Looking for Rachel Wallace

by Robert B. Parker

  “Why do you want to know all this? Furniture and everything?”

  “It’s good to know what you can. I’m not sure even what I’m up to. I’m just gathering information. There’s so much that I can’t know, and so many things I can’t predict, that I like to get everything I can in order so when the unpredictable stuff comes along I can concentrate on that.”

  Susan made a large plate of ham sandwiches while we finished up our maps and we had them with coffee in front of the fire.

  “You make a good fire for a broad,” I said to Susan.

  “It’s easy,” Susan said, “I rubbed two dry sexists together.”

  “This is a wonderful sandwich,” Julie said to Susan.

  “Yes. Mr. Macho here gets the ham from someplace out in eastern New York State.”

  “Millerton,” I said. “Cured with salt and molasses. Hickory-smoked, no nitrates.”

  Julie looked at Susan. “Ah, what about that other matter?”

  “The shadow?” I said.

  She nodded.

  “You can go home and let him spot you, and then I’ll take him off your back.”

  “Home?”

  “Sure. Once he lost you, if he’s really intent on staying with you, he’ll go and wait outside your home until you show up. What else can he do?”

  “I guess nothing. He wouldn’t be there today, I wouldn’t think.”

  “Unless he was there yesterday,” Susan said. “The governor’s been on TV. No cars allowed on the highway. No buses are running. No trains. Nothing coming into the city.”

  “I don’t want to go home,” Julie said.

  “Or you can stay hiding out for a while, but I’d like to know where to get you.”

  She shook her head.

  “Look, Julie,” I said. “You got choices, but they are not limitless. You are part of whatever happened to Rachel Wallace. I don’t know what part, but I’m not going to let go of you. I don’t have that much else. I need to be able to find you.”

  She looked at me and at Susan, who was sipping her coffee from a big brown mug, holding it in both hands with her nose half-buried in the cup and her eyes on the fire. Julie nodded her head three times.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m in an apartment at one sixty-four Tremont. One of the girls at the agency is in Chicago, and she let me stay while she’s away. Fifth floor.”

  “I’ll walk you over,” I said.

  28

  The day after the big blizzard was beautiful, the way it always is. The sun is shining its ass off, and the snow is still white, and no traffic is out, and people and dogs are walking everywhere and being friendly during shared duress.

  Susan and I walked out to Boylston and up toward Mass. Ave. She had bought a funky-looking old raccoon coat with padded shoulders when we’d gone antiquing in New Hampshire in November, and she was wearing it with big furry boots and a woolen hat with a big pom-pom. She looked like a cross between Annette Funicello and Joan Crawford.

  We’d been living together for two and a half days, and if I had known where Rachel Wallace was, I would have been having a very nice time. But I didn’t know where Rachel Wallace was, and what was worse, I had a suspicion where she might be, and I couldn’t get there. I had called Quirk and told him what I knew. He couldn’t move against a man of English’s clout without some probable cause, and we agreed I had none. I told him I didn’t know where Julie Wells was staying. He didn’t believe me, but the pressure of the snow emergency was distracting the whole department, and no one came over with a thumbscrew to interrogate me.

  So Susan and I walked up Boylston Street to see if there was a store open where she could buy some underclothes and maybe a shirt or two, and I walked with her in a profound funk. All traffic was banned from all highways. No trains were moving.

  Susan bought some very flossy-looking lingerie at Saks, and a pair of Levi’s and two blouses. We were back out on Boylston when she said, “Want to go home and model the undies?”

  “I don’t think they’d fit me,” I said.

  “I didn’t mean you,” she said.

  I said, “God damn it, I’ll walk out there.”

  “Where?”

  “I’ll walk out to Belmont.”

  “Just to avoid modeling the undies?”

  I shook my head. “It’s what? Twelve, fifteen miles? Walk about three miles an hour. I’ll be there in four or five hours.”

  “You’re sure she’s there?”

  “No. But she might be, and if she is, it’s partly my fault. I have to look.”

