“Why ‘of course’?”
Rosie discovered the empty wrapper to a Mounds bar crumpled in the corner of a building, and we came to a halt while she sniffed it very carefully.
“Most grown-ups, when they are dating, become intimate,” I said.
“Including you?”
“Including me,” I said.
“Do you have much experience?”
“Not enough.”
“Why ‘not enough’?”
“Another weak gesture toward wit,” I said. “Why do you ask?”
“Well…”
Elizabeth paused and watched Rosie sniff the candy wrapper, as if she found it interesting. I waited. Rosie concluded that there was nothing palatable left in the wrapper, and turned from it and leaned against the leash, ready to forge on. Elizabeth and I followed her. Elizabeth tried again.
“Do…?”
“Do what,” I said.
“This is very difficult, Sunny. I never had sex with anyone but Hal.”
“And now you have, and probably a good thing,” I said.
I could almost hear Elizabeth inhale.
“Do all the men you go out with perform?”
“Oh,” I said. “That’s it.”
“Well, do they?”
“Mostly,” I said. “I don’t think there are many women who haven’t been with a man who drank too much, and wasn’t, ah, up to the task. But it hasn’t happened often.”
“What do you do when that happens?”
“I assure him that it’s okay, and kiss him affectionately good night and thank him for the evening, and go home.”
“Do you see him again?”
“It only happened to me once, that I remember,” I said. “And no, I didn’t see him again.”
“Because he couldn’t perform?”
“No. If I liked him, I could wait for another try. But if you get so drunk while you’re with me that you can’t, for lack of a better phrase, complete the evening, what does that say about where I stand?”
“Where you stand?”
A man with an Akita on a thick leash came along the sidewalk toward us. Rosie spotted him and stopped and got very low, her ears flat, her tail down. Given the size of the Akita I felt like doing the same thing. The man smiled and tightened the leash up so that he held the Akita against his leg and we passed each other with plenty of room.
When the crisis had passed and Rosie was back up and sprightly again, I said, “Yes. I insist on ranking above booze.”
“I don’t think Mort was drunk,” she said.
“But he couldn’t get it up.”
“No. Is it my fault?”
“No.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because you look like me,” I said.
“No, seriously,” Elizabeth said.
“I was serious.”
“Well, besides that?”
“If you don’t excite a man, he won’t attempt your virtue in the first place,” I said.
“Attempt my virtue?”
“He won’t make a pass at you, Elizabeth. If Mort had taken you home and given you a peck on the cheek and said he’d call, then you might assume you didn’t excite him. But if he attempted to have sex and failed, it’s not you.”
“I was afraid that when he saw me with my clothes off that he…I’m thirty-eight years old.”
“It’s not about you, Elizabeth. It’s about him. Blood pressure medication. Stress. Maybe making all that money exhausts him.”
“I tried my best,” Elizabeth said. “I only know what worked with Hal, but I did everything I knew.”
“How’d he feel about it?” I said.
“Him?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know.”
“Jesus Christ!”
I tried to keep the irritation out of my voice. I felt sort of bad for her. It was like talking to a self-absorbed child.
“Maybe you should move on,” I said.
“To whom?”
“To the next guy that seems suitable. No rush. I like men, but I find it perfectly nice to be without one as needed. I’m enough.”
“That’s feminist propaganda. A woman without a man is nowhere, and you know it.”
“Actually, hon, I don’t know that.”
“Men are where the bucks are,” she said. “And anyone who pretends differently is just lying to themselves.”
“So you’re going to keep seeing Mort?”
“Absolutely.”
“And when the evening’s over you’ll go home and, what, grope him?”
“It’s where the bucks are,” she said. “You’d do exactly the same thing.”
If I was quick, I could push her in front of one of the fill trucks moving along Summer Street. She would be out of her misery. I would be out of mine. I could plead justifiable homicide.
“You would,” Elizabeth said. “You know you would.”
“Sure,” I said. “Sure I would.”
CHAPTER
24
I WAS IN a store in Cambridge called the Blossom Shop, talking to the owner, a black-haired woman with a short haircut, in black jeans and a black turtleneck, wearing gold-framed granny glasses. She had pale skin, a lot of dark eye makeup, and black lipstick.
“Your name wouldn’t be Addams, would it?” I said.
She told me her name was Blossom.
“Like the shop,” she said.
“Isn’t that adorable,” I said. “I’m working with Detective Larkin.”
“I don’t know any cops.”
I handed her a Xerox of the credit card statement.
“There are three charges for flowers,” I said. “I need to know who received them.”
“You say you’re with the police?”
“Sure.”
“Let me check.”
She went to the back of the store and sat down at a computer and fiddled with it for a bit.
“All three orders went to Mary Lou Goddard, in Chestnut Hill. You want the address?”
