Now and Then s-35

  Now and Then

  ( Spenser - 35 )

  Robert B Parker

  1.

  He came into my office carrying a thin briefcase under his left arm. He was wearing a dark suit and a white shirt with a red-and-blue-striped tie. His red hair was cut very short. He had a thin, sharp face. He closed the door carefully behind him and turned and gave me the hard eye.

  “You Spenser?” he said.

  “And proud of it,” I said.

  He looked at me aggressively and didn’t say anything. I smiled pleasantly.

  “Are you being a wise guy?” he said.

  “Only for a second,” I said. “What can I do for you?”

  “I don’t like this,” he said.

  “Well,” I said. “It’s a start.”

  “I don’t like funny either,” he said.

  “Then we should do great,” I said.

  “My name is Dennis Doherty,” he said.

  “I love alliteration,” I said.

  “What?”

  “There I go again,” I said.

  “Listen, pal. You don’t want my business, just say so.”

  “I don’t want your business,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said.

  He stood and walked toward my door. He opened it and stopped and turned around.

  “I came on a little strong,” he said.

  “I noticed that,” I said.

  “Lemme start over,” Doherty said.

  I nodded.

  “Try not to frighten me,” I said.

  He closed the door and came back and sat in one of the chairs in front of my desk. He looked at me for a time. No aggression. Just taking notice.

  “You ever box?” he said.

  I nodded.

  “The nose?” I said.

  “More around the eyes,” Doherty said.

  “Observant,” I said.

  “The nose has been broken,” Doherty said. “I can see that. But it’s not fl attened.”

  “I retired before it got fl at,” I said.

  Doherty nodded. He looked at the large picture of Susan on my desk.

  “You married?” he said.

  “Not quite,” I said.

  “Ever been married?”

  “Not exactly,” I said.

  “Who’s in the picture?” he said.

  “Girl of my dreams,” I said.

  “You together?” Doherty said.

  “Yes.”

  “But not married,” he said.

  “No.”

  “Been together long?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  We were quiet.

  “You having trouble with your wife?” I said after a time. He glanced at the wedding ring on his left hand. Then he looked back at me and didn’t answer.

  “The only person you could ever talk with is your wife,” I said, “and she’s the issue, so you can’t talk to her.”

  He kept looking at me and then slowly nodded.

  “You know,” he said.

  “I do.”

  “You’ve been through it.”

  “I’ve been through something,” I said.

  He looked at Susan’s picture.

  “With her?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re still together.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re all right?” Doherty said.

  “Very.”

  With his elbows on the arms of the chair, he clasped his hands and rested his chin on them.

  “So it’s possible,” he said.

  “Never over till it’s over,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  I waited. He sat. Then he opened the thin briefcase and took out an 8×10 photograph. He put the photograph in front of me on the desk.

  “Jordan Richmond,” he said.

  “Your wife.”

  “Yes,” Doherty said. “She kept her name. She’s a professor.”

  “Ah,” I said, as if he had explained something.

  I try to be encouraging.

  “I think she thought it was low class,” he said. “To have a name like Doherty.”

  “Too ethnic,” I said.

  “Too Irish,” he said.

  “Even worse,” I said.

  “I don’t mean she’s snobby,” Doherty said. “She isn’t. She just grew up different than I did. Private school, Smith College.”

  “Kids?” I said.

  “No.”

  “Where do I come in?” I said.

  He took in a big breath of air.

  “I want you to fi nd out what she’s up to,” he said.

  “What do you think she’s up to?” I said.

  “I don’t know. She’s out late a lot. Sometimes when she comes home I can tell she’s been drinking.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That.”

  “That?”

  “You think she’s fooling around,” I said.

  “I don’t think she’d do that to me,” he said.

  “Maybe it’s not about you,” I said.

  “What?”

  I shook my head.

  “So what do you think?” I said.

  “I don’t know what to think, it’s just not going well. She’s out too much. She’s sort of brusque when she’s home. I don’t know. I want you to fi nd out.”

  There were a few questions I wanted to ask, but they were more shrink-type questions. And he wasn’t hiring me for my shrink skills.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “What do you charge?”

  I told him. He nodded.

  “And you’ll fi nd out?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t want her to know,” Doherty said.

  “I’m pretty slick,” I said. “Where do you live?”

  “No need to know that,” he said. “You can pick her up at school.”

  “And tail her home,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “Of course,” he said. “Six thirty-six Brant Island Road in Milton.”

  I looked at the picture.

  “Good likeness of her?” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “She’s fifty-one, looks younger. Five feet, seven inches, a hundred and thirty pounds. She’s in good shape. Works out. Drives a silver Honda Prelude. Mass plate number ARP7 JD5.”

  He reached into the slim briefcase again and brought out a printed sheet of paper. He put it on the desk beside her photograph.

  “Her teaching schedule,” he said. “Concord College, you know where it is?”

