Pastime
(Spenser 18)

By
Robert B. Parker

For my wife and sons-sine qua non

CHAPTER 1

THE dog was a pointer, a solid chocolate German shorthair, three years old and smallish for her breed. She sat bolt upright on the couch in Susan Silverman’s office and stared at me with her head vigilantly erect in case I might be a partridge.

“Shouldn’t she be lying on the couch?” I said.

“She’s not in analysis,” Susan said.

“She belonged to your ex-husband.”

“Yes,” Susan said. “Good point.”

The dog’s eyes shifted from Susan to me as we spoke. The eyes were hazel and, because she was nervous, they showed a lot of white. Her short brown coat was sleek, like a seal’s, and her oversized paws looked exaggerated, like a cartoon dog.

“What’s her name?” I said.

Susan wrinkled her nose. “Vigilant Virgin.”

“And she’s not in analysis?”

“I believe they have to have long silly names like that because of the American Kennel Club,” Susan said. “She’s a hunting dog.”

“I know,” I said. “I had one like her when I was a kid.”

“Like her?”

“Yeah. Same breed, same color, which is not usual. Mine was bigger though.”

“Don’t listen,” Susan said to the dog. “You’re perfectly big enough.”

The dog canted her head at Susan, and raised her ears slightly.

“What are we going to do with her?” Susan said.

“We? My ex-husband didn’t give her to me,” I said.

“Well, he gave her to me, and what’s mine is yours.”

“Not if I have to walk around calling her Vigilant Virgin,” I said.

“What was your dog’s name?” Susan said.

“Pearl.”

“Well, let’s call her Pearl.”

“And Boink Brain isn’t going to want her back?” I said.

“He’s not so bad,” Susan said.

“Anyone who let you get away is a boink brain,” I said.

“Well,” Susan said, “perhaps you’re right… anyway. He’s been transferred to London, and you can’t even bring a dog in there without a six-month quarantine.”

“So she’s yours for good,” I said.

“Ours.”

I nodded. The dog got off the couch quite suddenly, and walked briskly over and put her head on my lap and stood motionless, with her eyes rolled slightly upward looking at me obliquely.

I nodded. “Pearl,” I said.

Susan smiled. “Beautiful Jewish-American girls don’t grow up with hunting dogs,” she said. “If they have dogs at all they are very small dogs with a little bow.”

“Sure thing, little lady. This looks to me like man’s work.”

“I think so,” Susan said.

I patted Pearl’s head.

“You could have told him no,” I said.

“He had nowhere else to place her,” Susan said. “And she’s a lovely dog.”

Pearl sighed. It seemed a sigh of contentment though dogs are often mysterious and sometimes do things I don’t understand. Which is true also of people.

“Do we have joint custody?” I said. “I get her on weekends?”

“I think she can stay here,” Susan said. “I have a yard. But certainly she could come to your place for sleep-overs.”

“Bring her jammies and her records? We could make brownies?”

“Something like that,” Susan said. “Of course this is the city. We can’t let her run loose.”

“Which means you’ll need to fence your yard.”

“I think it’s the best thing for us to do,” Susan said. “Don’t you?”

“No question,” I said. “We’ll have to work our ass off, of course.”

“Beautiful Jewish-American girls do not `work their ass off,‘ they bring iced tea in a pretty pitcher to the large goy they’ve charmed into doing it.”

“When do we get to that?”

“The charm?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, you remember once you suggested something and I said I’d never done it because I was too embarrassed.”

“Certainly. It’s one of the two or three times you’ve ever blushed.”

Susan smiled and nodded.

“Today?” I said.

She smiled more widely and nodded again. If a serpent had come by with an apple at that moment she’d have eaten it.

“Spenser’s my name,” I said. “Fences are my game.

“Do you require a charm down payment?” Susan said.

“Well,” I said, “some small gesture of earnest intent might be appropriate.”

“Not in front of the baby,” Susan said.

Pearl was on the couch again, perfectly still, gazing at us as if she were smarter than we were, but patient.

“Of course not,” I said. “What kind of fence would you like?”

“Let’s go look at some, she can ride along with us and wait in the car.”

“What could be better?” I said.

“You’ll find out,” Susan said and smiled that smile.

CHAPTER 2

SUSAN had selected a picket fence made of spaced 1-inch dowels in a staggered pattern. I was listening to the ball game and drilling holes in the stringers to accommodate the dowels when a voice said, “Hi, Ozzie.

Where’s Harriet?“

It was Paul Giacomin, wearing jeans and hightop sneakers and a black tee shirt that said on it American Dance Festival, 1989, in white letters. I

had taken him in hand when he was a fifteen-yearold kid caught in his parents’ divorce feud with no interests but television and no prospects but more of the same. He was twenty-five now, an inch taller than I was, and almost as graceful.

“Making iced tea in a pretty pitcher,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

“I tried your apartment first, and then followed my instincts.”

“Trained by a master,” I said.

Paul came over and shook my hand and patted me on the shoulder. Susan came out of the house and told him how glad she was to see him and gave him a hug and kissed him.

Her range of demonstrable emotion is maybe a little wider than mine.

“Wait until you see what we have,” Susan said.

She was wearing a glossy black leotard-esque exercise outfit and white sneakers and a bright blue headband and she looked a lot like Hedy Lamarr would have looked if Hedy worked out. She ran back to the house and opened the back door and Pearl came surging out, jumped the three steps off the back porch and, with her ears back, and her mouth open, dashed around the backyard in a slowly imploding circle until she finally ran into me, bounced off, and jammed her head into Paul’s groin.

“Jesus Christ,” Paul said. Pearl jumped up with her forepaws on his chest, dropped back down, turned in a tight circle as if she were chasing her tail, and jumped up again trying to lap Paul’s face before she dropped back down and streaked around the yard again. As she came by the second time, Susan got a hold on her collar and managed to force her to a barely contained stop.

“She gets over her shyness,” Paul said, “she might be cute.”

“Regal,” I said.

“Regal.”

“This is Pearl,” Susan said. “I inherited her from my ex-husband because he’s transferred to London, and her daddy is building her a fence.”

“This is embarrassing,” Paul said.

“Let’s go get a beer,” I said, “and you can see how regal she is inside.”

It took Pearl maybe fifteen minutes to calm down, climb up into the white satin armchair in Susan’s living room, turn around three times, and lie with her head on her back legs in a tight ball and watch us drink beer.

“I recall,” Paul said to Susan, “that you used to kick me off that chair.

It was for looking at, not sitting in, you said.“

“Well, she likes it,” Susan said.

Paul nodded. “Oh,” he said.

“You going to stay awhile?” I said.

“Maybe,” he said. “I left my stuff at your place.” I nodded. There was more.

I’d known him since he was a fragmented little kid. I waited.

“How’s Paige?” Susan said.

“Fine.”

“Have you set a date yet?”

“Sort oœ”

“How does one sort of set a date?” Susan said.

“You discuss next April with each other, but you don’t tell anyone else. It allows for a certain amount of ambivalence.”

Susan nodded.

“Want a sandwich or something?” she said.

“What have you got?”

“There’s some whole wheat bread,” Susan said. “And some lettuce…”

Paul waited.

“Oregano,” I said. “I think I saw some dried oregano in the refrigerator.”

“In the refrigerator?” Paul said.

“Keeps it nice and fresh,” Susan said.

“That’s it?” Paul said. “A lettuce and oregano sandwich on whole wheat?”

“Low in calories,” Susan said, “and nearly fat free.”

“Maybe we could go out and get something later,” Paul said.

I went to the kitchen and got two more beers and a diet Coke, no ice, for Susan.

“Makes me question myself sometimes,” I said when I brought the drinks.

“Being the love object of a woman who likes warm diet Coke.”

Susan smiled at me.

Paul said, “My mother’s missing.”

I nodded. “Tell me about it.”

“We’ve been getting along a little better. She’s a little easier mother for a twenty-five-year-old man than for a fifteen-year-old boy,” Paul said.

“And I used to call her maybe every other week and we’d talk, and maybe two three times a year we’d see each other when she was in New York. She even came to a couple of my performances.”

On the armchair, Pearl sat up suddenly as if someone had spoken to her and gazed off silently toward the bookcase on the far wall. Her head in profile was perfectly motionless and her face was very serious.

“One thing made her easier was she had a boyfriend, has a boyfriend, I guess. When she’s got a boyfriend, she’s pretty good. Kind of fun, and interested in me, and not, you know, desperate.”

Pearl put her head slowly back down, this time on her front paws, which hung off the front of the armchair. She gazed soberly at the dust motes that drifted in the shaft of sunlight that came through Susan’s back window.

“Anyway,” Paul said, “I’ve called. her three or four times and got no answer, even though I left messages on her machine. And so I came up and went by her place in Lexington before I went to your place. There’s no one there.”

Paul drank some beer from the bottle, held it by the neck, and gazed for a moment at the label.

“It’s got that look, you know, that says it’s empty.”

“You have a key?” I said.

“No. I think she didn’t want me walking in on her when she had a date. She was always a little embarrassed with me about dating.”

“Want me to take a look?”

“Yes.”

“Want to go with me?”

“Yes. I want more than that. I want you and me to find her.”

“She’s probably just off on a little trip with somebody,” I said.

“Probably,” he said, and I knew he didn’t mean it.

“Your father?” Susan said.

Paul shook his head. “I haven’t heard from him in maybe six years. I

haven’t a clue where he is. Once the tuition money stopped…“ Paul shrugged.

“Okay,” I said. “We’ll find her.”

“I have to know she’s all right,” Paul said.

“Sure,” I said.

“Funny,” Paul said. “Ten years ago you found me for her.”

The dog uncurled from the chair and hopped down and stretched and came over and got up beside me where I was sitting on the couch and began to lick my face industriously. Her tongue was rough, which was probably useful for stripping meat from bones in the Pleistocene era, but served in the late 20th century as a kind of sloppy dermabrasion.

“It’ll be even easier this time,” I said with my face clenched. “We’ll have a trained hunter to help us.”

