Painted Ladies

30

In the morning, I stopped by the Boston Public Library on my way to work and picked up a copy of Aesthetics and Greed in the Second Great War and took it with me while I picked up two large coffees and a whole-wheat bagel and went up to my office.

I drank my coffee and ate my bagel, which was pretty good, and dipped into Prince’s book. Which was not pretty good. He was an academic. He never used a short word when a long one would do nearly as well. His prose style was so pretentious that it obscured his meaning. After the first page I could feel my head beginning to nod. I plugged through the first chapter, taking solace in my coffee and my bagel, and stopped. I didn’t want to solve his murder badly enough that I would read more than one chapter at a time. In chapter one, I learned that Germany had invaded the Netherlands in 1940.

I couldn’t wait for chapter two to find out who won.

I checked out the length of the book and the approximate size of each chapter, and made a deal with myself that I’d read a chapter a day. More than that and I wouldn’t know what I had read, anyway.

It was ten in the morning. I had read a chapter, eaten a bagel, and drunk two cups of Guatemalan coffee, and the day stretched out ahead of me like an empty road. I invoked Spenser’s crime-stopper tip #5: When you have nothing else to do, follow someone.

I drove out to Walford and set up outside Missy Minor’s dorm. It was not yet eleven. Many college students avoided classes that early in the day. Some, as I recall, avoided them altogether. But in most cases, they were just beginning to surface in the hour before lunch.

At about one-thirty in the afternoon, Missy Minor came out, ready to face the day. She was wearing her fleece-lined coat again. Very tight black jeans again, though not perhaps the same ones. The jeans were tucked into Uggs today. On her head was a white knit cap with a big white ball on top. The cap was pulled down carefully over her ears, allowing her blonde hair to frame her face. Warm yet fashionable. She was carrying no books as she cut across campus, with me discreetly behind her. She went into the library and up to the big reading room on the second floor. Missy went straight across the big room and sat down at an otherwise empty table across from a guy in a navy peacoat.

With my hands in my pockets and my head down, I went to the back end of the reading room, where there was a newspaper rack, got a New York Times, opened it up, and sat in a chair behind it, and peeked around.

The guy in the peacoat didn’t look like a student. No shame to it. I didn’t, either. And maybe he was an older student. He looked to be in his middle forties, with a flat, expressionless face and short blond hair. There was something about him that reminded me of the kind of guy I sometimes did business with. But it was an intangible something, and for all I knew, he could be a scholar of the eighteenth-century English novel.

As I watched, they leaned across the table toward each other and talked with their faces very close. It looked romantic, but they didn’t touch. They talked intensely. She with animation. He was nearly motionless, except that he tapped his forefinger on the tabletop. They spoke for maybe fifteen minutes. Then she leaned back a little, as if she was going to stand. He put his right hand on her forearm and held her there.

They spoke for several more minutes. He was doing most of the talking. She was nodding. And she appeared to be pressing a little against the restraint of his hand. When he let her go, she stood and walked away. From where I sat, I couldn’t read her expression. The man watched her walk across the reading room and out into the corridor and down the stairs. When she was out of sight, he sat quietly for a time, looking at nothing, slowly rubbing his chin with the back of his hand.

I stayed where I was behind my newspaper and waited. After a while he stopped rubbing his chin, and stood and walked out of the reading room. I gave him a minute and then put my newspaper back in its rack and strolled out after him. He was at the bottom of the stairs when I reached the top. I let him cross the big lobby to the front door before I started down. He had no reason to think he was being followed, so he had no reason to do anything tricky. And, of course, he was being tailed by an ace. I went down after him.

On the broad front steps of the library, I paused and took in some fresh air. Libraries always made me feel as if I’d been indoors too long. I saw my man across the street, heading toward a parking lot. I strolled after him. He got into a Toyota 4Runner and backed out. I recorded his license number in my steel-trap memory, and as soon as he was out of sight took out a little notepad and wrote it down. Just in time, before I forgot it.