Thin Air s-22

by Robert B. Parker

  "Self-regard, I suppose, is as good a word as any," Susan said. "At bottom you are pleased with yourself."

  "Self-regard? How about saying I have an optimally integrated self? Wouldn't that sound better?"

  "Of course it would. I wish I'd said it."

  "Go ahead, claim you did," I said. "In a while I'll think so too."

  "It's what made you survive our separation, the thing you got before you knew it, from your father and your uncles."

  Dinner was over, the last Rolling Rock had been drunk. Susan had guzzled nearly a third of her glass of red wine.

  "Heaviest rap I've had in a long time," I said.

  "Were you able to follow the hard parts okay?"

  "I think so," I said. "But the effort has exacerbated my libido."

  "Is there any effort that does not exacerbate your libido?" Susan said.

  "I don't think so," I said. "Shall we go back to your place and explore my vulnerability?"

  "What about Pearl?"

  "She's a dog. Let her explore her own vulnerability," I said.

  "I'll ask her to go in the living room," Susan said. "Was I really wearing blue eye shadow when you met me?"

  "Un huh."

  "God, never tell the fashion police."

  The first thing she was aware of as she came to consciousness was a silent voice.

  "Frank will find me," the voice said. "Frank will find me."

  Then she smelled the roach powder. She had once lived in an apartment where the janitor put it out every day to fight the roaches. She knew the smell; it seemed almost reassuring in its familiarity. She opened her eyes. She was in bed, with a purple silk coverlet over her, her head propped on several ivory lace pillows. She tried to sit up. She was still tied. The knotted scarf was still in her mouth. She could hear someone laughing. It sounded familiar. Silly laughter, happy and slightly manic. Around the room were television monitors, some on light stands, some suspended from the high ceiling, at least five of them. On each monitor Lisa saw herself, her head thrown back, laughing. She had on a daring swimsuit, and in the background the ocean advanced and receded. She remembered the day. They had been at Crane's Beach. She had brought chicken and French bread and nectarines and wine.

  She heard herself shriek with laughter as he poured a little wine down her bra. The sound went suddenly silent, leaving only the noiseless images of her giggling on the silent screens. Suddenly, shocking the darkness in the room where she lay helplessly watching herself, there was the sudden white light of the video camera. She heard the whir of the tape moving, and the whine of the zoom lens. He came out of the darkness behind the monitors, with his camera.

  "Don't you love Crane's Beach, Angel?" he said, the camera in front of his face. "We'll go there again… Look at us, is that great?… Me Tarzan, you Jane."

  On the monitors, there was a shot of her home in Jamaica Plain, then a splice jump and her face appeared on the screen, close up, her mouth contorted into something almost like a grin by the tightness of the gag. The camera zoomed back. She was on the floor in the back of the van, her eyes shiny in the pitiless light. On the bed she turned her head away. He reached out and gently turned it back.

  "I have to see you, baby, don't be coy."

  And he filmed her in time present watching films he'd taken of her in times past.

  Chapter 3

  I sat inside the frosted glass cubicle where the Homicide Commander had his office and talked with Martin Quirk about Belson.

  "Frank's taking some time off," Quirk said.

  His blue blazer hung on a hanger on a hook inside his door. He wore a white shirt and a maroon knit tie and his thick hands rested quietly on the near-empty desk between us. He was always quiet, except when he got mad, then he was quieter. Nobody much wanted to make him mad.

  "I know," I said.

  "You know why?"

  "Needed a rest."

  "You know about his wife?"

  "Yes."

  "Me too," I said.

  "What do you know?"

  "I know she's gone."

  Quirk nodded.

  "Okay," he said. "So I don't have to be cute."

  "Is that what you were being?"

  "Yeah."

  "He's afraid she left him," I said.

  "Happens," Quirk said.

  "You've never had the experience," I said.

  "You have."

  "Yeah."

  "I remember."

  "There's nothing logical about your first reactions," I said.

  "Must be why they call it crazy time."

