Looking for Rachel Wallace

18

I went out to Arlington Street and turned left and walked down to Boylston eating my Winesap apple. On Boylston Street there were lots of Christmas decorations and pictures of Santa Glaus and a light, pleasant snow falling. I wondered if Rachel Wallace could see the snow from where she was. Tis the season to be jolly. If I had stayed with her … I shook my head. Hard. No point to that. It probably wasn’t much more unpleasant to be kidnaped in the Christmas season than any other time. I hadn’t stayed with her. And thinking I should have wouldn’t help find her. Got to concentrate on the priority items, babe. Got to think about finding her. Automatically, as I went by Brentano’s, I stopped and looked in the window at the books. I didn’t have much hope for Manfred—he was mean and bigoted and stupid. Cosgrove was none of those things, but he was a working reporter on a liberal newspaper. Anything he found out, he’d have to stumble over. No one was going to tell him.

I finished my apple and dropped the core in a trash basket attached to a lamp post, I looked automatically in Malben’s window at the fancy food. Then I could cross and see what new Japanese food was being done at Hai Hai, then back this side and stare at the clothes in Louis, perhaps stop off at the Institute of Contemporary Art. Then I could go home and take a nap. Shit. I walked back to my office and got my car and drove to Belmont.

The snow wasn’t sticking as I went along Storrow Drive, and it was early afternoon with no traffic. On my right the Charles was very black and cold-looking. Along the river people jogged in their winter running clothes. A very popular model was longjohns under shorts, with a hooded sweatshirt and blue New Balance shoes with white trim. I preferred a cutoff sweatshirt over black turtleneck sweater, with blue warm-up pants to match the New Balance 32O’s. Diversity. It made America great.

I crossed the Charles to the Cambridge side near Mt. Auburn Hospital and drove through a slice of Cambridge through Watertown, out Belmont Street to Belmont. The snow was beginning to collect as I pulled into a Mobil station on Trapelo Road and got directions to the Belmont Police Station on Concord Avenue.

I explained to the desk sergeant who I was, and he got so excited at one point that he glanced up at me for a moment before he went back to writing in a spiral notebook.

“I’m looking for one of your patrol car people. Young guy, twenty-five, twenty-six. Five ten, hundred eighty pounds, very cocky, wears military decorations on his uniform blouse. Probably eats raw wolverine for breakfast.”

Without looking up the desk sergeant said, “That’d be Foley. Wise mouth.”

“Man’s gotta make his mark somehow,” I said. “Where do I find him?”

The sergeant looked at something official under the counter. “He’s cruising up near the reservoir,” he said. “I’ll have the dispatcher call him. You know the Friendly’s up on Trapelo?”

“Yeah, I passed it coming in,” I said.

“I’ll have him meet you in the parking lot there.”

I thanked him and went out and drove up to Friendly’s ice cream parlor. Five minutes after I got there, a Belmont cruiser pulled in and parked. I got out of my car in the steady snowfall and walked over to the cruiser and got in the back seat. Foley was driving. His partner was the same older cop with the pot belly, still slouched in the passenger seat with his hat over his eyes.

Foley shifted sideways and grinned at me over the seat. “So someone snatched your lez, huh?”

“How gracefully you put it,” I said.

“And you got no idea who, and you come out grabbing straws. You want me to ID the cluck you hit in the gut, don’t you?”

I said to the older cop, “How long you figure before he’s chief?”

The older cop ignored me.

“Am I right or wrong?”

“Right,” I said, “you know who he is?”

“Yeah, after we was all waltzing together over by the library that day, I took down his license number when he drove off, and I checked into him when I had time. Name’s English—Lawrence Turnbull English, Junior. Occupation, financial consultant. Means he don’t do nothing. Family’s got twelve, fifteen million bucks. He consults with their trust officer on how to spend it. That’s as much as he works. Spends a lot of time taking the steam, playing racquetball, and protecting democracy from the coons and the queers and the commies and the lower classes, and the libbers and like that.”

