Widow’s Walk Read online

  “Why are you worried about me talking with Brinkman Tyler?” I said.

  “Tyler?”

  “Tyler. You had people following me for days until I talked with Tyler, then they made a move on me.”

  “I didn’t have anyone follow you,” Shawcross said.

  Behind me I heard people come through Shawcross’s door. I glanced back. Hatfield was one of them. The right side of his face was already starting to swell. With him were three other guys in blue suits.

  “Internal security,” Hawk said.

  I said, “You think?”

  Hawk grinned.

  “You all right, Mr. Shawcross?” Hatfield said.

  “I’m fine,” Shawcross said. “Before you throw them out, let’s hear what these gentlemen have to say.”

  Hawk stayed by the door. The Internal Security Squad ranged along the wall on the other side of the room. I took a seat in a green leather chair with little brass studs showing on the face of the arms. I crossed my legs and admired my ankle for a moment.

  “Nathan Smith has been murdered,” I said. “His wife has been accused of the crime. I’ve been employed by her law firm to clear her.”

  “If she didn’t do it,” Shawcross said.

  “I’m not sure the law firm cares,” I said. “But I do. We don’t have to be silly here, right? Since Nathan Smith is listed on your board of directors, we’ll agree that you know him and since you are on his wife’s invitation list we’ll agree that you know her.”

  “Agreed,” Shawcross said.

  He was not a nervous guy. From their respective walls Hawk and the security squad were looking at each other.

  “So as soon as I get hired onto this thing, I pick up a tail. My associate, Mr. Hawk, here, followed the tail back to this building. The tail was driving a car registered to this company.”

  Shawcross nodded, and said, “Um hm.”

  “I didn’t do anything about the tail,” I said. “Because I wanted to see if I could figure out why you were tailing me.”

  “It was not necessarily me,” Shawcross said.

  “Yesterday I talked with a guy named Brinkman Tyler, and after I finished, the tail made a pass at me.”

  “A pass?”

  “They assaulted me,” I said. “Wanted to know what I had talked with Tyler about.”

  “Really?” Shawcross said. “Did you tell them?”

  “No.”

  “If you’re trying to clear Mary Smith of her husband’s murder, why are you talking to his broker?”

  “Gotta talk to someone,” I said. “Did you do any business with Nathan Smith?” I said.

  “Business?”

  “You develop real estate. He has mortgage money. He’s on your board.”

  “It would be inappropriate for him to lend money to a business he was involved with,” Shawcross said.

  “How involved was he?”

  “Not,” Shawcross said. “His presence on the board was a titular formality. But the bank regulators would frown on it nonetheless.”

  “So why have you been following me?”

  “I know nothing of anyone following you. Do you know about that, Curtis?”

  Hatfield frowned. It was harder now that his cheek was puffy, but he managed.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t.”

  “Do your employees have access to the company cars?” I said.

  “They’re not supposed to,” Shawcross said. “You know anything about this, Curtis?”

  “No.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t do much for you, Mr. Spenser,” Shawcross said. “I’ll certainly look into your charges, and inform you if we find anything substantial.”

  “I know you will,” I said.

  “In the meantime,” Shawcross said, “should you feel inclined to barge in here again, you will be apprehended and held for the police.”

  “We’re fairly hard to apprehend,” I said. “Aren’t we, Mr. Hawk.”

  “Heavens, yes,” Hawk said.

  “I don’t intend to get into a pissing contest with you,” Shawcross said. “I think we have nothing else to discuss.”

  “Until next time,” I said.

  No one else said anything as Hawk and I walked out of the office and down the corridor. As we passed through the reception area Hawk winked at the receptionist. She smiled.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  I was sitting in the guidance office at Franklin High School, talking with a sturdy gray-haired woman named Ethel Graffino. “Mary Toricelli,” she said. “Name doesn’t ring a bell. A lot of students passed through here in thirty-five years.”

  “Class of 1989,” I said. “Used to date a boy named Roy Levesque.”

  “Him I remember,” Mrs. Graffino said. “He was in here a lot.”

  “Why?”

  “Bad kid. Stole. Peddled dope. Cheated. Bullied any kids he could. I believe he dropped out without graduating.”

  “We all cheated,” I said.

  Mrs. Graffino smiled. “I know, but we’re still required to condemn it.”

  “How about friends.”

  “Roy’s? Or Mary’s?”

  “Either.”

  “I can give you class lists,” she said.

  “Two years on either side?”

  “‘Eighty-seven through ’ninety-one? Are you going to harass these people?”

  “No. I’m just going to ask them pleasantly about Mary and Roy.”

  “And you’re trying to clear Mary of a murder charge?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you are working for a law firm?”

  “Yes. Cone Oakes.”

  “Is there someone I could call?”

  “Sure.” I gave her Rita Fiore’s number.

  She said, “Excuse me,” called it and talked with Rita and hung up.

  “I needed to be sure,” she said.

  She got up and went around to her office door and spoke to the secretary. Then she came back and sat.

