Pastime

by Robert B. Parker

  "For her son?" Nancy said.

  "Yes. She's apparently gone, and he doesn't know where and he wants to."

  "I don't blame him," PJ said.

  "You know where she is?"

  Both women shook their heads. "She hasn't been in for about ten days," PJ said.

  "A week ago last Monday," Nancy said.

  "Is that usual?"

  "No. I mean, it's not like she's on salary. She doesn't come in, she doesn't get listings, she doesn't sell anything, she doesn't get commission," PJ said. "But usually she was in here three, four days a week-she was sort of part-time."

  "Who runs the place?"

  "I do," PJ said.

  "Are you Chez or Vous?"

  PJ grinned. "Is that awful, or what? No. My name's P. J. Garfield. PJ stands for Patty Jean. But with Patty Giacomin working here, it was easier to use PJ, saved confusion. I bought the place from the previous owner when she retired. Chez Vous was her idea. I didn't want to change the name."

  "Either of you know Patty's boyfriend?" I said.

  "Rich?" Nancy said.

  "Rich what?"

  Nancy looked at PJ. She shrugged.

  "Rich…" PJ said. "Rich… she brought him to the Christmas party last year. An absolute hunk. Rich… Broderick, I think, something like that. Rich Broderick? Bachrach? Beaumont?"

  "Beaumont," Nancy said.

  "You sure?"

  "Oh." She put her hand to her mouth. "No, god no, I'm not sure. I don't want anyone to get in trouble."

  "How nice," I said. "Do we know where Rich lives?"

  "Somewhere on the water," Nancy said. She looked at PJ.

  PJ shrugged. "Could be. I frankly paid very little attention to him. He's not Patty's first boyfriend. And most of them are not, ah, mensches."

  "What can you remember?" I said.

  "Me?" Nancy said.

  "Either of you. What did he look like? What didhe do for a living? What did he talk about? Did he like baseball, or horse racing, or sailboats? Was he married, separated, single, divorced? Did he have children? Did he have any physical handicap, any odd mannerisms, did he have an accent? Did he mention parents, brothers, sisters? Did he like dogs?"

  PJ answered. "He was as tall as you, probably not as"-she searched for the word-"thick. Dark hair worn longish, good haircut"-her eyes crinkled"great buns."

  "So we have that in common too," I said. Nancy looked at her desk.

  "His clothes were expensive," PJ said. "And they fit him well. He's probably a good off-the-rack size."

  "What size?"

  "What size are you?" PJ said.

  "Fifty," I said, "fifty-two, depends."

  "He'd probably be a forty-four, maybe. He's more, ah, willowy."

  "How grand for him," I said.

  "I like husky men, myself," PJ said.

  "Phew!"

  "He didn't have an accent," Nancy said.

  "You mean he talked like everyone else around here?"

  "No. I mean he had no accent at all," Nancy said. "Like a radio announcer.

  He didn't sound like he was from here. He didn't sound like he was from the

  South, or from anywhere."

  Nancy was maybe a little keener than she seemed.

  "Good-looking guy?" I said.

  Nancy nodded very vigorously. PJ noticed it and grinned.

  "He was pretty as hell," she said. "Straight nose, dimple in his chin, kind of pouty lips, smoothshaven, though you could see that his beard is dark.

  Kind of man that wears cologne, silk shorts."

  Nancy got a little touch of pink on her cheekbones.

  "Okay," I said. "The consensus is that his name is Rich Beaumont, or thereabouts, that he's six feet one, maybe a hundred eighty-five pounds, dark longish hair, well styled, good clothes, handsome, and particularly attractive to slender blonde women.

  "What do you mean?" Nancy said.

  "A wild guess," I said. "He speaks in an accentless way, and lives near the water."

  "Hell," PJ said. "We knew more than we thought we did."

  "Masterful questioning," I said, "brings it out. You have any thoughts at all about where Patty Giacomin might be?"

  "No. Really," Nancy said, "I can't imagine."

  "You find the boyfriend," PJ said, "you'll probably find her. Patty doesn't do much without a man. Usually not that good a man."

