Five Classic Spenser Mysteries (25 page)

“However, in his personal life, and of this I know very little, he appears to be doctrinaire. He is entirely committed to the belief in some kind of frontier radicalism in which absolute individual freedom is life’s greatest good. He is also a white supremacist.”

“Him too,” Hawk murmured.

Rachel Wallace smiled. “And an anti-Semite. He seems to believe that America is in danger of being overrun by blacks and Jews and foreigners and”—she smiled again—“lesbians.”

“The lesbians are arming?” I said.

“And gay men,” she said, “and feminists, and the IRS.”

“How about the worldwide Roman Catholic conspiracy,” I said.

“You get the idea,” Rachel Wallace said. “Costigan appears to be fearful that America will be overrun by Americans. As a result he maintains not only a level of security commensurate with his wealth and power; but he keeps elements of his mercenary army on alert near him in anticipation of the forthcoming apocalypse.”

“Where is he?” I said.

Rachel Wallace shook her head and smiled sadly. “Everywhere,” she said, “nowhere. He has establishments
and redoubts and hideaways and retreats and castles and keeps everywhere. I can, and will, add to the list I gave you by phone in California, but there’s no way to know that the places I know of are all there are and less way than that to know if he’s there, or when he will be. We know for sure only that he’s not here in this room.”

“Gee, that a start,” Hawk said.

“Christ,” I said, “we’ve got him cornered.”

“Perhaps the government people can add to what I’ve got,” Rachel Wallace said.

“As far as I can tell,” I said, “they wouldn’t even be certain he wasn’t in this room.”

“But they’d manage to let Costigan know that we were,” Hawk said.

Rachel Wallace nodded. “So we’re on our own,” she said.

“I appreciate the
we
,” I said.

“I had occasion to appreciate it some years ago,” she said. “Susan, do you have anything to add.”

Susan was looking at her sandwich. She picked up a half slice of tomato and ate it carefully.

“I don’t know where to look either,” she said.

We were quiet. Hawk began on his second sandwich. Corned beef. I finished my beer and opened another.

“I don’t want to talk about Russell,” Susan said.

“Talk about whatever you want to,” I said.
“Anything we know will put us ahead of where we are now.”

“Russell is not like his father,” Susan said. She foraged a small piece of bacon from the sandwich and ate it. “I …”

I leaned a little forward toward her. “I won’t hurt him,” I said.

“Do you promise,” Susan said.

“I just did,” I said.

Susan raised her eyes from her plate. “Yes,” she said. “You did. I’m sorry.” She shifted her glance to Hawk. He was lying on the bed fully invested in his corned beef sandwich. He looked back at Susan.

“You tough lady,” he said.

Susan was silent.

Hawk grinned. “Okay, since you put it that way. I won’t hurt him either.”

Susan nodded her head, almost as if to herself.

“Less of course you change your mind,” Hawk said.

“In his personal habits Jerry is quite ascetic,” Susan said. “He doesn’t drink, he doesn’t smoke. He doesn’t drink coffee or tea. Of course he does not ingest drugs. He runs five miles every morning. He avoids red meat. He is self-educated, and quite well. He reads a great deal, and he is very intelligent, but very rigid. He is devoted to his son, and devoted to his wife. Other than those two devotions, I have no reason to think he has any feelings whatsoever.”

“How did he treat you?” I said.

“His anti-Semitism is virulent. It must have deeply offended him that I was with his son, though it’s probably one of my charms for his son, but he never showed it. He was always polite, almost courtly, to me. If his son chose me, then he could forgive even my Jewishness.”

“My son right or wrong but still my son,” Rachel Wallace said.

“His love for his son is unflinching,” Susan said, “and his son often did not make that easy.”

“And his wife?” I said.

Susan shook her head. “Grace,” she said.

“He not infatuated with her beauty,” Hawk said.

Susan continued to shake her head. “I’ve always known that love was a compendium of needs. You learn that in your introductory psych course, but what complex of needs and pathologies binds those two people together …” She shrugged. “Yes, he loves her.”

“And she loves him?”

“I don’t know. She needs him, she manipulates him. She loves Russell,” Susan said. “I don’t know all the dynamics in that family. But I know … I
know
that Grace is the worm in that apple.”

