Paper Doll s-20

by Robert B. Parker

  “She was promiscuous,” I said.

  “The queen of the star fuckers,” Stratton said. “You haven’t had Livvie Nelson’s pants off, you simply aren’t important in this town.”

  “Always stars?” I said.

  “Sure, it was like belonging to an exclusive club; you fucked Livvie Nelson, you knew you’d made it,” Stratton said.

  Was it a long affair?“

  “Not really an affair. It was great for a guy like me, just wham bam, thank you, ma’am. Usually she’d come to my office, when I was here in town. Very discreet. Nothing in public.”

  Stratton grinned at me again. “I’m a married man,” he said.

  “I could tell,” I said.

  He shrugged and grinned at me further.

  “And you were afraid,” I said, “that my investigation would turn up this connection?”

  “Exactly, my friend. Exactly right. At first, we thought you’d just go through the motions and take Loudon’s money-he’s got plenty. But then you went down there and we realized you were serious. And we figured maybe we lean on you down there, away from me, so there’d be no way to connect me to it, and off your home turf, you know, so you’d be a little more vulnerable? And we have a good friend in South Carolina, and he’s holding some markers on the Alton County Sheriff…” He spread his hands again. “It’s how things work.”

  “Who’s the we?” I said.

  “We? Oh, myself and my staff.”

  “So you went to all that trouble to keep me from finding out about you and Olivia Nelson.”

  “Yes. I told you, we had you checked out. We didn’t like what we heard. You seemed to us like trouble and we wanted to get it under control right now.”

  “So your wife wouldn’t know,” I said.

  “Well, Laura and I have a kind of understanding. But… we’re planning for the presidential nomination, next time, maybe,” Stratton said. “It could have hurt us.”

  “Still could,” I said.

  “Hey, this is off the record.”

  “What record?” I said. “You think this is an interview? I’m a detective. You could have killed her.”

  “Me?”

  “You and your staff,” I said.

  “Don’t be absurd,” Stratton said. “I’m a United States Senator.”

  “I rest my case,” I said.

  chapter twenty-nine

  TRIPP’S OFFICE WAS as peaceful as ever. Ann Summers was there at her desk, in a simple black dress today. She remembered me and was glad to see me, a combination I don’t always get. On the other hand, given the activity level in the office, she was probably glad to see anyone.

  “He’s back,” I said.

  “Yes, he’s just down the hall.”

  “Do you handle his checkbook?” I said.

  “Mr. Tripp’s? Not really, why do you ask?”

  “His check bounced,” I said and took the bank notice out of my pocket and showed it to her.

  “Mr. Tripp’s?”

  “Un huh.”

  “Oh dear,” she said. “Probably a mistake.”

  “Oh, I’m sure it is.” I said.

  I waved it off and she showed me into Tripp’s big office and sat me in the leather chair by his desk. The office was done in green. The walls and woodwork were green. The rug was a green Oriental, the furniture was cherry, the high-backed swivel chair behind Tripp’s desk was cherry with green leather upholstery. The long desk had a red leather top, with a gold leaf design around the edges of it. There was a wet bar at the far end of the office, and a fireplace on the wall behind Tripp’s desk. It was faced in a sort of plum-colored tile with a vine pattern running through the tiles, and it was framed on each side by big cherry bookcases. The books looked neat and mostly unread. A lot of them were leather-bound to match the room. In two of the four corners there were cherry corner cabinets with ornate tops, and gold leaf dentil molding highlighting them. The corner cupboards were filled with designer knickknacks, and in the middle shelf on one of them was a picture of Olivia Nelson, or whoever the hell she had been, as a younger woman. Tripp’s desktop was empty except for the onyx pen set, a telephone, and a big three-check checkbook. The checkbook was set square in the center of the desk as if to demand reconciling as soon as you sat down. I picked it up and opened the ledger pages, and ran back through them looking for my check. As I read, I noticed that there was no running balance. Each check was carefully entered, numbered and dated, but there was no way, looking at the checkbook, to know how much you had. I found my check, right below a check to Dr. Mildred Cockburn. I read back further. There were checks every month to Dr. Cockburn. All the entries were in the same thin hand. I’d seen it on my check. Most of the other checks were obvious. Telephone, electricity, insurance, cleaners, credit card payments. The only recurring one that was not obvious was Dr. Cockburn. Many of the check entries had Returned written across the original entry, in red ink, in the same hand, including several of Dr. Cockburn’s. I looked a little harder. There seemed to be no checks rewritten to make good the ones that bounced. Something else was off in the check register. I didn’t get it for a minute. I went back through more pages. And then I saw it. There were no deposits. In the whole ledger, there was no deposit entry. I put the checkbook back, and sat, and thought about that, and in a while, Tripp came into his office carrying a folded copy of The Wall Street Journal.

