Paper Doll

chapter forty-three

THE RAIN HAD come up the coast behind me. It had traveled more slowly than I had and arrived in Boston only this morning, when Susan and I, with still the taste of polenta and chicken and Alsatian wine, went to a memorial service for Farrell’s lover, whose name had been Brian, in a white Unitarian church in Cambridge. Farrell was there, looking sleepless. And the dead man’s parents were there. The mother, stiff with tranquilizers and pale with grief, leaned heavily on her husband, a burly man with a large gray moustache. He looked puzzled, as much as anything, as he held his wife up.

Susan and I sat near the back of the small plain church, while the minister blathered. It was probably not his fault that he blathered. Ministers are expected to speak as if death were not the final emperor. But it came out, as it usually did, blather. Farrell sat with a guy that looked like him, and a woman and two small children. Brian’s mother and father sat across the aisle.

There were maybe eight other people in the church. I didn’t recognize any of them except Quirk, who stood in the back, his hands folded calmly in front of him, his face without expression. The church doors stood open and the gray rain came bleakly down on the black street. Susan held my hand.

After the service, Farrell came out of the church and introduced us to the guy that looked like him. It was his brother. The woman was his brother’s wife, and the kids were Farrell’s nephews.

“My mother and father wouldn’t come,” he said.

“How too bad for them,” Susan said.

Quirk came to stand beside us.

“Thank you for coming, Lieutenant,” Farrell said.

“Sure,” Quirk said.

Farrell moved on with his brother on one side and his sister-in-law on the other. His nephews, small and quiet, frightened by death, probably, each held a parental hand.

“Tough,” Quirk said. “You back from another visit to South Carolina?”

We were standing under an overhang out of the cold rain, which came grimly down.

“Yeah.”

“You got anything?”

“I don’t know yet.”

Quirk frowned.

“What the hell does that mean?” he said.

“Means I don’t know yet.”

Quirk looked at Susan. She smiled like Mona Lisa.

“Christ,” Quirk said to her. “You get better every time I see you.”

“Thank you, Martin,” she said. He looked back at me.

“Call me when you know,” he said, and turned his raincoat collar up and went down the steps to an unmarked police car and drove away. I turned up my collar too, and took Susan’s hand, and walked down the steps and away from the church in the rain, which was cold and hard and without respite.