  “It’s a lot of other people’s fault much more than yours. Especially the people who took her.”

  “I know, but if I’d been with her, they wouldn’t have taken her.”

  Susan nodded.

  “Why not call the Belmont Police?” she said.

  “Same as with Quirk. They can’t just charge in there. They have to have a warrant. And there has to be some reasonable suspicion, and I don’t have anything to give them. And … I don’t know. They might screw it up.”

  “Which means that you want to do it yourself.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Even if it endangers her?”

  “I don’t want to endanger her. I trust me more than I trust anyone else. Her life is on the line here. I want me to be the one who’s in charge.”

  “And because you have to even up with the people that took her,” Susan said, “you’re willing to go after her alone and risk the whole thing, including both your lives, because your honor has been tarnished, or you think it has.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t want some Belmont cop in charge of this whose last bust was two ninth-graders with an ounce of Acapulco gold.”

  “And Quirk or Frank Belson can’t go because they don’t have jurisdiction, and they don’t have a warrant and all of the above?”

  I nodded.

  We turned the corner onto Arlington and walked along in the middle of the bright street, like a scene from Currier and Ives.

  “Why don’t you find Hawk and have him go with you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Why not?”

  “I’m going alone.”

  “I thought you would. What if something happens to you?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like suppose you sneak in there and someone shoots you. If you’re right, you are dealing with people capable of that.”

  “Then you tell Quirk everything you know. And tell Hawk to find Rachel Wallace for me.”

  “I don’t even know how to get in touch with Hawk. Do I call that health club on the waterfront?”

  “If something happens to me, Hawk will show up and see if you need anything.”

  We were on the corner of Marlborough Street. Susan stopped and looked at me. “You know that so certainly?”

  “Yes.”

  She shook her head and kept shaking it. “You people are like members of a religion or a cult. You have little rituals and patterns you observe that nobody else understands.”

  “What people?”

  “People like you. Hawk, Quirk, that state policeman you met when the boy was kidnaped.”

  “Healy.”

  “Yes, Healy. The little trainer at the Harbor Health Club. All of you. You’re as complexly programmed as male wildebeests, and you have no common sense at all.”

  “Wildebeests?” I said.

  “Or Siamese fighting fish.”

  “I prefer to think lion, panther maybe.”

  We walked to my apartment. “I suppose,” Susan said, “we could settle for ox. Not as strong but nearly as smart.”

  Susan went to the apartment. I went to the basement and got some more firewood from the storage area and carried an armful up the back stairs. It was early afternoon. We had lunch. We watched the news. The travel ban was still with us.

  “At least wait until morning,” Susan said. “Get an early start.”

  “And until then?”

  “We can read by the f
ire.”

  “When that gets boring, I was thinking we could make shadow pictures on the wall. Ever see my rooster?”

  Susan said, “I’ve never heard it called that.” I put my arm around her shoulder and squeezed her against me and we began to giggle. We spent the rest of the day before the fire on the couch. Mostly we read.

  29

  By seven thirty the next morning I was on the road. I had a flashlight in my hip pocket, a short prying tool stuck in my belt, my packet of floor plans in my shirt pocket, and my usual jackknife and gun. Susan kissed me goodbye without getting up, and I left without hearing any more wildebeest remarks. I walked up Marlborough to the Mass. Ave. Bridge along a quiet and narrow lane, one plow-blade wide, with the snow head-high on either side of me. Below the bridge the Charles was frozen and solid white. No sign of the river. Memorial Drive had one lane cleared in either direction, and I turned west. I had learned to walk some years ago at government expense when I had walked from Pusan to the Yalu River and then back. I moved right along. After the first mile or so I had a nice rhythm and even felt just a trickle of sweat along the line of my backbone.

  It was shorter than I thought. I was on Trapelo Road in Belmont by ten forty-five. By eleven I was standing two houses away from the English place, across the street. Now if I found Rachel Wallace, I wouldn’t have to walk back. The cops would drive me. Maybe.