  “Spenser,” he said. “Good of you to come.”

  We shook hands, and he went around his desk and got into his padded leather swivel. He put the paper on the desk next to the checkbook, which he straightened automatically so that it was exactly square with the desk.

  “Do you have a report for me?”

  “Not exactly,” I said. “Maybe a couple of more questions.”

  “Oh, certainly. But I am disappointed. I was hoping you’d have something.”

  I had something all right. But what the hell was it?

  “Have you ever met any of your wife’s family?” I said.

  “No. She had none. That is, of course, had she one once, but they all died before I met her. She was quite alone, except for me.”

  “Ever been to Alton?” I said.

  Tripp smiled sadly.

  “No. There was never any reason.”

  I nodded. We were both silent for a moment.

  “Sometimes,” Tripp said, “I think I ought to go down there, walk around, look at the places where she walked, went to class, had friends.”

  He gazed past me, up toward the ceiling. Far below us, where State Street met Congress, there was traffic, and tourists looking at the marker for the Boston Massacre, and meter maids, and cabbies. Up here there was no hint of it. In Tripp’s office you could just as well be in the high Himalayas for all the sound there was.

  Tripp shook his head suddenly.

  “But what would be the point?” he said.

  There was something surrealistic about his grief. It was like a balloon untethered and wafted, aimless and disconnected, above the felt surface of life.

  “How well do you know Senator Stratton?” I said.

  “Bob’s a dear friend. I’ve supported him for years. He was a good friend to Livvie as well, helped her get her teaching appointment, I’m sure. Though he never said a word about it.”

  “And you and your wife were on good terms?” I said.

  Tripp stared at me as if I had offered to sell him a French postcard.

  “You ask me that? You have been investigating her death for days and you could ask me that? We were closer than two people have ever been. I was she. She was I, we were the same thing. How could you…?” Tripp shook his head. “I hope I’ve not been mistaken in you.”

  I plowed ahead.

  “And you were intimate?”

  Tripp stared at me some more. Then he got up suddenly, and walked to the window of his office, and looked down at the street. He didn’t speak. I looked at his back for a while. Maybe I should investigate other career opportunities. Se
lling aluminum siding, say. Or being a television preacher. Or child molesting. Or running for public office.

  “Look, Mr. Tripp,” I said. My voice sounded hoarse. “The thing is that stuff makes no sense. I know you’re sad. But I’ve got to find things out. I’ve got to ask.”

  He didn’t move.

  “There’s pretty good evidence, Mr. Tripp, that your wife’s name is not, in fact, Olivia Nelson.”

  Nothing.

  “That she was sleeping with Senator Stratton, and maybe with others.”

  Still nothing. Except his shoulders hunched slightly and his head began to shake slowly, back and forth, in metronomic denial.

  “I’ve seen pictures of two different people, both of whom look like your wife.”

  His head went back and forth. No. No. No.

  “Have you ever heard of anyone named Cheryl Anne Rankin?”

  No. No. No.

  “Your retainer check bounced,” I said.

