Pastime s-18

by Robert B. Parker

  It was dark now outside the Ritz bar, and the rain coiling down the windowpane looked black. Susan had finished her cashew and was leaning back in her chair, holding her drink in both hands, watching me.

  "The dog was no good for birds the rest of the day, and neither were we, I suppose. We went back to the lodge we were staying at and put Pearl in our room, and fed her, and then my father and I went down to the bar and my father ordered two double 23

  scotch whiskies. The bartender looked at me and looked at my father and didn't say anything and brought the whiskey. He put both of them in front of my father and my father pushed one of them over in front of me.

  " `Ran into a bear in the woods today,' my father said without much inflection. He still had the Western sound in his voice. `Kid stood his ground.'

  "The bartender was a lean, dark guy, with a big nose. He looked at me and nodded and moved on down the bar, and my father and I drank the scotch."

  "And he never said anything to you," Susan said.

  I shook my head.

  " `That brown liquor,'" Susan said, " `which not women, not boys and children, but only hunters drank.' "

  "Faulkner," I said.

  Susan smiled. "You're very literate for a man who has to buy extra-long ties."

  "I had acted like a man, in his view, so he treated me like a man, in his view."

  " `Not women, not boys and children,'" Susan said.

  "Sounds ageist and sexist to me," I said.

  "Maybe we can have his Nobel prize posthumously revoked," Susan said.

  CHAPTER 4

  PAUL and I were driving out Route 2 toward Lexington to break into Paul's mother's house. It was the first day that had felt like fall this year. And it was still raining, a lighter rain than last night, but steady so that the streets glistened and the cars had their lights on even though it was well after sunrise.

  Pearl was sitting in the backseat looking steadily out the window on the passenger side, mostly motionless except when she turned her head to look out the other window. She had wanted very much to come and neither Paul nor

  I could quite think of a reason sufficient to leave her staring after us with that look.

  A school bus passed us going the other way and I felt the pang I always felt in early fall, the remembered pang of school. So many days like this

  I remembered in the brick elementary school, the lights on inside, the day wet and shiny outside, cars moving past the school with their wipers going, and the smell of steam pipes and disinfectant and limitation and tedium, while outside the adult world moved freely about.

  "How was it last night?" I said. I was drinking a cup of coffee as I drove, something I prided myself on doing with the cover off and never a drop spilled. Paul drank his out of a hole he'd torn in the cover. A boy still, with things to learn.

  "She's good," Paul said, "very interesting. Essentially it's just a one-woman show, like, ah, whosis, Lily Tomlin, except a lot more angry and foulmouthed."

  "I never heard of her," I said.

  "I know her from New York," Paul said. "She's just a regular downtown performer, like me, trying to find performance space someplace in the East

  Village, except that she was lucky enough to be denied an NEA grant. Now she's making big money. And playing high-visibility theaters. And getting written up in Time."

  "Have you thought of applying?"

  "The tricky part is to make a grant application good enough to get approved by the peer review panel, and still exotic enough to be officially re jected."

  "Maybe I should take Susan," I said.

  Paul laughed. "She might like it," he said. "You'd hate it."

  We pulled off into Lexington. The traffic was at a crawl, stuck behind a school bus that stopped every few blocks and took on children.

  "Do you know your mother's new boyfriend?" I said.

  Paul shook his head. "Never met him. His name is Rich something or other."

  "What's he do?"

  "My mother says he's a consultant."

  "Self-employed?"

  Paul shook his head. "I don't know. She seemed a little vague about what he did. She never wants to talk much about any of her boyfriends. Like I said, she's always embarrassed about them."

  We went through the middle of Lexington, past the Battle Green, with the

  Minuteman statue at the near end of it and the restored colonial buildings across the street. Paul was staring around at the town as if it were a

  Martian landscape.

  "Every Patriots Day there was a big parade in town," Paul said. "It was always exciting. Every April 19, I'd wake up excited, and my mother and father and I would come down and get a good spot and watch for the parade, and afterwards we'd go home and there'd be nothing to do and I'd feel let down, and the next day would be school."

  I turned into Emerson Road.

  "Parade was usually good, though," Paul said.

  Patty Giacomin's house was as I remembered it, set back a bit from the road, among trees. The trees were probably fuller than they had been ten years ago when I'd come out here before. But they looked the same and so did the dense spread of pachysandra that did service as lawn around her house.

  The house itself was angular, and shingled; mod 29

  ern looking without violating either the site or the colonial town in which it stood.

  I parked next to a Honda Prelude in the driveway. We rolled the windows half down and left Pearl in the car. I went and opened the trunk and took out a gym bag with tools in it. As we walked toward the house I automatically felt the hood of the Prelude. It was cold.

  There was no answer when we rang the bell. The house had that stillness that Paul had mentioned. In the interests of not looking like a jerk, I tried the doorknob. It was locked.

  "I already did that," Paul said.

  "It's a Dick Tracy crime stopper," I said. "Always try the door before jimmying it."

  "Great working with a pro," Paul said.

  There was no sign of flies on the inside of the windows, which was encouraging. I looked at the door. There was a keyhole in the handle. No other lock, so it was probably a spring lock, though it didn't have to be.