  “It’ll only be a minute,” she said. “Computers, you know, they’ve revolutionized record-keeping.”

  “I’m going to get one soon,” I said.

  “They’re here to stay,” she said.

  Her phone rang. She excused herself again and answered. While she talked I thought how schools always felt like schools when you went in them. Even full grown and far removed, when I went in one I felt the old hostility again. While Mrs. Graffino spoke on the phone, the secretary came in with several pages of printout and put them on Mrs. Graffino’s desk. She mouthed “thank you” to the secretary, pushed the printouts toward me, and nodded. I picked them up. Another list. About 1,200 names long. We never sleep.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  I sat with Susan and Pearl on the front steps of her big Victorian house in Cambridge, where she had her office on the first floor and her home on the second. I drank some beer. Susan had a martini I’d made for her, which she would sip for maybe two hours and leave half finished. Pearl was abstaining. People went by and smiled at us. Occasionally someone would walk a dog past, and Pearl would give a disinterested bark. Otherwise we were quiet. “I should be wearing a sleeveless undershirt,” I said.

  “The notorious wife-beater undershirt,” Susan said.

  “Like Brando,” I said. “In Streetcar.”

  “Wasn’t he a wonderful actor?” Susan said.

  “No,” I said. “I always thought he seemed mannered and self-aware.”

  “Really?”

  “Can’t help it,” I said.

  “But he was so beautiful.”

  “Didn’t do much for me,” I said.

  A woman with shoulder-length gray hair walked by in hiking boots and short shorts. Her companion was tall and bald with a combover.

  “How you feeling?” I said to Susan.

  “Like I failed.”

  “The kid who killed himself?”

  “Yes. I’m supposed to prevent those things.”

  “Didn’t someone say something about t
he tyrannical ”supposed to’s“?”

  “Karen Horney,” Susan said. “The tyrannical shoulds.”

  A guy walked past wearing a seersucker suit and one of those long-billed boating caps. He had a tan mongrel on a leash. The mongrel was wearing a red kerchief.

  “Stylish,” I said.

  Susan nodded. Pearl lay between us on the top step with her head on her paws. The mongrel spotted Pearl and barked at her. Pearl’s hearing wasn’t much anymore. She glanced at the source of what must have been a dim sound, and growled a little without raising her head. Susan patted her absently.

  “My office was the only place he was safe,” Susan said. “His parents were appalled that he was gay. His schoolmates were cruel. He had no friends.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “He could only be who he was in my office.”

  I nodded.

  “I couldn’t help him to change who he was. I couldn’t help him to accept who he was. All I could accomplish, finally, for a few hours a week, was to provide a temporary refuge.”

  “Not enough,” I said.

  “No.”

  My beer was gone. I got up and went to the kitchen and got a jar of olives and another beer. I was trying Heineken again. A blast from the past. Susan was having another micro sip of her martini when I came back and sat down beside her. It was still warm, in the evening. The air had begun to turn faintly blue as the darkness came toward us. There was no wind. I plunked a fresh olive into Susan’s martini. She smiled at me.

  “If they have something somewhere,” Susan said. “If they are loved at home. If they have a circle of friends. But if it’s no good at home and it’s no good at school… Goddamn it.”

  “No place to hide,” I said.

  “No place.”

  “Any theories why people are such jerks about it?” I said.

  Susan shrugged.

  “Nature of the beast,” she said.

  “There is a high jerk count among the general populace,” I said. “Present company, of course, excluded.”

  Four girls from Radcliffe went past us in various stages of undress. They all talked in that fast, slightly nasal way that well-bred young women talked around here.

  “Living in a college town is not a bad thing,” I said.

  Susan watched silently as the girls passed. She sipped her martini. I could hear her breathing.

  “We are both in a business,” I said, “where we lose people.”

  “I know.”

  “A wise therapist once told me that you can’t really protect anyone, that sooner or later they have to protect themselves.”

  “Did I say that?”

  “Yes.”

  “After you lost Candy Sloan?”

  “Yes.”

  “I am wise.”

  “Good-looking, too,” I said.

  “But god-damn it…” she said.

  “Doesn’t mean you can’t feel bad when you lose one.”

  Susan nodded.

  “Go ahead,” I said. “Feel bad.”

  Susan nodded again.

  “I’ve been fighting it,” she said.

  “And losing,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Give in to it. Feel as bad as you have to feel. Then get over it.”

  Susan stared at me for a while. Then she put her head against my shoulder. We sat for a time watching the street traffic. I listened to her breathing.

  “That what you do?”

  “Yes.”

  “Even after Candy Sloan?”

  “Yes.”

  She fished another olive from the jar and put it in her martini. She had already drunk nearly a fifth of it.

  “And,” I said, “there’s always you and me.”

  “I know.”

  A squirrel ran along Susan’s front fence and up a fat oak tree and disappeared into the thick foliage. Pearl followed it with her eyes but didn’t raise her head.

  “You’re a good therapist,” Susan said after a while.

  “Yes, I am,” I said. “Maybe we should open a joint practice.”

