Promised Land Read online

  The waitress reappeared with our first course. My platter of hot hors d’oeuvres included a clam casino, an oyster Rockefeller, a fried shrimp, a soused shrimp and a stuffed mushroom cap.

  “I’ll trade you a mushroom cap for a snail,” I said to Susan.

  She picked a snail up in the tongs and put it on my plate. “I don’t want the mushroom,” she said.

  “No need for a hunger strike, Suze, just because you’re mad.” I poked the snail out of its shell and ate it. “Last chance for the mushroom.”

  She shook her head. I ate the mushroom.

  Susan said, “You don’t know why she ran off.”

  “Neither of us does.”

  “But you assumed a feminist reason.”

  “I should not have. You are right.”

  “I’ll take that soused shrimp,” Susan said. I put it on her plate with my fork.

  I said, “You know they’re my favorite.”

  She said, “AndI know you don’t care that much for the mushroom caps.”

  “Bitch.”

  Susan smiled. “The way to a man’s remorse,” she said, “is through his stomach.”

  The smile did it, it always did it. Susan’s smile was Technicolor, Cinemascope and stereophonic sound. I felt my stomach muscles tighten, like they always did when she smiled, like they always did when I really looked at her.

  “Where in hell were you,” I said, “twenty years ago?”

  “Marrying the wrong guy,” she said. She put her right hand out and ran her forefinger over the knuckles on my left hand as it lay on the tabletop. The smile stayed but it was a serious smile now. “Better late than never,” she said. The waitress came with the salad.

  Chapter 3

  I was up early and on my way to Hyannis before the heavy rush hour traffic started in Boston. Route 3 to the Cape is superhighway to the Sagamore Bridge. Twenty years ago there was no superhighway and you went to the Cape along Route 28 through the small southern Mass towns like Randolph. It was slow but it was interesting and you could look at people and front yards and brown mongrel dogs, and stop at diners and eat hamburgers that were cooked before your very eyes. Driving down Route 3 that morning the only person I saw outside a car was a guy changing a tire near a sign that said PLYMOUTH.

  As I arched up over the Cape Cod Canal at the Sagamore Bridge, Route 3 became Route 6, the Mid-Cape Highway. In the center strip and along each roadside was scrub white pine, and some taller, an occasional maple tree and some small oak trees. At high points on the road you could see ocean on both sides, Buzzards Bay to the south, Cape Cod Bay to the north. In fact the whole Cape echoed with a sense of the ocean, not necessarily its sight and not always its scent or sound. Sometimes just the sense of vast space on each side of you. Of open brightness stretching a long way under the sun.

  Route 132 took me into Hyannis center. The soothing excitements of scrub pine and wide sea gave way to McDonald’s and Holiday Inn and prefab fence companies, shopping malls and Sheraton Motor Inns, and a host of less likely places where you could sleep and eat and drink in surroundings indistinguishable from the ones you’d left at home. Except there’d be a fishnet on the wall. If Bartholomew Gosnold had approached the Cape from this direction he’d have kept on going.

  At the airport circle, I headed east on Main Street. Hyannis is surprisingly congested and citylike as you drive into it. Main Street is lined with stores, many of them branches of Boston and New York stores. The motel I wanted was at the east end of town, a big handsome resort motel with a health club and a good restaurant of Victorian décor. A big green sign out front said DUNFEY’S. I had stayed there two months ago with Brenda Loring and had a nice time.

  I was in my room and unpacked by nine-thirty. I called Shepard. He was home and waiting for me. Ocean Street is five minutes from the motel, an extension of Sea Street, profuse with weathered shingles and blue shutters. Shepard’s house was no exception. A big Colonial with white cedar shingles weathered silver, and blue shutters at all the windows. It was on a slight rise of ground on the ocean side of Ocean Street. A white Caddie convertible with the top down was parked in front. A curving brick path ran up to the front door and small evergreens clustered along the foundation. The front door was blue. I rang the bell and heard it go bing-bong inside. To the left of the house was a beach, where the street curved. To the right was a high hedge concealing the neighbors’ house next door. A blond teenage girl in a very small lime green bikini answered the door. She looked maybe seventeen. I carefully did not leer at her when I said, “My name’s Spenser to see Mr. Shepard.”