CHAPTER 3

PAUL had gone off to the American Rep Theater to watch a performance artist smear herself with chocolate. Susan and I, feeling a little middle class and uptown, went for drinks to the Ritz bar. It had begun to rain when we got there and I got several raindrop spots on my maroon silk tie while I stashed the car with the doorman. Even with the raindrops, I looked Ritz-worthy with my black cashmere blazer and my gray slacks. I had wanted to complete the look by wearing the cowboy boots that had been handmade for me in L.A. by Willie the Cobbler. But Susan reminded me that I tended to fall off them if I had more than one drink, so I settled for black cordovan loafers.

As we cut through the lobby toward the bar, Callahan, the houseman, nodded at me pleasantly. I shot him with my forefinger and he looked at Susan and whistled silently.

“The house dick just whistled at you,” I said.

“At the Ritz?” Susan said.

“Shocking but true,” I said.

“Which one is he?” Susan said.

“Big guy with a red nose and gray hair. Looks fatter than he is.”

“He looks very discerning,” Susan said.

We got a table by the window in the bar, where we could look out through the rain at the Public Gardens. Susan ordered a champagne cocktail. I had scotch and soda.

“No beer?” Susan said.

“Celebration,” I said. “I’m here with you and Paul’s home. Makes me feel celebratory.”

“When did scotch become the drink of celebration?” Susan leaned her chin on her folded hands and rested her gaze on me. The experience was, as it always was, tangible. The weight of her serious intelligence in counterpoint to her playful spoiled princess was culminative.

“Sometimes it’s champagne,” I said. “Sometimes it’s scotch.”

The bar was dark. The rain slid down the big window, and the early evening light filtering through it was silvery and slight. Susan picked a cashew from the small bowl of mixed nuts on the table, and bit off maybe a third of it and chewed it carefully.

“I was seventeen,” I said, “the first time I had anything but beer. We were bird hunting in Maine, my father and I, and a pointer, Pearl the first. We were looking for pheasant in an old apple orchard that hadn’t been farmed in maybe fifty years. You had to go through bad cover to reach it, brambles, and small alder that was clumped together and tangled. My father was maybe thirty yards off to the right, and the dog was ahead, ranging, the way they do, and coming back with her tongue out and her tail erect, and looking at me, and then swinging back out in another arc.

“Did you train her to do that?” Susan said.

“No,” I said. “It’s in the genes, I guess. They’ll range like that and come back; and they’ll point birds instinctively, but you’ve got to teach them to hold the point. Otherwise they’ll stalk in on the bird and flush it too soon, and it’ll fly when you’re out of range. Or, if they’re really good, they’ll kill the bird.”

Susan ate another third of her cashew, and sipped some champagne cocktail.

The light through the rain was getting grayer. The silver edge was thinning as the evening came down on us.

“All of a sudden I heard her bark-half hysterical bark, half growl-and she came loping back, stopping every few yards and turning and making her barking snarling sound that had some fear in it, and then she reached me and leaned in hard on my leg and stood like they do, with her front legs stiff and her tail down and her ears sort of flattened back, and growled.

And the hair was stiff along her spine. And I remember thinking, `Jesus, this must be the pheasant that ate Chicago.‘ We had just come out of the cover and into the orchard and I looked and there was a bear.“

“A grizzly?” Susan said. Her eyes were fixed on me and they seemed bottomless and captivated, like a kid listening to ghost stories.

“No, they don’t have grizzly bears in Maine. It was a black bear, he’d been feeding on the fallen apples that some of the trees were still producing.

They must have been close to rotten, and they must have been fermenting in his stomach, because he was drunk.“

“Drunk?”

“Yeah, bears do that sometimes. Usually it happens close to a town, because that’s where there are apple orchards, and the forest ranger types dart them and haul them off to some other place in the woods to sober up. But no one had tranquilized this one. He was loose, upright, drunk, and swaying a little. I don’t know how big he was. Maybe a hundred and fifty pounds or so. Maybe more. They can get bigger. Standing on his hind legs he looked a lot bigger than I was.”

“What did you do?”

“Well, the dog was going crazy now, growling and making a kind of high whining noise, and the bear was reared up and grunting. They sound more like pigs than anything else. I had a shotgun full of birdshot, sevens, I think, and it might have annoyed the bear. It sure as hell wouldn’t have stopped him. But I didn’t have anything else and I was pretty sure if I ran it would chase me, and they can run about forty miles an hour, so it was going to catch me. So I just stood there with the shotgun leveled. It was a pump. I had one round in the chamber and three more in the magazine, and I prayed that if he charged and if I got him in the face it would make him turn. The dog was in a frenzy, dashing out a few feet and barking and snarling and then running back to lean against my leg. The bear reared up, swaying, and I can still remember how rank the bear smelled and the way everything moved so slowly.

And then my father was beside me. He didn’t make any noise coming.

Afterwards he said he heard the dog and knew it was something, probably a bear, from the way the dog sounded. He had a shotgun too, but he also was carrying a big old .45 hogleg, a six-shooter he’d had ever since he was a kid in Laramie. And he stood beside the dog, next to me, and took that shooter’s stance that I always can remember him using, and cocked the .

and we waited. The bear dropped to all fours, and snorted and grunted and dipped its head and turned around and left. I can see us like a painting on a calendar, my father with the .45 and the dog between us, snarling, and yipping, and me with the shotgun that, if he’d charged, the bear would have picked his teeth with.“

It was dark now outside the Ritz bar, and the rain coiling down the windowpane looked black. Susan had finished her cashew and was leaning back in her chair, holding her drink in both hands, watching me.

“The dog was no good for birds the rest of the day, and neither were we, I suppose. We went back to the lodge we were staying at and put Pearl in our room, and fed her, and then my father and I went down to the bar and my father ordered two double scotch whiskies. The bartender looked at me and looked at my father and didn’t say anything and brought the whiskey. He put both of them in front of my father and my father pushed one of them over in front of me.

“ `Ran into a bear in the woods today,‘ my father said without much inflection. He still had the Western sound in his voice. `Kid stood his ground.’

“The bartender was a lean, dark guy, with a big nose. He looked at me and nodded and moved on down the bar, and my father and I drank the scotch.”

“And he never said anything to you,” Susan said.

I shook my head.

“ `That brown liquor,‘” Susan said, “ `which not women, not boys and children, but only hunters drank.’ ”

“Faulkner,” I said.

Susan smiled. “You’re very literate for a man who has to buy extra-long ties.”

“I had acted like a man, in his view, so he treated me like a man, in his view.”

“ `Not women, not boys and children,‘” Susan said.

“Sounds ageist and sexist to me,” I said.

“Maybe we can have his Nobel prize posthumously revoked,” Susan said.

CHAPTER 4

PAUL and I were driving out Route 2 toward Lexington to break into Paul’s mother’s house. It was the first day that had felt like fall this year. And it was still raining, a lighter rain than last night, but steady so that the streets glistened and the cars had their lights on even though it was well after sunrise.

Pearl was sitting in the backseat looking steadily out the window on the passenger side, mostly motionless except when she turned her head to look out the other window. She had wanted very much to come and neither Paul nor I could quite think of a reason sufficient to leave her staring after us with that look.

A school bus passed us going the other way and I felt the pang I always felt in early fall, the remembered pang of school. So many days like this I remembered in the brick elementary school, the lights on inside, the day wet and shiny outside, cars moving past the school with their wipers going, and the smell of steam pipes and disinfectant and limitation and tedium, while outside the adult world moved freely about.

“How was it last night?” I said. I was drinking a cup of coffee as I drove, something I prided myself on doing with the cover off and never a drop spilled. Paul drank his out of a hole he’d torn in the cover. A boy still, with things to learn.

“She’s good,” Paul said, “very interesting. Essentially it’s just a one-woman show, like, ah, whosis, Lily Tomlin, except a lot more angry and foulmouthed.”

“I never heard of her,” I said.

“I know her from New York,” Paul said. “She’s just a regular downtown performer, like me, trying to find performance space someplace in the East Village, except that she was lucky enough to be denied an NEA grant. Now she’s making big money. And playing high-visibility theaters. And getting written up in Time.”

“Have you thought of applying?”

“The tricky part is to make a grant application good enough to get approved by the peer review panel, and still exotic enough to be officially rejected.”

“Maybe I should take Susan,” I said.

Paul laughed. “She might like it,” he said. “You’d hate it.”

We pulled off into Lexington. The traffic was at a crawl, stuck behind a school bus that stopped every few blocks and took on children.

“Do you know your mother’s new boyfriend?” I said.

Paul shook his head. “Never met him. His name is Rich something or other.”

“What’s he do?”

“My mother says he’s a consultant.”

“Self-employed?”

Paul shook his head. “I don’t know. She seemed a little vague about what he did. She never wants to talk much about any of her boyfriends. Like I said, she’s always embarrassed about them.”

We went through the middle of Lexington, past the Battle Green, with the Minuteman statue at the near end of it and the restored colonial buildings across the street. Paul was staring around at the town as if it were a Martian landscape.

“Every Patriots Day there was a big parade in town,” Paul said. “It was always exciting. Every April 19, I’d wake up excited, and my mother and father and I would come down and get a good spot and watch for the parade, and afterwards we’d go home and there’d be nothing to do and I’d feel let down, and the next day would be school.”

I turned into Emerson Road.

“Parade was usually good, though,” Paul said.

Patty Giacomin’s house was as I remembered it, set back a bit from the road, among trees. The trees were probably fuller than they had been ten years ago when I’d come out here before. But they looked the same and so did the dense spread of pachysandra that did service as lawn around her house.

The house itself was angular, and shingled; modern looking without violating either the site or the colonial town in which it stood.

I parked next to a Honda Prelude in the driveway. We rolled the windows half down and left Pearl in the car. I went and opened the trunk and took out a gym bag with tools in it. As we walked toward the house I

automatically felt the hood of the Prelude. It was cold.

There was no answer when we rang the bell. The house had that stillness that Paul had mentioned. In the interests of not looking like a jerk, I tried the doorknob. It was locked.

“I already did that,” Paul said.

“It’s a Dick Tracy crime stopper,” I said. “Always try the door before jimmying it.”

“Great working with a pro,” Paul said.