  With her head still against my shoulder Susan patted my thigh.

  “Maybe not,” Susan said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  It took me three days to boil the class lists down to people I could locate, and another two days to find people on that list who remembered Mary Toricelli. One of them was a woman named Jamie Deluca, who tended bar at a place on Friend Street, near the Fleet Center. I went in to see her at 3:15 in the afternoon when the lunch crowd had left and the early cocktail group had not yet arrived. Jamie drew me a draft beer and placed it on a napkin in front of me.

  “I didn’t really know her very good,” Jamie said. “Mary was really kind of a phantom.”

  Jamie had short blond hair and a lot of eye makeup. She was wearing black pants and a white shirt with the cuffs turned back.

  “What kind of a phantom?” I said.

  “Well, you know. You didn’t see much of her. She wasn’t popular or anything. She just come to class and go home.”

  “Sisters or brothers?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  While she talked Jamie sliced the skin off whole lemons. I wondered if the object was to harvest the skin, or the skinless lemon. I decided that asking would be a needless distraction, and I had the sense that Jamie would find too much distraction daunting.

  “Parents?”

  “Sure, of course.” Jamie looked as if it was the dumbest question she’d ever heard. “She lived with her mother.”

  “Father?”

  “I don’t know. When I knew her there wasn’t no father around.”

  “Her mother still live in Franklin?” I said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Her mother’s name is Toricelli.”

  “Sure. I guess so.”

  “Who’d Mary hang out with?” I said.

  “Most of the time she didn’t hang with anybody,” Jamie said. “She didn’t have a bunch of friends. Just some of the burnouts.”

  “Burnouts?”

  “Yeah. You know, druggies, dropouts, the dregs.”

  “Remember anybody?”

  “Yeah. Roy Levesque. He was like her boyfriend. And, ah, Tammy, and Pike, and Joey Bucci… I don’t know some of those kids. I think she just hung with them because she didn’t have no other friends.”

  “Got any last names for Tammy and Pike?”

  “Pike is a last name. It’s a guy. I don’t even remember his first name. Everybody called him Pike.”

  “How about Tammy?”

  “Wagner, I think. Tammy Wagner. Kids used to call her Wags.”

  “You know where they are?”

  “No. I moved in with my boyfriend soon as I graduated. Pretty much lost touch with the kids I knew.”

  “Boyfriend from Franklin?”

  “No. Brockton. I met him at a club. He didn’t last.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “It’s all right, he was a loser anyway.”

  “Lot of them around,” I said, just to be saying something.

  “Least he didn’t knock me up,” she said.

  I nodded as I was glad about that, too.

  “What was Mary like,” I said. “Was she smart in school?”

  “No. She was pretty dumb. Kids made fun of her. Teachers, too, sometimes.”

  “She ever get in trouble?”

  Jamie shook her head and smiled.

  “She was too boring to get in trouble,” Jamie said.

  The early cocktail crowd was beginning to drift in. The demands on Jamie made it harder to talk with her.

  “Anything else you can tell me about Mary?” I said. “Anything unusual?”

  Down the bar a guy was gesturing to Jamie. He had on a black shirt with the collar worn out over the lapels of his pearl gray suit.

  “No,” Jamie said as she started to move down the bar. “She was just a kind of dumb phantom kid, you know? Nothing special.”r />
  That would be Mary.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  I was in my office reading Tank Mcationamara and preparing to think about Mary Toricelli Smith some more when my door opened carefully and a woman poked her head in. “Mr. Spenser?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She came in quickly and shut the door behind her.

  “Remember me?” she said. “Amy Peters? From Pequod Bank?”

  “Who could forget you,” I said.

  I gestured quite elegantly, I thought, at one of my two client chairs. She sat and crossed her legs, holding her purse in her lap with both hands. I smiled. She smiled. I waited.

  “I… I… don’t know quite how to do this,” she said.

  “I can tell.”

  “It’s… I’ve been fired.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “It was… they said I had no business talking to you the way I did.”

  “What would be the business of a PR director?” I said.

  She smiled and shrugged. “I don’t even know what I said to you that was so bad,” she said.

  “Who exactly is ”they“?”

  “Mr. Conroy. He called me into his office and questioned me quite closely about our conversation.”

  “And?”

  “And when he was through he told me I was fired. The bank, he said, would give me two weeks’ pay. But as of this moment I was through.”

  “What was the thrust of his questioning?” I said.

  “He wanted to know what we talked about.”

  “Specifically,” I said.

  “He wanted to know what you asked about Mr. Smith, and what I told you.”

  “And why are you telling me?”

  She stopped as if she hadn’t thought about that before. I nodded encouragingly.

  “I, well, I guess I thought it was important,” she said.

  “Un huh?”

  “I mean, you are investigating his death.”

  “Do you have a theory about what the connection might be?” I said.

  “They seemed pretty worried about you.”

  “”They“ being Marvin Conroy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why do you call him ”they“?”

  “I don’t know. I guess…” She paused and thought about my question. “I guess it’s because I think there are people behind him.”