  The girl said, “Come in.”

  I stepped into the front hallway and she left me standing while she went to get her father. I closed the door behind me. The front hall was floored in flagstone and the walls appeared to be cedar paneling. There were doors on both sides and in the rear, and a stairway leading up. The ceilings were white and evenly rough, the kind of plaster ceiling that is sprayed on and shows no mark of human hand.

  Shepard’s daughter came back. I eyed her surreptitiously behind my sunglasses. Surreptitious is not leering. She might be too young, but it was hard to tell.

  “My dad’s got company right now, he says can you wait a minute?”

  “Sure.”

  She walked off and left me standing in the hall. I didn’t insist on port in the drawing room, but standing in the hall seemed a bit cool. Maybe she was distraught by her mother’s disappearance. She didn’t look distraught. She looked sullen. Probably mad at having to answer the door. Probably going to paint her toenails when I’d interrupted. Terrific-looking thighs though. For a little kid.

  Shepard appeared from the door past the stairs. With him was a tall black man with a bald head and high cheekbones. He had on a powder blue leisure suit and a pink silk shirt with a big collar. The shirt was unbuttoned to the waist and the chest and stomach that showed were as hard and unadorned as ebony. He took a pair of wraparound sunglasses from the breast pocket of the jacket and as he put them on, he stared at me over their rims until very slowly the lenses covered his eyes and he stared at me through them.

  I looked back. “Hawk,” I said.

  “Spenser.”

  Shepard said, “You know each other?”

  Hawk nodded.

  I said, “Yeah.”

  Shepard said to Hawk, “I’ve asked Spenser here to see if he can find my wife, Pam.”

  Hawk said, “I’ll bet he can. He’s a real firecracker for finding things. He’ll find the ass off of a thing. Ain’t that right, Spenser?”

  “You always been one of my heroes too. Hawk. Where you staying?”

  “Ah’m over amongst de ofays at de Holiday Inn, Marse Spensah.”

  “We don’t say ofays anymore. Hawk. We say honkies. And you don’t do that Kingfish dialect any better than you used to.”

  “Maybe not, but you should hear me sing ‘Shortnin’ Bread,’ babe.”

  “Yeah, I’ll bet,” I said.

  Hawk turned toward Shepard. “I’ll be in touch, Mr. Shepard,” he said. They shook hands and Hawk left. Shepard and I watched him from the front door as he walked down toward the Caddie. His walk was graceful and easy yet there was about him an aura of taut muscle, of tight coiled potential, that made it seem as if he were about to leap.

  He looked at my ‘68 Chevy, and looked back at me with a big grin. “Still first cabin all the way, huh, baby?” I let that pass and Hawk slid into his Cadillac and drove away. Ostentatious.

  Shepard said, “How do you know him?”

  “We used to fight on the same card twenty years ago. Worked out in some of the same gyms.”

  “Isn’t that amazing, and twenty years later you run into him here.”

  “Oh, I’ve seen him since then. Our work brings us into occasional contact.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know, I could sense that you knew each other pretty well. Salesman’s instinct at sizing people up, I guess
. Come on in. Have a cup of coffee or something? It’s pretty early for a drink, I guess.”

  We went into the kitchen. Shepard said, “Instant okay?” I said, “Sure,” and Shepard set water to boiling in a red porcelain teakettle.

  The kitchen was long with a divider separating the cooking area from the dining area. In the dining area was a big rough hewn picnic table with benches on all four sides. The table was stained a driftwood color and contrasted very nicely with the blue floor and counter tops.

  “So you used to be a fighter, huh?”

