"You think he shot this guy?" he said.
"His office," I said. "And he's disappeared."
"We noticed that too."
"Doesn't mean he did it," I said.
"Doesn't mean he didn't," Quirk said.
"Mind if I go," I said.
"Go ahead," Quirk said.
I was tired. I walked slowly out through the uniformed cops standing around in the corridor and got in the elevator and went down. I looked at my watch. It was 3:40. When I went outside it was raining. Boylston Street was empty. The wet pavement gleamed under the street lights, reflecting the bright lifeless color of the neon signs that gleamed an artificial welcome outside bars and restaurants closed for the night. I turned up my coat collar and trudged down Boylston Street, thinking about the most encouraging way to tell Susan that her ex had upgraded from sexist to murder suspect. The rain came harder. This thing showed every sign of not working out well for me.
chapter twenty-three
SUSAN HAD HER first appointment at eight. Normally I never called her before she went to work, because she was zooming around like the Flight of the Bumble Bee, getting ready. Years ago I had stopped asking stupid questions, like why not start getting ready earlier so you won't be so rushed? And when I was there in the morning, I sat at the kitchen counter and had coffee and read the paper so as not to get trampled. But this morning I didn't want her to hear from television about the corpse in Sterling's office. They probably didn't have it yet, but I didn't want to take the chance. So soggy with two hours' sleep I turned off my alarm and rolled over in bed and called her up and told her what I knew. "Do you know where Brad is?" Susan said.
As always, about important stuff Susan was calm. It is about the small stuff that she permits herself frenzy.
"No. He's not at home, or at least he wasn't last night."
"Do you think he is in trouble?"
"Yes," I said.
"Do you think he killed the man?"
"Don't know," I said. "He's obviously a suspect."
"Do you want to get out of this?"
"Not unless you want me to."
She was quiet on the phone for a moment.
"No, if you are willing, I'd like us to see it through."
"I'm willing," I said.
"When will I see you?" Susan said.
"After your last patient," I said. "I'll buy you dinner."
"Sevenish," Susan said.
Unless she had to, Susan never specified an exact time. Since I never knew how to time an arrival at sevenish, I always specified, knowing I'd wait anyway.
"I'll be there at seven," I said.
"Maybe you ought to try and go back to sleep," she said. "You were up awfully late."
"Good suggestion," I said.
"Yes," she said.
There was a pause.
Then she said, "And thank you."
"You're welcome," I said.
I knew the thank you covered a lot of ground. It didn't need to be exact.
Showered, shaved, wearing a crisp white shirt, with my jeans pressed and new bullets in my gun, I arrived at the office a little past noon, carrying a ham and egg sandwich and two cups of coffee in a brown paper bag. I took off my raincoat and my new white Red Sox cap, sat at my desk, and ate my sandwich and drank my coffee with my office door invitingly open and my feet up on the desk so anyone going by could see that I had some new running shoes. Except for the fact that I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, I was the very model of a modern major shamus. After I finished my sandwich and the first cup of coffee, I considered what options the day offered. I decided that the best one was to drink the second coffee, which I had commenced to do when Hawk showed up carrying the red Nike gym bag. He took two coffees out of the bag and put them on the edge of my desk and sat in a client chair and put the gym bag on the floor.
"Want another coffee?" he said.
"Absolutely," I said. "Doubles my options."
"Got your computer disks," he said.
"Good," I said. "Give us something to do."
"What's this `us'?"
"You're not computer literate?"
"Been keeping company," Hawk said. "With a woman works for a software outfit. One night she show me the wonders of the Internet."
"Your reward probably for being such a studly," I said.
"Studly be its own reward," Hawk said. "Anyway, that more than I want to know about computers."
"You don't groove on the information highway?"
Hawk snorted.
"What I like," I said, "is how this wondrous artifact of science is primarily useful as a conveyance for dirty pictures."
"Of ugly people," Hawk said.
"Sadly," I said.
"Confirms your faith," Hawk said.
"My faith is unshakable, anyway," I said.
Hawk reached into the gym bag and produced a white paper bag, from the white paper bag he produced a donut. He took a bite of the donut and leaned forward and put the bag on the desk.
"Now here's a real bridge to the twenty-first century," I said and took a donut.
"Quirk tell you anything last night?" Hawk said.
"They hadn't ID'd him yet," I said. "Nobody wanted to search the body."
"Let the ME do it," Hawk said.
"That's what Quirk said. Stiff had a gun, though. It fell out of his pocket when they were taking him away."
"So maybe he ain't from the United Way," Hawk said.
"Or maybe he is," I said.
