Painted Ladies (18 page)

“It’s well beyond hope,” I said.

“I know,” she said, and sipped again. “If I were outside looking in, which I’m not, I wish I were—if I were outside, I’d think this was very interesting.”

“Because?” I said.

“Because you’re as implacable as he is,” she said. “Be interesting to see who wins.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m interested in that, too.”

A
n outfit named Galvin Contracting came in and restored my bombed-out bedroom. They put in a new window, changed the lock on my front door, and even assembled the new bed when it was delivered. They repainted the bedroom, same color, more gray than tan but with some hint of both, depending on the light. Susan came with me when I moved back in. She brought with her a bunch of linens that she’d purchased for me. I helped her carry them in.

“How’d you know what color I’d paint it?” I said.

She looked at me and made a sound that, had she been less elegant, would have been a snort.

“Are you implying by that look that I’m boringly predictable?” I said.

She nodded vigorously.

We made the bed together. The sheets and pillowcases were plum-colored. I went to the linen closet in the bathroom and got a black down comforter and put it on the bed. Susan went to the living room and got a large plastic bag with several decorative pillows in it. They appeared to match or contrast with the plum sheets.

“What are those for?” I said.

She ignored me and began to place them strategically on my bed until they covered more than half.

“Where do I sleep?” I said.

“At night you take them off,” she said.

“And put them on again in the morning?”

“When you make the bed,” she said.

“Every day?” I said.

“Do you make the bed every day?”

“I do,” I said.

“Then of course,” she said. “Every day.”

“Will you be stopping by to inspect every day?” I said.

“No more than usual,” she said.

I smiled.

“Do I sense that they may not be on the bed when I’m not here?”

“Hard to predict,” I said.

“But they look so beautiful,” she said.

There was nowhere to go with that, so I said, “How about lunch?”

“Sounds good to me,” she said. “Where?”

“Here,” I said. “I’ll leave the bedroom door open, and we can admire the pillows while we eat.”

Susan looked at me kind of slant-eyed sideways and went to the kitchen counter and sat.

“Whatcha gonna make?” she said.

“How about cold chicken with mixed fruit and whole-wheat biscuits?”

“What could be better,” she said.

“Well, there’s one thing I can think of,” I said. “But there’s so many damn pillows on the bed. . . .”

She grinned.

“Oh, shut up,” she said.

I took out the chicken to allow the refrigerator chill to dissipate, and some fruit salad, and started mixing the biscuits.

“Is her mother going with you when you talk to Missy?” Susan said.

“No,” I said. “Winifred says that she and her daughter are so at odds that she would only make matters worse.”

“At odds over the father?” Susan asked.

“I would say so.”

“Women fighting over a man,” Susan said.

“It’s that simple?” I said.

“Oh, God, no,” Susan said. “I was just sort of musing aloud. Consider the girl. She thinks she has no father, that he’s dead, and she fantasizes the dream father, and then when she’s sixteen years old he appears and he seems to be the dream father she had imagined: handsome, mysterious, charming, and he comes to her. She’s furious with her mother for denying him all these sixteen years. On the other hand, it took him sixteen years to come see her. Who should she love? Who can she trust? How should she feel?”

“Sixteen years is a long time when you’re sixteen,” I said.

“A lifetime,” Susan said. “Do you have a plan?”

“I thought I’d ask her about her relationship with her father and the Herzberg Foundation.”

Susan smiled.

“Subtle,” she said.

I shrugged.

“At the beginning I was walking around saying, ‘What’s going on?’ At least now I’ve narrowed the focus of my general questions.”

“And after you’ve asked?” Susan said.

“I’ll listen,” I said. “You know how that works.”

“I do,” she said. “Though my goal is generally somewhat different.”

“We’re both after the truth,” I said.

“There’s that,” Susan said.

I
fell in beside Missy Minor as she walked near the student union.

“I don’t want to talk to you,” she said.

“I don’t blame you,” I said. “You have so much you don’t want me to know.”

She stopped walking and turned toward me.

“What’s that mean?” she said.

It had stopped snowing during the night. But it was kind of cold, and the wind tossed the new snow around in small white eddies.

“I’ll explain if we can get out of the cold,” I said. “Buy you breakfast?”

“I had breakfast,” she said.

“No reason you can’t have another one,” I said.

“I’ll have coffee,” she said.

We went into the student union and got a table in the far corner of the cafeteria. At mid-morning, the place was half empty. I had milk and sugar in my coffee. She drank hers black.

“I know that your father is Ariel Herzberg and that you and he see one another,” I said.

“My mother tell you that?”

“I’ve talked with your mother,” I said. “But I actually saw you and him together in the library.”

“You’ve been spying on me,” she said.

“I have.”

“Why,” she said. “Why don’t you just leave me alone?”

“Wish I could,” I said. “But you are alleged to have been intimate with a murder victim, and the man who killed him appears to be your father.”

“You’re disgusting,” she said.

“But only a little,” I said. “You involved at all with the foundation?”

“I’m not involved with anything,” she said. “I hate you.”

Even for nineteen, she was young.

“Must be hard,” I said. “No father for sixteen years and all of a sudden a father. What’s that like?”

“It’s a bitch, is what it’s like,” she said. “I mean, for sixteen years my mother lied through her teeth that he was dead. You know, she never even told me he sent money. You know that they were never married?”

“She told you they were?”

“Yeah, and that he died after I was conceived,” she said. “Fact is, for crissake, she was shacking up with some guy who had no intention of marrying her, and when she got knocked up, he left.”

