I walked back along Arlington and back up Boylston for a block to Berkeley Street. I had several choices. I could go down to the Dockside Saloon and drink all their beer, or I could drive up to Smithfield and wait till Susan came home from school and tell her I flunked Women’s Lib. Or I could do something useful. I opted for useful and turned up Berkeley.
Boston Police Headquarters was a block and a half up Berkeley Street on the right, nestled in the shadows of big insurance companies—probably made the cops feel safe. Martin Quirk’s office at the end of the Homicide squadroom was just as it always was. The room was neat and spare. The only thing on the desk was a phone and a plastic cube with pictures of his family in it.
Quirk was on the phone when I appeared in his doorway. He was tilted back in his chair, his feet on the desk, the phone hunched against his ear with his shoulder. He pointed at the straight chair beside his desk, and I sat down.
“Physical evidence,” Quirk said into the phone. “What have you got for physical evidence?” He listened. His tweed jacket hung on the back of his chair. His white shirt was crisp and starchy. The cuffs were turned under once over his thick wrists. He was wearing over the ankle cordovan shoes with brass buckles. The shoes shined with fresh polish. The gray slacks were sharply creased. The black knit tie was knotted and in place. His thick black hair was cut short with no sign of gray.
“Yeah, I know,” he said into the phone. “But we got no choice. Get it.” He hung up and looked at me. “Don’t you ever wear a tie?” he said.
“Just the other day,” I said. “Dinner at the Ritz.”
“Well you ought to do it more often. You look like a goddamned overage hippie.”
“You’re jealous of my youthful image,” I said. “Just because you’re a bureaucrat and have to dress up like Calvin Coolidge doesn’t mean I have to. It’s the difference between you and me.”
“There’s other differences,” Quirk said. “What do you want?”
“I want to know what you know about threats on the life of Rachel Wallace.”
“Why?”
“Until about a half hour ago I was her bodyguard.”
“And?”
“And she fired me for being too masculine.”
“Better than the other way around, I guess,” Quirk said.
“But I figured since I’d been hired by the day I might as well use the rest of it to see what I could find out from you.”
“There isn’t much to tell. She reported the threats. We looked into it. Nothing much surfaced. I had Belson ask around on the street. Nobody knew anything.”
“You have any opinion on how serious the threats are?”
Quirk shrugged. “If I had to guess, I’d guess they could be. Belson couldn’t find any professional involvement. She names a lot of names and makes a lot of embarrassing charges about local businesses and government figures, but that’s all they are—embarrassing. Nobody’s going to go to jail or end his career, or whatever.”
“Which means,” I said, “if the threats are real, they are probably from some coconut, or group of coconuts, that are anti-feminist or anti-gay, or both.”
“That would be my guess,” Quirk said. “The busing issue in this town has solidified and organized all the redneck crazies. So any radical issue comes along, there’s half a dozen little fringe outfits available to oppose it. A lot of them don’t have anything to do now that busing is getting to be routine. For crissake they took the state cops out of South Boston High this year.”
“Educational reform,” I said. “One comes to expect such innovation in the Athens of America.”
Quirk grunted and locked his hands behind his head as he leaned back further in his chair. The muscles in his upper arm swelled against the shirt sleeve.
“So who’s looking after her now?” he said.
“Nobody that I know of. That’s why I’m interested in the reality of the threats.”
“You know how it is,” Quirk said. “We got no facts. How can we? Anonymous phonecalls don’t lead anywhere. If I had to guess, I guess there might be some real danger.”
“Yeah, me too,” I said. “What bothers you?”
“Well, the threat to harm her if the book wasn’t suppressed. I mean, there were already copies of the damned thing around in galleys or whatever they are. The damage had been done.”
“Why doesn’t that make you feel easier?” I said. “Why isn’t it just a crank call, or a series of crank calls?”
“How would a crank caller even know about the book? Or her? I’m not saying it’s sure. I mean it could be some numb-nuts in the publishing company, or at the printer, or anywhere that they might see the book. But it feels worse than that. It has a nice, steady hostile feel of organized opposition.”
“Balls,” I said.
“You don’t agree,” Quirk said.
“No. I do. That’s what bothers me. It feels real to me, too. Like people who want that book suppressed not because it tells secrets, but because it argues something they don’t want to hear.”
Quirk nodded. “Right. It’s not a matter of keeping a secret. If we’re right, and we’re both guessing, it’s opposition to her opinion and her expression of it. But we are both guessing.”
“Yeah, but we’re good guessers,” I said. “We have some experience in the field.”