  "That's why," I said. "What do you know about her?"

  "No, you got it wrong," Quirk said. "I'm the copper. I say stuff like that to you."

  "Frank won't talk about her."

  Quirk nodded. "But you, being a fucking Eagle Scout, are nosing around."

  "That's how I like to think of it," I said.

  "Frank's kind of fucked up about this."

  "So what do you know about her?"

  "Her name's Lisa St. Claire. She's a disc jockey at a station in Proctor, which is one of those jerkwater cities up by New Hampshire."

  "I know Proctor," I said.

  "Good for you," Quirk said. "Frank met her about a year ago. In the bar at the Charles Hotel. Frank had just gone through the divorce. The old lady didn't let go easy. You ever meet adorable Kitty?"

  I nodded.

  "So Lisa looked good to him. Hell, she looks good to me, and I'm happily married. Frank probably did the I'm-a-police-detective trick, always works great."

  "How the hell do you know?" I said.

  "Used to work great for me."

  "You got married before you were a detective."

  Quirk grinned.

  "I used to lie," he said. "Anyway, she and Frank started going out. They moved in together about a month later, his old lady had the house. Maybe six months ago they got married and bought that place out near the pond."

  "She got money?"

  Quirk shrugged.

  "How much does a disc jockey make?"

  "More than a cop."

  "'Cause they're more valuable," he said. "Frank worked a lot of overtime, probably had a little something put away, himself."

  "That his wife didn't get?"

  "He saw that coming for a long time," Quirk said. "Might have had a few bearer bonds someplace."

  "You know how old Lisa is?"

  "Nope, I'd guess around thirty. What do you think?"

  "Lot younger than Frank," I said.

  "And better looking. Frank was fucking blown away by how good looking she was."

  "Yeah," I said, "but is she a nice person?"

  "Maybe we'll find that out," Quirk said.

  "You know where she's from?"

  Quirk shrugged.

  "Family?"

  Shrug.

  "You know where she worked before Proctor?"

  "No."

  "Ever hear her program?"

  "No. I'm too busy listening to my Prince albums."

  "He doesn't call himself Prince anymore."

  "Who gives a fuck," Quirk said.

  "Nobody I know," I said. "She been married before?"

  "I don't know."

  "Thirty's kind of old for a first marriage," I said.

  "For crissake, Spenser, you've never been married at all."

  "Sure, that's odd, too. But I'm not missing."

  "Kids get laid now. They live with people. They don't marry as early."

  "How old were you?" I said.

  "Twenty," Quirk said.

  "Better to marry than burn," I said.

  "Worked out okay for me," Quirk said. "But a lot of people got married so they could fuck six times a week. Then in a while they only felt like fucking once a week and had to talk to each other in between. Created a lot of drunks."

  "You think she left him?" I said.

  "I don't know," Quirk said. "If she left him it'll kill him. If she didn't leave him… where the fuck is she?" />
  "Hard to know what to root for," I said.

  The window behind Quirk looked out into Stanhope Street, which was little more than an alley. If you stood up and looked, you could see Bertucci's Pizza, where the Red Coach Grill once was. A pigeon settled on Quirk's window ledge and sidled across it, puffing up his feathers as he went. He turned sideways and looked in at us with one eye. Behind me in the squad room the phone rang periodically, sometimes only once, sometimes for much too long. A phone call to Homicide didn't usually bring good news.

  I stood up. The pigeon watched me.

  "I hear anything, I'll let you know," Quirk said.

  I opened Quirk's door. As I went out, the pigeon flew away.

  She was out of bondage. And she was alone. On the monitors were images of him, carefully untying the scarves. The release helped reduce her panic a little. She could at least move. She could speak, though there was no one but him to speak to.

