Rough Weather

by Robert B. Parker

  “What?”

  “The murder of the clergyman . . . or the son-in-law . . . or a scheme to extract ransom from somebody, like Adelaide’s father.”

  “And you think Heidi could be involved?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “That’s why I’m noodling. It doesn’t have to be Heidi. It could be anybody who knew what was going on. Maggie Lane, the famous conductor . . . Adelaide.”

  “Wow, you are noodling,” Susan said.

  “Better a theory,” I said, “than nothing.”

  “Theory is no substitute for information,” Susan said.

  “They certainly didn’t teach you that at Harvard,” I said.

  Susan smiled.

  “No,” she said. “Some things I know, I learned from you.”

  21

  Lydia Hall College was north of New York City, near Greenwich, Connecticut. About a three-hour drive from Boston, unless you stopped at Rein’s Deli for a tongue sandwich on light rye. So it was almost four hours after I left home that I was in the alumni office talking to a very presentable woman named Ms. Gold.

  “At various times,” I said, “her name has been Heidi Washburn, Heidi Van Meer, and currently, Heidi Bradshaw.”

  “Marriages?” Ms Gold said.

  “Yes,” I said. “All to men of substance, I believe.”

  Ms. Gold smiled.

  “The best kind,” she said. “And what is your interest?”

  “You know who Heidi Bradshaw is?” I said.

  “I’ve heard of her,” Ms. Gold said.

  “Then you know of the recent kidnapping?”

  “Of her daughter,” Ms. Gold said. “Yes.”

  “I’m involved in that investigation,” I said.

  “Are you a police officer?” Ms. Gold said.

  “Private detective,” I said.

  “Do you have any identification?” Ms. Gold said.

  I showed her some. She looked at it and handed it back.

  “We do not normally give out information about our alumni,” she said.

  “I really only want to know that she is an alumna, and what her maiden name is.”

  Ms. Gold looked like she approved of my use of alumna.

  “Well, I think we can tell you that,” she said. “We’ll take up the maiden-name business later.”

  “She may have graduated in 1980,” I said.

  She turned to the desktop computer and worked it for a while.

  “We have no Heidi Van Meer. We have a Heidi Washburn, but she graduated in 1926. And we have a Heidi Bradshaw who graduated in 2001.”

  “How about under her husbands’ names,” I said, and gave her the names that were in Healy’s background folder. “Mrs. Peter Van Meer. Mrs. J. Taylor Washburn. Mrs. Harden Bradshaw?”

  She did the computer thing again.

  “No,” she said.

  Her voice lingered on the no.

  “But?” I said.

  “Let me think a moment,” Ms. Gold said.

  I waited. She was ash-blonde and slim. She wore a pair of glasses with big blue frames. She was nicely dressed in a tasteful well-tailored cashmere-and-tweed kind of way. There was a wedding ring on the appropriate finger. After a time she exhaled softly.

  “Do you suspect Heidi Bradshaw of involvement?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m collecting information.”

  “Who are you working for?”

  “This is pro bono,” I said.

  “Really? I was under the impression that everyone involved is wealthy.”

  “I was there when the kidnapping went down, and couldn’t prevent it,” I said.

  “And it rankles you?” she said.

  “It does.”

  “So you are investigating basically in service to your own self-regard?” she said.

  “You could say so.”

  “Your self-regard seems very high,” she said.

  “And I want to keep it that way,” I said.

  She nodded and smiled and sat another moment.

  “We have a senior faculty member named J. Taylor Washburn,” she said.

  “Was he married to someone named Heidi?” I said.

  “I don’t know. It just seemed a sufficient coincidence that I should tell you.”

  “Would it be in your best interest,” I said, “if I didn’t tell anyone how I learned of Professor Washburn?”

  “His existence is hardly a secret,” Ms. Gold said. “He’s listed in our catalog.”

  “Can you tell if she ever attended this college?” I said.

  “If she did, it is unlikely that we wouldn’t have her,” Ms. Gold said.

  “Even if she didn’t graduate?”

  “This office is about acquiring money for the college,” Ms. Gold said. “Once you are no longer a student, you become alumni, which is to say a source of revenue.”

  “So you are quite assiduous,” I said.

  Ms. Gold smiled.

  “Like wolverines,” she said.

  22

  Professor J. Taylor Washburn had a B.A. from Penn and a PhD from Columbia. He was an art historian. He taught a graduate seminar in low-country realism, and was the chairman of the Fine Arts Department.

  I learned all of this in the first five minutes of our conversation. I also learned that he had once been married to a young woman named Hilda Gretsky.

  “Was she a student here?” I said.

  “No,” Washburn said. “I met her at a gallery.”

  “In the city?”

  “Yes,” Washburn said, “downtown. One of my teaching assistants was having a show. Sadly, it was not very good.”

  Washburn appeared to be about sixty, with wavy snow-white hair worn longish. His complexion was red, and his thick white mustache was carefully trimmed.

  “When were you married?”

  “Nineteen eighty,” Washburn said.

  “How long did it last?”

