Looking for Rachel Wallace

by Robert B. Parker

  “Observant,” I said. “We’ll try Information.”

  “Christ, you think I’m lying? Hey, man, no way. You know? No way I’m going to bullshit you, man, with the piece you’re carrying. I mean my old lady didn’t raise no stupid kids, you know?”

  I put in a dime and dialed Information. “In Watertown,” I said. “The number for Eugene I. Mulready—what’s the address, Michael?”

  He told me. I told the operator.

  “The number is eight-nine-nine,” she said, “seven-three-seven-oh.”

  I said thank you and hung up. The dime came back.

  “Okay, Michael, you’re on your way.”

  “From here?”

  “Yep.”

  “Man, I got no coat—I’ll freeze my ass.”

  “Call a cab.”

  “A cab? From here? I ain’t got that kind of bread, man.”

  I took the dime out of the return slot. “Here,” I said. “Call your buddy Swisher. Have him come get you.”

  “What if he ain’t home?”

  “You’re a grown-up person, Michael. You’ll figure something out. But I’ll tell you one thing—you call and warn Mingo, and you won’t grow up any more.”

  “I ain’t going to call Mingo, man. I’d have to tell him I tipped you.”

  “That’s what I figure,” I said. I got in my car. Michael Mulready was standing shivering in his shirt sleeves, his hands in his pants pocket, his shoulders hunched.

  “I give you one tip though, pal,” he said. “You got a big surprise coming, you think you can fuck around with Mingo like you done with me. Mingo will fucking destroy you.”

  “Watch,” I said and let the clutch out and left him on the sidewalk.

  24

  Watertown was next to Belmont, but only in location. It was mostly working-class and the houses were shabby, often two-family, and packed close together on streets that weren’t plowed well. It was slow going now, the snow coming hard and the traffic overcautious and crawling.

  Mingo Mulready’s house was square, two stories, with a wide front porch. The cedar shingle siding was painted blue. The asbestos shingles on the roof were multicolored. I parked on the street and walked across.

  There were two front entrance doors. The one on the left said Mulready. I rang the bell. Nothing. I waited a minute, rang it again. Then I leaned on it for about two minutes. Mingo wasn’t home. I went back to my car. Mingo was probably off working at his soft job, driving the rich woman around Belmont. I turned on the radio and listened to the news at noon. Two things occurred to me. One was that nothing that ever got reported in the news seemed to have anything to do with me, and the other was that it was lunchtime. I drove about ten blocks to the Eastern Lamjun Bakery on Belmont Street and bought a package of fresh Syrian bread, a pound of feta cheese, and a pound of Calamata olives.

  The bread was still warm. Then I went across the street to the package store and bought a six-pack of Beck’s beer, then I drove back and parked in front of Mingo’s house and had lunch, and listened to a small suburban station that played jazz and big-band music. At three I drove down the block to a gas station and filled my gas tank and used the men’s room and drove back up to Mingo’s and sat some more.

  I remembered this kind of work as less boring fifteen years ago when I used to smoke. Probably not so. Probably just seemed that way. At four fifteen Mingo showed up. He was driving a tan Thunderbird with a vinyl roof. He pulled into the driveway beside the house and got out. I got out and walked across the street. We met at the front steps of his home.

  I said, “Are you Mingo Mulready?”

  He said, “Who wants to know?”

  I said, “I say, ‘I do,’ then you say, ‘Who are you?’ then I say—”

  He said, “What the fuck are you talking about, Jack?”

  He was big enough to talk that way, and he must have been used to getting away with it. He was about my height, which made him just under six two, and he was probably twenty-five or thirty pounds heavier, which would have made him 230. He had one of the few honest-to-God boot-camp crew cuts I’d seen in the last eight or ten years. He also had small eyes and a button nose in a doughy face, so that he looked like a mean, palefaced gingerbread man. He was wearing a dark suit and a white shirt and black gloves. He wore no coat.

  I said, “Are you Mingo Mulready?”

  “I want to know who’s asking,” he said. “And I want to know pretty quick, or I might stomp your ass.”