There was no sign of flies on the inside of the windows, which was encouraging. I looked at the door. There was a keyhole in the handle. No other lock, so it was probably a spring lock, though it didn’t have to be.

It could be a combination spring and deadbolt, but at least there was no separate keyhole which there would be most certainly for a deadbolt. There was a strip of molding down along the lock side of the door to prevent someone from slipping a flat blade like a putty knife in there and springing the lock. I looked at the molding closely. The house was stained rather than painted, which made it easier to see the line where the molding butted up to the doorjamb. While I was examining it, I took a deep inhale.

I smelled nothing dead, which was even more encouraging.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll open this thing unless you have a better thought.”

Paul shook his head. His face looked tight. I took a flat chisel from the bag, and a hammer, and gently loosened the molding along the door strip. No point trashing the house.

“I’ll get this off intact,” I said. “We can put it back on when we get through.”

Paul nodded. I pried the molding away, a little at a time, all along its length, and then got a flat bar under it at the nail holes and pried it carefully loose so that it came off nails still sticking through it. I

handed it to Paul and he leaned it against a tree. I put the flat bar and the chisel and the hammer away and got out a putty knife with an inch and a half blade and slid it into the door crack at the latch and felt for the lock tongue. I found it and pressed and felt the tongue give and the blade of the putty knife push in. I held the putty knife in place with my right hand, and with the flat of my left, pushed the door open. There was no smell.

“We’re not going to find anything bad,” I said to Paul. “Promise.”

“That’s good,” he said. His voice was a little hoarse.

We were in a small entry hall, with a polished flagstone floor, then up a couple of steps to the living room, the kitchen to the right, a view of the woods straight ahead through the big picture window across the back. Off the kitchen, constituting a short L to the living room, was a dining area where once Patty Giacomin had served me dinner and propositioned me. It hadn’t been me, really, just the need to validate herself with a man, and there I was. I had declined, but I remembered it well. I always thought about the ones I’d missed, and speculated about how they’d have been, even though wisdom and experience would suggest that they’d have been much like the ones I hadn’t missed. The thing was, though, that I always thought about the ones I hadn’t missed, too.

The house was still and close, and neat. We walked around, checked the bedrooms. Patty’s big, pink, puffy bed was made, her bathroom was orderly, though it didn’t look like it had been put in order by someone who was leaving. Around the mirror were postcards with amusing pictures.

“I sent her those,” Paul said, “from wherever I was performing. She kept them.”

The other bedroom, where Paul had slept, was perfectly neat, with a high school picture of Paul still in its cardboard frame set up on the dresser.

The picture had been taken the year he’d graduated from prep school, three years after I’d met him, and already the aimlessness had disappeared from his face. He was still very young there, but it was a face that knew more than most eighteen-year-old faces knew.

Paul looked at the picture. “Three years of therapy,” he said.

“And more to come,” I said.

“For sure,” he said.

There was a neat green corduroy spread over the single bed, with a plaid blanket folded neatly at the foot. There was a student desk with a reading lamp on it and a green blotter that matched the spread.

We went back downstairs. On the coffee table in the living room was a green imitation leather scrapbook. I picked it up and opened it. Carefully pasted in were clippings: reviews of Paul’s dance concerts, listings from the newspaper of performances to come. There were ticket stubs and program covers and the program pages listing Paul’s name, or Paige’s or both. There were pictures of Paul, often with Paige, sometimes with other dancers, taken in places domestic and foreign, where they had danced. I handed the album to him without comment and he took it and looked at it and sat down slowly on the couch and leafed slowly through it.

“I used to think,” he said, “that because she was so needy of my father, and after she lost him, so needy for other men, that she didn’t care about me.” He turned the pages in the album slowly, as he talked. He’d seen them already. He wasn’t looking at them. It was merely something the hands did.

“Sort of an either-or situation. Me or them. It took me a long time to see that it was both. That she cared about me, too.”

“As best she could,” I said.

“Her best wasn’t enough,” Paul said.

“No. It’s why we separated you.”

“And we were right,” Paul said.

“Yeah.”

Paul closed the album and put it back on the coffee table.

“If she’d gotten some help, maybe if she would have seen somebody…”

I shrugged.

“You don’t think so.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think she’s smart enough. I don’t think she’s got enough will.”

Paul nodded slowly. He looked down at the scrapbook on the coffee table.

“She is what she is,” he said.

CHAPTER 5

PAUL, went out to the car and brought Pearl in. She raced around the house with her nose to the ground for about fifteen minutes before she was able to slow down and follow me around while I searched the house.

The refrigerator was on, but nearly empty, and there was nothing perishable in it. There was no fruit in the bowl on the table. The strainer was out of the drain in the kitchen sink. There was no suitcase to be found in the house, which meant either that she had packed it and taken it with her or that she didn’t have one. Paul didn’t know if she had one, and he couldn’t tell if any of her clothes were missing. There were very few cosmetics in the bathroom. There were eleven messages on her answering machine, three from Paul. I copied down the names and phone numbers that had been left.

Mostly they were first names only, and Paul didn’t know who they were. But the phone numbers could lead to something. I couldn’t find an address book.

“Did she have one?” I said.

“Yes. I know she did. She carried it around with her and she was always afraid of losing it.”

“She work?”

“Yes. She sold real estate. Worked for a company called Chez Vous.”

“Cute.”

“Hey,” Paul said. “We’re in the suburbs. Cute is important out here.”

“You New York kids are so jaded,” I said. “Do you know where she met Rich?”

“No.”

“Probably a dating bar called Entre Nous,” I said.

“Or Cherchez la Femme,” Paul said.

“That betrays a preconception about dating bars,” I said.

“I suppose it does,” Paul said. “How about what you’ve found here? You have any conclusions to reach?”

“Everything here says that she left of her own accord,” I said. “There’s no mail piled up, which means she stopped it at the post office. There’s no suitcase. Most people have one, which suggests that she took it. There’s a dearth of cosmetic, which suggests that she packed them. The house is neat, but not like no one’s ever coming back. There are no perishables in the refrigerator, which suggests that she was planning to be gone for a while.”

“Without telling me?”

“We agree that’s she’s not Mother Courage,” I said.

“True.”

“You want me to find where she went?”

“I feel like kind of a jerk,” Paul said. “I wouldn’t want the police involved.”

“But you’d still like to know where she is,” I said.

Paul nodded. “I think she’d have called, or written me a postcard, something.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Of course I want to think that,” Paul said. “I don’t want to think she went off and didn’t think about me.”

“Well, let’s find out,” I said.

“What will you do?”

“First we’ll track down Rich. There must be people know his last name. If he’s also not around we’ll have a reasonable presumption.”

“And then what?”

“We’ll ask everyone we can find who knows either of them if they know where Patty and Rich are.

“And if no one knows?”

“We check airlines, trains, local travel agencies, that stuff. We see if Rich’s car is missing. If it is we run a trace on his license number. If it’s not missing we check the car rental agencies.”

“And if none of that works?”

“Some of it will work,” I said. “You keep asking enough questions and checking enough options, something will come up, and that will lead to something, and that will lead to something else. We’ll be getting information in ways, and from people, that we don’t even know about now.”

“You can’t be sure of that,” Paul said.

“I’ve done this for a long time, Paul. It’s a high probability. If you want to find someone, you can find them. Even if they don’t want to be found.”

Paul nodded. “And you’re good at this,” he said.

“Few better,” I said.

“Few?”

“Actually, none,” I said. “I was trying for humble.”

“And failing,” Paul said.

CHAPTER 6

IT was a nearly perfect September day. Temperature around 72, sky blue, foliage not yet turned. There was still sweet corn at the farm stands, and native tomatoes, and the air moved gently among the yet green leaves of the old trees that still stood just off the main drag undaunted by exhaust fumes or ancestral voices prophesying war. Paul was in my office with the list of callers from his mother’s answering machine. I was back out in Lexington at the post office in the center of town, where a woman clerk with her pinkish hair teased high told me that Patty Giacomin had put an indefinite hold-for pickup on her mail. There was no forwarding address.

I went to Chez Vous, which was located next to an ice cream parlor behind a bookstore in a small shopping center on Massachusetts Avenue. Four desks, four swivel chairs, four phones, four side chairs, and a sofa with maplewood arms and a small floral print covering. The wall was decorated with flattering photos of the property available, and the floor was covered with a big braided rug in mostly blues and reds. Two of the desks were empty, a woman with blue-black hair and large greenrimmed glasses sat at one of the remaining desks speaking on the phone. She was speaking about a house that the office was listing and she was being enthusiastic. The other desk was occupied by a very slender blonde woman wearing a lot of clothes. Her white skirt reached her ankles, nearly covering her black-laced high-heeled boots.

Over the skirt she wore a longish ivory-colored tunic and a black leather belt with a huge buckle and a small crocheted beige sleeveless sweater, and a beige scarf at her neck, and ivory earrings that were carved in the shape of Japanese dolls, and rings on all her fingers, and a white bow in her hair.

“Hi, I’m Nancy,” she said. “Can I help?”

I took a card out of my shirt pocket and gave it to her. It had my name on it, and my address and phone number and the word Investigator. Nothing else. Susan had said that a Tommy gun, with a fifty-round drum, spewing flame from the muzzle, was undignified.

“I’m representing Paul Giacomin, whose mother works here.”

Nancy was still eyeballing the card. “Does this mean, like a Private Investigator?”

I smiled winningly and nodded.

“Like a Private Eye?”

“The stuff that dreams are made of, sweetheart,” I said.

The woman with the blue-black hair hung up the phone.

“Hey, PJ,” Nancy said. “This is a Private Eye.”

“Like on television?” PJ said. Where Nancy was flat, PJ was curved. Where Nancy was overdressed, PJ wore a sleeveless crimson blouse and gray slacks which fitted very smoothly over her sumptuous thighs. She had bare ankles and high-heeled red shoes. Around her left ankle was a gold chain.

“Just like television,” I said. “Car chases, shootouts, beautiful broads .. .”

“Which is where we come in,” PJ said. She had on pale lipstick and small gold earrings. There were small laugh wrinkles around her eyes, and she looked altogether like more fun than was probably legal in Lexington.