  "We will save these scarves, amor mio," he said on the monitors. "They are part of our reuniting. "

  She sat on the edge of her bed waiting for the pins and needles of reawakened circulation to subside. It was a huge, four-poster Victorian bed fitted with pale lavender satin sheets covered with a thick damask canopy. Around the bed were theater flats, creating a tarnished and shabby illusion of green meadows, and willow trees, archaic stone walls, and an elongated English pointer in field pose. In the distance, lambs grazed under the gaze of a young shepherd with no shoes and a crook. A winding road dwindled in geometric perspective through the meadow, and curved out of sight behind the wall. Some of the flats she knew were from a Children's Theater production of Rumpelstiltskin. How he had gotten them she didn't know. Behind the flats the windows were boarded up, and the light came from a series of clamp lights on the web of pipes near the black painted ceiling, as well as the glow of the television monitors, which looped the same sequences over and over. The monitors were silent again. He seemed to control the sound whimsically. There were gauze cloths draped among the lights, masking the ceiling and creating a tattered semblance of gossamer eternity above. A big oak wardrobe stood against the wall opposite the foot of the bed. Its double doors were open, and the wardrobe was packed with theatrical costumes. In the far wall to the right of the bed was a doorway. She got up when she could and went to it, walking with difficulty, her legs still numb and tingling. The door was locked. She hadn't thought it would be open. She turned and began to circle the room, running her hands around the black plywood panels that had been nailed in place over the windows. One of the panels was hinged on one side and padlocked on the other. Another had an air conditioner cut into it. All of them were impenetrable. She opened her mouth and worked her jaw a little. Her mouth, which had felt so wet when she was gagged, now felt dry and stiff. She said "Hello" out loud a couple of times to see if she could speak. The noise was rusty and small in the sealed room. She felt the claustrophobic panic again. She was untied, but she was not free. To the left of the armoire was a bathroom, the door ajar, the light on dimly. The walls were pink plastic tile. There was a pink chenille cover on the toilet seat, and the one-piece fiberglass shower stall had a pink tinted glass door on it. There were flowers in a vase, and a thick pink rug on the floor. There was no window. Behind her she heard the camera sound.

  "You should shower, querida. There is French milled soap, and lilac shampoo, and there are fresh clothes for you in the armoire… Do not be shy… I will have everything on tape… we will watch it all together when we are old."

  She stared at him, unmoving. She was wearing the sweat-soaked blouse and jeans that she'd been wearing when he took her.

  "Take off your clothes, chiquita, you need to shower and change."

  She continued to stare at him. She had been naked with him before. They had made love often. But now it was as if a stranger had ordered her to disrobe in public. She could think of no words.

  "Do it," he said and his voice was full of hate, "or I will have it done."

  She stared at him still, and the camera continued to whir. She felt the bottomlessness of herself, the sense of weakness that raced along her arms and clenched in her stomach. It was an old feeling. She'd had it many times. She didn't want to. She couldn't bear to. She was being forced to. There was no way not to. The two of them stood poised like that, in a kind of furious immobility for an infinite time in which all there was was the sound of the camera tape rolling, and of her breath and his, both slightly raspy. Helpless, she thought. I'm helpless again. Then, slowly, she began to unbutton her blouse.

  Chapter 4

  I sat in a coffee shop on Columbus Avenue with Frank Belson and drank a cup of decaffeinated coffee on an ugly spring day with the sky a hard gray and a spit of rain mixed with snow flakes in the air. He hadn't found his wife yet.

  "You meet her before you got divorced from Kitty?" I said, mostly to be saying something.

  "No."

  "So she wasn't the reason for the divorce," I said.

  "The divorce was just making it official," he said. "The marriage had been fucked for a long time."

  I was on one of my periodic attempts to give up coffee. The previous failures were discouraging, but not final. I stirred more sugar into my decaf to disguise it.

  "Kitty was bad," Belson said, looking at the faintly iridescent surface of his real coffee. "Hysterical, nervous-thought fucking was only a way to get children. Didn't want children, but didn't want anyone to get ahead of her by having them first. You know?"

  "I was never one of Kitty's rooters," I said.