  I was holding my right hand in my left at about belt level. While I was talking I strained the right against the left, so that when I let go with the left, the right snapped up, and the edge of my hand caught Mingo under the nose the way a cocked hammer snaps when you squeeze the trigger. I accelerated it a little on the way up, and the blood spurted from Mingo’s nose, and he staggered back about two steps. It was a good shot.

  “That’s why I wanted to know if you were Mingo,” I said. I drove a left hook into the side of his jaw. “Because I didn’t want to beat hell out of some innocent bystander.” I put a straight right onto Mingo’s nose. He fell down. “But you’re such a pain in the ass that you need to get the hell beat out of you even if you aren’t Mingo Mulready.”

  He was not a bunny. I’d sucker-punched him and put two more good shots in his face, and he didn’t stay down. He came lunging up at me and knocked me back into the snow and scrambled on top of me. I put the heels of both hands under his chin and drove his head back and half-lifted him off me and rolled away. He came after me again, but that extra thirty pounds wasn’t helping him. It was mostly fat, and he was already rasping for breath. I moved in, hit him hard twice in the gut, moved out, and hit him twice on that bloody nose. He sagged. I hit him on each side of the jaw. Left jab, right cross, left jab, right cross. He sagged more. His breath wheezed; his arms dropped. He was arm-weary in the first round.

  I said, “Are you Mingo Mulready?”

  He nodded.

  “You sure?” I said. “I heard you were a bad ass.”

  He nodded again, wheezing for oxygen.

  “I guess I heard wrong,” I said. “You work for a rich woman in Belmont?”

  He stared at me.

  “If you want to keep getting your breath back, you answer what I ask. You don’t answer, and you’ll think what we did before was dancing.”

  He nodded.

  “You do. What’s her name?”

  “English,” he said.

  “She tell you to hire your cousin and his pal Swisher to run me off the road in Lynn?”

  He said, “You?”

  “Yeah, me. Me and Rachel Wallace. Who told you to harass us?”

  He looked toward the street. It was empty. The snow was thin and steady, and darkness had come on. He looked toward the house. It was dark.

  He said, “I dunno what you mean.”

  I hit him a good left hook in the throat. He gasped and clutched at his neck.

  I said, “Who told you to run Rachel Wallace off the road? Who told you to hire your cousin and his pal? Who gave you the two bills?”

  He was having trouble speaking. “English,” he croaked.

  “The old lady or the son?”

  “The son.”

  “Why?”

  He shook his head. I moved my left fist. He backed up. “Swear on my mother,” he said. “I don’t ask them questions. They pay me good. They treat me decent.” He stopped and coughed and spit some blood. “I don’t ask no questions. I do what they say, they’re important people.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Remember, I know where you live. I may come back and talk with you again. If I have to look for you, it will make me mad.”

  He didn’t say anything. I turned and walked across the street to my car. It was very dark now, and in the snow I couldn’t even see the car till I was halfway across the street. I opened the door. The inside light went on. Frank Belson was sitting in the front seat. I got in and closed the door.

  “For crissake turn the motor
on and get the heater going,” he said. “I’m freezing my nuts off.”

  25

  “You want a beer?” I said. “There’s four left in the back seat.”

  “I don’t drink on duty,” he said. He took two bottles of Beck’s out of the carton. “For crissake, what kind of beer is this? It doesn’t even have a twist-off cap.”

  “There’s an opener in the glove compartment,” I said.

  Belson opened the two beers, gave one to me and took a long pull on the other bottle.

  “What you get from Mingo?”

  “I thought I was ostracized,” I said.

  “You know Marty,” Belson said. “He gets mad quick, he cools down quick. What you get from Mingo?”

  “Haven’t you talked to him?”

  “We figured you could talk with him harder than we could. We were right. But I thought he’d give you more trouble than he did.”

  “I suckered him,” I said. “That got him off to a bad start.”

  “Still,” Belson said, “he used to be goddamned good.”

  “Me, too,” I said.

  “I know that. What’d you get?”

  “English set up the hit-and-run on the Lynnway.”

  “Mingo do it through his cousin?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Cousin tell you that?”