“No. I know it.”
“Is this an important clue?” Blossom said.
“It might be,” I said. “Watch the newspapers.”
After I left Blossom, I got my car and went up to Central Square to talk with Larkin. I found a parking space outside the police station on the curb by a sign that said police vehicles only. Larkin was in the squad room on the second floor, with five other detectives. He stood when I approached his desk, snagged a straight chair from next to another desk, and put it beside his. I sat down.
“Farrell called me. You’ve been doing some illegal entry.”
“Exactly,” I said.
There was a picture of a woman and three small children framed on Larkin’s desk.
“You’re not satisfied that Reeves killed himself?”
“No.”
“We like the theory,” Larkin said.
“Farrell likes it too. Did you happen to trace the gun?”
Larkin shrugged. He had blond hair combed straight back, a thin reddish face, and a thick redblond moustache. He wore a gold wedding band on his left hand.
“Not so far,” he said. “Nobody here figures it’s a high priority.”
“It’s not registered to Reeves?”
“Sunny, when you were a cop, how were the gun records?”
“Chaos.”
Larkin smiled.
“So,” I said, “we don’t even know if it’s Reeves’s gun.”
“Could have bought it out of state,” Larkin said. “Could have bought it illegally. Could have bought it down the street, filled out all the forms, and some clerk in Boston fi
led it under Zbigniew.”
“Anybody issue him a permit?”
“We haven’t.”
“But somebody might have.”
“Yep.”
“It’s something that could be ascertained.”
“‘Ascertained’? Wow, Sunny. You’re some talker.”
“But it could be,” I said.
“Sure. Eventually.”
“Could you look into that?”
Larkin grinned at me.
“You ever think how blond our kids would be if we mated?” he said.
“All the time,” I said. “See what you can find out for me about the gun.”
“Will it improve our chances of mating?”
“Won’t hurt them,” I said. I nodded at the picture on his desk. “They might.”
Larkin looked at the picture and smiled.
“Yeah,” he said. “They always do.”
I went across the river and got on the Mass Pike and drove out to Natick. The motel I was after was done up like a Norman castle. But I wasn’t fooled. I parked in the lot and went into the lobby and asked at the desk for the manager. The manager wasn’t available but the assistant manager was in. He would do.
The assistant manager’s name was Mr. Francis. His office was small and neat. He was tall, slim, and neat. Gray suit, red tie, white shirt, new haircut, a hint of cologne.
“My name is Randall,” I said. “I’m working with the Boston Police Department on a murder-suicide, and I need a little information.”
I sort of mumbled the “working with” part, but he was too slick for me.
“I hate to trouble you,” he said, “but may I see some identification?”
I handed some over. He read it.
“You’re a private detective,” he said.
“Yes.”
It didn’t seem to trouble him. He was employed to please people.
“How can I help?”
“I have a listing on a credit card bill, for a night at this hotel. I wonder if you could tell me who stayed here?”
“I can tell you who registered here, which may not, of course, be the same thing.”
“I know,” I said. “I’d be grateful for anything you can tell me.”
He took the bill and smiled and excused himself and left the office. In about five minutes he was back. His files were obviously in better shape than those in the state gun office.
“Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence B. Reeves,” he said. “From Cambridge.”
“Do you suppose anyone would remember Mrs. Reeves?”
“Almost certainly not,” Mr. Francis said. “It was more than a month ago. We check people in and out one hundred a day or more. Unless there was something unusual…”
“Perhaps if I could talk with the clerk,” I said.
“I’d have to check the personnel records to see who was on duty, which would take some time and effort, and believe me, no one is going to remember a face unless there was some reason to. Is there anything unusual about these people?”
“Not in the sense you mean,” I said.
“Then it would waste everybody’s time. If you work with the public you tend to blur them in self-defense.”
He was right, and I knew it. So I thanked him and left. Was it Mary Lou he’d shacked up with? It might have been. It was obviously covert, otherwise why drive out to Natick and check into a motel? Why not take her to his love nest in Cambridge the way he had Bonnie? This was someone who didn’t want to be known. Somebody whose professional credentials included being a feminist lesbian. I thought I might have a clue. How exciting. Buoyed by success, I drove back into Boston to talk with someone at Boston University.
Since I was slouching toward a distant M.F.A. at B. U., I knew where to park and where to ask. But for all I learned there about Lawrence B. Reeves, I could have been a student in hydraulic repair at Wentworth. Lawrence B. was a part-time instructor in philosophy in the night school and had been for the last five years. He had a master’s degree in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin, and, according to the résumé in his personnel file, had completed the course work for a Ph.D. and was listed as ABD (all but dissertation). Like a lot of people teaching nights in large urban schools, Lawrence didn’t seem to be a finisher.