The old cop shifted a little in the front seat and said, “He’s got an IQ around eight, maybe ten.”

“Benny’s right,” Foley said. “He snatched that broad, he’d forget where he hid her.”

“Where’s he live?” I said.

Foley took a notebook out of his shirt pocket, ripped out a page, and handed it to me. “Watch your ass with him though. Remember, he’s a friend of the chiefs,” Foley said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks.”

A plow rumbled by on Trapelo Road as I got out of the cruiser and went back to my car. The windows were opaque with snow, and I had to scrape them clean before I could drive. I went into the same Mobil station and got my tank filled and asked for directions to English’s house.

It was in a fancy part of Belmont. A rambling, gabled house that looked like one of those old nineteenth century resort hotels. Probably had a hunting preserve in the snow behind it. The plow had tossed up a small drift in front of the driveway, and I had to shove my car through it. The driveway was clear and circled up behind the house to a wide apron in front of a garage with four doors. To the right of the garage there was a back door. I disdained it. I went back around to the front door. A blow for the classless society. A young woman in a maid suit answered the bell. Black dress, little white apron, little hat—just like in the movies.

I said, “Is the master at home?”

She said, “Excuse me?”

I said, “Mr. English? Is he at home?”

“Who shall I say is calling, please?”

“Spenser,” I said, “representing Rachel Wallace. We met once, tell him, at the Belmont Library.”

The maid said, “Wait here, please,” and went off down the hall. She came back in about ninety seconds and said, “This way, please.”

We went down the hall and into a small pine-paneled room with a fire on the hearth and a lot of books on built-in shelves on either side of the fireplace. English was sitting in a red-and-gold wing chair near the fire, wearing an honest-to-God smoking jacket with black velvet lapels and smoking a meerschaum pipe. He had on black-rimmed glasses and a book by Harold Robbins was closed in his right hand, the forefinger keeping the place.

He stood up as I came in but did not put out his hand—probably didn’t want to lose his place. He said, “What do you want, Mr. Spenser?”

“As you may know, Rachel Wallace was kidnaped yesterday.”

“I heard that on the news,” he said. We still stood.

“I’m looking for her.”

“Yes?”

“Can you help?”

“How on earth could I help?” English said. “What have I to do with her?”

“You picketed her speech at the library. You called her a bulldyke. As I recall, you said you’d ‘never let her win’ or something quite close to that.”

“I deny saying any such thing,” English said. “I exercised my Constitutional right of free speech by picketing. I made no threats whatsoever. You assaulted me.”

So he hadn’t forgotten.

“We don’t have to be mad at each other, Mr. English. We can do this easy.”

“I wish to do nothing with you. It is preposterous that you’d think I knew anything about a crime.”

“On the other hand,” I said, “we can do it the other way. We can talk this all over with the Boston cops. There’s a sergeant named Belson there who’ll be able to choke back the terror he feels when you mention your friend, the chief. He’d feel duty bound to drag your tail over to Berkeley Street and ask you about the reports that you’d threatened Rachel Wallace before witnesses. If you annoyed him, he might even feel it necessary to hold you overnight in the tank with the winos and fags and riffraff.”

“My attorney—” English said.

“Oh yeah,” I said, “Belson just panics when an attorney shows up. Sometimes he gets so nervous, he forgets where he put the client. And the attorney has to chase all over the metropolitan area with his writ, looking into assorted pens and tanks and getting puke on his Chesterfield overcoat to see if he can find his client.”

English opened his mouth and closed it and didn’t say anything.

I went and sat in his red-and-gold wing chair. “How’d you know Rachel Wallace was going to be at the library?” I said.

“It was advertised in the local paper,” he said.

“Who organized the protest?”

“Well, the committee had a meeting.”

“What committee?”

“The vigilance committee.”

“I bet I know your motto,” I said.

“Eternal vigilance—” he said.

“I know,” I said. “I know. Who is the head of the committee?”

“I am chairman.”

“Gee, and still so humble,” I said.