“My point exactly,” I said. “I’m trying to locate Patty Giacomin.”

“For her son?” Nancy said.

“Yes. She’s apparently gone, and he doesn’t know where and he wants to.”

“I don’t blame him,” PJ said.

“You know where she is?”

Both women shook their heads. “She hasn’t been in for about ten days,” PJ said.

“A week ago last Monday,” Nancy said.

“Is that usual?”

“No. I mean, it’s not like she’s on salary. She doesn’t come in, she doesn’t get listings, she doesn’t sell anything, she doesn’t get commission,” PJ said. “But usually she was in here three, four days a week-she was sort of part-time.”

“Who runs the place?”

“I do,” PJ said.

“Are you Chez or Vous?”

PJ grinned. “Is that awful, or what? No. My name’s P. J. Garfield. PJ stands for Patty Jean. But with Patty Giacomin working here, it was easier to use PJ, saved confusion. I bought the place from the previous owner when she retired. Chez Vous was her idea. I didn’t want to change the name.“

“Either of you know Patty’s boyfriend?” I said.

“Rich?” Nancy said.

“Rich what?”

Nancy looked at PJ. She shrugged.

“Rich…” PJ said. “Rich… she brought him to the Christmas party last year. An absolute hunk. Rich… Broderick, I think, something like that. Rich Broderick? Bachrach? Beaumont?”

“Beaumont,” Nancy said.

“You sure?”

“Oh.” She put her hand to her mouth. “No, god no, I’m not sure. I don’t want anyone to get in trouble.”

“How nice,” I said. “Do we know where Rich lives?”

“Somewhere on the water,” Nancy said. She looked at PJ.

PJ shrugged. “Could be. I frankly paid very little attention to him. He’s not Patty’s first boyfriend. And most of them are not, ah, mensches.”

“What can you remember?” I said.

“Me?” Nancy said.

“Either of you. What did he look like? What did he do for a living? What did he talk about? Did he like baseball, or horse racing, or sailboats? Was he married, separated, single, divorced? Did he have children? Did he have any physical handicap, any odd mannerisms, did he have an accent? Did he mention parents, brothers, sisters? Did he like dogs?”

PJ answered. “He was as tall as you, probably not as”-she searched for the word-“thick. Dark hair worn longish, good haircut”-her eyes crinkled “great buns.”

“So we have that in common too,” I said. Nancy looked at her desk.

“His clothes were expensive,” PJ said. “And they fit him well. He’s probably a good off-the-rack size.”

“What size?”

“What size are you?” PJ said.

“Fifty,” I said, “fifty-two, depends.”

“He’d probably be a forty-four, maybe. He’s more, ah, willowy.”

“How grand for him,” I said.

“I like husky men, myself,” PJ said.

“Phew!”

“He didn’t have an accent,” Nancy said.

“You mean he talked like everyone else around here?”

“No. I mean he had no accent at all,” Nancy said. “Like a radio announcer.

He didn’t sound like he was from here. He didn’t sound like he was from the South, or from anywhere.“

Nancy was maybe a little keener than she seemed.

“Good-looking guy?” I said.

Nancy nodded very vigorously. PJ noticed it and grinned.

“He was pretty as hell,” she said. “Straight nose, dimple in his chin, kind of pouty lips, smoothshaven, though you could see that his beard is dark.

Kind of man that wears cologne, silk shorts.“

Nancy got a little touch of pink on her cheekbones.

“Okay,” I said. “The consensus is that his name is Rich Beaumont, or thereabouts, that he’s six feet one, maybe a hundred eighty-five pounds, dark longish hair, well styled, good clothes, handsome, and particularly attractive to slender blonde women.

“What do you mean?” Nancy said.

“A wild guess,” I said. “He speaks in an accentless way, and lives near the water.”

“Hell,” PJ said. “We knew more than we thought we did.”

“Masterful questioning,” I said, “brings it out. You have any thoughts at all about where Patty Giacomin might be?”

“No. Really,” Nancy said, “I can’t imagine.”

“You find the boyfriend,” PJ said, “you’ll probably find her. Patty doesn’t do much without a man. Usually not that good a man.”

“Thank you,” I said. “The kid’s worried. If you hear anything, please call me.”

“Certainly,” Nancy said.

PJ grinned so that her eyes crinkled a little.

“You had lunch?” she said.

“Can’t,” I said. “I got a dog in the car.”

“An actual dog or is that an unkind euphemism?”

“An actual dog, named Pearl. Can euphemisms be unkind?”

“I don’t know. There’s always dinner? Or are you married?”

“Well, I have a friend.”

“Don’t they all,” PJ said. “Too bad. We’d have had fun.”

“Yeah,” I said. “We would have in fact.”

I went out of Chez Vous, and went back to the car.

CHAPTER 7

WHEN I got to my car, Pearl was curled tightly in the driver’s seat. She sprang up when I opened the door and insinuated herself between the bucket front seats into the back. When I got in she lapped the side of my face vigorously.

“I thought you were Susan’s dog,” I said.

She made no response.

Back in my office she guzzled down some water from a bowl placed for that purpose by Paul.

“Did you know that they drink by curling their tongue backwards?” I said.

“Under?”

“How exciting,” Paul said. “Thank you for sharing that with me.”

“How’d you do on the phone?”

“Not very well,” he said. “No one knew where she was. Some of the calls were from real estate customers who don’t know anything about her. One woman said she was my mother’s best friend. I figure she’s worth a visit.”

“She know anything?”

“She was late for aerobics, she said. But I could call later.”

“Better to visit,” I said. “Where is she?”

“Lives in Concord. She gave me the address.”

“Okay. I’ll run out and have a talk with her,” I said.

“I’ll go with you.”

“No need to.”

“Yes,” Paul said. “There is a need to.”

“Okay.”

“You took care of everything when I was fifteen,” he said. “I’m not fifteen now. I need to do part of this.”

“Sure,” I said. Paul’s presence would make it harder. People would be less frank about Patty in front of her son. But he wasn’t fifteen anymore and it was his mother. Pearl had gotten herself up onto the narrow client’s chair and was curled precariously, mouthing the yellow tennis ball she’d tracked down on a walk in Cambridge. Her eyes followed every movement I made. I got her leash and snapped it on and took her to the car and drove her and Paul to Concord.

Most of the way up Route 2 she had her head on my left shoulder, her nose out the open window, sampling the wind.

“It is not entirely clear,” I said to Paul, “why I am bringing this hound with me everywhere I go.”

“Cathexis,” Paul said.

“I knew you’d know.”

“What did they say about my mother?” he said.

“The people at Chez Vous?”

“Ou i. ”

“They had no real idea where she might be.”

“I know, you told me that. But what did they say?”

“They said she worked, usually, three or four days a week, on commission.

That she had brought Rich to a Christmas party last year and that he was very good looking.“

“That all?”

“They didn’t exactly say, but made it quite clear that they thought that your mother’s choices of men were often ill-advised.”

“Many men?”

“They suggested that she needed to be with a man, and that if we found Rich we’d find her.”

“Did they talk about her need to be with men?”

“Not a lot. They seemed to record it as a fact of your mother’s nature that she wasn’t likely to go very far, very often, without the company of a man.”

“That could get you in trouble,” Paul said.

I nodded. We left Route 2, onto 2A, which was the old Revolutionary War road, where the embattled farmers sniped at the redcoats from behind the fieldstone walls. We passed historic houses-the Wayside, the Alcott House-all the way into Concord center.

Not all of the historical places in Massachusetts look the way you’d like them to. But Concord does. It has overarching trees, spacious colonial homes, a green, a clean little downtown made mostly of red brick, a rambling white clapboard inn that looks as if stagecoaches should still be stopping there. There are the historic sights, the academy, the river where one can rent a canoe and spend a day of transcendental paddling, as Susan and I had occasionally done, pausing to picnic one day almost beneath the rude bridge that arched the flood.

The address we wanted was a recycled jelly factory in downtown Concord.

They’d sandblasted the brick and cleaned up the clock tower and gutted the interior and built blond-wood-with-white-walls condominium apartments inside. Out back was a big parking lot. A hopeful sales office was still open on the first floor of the building.

The woman’s name was Caitlin Moore. She answered the bell in a pink spandex leotard, white sneakers, and a pink sweatband. She was built like the cheerleaders of my youth, chunky, bouncy, not very tall. Her extremely blonde hair was caught into a ponytail. She had on green eye shadow and false eyelashes and whitish lip gloss, which made her look a little spectral.

“Hi,” she said, friendly. “I’m Caitlin. You must be Paul, who I talked with on the phone.”

Paul said he was, and introduced me.

“You’re a detective?”

“Yes.”

“Could I see something?”

“Sure.” I gave her my license, she looked at it for a moment, then went to a bleached oak table and got a pair of half-glasses and put them on and came back looking further at my license. “Well,” she said. “A hard man is good to find.”

She smiled. I smiled. Paul smiled.

“Come on in,” Caitlin said. “Want some coffee? All I got is instant, but I can microwave it in no time.”

Paul and I declined. Caitlin led us into her sitting room, her prominent little butt waggling ahead of us as we followed her. With its bleached woodwork and stark white walls and ceiling, and anodized combination windows, the room was standard condo modern. It appeared to have been furnished by Betsy Ross. There was an old maple standup desk, an antique pine harvest table, a pine thumbback rocker, a coffee table made from a cobbler’s bench. It went with the room the way Liberace goes with Faust.

“I love early American,” she said as we sat down. Paul and me on the sofa.

Caitlin on the thumbback rocker, where she crossed both legs under her.

“When I got divorced I made the bastard give me all the furniture.”

“Great,” I said.

“You’re my mother’s best friend?” Paul said.

“Oh, absolutely,” Caitlin said. “Patty and I are like twins. She’s always talking about you.”

“What does she say?”

“She talks about how successful you are. You’re in the movies, I think?”

“I’m a dancer in New York,” Paul said. “I was on screen for a minute and twenty-six seconds in a film about American Dance that played on PBS.”

