Small Vices

Chapter 13

The Merrimack River comes down through New Hampshire by way of Concord and Manchester and Nashua. It enters Massachusetts a little north of Lowell and weaves toward the coast through Lowell and Lawrence and Haverhill. Up until the Second World War, the textile industry was strung out along that stretch of river, the mills powered by it, the inexpensive, often female, labor force making up most of the populace in the region. It was an affluent region, and here and there, near the mill cities, residential towns like Andover sprang up to service the executives. Then after the war the labor force organized, their cost went up, the textile mills moved south where the labor was still cheap, and the big mill cities like Lawrence and Lowell were left impoverished, awaiting urban renewal, and the executive bedroom towns turned their lonely eyes toward Boston.

Andover was a little different. It had at one time its own textile mill, and the Shawsheen Village area of the town had been built largely by the mill. Its executives were encouraged to live there and walk to work; no garages were built. The mill’s corporate offices were across the street from the manufacturing facility.

Unlike most of the Merrimack valley, Andover remained upscale after the mill closed. The Academy was there. The mill manufacturing facility was taken over by an electronics firm, the McMartin Corporation; and the corporate offices went through several incarnations before being rehabbed into an upscale condominium complex called very grandly, I thought, The Trevanion. Hunt and Glenda Baker McMartin lived at The Trevanion.

It took about forty-five minutes to drive up to Andover in the late afternoon, with the rain spitting against my windshield and the wipers on slow sporadic. The foliage along Route 93 had peaked and was faded mostly yellow against the early November drab. I found a parking lot in back of The Trevanion and put my car in a slot that said Guest.

Glenda and Hunt were what every couple would want to be. He was tall and athletic looking with thick dark hair expensively cut. He was dressed in the J. Crew version of after-work leisure, and sported what used to be thought of as a healthy tan. She looked like him except she was shorter and her hair was auburn. She too had an even tan, which didn’t look precancerous, and had the advantage of reminding me that they could probably afford to go to the Caribbean. Or a tanning salon. She too was in freshly ironed active wear. They both looked like they belonged to a health club.

“Hello,” I said. “I’m Spenser. I called earlier.”

“Yes, please, do come in,” Glenda said.

She looked about twenty-two and acted as if she were a bit older than I. Neither of them looked as if they’d ever had a childhood. Probably they had been too busy being rich. The condo was money. The ceilings were twenty feet high, the bedroom was a loft. There was a kitchenette with a black-and-white tile dining counter, and a ruby-colored stove and refrigerator. The windows reached the full height of the ceiling. A brightly colored Tiffany-type lamp hung on a long brass chain over a thick glass-topped dining room table. There was an antique chaise covered with leather, and a refinished carriage seat, and a carefully assembled stereo system that would play Procol Harum in every nuance. Everything about them and the place spoke of money. Including the way they talked. Both of them had the sort of tight-jawed WASP drawl that only elocution lessons, or several generations of money and private education, can sometimes instill. My sense was that they hadn’t taken elocution lessons.

“A drink?” Hunt said. “Coffee?”

“Beer is nice,” I said.

“I have Sam Adams,” he said. “White Buffalo, Red Hook Ale, Saranac Black and Tan.”

“White Buffalo would be fine,” I said, as if it made a difference.

We sat in the small room dominated by the television set. Probably only used it to watch Masterpiece Theatre. Hunt poured my beer into a fine tall pilsner glass being careful to get an inch of head on it. Glenda had a glass of white wine, and sat on the couch with her feet tucked under her. Hunt held a short thick glass of single malt scotch on the rocks, and rattled the ice cubes a little as he sat on the edge of the couch leaning forward a little with his forearms resting on his thighs. I sat on a Moroccan leather hassock across from them and slurped a little beer through the foamy head, and wiped my upper lip with my thumb and forefinger and smiled.

“You related to the McMartin Corporation?” I said.

“My great-grandfather founded the company,” Hunt said.

“Nice to have job security,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Tell me about Melissa Henderson’s abduction,” I said.

Glenda looked at Hunt. Hunt was being calm, a take-charge guy, full of confidence and poise, or as full of those things as a twenty-five-year-old kid is likely to be.

“Frankly, sir, we’re a little tired of telling people about that. It was unpleasant to see, and it is unpleasant to talk about.”

“I’m sure Melissa would agree,” I said. “But I need to hear about it again.”

“You work for Cone, Oakes?” Hunt said.

“Yes.”

“And you or they or both seem to think that the murderer was wrongly convicted?”

“They would like to be assured that he wasn’t,” I said.

“He wasn’t,” Hunt said.

I looked at his wife.

“You as sure as your husband?” I said.

“Oh,” Glenda said, “yes.”

She had on an expensive, oversized waffle weave cobalt sweat shirt over silvery tights. Her twenty-two-year-old body seemed restless under the clothing, as if her natural state was naked, and clothes were a grudging accommodation to propriety.

