“When you get a client,” Susan said, “you really galvanize into action, don’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am. I move immediately for the nearest restaurant.”
I clipped my gun on my right hip, put on my shirt and left the shirttail out to hide the gun and we left. It was a ten-minute walk to my apartment, most of it down the mall on Commonwealth Ave. When we got there, Susan took the first shower and I had a bottle of Amstel while I called for reservations. In fact I had three.
Pier 4 looms up on the waterfront like a kind of Colonial Stonehenge. Used brick, old beams and a Hudson River excursion boat docked alongside for cocktails. A monument to the expense account, a temple of business lunches. One of the costumed kids at the door parked my convertible with an embarrassed look. Most of the cars in the lot were newer and almost none that I could see had as much gray tape patching the upholstery.
“That young man seemed disdainful of your car,” Susan said.
“One of the troubles with the culture,” I said. “No respect for age.”
There’d be a wait for our table. Would we care for a cocktail in the lounge? We would. We walked across the enclosed gangplank to the excursion boat and sat and looked at Boston Harbor. Susan had a Margarita, I had some Heinekens. Nobody has Amstel. Not even Pier 4.
“What does your client want you to do?”
“Find his wife.”
“Does it sound difficult?”
“No. Sounds like she’s simply run off. If she has she’ll be easy to find. Most wives who run off don’t run very far. The majority of them, in fact, want to be found and want to come home.”
“That doesn’t sound particularly liberated.”
“It isn’t particularly liberated but it’s the way it is. For the first time the number of runaway wives exceeds the number of runaway husbands. They read two issues of Ms. Magazine, see Mario Thomas on a talk show and decide they can’t go on. So they take off. Then they find out that they have no marketable skills. That ten or fifteen years of housewifing has prepared them for nothing else and they end up washing dishes or waiting table or pushing a mop and they want out. Also lots of them get lonesome.”
“And they can’t just go home,” Susan said, “because they are embarrassed and they can’t just go crawling back.”
“Right. So they hang around and hope someone looks for them.”
“And if someone does look for them it’s a kind of communicative act. That is, the husband cared enough about them to try to find them. It’s a gesture, in it’s odd way, of affection.”
“Right again. But the guilt, particularly if they have kids, the guilt is killing them. And when they get home things are usually worse than they were when they left.”
Susan sipped at her Margarita. “The husband has a new club to beat her with.”
I nodded. “Yep. And partly he’s right. Partly he’s saying, hey, you son of a bitch. You ducked out on us. You left me and the kids in the goddamned lurch and you ran. That’s no reason for pride, sweetheart. You owe us,”
“But,” Susan said.
“Of course, but. Always but. But she’s lived her life in terms of them and she needs a chance to live it in terms of her. Natch.” I shrugged and drank the rest of my beer.
“You make it sound so routine.”
“It is routine in a way,” I said. “I’ve seen it enough. In the sixties I spent most of my time looking for runaway kids. Now I spend it looking for runaway mommas. The mommas don’t vary the story too much.”
“You also make it sound, oh I don’t know, trivial. Or, commonplace. As if you didn’t care. As if they were only items in your work. Things to look for.”
“I don’t see much point to talking with a tremor in my voice. I care enough about them to look for them. I do it for the money too, but money’s not hard to make. The thing, in my line of work at least, is not to get too wrapped up in caring. It tends to be bad for you.” I gestured to the waitress for another beer. I looked at Susan’s drink. She shook her head.
Across the harbor a 747 lifted improbably off the runway at Logan and swung slowly upward in a lumbering circle before heading west. L.A.? San Francisco?
“Suze,” I said. “You and I ought to be on that.”
“On what?”
“The plane, heading west. Loosing the surly bonds of earth.”
“I don’t like flying.”
“Whoops,” I said, “I have trod on a toe.”
“Why do you think so?”
“Tone, babe, tone of voice. Length of sentence, attitude of head. I am, remember, a trained investigator. Clues are my game. What are you mad at?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s a start.”
“Don’t make fun of me, Spenser. I don’t exactly know. I’m mad at you, or at least in that area. Maybe I’ve read Ms. Magazine, maybe I spend too much time seeing Mario Thomas on talk shows. I was married and divorced and maybe I know better than you do what this man’s wife might be going through.”