  The silence was so thick it seemed hard to breathe. Tripp’s stillness had become implacable. I waited. Tripp stood, his head still negating. Back and forth, denying everything. I got up and left.

  chapter thirty

  QUIRK AND FARRELL and Belson and I were in Quirk’s office. Quirk told us that while he was in Alton he had learned exactly nothing.

  “Everybody agrees that Olivia Nelson is married to a Kenyan citizen named Mano Kuanda and living in Nairobi. Embassy guy talked with her, took her fingerprints. We’ve compared them to her Peace Corps prints. She hasn’t been in the United States since 1982. Never been in Boston. Has no idea who the victim is.”

  “She know anything about Cheryl Anne Rankin?” I said.

  “No.”

  “Never heard the name?”

  “No,” Quirk said.

  “You talk to Stratton?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And?”

  “He says he was sleeping with Tripp’s wife regularly, and that he wasn’t the only one.”

  Quirk raised his eyebrows.

  “Our Bobby?” he said.

  “Shocking,” Belson said. “And him a Senator and all.”

  “That’s why he tried to chase you off?”

  “So he says. Says he was afraid I’d find out about them and it would spoil his chances for the nomination next year.”

  “For President?” Quirk said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Jesus,” Belson said. “President Stratton.”

  “How about Tripp?”

  “I talked to him.”

  “And?”

  “He says everything was perfect.”

  “You got anything, Lee?” Quirk said.

  Farrell jerked a little, as if he’d not been paying close attention.

  “No, Lieutenant, no, I don’t.”

  “Why should you be different?” Quirk said. He kept his eyes on Farrell for a long moment.

  “One thing,” I said. “I don’t know why you would have, but has anyone run a credit check on Tripp?”

  “Worried about your fee?” Belson said.

  It was two-thirty in the afternoon and his thin face already sported a five o’clock shadow. He was one of those guys who looked cleanshaven for about an hour in the morning.

  “In fact, his check bounced. But I think there’s something goofy about his finances.”

  I told them about the checkbook. “Might be something,” I said.

  “Lee?” Quirk said.

  Farrell nodded.

  “I’ll find out,” he said. “Anything else?”

  “The name Dr. Mildred Cockburn shows up in his checkbook a lot.”

  “Written like that?” Belson said.

  I nodded.

  “Probably not a medical doctor,” Belson said.

  “Yeah,” I said, “then the check would be to Mildred Cockburn, DMD, or Mildred Cockburn, MD.”

  “Maybe she’s a shrink,” Belson said.

  “Or a chiropractor, or a doctor of podiatry,” I said.

  “Hope for a shrink,” Quirk said.

  chapter thirty-one

  SUSAN AND I had dinner at Michela’s in Cambridge with Dennis and Nancy Upper. Susan knew Dennis from them both being shrinks. Nancy turned out to be an ex-dancer, so I was able to dazzle her with the knowledge of dance I had gained from Paul Giacomin, while Susan and Dennis talked about patients they had known.

  I asked if either of them had heard of Dr. Mildred Cockburn. Neither of them had. Still, there was risotto with crab meat and a pistachio pesto. The room was elegant, and the bartender made the best martinis I’d ever drunk.

  “I’ve got to find out how he does that,” I said to Susan on the ride home.

  “Well, you’re a detective.”

  “And how complicated a recipe can it be?” I said.

  “Vodka and vermouth?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sounds complicated to me,” Susan said.

  “Recipes are not the best thing you do,” I said.

  We were on Memorial Drive. Across the river the Boston skyline looked like a contrivance. The State House stood on its low hill, the downtown skyscrapers loomed behind it. And strung out along the flatness of the Back Bay, with the insurance towers in the background, the apartment houses were soft with the glow of lighted living rooms. It was Friday night. I was going to stay with Susan.

  “Why do you want to know about Mildred Cockburn?” Susan said.

  “Saw her name in Loudon Tripp’s checkbook, `Dr. Mildred Cockburn,‘ every month, checks for five hundred dollars. So I looked her up in the phone book. She’s listed as a therapist with an office on Hilliard Street in Cambridge.”