  "Thank you," I said. "The kid's worried. If you hear anything, please call me."

  "Certainly," Nancy said.

  PJ grinned so that her eyes crinkled a little.

  "You had lunch?" she said.

  "Can't," I said. "I got a dog in the car."

  "An actual dog or is that an unkind euphemism?"

  "An actual dog, named Pearl. Can euphemisms be unkind?"

  "I don't know. There's always dinner? Or are you married?"

  "Well, I have a friend."

  "Don't they all," PJ said. "Too bad. We'd have had fun."

  "Yeah," I said. "We would have in fact."

  I went out of Chez Vous, and went back to the car.

  CHAPTER 7

  WHEN I got to my car, Pearl was curled tightly in the driver's seat. She sprang up when I opened the door and insinuated herself between the bucket front seats into the back. When I got in she lapped the side of my face vigorously. "I thought you were Susan's dog," I said.

  She made no response.

  Back in my office she guzzled down some water from a bowl placed for that purpose by Paul.

  "Did you know that they drink by curling their tongue backwards?" I said.

  "Under?"

  "How exciting," Paul said. "Thank you for sharing that with me."

  "How'd you do on the phone?"

  "Not very well," he said. "No one knew where she was. Some of the calls were from real estate customers who don't know anything about her. One woman said she was my mother's best friend. I figure she's worth a visit."

  "She know anything?"

  "She was late for aerobics, she said. But I could call later."

  "Better to visit," I said. "Where is she?"

  "Lives in Concord. She gave me the address."

  "Okay. I'll run out and have a talk with her," I said.

  "I'll go with you."

  "No need to."

  "Yes," Paul said. "There is a need to."

  "Okay."

  "You took care of everything when I was fifteen," he said. "I'm not fifteen now. I need to do part of this."

  "Sure," I said. Paul's presence would make it harder. People would be less frank about Patty in front of her son. But he wasn't fifteen anymore and it was his mother. Pearl had gotten herself up onto the narrow client's chair and was curled precariously, mouthing the yellow tennis ball she'd tracked down on a walk in Cambridge. Her eyes followed every movement I made. I got her leash and snapped it on and took her to the car and drove her and Paul to Concord.

  Most of the way up Route 2 she had her head on my left shoulder, her nose out the open window, sampling the wind.

  "It is not entirely clear," I said to Paul, "why I am bringing this hound with me everywhere I go."

  "Cathexis," Paul said.

  "I knew you'd know."

  "What did they say about my mother?" he said.

  "The people at Chez Vous?"

  "Oui. "

  "They had no real idea where she might be."

  "I know, you told me that. But what did they say?"

  "They said she worked, usually, three or four days a week, on commission.

  That she had brought Rich to a Christmas party last year and that he was very good looking."

  "That all?"

  "They didn't exactly say, but made it quite clear that they thought that your mother's choices of men were often ill-advised."

  "Many men?"

  "They suggested that she needed to be with a man, and that if we found Rich we'd find her."

  "Did they talk about her need to be with men?"

  "Not a lot. They seemed to recor
d it as a fact of your mother's nature that she wasn't likely to go very far, very often, without the company of a man."

  "That could get you in trouble," Paul said.

  I nodded. We left Route 2, onto 2A, which was the old Revolutionary War road, where the embattled farmers sniped at the redcoats from behind the fieldstone walls. We passed historic houses-the Wayside, the Alcott

  House-all the way into Concord center.

  Not all of the historical places in Massachusetts look the way you'd like them to. But Concord does. It has overarching trees, spacious colonial homes, a green, a clean little downtown made mostly of red brick, a rambling white clapboard inn that looks as if stagecoaches should still be stopping there. There are the historic sights, the academy, the river where one can rent a canoe and spend a day of transcendental paddling, as Susan and I had occasionally done, pausing to picnic one day almost beneath the rude bridge that arched the flood.

  The address we wanted was a recycled jelly factory in downtown Concord.