  It could be a combination spring and deadbolt, but at least there was no separate keyhole which there would be most certainly for a deadbolt. There was a strip of molding down along the lock side of the door to prevent someone from slipping a flat blade like a putty knife in there and springing the lock. I looked at the molding closely. The house was stained rather than painted, which made it easier to see the line where the molding butted up to the doorjamb. While I was examining it, I took a deep inhale.

  I smelled nothing dead, which was even more encouraging.

  "Okay," I said. "I'll open this thing unless you have a better thought."

  Paul shook his head. His face looked tight. I took a flat chisel from the bag, and a hammer, and gently loosened the molding along the door strip. No point trashing the house.

  "I'll get this off intact," I said. "We can put it back on when we get through."

  Paul nodded. I pried the molding away, a little at a time, all along its length, and then got a flat bar under it at the nail holes and pried it carefully loose so that it came off nails still sticking through it. I handed it to Paul and he leaned it against a tree. I put the flat bar and the chisel and the hammer away and got out a putty knife with an inch and a half blade and slid it into the door crack at the latch and felt for the lock tongue. I found it and pressed and felt the tongue give and the blade of the putty knife push in. I held the putty knife in place with my right hand, and with the flat of my left, pushed the door open. There was no smell.

  "We're not going to find anything bad," I said to Paul. "Promise."

  "That's good," he said. His voice was a little hoarse.

  We were in a small entry hall, with a polished flagstone floor, then up a couple of steps to the living room, the kitchen to the right, a view of the woods straight ahead through the bi
g picture window across the back. Off the kitchen, constituting a short L to the living room, was a dining area where once Patty Giacomin had served me dinner and propositioned me. It hadn't been me, really, just the need to validate herself with a man, and there I was. I had declined, but I remembered it well. I always thought about the ones I'd missed, and speculated about how they'd have been, even though wisdom and experience would suggest that they'd have been much like the ones I hadn't missed. The thing was, though, that I always thought about the ones I hadn't missed, too.

  The house was still and close, and neat. We walked around, checked the bedrooms. Patty's big, pink, puffy bed was made, her bathroom was orderly, though it didn't look like it had been put in order by someone who was leaving. Around the mirror were postcards with amusing pictures.

  "I sent her those," Paul said, "from wherever I was performing. She kept them."

  The other bedroom, where Paul had slept, was perfectly neat, with a high school picture of Paul still in its cardboard frame set up on the dresser.

  The picture had been taken the year he'd graduated from prep school, three years after I'd met him, and already the aimlessness had disappeared from his face. He was still very young there, but it was a face that knew more than most eighteen-year-old faces knew.

  Paul looked at the picture. "Three years of therapy," he said.

  "And more to come," I said.

  "For sure," he said.

  There was a neat green corduroy spread over the single bed, with a plaid blanket folded neatly at thefoot. There was a student desk with a reading lamp on it and a green blotter that matched the spread.

  We went back downstairs. On the coffee table in the living room was a green imitation leather scrapbook. I picked it up and opened it. Carefully pasted in were clippings: reviews of Paul's dance concerts, listings from the newspaper of performances to come. There were ticket stubs and program covers and the program pages listing Paul's name, or Paige's or both. There were pictures of Paul, often with Paige, sometimes with other dancers, taken in places domestic and foreign, where they had danced. I handed the album to him without comment and he took it and looked at it and sat down slowly on the couch and leafed slowly through it.

  "I used to think," he said, "that because she was so needy of my father, and after she lost him, so needy for other men, that she didn't care about me." He turned the pages in the album slowly, as he talked. He'd seen them already. He wasn't looking at them. It was merely something the hands did.

  "Sort of an either-or situation. Me or them. It took me a long time to see that it was both. That she cared about me, too."

  "As best she could," I said.

  "Her best wasn't enough," Paul said.

  "No. It's why we separated you."

  "And we were right," Paul said.

  "Yeah."

  Paul closed the album and put it back on the coffee table.

  "If she'd gotten some help, maybe if she would have seen somebody…"

  I shrugged.

  "You don't think so."

  "No," I said. "I don't think she's smart enough. I don't think she's got enough will."

  Paul nodded slowly. He looked down at the scrapbook on the coffee table.

  "She is what she is," he said.

  CHAPTER 5

  PAUL, went out to the car and brought Pearl in. She raced around the house with her nose to the ground for about fifteen minutes before she was able to slow down and follow me around while I searched the house.

  The refrigerator was on, but nearly empty, and there was nothing perishable in it. There was no fruit in the bowl on the table. The strainer was out of the drain in the kitchen sink. There was no suitcase to be found in the house, which meant either that she had packed it and taken it with her or that she didn't have one. Paul didn't know if she had one, and he couldn't tell if any of her clothes were missing. There were very few cosmetics in the bathroom. There were eleven messages on her answering machine, three from Paul. I copied down the names and phone numbers that had been left.

  Mostly they were first names only, and Paul didn't know who they were. But the phone numbers could lead to something. I couldn't find an address book.

  "Did she have one?" I said.

  "Yes. I know she did. She carried it around with her and she was always afraid of losing it."