  "Money," he said. "I never saw anyone worry about money like her. How to get it, how to save it, why we shouldn't spend it, why I should earn more. How we were going to hold up our head in the neighborhood when Trudy Fitzgerald's husband made twice what I did being an engineer at Sylvania. If I would of paid her to fuck she'd have done it every night."

  "What could be more natural," I said.

  "'Course, after the first couple months I would probably have paid her not to. But we had the kid and then we had a couple more. Kitty always knew the correct number of children to have. She had all the damn rules down, you know? Whether you needed a house on the water, whether the girls should go to parochial school, whether you should add salt to the water before you boiled it, what kind of underwear a decent woman wore."

  He stopped talking for a while. He still held the coffee, but he didn't drink it. I waited. A couple of cops came in and sat at the counter. Belson nodded at them without speaking. Both cops ordered coffee, one had a piece of pineapple pie with it.

  "But you didn't get a divorce," I said.

  "We were Catholics since twenty fucking thousand years ago. And we had the kids, and, shit, the time went by and we'd been married twenty-three years and barely spoke. I worked a lot of overtime."

  "And then you met Lisa," I said.

  "Yeah. Cambridge had picked up a guy named Wozak on an assault warrant, thought he might be a guy we were looking for; clipped an informant we use, junkie named Eddie Navarrone. Eddie's no loss, but it's a departmental policy to discourage murder when we can, so I went over and talked with Wozak. Might be our guy, I'm not sure. Cambridge has got him cold, so he's not going anywhere. At least until some judge walks him because he was denied health insurance."

  "Or they got no place to put him," I said.

  Belson shrugged, his back still to me, staring out at the grim spring day.

  "Oughta put him in the ground," Belson said.

  I ordered another decaf. Belson's coffee must have turned cold in his cup while we talked. He still held it, and he didn't drink it. He glanced out at the early spring snow spatter.

  "You seen any robins yet?" Belson said.

  "No."

  "Me either."

  "Did you meet Lisa in Cambridge?" I said.

  "Yeah."

  "You want to tell me about it or shall I make something up and you tell me if I'm getting warm?"

  Belson took a sip of coffee, shook h
is head and put it down.

  "It's about five-thirty. I'm at the bar at the Charles Hotel, having a vodka and tonic. And she's at the bar. It's not a big bar, you ever been there?"

  "Yeah."

  "She had on a yellow dress, and one of those hats with the brim turned up all around that women wear right down over their eyes, and she's drinking the same thing. And she says to me, `What kind of vodka?' And I say, `Stoli,' and she smiles at me, says, `That's what I used to drink. Great minds, huh?"'

  The two cops at the counter finished their coffee, got up, and headed for the door. Belson watched them go. "Area B guys," he said absently.

  "So it began," I said.

  "Yeah. And she asked me what I did and I told her and she said, `Are you carrying a gun?' and I said, `Yeah, pointing your finger at them doesn't work,' and she laughed and we talked the rest of the night. And I didn't go home with her, but I got her number and I called her the next day."

  He paused again, watching the two cops get into a gray Ford sedan and pull away from the hydrant they'd parked on. Then he spoke again, still staring after the departing car.

  "She wasn't, isn't, like anyone else. She was all there in the right-now, you know? She was everything she was, all the time. Nothing held back, no games. And the first time we went to bed she said to me, `I'll tell you anything about myself you want to know, but if it's up to me, I'd like to pretend life started the night we met.' And I said, `Sure. No past. No nothing, just you and me.' And that's how it's been. I don't know anything about her except with me."

  I waited, sipping my decaf. Belson sat quietly.

  "You think Kitty might have anything to do with Lisa going away?"

  "No," Belson said slowly. "I've thought about it. And no. Kitty's a bad asshole, but she's not that kind of bad asshole. She's in Florida with her sister, been there since February tenth."

  She could have had it done, I thought. But that implied things it would do Belson no good to think about.

  "You think you might want to look into Lisa's background a little, now that this has happened?"

  "Yeah," Belson said. "I haven't, but I know I have to."

  After a while I said, "You'll find her."