CHAPTER
25
IN THE MORNING, showered, with my hair nearly perfect, full of good coffee and an oatmeal scone with maple frosting, I went downtown to talk with Mary Lou Goddard at her office. The bloodstained rug in the outer office had been replaced. Mary Lou was in her office, separated from the lower orders by glass partitioning. She looked at me with restrained distaste when I was shown in by her secretary.
“I want nothing to do with you, Ms. Randall.”
“I know why,” I said.
“I made it very clear to you why, when I discharged you.”
“I know about you and Lawrence Reeves. I know about you and him at Locksley Hall Motel in Natick.”
I knew no such thing. I had no evidence that his guest that night was Mary Lou. It was a guess. And it was a good one. Mary Lou looked as if I had offered to eviscerate her. She sat and stared at me for a moment, then got up and crossed the room and closed the door and went back and sat behind her desk again.
“What do you want?” she said after a while.
“I want to know the truth,” I said.
Actually my hopes were more modest than that, but it implied that I knew more than I actually did, and it had a nice dramatic ring to it. Maybe she’d snarl, You can’t handle the truth. But maybe she’d say something that would tell me something useful.
“Who else knows about this?” Mary Lou said softly.
“I haven’t told anyone,” I said. “I don’t know what Farrell and Larkin know.”
“Who are they?”
“Farrell’s the Boston detective you talked with,” I said. “Larkin is a Cambridge detective. Reeves died in Cambridge.”
“Why won’t you leave this alone,” Mary Lou said.
Her voice seemed more sad than angry. It wasn’t a bad question. I was quiet while I thought about it.
“I’m a detective,” I said. “That means, concretely, that I like to detect things; and, abstractly, that I have some concern with justice.”
“What kind of an answer is that?” Mary Lou said. “That answer makes no sense to me.”
“I’ll rephrase it,” I said. “I won’t leave this alone, because this, whatever it quite is, is what I do.”
“Freud said that love and work are what matter most to people.”
“Um hm.”
“And this is your work.”
“Um hm.”
“Even though no one is paying you.”
“No one is paying me either way,” I said. “I’m between cases.”
“But not out of work,” Mary Lou said.
“Exactly,” I said. “So why didn’t you tell me about Lawrence B. Reeves?”
Mary Lou put her fingertips carefully together in front of her chest and leaned back in her spring chair and examined the pyramid her hands made.
“The name of this organization is Great Strides,” she said. “We consult on women’s issues from a feminist perspective. I am an avowed and public lesbian, which tends to underscore our perspective.”
“And a fling with a man would be bad for business,” I said.
“Bad for everything. For business, for women’s rights, for my relationship with my life partner.”
“Who is a woman?”
“Yes. Natalie.”
“Natalie what?”
“Goddard. She has taken my name.”
“She live with you?”
“No. We do not wish to reconstruct the same narrowl
y defining box that too many of our married sisters have been enclosed by.”
“Where’s she live?”
“She has an apartment on Revere Street.”
“She know about Lawrence?”
“No.”
“Tell me about him.”
“I am, in all ways, philosophically, socially, politically, a lesbian. My—for lack of a better word—my biology has betrayed me. Biologically, I am bisexual. Now and then I need sex with a man.”
“And Lawrence B. Reeves was the most recent.”
“Yes.”
“There have been others.”
“Yes. They never knew my name, nor I theirs.”
“Pick them up in bars or wherever?”
“Yes. I am not a terribly handsome woman. But I am not choosy, and there is a certain kind of man that finds me desirable. Perhaps I remind them of their mothers.”
“But Lawrence was different?”
“Yes. For one thing, he knew who I was. I don’t know how, exactly. He may have seen me lecture, or read about me in the newspapers. By now my profile has become perhaps too high to be picking people up in bars.”
“You saw him more than once?”
“Yes. He wasn’t handsome, nor was he particularly accomplished. But he was sexually adroit, and he was educated. He could talk about ideas, which I rather liked in him. We were discreet. We went to the suburbs. Lawrence would check in and I would join him later. No one ever saw me.”
“So what happened?”
“He wanted more than I could offer. He seemed infatuated. Flowers. Phone calls. Natalie was beginning to ask about the bouquets that were filling my home. After several evenings, I told him I wouldn’t be able to see him again. He was furious. Told me I was a bitch, the all-purpose male pejorative.”
My experience with men suggested that they had a lot stronger pejoratives than that, but I wasn’t here to argue.
“And?” I said.
“And he began to harass me. Phone calls at first. Then when I had my number changed, letters.”
“Abusive?”
“Yes. Obscene and violent.”
“For instance?”
She shook her head. “It’s too distasteful.”
“You keep any?”
“No. After a time, I began to return his letters unopened. At which point he began to follow me, and I hired you.”
Perish Twice Page 9