Susan’s club sandwich lay unattended on her plate. I eyed it. Maybe if I reassembled it. No, it was hers. I looked at the sandwich platter. It was empty. I looked at Susan’s disorganized sandwich again. Hell, she wasn’t going to eat it. Susan took a piece of lettuce in her fingers and tore off a small triangle and ate it. She held the rest of the leaf poised in front of her.

“Talk a little more about Grace,” I said.

“She’s not very bright,” Susan said. “And she affects a kind of little-girlishness that is simply incongruous with her bulk. She’s … what is the phrase Jerry used about her once … often wrong, but never uncertain. She’s overbearing and full of fear. She’s infantile and tyrannical at the same time. She’s weak and silly and her husband
and her son are neither and she controls both of them.”

Susan shook her head. “Remarkable,” she said.

“Why,” Rachel Wallace said.

“Why does she do that?” Susan said.

“Yes.”

Susan tore off another edge of lettuce and ate it. The large remainder of the sandwich lay nearly pristine if confused on her plate.

“To be taken care of, probably.”

“She doesn’t trust them to do that,” Rachel Wallace said. It wasn’t a question. She and Susan were beginning to work on a puzzle. People who were therapists or had had a lot of psychotherapy tended to do that. To get interested in the problem for its own sake, to work wondrous patterns out of human behavior. Sort of like close reading a poem. I couldn’t see where this would take us, but I didn’t have anything else to listen to that was more likely to help.

“No. She’s scared, it’s maybe the central fact about her. She doesn’t understand life and it scares hell out of her. She needs to be taken through it by the hand and she doesn’t trust anyone to do it unless she can control them.”

“Her husband doesn’t understand this,” Rachel Wallace said. “How about her son?”

“He hates her,” Susan said.

“Without ambivalence,” Rachel Wallace said.

Susan smiled. “And loves her.”

“Powerful father,” Rachel Wallace said, “seductive and susceptible mother.”

“Seductive?” I said.

“To Russell,” Rachel Wallace said. “Classic pattern.”

“Classic,” Hawk said.

“Of course it sounds like psychobabble,” Susan said. “But she’s right.”

I reached for one of the best-organized remnants of Susan’s sandwich. She slapped my wrist. I pulled my hand back.

“Is this getting me a shot at Jerry Costigan,” I said.

Susan shook her head. “Probably not,” she said. “But that’s really your area. What we can do is report what we know. You and Hawk are the ones who are supposed to see what can be made from it.”

“True,” I said. “Are you going to finish that sandwich?”

“In time,” Susan said.

“Grace always travel with them?” Hawk said.

“No, she’s afraid to fly,” Susan said.

Hawk raised his eyebrows and nodded his head once.

I sucked my lower lip in and worried it a little. “Okay,” I said. “Say we can get her alone, once we’ve got her what do we do with her?”

“He love her like he supposed to we can make him swap. Him for her.”

I said to Susan, “When he travels does she normally stay in Mill River?”

“Yes.”

“He knows we’re looking for him. Richie Loo knew it so Costigan knows it.”

“Ives know it,” Hawk said. “Everybody know it.”

“He loves her like he’s supposed to he won’t leave her alone.”

Hawk nodded. “A point,” he said.

“So he stays in Mill River with her, or he insists she go with him, scared or no.” I looked at Susan.

“Yes,” she said. “He wouldn’t leave her, and he wouldn’t force her to fly, maybe couldn’t force her to fly. But she’ll ride in a car.”

“We’ve already gotten inside the Mill River place once,” I said.

“Want to bet they’ve improved security,” Hawk said.

I nodded. “Still, if he had a better place.”

“That he could drive to,” Hawk said.

“So we narrow it to the West Coast,” I said.

“More or less,” Hawk said.

All of the tomato was gone from Susan’s sandwich. She was nibbling the last piece of bacon.

“Say, arbitrarily, a day’s drive at fifty miles an hour.”

“How long a day?”

“Say twelve hours,” I said. “Six hundred miles. Draw a circle around Mill River with a sixteen-mile radius, what have you got?”

“A equals π th,” Hawk said. “ ’Bout 3,600 square miles.”

“Search a square mile a day and, if he doesn’t move, we’ll have him within ten years.”

Hawk looked at me in amazement. “My God,” he said in a flawless English accent, “Holmes, you’re incredible.”