  Washburn looked out the window at the open quadrangle in the center of the campus with the redbrick Georgian library at one end and the redbrick Georgian student union at the other.

  “Two years,” he said.

  “What occasioned the breakup,” I said.

  He kept looking out the window.

  “She asked me for a divorce,” he said. “She told me she’d been having an affair with a man named Van Meer.”

  “Must have been hard to hear,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  I took a picture of Heidi from my pocket and put it on his desk.

  “Is this Hilda Gretsky?” I said.

  He looked at the photograph.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Are you aware of who she’s become?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know when she began to call herself Heidi?” I said.

  “When I knew her she called herself Heidi. The name on her birth certificate and her marriage license was Hilda, but she always hated the name, and always introduced herself as Heidi.”

  “How old is she?” I said.

  “She was born in 1959,” Washburn said.

  “She from New York?” I said.

  He shook his head.

  “Dayton, Ohio,” he said.

  “Why did she come to New York?” I said.

  He stopped looking out the window and turned to me and smiled without much pleasure.

  “To make her fortune,” he said.

  “Doing what?” I said.

  “Marrying well,” he said.

  “Starting with you?”

  “I suppose,” Washburn said. “One achieves, in some circles, a certain, ah, tone, I guess. Also, in addition to my academic earnings, there is a considerable trust fund. My father was aggressive in banking.”

  “Prestige and money,” I said. “Good start.”

  “Yes.”

  “Love?” I said.

  “She was not unkind,” Washburn said.

  23

  I had a drink at the bar in Lock-
Ober with the Special Agent in Charge at the Boston FBI office. He was a smallish guy with glasses, and he didn’t look like much of a crime fighter. Which often worked for him. His name was Epstein.

  “You on the kidnapping deal on the south coast?” I said.

  “Heidi Bradshaw’s daughter,” Epstein said. “Yeah, we’re on it, too.”

  “Know anything Healy doesn’t?”

  “Nope, we’re sharing.”

  “That’s so sweet,” I said.

  “We try,” Epstein said, and sipped some bourbon. “People aren’t liking federal agencies much these days.”

  “Is it because we’re being governed by a collection of nincompoops?” I said.

  Epstein grinned at me.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Pretty much.”

  “It’ll pass,” I said. “We got through Nixon.”

  “I know,” Epstein said. “You got anything for me?”

  “Heidi Bradshaw’s birth name was probably Hilda Gretsky,” I said. “She might have been born in 1959 in Dayton, Ohio.”

  “Busy, busy,” Epstein said.

  “I got nothing else to do,” I said.

  Epstein nodded.

  “You been out there?” he said.

  “Dayton? Not yet. I was hoping maybe you could enlist one of your colleagues out there to run it down.”

  “Where’d you get your information?” Epstein said.

  “Heidi’s first husband, a professor at Lydia Hall College in New York.”

  “Name?”

  “J. Taylor Washburn.”

  Epstein nodded. He didn’t write anything down, but I knew everything was filed.

  “Yeah,” he said. “We’ll run that down for you.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “It’s our case, too,” Epstein said. “She go to Lydia Hall?”

  “No,” I said. “But I suspect she has claimed to.”

  “Some reinvention going on?” Epstein said.

  “It’s the American way,” I said.

  “Sure,” Epstein said. “You told Healy this?”

  “Yeah, but we both figured your resources in the Dayton area were better than his.”

  “Or yours,” Epstein said.

  “Much better than mine,” I said.

  “You were there,” Epstein said, “at the wedding when the whole thing went down.”

  “Yep.”

  “Why?”

  “Her story is that she was at the moment between husbands and needed an adequate substitute for the wedding,” I said.

  “So if, say, the wine wasn’t chilled, she could ask you to fix it?”

  “I guess.”

  “You believe her?”

  “No.”

  “There are women like that,” Epstein said. “I’m Jewish, I know a lot of them.”

  “Isn’t that anti-Semitic?” I said.

  “Only female Semites,” Epstein said.

  “You’ve not had good fortune with the women of your kind?” I said.

  “Or any other,” he said.

  “So it’s more misogyny,” I said.

  “You’re right,” he said. “I was imprecise. Anybody paying you on this case?”

  “I’m looking into it on my own,” I said.

  “Because they kidnapped somebody on your watch,” Epstein said. “So to speak.”

  “Something like that. I wasn’t very useful.”

  “You were looking out for Susan,” Epstein said. “That’s useful.”

  “How do you know?” I said.

  “Because she was there. Because I am a skilled investigator. And because I know what you’re like.”

  “Didn’t do the kidnap victim much good,” I said.

  “What I hear, no one could. If you had it to do over again, would you do it different?”

  “No,” I said.

  Epstein grinned.

  “That’s right,” he said. “You wouldn’t.”

  24

  Peter Van Meer lived in a very big condominium on top of the Four Seasons, with a view of the Public Garden and eternity. I had a long time to study eternity because Van Meer kept me waiting for at least twenty minutes in the room where the maid left me. It was a big room with heavy furniture and leather-bound books. Many of the books had Latin titles and looked as if they had been printed in the nineteenth century. Van Meer probably called the room his study. Everything was expensive and perfectly matched and color-coordinated, and arranged, and appropriate, and as warm as a display room in Bloomingdale’s.

