Paper Doll

chapter nine

I HAD LUNCH with Loudon Tripp at the Harvard Club. In Boston there are two, one downtown in a tall building on Federal Street, and the other, more traditional one in the Back Bay on Commonwealth Ave. Despite the fact that Tripp’s office was downtown about a block from the Federal Street site, he chose tradition. So did I. Instead of my World Gym tank top, I wore a brown Harris tweed jacket with a faint maroon line in the weave, a blue Oxford button-down, a maroon knit tie, charcoal slacks, and chocolate suede loafers with charcoal trim. There was a herringbone pattern in my dark gray socks. I had a maroon silk handkerchief in my breast pocket, a fresh haircut, and a clean shave. Except maybe that my nose had been broken about six times, you couldn’t tell I wasn’t wealthy.

Tripp was wearing a banker’s gray Brooks Brothers suit with narrow lapels, and three buttons, and trousers ending at least two inches short of his feet. He had on a narrow tie with black and silver stripes, and scuffed brown shoes with wing tips. You knew he was wealthy.

Tripp shook hands democratically.

“Good of you to come,” he said, although I had requested the lunch.

The Harvard Club looked the way it was supposed to. High ceilings and carpeted floors and on the walls pictures of gray-haired WASPs in dark suits. We went to the dining room and sat. Tripp ordered a Manhattan. I had a club soda.

“Don’t you drink?” Tripp said. He sounded a little suspicious.

“I’m experimenting,” I said, “with intake modification.”

“Ah,” he said.

We looked at menus. The cuisine ran to baked scrod and minute steak. The waiter brought our drinks. Tripp drank half his Manhattan. I savored a sip of club soda. We ordered.

“Now,” Tripp said, “how can I help you?”

“If it is not too painful,” I said, “tell me about your family.”

“It is not too painful,” Tripp said. “What do you wish to know?”

“Whatever you wish to tell me. Talk about them a little, your wife, your kids, what they liked to do, how they got along, anything interesting about them. I’m just looking for a place to start.”

Tripp smiled courteously. “Of course,” he said.

He gestured at the waiter to bring him a second Manhattan. I declined a second club soda. I still had plenty left of the first one. Club sodas seemed to last longer than vodka martinis on the rocks with a twist.

“We were,” Tripp said, “just about an ideal family. We were committed to one another, loved one another, cared about one another completely.”

I nodded. The waiter brought the second Manhattan. Tripp drained the remainder of the first one and handed the glass to the waiter. The waiter completed the exchange and moved away. Tripp stared at the new Manhattan without drinking any.

“The thing was,” he said, “not only were Olivia and I husband and wife, we were pals. We enjoyed each other. We enjoyed our children.”

He paused, still staring at the untouched drink in front of him. He shuddered briefly. “To have so good a thing shattered so terribly…”

I waited. He picked up the Manhattan and took a small sip and replaced it. I ignored my club soda.

“I know it sounds, probably, too good to be true, nostalgia or something, but, by golly, it was good. There’ll never be anyone like her.”

He broke off and we sat quietly. In the silence the waiter brought our lunch. I had opted for a chicken sandwich. Tripp had scrod. The food was every bit as good as it was at the Harvard Faculty Club where I had eaten a couple of years ago.

There weren’t many women in the dining room. At a table next to the wall two men in suits were ordering more drinks. One of them was a U.S. Senator, still pink from the steam room, whose drink, when it arrived, appeared to be a tall dark scotch and soda. At the table next to me were three guys dressed by the same costumer. All wore dark blue suits with a thin chalk stripe, white shirts with discreetly rolled button-down collars, red ties. The ties varied-one red with tiny white dots, one a darker red with blue stripes, one blue paisley on a red background. He who would be a man must be a non-conformist. One of them was holding forth. He was large without being muscular, and his neck spilled out a little over his collar.

“So there’s Buffy,” he was saying, “bare ass in the middle of the fucking tennis court, and…”

“I suppose it seems idealized to you,” Tripp said. “I imagine people tend to talk that way after a great loss.”

“I just listen,” I said.

“And make no judgments?”

“Open-shuttered and passive,” I said. “Not thinking, merely recording.”

“Always?”

“At least until all the precincts are heard from,” I said.

“I would find that difficult, I guess,” Tripp said.

I chewed on my chicken sandwich. The chicken had traveled some distance from the coop. The slices in my sandwich were perfectly round and wafer thin. But the bread was white, and the pale lettuce was limp.

I finished chewing and said, “What I do requires a certain amount of distance, sort of a willful suspension, I suppose.”

“A what?”

I shook my head. “Literary allusion,” I said. “I was just showing off.”

“Olivia was a great one for that. She was always quoting somebody.”

“She taught literature, did she not?”

“Yes, and theater, at Shawmut College. Her students loved her.”

I nodded. I was trying to pick up the conversation at the next table. They were discussing what Buffy had tattooed on her buttocks.

“She was a marvelous teacher,” Tripp said. He was eating his scrod at a pace that would take us into the dinner hour. If he and Susan had an eating race you couldn’t get a winner.

The Senator had finished one dark scotch and soda, and had another, partly drunk, in his left hand. He was table-hopping. At the table next to us he paused long enough to hear the end of Buffy’s adventure, and laughed and said something in an undertone to the story teller. The whole table laughed excessively. It was clannish laughter, the laughter of insiders, us-boys. It was almost certainly laughter about the aptly named Buffy. Men never laughed quite that way about anything but women in a sexual context. And it was sycophantic laughter, tinged with gratitude that a man of the Senator’s prominence had shared with them not only a salacious remark but a salacious view of life.

“Old enough to bleed,” the Senator said, “old enough to butcher.”

The table was again frantic with grateful hilarity as the Senator turned toward us. The pinkness in his face had given way to a darker red. A tribute perhaps to the dark scotch and soda. He was nearly bald but had combined his hair in the bald man’s swoop up from behind one ear, arranged over the baldness, and lacquered in place with hair spray. A smallish man, he looked in good shape. His three-piece blue suit fit him well, and his vest didn’t gapno mean achievement in a politician. When he turned toward us, his expression was grave. He put a hand on Tripp’s shoulder.

“Loudon,” he said. “How you holding up?”

Tripp looked up at the Senator and nodded. “As well as one could expect, Senator, thanks.”

The Senator looked at me, but Tripp didn’t introduce us.

“I’m Bob Stratton,” the Senator said, and put out his hand. I said my name and returned his handshake. If he really saw me at all, it was peripherally. In his public self he probably saw everything peripherally. His focus was him.

“Any progress yet in finding the son of a bitch?”

Tripp shook his head.

“Not really,” he said. “Spenser here is working on it for me.”

“You’re a police officer?” the Senator said.

“Private,” I said.

“Really?” he said. “Well, you need any doors open, you call my office.”

“Sure,” I said.

“You have a card?” the Senator said. “I want to alert my people in case you need help.”

I gave him a card. He looked at it for a moment, and nodded to himself, and put the card in his shirt pocket. And put his hand back on Tripp’s shoulder.

“You hang tough, Loudon. Call me anytime.”

Tripp smiled wanly.

“Thanks, Senator.”

The Senator squeezed Tripp’s shoulder and moved off toward another table, slurping a drink of dark scotch and soda as he went.

“Fine man,” Tripp said. “Fine Senator, fine man.”

“E pluribus unum,” I said.