Painted Ladies s-39

by Robert B. Parker

  “That’s the spirit,” I said.

  “I know,” she said. “Seems kind of, what? Pathetic, now all this time later. What we know about the Bureau. What we know about the government. What we know about . . .” She shrugged. “What we know about everything.”

  “We all gotta forgive ourselves our youth,” I said.

  “But it was kind of pathetic,” she said. “Doesn’t it sound pathetic?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Some.”

  She looked relieved, as if I’d complimented her.

  “I was in Chicago,” she said. “And we were working on a case involving art theft from a private collector in Evanston.”

  “Where Northwestern is,” I said. Just to let her know I was alert.

  “Yuh. There were several of us on it; the guy they were stolen from was connected in D.C. I was the only female, and I outworked all of them. We always had a lot of money to pay for information. Local cops resented us for that.”

  “They never had enough,” I said.

  “No. I got a lead from a snitch, I don’t even remember the details. They may have tried to recruit him for something. He told me about a gang of art thieves that he said had something to do with the World War Two prisons or something, and how a lot of Jews got killed.”

  She paused and drank some coffee and smiled very slightly.

  “He told me all this like it was news. I don’t think he’d ever heard of the Holocaust and was only vaguely aware of World War Two.”

  “Snitches don’t always have a broad historical perspective,” I said.

  “Probably why they’re snitches,” she said. “Anyway, the tip was good. It led me to a guy who was apparently in the business of finding and liberating Jewish-owned art stolen by the Nazis.”

  “Still?” I said.

  “Well, we’re talking twenty years ago,” she said. “But yes, still.”

  “Holocaust throws a long shadow,” I said. “Doesn’t it.”

  “Yes. So I confront this guy, and he’s, like, unshakeable. Doesn’t deny. Doesn’t admit. And is so charming about it,” she said. “I spent a lot of time with him, working on him. But more and more I was spending it because I wanted to. I started looking forward to seeing him again. And I could tell, I thought, that he felt the same way.”

  “Until one day . . .” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “In a room at the Park Hyatt near the water tower off Michigan Avenue.”

  “I know where it is,” I said.

  “It became our place,” she said. “We didn’t go there all the time. We couldn’t afford it. But on special dates. You know, our one-week anniversary. Our one-month anniversary . . .”

  She stopped talking for a bit and looked through my window at the soft snow.

  “Pathetic,” she said.

  “No,” I said. “A run like that isn’t pathetic. It may be ill-advised. Might even be contrived. Might be cathexis and not love. But the feelings are real when you have them. And they are not valueless.”

  “ ‘Cathexis’?”

  “Libidinal energy,” I said. “Sorry. I’m in love with a shrink.”

  “And it’s different than love?”

  “The shrink I’m in love with says so.”

  “I wonder how much shrinks know about love?” she said.

  “Mine knows a lot,” I said. “But not, I think, because she’s a shrink. How soon did you get pregnant?”

  “You know where this is going,” she said.

  “I think so.”

  “Maybe you and I are developing some cathexis?” she said.

  “Absolutely,” I said. “But my shrink won’t let me.”

  “I was pregnant the second month we were together,” she said.

  “I assume the investigation had slowed during this period.”

  “Worse,” she said. “I warned him what we had.”

  “How’d he take to the pregnancy?” I said.

  “He wanted me to abort,” she said.

  “And?”

  She shook her head.

  “I had already sold out the Bureau for him,” she said. “I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t kill the baby for him.”

  “How’d he take that?”

  “He said there were things he had to do, and they didn’t include marriage and children.”

  “He have numbers tattooed on his forearm?”

  “Yes.”

  “The baby was Missy?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the father was Ariel Herzberg,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  53

  Her eyes had filled with tears. I handed her a box of Kleenex and took her coffee cup and poured her some fresh coffee. I looked at my watch; it was two in the afternoon. Late enough in the day. I took a bottle of Irish whiskey from a drawer in my file cabinet and held it up. She stared blankly at it for a moment, then nodded. I poured some into the coffee and gave her back her cup.

  “You had the baby alone,” I said.

  She sipped her enhanced coffee.

  “Yes,” she said. “I obviously couldn’t let the Bureau know what was going on. So I took a leave. My doctor, a lovely woman named Martha Weidhaus, contrived me a medical reason. I had the baby, hired a nanny, and went back to work.”

  “Pressed for money?” I said.

  “Of course,” she said. “Ariel would occasionally send some, for which I was grateful. But I could never count on it.”

  “Did you see him?”

  “No. After I got pregnant he disappeared.”

  “What does Missy know about him?” I said.

  “I told her he was dead,” Winifred said. “And she bought that, though she still wanted to know about him, what his name was, what he was like, what he worked at, how we had met. I created quite an admirable fictional character over the years.”

  “Anyone ask you about that case you had in Chicago?”

  “Often,” Winifred said. “It kept poking at me with its nose. Like a dog at suppertime. It’s one of the reasons I left, and took this job.”

