Looking for Rachel Wallace

27

The waitress said, “May I get you anything else?”

I shook my head, so did Julie. The waitress put the check down, near me, and I put a ten down on top of it.

Julie said, “They wouldn’t. They couldn’t do that. They wouldn’t know what to do.”

“They could hire a consultant. Their chauffeur has done time. Name’s Mingo Mulready, believe it or not, and he would know what to do.”

“But they don’t know.”

“Maybe they don’t. Or maybe the guy that was following you around was your brother’s. You haven’t been living at home.”

“Spenser, I’m thirty years old.”

“Get along with the family?”

“No. They didn’t approve of my marriage. They didn’t approve of my divorce. They hated me going to Goucher. They hate me being a model. I couldn’t live with them.”

“They worry about you?”

She shrugged. Now that she was thinking, she wasn’t crying, and her face looked more coherent. “I suppose they did,” she said. “Lawrence likes to play father and man of the house, and Mother lets him. I guess they think I’m dissolute and weak and uncommitted—that kind of thing.”

“Why would they have a thug like Mulready driving them around?”

Julie shrugged her shoulders. “Lawrence is all caught up in his Vigilance Committee. He gets into situations, I guess, where he feels he needs a bodyguard. I assume this Mulready is someone who would do that.”

“Not as well as he used to,” I said.

The waitress picked up my ten and brought back some change on a saucer.

“If they did take Rachel,” I said, “where would they keep her?”

“I don’t know.”

“Sure you do. If you were your brother and you had kidnaped Rachel Wallace, where would you keep her?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Spenser … ”

“Think,” I said. “Think about it. Humor me.”

“This is ridiculous.”

“I walked a half-mile through a blizzard because you asked me to,” I said. “I didn’t say it was ridiculous.”

She nodded. “The house,” she said.

The waitress came back and said, “Can I get you anything else?”

I shook my head. “We better vacate,” I said to Julie, “before she gets ugly.”

Julie nodded. We left the coffee shop and found an overstuffed loveseat in the lobby.

“Where in the house?” I said.

“Have you seen it?”

“Yeah. I was out there a few days ago.”

“Well, you know how big it is. There’s probably twenty rooms. There’s a great big cellar. There’s the chauffeur’s quarters over the garage and extra rooms in the attic.”

“Wouldn’t the servants notice?”

“They wouldn’t have to. The cook never leaves the kitchen, and the maid would have no reason to go into some parts of the house. We had only the cook and the maid when I was there.”

“And of course old Mingo.”

“They hired him after I left. I don’t know him.”

“Tell you what,” I said. “We’ll go back to my place. It’s just over on Marlborough Street, and we’ll draw a map of your brother’s house.”

“It’s my mother’s,” Julie said.

“Whoever,” I said. “We’ll make a map, and later on I’ll go take a look.”

“How will you do that?”

“First the map. Then the B-and-E plans. Come on.”

“I don’t know if I can make a map.”

“Sure you can. I’ll help and we’ll talk. You’ll remember.”

“And we’re going to your apartment?”

“Yes. It’s quite safe. I have a woman staying with me who’ll see that I don’t molest you. And on the walk down we’ll be too bundled up.”

“I didn’t mean that.”

“Okay, let’s go.”

We pushed out into the snow again. It seemed to be lessening, but the wind was whipping it around so much it was hard to tell. A half-block up Beacon Street Julie took my arm, and she hung on all the way up over the hill and down to Marlborough. Other than, two huge yellow pieces of snow equipment that clunked and waddled through the snow, we were all that moved.

When we got to my apartment, Susan was on the couch by the fire reading a book by Robert Coles. She wore a pair of jeans she’d left there two weeks ago and one of my gray T-shirts with the size, XL, printed in red letters on the front. It hung almost to her knees.

I introduced them and took Julie’s coat and hung it in the hall closet. As I went by the bathroom, I noticed Susan’s lingerie hanging on the shower rod to dry. It made me speculate about what was under the jeans, but I put it from me. I was working. I got a pad of lined yellow paper, legal size, from a drawer in the kitchen next to the phone and a small translucent plastic artist’s triangle and a black-ballpoint pen, and Julie and I sat at the counter in my kitchen for three hours and diagrammed her mother’s house—not only the rooms, but what was in them.

“I haven’t been there in a year,” she said at one point.

“I know, but people don’t usually rearrange the big pieces. The beds and sofas and stuff are usually where they’ve always been.”

We made an overall diagram of the house and then did each room on a separate sheet. I numbered all the rooms and keyed them to the separate sheets.

“Why do you want to know all this? Furniture and everything?”

“It’s good to know what you can. I’m not sure even what I’m up to. I’m just gathering information. There’s so much that I can’t know, and so many things I can’t predict, that I like to get everything I can in order so when the unpredictable stuff comes along I can concentrate on that.”

Susan made a large plate of ham sandwiches while we finished up our maps and we had them with coffee in front of the fire.

“You make a good fire for a broad,” I said to Susan.

“It’s easy,” Susan said, “I rubbed two dry sexists together.”

“This is a wonderful sandwich,” Julie said to Susan.

“Yes. Mr. Macho here gets the ham from someplace out in eastern New York State.”

“Millerton,” I said. “Cured with salt and molasses. Hickory-smoked, no nitrates.”

Julie looked at Susan. “Ah, what about that other matter?”

“The shadow?” I said.

She nodded.

“You can go home and let him spot you, and then I’ll take him off your back.”

“Home?”

“Sure. Once he lost you, if he’s really intent on staying with you, he’ll go and wait outside your home until you show up. What else can he do?”

“I guess nothing. He wouldn’t be there today, I wouldn’t think.”

“Unless he was there yesterday,” Susan said. “The governor’s been on TV. No cars allowed on the highway. No buses are running. No trains. Nothing coming into the city.”

“I don’t want to go home,” Julie said.

“Or you can stay hiding out for a while, but I’d like to know where to get you.”

She shook her head.

“Look, Julie,” I said. “You got choices, but they are not limitless. You are part of whatever happened to Rachel Wallace. I don’t know what part, but I’m not going to let go of you. I don’t have that much else. I need to be able to find you.”

She looked at me and at Susan, who was sipping her coffee from a big brown mug, holding it in both hands with her nose half-buried in the cup and her eyes on the fire. Julie nodded her head three times.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m in an apartment at one sixty-four Tremont. One of the girls at the agency is in Chicago, and she let me stay while she’s away. Fifth floor.”

“I’ll walk you over,” I said.