  The house was three stories high. Across the front was a wide veranda. A long wing came off the back, and at the end of the wing there was a carriage house with a little pointed cupola on top. Mingo probably parked the family Caddies in the carriage house. There was a back door, which led through a back hall into the kitchen, according to Julie. Off the back hall there were back stairs. The veranda turned one corner and ran back along the short side of the house, the one without the wing. Big french doors opened out onto the library, where I’d talked with English before. The yard wasn’t as big as you’d expect with a house like that. Last century when they’d built the house there was plenty of land, so no one had wanted it. Now there wasn’t and they did. The neighbor’s house was maybe fifty feet away on one side, a street was ten feet away on the other, and the backyard was maybe a hundred feet deep. A chain-link fence surrounded the property, except in front, where there was a stone wall, broken by the driveway. There was no sign of the driveway now and very little of the fence in the high snow. It took me nearly two and a half hours of clambering about through snowbanks and side streets to get all of the layout of the grounds and to look at the house from all sides. When I got through, I was sweaty underneath my jacket, and the shoulder rig I was wearing chafed under my left arm. I figured it was better than walking ten miles with the gun jiggling in a hip holster.

  There were people out now, shoveling and walking to the store for supplies, and a lot of laughter and neighborly hellos and a kind of siege mentality that made everyone your buddy. I studied the house. The shutters on the top-floor windows were closed, all of them, on the left side and in front. I strolled around the corner and up the side street to the right of the house. The top-floor shutters were closed there, too. I went on down the road till I could see the back shutters.

  I knew where I’d look first if I ever got in there. That was the only detail to work out. Julie had told me there was a burglar alarm, and that her mother had always set it before she went to bed. Going in before Mom went to bed would seem to be the answer to that. It would help if I knew who was in there. Mingo, probably. I saw what looked like his tan Thunderbird barely showing through a snowdrift back by the carriage house. There’d be a maid or two probably, and Momma and Lawrence. Whoever was in there when the storm came would be in there now. There were no tracks, no sign of shoveling, just the smooth white sea of snow out of which the old Victorian house rose like a nineteenth-century ship.

  I thought about getting in. Trying the old I’m-from-the-power-company trick. But the odds were bad. English knew me, Mingo knew me. At least one of the maids knew me. If I got caught and they got wise, things would be worse. They might kill Rachel. They might kill me, if they could. And that would leave Rachel with no one looking for her the way I was looking for her. Hawk would find her eventually, but he wouldn’t have my motivation. Hawk’s way would be prompt though. Maybe he’d find her quicker. He’d hold English out a twenty-story window till English said where Rachel was.

  I thought about that. It wasn’t a bad way. The question was, How many people would I have to go through to hang English out the window? There were probably at least five people in there—Mingo, English, Momma, and two maids—but the whole Vigilance Committee could be in there sharpening their pikes for all I knew.

  It was two o’clock. Nothing was happening. People like English wouldn’t have to come out till April. They’d have food in the pantry and booze in the cellar and fuel in the tank and nothing to make winter inconvenient. Did they have a hostage in the attic? Why hadn’t there been some kind of communication? Why no more ransom notes or threats about canceling the books or anything? Had they been snowed out? I didn’t know any of the answers to any of the questions, and I could only think of one way to find out.

  At two fifteen I waded through the snow, sometimes waist-deep, and floundered up to the front door and rang the bell. If they knew me, they knew me. I’d deal with that if it happened. A maid answered.

  I said, “Mr. English, please.”

  She said, “Who may I say is calling?”

  I said, “Joseph E. McCarthy.”

  She said, “Just a moment, please,” and started to close the door.

  I said, “Wait a minute. It’s cold, and we’ve had a blizzard. Couldn’t I wait in the front hall?”

  And she hesitated and I smiled at her disarmingly but a bit superior, and she nodded and said, “Of course, sir. I’m sorry. Come in.”

