Widow’s Walk

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

I went over to Pequod Bank on Monday morning to talk with Marvin Conroy. He wasn’t there. I said I would wait. They were cool with it. I sat in a chair and watched people discuss checking accounts and loans for three hours. At noon I asked if there was a number for Conroy. There was. But they couldn’t give me his home phone number.

“Could you call him for me?” I said.

The acting second assistant junior auxiliary vice president who was working with me looked startled.

“Me? Call him at home?”

“Y. Yes.”

“Is it, ah, an emergency?” she said.

“Life and death,” I said.

“Not really?” she said.

“Really,” I said.

She hesitated. I fixed her with my gleaming blue stare. She shrugged and opened her Rolodex and picked up the phone. She gave her hair a little toss to get the phone in under it, and dialed a number. I waited. She was wearing one of those thin, loose-fitting ankle-length flowered dresses that women sometimes wore in Cambridge, I assumed in tribute to a long-gone hippie past. Hers was especially sporty, tan with brown flowers. Whether there was any kind of worthwhile body going on underneath there was difficult to say, but I was ready to give her the benefit of the doubt.

She hung up the phone.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “There’s no answer. Would you like to leave a message for him?”

“You have an address for him?” I said.

“Certainly not,” she said.

I glanced at her Rolodex and she grabbed it and clutched it to her as if she were protecting its virtue. I smiled at her.

“You’ve been more than kind,” I said.

Back in my car I called Bobby Kiley’s office. Argued with the switchboard operator, and the receptionist, and Kiley’s secretary until I got through.

“It would be easier calling the Pope,” I said, when he was on the phone.

“But less useful,” Kiley said. “What do you want?”

“How’s Ann?”

“She’s lousy.”

“I need to know Marvin Conroy’s address,” I said.

“I’ll call you back,” Kiley said.

I gave him my car phone number, which I could never remember and therefore had written on a piece of paper tucked over the sun visor. Then I sat and looked at life in East Cambridge for maybe ten minutes until Kiley called back.

Conroy lived in an apartment in the North End on Commercial Street across from the Coast Guard station and a little ways down the street from the old garage where the Brink’s Robbery had taken place. I went up four cement steps and looked at the small sign that said NORTH CHURCH REALTY. LONG AND SHORT TERM RENTALS. I read the names on the mailboxes. Conroy was on the second floor. I rang. No luck. There were seven other names on the mailboxes. I rang all of them. Only one person, a woman, who sounded sleepy, answered through the speaker.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m from the cable company. We need to check some terminals.”

“Well, check them some other time, pal,” the woman said. “I’m trying to take a freakin‘ nap.”

The speaker went dead. Okay, if the terminals went bad it wasn’t my fault. I leaned my fanny on the black iron porch rail and thought about it. As I was thinking a young man in a gray suit and big glasses came up the steps with his key out. I fumbled in my pockets.

“Oh God,” I said. “I’m staying in 2B and I can’t find my keys.”

He smiled blankly and nodded and opened the door. I walked in right behind him. He disappeared into the elevator. I took the stairs. When I got to Conroy’s place, I looked around in the small hallway. There was only one other apartment. I went to it and knocked on the door. No one answered. I went back to Conroy’s door and kicked it in.

Inside was bedroom, sitting room, bath, kitchenette. It was charmless and impersonal. It showed little signs of occupancy. Cereal in the kitchen cabinet and half a loaf of bread, orange juice, and milk in the refrigerator. Two utility bills on the kitchen counter, both overdue. There were no clothes in the closet. No toiletries in the bath. A bath towel was crumpled on the floor. I picked it up. It was wrinkled, but no longer damp. There were no credit-card receipts, no answering machine with phone messages, no personal computer with e-mail messages. No clue at all about where Marvin Conroy had gone, or who he was.