“What did you see?” I said.

Glenda smiled and sipped some wine and looked at her husband.

“Glenda and I were walking back from a movie,” he said.

“Actually I was hoping to hear from your wife,” I said.

“I’ll do the talking,” Hunt said firmly. “We both saw the same thing. We were coming back from a movie, walking maybe twenty-five yards behind Melissa along Main Street near the campus front entrance. And a car came along the street, driving slowly, and pulled in beside her and a black guy jumped out and dragged her in and sped away.”

“Where’d he speed away to?”

“Into the campus.”

“Just where I’d go,” I said. “If I were kidnapping a coed.”

“I started toward her to see if I could help, but I was too late and I didn’t know. I thought it might have been a lover’s quarrel, you know. Lot of the girls dated black guys, and it would look like because he was black...”

“Sure,” I said. “What kind of car?”

“Big car, pink. Maybe an old Cadillac.”

“Just the thing for sneaking around Pemberton,” I said. “How’d he grab her?”

“Excuse me?”

“He grabbed her and dragged her into the car. What part of her did he grab?”

“I, it was dark, you know, I think he had her by the hair.”

“That how you remember it, Mrs. McMartin?”

“Yes,” she said.

There was a faintly dreamy quality about her, as if she were always a little disengaged, thinking of her body.

“She scream?”

“Yes.”

“What’d she scream?”

“She just screamed, you know, eeek. A scream.”

I nodded.

“You knew Melissa well?” I said.

“Oh, certainly,” Hunt said. “She and Glenda were very close friends.”

“She was my sorority daughter,” Glenda said. “She was like a younger sister.”

Hunt looked slightly annoyed, as if he wasn’t used to being interrupted.

“When Glenda and I began dating,” he said, “I got to know her well, too.”

“So you saw a black man in an old pink car pull up, grab a female friend of yours by the hair and drag her screaming into his car and speed away.”

“Yes.”

“And you didn’t call the cops.”

“I didn’t want to be one of those country-club liberals who thinks all blacks are hoodlums. I guess I made a mistake.”

“I guess,” I said. “Where’d you grow up?”

“Here, in Andover.”

“Go to the Academy?”

“Yes, and on to Williams, and then graduate work at M.I.T.”

“How about you, Mrs. McMartin?”

“Same,” she said. “Hunt was three years ahead of me at Phillips.”

“Did the kidnapper ever get out of the car?” I said.

Again Hunt answered.

“Yes, he had to catch her and when he did the streetlight was right above him and I saw him clear.”

“And when Melissa turned up dead you went to the cops.”

“Yes.”

“And they put you in front of a lineup, and you picked out Ellis Alves.”

“We both knew him right away.”

“That’s really good,” I said. “Eyewitnesses are often confused.”

Hunt smiled contentedly. Glenda gazed past me into space.

“She have a boyfriend?” I said.

“A boyfriend?”

“Yeah. You were close with Melissa, you double-date at all?”

“Yeah, once in a while. Why are you asking?”

“Got nothing else to ask about,” I said. “And I’m supposed to be asking something.”

“Well, it’s a damn waste of time,” Hunt said. “The jasper did it, and he’s where he ought to be.”

“She date a guy from Taft? Tennis player?” I said.

“I don’t know where he was from or what he played. We only doubled with them a few times. I don’t know how serious they were.”

“You like him, Mrs. McMartin?”

It took her a minute to come back to us.

“Sure,” she said. “He was a cute guy.”

“Either of you remember his name?”

Neither of them did.

“I’m afraid this is all the time we can give you, sir,” Hunt said. “We haven’t had dinner yet, and both of us have early days tomorrow.”

“Hard day at the plant?” I said.

“I have some early meetings.”

“How about you, Mrs. McMartin. What do you do?”

“I’m training,” she said, “at Healthfleet Fitness Center.”

“She’s learning the business,” Hunt said. “We’d like to open a chain of health clubs ourselves one of these days.”

“Great idea,” I said. “They’re starting to catch on.”

“The trick is to position yourself to capture a market segment that’s underserved.”

“That’s sort of my secret,” I said. “And then you say bye-bye to the family business?”

“No, I wouldn’t leave my job. The company’s been in our family for four generations. I’d consult, of course, especially during start-up. But Glenda would run the health clubs.”

My own sense was that Glenda enjoyed being a member of the leisure class and the thought of her running a chain of health clubs made me smile, but I kept the smile to myself. Hunt was on his feet. Nobody was offering me a second beer, which was too bad, because the White Buffalo was good. Glenda smiled at me thoughtfully. Hunt was still swirling the remains of his single malt over the remains of his ice cubes.

He said, “We really do need to get to our dinner, Mr. Spenser.”

I didn’t like their story. It seemed glib to me, and I found both of them in their smooth, upper-class propriety entirely unbelievable. I smiled graciously, however, and shook hands with them and departed. Spenser the civilized gumshoe.