  “I do.”

  “Her office is in Foss Hall,” Doherty said. “English department. It’s on the schedule.”

  “How about you,” I said. “How do I reach you?”

  “I’ll give you my cell phone,” he said.

  I wrote it down.

  “Where do you work?” I said.

  “You don’t need to know that,” he said. “Cell phone will get me.”

  I didn’t press it.

  “You want regular reports?”

  “No. When you know something, tell me.”

  “If she’s doing anything out of the ordinary,” I said, “it shouldn’t take long to catch her.”

  He nodded.

  “I don’t think she’s having an affair,” he said.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “When can you start?”

  “I’m away for a couple of days,” I said. “I’ll start Tuesday.”

  He didn’t move. I waited.

  “She’s not . . .” he said finally. “I can’t see her having an affair . . . she’s not that interested in sex.”

  “I’ll let you know,” I said.

  He nodded and turned and headed for the door. The way his jacket fell, he might have
been carrying a gun behind his right hip.

  2.

  It was late september on Cape Cod, and the summer people were gone. Susan and I liked to go down for a couple of nights in the off-season, before things shut down for the winter. Which is how we ended up on a Sunday night, eating cold plum soup and broiled Cape scallops, and drinking a bottle of Gewürztraminer at Chillingsworth in Brewster.

  “When someone says that their mate is not interested in sex,” Susan said, “all they can really speak to with authority is that their mate is not interested in sex with them.”

  “I’ve never made that statement,” I said.

  “And with good reason,” Susan said.

  “It sounds like sex to me,” I said.

  “And it sounds like he fears that it is,” Susan said.

  “He fears something,” I said.

  “And he’s reticent about himself,” she said. “Didn’t want to tell you where he lived. Won’t tell you where he works.”

  “Lot of people are embarrassed about things like this,” I said.

  “Are you?” she said.

  “No more than you are, shrink girl.”

  She smiled and sipped her wine.

  She said, “We both uncover secrets, I guess.”

  “And chase after hidden truths,” I said.

  “And people are often better for it,” she said.

  “But not always.”

  “No,” she said. “Not always.”

  We ate our plum soup happily and sipped our wine.

  “You don’t like divorce cases, do you?” she said.

  “Make me feel like a Peeping Tom,” I said.

  Susan smiled, which is a luminous sight.

  “Is that different than a private eye?” she said.

  “I hope so,” I said.

  “You feel intrepid, chasing bad guys,” Susan said.

  “Yes.”

  “And sleazy, chasing errant mates.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you do it,” she said.

  “It’s work.”

  “It’s good work,” Susan said. “The pain of emotional loss is intense.”

  “I recall,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “We both do. Half my practice comes from people like that.”

  “Despite similarities, our practices are not identical.”

  “Mine requires less muscle,” she said. “But the point is, you can rescue people in different ways. Leaping tall buildings at a single bound is not the only way.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Which is why you’ll work divorce cases,” she said, “even though they make you feel sleazy.”

  “Heroism has its downside,” I said.

  “It has its upside too,” Susan said.

  Susan’s eyes had a small glitter.

  “Speaking of which . . .” I said.

  “Could we maybe fi nish dinner?” she said.

  “Of course,” I said. “The upside is patient.”

  “And frequent,” Susan said.

  3.

  Iknew Doherty’s name and address. It would not be very hard to find out more about him. He had not, however, hired me to find out anything about him. So I decided to find out about his wife.

  Concord College was not in Concord. It was in Cambridge. Three recent high-rise buildings with a lot of windows, just across the Longfellow Bridge in Kendall Square. A software tycoon with a streak of vestigial hippie-ness had endowed the place with a sum larger than the GNP of several small countries. And the college, perhaps respectful of its financial base, was an exfoliating swamp of unusual ideas. It cost about $40,000 a year to go there.

  I went into Foss Hall, which was the middle high-rise, and up to the fourth floor. Aside from my adulthood, I was too neat to be mistaken for a student. Most of them wore very sloppy clothes that had cost a lot. Chronologically, I could have passed for faculty, but once again the neatness factor gave me away. The faculty was no neater than the students, but their clothes had cost less. Hoping to pass anyway, I was carrying a green book bag. Deep cover.

  According to the schedule Doherty had given me, Jordan Richmond’s office was in room 425, and her office hours began in ten minutes. I strolled past the office. It had an oak door with a window. There was no one in there. I wandered past the door and stopped to study a bulletin board, beyond the next offi ce. Crush Imperialism . . . Film Festival: Jean-Luc Godard . . . Stop the Murders for Oil . . . Roommate Wanted, M or F . . . Wage Peace . . . No Wel- fare for the Wealthy . . . Keg Party at MIT . . . African-American conference . . . Concordian Lecture Series: “Apollonian Despair in the Poetry of Sara Teasdale” . . . Equal Work, Equal Wage . . . Gay & Lesbian Coalition . . . Intelligent Design Is Neither . . . Maybe it wasn’t such a hothouse of new ideas. Except for Apollonian Despair. As I studied the notices, Jordan Richmond strolled past me down the hall toward her offi ce.