  I nodded.

  “That how your nose got broken?”

  “Yep.”

  “And the scar under your eye, too, I’ll bet.”

  “Yep.”

  “Geez, you look in good shape, bet you could still go a few rounds today, right?”

  “Depends on who I went them with.”

  “You fight heavyweight?”

  I nodded again. The coffee water boiled. Shepard spooned some Taster’s Choice from a big jar into each cup. “Cream and sugar?”

  “No thank you,” I said.

  He brought the coffee to the table and sat down across from me. I’d been hoping, maybe for a doughnut, or a muffin. I wondered if Hawk had gotten one.

  “Cheers,” Shepard said, and raised his cup at me. “Harv,” I said, “you got more troubles than a missing wife.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean I know Hawk, I know what he does. He’s an enforcer, what the kids on my corner used to call a legbreaker. He freelances and these days he freelances most often for King Powers.”

  “Now wait a minute. I hired you to find my wife. Whatever business I’m in with Hawk is my business. Not yours. I’m not paying you to nose around in my business.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “But if you are dealing with Hawk, you are dealing with pain. Hawk’s a hurter. You owe Powers money?”

  “I don’t know a goddamned thing about Powers. Don’t worry about Powers or Hawk or anybody else. I want you looking for my wife, not peeking into my books, you know?”

  “Yeah, I know. But I’ve spent a lot of years doing my business with people like Hawk. I know how it goes. This time Hawk came and talked to you, pleasantly enough, spelled out how much you owed and how far behind you were on the vig and when you had to pay it by.”

  “How the hell do you know what we were talking about.”

  “And at the end he told you, with a friendly enough smile, what would happen if you didn’t pay. And then I came and he said goodby politely and he left.”

  “Spenser, are you going to talk about this anymore or are you going to get to work on what I hired you for.”

  “Harv. Hawk means it. Hawk is a bad man. But he keeps his word. If you owe money, pay it. If you haven’t the money, tell me now, and we can work on the problem. But don’t bullshit me, and don’t bullshit yourself. If you’re dealing with Hawk you are in way, way, far way, over your head.”

  “There’s nothing to talk about. Now that’s it. There’s no more to say about it.”

  “You may even be in over mine,” I said.

  Chapter 4

  I had a sense, call it a hunch, that Shepard didn’t want to talk about his dealings with Hawk, or King Powers or anybody else. He wanted to talk about his wife.

  “Your wife’s name is Pam, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Maiden name?”

  “What difference does that make?”

  “She might start using it when she took off.”

  “Pam Neal.” He spelled it.

  “Folks living?”

  “No.”

  “Siblings?”

  He looked blank.

  “Brothers or sisters,” I said.

  “No. She’s an only child.”

  “Where’d she grow up?”

  “Belfast, Maine. On the coast, near Searsport.”

  “I know where it is. She have friends up there she might visit?”

  “No. She left there after college. Then her folks died. She hasn’t been back in fifteen years, I’d bet.”

  “Where’d she go to college?”

  “Colby.”

  “In Waterville?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What year she graduate?”

  “Nineteen fifty-four, both of us. College sweethearts.”

  “How about college friends?”

  “Oh, hell, I don’t know. I mean we still see a lot of people we went to school with. You think she might be visiting someone?”

  “Well, if she ran off, she had to run somewhere. She ever work?”

  He shook his head strongly. “No way. We got married right after graduation. I’ve supported her since her father stopped.”

  “She ever travel without you, separate vacations, that sort of thing?”

  “No, Christ, she gets lost in a phone booth. I mean she’s scared to travel. Anywhere we’ve ever gone, I’ve taken her.”

  “So if you were her, no work experience, no travel skills, no family other than this one, and you ran off, where would you go?”

  He shrugged.

  “She take money,” I said.

  “Not much. I gave her the food money and her house money on Monday and she took off Thursday, and she’d already done me food shopping. She couldn’t a had more than twenty bucks.”