  “Plus better pay,” I said. “And no heavy lifting.”

  She nodded.

  “Missy is seeing Ariel. Does she know who he is?”

  “Yes,” Winifred said. “He showed up one day when she was sixteen and introduced himself.”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  “It wasn’t the way to do it,” she said. “And I don’t know how much damage it did. But Ariel always wanted what he wanted and didn’t think much about damage . . . to others. She got a little hysterical at me for lying to her, at him for not being there, but he talked to her, and I watched her fall in love with him the way I did.”

  “Why did he show up?”

  “I don’t know,” Winifred said. “I never knew why he sent us money when he did. I never know why he does what he does. But I am almost certain it is finally in his own best interest, not someone else’s.”

  “He hang around for a while?” I said.

  “Yes, still does. He and I have not taken up again. I’m older and wiser. But he sees Missy regularly. I have warned her about him. But she is . . . She is infatuated with him . . . like I was. She wanted to be an art major. And she wanted to go to Walford. He got her in. ‘No problem,’ he said. ‘I have a friend there.’”

  “Ashton Prince,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “What do they do together?” I said.

  She shook her head and drank some coffee.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “They don’t . . . They exclude me.”

  “That’ll fix you,” I said.

  “For telling her he was dead?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I was trying to protect her,” Winifred said. “He’s not cruel, or even mean. But he’s entirely interested in himself, and what he wants.”

  “Well,” I said. “I’m going to solve that problem for you.”

  “You have enough evidence?”

  “Not yet,” I said.

&n
bsp; “But you will,” Winifred said.

  “Sooner or later,” I said.

  She stared at me for a while and nodded.

  “Yes,” she said. “You will.”

  She handed me her cup.

  “Don’t bother with the coffee,” she said.

  I poured some whiskey in the cup and gave it back to her. She sipped some.

  “I’ll be as kind as I can be,” I said. “If she’s involved, I’ll try to keep her, and you, out of it.”

  “Oh, God,” Winifred said. “It will kill her. I don’t know what to hope for.”

  “It’s well beyond hope,” I said.

  “I know,” she said, and sipped again. “If I were outside looking in, which I’m not, I wish I were—if I were outside, I’d think this was very interesting.”

  “Because?” I said.

  “Because you’re as implacable as he is,” she said. “Be interesting to see who wins.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m interested in that, too.”

  54

  An outfit named Galvin Contracting came in and restored my bombed-out bedroom. They put in a new window, changed the lock on my front door, and even assembled the new bed when it was delivered. They repainted the bedroom, same color, more gray than tan but with some hint of both, depending on the light. Susan came with me when I moved back in. She brought with her a bunch of linens that she’d purchased for me. I helped her carry them in.

  “How’d you know what color I’d paint it?” I said.

  She looked at me and made a sound that, had she been less elegant, would have been a snort.

  “Are you implying by that look that I’m boringly predictable?” I said.

  She nodded vigorously.

  We made the bed together. The sheets and pillowcases were plum-colored. I went to the linen closet in the bathroom and got a black down comforter and put it on the bed. Susan went to the living room and got a large plastic bag with several decorative pillows in it. They appeared to match or contrast with the plum sheets.

  “What are those for?” I said.

  She ignored me and began to place them strategically on my bed until they covered more than half.

  “Where do I sleep?” I said.

  “At night you take them off,” she said.

  “And put them on again in the morning?”

  “When you make the bed,” she said.

  “Every day?” I said.

  “Do you make the bed every day?”

  “I do,” I said.

  “Then of course,” she said. “Every day.”

  “Will you be stopping by to inspect every day?” I said.

  “No more than usual,” she said.

  I smiled.

  “Do I sense that they may not be on the bed when I’m not here?”

  “Hard to predict,” I said.

  “But they look so beautiful,” she said.

  There was nowhere to go with that, so I said, “How about lunch?”

  “Sounds good to me,” she said. “Where?”

  “Here,” I said. “I’ll leave the bedroom door open, and we can admire the pillows while we eat.”

  Susan looked at me kind of slant-eyed sideways and went to the kitchen counter and sat.

  “Whatcha gonna make?” she said.

  “How about cold chicken with mixed fruit and whole-wheat biscuits?”

  “What could be better,” she said.

  “Well, there’s one thing I can think of,” I said. “But there’s so many damn pillows on the bed. . . .”

  She grinned.

  “Oh, shut up,” she said.

  I took out the chicken to allow the refrigerator chill to dissipate, and some fruit salad, and started mixing the biscuits.

  “Is her mother going with you when you talk to Missy?” Susan said.

  “No,” I said. “Winifred says that she and her daughter are so at odds that she would only make matters worse.”

  “At odds over the father?” Susan asked.

  “I would say so.”

  “Women fighting over a man,” Susan said.

  “It’s that simple?” I said.