  “Yeah. Him and Cody did the work. Mingo gave them a deuce. He got the money from English. I braced Cousin Michael this morning.”

  “I know,” Belson said.

  “What the hell is this—practice teaching? You follow me around and observe?”

  “I told you we had Cody and Mulready staked out,” Belson said. “When you showed up, the detail called in. I told them to let you go. I figured you’d get more than we would because you don’t have to sweat brutality charges. They lost you heading out of Sears, but I figured you’d end up here and I came over. Got here about one thirty and been sitting in the next block since. You get anything else?”

  “No. But English is looking better and better. You look into those pie-throwers in Cambridge?”

  Belson finished the beer and opened another bottle. “Yeah,” he said. “There’s nothing there. Just a couple of right-wing fruitcakes. They never been in jail. They don’t show any connection with English or Mingo Mulready or the Vigilance Committee or anybody else. They go to MIT, for crissake.”

  “Okay. How about Julie Wells? You talk to her yet?”

  Belson held the beer between his knees while he got a half-smoked cigar out of his shirt pocket and lit it and puffed at it. Then he took the cigar out of his mouth, sipped some beer, put the cigar back in, and said around it, “Can’t find her. She doesn’t seem to have moved or anything, but she’s not at her apartment whenever we show up. We’re sort of looking for her.”

  “Good. You think you might sort of find her in a while?”

  “If we’d known some things earlier, buddy, we’d have been more likely to have kept an eye on her.”

  “Know anything about Mingo? You sound like you’ve known him before.”

  “Oh, yeah, old Mingo. He’s got a good-sized file. Used to work for Joe Broz once. Used to be a bouncer, did some pro wrestling, some loansharking. Been busted for assault, for armed robbery, been picked up on suspicion of murder and released when we couldn’t turn a witness that would talk. English employs some sweetheart to drive the old babe around.”

  I said, “You people going to keep English under surveillance?”

  “Surveillance? Christ, you been watching Police Woman again? Surveillance. Christ.”

  I said, “You gonna watch him?”

  “Yeah. We’ll try to keep someone on him. We ain’t got all that many bodies, you know?”

  “And he’s got money and maybe knows a couple city councilmen and a state senator.”

  “Maybe. It happens. You know Marty. You know me. But you also know how it works. Pressure comes down, we gotta bend. Or get other work, you know?”

  “Felt any pressure yet?”

  Belson shook his head. “Nope,” he said, “not yet.” He finished the bottle of beer.

  “Belmont cops?”

  “They said they could help out a little.”

  “You got anybody at Julie Wells’s apartment?”

  “Yeah. And we check in at the agency regular. She ain’t there.”

  I said, “You want a ride to your car?”

  He nodded, and I went around the block and dropped him off on the street behind Mingo’s house. “You stumble across anything, you might want to give us a buzz,” Belson said as he got out.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I might.”

  He said, “Thanks for the beer,” and closed my door, and I pulled away. It was almost an hour and a half in the snow and the near-motionless rush hour until I got to my apartment. Susan was there.

  “I had an Adolescent Development Workshop at B.U. this afternoon, and when I got out it was too bad to drive home, so I left my car in the lot and walked down,” she said.

  “You missed a golden opportunity,” I said.

  “For what?”

  “To take off all your clothes and make a martini and surprise me at the door.”

  “I thought of that,” Susan said, “but you don’t like martinis.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “But I made a fire,” she said. “And we could have a drink in front of it.”

  “Or something,” I said. I picked her up and hugged her.

  She shook her head. “They were talking about you all day today,” she said.

  “At the workshop on adolescent development?”

  She nodded and smiled her fallen-seraph smile at me. “You exhibit every symptom,” she said.

  I put her down and we went to the kitchen. “Let us see what there is to eat,” I said. “Maybe pulverized rhino horn with a dash of Spanish fly.”

  “You whip up something, snooks,” she said. “I’m going to take a bath. And maybe rinse out the pantyhose in your sink.”

