A Catskill Eagle

CHAPTER 46

“IN HIS PERSONAL HABITS JERRY IS QUITE ascetic,” Susan said, “He doesn’t drink, he doesn’t smoke. He doesn’t drink coffee or tea. Of course he does not ingest drugs. He runs five miles every morning. He avoids red meat. He is self-educated, and quite well. He reads a great deal, and he is very intelligent, but very rigid. He is devoted to his son, and devoted to his wife. Other than those two devotions, I have no reason to think he has any feelings whatsoever.”

“How did he treat you?” I said.

“His anti-Semitism is virulent. It must have deeply offended him that I was with his son, though it’s probably one of my charms for his son, but he never showed it. He was always polite, almost courtly, to me. If his son chose me, then he could forgive even my Jewishness.”

“My son right or wrong but still my son,” Rachel Wallace said.

“His love for his son is unflinching,” Susan said, “and his son often did not make that easy.”

“And his wife?” I said.

Susan shook her head. “Grace,” she said.

“He not infatuated with her beauty,” Hawk said.

Susan continued to shake her head. “I’ve always known that love was a compendium of needs. You learn that in your introductory psych course, but what complex of needs and pathologies binds those two people together…” She shrugged. “Yes, he loves her.”

“And she loves him?”

“I don’t know. She needs him, she manipulates him. She loves Russell,” Susan said. “I don’t know all the dynamics in that family. But I know… I know that Grace is the worm in that apple.”

Susan’s club sandwich lay unattended on her plate. I eyed it. Maybe if I reassembled it. No, it was hers. I looked at the sandwich platter. It was empty. I looked at Susan’s disorganized sandwich again. Hell, she wasn’t going to eat it. Susan took a piece of lettuce in her fingers and tore off a small triangle and ate it. She held the rest of the leaf poised in front of her.

“Talk a little more about Grace,” I said.

“She’s not very bright,” Susan said. “And she affects a kind of Iittle-girlishness that is simply incongruous with her bulk. She’s… what is the phrase Jerry used about her once… often wrong, but never uncertain. She’s overbearing and full of fear. She’s infantile and tyrannical at the same time. She’s weak and silly and her husband and her son are neither and she controls both of them.”

Susan shook her head. “Remarkable,” she said.

“Why,” Rachel Wallace said.

“Why does she do that?” Susan said.

“Yes.”

Susan tore off another edge of lettuce and ate it. The large remainder of the sandwich lay nearly pristine if confused on her plate.

“To be taken care of, probably.”

“She doesn’t trust them to do that,” Rachel Wallace said.

It wasn’t a question. She and Susan were beginning to work on a puzzle. People who were therapists or had had a lot of psychotherapy tended to do that. To get interested in the problem for its own sake, to work wondrous patterns out of human behavior. Sort of like close reading a poem. I couldn’t see where this would take us, but I didn’t have anything else to listen to that was more likely to help.

“No. She’s scared, it’s maybe the central fact about her. She doesn’t understand life and it scares hell out of her. She needs to be taken through it by the hand and she doesn’t trust anyone to do it unless she can control them.”

“Her husband doesn’t understand this,” Rachel Wallace said. “How about her son?”

“He hates her,” Susan said.

“Without ambivalence,” Rachel Wallace said.

Susan smiled. “And loves her.”

“Powerful father,” Rachel Wallace said, “seductive and susceptible mother.”

“Seductive?” I said.

“To Russell,” Rachel Wallace said. “Classic pattern.”

“Classic,” Hawk said.

“Of course it sounds like psychobabble,” Susan said. “But she’s right.”

I reached for one of the best-organized remnants of Susan’s sandwich. She slapped my wrist. I pulled my hand back.

“Is this getting me a shot at Jerry Costigan,” I said.

Susan shook her head. “Probably not,” she said. “But that’s really your area. What we can do is report what we know. You and Hawk are the ones who are supposed to see what can be made from it.”

“True,” I said. “Are you going to finish that sandwich?”

“In time,” Susan said.

“Grace always travel with them?” Hawk said.

“No, she’s afraid to fly,” Susan said.

Hawk raised his eyebrows and nodded his head once.

I sucked my lower lip in and worried it a little. “Okay,” I said. “Say we can get her alone, once we’ve got her what do we do with her?”

“He love her like he supposed to we can make him swap. Him for her.”

I said to Susan, “When he travels does she normally stay in Mill River?”

“Yes.”

“He knows we’re looking for him. Richie Loo knew it so Costigan knows it.”

“Ives know it,” Hawk said. “Everybody know it.”

“He loves her like he’s supposed to he won’t leave her alone.”

Hawk nodded. “A point,” he said.

“So he stays in Mill River with her, or he insists she go with him, scared or no.” I looked at Susan.

“Yes,” she said. “He wouldn’t leave her, and he wouldn’t force her to fly, maybe couldn’t force her to fly. But she’ll ride in a car.”

“We’ve already gotten inside the Mill River place once,” I said.

“Want to bet they’ve improved security,” Hawk said.

I nodded. “Still, if he had a better place.”

“That he could drive to,” Hawk said.

“So we narrow it to the West Coast,” I said.

“More or less,” Hawk said.

All of the tomato was gone from Susan’s sandwich. She was nibbling the last piece of bacon. “Say, arbitrarily, a day’s drive at fifty miles an hour.”

“How long a day?”

“Say twelve hours,” I said. “Six hundred miles. Draw a circle around Mill River with a sixteen-mile radius, what have you got?”

“A equals u th,” Hawk said. “ ‘Bout 3,600 square miles.”

“Search a square mile a day and, if he doesn’t move, we’ll have him within ten years.”

Hawk looked at me in amazement. “My God,” he said in a flawless English accent, “Holmes, you’re incredible.”

“Elementary,” I said.

“So what we know about Grace leaves us no better off than we were,” Rachel Wallace said.

“Only technically,” I said.

“‘Fore we discovered about her,” Hawk said, we thought we have to search three million square miles.“