“Yuh, I knew it was something like that. Anyway, we been really close ever since we were in aerobics together at Sweats Plus. Something about us, you know, we just hit it off. Both been divorced and all. I don’t have any kids, but, well, we knew something about pain, and recovery.”

“Know her current boyfriend?” I said.

“I introduced them.”

“Tell us a little about him,” Paul said.

“He’s a real doll. Friend of my brother’s. I knew Patty was looking to go out, and I knew Rich was single. So I…” Caitlin spread her hands and shrugged. “They really connected, you know, right from the start. It was something. You worried about her? Maybe she and Rich just went off, they were crazy like that, I don’t mean anything bad about your mom, Paul, she was just ready for fun anytime. I bet they just went off somewhere for a while on the spur.”

“They have a place they usually go?” I said.

“Oh, they’d go anywhere. I don’t know. Miami, Atlantic City, Club Med. You name it.”

“What’s Rich’s last name?” Paul said.

“Beaumont. Rich Beaumont.” She pronounced it with the stress on the last syllable.

“Where’s he live?” I said.

“Over in Revere someplace, I think. On the water. I think he’s got a condo on the beach.”

“Got an address?”

“No, not really. I don’t think I ever knew it exactly.”

“Phone number?”

Caitlin smiled and spread her hands. “I’d always meet him through my brother.”

“Can we talk with your brother?” Paul said.

“Marty? I don’t know what Marty can tell you.”

“How’s your brother know Rich?”

“I don’t know, they play handball together. Double date. I think they did some business sometime.”

“What’s Rich’s business?”

“Consultant.”

“You know what he consults in?”

“No, just some kind of consulting business.”

“What’s your brother do?”

“Marty’s a paving contractor. Hot top, you know, that stuff.”

“And his last name?” I said.

“Martinelli.”

“Martin Martinelli?” I said.

“Yeah. My mother was a lunatic. How about Caitlin Martinelli? My old lady was nuts.”

“What was it like being my mother’s friend?” Paul said.

“Huh?”

“What’s she like?”

“You’re her kid,” Caitlin said. “You should know-better than anybody.”

“I should but I don’t. What does she care about?” The question was too hard for Caitlin. She frowned. “What did she care about?”

“Yeah.”

Caitlin lifted her shoulders. “Ah…” Caitlin waved her hands vaguely.

“She, ah. She liked aerobics. You know she cared about her body, and how she looked. And she knew a lot about makeup.”

Paul nodded.

Caitlin had a thread to follow out of her confusion. She tumbled on. “And fun,” Caitlin said. “Patty loved to have fun.”

Paul nodded again.

“Who were her other close friends?” I said.

“I don’t really know her other friends… She had a friend named Sonny, was a traffic reporter, you know, from a helicopter.”

“Man or woman?” I said.

“Woman.”

“She have a last name?”

“Oh, sure. I mean, doesn’t everybody? I don’t know it, though. Just Sonny.”

“Know the station she reported for?”

Caitlin shook her head.

“We’d like to talk with your brother,” I said. “Could you give us an address?”

Caitlin looked flustered. “Gee, I don’t know. Marty won’t be too thrilled.

Marty’s a very private guy. Very successful businessman, very private.“

“I know his name,” I said. “I know his business. I can find him. Will he like me finding him, asking around about him?”

“God, no. Listen. I’ll give you his work address. That way you won’t be bothering him at home.”

“Sure,” I said.

She gave me an address on the Revere Beach Parkway in Everett.

“Did she ever talk about my father?” Paul said.

“Her ex-? What’s-his-name, Mel? Sure did. She called him a cheap sonovabitch every chance she could. Excuse me, I know he’s your dad and all.”

“That’s okay,” Paul said. “I can hear whatever there is to hear. I need to hear it.”

“Well, don’t worry about her. I’m sure she’s off someplace with Rich having a ball. Your mother is a fun lady!”

“You don’t think she might go someplace without Rich?” Paul said.

Caitlin looked startled. “No,” she said. “Of course not. What fun is it alone?”

CHAPTER 8

SUSAN said, “When Pearl sleeps with you does she get under the covers?”

We were sitting at the same table in the Ritz bar. On a Wednesday with the baseball season dwindling, and the kids grimly back in school. It was raining again. The Ritz bar is a good place to spend a rainy weekday afternoon.

“Of course,” I said. “Don’t you?”

“I’m not sure all dogs do that,” Susan said.

“We shouldn’t generalize,” I said.

Susan nodded. “True,” she said.

I was drinking Sam Adams. Susan had a glass of Riesling which would last her the day. The bar was nearly empty. It wasn’t the old Ritz bar. It had been refurbished by new owners into something that looked like an English hunting club, or the last twenty-five hotel bars you’d been in. But you could still have a table by the window, looking out at Arlington Street and the Public Gardens.

“What do you think about Paul?” I said. “It’s not just that he wants to locate his mother. He wants to find out about her.”

“He’s thinking about getting married,” Susan said.

“Yeah?”

“For a kid like Paul whose parents’ marriage was a failure, whose own life has made him careful, and introspective, the idea of marriage carries with it heavy baggage.”

“His mother really is missing,” I said.

“His mother has always been missing.”

“Mine too,” I said.

Susan took a gram of Riesling and swallowed it carefully and put the glass back down. She looked out at the wet street for a moment.

“How long have we been together?” she said.

“If you date together from the time I first got your clothes off,” I said, “sixteen years.”

“Aren’t you the romantic fool,” Susan said.

“How do you date it?” I said.

Susan thought a minute. Outside, chic Back Bay women were picking their way past the rain puddles on their high heels, bending in under the little black umbrellas they all had, most of them holding skirts down by pressing their left hand and forearm across their thighs as the wind pushed at them.

“I’d say it begins with the time you first got my clothes off.”

“September,” I said. “Nineteen seventy-four. After Labor Day. It’s almost an anniversary now that I think of it. You had on red undies with big black polka dots and a little black bow on the side.”

“Selected with great care,” Susan said. “I planned that you’d get my clothes off.”

Outside on Arlington Street, the taxis all had their lights on in the rain and the overcast. The yellow headlights mixed with the neon and the traffic lights to make glistening streaks on the wet pavement-red, green, and yellow mostly. Two young Boston cops strolled past, heading toward Park Square, their slickers gleaming in the rain, the plastic covers on their hats looking oddly out of keeping.

“In all that time,” Susan said, “you have spoken maybe for five minutes, total, about your past.”

“My past?”

“Yes, your past.”

“What is this, an old Bette Davis movie?”

“No,” Susan said. “I know you as I am sure no one in the world knows you.

But I only know you since we undressed that first time in September 1974.

I don’t to this day know how you got to be what you are. I don’t know about other women, about family, about what you were like as a little boy, peeking out at the adult world, trying to grow up, getting scarred in the process.“

“Heavens,” I said.

Susan smiled. Dampened the tip of her tongue with her wine. I drank the rest of my Sam Adams. The waiter noticed and raised an inquiring eyebrow.

I nodded and he hustled over a fresh bottle on a silver tray.

“It’s a rainy day,” Susan said. “We have nothing to do but look at the rain and watch the people go by on whatever street that is out there.”

“You’ve lived here since the Johnstown flood,” I said. “That’s Arlington Street, runs from Beacon Street in the north to Tremont Street in the South End.”

Susan smiled the smile she always smiled when you knew she hadn’t the slightest interest in what you were saying, and she knew it, and she knew you knew it.

“Of course,” she said.

The only other people in the bar were two women at a table, with Bonwit’s shopping bags piled on the two empty chairs; and a guy at the bar, reading The Wall Street Journal and sipping what looked like a Gibson, up. The women were drinking white wine. Both of them smoked. Susan settled her gaze on me and waited.

“Well, we had a dog named Pearl,” I said.

“I know that,” Susan said. “And I know that you were born in Laramie, Wyoming, and that your mother died while she carried you and you were born by caesarean section and your father and your two uncles, who were your mother’s brothers, raised you.”

“Me and Macbeth,” I said.

“Not of woman born,” Susan said. “But that’s all I know.”

“And all ye need to know,” I said.

“Many people would welcome the chance to sit in a quiet bar on a rainy afternoon and talk about themselves to an attentive listener,” Susan said.

“Many people pay one hundred and fifty dollars an hour to come and sit in a quiet office and talk to me about themselves.”

“Do they know you used to wear polka dot panties with a bow?” I said.

“Most of them don’t.”

I drank some beer. I looked out the window at the wet, wind-driven cityscape. The small rain down can rain.

“My father was a carpenter,” I said, “in business with his wife’s two brothers. They were very young when I was born. My uncles were seventeen and eighteen. My father was twenty.”

“My God,” Susan said. “Children raising children.”

“I suppose so,” I said. “But this was the depression, remember, and people grew up early those years. Everyone worked as soon as he could, especially in a place like Laramie.”

“Your father never remarried.”

“And your uncles lived with you?”

“Yeah, until they got married. They both married late. I was in my teens.”

“So you grew up in an all-male household.”

I nodded.

“My uncles dated a lot, so did my father. There were always girlfriends around. But they didn’t have anything to do with the family. The family was us.

“Three men and a boy,” Susan said.

“Maybe four boys,” I said.

“All unified by a connection to one woman.”

“Yeah.”

“Who was dead,” Susan said.

I nodded.

“They were all fighters,” I said. “My father used to pick up spare money boxing, around the state, at smokers, fairs, stuff like that. And my uncles did the same thing. Heavyweight, all three of them. One uncle fought for a while at light heavy until he filled out.”

“And they taught you.”

“Yeah. I could box as far back as I can remember.”

“What were they like?” Susan said.

“They were like each other,” I said. “Other than that it’s hard to summarize. They were fairly wild, tough men. But one thing was clear. We were family, the four of us, and in that family I was the treasure.”

“They loved you.”

“They loved me without reservation,” I said. “No conditions. Nothing about their love depended on my grades or my behavior. They expected me to learn how to act by observing them. And God save anyone who didn’t treat me properly.”

“Like what?” Susan said. I could see how she’d gotten to be such a good shrink. Her interest was luminous. She listened with her whole self. Her eyes picked up every movement of my hands, every gesture of my soul.