  "She work?"

  "Yes. She sold real estate. Worked for a company called Chez Vous."

  "Cute."

  "Hey," Paul said. "We're in the suburbs. Cute is important out here."

  "You New York kids are so jaded," I said. "Do you know where she met Rich?"

  No.

  "Probably a dating bar called Entre Nous," I said.

  "Or Cherchez la Femme," Paul said.

  "That betrays a preconception about dating bars," I said.

  "I suppose it does," Paul said. "How about what you've found here? You have any conclusions ~to reach?"

  "Everything here says that she left of her o~p accord," I said. "There's no mail piled up, which means she stopped it at the post office. There's n~ suitcase. Most people have one, which sugges* that she took it. There's a dearth of cosmetic, which suggests that she packed them. The house is neat, but not like no one's ever coming back. There are no perishables in the refrigerator, which suggests that she was planning to be gone for a while."

  "Without telling me?"

  "We agree that's she's not Mother Courage," I said.

  "True."

  "You want me to find where she went?"

  "I feel like kind of a jerk," Paul said. "I wouldn't want the police involved."

  "But you'd still like to know where she is," I said.

  Paul nodded. "I think she'd have called, or written me a postcard, something."

  "Sure," I said.

  "Of course I want to think that," Paul said. "I don't want to think she went off and didn't think about me."

  "Well, let's find out," I said.

  "What will you do?"

  "First we'll track down Rich. There must be people know his last name. If he's also not around we'll have a reasonable presumption."

  "And then what?"

  "We'll ask everyone we can find who knows either of them if they know where

  Patty and Rich are.

  "And if no one knows?"

  "We check airlines, trains, local travel agencies, that stuff. We see if

  Rich's car is missing. If it is we run a trace on his license number. If it's not missing we check the car rental agencies."

  "And if none of that works?"

  "Some of it will work," I said. "You keep asking enough questions and checking enough options, something will come up, and that will lead to something, and that will lead to something else. We'll be getting information in ways, and from people, that we don't even know about now."

  "You can't be sure of that," Paul said.

  "I've done this for a long time, Paul. It's a high probability. If you want to find someone, you can find them. Even if they don't want to be found."

  Paul nodded. "And you're good at this," he said.

  "Few better," I said.

  "Few?"

  "Actually, none," I said. "I was trying for humble."

  "And failing," Paul said.

  CHAPTER 6

  IT was a nearly perfect September day. Temperature around 72, sky blue, foliage not yet turned. There was still sweet corn at the farm stands, and native tomatoes, and the air moved gently among the yet green leaves of the old trees that still stood just off the main drag undaunted by exhaust fumes or ancestral voices prophesying war. Paul was in my office with the list of callers from his mother's answering machine. I was back out in Lexington at the post office in the center of town, where a woman clerk with her pinkish hair teased high told me that Patty Giacomin had put an indefinite hold-for pickup on her mail. There was no forwarding address.

  I went to Chez Vous, which was located next to an ice cream parlor behind a bookstore in a small shopping center on Mass
achusetts Avenue. Four desks, four swivel chairs, four phones, four side chairs, and a sofa with maplewood arms and a small floral print covering. The wall was decorated with flattering photos of the property available, and the floor was covered with a big braided rug in mostly blues and reds. Two of the desks were empty, a woman with blue-black hair and large greenrimmed glasses sat at one of the remaining desks speaking on the phone. She was speaking about a house that the office was listing and she was being enthusiastic. The other desk was occupied by a very slender blonde woman wearing a lot of clothes. Her white skirt reached her ankles, nearly covering her black-laced high-heeled boots.

  Over the skirt she wore a longish ivory-colored tunic and a black leather belt with a huge buckle and a small crocheted beige sleeveless sweater, and a beige scarf at her neck, and ivory earrings that were carved in the shape of Japanese dolls, and rings on all her fingers, and a white bow in her hair.

  "Hi, I'm Nancy," she said. "Can I help?"

  I took a card out of my shirt pocket and gave it to her. It had my name on it, and my address and phone number and the word Investigator. Nothing else. Susan had said that a Tommy gun, with a fifty-round drum, spewing flame from the muzzle, was undignified.

  "I'm representing Paul Giacomin, whose mother works here."

  Nancy was still eyeballing the card. "Does this mean, like a Private

  Investigator?"

  I smiled winningly and nodded.

  "Like a Private Eye?"

  "The stuff that dreams are made of, sweetheart," I said.

  The woman with the blue-black hair hung up the phone.

  "Hey, PJ," Nancy said. "This is a Private Eye."

  "Like on television?" PJ said. Where Nancy was flat, PJ was curved. Where

  Nancy was overdressed, PJ wore a sleeveless crimson blouse and gray slacks which fitted very smoothly over her sumptuous thighs. She had bare ankles and high-heeled red shoes. Around her left ankle was a gold chain.

  "Just like television," I said. "Car chases, shootouts, beautiful broads. .."

  "Which is where we come in," PJ said. She had on pale lipstick and small gold earrings. There were small laugh wrinkles around her eyes, and she looked altogether like more fun than was probably legal in Lexington.