Looking for Rachel Wallace

5

We got through the rest of dinner. Susan asked Rachel about her books and her work, and that got her off me and onto something she liked much better. Susan is good at that. After dinner I had to drive Rachel back to the Ritz. I said goodbye to Susan in the bank parking lot behind Rosalie’s where we’d parked.

“Don’t be mean to her,” Susan said softly. “She’s scared to death, and she’s badly ill at ease with you and with her fear.”

“I don’t blame her for being scared,” I said. “But it’s not my fault.”

From the front seat of my car Rachel said, “Spenser, I have work to do.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said to Susan.

“She’s scared,” Susan said. “It makes her bitchy. Think how you’d feel if she were your only protection.”

I gave Susan a pat on the fanny, decided a kiss would be hokey, and opened the door for her before she climbed into her MG. I was delighted. She’d gotten rid of the Nova. She was not Chevy. She was sports car.

Through the open window Susan said, “You held the door just to spite her.”

“Yeah, baby, but I’m going home with her.”

Susan slid into gear and wheeled the sports car out of the lot. I got in beside Rachel and started up my car.

“For heaven’s sake, what year is this car?” Rachel said.

“1968,” I said. “I’d buy a new one, but they don’t make convertibles anymore.” Maybe I should get a sports car. Was I old Chevy?

“Susan is a very attractive person,” Rachel said.

“That’s true,” I said.

“It makes me think better of you that she likes you.”

“That gets me by in a lot of places,” I said.

“Your affection for each other shows.”

I nodded.

“It is not my kind of love, but I can respond to it in others. You are lucky to have a relationship as vital as that.”

“That’s true, too,” I said.

“You don’t like me.”

I shrugged.

“You don’t,” she said.

“It’s irrelevant,” I said.

“You don’t like me, and you don’t like what I stand for.”

“What is it you stand for?” I said.

“The right of every woman to be what she will be. To shape her life in conformity to her own impulse, not to bend her will to the whims of men.”

I said, “Wow.”

“Do you realize I bear my father’s name?”

“I didn’t know that,” I said.

“I had no choice,” she said. “It was assigned me.”

“That’s true of me, too,” I said.

She looked at me.

“It was assigned me. Spenser. I had no choice. I couldn’t say I’d rather be named Spade. Samuel Spade. That would have been a terrific name, but no. I had to get a name like an English poet. You know what Spenser wrote?”

“The Faerie Queen?”

“Yeah. So what are you bitching about?”

We were out of Marblehead now and driving on Route 1A through Swampscott.

“It’s not the same,” she said.

“Why isn’t it?”

“Because I’m a woman and was given a man’s name.”

“Whatever name would have been without your consent. Your mother’s, your father’s, and if you’d taken your mother’s name, wouldn’t that merely have been your grandfather’s?”

There was a blue Buick Electra in front of me. It began to slow down as we passed the drive-in theater on the Lynnway. Behind me a Dodge swung out into the left lane and pulled up beside me.

“Get on the floor,” I said.

She said, “What—” and I put my right hand behind her neck and pushed her down toward the floor. With my left hand I yanked the steering wheel hard over and went inside the Buick. My right wheels went up on the curb. The Buick pulled right to crowd me, and I floored the Chevy and dragged my bumper along his entire righthand side and spun off the curb in front of him with a strong smell of skun* rubber behind me. I went up over the General Edwards Bridge with the accelerator to the floor and my elbow on the horn, and with the Buick and the Dodge behind me. I had my elbow on the horn because I had my gun in my hand.

The Lynnway was too bright and too busy, and it was too early in the evening. The Buick swung off into Point of Pines, and the Dodge went with it. I swerved into the passing lane to avoid a car and swerved back to the right to avoid another and began to slow down.

Rachel Wallace crouched, half fetal, toward the floor on the passenger’s side. I put the gun down on the seat beside me. “One of the advantages of driving a 1968 Chevy,” I said, “is you don’t care all that much about an occasional dent.”

“May I sit up?” she said. Her voice was strong.

“Yeah.”

She squirmed back up onto the seat.

“Was that necessary?”

“Yeah.”

“Was there someone really chasing us?”

“Yeah.”

“If there was, you handled it well. My reactions would not have been as quick.”

I said, “Thank you.”

“I’m not complimenting you. I’m merely observing a fact. Did you get their license numbers?”

“Yes, 469AAG, and D60240, both Mass. But it won’t do us any good unless they are bad amateurs, and the way they boxed me on the road before I noticed, they aren’t amateurs.”

“You think you should have noticed them sooner?”

“Yeah. I was too busy arguing patristic nomenclature with you. I should never have had to hit the curb like that.”

“Then partly it is my fault for distracting you.”

“It’s not your line of work. It is mine. You don’t know better. I do.”

“Well,” she said, “no harm done. We got away.”

“If the guy in front of us in the Buick was just a mohair better, we wouldn’t have.”

“He would have cut you off?”

I nodded. “And the Dodge would have blasted us.”

“Actually would he not have blasted you? I was on the floor, and you were much closer anyway.”

I shrugged. “It wouldn’t have mattered. If you survived the crash they’d have waited and blasted you.”

“You seem, so, so at ease with all of this.”

“I’m not. It scares me.”

“Perhaps. It scares me, too. But you seem to expect it. There’s no moral outrage. You’re not appalled. Or offended. Or … aghast. I don’t know. You make this seem so commonplace.”

“Aghast is irrelevant, too. It’s useless. Or expressing it is useless. On the other hand I’m not one of the guys in the other car.”

We went past the dog track and around Bell Circle. There was no one noticeable in the rearview mirror.

“Then you do what you do in part from moral outrage.”

I looked at her and shook my head. “I do what I do because I’m comfortable doing it.”

“My God,” she said, “you’re a stubborn man.”

“Some consider it a virtue in my work,” I said.

She looked at the gun lying on the seat.

“Oughtn’t you to put that away?”

“I think I’ll leave it there till we get to the Ritz.”

“I’ve never touched a gun in my life.”

“They’re a well-made apparatus,” I said. “If they’re good. Very precise.”

“Is this good?”

“Yes. It’s a very nice gun.”

“No gun is nice,” she said.

“If those gentlemen from the Lynnway return,” I said, “you may come to like it better.”

She shook her head. “It’s come to that. Sometimes I feel sick thinking about it.”

“What?”

“In this country—the land of the free and all that shit—I need a man with a gun to protect me simply because I am what I am.”

“That’s fairly sickening,” I said.