“Spenser, I do not find you funny,” he said.

“Puts you in excellent company,” I said. “Could you account for your movements since Monday night at nine o’clock if someone asked you?”

“Of course I could. I resent being asked.”

“Go ahead,” I said.

“Go ahead what?”

“Go ahead and account for your movements since nine o’clock Monday night.”

“I certainly will not. I have no obligation to tell you anything.”

“We already did this once, Lawrence. Tell me, tell Belson—I don’t care.”

“I have absolutely nothing to hide.”

“Funny how I knew you’d say that. Too bad to waste it on me though. It’ll dazzle the cops.”

“Well, I don’t,” he said. “I don’t have anything to hide. I was at a committee meeting from seven thirty Monday night until eleven fifteen. Then I came straight home to bed.”

“Anybody see you come home?”

“My mother, several of the servants.”

“And the next day?”

“I was at Old Colony Trust at nine fifteen, I left there at eleven, played racquetball at the club, then lunched at the club. I returned home after lunch, arrived here at three fifteen. I read until dinner. After dinner—”

“Okay, enough. I’ll check on all of this, of course. Who’d you play racquetball with?”

“I simply will not involve my friends in this. I will not have you badgering and insulting them.”

I let that go. He’d fight that one. He didn’t want his friends at the club to know he was being investigated, and a guy like English will dig in to protect his reputation. Besides I could check it easily. The club and the committee, too.

“Badger?” I said. “Insult? Lawrence, how unkind. I am clearly not of your social class, but I am not without grace.”

“Are you through?”

“I am for now,” I said. “I will authenticate your—if you’ll pardon the expression—alibi, and I may look further into your affairs. If the alibi checks, I’ll still keep you in mind, however. You didn’t have to do it, to have it done, or to know who did it.”

“I shall sue you if you continue to bother me,” English said.

“And if you are involved in any way in anything that happened to Rachel Wallace,” I said, “I will come back and put you in the hospital.”

English narrowed his eyes a little. “Are you threatening me?” he said.

“That’s exactly it, Lawrence,” I said. “That is exactly what I am doing. I am threatening you.”

English looked at me with his eyes narrowed for a minute, and then he said, “You’d better leave.”

“Okay by me,” I said, “but remember what I told you. If you are holding out on me, I’ll find out, and I’ll come back. If you know something and don’t tell me, I will find out, and I will hurt you.”

He stood and opened the study door.

“A man in my position has resources, Spenser.” He was still squinting at me. I realized that was his tough look.

“Not enough,” I said, and walked off down the hall and out the front door. The snow had stopped. Around back, a Plymouth sedan was parked next to my car. When I walked over to it, the window rolled down and Belson looked out at me.

“Thought this was your heap,” he said. “Learn anything?”

I laughed. “I just got through threatening English with you,” I said, “so he’d talk to me. Now here you are, and he could just as well not have talked to me.”

“Get in,” Belson said. “We’ll compare notes.”

I got in the back seat. Belson was in the passenger seat. A cop I didn’t know sat behind the wheel. Belson didn’t introduce us.

“How’d you get here?” I said.

“You told Quirk about the library scene,” Belson said, “and we questioned Linda Smith along with everybody else and she mentioned it to me. I had it on my list when Quirk mentioned it to me. So we called the Belmont Police and found ourselves about an hour behind you. What you get?”

“Not much,” I said. “If it checks out, he’s got an alibi for all the time that he needs.”

“Run it past us,” Belson said. “We won’t mention you, and we’ll see if the story stays the same.”

I told Belson what English had told me. The cop I didn’t know was writing a few things in a notebook. When I was through, I got out of the Plymouth and into my own car. Through the open window I said to Belson, “Anything surfaces, I’d appreciate hearing.”

“Likewise,” Belson said.

I rolled up the window and backed out and turned down the drive. As I pulled onto the street I saw Belson and the other cop get out and start toward the front door. The small drift of snow that had blocked the driveway when I’d arrived was gone. Man in English’s position was not without resources.