  Her picture didn’t do her justice. There was a time in my life when I would have thought that admiring the butt of a fifty-one-year-old woman was exploiting the elderly. I had not entertained that conceit in some years, but if I had, Jordan Richmond would have ended it. She had brown hair with blond highlights. By the standards of her colleagues she appeared to 12 be vastly overdressed. Glimpsed covertly as she passed, she seemed to be wearing makeup. She had on black pants and a jacket with a faint chalk stripe. Under the jacket was a pink tee. By the sound they made on the hard floor, I could tell she was wearing heels.

  I hung around the hallway, trying to look inconspicuous, until she finished her office hours at 4:30 and, carrying a black leather briefcase, she headed out of the building. I went with her. We stood so close in the elevator that I could smell her perfume. On the street we turned right and she went into the Marriott hotel. I took a baseball cap out of my book bag and put it on. Spenser, master of disguise. Then I put the book bag in a trash basket out front, waited for a moment, and went in after her. She was in the lobby bar. At a table with a man. I sat with my hat on, at the far end of the bar, where it turned. It put her back to me, and I could look at her companion. He appeared to be tall. His mustache and goatee were neatly trimmed. His nose was strong. His dark eyes were deep-set. His dark hair was curly and short with touches of gray. He wore an expensive dark suit with a white shirt and a blue silk tie. He was sipping a martini. As soon as she was seated he spoke to the waitress. She took his order and brought Jordan a martini. Jordan picked it up and gestured with it at the man. He raised his glass and they touched rims. I ordered a beer. The bartender put down a dish of nuts. I ate some so as not to hurt his feelings.

  Jordan and her companion gave some evidence that Doherty’s fears were not groundless. They sat close together. She touched him often, putting a hand on his forearm, or on his shoulder.

  Once, laughing, she leaned forward so that their foreheads touched. All his movements were languid, not as if he was tired, more as if he was happily relaxed about everything. And very pleased to be him.

  They had two drinks. He paid the check. They got up and went out. I left too much money on the bar and went after them. They walked back to Concord College together. Got into a Honda Prelude in the parking lot and drove out. I was parked down Main Street a way. By the time I got to my car they were out of sight. So instead I went over the Longfellow Bridge and drove down to Milton.

  It took about a half hour to get to Brant Island Road. I parked on the corner with a view of the house where Dennis and Jordan lived. It was a white garrison colonial, with green shutters. The lights were on. There was a Ford Crown Vic in the driveway. At ten after eleven Jordan pulled the Prelude into the driveway next to the Crown Vic. She got out, straightened her pants a little, fluffed her hair for a moment, then took her briefcase from the car, closed the car door, and walked carefully to the house.

  4.

  It does sound kind of affair-y,” Susan said.

  “I saw them together,” I said. “It’s an affair. But it’s not proof of an affair.”

&
nbsp; “I know,” Susan said. “Will you say anything to the husband?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “It would just be my opinion.”

  “You want to offer him certainty?”

  “I think until I can prove it, he’ll refuse to believe it,” I said.

  Susan nodded.

  “Hard to know, sometimes, what’s best,” she said.

  “How about the truth?” I said.

  She smiled.

  “That’s often effective,” she said.

  We were sharing sweet-and-sour pork for supper at P. F. Chang’s in Park Square. Unless you think that sharing means equal portions for both. In which case, I was having sweet-andsour pork, and Susan was having a couple of bites.

  “But I don’t know,” I said, “at this stage of things, if I would have wanted to know without certainty.”

  “You already had reason for suspicion,” Susan said.

  “I did, but I couldn’t believe it.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know if I couldn’t believe you’d do it, or I couldn’t believe it could happen to me.”

  “Or wouldn’t,” Susan said.

  “Same result,” I said.

  Susan isolated a small piece of pork on her plate, sliced it in half, and ate one of the halves.

  “So I think I’ll wait until I can prove it,” I said. Susan nodded.

  “Are you planning to burst in on them with a video camera?” Susan said.

  “Ugh!” I said.

  “How about planting some sort of electronic device?”

  “Ugh!”

  She smiled.

  “Are you sure you’re cut out for this sort of work?” she said.

  “Doherty needs to know,” I said.

  “Even though it will cause him pain,” she said.

  “He’s in pain now,” I said.

  She nodded again, and ate the other half of the small piece of pork.

  “And the pain of knowing is better than the pain of not knowing?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  She nodded. She seemed to have very little to say about this. Usually she had a lot.

  “Do you have a plan for proving it?”

  “None,” I said.

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “What I usually do,” I said. “Plow along, try not to break things, see what develops.”

  “And if nothing does?” Susan said.