  “Okay, so we’re back to where could she go. She needed help. There’s not a lot you can do on twenty bucks. What friends could she have gone to?”

  “Well, I mean most of her friends were my friends too, you know. I mean I know the husband and she knows the wife. I don’t think she could be hiding out anywhere like that. One of the guys would tell me.”

  “Unmarried friend?”

  “Hey, that’s a problem, I don’t think I know anybody who isn’t married.”

  “Does your wife?”

  “Not that I know. But, hell, I don’t keep track of her every move. I mean she had some friends from college, I don’t think ever married. Some of them weren’t bad either.”

  “Could you give me their names, last known address, that sort of thing?”

  “Jesus, I don’t know. I’ll try, but you gotta give me a little time. I don’t really know too much about what she did during the day. I mean maybe she wrote to some of them, I don’t know.”

  “Any who live around here?”

  “I just don’t know, Spenser. Maybe Millie might know.”

  “Your daughter?”

  “Yeah, she’s sixteen. That’s old enough for them to have girl talk and stuff, I imagine. Maybe she’s got something you could use. Want me to get her?”

  “Yeah, and old phone bills, letters, that kind of thing, might be able to give us a clue as to where she’d go. And I’ll need a picture.”

  “Yeah, okay. I’ll get Millie first, and I’ll look for that stuff while you’re talking with her.” He hadn’t come right home and done it like I told him. Maybe I lacked leadership qualities.

  Millie didn’t look happy to talk with me. She sat at the table and turned her father’s empty coffee cup in a continuous circle in front of her. Shepard went off to collect the phone bills and letters. Millie didn’t speak.

  “Any thoughts on where your mother might be, Millie?” She shook her head.

  “Does that mean you don’t know or you won’t say.” She shrugged and continued to turn the coffee cup carefully. “You want her back?”

  She shrugged again. When I turn on the charm they melt like butter.

  “Why do you think she ran off?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, staring at the cup. Already she was starting to pour out her heart to me.

  “If you were she,” I said, “would you run off?”

  “I wouldn’t leave my children,” she said and there was some emphasis on the my.

  “Would you leave your husband?”

  “I’d leave him,” she said and jerked her head toward the door her father had gone through.


  “Why?”

  “He’s a jerk.”

  “What’s jerky about him?”

  She shrugged.

  “Work too hard? Spend too much time away from the family?”

  She shrugged again.

  “Honey,” I said. “On the corner I hang out, when you call someone a jerk you’re supposed to say why, especially if it’s family.”

  “Big deal,” she said.

  “It’s one of the things that separate adults from children,” I said.

  “Who wants to be an adult?”

  “I been both and adult is better than kid.”

  “Sure,” she said.

  “Who’s your mother’s best friend?” I said.

  She shrugged again. I thought about getting up and throwing her through the window. It made me feel good for a minute, but people would probably call me a bully.

  “You love your mother?”

  She rolled her eyes at the ceiling and gave a sigh. “Course,” she said and looked back at the circles she was making with the coffee cup. Perhaps I could throw it through the window instead.

  “How do you know she’s not in trouble?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How do you know she’s not kidnaped?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Or sick someplace with no one to help her.” Ah, the fertility of my imagination. Maybe she was the captive of a dark mysterious count in a castle on the English moors. Should I mention to the kid a fate worse than death?

  “I don’t know. I mean my father just said she ran away. Isn’t he supposed to know?”

  “He doesn’t know. He’s guessing. And he’s trying to spare you in his jerky way from worse worry.”

  “Well, why doesn’t he find out?”

  “Ahhh, oh giant of brain, come the light. What the hell do you think he’s hired me for?”

  “Well, why don’t you find out.” She had stopped turning the coffee cup.

  “That’s what I’m trying to do. Why don’t you help? So far your contribution to her rescue is four I-don’t-knows and six shrugs. Plus telling me your old man’s a jerk but you don’t know why.”