I picked up the license, slipped it back in my wallet.
“Got a gun permit?”
I nodded, slipped that out of the wallet and laid it in front of him. He gave it the same treatment and said, “Okay.”
I put that away, put the wallet away and settled back in the chair.
Slade said, “Far as I can tell she ran off. Voluntary. No foul play. Can’t find any evidence that she went with someone. Took an Almeida bus to New Bedford and that’s as far as we’ve gone. New Bedford cops got her description and all, but they got things more pressing. My guess is she’ll be back in a week or so dragging her ass.”
“How about another man?”
“She probably spent the night prior to her disappearance with a guy down the Silver Seas Motel. But when she got on the bus she appeared to be alone.”
“What’s the guy’s name she was with?”
“We don’t know.” Slade rocked back in his chair.
“And you haven’t been busting your tail looking to find out either.”
“Nope. No need to. There’s no crime here. If I looked into every episode of extramarital fornication around here I’d have the whole force out on condom patrol. Some babe gets sick of her husband, starts screwing around a little, then takes off. You know how often that happens?” Slade’s arms were still folded.
“Yeah.”
“Guy’s got money, he hires somebody like you to look. The guy he hires fusses around for a week or so, runs up a big bill at the motel and the wife comes back on her own because she doesn’t know what else to do. You get a week on the Cape and a nice tan, the husband gets a tax deduction, the broad starts sleeping around locally again.”
“You do much marriage counseling?”
He shook his head. “Nope, I try to catch people that did crimes and put them in jail. You ever been a cop? I mean a real one, not a private license?”
“I used to be on the States,” I said. “Worked out of the Suffolk County D.A.‘s office.”
“Why’d you quit?”
“I wanted to do more than you do.”
“Social work,” he said. He was disgusted.
“Any regular boyfriends you know of?”
He shrugged. “I know she slept around a little, but I don’t think anybody steady.”
“She been sleeping around long or has this developed lately?”
“Don’t know.”
I shook my head.
Slade said, “Spenser, you want to see my duty roster? You know how many bodies I got to work with here. You know what a summer weekend is like when the weather’s good and the Kennedys are all out going to Mass on Sunday.”
“You got any suggestions who I might talk to in town that could get my wheels turning?” I said.
“Go down the Silver Seas, talk with the bartender, Rudy. Tell him I sent you. He pays a lot of attention and the Silver Seas is where a lot of spit gets swapped. Pam Shepard hung out down there.”
I got up. “Thank you, captain.”
“You got questions I can answer, lemme know.”
“I don’t want to take up too much of your time.”
“Don’t be a smart-ass, Spenser, I’ll do what I can. But I got a lot of things to look at and Pam Shepard’s just one of them. You need help, gimme a call. If I can, I’ll give you some.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Okay.” We shook hands and I left.
It was two-fifteen when I pulled into the lot in front of the Silver Seas Motel. I was hungry and thirsty. While I took care of that I could talk to Rudy, start running up that big bar bill. Slade was probably right, but I’d give Shepard his money’s worth before she showed up. If she was going to.
There’s something about a bar on the Cape in the daytime. The brightness of lowland surrounded by ocean maybe makes the air-conditioned dimness of the bar more striking. Maybe there’s more people there and they are vacationers rather than the unemployed. Whatever it is, the bar at the Silver Seas Motel had it. And I liked it.
On the outside, the Silver Seas Motel was two-storied, weathered shingles, with a verandah across both stories in front. It was tucked into the seaward side of Main Street in the middle of town between a hardware store and a store that sold scallop shell ashtrays and blue pennants that said CAPE COD on them. The bar was on the right, off the lobby, at one end of the dining room. A lot of people were eating lunch and several were just drinking. Most of the people looked like college kids, cut-offs and T-shirts, sandals and halter tops. The decor in the place was surfwood and fishnet. Two oars crossed on one wall, a harpoon that was probably made in Hong Kong hung above the mirror behind the bar. The bartender was middle-aged and big-bellied. His straight black hair was streaked here and there with gray and hung shoulder length. He wore a white shirt with a black string bow tie like a riverboat gambler. The cuffs were turned neatly back in two careful folds. His hands were thick with long tapering fingers that looked manicured.
“Draft beer?” I asked.