“Tough on her, I guess,” I said.

“She wanted him to marry her? There’s a laugh. He didn’t love her. He was just enjoying a little joyride, you know?”

“But he came back,” I said.

“He came back for me,” she said. “He said he always wanted to but she wouldn’t let him.”

“Why do you suppose she did that?” I said.

“Jealousy,” she said. “She knew if he was in my life I’d love him, and she didn’t want that.”

“Wow,” I said. “She was pretty mean, huh?”

Nothing like sowing a little family strife for stirring up information.

“Awful,” Missy said. “But Daddy is great. He got me into Walford. He introduced me to Ashton, Professor Prince; he’s been great.”

“Who pays the tuition?” I said.

“She does. She can afford it, already had the money put aside. Besides, she’s got a good job.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I imagine the foundation doesn’t pay too much.”

“God, no. Daddy’s not interested in money.”

“What does the foundation do?” I said.

She opened her mouth and closed it. I could almost read her face.
This way danger lay.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“That’s surprising,” I said. “How close you are.”

“He loves me, and I love him,” she said. “That’s all anyone needs to know.”

“’Cept me,” I said. “I need to know more.”

“Well, I’m not going to tell you anything,” she said.

She began to cry and stood suddenly and walked away, almost running. In the detective business, charm never fails.

W
ith my feet on my desk and the
Globe
open before me, I phoned Susan.

“I see in the paper,” I said, “that there’s an Evening of Verse being held at a church in Cambridge.”

“Hot dog,” Susan said.

“One of the performers is Rosalind Wellington.”

“No kidding,” Susan said.

“Do you remember who Rosalind Wellington is?” I said.

“No.”

“She’s Mrs. Ashton Prince,” I said.

“Uh-huh.”

“Want to go?”

“ ‘Go’?” Susan said.

“Attend, listen to her read her poetry,” I said.

“You think she is any good?” Susan said. “That any of the poets reading there will be any good?”

“No,” I said. “No, of course not. It’ll be awful.”

“Wow,” Susan said. “That’s persuasive.”

“So you want to go?” I said.

“No,” Susan said. “What I want to know is why you do?”

“Remember you got Prince’s Ph.D. dissertation and read it?” I said.

“I do. An act of breathtaking self-sacrifice, may I say.”

“We learned a lot from that,” I said.

“You’re welcome.”

“I thought I might learn something from her poetry,” I said.

Susan was silent for a moment.

Then she said, “You might. One of the predictable things about the kind of poets you are nearly certain to hear is that their poetry will be about the angst of being them. It will be hideous, but she might actually reveal something useful in the process.”

“I’m gonna go,” I said.

“You’ll have to brave it without me,” she said. “I get enough interior angst every day, fifty minutes an hour.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Not that I don’t admire your fortitude,” Susan said.

I admired it myself. The event started at seven; I was there at quarter of. The room was barren, with cement walls painted yellow. It looked like it should have been swept more recently than it had been. There were about fifty folding chairs and maybe fifteen people, grouped around a maple table with a lectern on it. The lighting was overhead and harsh. The room was too hot.

I took off my coat and sat. If anyone noticed the gun on my hip, they didn’t react. They were too deeply involved, I assumed, in the life of the imagination. They were generally not deeply involved in elegance. At seven, a heavy woman in an ankle-length dress walked in and stood at the lectern and welcomed us to the Evening of Verse. She announced that at the end of the evening, the poems read tonight would be for sale at the back of the room for five dollars.

Then a guy came out and read a detailed description of a series of homosexual acts. In the rhyme scheme, “foreskin” was rhymed with “more sin.” And “between us” with “penis.”

The next reader was a skinny woman with her hair in a tight bun who wrote about masturbation, then came a guy with a very long braid, who read something. But I couldn’t tell what it was about. Sadly, Rosalind Wellington was near the end of the program, and I might have left before she came on if Susan hadn’t admired my fortitude. So I stuck it out. When she came on, she was all in black, wearing a hat with a veil.

“ ‘So Little Left Behind,’ ” she intoned.” ‘An Ode to My Late Husband.’ ”

She looked down at the papers on the lectern and began to read in what she must have thought was a dramatic monotone.

She dropped her head to indicate she was finished, and stood that way for a moment, before she raised her eyes and began her second poem. The evening eventually ended. I remembered a line from Swinburne: “even the weariest river, winds somewhere safe to sea.” I got up and bought a copy of the poems, which appeared to have been run off on a computer and bound in gray cardboard.

At home I had a large drink and sat at my kitchen counter and drank my drink and looked at her first poem.

Two painted ladies.

If I asked her about it, she’d give me a lot of grad-school razzmatazz about meaning and beauty. I wondered how she’d deal with a Middlesex County prosecutor.

W
e gathered in Kate Quaggliosi’s office. Rosalind, me, Healy, and Belson as an interested observer. Rosalind immediately latched onto Kate, the other woman in a room with several men. My guess was that whatever her off-duty gender, in here she wasn’t a woman, she was a prosecutor.

“My home was burglarized,” she said.

“You report it to the Walford police?” Kate said.

“Yes.”

“They take anything?”

“No, but I feel dreadfully invaded.”

“Who would have done such a thing?” Healy said.

I looked at Healy. His face was expressionless.

“I’ve lost my husband,” she said to Kate. “I am still very fragile.”

Kate nodded and held up a copy of the painted-ladies poem.

“Walford cops are your best bet,” she said. “Could you explain to me what this poem means, with particular attention to the two painted ladies?”