I swung my chair around so I looked out my window. It was still raining, which in Boston, in April, was not startling to anybody but the local news people who treated it like the Apocalypse. I liked the rain. It was interesting to look at, and I enjoyed the feeling of shelter on a rainy day. When I was a little kid in Wyoming, the darkened days outside the school room window had given me something to contemplate while I was being bored to death. Something about its implacable reality reminding me that school was only a temporary contrivance. While I was thinking about the rain, the morning mail came. There was a check from a law firm I'd done some work for. There was some junk mail from a company selling laser sighting apparatus for hand guns. I gave the brochure to Hawk. And there was a letter from the Attorney General's Public Charities woman with a list of the principals involved with Civil Streets. With my feet propped against the windowsill I went through the list. It told me that Carla Quagliozzi was president and gave me her address. I already knew that. It listed a number of people on the board of directors, none of whom I knew, except Richard Gavin. His address was Gavin and Brooks, Attorneys-at-Law, on State Street. Son of a gun. I sat for another moment thinking about that. Behind me I heard Hawk crumple the brochure on laser sights and deposit it in the wastebasket beside my desk. I looked at the rain for a while longer.
"Okay," I said and swung my chair back around and got up and walked over to the narrow table that ran along the left-hand wall of my office. There was a computer on it. I turned it on.
"Gimme the disks," I said.
chapter twenty-four
I AM INEXPERT with a computer and hope to remain so. I had bought one initially because Susan had one and took to it easily and had become almost immediately convinced that no office should be without one. When I did use the computer, which was rarely, and I ran into a problem, which was whenever I used the computer, I called Susan and she straightened me out. Today I ran into a problem at once. When I started up the computer and slipped in a copy of Sterling's hard disk, I couldn't get any of the folders open. I tried the other disks from the disk file we'd taken from Sterling's office. Everything was locked. Hawk was sitting in my chair with his feet up on my desk watching me. "Need a code," he said.
"Thank you, Bill Gates," I said.
"Trying to be helpful," he said.
"Consultants!" I said in a loud mutter.
Susan did not seem the appropriate resource in this case, so I got up and went to my desk and called Sean Reilly.
"I'v
e got some disks," I said, "that I can't get open."
"Locked?"
"I assume so."
"I'll come over."
I said thank you, but he had already hung up.
"Help is on the way," I said.
"He going to bring donuts," Hawk said.
"I don't think Sean ever ate a donut," I said.
"Then how much help he going to be?"
Reilly arrived in about ten minutes, which was the time he took to carry his black plastic briefcase down Boylston Street from the Little Building where he had an office. He walked in, gave me a brief nod, and sat down at the computer table. I introduced Hawk. Sean gave him a brief nod as he opened the briefcase and took out some software.
"You related to Pat Riley?" Hawk said, his face blank.
"No."
Sean was a medium-sized, mostly bald guy, with a patchy ineffective beard. The thin fringe of long hair that remained around the perimeter of his head was not much more effective than the beard. He wore a red plaid flannel shirt, the collar of which was folded out over the double-breasted lapels of a gray sharkskin suit. On his feet were green rubber boots with brown leather tops, in deference, I hoped, to the rain. He slid a disk into the computer and leaned forward looking at the screen. His hands moved over the keyboard as if he were playing Mozart.
"Unlock everything?" Sean said.
"Yep."
He ejected the first disk and slipped in another one, his gaze still locked onto the screen. He nodded as if to affirm a truth.
"Take about half an hour," he said.
"Fine."
He paused. We waited. He stared at the screen without moving.
Finally he said, "I don't like people watching me."
"Ahh," I said.
Hawk and I got up and went out and leaned on the wall in the corridor.
"People normally kick you out your own office?" Hawk said.
"Just artists," I said.
Hawk said, "Sean on his way to a costume party, you think?"
"I told you, he's a computer geek," I said. "To him that's dress-for-success."
We loitered in the hall another twenty minutes, while Sean Reilly practiced his black arts. Hawk took the opportunity to brush up on his surveillance skills by watching the receptionist in the design office across the hall.
"Are you objectifying that young woman?" I said.
"Absolutely not," Hawk said. "I thinking about her with her clothes off."
"Oh," I said. "No problem there."
My office door opened, Reilly came out, carrying his ugly briefcase.
"Files are open. Bill's on your desk," he said and walked off down the corridor.
"Nice talking to you," Hawk murmured.
We went back into the office and I sat down at my computer. I put in the hard disk copy I had made and clicked open a folder marked "Addresses." It blossomed before me as if kissed by a summer rain. Susan's address was there, and mine, and Carla Quagliozzi and someone named Lisa Coolidge, who may or may not have been worried about being another notch on Brad's gun, and a number of people whose names meant nothing to me. And Richard Gavin.
"I go see Carla Quagliozzi," I said to Hawk, who was still leaning back in my chair with his feet up and his eyes closed. Hawk could sit motionless, as far as I knew, for days.
"She's the president of Civil Streets. And Richard Gavin shows up and leans on me. I get a list of directors of Civil Streets from the AG's office and Richard is on it. We open up Sterling's address book and there's Richard."
"Say what he does?" Hawk said.
"Apparently he's a lawyer."
"Oh good," Hawk said.
"Yeah, not many of them around," I said.
I went back to the computer. Jeanette Ronan was there and all the other women who were alleging sexual harassment. There was a woman named Buffy, no last name, there were a number of women. I took some notes.
When I finished with the addresses, I closed them and opened a folder titled "Finance." Some of it was simple. There was a list of names under the heading: Monthly Nut. The name Buffy was listed and beside it $5,000/mo.