  They'd sandblasted the brick and cleaned up the clock tower and gutted the interior and built blond-wood-with-white-walls condominium apartments inside. Out back was a big parking lot. A hopeful sales office was still open on the first floor of the building.

  The woman's name was Caitlin Moore. She answered the bell in a pink spandex leotard, white sneakers, and a pink sweatband. She was built like the cheerleaders of my youth, chunky, bouncy, not very tall. Her extremely blonde hair was caught into a ponytail. She had on green eye shadow and false eyelashes and whitish lip gloss, which made her look a little spectral.

  "Hi," she said, friendly. "I'm Caitlin. You must be Paul, who I talked with on the phone."

  Paul said he was, and introduced me.

  "You're a detective?"

  "Yes."

  "Could I see something?"

  "Sure." I gave her my license, she looked at it for a moment, then went to a bleached oak table and got a pair of half-glasses and put them on and came back looking further at my license. "Well," she said. "A hard man is good to find."

  She smiled. I smiled. Paul smiled.

  "Come on in," Caitlin said. "Want some coffee? All I got is instant, but I can microwave it in no time."

  Paul and I declined. Caitlin led us into her sitting room, her prominent little butt waggling ahead of us as we followed her. With its bleached woodwork and stark white walls and ceiling, and anodized combination windows, the room was standard condo modern. It appeared to have been furnished by Betsy Ross. There was an old maple standup desk, an antique pine harvest table, a pine thumbback rocker, a coffee table made from a cobbler's bench. It went with the room the way Liberace goes with Faust.

  "I love early American," she said as we sat down. Paul and me on the sofa.

  Caitlin on the thumbback rocker, where she crossed both legs under her.

  "When I got divorced I made the bastard give me all the furniture."

  "Great," I said.

  "You're my mother's best friend?" Paul said.

  "Oh, absolutely," Caitlin said. "Patty and I are like twins. She's always talking about you."

  "What does she say?"

  "She talks about how successful you are. You're in the movies, I think?"

  "I'm a dancer in New York," Paul said. "I was on screen for a minute and twenty-six seconds in a film about American Dance that played on PBS."

  "Yuh, I knew it was something like that. Anyway, we been really close ever since we were in aerobics together at Sweats Plus. Something about us, you know, we just hit it off. Both been divorced and all. I don't have any kids, but, well, we knew something about pain, and recovery."

  "Know her current boyfriend?" I said.

  "I introduced them."

  "Tell us a little about him," Paul said.

  "He's a real doll. Friend of my brother's. I knew Patty was looking to go out, and I knew Rich was single. So I…" Caitlin spread her hands and shrugged. "They really connected, you know, right from the start. It was something. You worried about her? Maybe she and Rich just went off, they were crazy like that, I don't mean anything bad about your mom, Paul, she was just ready for fun anytime. I bet they just went off somewhere for a while on the spur.

  "They have a place they usually go?" I said.

  "Oh, they'd go anywhere. I don't know. Miami, Atlantic City, Club Med. You name it."

  "What's Rich's last name?" Paul said.

  "Beaumont. Rich Beaumont." She pronounced it with the stress on the last syllable.

  "Where's he live?" I said.

  "Over in Revere someplace, I think. On the water. I think he's got a condo on the beach."

  "Got an address?"

  "No, not really. I don't think I ever knew it exactly."

  "Phone number?"

  Caitlin smiled and spread her hands. "I'd always meet him through my brother."

  "Can we talk with your brother?" Paul said.

  "Marty? I don't know what Marty can tell you." "How's your brother know

  Rich?"

  "I don't know, they play handball together. Double date. I think they did some business sometime."

  "What's Rich's business?"

  "Consultant."

  "You know what he consults in?"

  "No, just some kind of consulting business."

  "What's your brother do?"

  "Marty's a paving contractor. Hot top, you know, that stuff."

  "And his last name?" I said.

  "Martinelli."

  "Martin Martinelli?" I said.

  "Yeah. My mother was a lunatic. How about Caitlin Martinelli? My old lady was nuts."

  "What was it like being my mother's friend?" Paul said.

  "Huh?"

  "What's she like?"