  I turned from the window when he came in.

  He said, “Sorry to keep you waiting, my man.”

  He put out his hand as he walked toward me.

  “Pete Van Meer,” he said.

  He was a large man with a big, square face, gray hair, and a swell tan. He wore a black shirt with several buttons undone, and a black watch plaid sport coat over pearl-gray slacks. We shook hands and I sat down in a dark brown leather armchair on the far side of a low mahogany coffee table with fat curved legs. Van Meer stood beside his desk.

  “Drink?” Van Meer said.

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  Van Meer grinned.

  “Don’t mind if I do,” he said.

  He went to a sideboard, which concealed a refrigerator, and made himself a tall Courvoisier and soda. He brought it back with him and sat on the edge of his desk. He made a faint toasting gesture toward me and took a pull.

  “First of the day,” he said.

  “Always the best,” I said. “You were married to Heidi Washburn.”

  He smiled down at me happily.

  “Man,” he said. “What a ride that was.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said.

  He took another pull.

  “She could fuck the hinges off a firehouse door,” Van Meer said.

  “Good to know,” I said.

  “Oh, momma,” he said, and drank some more cognac.

  “How’d you meet?” I said.

  “My wife at the time, Megan, was a big patron of the arts, you know? I was with her at some gallery reception for some whack job that threw paint on his canvas, you know?”

  “I sort of like paintings where a horse looks like a horse, or at least reminds me of a horse,” I said.

  “You and me both, brother,” Van Meer said. “Anyway, my wife at the time, Megan, is taking this dildo around, and introducing him to the guests, and I’m trying to gag down enough white wine to get me through the evening, and I look around and I’m standing beside this firecracker of a broad. You seen her?”

  “I have,” I said.

  “Then you know what I mean,” Van Meer said. “So she looks at me and says, ‘You bored?’ And I say, ‘Not a big enough word for what I am,’ and she goes, ‘Do you like white wine?’ And I say, ‘No.’ And she says, ‘Me, either. Let’s get out of here and get a real drink.’ So we did.”

  “When was this?”

  “Nineteen eighty-two,” he said.

  “She still married to Washburn?” I said.

  “The art professor, yeah.”

  “Adelaide was born in 1985?” I said.

  He nodded.

  “You having any luck finding her?” he said.

  “I’ve not found her yet,” I said.

  “But you will.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I will.”

  He went to the sideboard and made himself another drink.

  “I’m a lush,” he said. “But a jolly one.”

  He drank some of his cognac and soda. His face darkened.

  “And I love my daughter.”

  I nodded.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “But I need to ask if you’re sure she’s yours.”

  His face stayed dark.

  “We never DNAed her,” Van Meer said.

  He sipped his drink.

  “You know,” he said. “Even if we DNAed her now, and she turned out to be Washburn’s or something? It wouldn’t matter. She’s my daughter.”

 
His eyes were wet-looking. I thought he might cry.

  “Do you think she’s alive,” he said.

  “Have you heard from the kidnappers?” I said.

  “No.”

  “There’s no reason to do such an elaborate kidnapping and then kill her,” I said. “She’s alive.”

  “What do they want?” Van Meer said.

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “I have tons of money,” Van Meer said.

  “Can’t hurt,” I said.

  “I can hire you to find her,” Van Meer said. “Any amount, doesn’t matter.”

  “No need,” I said. “I’m looking for her now.”

  “If you need anything, anything that money can buy, just say so. It’s yours.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind,” I said. “How long did the marriage last?”

  “Me and Heidi? We got divorced when Adelaide was five.”

  “Nineteen ninety,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you get divorced?”

  Van Meer took a slow drink and shrugged.

  “Bradshaw,” he said.

  “She was having an affair with him.”

  “Yeah, sure. I mean that wasn’t such a big deal. She’d fooled around before. Hell, so did I. All during the marriage. We both did. But Bradshaw . . .”

  He finished his drink and went to the sideboard and refreshed the glass.

  “She was too far into Bradshaw,” he said. “She stopped coming home. Stopped having sex. Stopped being fun. When she was with you, Heidi could be a big lot of fun.”

  He stayed at the sideboard holding his drink.

  “Divorce contentious?” I said.

  “No. I liked her. Hell, I probably loved her.”

  “Generous settlement?” I said.

  “Oh, sure,” he said. “I set up a big trust fund for Adelaide. She’s set for life. And Heidi got a lump-sum settlement instead of alimony. It was how she wanted it. Alimony would have stopped as soon as she married Bradshaw.”

  “Ever meet Bradshaw?” I said.

  “No.”

  “Know anything about him?”

  “No,” Van Meer said. “Heidi never talked about him. Never said a word.”

  “Who asked for the divorce?”

  “Her,” Van Meer said. “Told me she was in love with Bradshaw and wanted a divorce so she could marry him.”

  “And he was the one she’d been seeing?”