“I went to the store once,” I said, “and on the way back, past a saloon, a couple of drunks gave me a hard time. I was probably sort of mouthy.”

“Hard to believe,” Susan murmured.

“Anyway-I was maybe around ten-the bottle of milk I was carrying got broken. I went home and told my uncle Bob, who was the only one there. One of them was always home. I never had a babysitter. And he grinned and said we’d take care of it, and later that afternoon, we all went down to the place. It was called the Blind Pig Saloon, and my father and my uncles cleaned it out. It was like one of those old John Wayne movies, where bodies would come flying out through the front window. I didn’t know if the culprits were even in there when we arrived. Didn’t matter. By the time the cops came the place was empty except for me, and everything in there was broken.”

“Where were you,” Susan said, “while all this was happening?”

“Mostly behind the bar, watching, like the kid in Shane. Even had the dog with me.”

We were quiet. Susan twirled the stem of her nearly full wineglass. There was the imprint of her lipstick on the rim. I thought about what it might be like going through life with everything having a faint raspberry flavor.

“Parents’ day at school was an event,” I said. “They’d always come. The three of them. All six feet or more. All around two hundred pounds and hard as the handle on a pickax, and they’d sit in the back row, at the little desks, with their arms folded and not say a word. But they always came.”

Across Arlington Street, past the wrought-iron fence that rimmed the Public Gardens, beyond the initial stand of big trees, I could see the weeping willows that stood around the lagoon where the swan boats drifted in pleasant weather. Through the rain the willows had a misty green blur about them, softened by the weather, almost lacy.

“When I was ten or twelve,” I said, “we moved east. I think my father and my uncles thought it was a better place for a kid to grow up.”

“Boston?” Susan said.

“Yeah. The Athens of America. My father read a lot. My uncles didn’t, except to me. Every night one of them would read to me after dinner while the other two cleaned up.”

“What did they read?”

“To me? Uncle Remus, Winnie-the-Pooh, Joseph Altscheler, John R. Tunis, stuff like that.”

“And what did your father read, to himself?” Susan said.

“He had no formal education, so he had no master plan,” I said. “He read whatever came along: Shakespeare, Kenneth Roberts, Faulkner, C. S.

Forester, Dos Passos, Rex Stout. Actually I think he was reading Marquand when he decided to move us to Boston. Or Oliver Wendell Holmes, or Henry Adams, somebody like that.“

“Because he thought it would be good for you?”

“Yeah. He believed all that Hub of the Universe stuff.”

“So you all came.”

“Oh yeah, the four of us and Pearl.”

“And what about love? Was there someone before me?”

“There were a lot of women before you.”

“No. I mean, did you ever love anyone before me?”

“Just once,” I said.

“Was she as pretty, sexy, and smart as I am?” Susan said.

“Would you believe, prettier, sexier, and smarter.”

“No,” Susan said.

“How about younger?” I said.

“Younger is possible.”

CHAPTER 9

R & B Hot Top and Paving was behind a ragged shopping center off the Revere Beach Parkway in Everett. A red sign with yellow letters that appeared to have been hand painted on a piece of 4 X 8 plywood was nailed to a utility pole out front. There were a couple of asphalt-stained dump trucks parked on the hot-top turnaround, and, next to the Quonset but that served as an office, a power roller was parked on a trailer. The hot-top apron was maybe four inches thick and gleamed the way new hot top does, but no one had bothered to retain it and it was crumbly and scattered along the edges.

In the backseat Pearl growled in an entirely uncute way, and the hair along her spine went up. A black and tan pit bull terrier appeared in the door of the Quonset with his head down and stared out at the car.

“Pearl appears to want a piece of that pit bull,” Paul said.

“That’s because she’s in here,” I said. Paul and I

got out of the car carefully so Pearl would stay put. She was stiff-legged in the backseat, growling a low serious growl. The pit bull gazed at us, his yellow eyes unblinking.

“Nice doggie,” Paul murmured.

“I’m not sure that’s going to work,” I said.

We walked toward the door. A squat man appeared in it wearing a gold tank top and blue workout pants with red trim. He had dark curly hair, worn longish, over his ears, and there was a lot of dark hair on his chest and arms. As we got close I could see that he was wearing a small gold loop in his left ear. There were two gold chains around his neck, a gold bracelet on his right wrist, a gold Rolex watch on his left one. On his feet he wore woven leather sandals.

The pit bull growled briefly. The man bent over slightly and took hold of the loose end of the dog’s choke collar.

“He won’t bother you unless I tell him,” the man said.

“Good to know,” I said.

“We’re looking for Marty Martinelli,” Paul said.

“What for?” the man said. The pit bull was motionless, his expressionless yellow eyes staring at us. There was a barely audible rumble in his throat.

The man had a forefinger hooked less firmly than I would have liked through the ring on the choke collar. On the back of his wrist, in blue script, was tattooed the name Marty.

“We need to ask him a couple of questions about some people,” Paul said.

“I do hot top, you know. I put a nice driveway in your yard, put a nice sealer on it. Charge you a fair price. That’s what I do. I don’t go around answering questions about nobody. Gets you in trouble.”

“Sure,” Paul said. “I understand that, but I’m looking for my mother, and your sister said you might know something.”

“My sister?”

“Caitlin,” Paul said. “She said you might be able to help us.”

The pit bull kept up his very low rumbling growl.

“What makes you think I got a sister named Caitlin?”

“Well,” Paul said, “you’ve got Marty tattooed on your left wrist. I took a sort of guess based on that.”

“Smart guy,” Marty said.

“Smart enough not to tattoo his name on his arm if he doesn’t want people to know it,” I said.

“Lot of guys named Marty,” he said.

Paul didn’t say anything. Neither did I. The dog kept growling. Marty looked at me.

“You a cop?”

“Sort of,” I said.

“What the hell is sort of a cop?”

“Private detective,” I said.

Marty shook his head. “Caitlin,” he said. “The queen of the yuppies. What the fuck kind of name is that for an Italian broad, Caitlin?”

Paul started to speak. I shook my head. We waited.

“I don’t know nothing about nobody’s mother,” Marty said.

“Patty Giacomin,” Paul said.

“That your old lady?”

“Yes.”

“Hey, that’s a good paisano name.”

Paul nodded. “Her boyfriend is Rich Beaumont.”

Marty grinned. “Hey,” he said. “Richie.”

“You know him?”

“Sure. Richie’s my main man.”

“We think he and my mother have gone off together,” Paul said, “and we’re trying to find them.”

“Hey, if she went off with Richie, she’s having a good time. Why not leave them be?”

“We just want to know that she’s okay,” Paul said.

“She’s with Richie, kid, she’s okay. Hell, she probably…”

“Probably what?”

“Nothing. I forgot for a minute she’s your mother, you know?”

“You know where they might be?” I said.

Marty shrugged. To do so, he had to let go of the dog. I shrugged my left shoulder slightly to feel the pleasant weight of the Browning under my arm.

The dog maintained the steady sound. Maybe he was bored. Maybe he was humming to himself.

“Hell, no.”

“You know where Beaumont lives?”

“Sure. Lives on the beach in Revere. One of them new condos.”

“Address?”

“Richie won’t like it, me giving you his address.”

“We won’t like it if you don’t,” I said.

“You getting tough with me, buddy, you like to wrestle with Buster here?”

“Buster’s overmatched,” I said, “unless he’s carrying.”

“What’s that dog you got, a Doberman?”

I grinned. “Not quite,” I said. “What’s Rich Beaumont’s address?”

Marty hesitated.

“You got all the proper licenses here?” I said. “I don’t see any on that hound, for instance. You got the proper permits for everything? Asphalt storage? Vehicle’s been inspected lately? That Quonset built to code?”

“Hey,” Marty said. “Hey. What the fuck?”

“It’ll save us a little time if you give us the address,” Paul said. “We can find it anyway. Just take a little longer. You save us some time, we’d be very grateful. We won’t tell him where we got it.”

Marty looked down at the dog, looked at me, and looked back at Paul.

“Sure,” he said. “You seem like a nice kid.” He gave Paul an address on Revere Beach Boulevard. Then he looked at me. “You catch more flies with honey,” he said, “than you do with vinegar. You know?”

“I’ve heard that,” I said. “I’ve not found it to be true.”

CHAPTER 10

Richie Beaumont wasn’t home. He had a condominium on the top floor of a twelve-story concrete building full of condominia that faced the Atlantic, across Revere Beach. From his living room you could probably see the oil tankers easing into Chelsea Creek. Rich wasn’t the only one that wasn’t home. Still and clean and smelling strongly of recently cured concrete, the place echoed with emptiness.

“They must have built this place as the condo boom was peaking,” Paul said.

“Or slightly after,” I said.

Pearl skittered down the empty corridor ahead of us, her claws sliding on the new vinyl. At the elevator she pressed her nose at the crack where the closed doors met and snuffled loudly.

“I thought she only pointed birds,” Paul said.

The elevator arrived, the doors opened, and we got in. When we got to the lobby there were two guys in it. One of them was a stocky guy with a high black pompadour. He had on a black, thigh-length leather coat and black pegged pants. His black boots were badly worn at the heels and had sharp toes. The other guy was a slugger. Maybe three hundred pounds, his chin sunk into the folds of fat around his neck. Pearl went directly to them, her tail wagging, her ears pricked, her tongue lolling happily. The slugger backed up involuntarily.

“Watch it,” he said to the guy with the hairdo. “That’s a Doberman, it’ll take your hand off.”

The guy with the pompadour barely glanced at him. He put one hand down absently and scratched Pearl behind the ear.

“You the guys looking for Richie Beaumont?” he said.

I looked at Paul. “Now you say, `Who wants to know?‘”

“Who wants to know?” Paul said.

“Good,” I said. “Now you.” I pointed at Pompadour.

“What are you, a comedian?” he said.

“Breaking the kid in,” I said. “I’d appreciate if you answered right. Say, 1 want to know.”

The fat slugger was looking nervously at Pearl. She turned her head toward him and he flinched a little, and put his hand inside his Members Only windbreaker.

“Listen, asshole. Vinnie Morris is outside and he wants to talk with you. Now.”