Cask and Carafe, $600/mo.
Matorian Realty, $1,100/mo.
Import Credit, $575/mo.
DePaul Federal, $4,000/mo.
Foxwood School, $22,000/year.
Then there was a notation, "Galapalooza-see blue disk."
"So why would he bother to lock this information," I said.
"What's a blue disk?" Hawk said.
"No idea," I said.
"Maybe stuff on blue disk was on this disk once," Hawk said. "And he coded it. Then later on he change it onto the blue disk and didn't take the code off."
"Be nice if we had the blue disk," I said.
"Be nice if we had lunch," Hawk said.
"Well, hell," I said. "There's something we can find."
And we did.
chapter twenty-five
SUSAN AND I went up to Essex and had some fried clams at a place called Farnham's. We got the clams, and some onion rings to go, and ate them in the car looking out over the tidal marshes toward Ipswich Bay. It was still raining. And it was cold enough to leave the car running and the heater on low. I had brought with me some Blue Moon Belgian White Ale in a cooler, and a jar of tartar sauce. Farnham's sold beer and they gave you little cups of tartar sauce for free. But Blue Moon Belgian White was a little exotic for Farnham's, and it always took too many little cups for the proper clam-to-tartar-sauce ratio. Susan watched me as I arranged the tartar sauce and the Belgian White, to be ready at hand. "You don't leave much to chance, do you?" she said.
"Proper provisioning is the mark of a good eater," I said.
I had a large order of clams. Susan had chosen the small. We shared an order of rings. Sharing with Susan was always good because she consumed slowly and not too much. We ate for a time in silence. The evening had darkened and the windshield wipers were off so that we couldn't see much of the scenery and what we could see was blurred. But the lights from the clam shack made dark crystal patterns out of the rain that sluiced on the windshield, and the steady sound of the rain made the dark interior of the car seem like the perfect refuge.
"Police have any leads on Brad," Susan said.
"Not that they are sharing with me."
"Were we going to share those onion rings?" Susan said.
"Of course," I said. "I was only picking out the fattening ones to save you."
"And so fast," Susan said.
"Just doing my job, little lady."
I got the right amount of tartar sauce on a clam and put it in my mouth.
"Brad always had to be a success," Susan said.
I chewed my clam.
"No, it's not quite that," Susan said.
She was staring out at the barely discernible tidal marshes, her profile lit by the lights from the clam shack.
"He always had to be perceived as a success," she said.
"You would have helped," I said.
"Or he thought I would," she said.
I ate another clam.
"Could he really have shot someone?" she said.
It seemed a rhetorical question to me. Even if it wasn't, I decided to treat it like one. I examined my clams and my tartar sauce to make sure I wasn't getting disproportionately ahead in one area or the other.
"You think?" she said.
"I don't know, Suze. I barely know him."
"Hell, I probably don't know him any better," Susan said.
She ate half a clam, no tartar sauce. She said she hated tartar sauce. She had always hated tartar sauce, and no amount of psychotherapy had ever succeeded in changing her.
"I was married to him a lifetime ago," Susan said. "One of the common problems I run into in the shrink business is the assumption that people are always what they were. That time and experience haven't changed them."
"It's the basis of reunions," I said.
"Reunions are normally a fund-raising device," Susan said,
"contrived by the sponsoring institution to exploit that delusion."
"And it makes you mad as hell," I said.
"I suppose so," Susan said. "It stunts people's growth."
"Mind if I have another ring?" I said.
"Speaking of growth… No, go ahead. I won't be able to eat my share anyway."
"Could the Brad you were married to have shot somebody?"
"I always thought he was weak," Susan said. "He covered it. He was big, he played football. He became more Harvard than the Hasty Pudding Club-of which he was a member, by the way."
"Lucky duck," I said.
"But he didn't seem to have any real inner resources. You couldn't trust his word. You couldn't count on him. One reason I didn't want children is that I couldn't imagine him being a good father. I couldn't imagine him working at whatever job he had to because his kids needed to be fed. I couldn't imagine him actually being a man. I would have said he didn't have the courage to shoot someone."
"Doesn't necessarily take courage," I said. "Weakness would do. Fear. Desperation."
"Yes," Susan said, "of course."
She smiled. I could tell she was smiling as much from the sound of her voice as I could from the look of her face in the rain-dimmed car. It didn't sound like a happy smile.
"Did he have a gun when you knew him?" I said.
"I don't think so, but it would have been a nice accessory for his self-esteem."
"Which was a little shaky," I said.
"Yes."
"Was he in the army?"
"No."
"Does the name Buffy mean anything to you?"
"I think she was my successor," Susan said.
"Carla Quagliozzi?"
"No. Brad's been married several times; I only knew the next woman. But you must understand that the Brad I knew needed to be with a woman. Since many women would find him initially attractive, but finally insufficient, I imagine there have been quite a few."
"His parents alive?"
"No."
"You mentioned a sister, went to Bryn Mawr."
"Yes, Nancy."
"Know where she is?"
"Bedford. She's married to a dentist."
"Know her married name."
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