“Elementary,” I said.

“So what we know about Grace leaves us no better off than we were,” Rachel Wallace said.

“Only technically,” I said.

“ ’Fore we discovered about her,” Hawk said, “we thought we have to search three million square miles.”

Narrowing the search area to 3,600 miles was about as well as we did for the rest of the afternoon. When we finished trying at six o’clock, we were no closer to finding Costigan than we had been at lunch. But dinner was closer. No cloud is all dark.

“I need a drink,” Rachel Wallace said. “Or maybe twelve.”

“I go out and get a bottle,” Hawk said. “Stretch my legs.”

“Why not have it sent up,” Rachel Wallace said. “You might be spotted.”

Hawk looked at her as if she’d said the world was flat.

“Or someone might follow you back here,” Rachel Wallace said.

Hawk looked at her as if she had just fallen off the edge of the world.

“Scotch?” he said.

“And soda and ice and glasses,” I said.

“Hotel will send them up,” Hawk said. “I don’t do set-ups.”

He opened the door quietly and went out.

“Why,” Rachel Wallace said.

“He feels like it,” I said.

“But we all feel like things, he could cause trouble, he could jeopardize … it’s childish.”

“I know,” I said. “Why don’t you call and have set-ups delivered.”

Rachel Wallace looked at Susan.

“They understand each other,” Susan said. “Something about not letting the world dictate to you. As you said, it’s childish.”

Rachel Wallace shook her head and reached for the phone on the nightstand.

Susan said to me, “I need to talk.” I pointed to the connecting room.

To Rachel Wallace, I said, “When they deliver, let me know before you open the door. And don’t stand in front of it when he knocks.”

She smiled and nodded. Susan went into the connecting room. I followed her and closed the door. She sat on the bed. I sat beside her.

“I need to talk with Russell,” she said.

I nodded.

“I am clear on what I want. I don’t want to be with him again. But I can’t just end our relationship like we did. Just drive away and leave him standing by the side of the road.”

I nodded again. “You know if you want to be with me?” I said.

“I know I don’t want to be without you,” she said.

“You know a number to call him?”

“Yes.”

“Why don’t you do it in here,” I said.

She nodded. “If you had the number Martin Quirk could probably get the location.”

I nodded. “I can’t,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “I didn’t ask.”

“He may not be with his father,” she said.

“Maybe not,” I said.

“Even if he were,” Susan said, “I couldn’t …”

“No,” I said, “you couldn’t. You couldn’t use your private knowledge of him to get his father killed. Even though Russell might like it.”

“You understand that?”

“Yes.”

“You understand that I can tell you about Jerry and about Grace and that sort of thing. But I can’t give you his number that he trusted me with.”

I nodded.

“You see the difference,” Susan said.

“Yes,” I said.

She took my right hand in both of hers and leaned forward and kissed me on the lips. Lightly.

Rachel Wallace tapped on the door. “Room service is here,” she said. I took my hand from Susan’s and patted her on the cheek. Then I went into the other room, and took my gun out and stood half into the bathroom door with the gun out of sight and said to Rachel Wallace, “Okay.”

When the waiter left there were glasses and soda and a large bowl of Smokehouse almonds. “Ice down the corridor,” Rachel Wallace said.

I was gazing at the almonds. “I’ll get some when Hawk comes back.”

Rachel Wallace grinned. “The almonds were with you in mind,” she said.

“If you weren’t a pervert,” I said, “I think I’d marry you.”

There was a tap on the door and Hawk’s voice said, “Booze patrol.”

I opened the door and Hawk came in with two bottles of Glenfiddich and a bottle of Domaine Chandon Blanc de Noirs champagne.

“Let the good times roll,” he said.

I looked at the champagne. “Domestic?” I said.

“French house, California grapes,” he said. “Top shelf.”

I went down the hall for ice. When I came back into the room Rachel Wallace was talking to Hawk.

“And he knew that you were alone at the door. How could he know someone wasn’t forcing you to lie at gunpoint.”

Hawk looked at me sadly.

“If I understand your question,” I said, “Hawk wouldn’t do it.”

“Even under threat of death he wouldn’t betray you?”

“I doubt that either of us has thought of it that elegantly, but no, he wouldn’t.”