his head. “I don’t know any names, I promise I don’t. I just see him with people, and, you know, they’re the kind that would know about that kind of stuff.”

  Mrs. Roy brought in some instant coffee in white mugs that had pictures of vegetables on them. She’d put some Oreo cookies on a plate and she put the two cups and the plate down on a yellow plastic molded coffee table with a translucent plastic top that had been finished to imitate frosted glass.

  I said, “Thank you, Mrs. Roy.”

  Manfred didn’t look at her. She didn’t look at him, either. She nodded her head at me to acknowledge the thanks and went back to the kitchen. She didn’t want to hear what Manfred was saying.

  “I heard he could get anything done and that he was a good man if you needed anything hard done, or you needed to hire anyone for special stuff.”

  “Like what?” I sipped at the coffee. The water had been added to the coffee before it was hot enough, and the coffee wasn’t entirely dissolved. I swallowed and put the cup down.

  “You know.”

  “No, I don’t, Manfred. Like what?”

  “Well, if you needed people for, like, you know, like fighting and getting things done.”

  “Like the baboons that pounded on me this morning?”

  “I didn’t hire them, Spenser. They’re from the organization. They wanted to make sure I wasn’t bothered.”

  “Because you are a Klan mucky-muck?” I said. “Second Assistant Liza
rd?”

  “I’m an official. And they were looking out for me. We stick together.”

  Manfred’s voice tried for dignity, but he kept staring at the floor, and dignity is hard, while you’re looking at the floor.

  “Ever meet his mother or his sister?”

  “No.”

  “Know anything about them?”

  “No.”

  “Manfred, you are not being a help.”

  “I’m trying, Spenser. I just don’t know nothing. I never heard of Rachel Whosis.”

  “Wallace,” I said. “Rachel Wallace.”

  22

  Manfred and I chatted for another hour with no better results. Hardly seemed worth getting beat up for. When I left, Mrs. Roy didn’t come to say goodbye, and Manfred didn’t offer to shake hands. I got even—I didn’t wish them Merry Christmas.

  It was a little after three when I got back out onto Commonwealth. The whiskey and aspirin had worn off, and I hurt. A three-block walk and I could be in bed, but that wouldn’t be looking for Rachel Wallace. That would be taking a nap. Instead I walked down to Berkeley and up three blocks to Police Headquarters to talk with Quirk.

  He was there and so was Belson. Quirk had his coat off and his sleeves rolled up. He was squeezing one of those little red rubber grip strengtheners with indentations for the fingers. He did ten in one hand and switched it to the other and did ten more.

  “Trying to keep your weight down, Marty?” I said.

  Quirk switched the grip strengthener back to his right hand. “Your face looks good,” he said.