  I went in. She closed the door behind me and went off down the corridor and through a door and closed it behind her. I went up the front stairs as quietly as I could. There was a landing and then a short left turn, then three steps to the upstairs hall. Actually there were two upstairs halls. One ran from front to back and the other, like the cross of a capital T, ran the width of the house and led into the wing hall.

  I had the general layout in my head. I’d spent most of my time in front of yesterday’s fire looking at Julie’s diagrams. The stairway to the attic was down the hall in a small back bedroom. The house was quiet. Faintly somewhere I could hear television. There was a smell of violet sachet and mothballs in the small bedroom. The door to the stairs was where it should have been. It was a green wooden door made of narrow vertical boards with a small bead along one edge. It was closed. There was a padlock on it.

  Behind me I heard no hue and cry. The maid would be returning now to say that Mr. English didn’t know a Joseph E. McCarthy, or that the one he knew wasn’t likely to be calling here. I took my small pry bar from my belt. The padlock hasp wasn’t very new, and neither was the door. The maid would look and not see me and be puzzled and would look outside and perhaps around downstairs a little before she reported to English that Mr. McCarthy had left. I wedged the blade of the pry bar under the hasp and pulled the whole thing out of the wood, screws and all. It probably wasn’t much louder than the clap of Creation. It just seemed so because I was tense. The door opened in, and the stairs went up a right angle, very steep, very narrow treads and high risers. I closed the door and went up the stairs with hand and feet touching like a hungry monkey. Upstairs the attic was pitch-black. I got out my flashlight and snapped it on and held it in my teeth to keep my hands free. I had the pry bar in my right hand.

  The attic was rough and unfinished except for what appeared to be two rooms, one at each gabled end. All the windows had plywood over them. I took one quick look and noticed the plywood was screwed in, not nailed. Someone had wanted it to be hard to remove. I tried one door at the near end of the attic. It was locked. I went and tried the other. It opened, and I went in holding the pry bar like a
weapon. Except for an old metal frame bed and a big steamer trunk and three cardboard boxes it was empty. The windows were covered with plywood.

  If Rachel was up here, she was back in the other room at the gable end. And she was here—I could feel her. I could feel my insides clench with the certainty that she was behind that other door. I went back to it. There was a padlock, this one new, with a new hasp. I listened. No sound from the room. Downstairs I could hear footsteps. I rammed the pry bar in under the hasp and wrenched the thing loose. The adrenaline was pumping, and I popped the whole thing off and ten feet across the attic floor with one lunge. There was saliva on my chin from holding the flashlight. I took the light in my hand and shoved into the room. It stunk. I swept the flashlight around. On an iron-frame bed with a gray blanket around her, half-raised, was Rachel Wallace, and she looked just awful. Her hair was a mess, and she had no make-up, and her eyes were swollen. I reversed the flashlight and shone it on my face.

  “It’s Spenser,” I said.

  “Oh, my God,” she said. Her voice was hoarse.

  The lights went on suddenly. There must have been a downstairs switch, and I’d missed it. The whole attic was bright. I snicked off the flashlight and put it in my pocket and took out my gun and said, “Get under the bed.”

  Rachel rolled onto the floor and under the bed. Her feet were bare. I heard footsteps coming up the stairs, and then they stopped. They’d spotted the ruptured door. It sounded like three sets of footsteps. I looked up. The light in this room came from a bare bulb that hung from a zinc fixture in the ceiling. I reached up with the pry bar and smashed the bulb. The room was dark except for the light from beyond the door.

  Outside, a woman’s voice said, “Who is in there?” It was an old voice but not quavery and not weak. I didn’t say anything. Rachel made no sound.

  The voice said, “You are in trespass in there. I want you out. There are two armed men out here. You have no chance.”

  I got down on the floor and snaked along toward the door. In the light at the head of the stairs was Mingo with a double-barreled shotgun and English with an automatic pistol. Between them and slightly forward was a woman who looked like a man, and an ugly, mean man at that. She was maybe five eight and heavy, with a square massive face and short gray hair. Her eyebrows came straight across with almost no arch and met over the bridge of her nose. They were black.