  “A man’s work is never done,” I said. I looked in the refrigerator. There was Molson Golden Ale on the bottom shelf. If we were snowbound, at least I had staples on hand. In the vegetable keeper there were some fresh basil leaves and a bunch of parsley I’d bought in Quincy Market. It was a little limp but still serviceable. I opened a Molson. I could hear the water running in the bathroom. I raised the bottle of ale, and said, “Here’s looking at you, kid,” in a loud voice.

  Susan yelled back, “Why don’t you make me a gimlet, blue eyes, and I’ll drink it when I get out. Ten minutes.”

  “Okay.”

  In the freezer was chopped broccoli in a twenty-ounce bag. I took it out. I got out a large blue pot and boiled four quarts of water, and a smaller saucepan with a steamer rack and boiled about a cup of water. While it was coming to a boil I put two garlic cloves in my Cuisinart along with a handful of parsley and a handful of basil and some kosher salt and some oil and a handful of shelled pistachios and I blended them smooth. Susan had given me the Cuisinart for my birthday, and I used it whenever I could. I thought it was kind of a silly toy, but she’d loved giving it to me and I’d never tell. When the water boiled, I shut off both pots. I could hear Susan sloshing around in the tub. The door was ajar, and I went over and stuck my head in. She lay on her back with her hair pinned up and her naked body glistening in the water.

  “Not bad,” I said, “for a broad your age.”

  “I knew you’d peek,” she said. “Voyeurism, a typical stage in adolescent development.”

  “Not bad, actually, for a broad of anyone’s age,” I said.

  “Go make the gimlet now,” she said. “I’m getting out.”

  “Gin or vodka?” I said.

  “Gin.”

  “Animal,” I said.

  I went back to the kitchen and mixed five parts gin to one part Rose’s limejuice in a pitcher and stirred it with ice and poured it into a glass with two icecubes. Susan came into the kitchen as I finished, wearing the hal
f-sleeved silk shaving robe she’d given me last Christmas, which I never wore, but which she did when she came and stayed. It was maroon with black piping and a black belt. When I tried it on, I looked like Bruce Lee. She didn’t.

  She sat on one of my kitchen stools and sipped her gimlet. Her hair was up and she had no make-up and her face was shiny. She looked fifteen, except for the marks of age and character around her eyes and mouth. They added.

  I had another Molson and brought my two pots to a boil again. In the big one I put a pound of spaghetti. In the small one with the steamer rack I put the frozen broccoli. I set the timer for nine minutes.

  “Shall we dine before the fire?” I said.

  “Certainly.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Put down the booze and take one end of the dining-room table.”

  We moved it in front of the fire and brought two chairs and set the table while the spaghetti boiled and the broccoli steamed. The bell on the timer rang. I went to the kitchen and drained the broccoli and tried the spaghetti. It needed another minute. While it boiled I ran the Cuisinart another whirl and reblended my oil and spices. Then I tried the pasta. It was done. I drained it, put it back in the pot and tossed it with the spiced oil and broccoli. I put out the pot, the leftover loaves of Syrian bread that I bought for lunch, and a cold bottle of Soave Bolla. Then I held Susan’s chair. She sat down. I put another log on the fire, poured a dash of wine in her glass. She sipped it thoughtfully, then nodded at me. I filled her glass and then mine.

  “Perhaps madam would permit me to join her,” I said.

  “Perhaps,” she said.

  I sipped a little wine.

  “And perhaps later on,” she said, “we might screw.”

  I laughed halfway through a swallow of wine and choked and gasped and splattered the wine all over my shirt front.

  “Or perhaps not,” she said.

  “Don’t toy with me while I’m drinking,” I said, when I was breathing again. “Later on I may take you by force.”

  “Woo-woo,” she said.

  I served her some pasta with broccoli and some to myself. Outside it was snowing steadily. There was only one light on in the room; most of the light came from the fire, which was made of applewood and smelled sweet. The glow of the embers behind the steady low flame made the room faintly rosy. We were quiet. The flame hissed softly as it forced the last traces of sap from the logs. I wasn’t nearly as sore as I had been. The pasta tasted wonderful. The wine was cold. And Susan made my throat ache. If I could find Rachel Wallace, I might believe in God.