“We can do this easy or hard,” Sluggo said.

“Careful I don’t sic my Doberman on you,” I said.

“It ain’t a fucking Doberman,” Pompadour said,

“it’s a fucking pointer. Tiny don’t know shit from dogs.”

“Among other things,” I said. “We’ll talk with Vinnie.”

I put Pearl’s leash on and we went out through the wide glass doors and down the empty capacious steps. The light had the brightness of nearby ocean in it, and there was traffic moving on the boulevard. In the turnaround in front of the near empty condominium complex a white Lincoln Town Car was parked. When we reached it, the rear window went down, and there was Vinnie. He still had the thick black mustache, but his hair was shorter now. He still dressed like a GQ cover boy.

“What the hell is that on the end of the leash?” he said. “You finally get married?”

“That’s Pearl,” I said. “This is Paul Giacomin. Vinnie Morris. You still with Joe, Vinnie?”

“You been trying to find Richie Beaumont,” Vinnie said.

“Actually we’ve been trying to find Patty Giacomin,” I said. “Beaumont is her boyfriend.”

“Why you want her?”

“She’s my mother,” Paul said.

Vinnie nodded. “She sort of took off on you, huh? And didn’t tell you where she was going.”

“Yes,” Paul said. “Or not. I don’t know where she is.”

“And you’re looking for Richie because he’s her boyfriend and you figure he’ll know?”

Paul nodded.

“You know Richie Beaumont?” Vinnie said.

“No.”

Vinnie nodded again and sucked on his upper lip a little.

“And if you knew where he was you wouldn’t be here looking for him.”

Neither Paul nor I said anything. Vinnie nodded again, to himself. At the end of the nod he jerked his head at the two soldiers. The guy with the pompadour started around the car toward the driver’s side. The slugger made a circle around Pearl as he got in his side.

“I’ll bet you never had a puppy as a kid,” I said to him.

“Tiny never was a kid,” Vinnie said. “You gonna be in your office today?”

“Could be,” I said. “Any special time?”

Vinnie looked at his watch. “This afternoon, around four.”

“I’ll be there,” I said.

Vinnie reached his hand out the rear window toward Pearl, who promptly licked it. Vinnie looked at her a moment and shook his head. He took the show handkerchief out of the breast pocket of his dark suit and wiped his hands. The car started up and pulled away, and as it went the tinted rear window eased silently up.

“You care to comment on any of this?” Paul said.

“The two enlisted men don’t count. Vinnie Morris is Joe Broz’s executive officer. Joe Broz is a crook.”

“A crook.”

“A major league, nationally known, well-connected crook,” I said.

“Well, isn’t this getting worse and worse,” Paul said.

“Maybe,” I said.

“Why are they interested in my mother?”

“I think they’re interested in her for the same reason we’re interested in Beaumont.”

“They’re looking for him.”

I nodded.

“Why did he want you to be in your office later?”

“He wants to talk with me after he’s talked with Joe.”

“Mind if I am there?” Paul said.

I shrugged. “I hate an astute kid,” I said.

“I shouldn’t be there.”

“Because he’s got stuff to say about my mother he doesn’t want me to hear.”

“Probably.”

“We should have insisted he say what he had to say.

“Vinnie’s hard to insist,” I said.

I could see the chill of realization dart through him. I knew the feeling.

“Jesus,” he said. “What is she into?”

“Maybe nothing,” I said. “Maybe just a boyfriend who will turn out to be sleazy.”

“It would be consistent,” Paul said.

Pearl had discovered a gum wrapper and was busy sniffing it from all possible perspectives.

“Can we go back to your office and call him now?”

“No,” I said.

“But I want to know. I don’t want to wait.”

“This is a business, like most businesses it has its own rules. We let him call me at the office around four.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Paul said. “Why do we have to sweat all afternoon out for some goddamned rules of the game?”

“Look,” I said. “Vinnie and I have a kind of working relation, despite the fact that we are, you might say, sworn enemies. Vinnie will do what he says he will do, and so will I. He knows it, and I know it, and we can function that way. It is in our best interest to keep it that way.”

“This sucks,” Paul said.

Pearl picked up the gum wrapper and chewed it experimentally, and found it without savor and spit it out.

“It often does,” I said.

CHAPTER 11

AT four o’clock the fall sun was glinting off the maroon scaffolding of the new building across Berkeley Street. I used to be able to sit in my office and watch the art director in a large ad agency work at her board. But Linda Thomas was gone, and so was the building, and a new skyscraper was going in, which would help to funnel the wind off the river and increase its velocity as it whistled past Police Headquarters two blocks south. I was watching the ironworkers on the scaffolding and thinking about Linda Thomas when Vinnie Morris came in exactly on time, without knocking.

He’d changed his clothes. This morning it had been a black suit with a pale blue chalk stripe. Now it was an olive brown Harris Tweed jacket, with a tattersall shirt and a rust-colored knit tie, with a wide knot. His slacks were charcoal. His kiltie loafers were mahogany cordovan. His wool socks were rust. I knew he was carrying, but his clothes were so well tailored that I couldn’t tell where.

“You got the piece in the small of your back?” I said. “So it won’t break the line of your jacket?”

“Yeah.”

“It will take you an extra second to get it. Vanity will kill you sometime, Vinnie.”

“Hasn’t so far,” Vinnie said. “The kid hire you?”

“No,” I said. “It’s personal.”

“You and the kid or you and the old lady?”

“The kid. He’s like family. The old lady doesn’t matter to me except as she matters to the kid.”

Vinnie was silent. I waited.

“I talked this over with Joe,” Vinnie said. I waited some more. Vinnie didn’t need prompting.

Vinnie shook his head and almost smiled. “He can’t fucking stand you,” he said.

“A tribute,” I said, “to years of effort.”

“But he left it up to me what I tell you, what I don’t.”

Vinnie was gazing past my shoulder out over Berkeley Street; there was a slice of sky you could see from that angle, to the right of the new building, and up, before the buildings closed you off across the street.

“We got an interest in Richie Beaumont.”

I nodded.

A look of nearly concealed distaste showed at the corners of his mouth for a moment. “He’s a friend of Joe’s kid.”

“Joe deserves Gerry,” I said.

“I ain’t here to talk about it,” Vinnie said. “Gerry brought Rich in and gave him some responsibility.”

“And… ?”

“And it didn’t work out.”

“And Rich dropped out of sight,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Maybe with some property that Joe feels is not rightfully his.”

“Yeah.”

“And then you heard I was looking for him.”

Vinnie was nodding slowly.

“Martinelli called you.”

“Somebody called somebody, don’t matter who.”

“And you thought I might know something useful. So you collected the two galoots and went to meet me at the condo.”

“Okay,” Vinnie said. “You got everything we know. Now what do you know?”

“I got nowhere near what you know,” I said. “What did Beaumont take that belongs to you? Money? Something he can use for blackmail? What were he and Gerry involved in? It had to be bad. Anything Gerry’s involved in would make a buzzard puke.”

“You figure Richie took off with this Giacomin broad?” Vinnie said.

“Don’t know,” I said. “She’s not around. Thought it was logical to see if she was with her boyfriend.”

“He’s not around,” Vinnie said.

“Un huh,” I said. My repartee grew more elegant with every passing year.

“You got a thought where he might be?”

“Un uh,” I said.

Vinnie sat back a little and looked at me. He had one knee crossed over the other and he tossed his foot for a moment while he looked.

“You used to be a mouthy bastard,” he said finally.

“Brevity is the soul of wit,” I said.

“Why’s the kid want to find her?” Vinnie said.

I shrugged. “She’s not around.”

“So what?” Vinnie said. “My old lady’s not around either. I ain’t looking for her.”

“He cares about her,” I said.

“There’s one difference right there,” Vinnie said. “She got something he wants?”

“His past,” I said.

Vinnie looked at me some more, and tossed his foot some more.

“His past,” Vinnie said.

I nodded.

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“Kid’s about to get married,” I said. “She was pretty much a bitch all his childhood and he wants to know her as something other than that before he moves too far on into adulthood.”

“You shoulda been a college professor,” Vinnie said.

“You say that because you don’t know any college professors,” I said.

Vinnie shrugged. “Anyway, that may all be true, whatever the fuck it means, but it don’t help my case. Or, far as I can see, yours.”

“True,” I said. “But you asked me.”

“Yeah,” Vinnie said. “Sure. The point is you’re looking and we’re looking and I want to be sure we aren’t trampling on each other’s feet, you know?”

He took a package of Juicy Fruit gum from his coat pocket and offered me some. I shook my head, and he selected a stick, and peeled it open, and folded it into his mouth.

“Me and Joe don’t give a fuck about her,” he said. “We want him.”

“I don’t give a fuck about him,” I said. “I want her.”

Vinnie smiled widely. “Perfect,” he said and chewed his gum slowly.

“How about Gerry?” I said.

This time there was no hint of expression in Vinnie’s face. “Hey, he’s Joe’s kid.”

“Joe’s a creep,” I said, “but compared to his kid he’s Abraham Lincoln.”

Vinnie turned his hands palms up.

“Is Gerry going to get in the way?” I said.

“Joe told him to stay out of this.”

“You think he will?”

Again Vinnie’s face was without expression. His voice was entirely neutral.

“No.”

“Like I said. What about Gerry?”

“Okay,” Vinnie said. “We won’t fuck around with this either. I been with Joe a long time. You don’t like him. That’s okay. He don’t like you. But Joe says he’ll do something, he will. He says he won’t, he won’t.”

“That’s true for you, Vinnie. It’s not true for Joe.”

“We won’t argue. I know Joe a long time. But we both know Gerry and we know he’s a fucking ignoramus.

“But he’s mean and you can’t trust him,” I said.

“Exactly,” Vinnie said. “And Joe loves him. Joe don’t see him for the fucking weasel that he is.”

“So you’re going to have trouble with Gerry too.”

“Nothing I can’t handle.”

“Tricky though,” I said.

“Yeah,” Vinnie said.

“You want to tell me what kind of mess Gerry is in with Richie Beaumont?”

“No.”