  "You're her kid," Caitlin said. "You should know-better than anybody."

  "I should but I don't. What does she care about?" The question was too hard for Caitlin. She frowned. "What did she care about?"

  "Yeah."

  Caitlin lifted her shoulders. "Ah…" Caitlin waved her hands vaguely.

  "She, ah. She liked aerobics. You know she cared about her body, and how she looked. And she knew a lot about makeup."

  Paul nodded.

  Caitlin had a thread to follow out of her confusion. She tumbled on. "And fun," Caitlin said. "Patty loved to have fun."

  Paul nodded again.

  "Who were her other close friends?" I said.

  "I don't really know her other friends… She had a friend named Sonny, was a traffic reporter, you know, from a helicopter."

  "Man or woman?" I said.

  "Woman."

  "She have a last name?"

  "Oh, sure. I mean, doesn't everybody? I don't know it, though. Just Sonny."

  "Know the station she reported for?"

  Caitlin shook her head.

  "We'd like to talk with your brother," I said. "Could you give us an address?"

  Caitlin looked flustered. "Gee, I don't know. Marty won't be too thrilled.

  Marty's a very private guy. Very successful businessman, very private."

  "I know his name," I said. "I know his business. I can find him. Will he like me finding him, asking around about him?"

  "God, no. Listen. I'll give you his work address. That way you won't be bothering him at home."

  "Sure," I said.

  She gave me an address on the Revere Beach Parkway in Everett.

  "Did she ever talk about my father?" Paul said.

  "Her ex-? What's-his-name, Mel? Sure did. She called him a cheap sonovabitch every chance she could. Excuse me, I know he's your dad and all."

  "That's okay," Paul said. "I can hear whatever there is to hear. I need to hear it."

  "Well, don't worry about her. I'm sure she's off someplace with Rich having a ball. Your mother is a fun lady!"

  "You don't think she might go someplace without Rich?" Paul said.

  Caitlin looked startled. "No," she said. "Of course not. What fun is it alone?"

  CHAP
TER 8

  SUSAN said, "When Pearl sleeps with you does she get under the covers?" We were sitting at the same table in the Ritz bar. On a Wednesday with the baseball season dwindling, and the kids grimly back in school. It was raining again. The Ritz bar is a good place to spend a rainy weekday afternoon.

  "Of course," I said. "Don't you?"

  "I'm not sure all dogs do that," Susan said.

  "We shouldn't generalize," I said.

  Susan nodded. "True," she said.

  I was drinking Sam Adams. Susan had a glass of Riesling which would last her the day. The bar was nearly empty. It wasn't the old Ritz bar. It had been refurbished by new owners into something that looked like an English hunting club, or the last twenty-five hotel bars you'd been in. But you could still have a table by the window, looking out at Arlington Street and the Public Gardens.

  "What do you think about Paul?" I said. "It's not just that he wants to locate his mother. He wants to find out about her."

  "He's thinking about getting married," Susan said.

  "Yeah?"

  "For a kid like Paul whose parents' marriage was a failure, whose own life has made him careful, and introspective, the idea of marriage carries with it heavy baggage."

  "His mother really is missing," I said.

  "His mother has always been missing."

  "Mine too," I said.

  Susan took a gram of Riesling and swallowed it carefully and put the glass back down. She looked out at the wet street for a moment.

  "How long have we been together?" she said.

  "If you date together from the time I first got your clothes off," I said,

  "sixteen years."

  "Aren't you the romantic fool," Susan said.

  "How do you date it?" I said.

  Susan thought a minute. Outside, chic Back Bay women were picking their way past the rain puddles on their high heels, bending in under the little black umbrellas they all had, most of them holding skirts down by pressing their left hand and forearm across their thighs as the wind pushed at them.

  "I'd say it begins with the time you first got my clothes off."

  "September," I said. "Nineteen seventy-four. After Labor Day. It's almost an anniversary now that I think of it. You had on red undies with big black polka dots and a little black bow on the side."

  "Selected with great care," Susan said. "I planned that you'd get my clothes off."