  “Odd,” Susan said.

  “You’d expect to know her?”

  “Yes.”

  “When I talk with her, what is it reasonable to expect her to tell me?” I said.

  “Ethically?” Susan said.

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t say in the abstract,” Susan said. “She should be guided by the best interests of her patient.”

  On our left, the surface of the river had a quick-silver gloss in the moonlight. A small cabin cruiser with its running lights on moved silently upstream, passing under the barrel-arched bridges, its wake a glassy furrow in the surface. Susan’s street was silent, the buildings dark, the trees, half unleaved, made spectral by the street lamps shining through them.

  Susan lived in an ornate Victorian house. On the first floor her office was on one side of the front hall, and her big waiting room was on the other. We went up the curving staircase to the second floor where she lived. When we opened the door, Pearl dashed at us, and jumped up, and tore Susan’s hose, and lapped our faces, and ran to the couch and got a pillow and shook it violently until it was dead, and came back to show us.

  “Cute,” Susan said.

  We took Pearl down and let her out into the fenced-in backyard. It was shadowy in the moonlight, but not dark, and we could watch her as she hurried about the yard, looking for the proper spot.

  Later we lay in bed, the three of us, and talked, looking up at the ceiling in the moonbright darkness. Pearl had little to say, but she compensated by taking up the most room in the bed.

  “Is this Olivia Nelson thing making you crazy?” Susan said. We were holding hands under the covers, across Pearl’s back.

  “Nothing is turning out to be the way it appeared to be,” I said.

  “Things do that,” Susan said.

  “Wow,” I said.

  “I’m a graduate of Harvard University,” Susan said.

  chapter thirty-two

  DR. MILDRED COCKBURN had office space in a tired-looking, brown-shingled house on Hilliard Street, down from the American Repertory Theater. There was a low wrought-iron fence with some rust spots around the yard. The fence had shifted over the years as the ground froze each winter and melted each spring, and it was now canted out toward the sidewalk. There was some grass in the yard, and a lot of hard-packed dirt. The front walk was brick, w
hich had heaved with the fence. The bricks were skewed and weeds had grown up among them. Many of the brown shingles had cracked, and a couple had split on through, and the front door had been inadequately scraped before being painted over. Cambridge was not a hotbed of pretentious neatness.

  A sign said Enter, which I did, and took a seat in a narrow foyer with doors leading out of it through each wall. I had an eleven o’clock appointment, and it was five of. The walls of the foyer were cream colored, though once they might have been white. There were a couple of travel posters on the walls, and an inexpensive print of one of Monet’s paintings of his garden. There was also the insistent odor of cat. The low deal table beside the one straight chair had two recent copies of Psychology Today, and a copy of The Chronicle of Higher Education from last May.

  At 11:06, the office door opened and a pale woman with a thin face, and her gray-streaked hair in a bun, came out of the office. She did not look at me. She took a long tweed coat from the coatrack, and put it on, and buttoned it carefully, and went out the door, maneuvering in the mailbox-sized foyer without ever acknowledging another presence.

  There was a three- or four-minute wait thereafter, and then the office door opened again and Dr. Cockburn said, “Mr. Spenser?”

  She wore a black turban and a large flowing black garment which I couldn’t quite identify, something between a housecoat and an open parachute. She was obviously heavy, though the extent of her garment left the exact heaviness in doubt. Her skin was pale. She wore a lot of eye makeup and no lipstick.

  I stood, and she ushered me past her into the office. The office was draped in maroon fabric. The window had louvered blinds, opened over the top half, closed on the bottom. There was a Victorian sofa, upholstered in dark green velvet, against the wall to the right of the door, and a high-backed mahogany chair with ugly wooden arms, facing a wing chair upholstered in the same green. She sat across from me in the wing chair. She made a barely visible affirmative movement with her head, and then waited, her hands folded in her lap.