The light was beginning to fade outside, and the traffic sounds drifting up from Boylston Street increased as people started going home. The iron workers had already left the site where Linda Thomas had worked once, across the street, and the maroon skeleton stood empty. Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.

“I have no interest in Richie Beaumont,” I said. “But I have a lot of interest in Patty Giacomin. I would not want anything bad to happen to her.”

“I got no need to hurt the old lady,” Vinnie said. “You let me know if you find her?”

“You let me know if you find him?”

I grinned. “Maybe.”

“Yeah,” Vinnie said. “Me too.”

We were silent some more, listening to the traffic. “I don’t want trouble with you, Spenser.”

“Who would,” I said.

“You’re probably half as good as you think you are,” Vinnie said. “But that’s pretty good. And you got resources.”

“Hawk,” I said.

“You and he can be a large pain in the fungones.”

“Nice of you to say so, Vinnie. Hawk will be flattered.”

“So let’s think about helping each other out, maybe, to the extent we can.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Good,” Vinnie said. Then he stood up and headed for the door. At the door he paused, and then turned slowly back.

“Hawk with you in this?” he said.

“Not so far,” I said.

“Gerry’s got a lot at stake here,” Vinnie said. He looked down, and without looking up said, “Kid’s a back-shooter.”

“He has to be,” I said. “Thanks.”

Vinnie was still looking at the floor. He nodded.

“Yeah,” he said. And went out.

CHAPTER 12

SUSAN insisted on cooking dinner for Paul and me. When she put her mind to it she could cook, but she had a lot of trouble putting her mind to it, and most of the time she had it delivered from The Harvest Express.

“Helmut hears you’re doing your own cooking,” I said, “he’ll have a heart attack. You represent his profit margin.”

“I won’t abandon him,” Susan said. She had every pot she owned, including two she had just bought for the occasion, out on the counter. Pearl was underfoot sampling the residue in a pan already used. Susan gave us each a Catamount Golden Lager to drink and then went back to her preparation.

“Couscous,” she said. “With chicken and vegetables.”

“Sounds great,” Paul said.

Susan cleared a space among the pans and put some chicken breasts down on the marble counter and began to cut them into cubes. Pearl stood on her hind legs, with her front paws on the counter, and pointed the raw chicken from a distance of three inches.

“Doesn’t that tend to beat hell out of the knife blade?” Paul said.

Susan looked at him as if he’d espoused pedophilia.

“No,” Paul said quickly. “No, of course it doesn’t.”

I sipped my beer. Susan continued to hack up the chicken. She had her lower lip caught in her teeth, as she always did when she was concentrating. I liked to watch her.

Paul watched me watching her.

“Is Susan the first woman you ever loved?” he said.

“Yes.”

“What about this hussy you mentioned the other day in the Ritz bar?” asked Susan.

“She was a girl,” I said.

“And you?” Susan said.

“I was sixteen,” I said. “And she sat in front of me in French class.”

“Sixteen?” Paul said. “You had a childhood?”

Pearl managed to get a scrap of raw chicken. She got down quickly and trotted to the living room where she put it on the rug and rolled on it.

“I can hardly remember her face now,” I said. “But she had long hair the color of thyme honey, and she combed it straight back and it was quite long and very smooth. Her name was Dale Carter, and I used to write her little notes of poetry and slip them to her. And she’d read them and smile and I knew she was flattered.”

“Poetry?” Susan said.

Pearl returned from the living room licking her muzzle.

“Yeah. Stuff I’d read and would adjust to fit her.”

“Dale, thy beauty is to me like those Nicean barks of yore… that kind of thing.”

Paul and Susan looked at each other. Pearl continued to point the chicken.

“Well,” Susan said, “you were sixteen.” “No.”

“Barely,” I said.

“So,” she said, “did it develop?”

“We became friends,” I said. “We would talk all the time between classes and we would eat lunch together and sit on the high school steps after school, and I just couldn’t get enough of her. I just wanted to look at her and hear her voice.”

Paul was sitting quietly, watching me. There was no amusement in his face.

“She was slender,” I said. “Medium height, from a well-off and intellectual family in the Back Bay. Very, ah, Brahmin. And there was something about her way of carrying herself. She seemed to walk very lightly. She seemed to be very, very interested in what you said, and she would listen with her lips just a little apart and breathe softly through her mouth while she listened.”

Susan wet her lower lip and opened her mouth and leaned forward and panted at me.

“A little more subtly than that,” I said. “And she would sort of cock her head a little to the side when she talked and look right at me.”

Susan tossed her chicken into a bowl and poured some honey over it, and sprinkled on some spices. Pearl’s eyes had never left the chicken. When it went in the bowl her eyes didn’t leave the bowl.

“Did you go out?” Susan said.

“Not really,” I said. “They used to have sort of a canteen dance every afternoon after school in the basement of the Legion hall across the street. Some sort of keep-the-kids-off-the-street campaign which lasted about six months. And we used to go over there sometimes and dance. I never danced very well.”

“I’ll say,” Susan murmured.

“But with her I was Arthur Murray. She seemed to operate a little off the ground, as if her feet were floating; and her hand on my shoulder was very light and yet she felt every movement of the music and seemed to know exactly where I was going before I went. And she always wore perfume. And good clothes. I don’t even remember what they were like, but I knew they were good.”

“Longish skirt,” Susan said. “Thick white socks halfway up the calf, penny loafers, cashmere sweater, maybe a little white collar like Dorothy Collins on The Hit Parade.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s exactly right.”

“Of course it is. It’s what I wore. It’s what we all wore, those of us who wore `good clothes.‘”

Paul’s attention, I noticed peripherally, had intensified. Pearl had moved out of the kitchen, en couraged by a gentle shove from Susan, and now sat on the floor beside my stool, her shoulder leaning in against my leg, - her eyes still fixed on the bowl where the chicken was marinating.

“Sure,” I said. “Anyway we’d dance sometimes, and dance close, but no kissing, or protestations of affection, except cloaked as badinage. I never took her out in the sense of going to her house, picking her up, taking her to the movies, to a dance, that stuff. We never had a meal together except in the school cafeteria.”

“Why didn’t you take her out, kiss her, take her to dinner?”

“Shy.”

“Shy?” Susan said. “You?”

“When I was a kid,” I said. “I was shy with girls.”

“And now you’re not.”

“No,” I said, “now I’m not.”

Susan was struggling with the seal on a box of prepackaged couscous.

Pearl was leaning more heavily against my leg, her neck stretched as far as she could stretch it, to rest her head on my thigh.

“Well, weren’t you weird,” Susan said.

“It’s great talking to a professional psychotherapist,” I said. “They are so sensitive, so aware of human motivation, so careful to avoid stereotypic labeling.”

“Yes, weirdo,” Susan said. “We take pride in that. What happened to her?”

Paul reached over to pat Pearl’s head. Pearl misread it as a food offer and snuffed at his open palm, and finding no food, settled for lapping Paul’s hand. Susan got the box of couscous open and dumped it in another bowl and added some water.

“She told me one day that a close friend of mine had asked her to the junior class dance, and should she accept.”

“And of course you told her yes, she should accept,” Susan said. “Because that was the honorable thing to do.”

“I said yes, that she should accept.”

“Now that you are sophisticated and no longer shy with girls, I assume you understand that she was asking you if you were going to ask her to the dance, and was telling you that if you were, she would turn your friend down and go with you.”

“I now understand that,” I said. “But consider if I had been different.

What if I had not panted after the sweet sorrow of renunciation? What if I’d gone to the dance with her, and we’d become lovers and married and lived happily ever after? What would have become of you?“

“I don’t know,” Susan said. “I guess I’d have wandered the world tragically, wearing my polka dot panties, looking for Mister Right, never knowing that Mister Right had married his high school sweetheart.”

Paul put his hands over his ears.

“Polka dot panties?” he said.

Susan smiled. She transferred the refreshed couscous from the bowl to a cook pot. Neither Paul nor I asked her why she had not refreshed it in the cook pot in the first place. She put the cook pot on the stove and put a lid on it and turned the flame on low.

I rested my hand on Pearl’s head. “I think,” I said, “that even had Dale and I gone to the dance and lived happily ever after, we wouldn’t have lived happily ever after. Any more than you were able to stay with your first husband.”

“Because we’d have been looking for each other?”

I nodded.

“That’s what you think, isn’t it?” Susan said. She was no longer teasing me.

“Yes,” I said. “That’s what I think. I think your marriage broke up because you weren’t married to me. I think neither one of us could be happy with anyone else because we would always be looking for each other, without even knowing it, without knowing who each other was or even knowing there was an each other.”

“Do you think that’s true of love in general?”

“No,” I said. “I only believe that about us.”

“Isn’t that kind of exclusionary?” Paul said.

“Yes,” I said. “Embarrassingly so.”

The room was silent now, not the light and airy silence of contentment, but the weighty silence of intensity.

Paul was choosing his words very carefully. It took him a little time.

“But you’re not saying I couldn’t feel that way?”

“No,” I said. “I’m not.”

Paul nodded. I could see him thinking some more.

“Do you feel that way?” I said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “And I feel like I ought to, because you do.”

“No need to be like me,” I said.

“Who else, then?” he said. “Who would I be like? My father? Who did I learn to be me from?”

“You’re right,” I said. “I was glib. But you know as well as I do that you can’t spend your life feeling as I do, and thinking what I think. You don’t now.”

“The way you love her makes me feel inadequate,” Paul said. “I don’t think I can love anyone like that.”

Susan was chopping fresh mint on the marble countertop.

“One love at a time,” she said.

“Which means what?” Paul said. “My mother?”

Susan smiled her Freudian smile. “We shrinks always imply more than we say.”

“There’s nothing necessarily bizarre in wanting to find my mother.”

“Of course not, and when you do it will help clarify things, maybe.”

“Maybe,” Paul said.

I sipped a little more of my Catamount Gold and thought about Dale Carter, whom I hadn’t seen in so long. It wasn’t the first time I’d thought about her. I looked at Susan. She smiled at me, a wholly non-Freudian smile.

“We’d have found each other,” she said.

“In fact,” I said, “we did it twice.”