  “Oh, God, no,” Susan said. “I was just sort of musing aloud. Consider the girl. She thinks she has no father, that he’s dead, and she fantasizes the dream father, and then when she’s sixteen years old he appears and he seems to be the dream father she had imagined: handsome, mysterious, charming, and he comes to her. She’s furious with her mother for denying him all these sixteen years. On the other hand, it took him sixteen years to come see her. Who should she love? Who can she trust? How should she feel?”

  “Sixteen years is a long time when you’re sixteen,” I said.

  “A lifetime,” Susan said. “Do you have a plan?”

  “I thought I’d ask her about her relationship with her father and the Herzberg Foundation.”

  Susan smiled.

  “Subtle,” she said.

  I shrugged.

  “At the beginning I was walking around saying, ‘What’s going on?’ At least now I’ve narrowed the focus of my general questions.”

  “And after you’ve asked?” Susan said.

  “I’ll listen,” I said. “You know how that works.”

  “I do,” she said. “Though my goal is generally somewhat different.”

  “We’re both after the truth,” I said.

  “There’s that,” Susan said.

  55

  I fell in beside Missy Minor as she walked near the student union.

  “I don’t want to talk to you,” she said.

  “I don’t blame you,” I said. “You have so much you don’t want me to know.”

  She stopped walking and turned toward me.

  “What’s that mean?” she said.

  It had stopped snowing during the night. But it was kind of cold, and the wind tossed the new snow around in small white eddies.

  “I’ll explain if we can get out of the cold,” I said. “Buy you breakfast?”

  “I had breakfast,” she said.

  “No reason you can’t have another one,” I said.

  “I’ll have coffee,” she said.

  We went into the student union and got a table in the far corner of the cafeteria. At mid-morning, the place was half empty. I had milk and sugar in my coffee. She drank hers black.

  “I know that your father is Ariel Herzberg and that you and he see one another,” I said.

  “My mother tell you that?”

  “I’ve talked with your mother,” I said. “But I actually saw you and him together in the library.”

  “You’ve been spying on me,” she said.

  “I have.”

  “Why,” she said. “Why don’t you just leave me alone?”

  “Wish I could,” I said. “But you are alleged to have been intimate with a murder victim, and the man who killed him appears to be your father.”

  “You’re disgusting,” she said.

  “But only a little,” I said. “You involved at all with the foundation?”

  “I’m not involved with anything,” she said. “I hate you.”

  Even for nineteen, she was young.

  “Must be hard,” I said. “No father for sixteen years and all of a sudden a father. What’s that like?”

  “It’s a bitch, is what it’s like,” she said. “I mean, for sixteen years my mother lied through her teeth that he was dead. You know, she never even told me he sent money. You know that they were never married?”

  “She told you they were?”

  “Yeah, and that he died after I was conceived,” she said. “Fact is, for crissake, she was shacking up with some guy who had no intention of marrying her, and when she got knocked up, he left.”

  “Tough on her, I guess,” I said.

  “She wanted him to marry her? There’s a laugh. He didn’t love her. He was just enjoying a little joyride, you know?”

  “But he came back,” I said.

  “He came back for me,”
she said. “He said he always wanted to but she wouldn’t let him.”

  “Why do you suppose she did that?” I said.

  “Jealousy,” she said. “She knew if he was in my life I’d love him, and she didn’t want that.”

  “Wow,” I said. “She was pretty mean, huh?”

  Nothing like sowing a little family strife for stirring up information.

  “Awful,” Missy said. “But Daddy is great. He got me into Walford. He introduced me to Ashton, Professor Prince; he’s been great.”

  “Who pays the tuition?” I said.

  “She does. She can afford it, already had the money put aside. Besides, she’s got a good job.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I imagine the foundation doesn’t pay too much.”

  “God, no. Daddy’s not interested in money.”

  “What does the foundation do?” I said.

  She opened her mouth and closed it. I could almost read her face. This way danger lay.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “That’s surprising,” I said. “How close you are.”

  “He loves me, and I love him,” she said. “That’s all anyone needs to know.”

  “’Cept me,” I said. “I need to know more.”

  “Well, I’m not going to tell you anything,” she said.

  She began to cry and stood suddenly and walked away, almost running. In the detective business, charm never fails.

  56

  With my feet on my desk and the Globe open before me, I phoned Susan.

  “I see in the paper,” I said, “that there’s an Evening of Verse being held at a church in Cambridge.”

  “Hot dog,” Susan said.

  “One of the performers is Rosalind Wellington.”

  “No kidding,” Susan said.

  “Do you remember who Rosalind Wellington is?” I said.

  “No.”

  “She’s Mrs. Ashton Prince,” I said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Want to go?”

  “ ‘Go’?” Susan said.

  “Attend, listen to her read her poetry,” I said.

  “You think she is any good?” Susan said. “That any of the poets reading there will be any good?”

  “No,” I said. “No, of course not. It’ll be awful.”

  “Wow,” Susan said. “That’s persuasive.”