“Look,” I said. “You’ve been through a lousy divorce. For sixteen years or more you’ve been a housewife and now all of a sudden there’s no man in the house. You’re a little lost. And then I move in. You start cooking for me. Putting flowers on the table. Pretty soon you’re a housewife again. This morning had to happen. You had to prove your housewifery, you know? It would have been a kind of confirmation. And it would have confirmed a status that I don’t want, and you don’t really want. I’m committed to another woman. I’m committed to protecting your son. Screwing his mom, pleasant as that would be, is not productive.”
“Why not?” She looked up when she said it and straight at me.
“For one thing it might eventually raise the question of whether I was being paid for protecting Paul or screwing you, of being your husband substitute.”
“Gigolo?”
“You ought to stop doing that. Classifying things under some kind of neat title. You’re a whore, I’m a gigolo, that sort of thing.”
“Well, what was I if I wasn’t a whore?”
“A good-looking woman, with a need to be loved, expressing that need. It’s not your fault that you expressed it to the wrong guy.”
“Well. I’m sorry for it. It was embarrassing. I was like some uneducated ginzo.”
“I don’t know that the lower classes do that sort of thing much more often than we upper-class types. But it wasn’t simply embarrassing. It was also in some ways very nice. I mean I’m very glad to have seen you with your clothes off. That’s a pleasure.”
“I need men,” she said.
I nodded. “That’s where the bucks are,” I said.
“That’s still true,” she said. “But it’s more than that.”
I nodded again.
“Women are so goddamned boring,” she said. She stretched out the or in boring.
“Sometime I’ll put you in touch with a woman I know named Rachel Wallace,” I said.
“The writer?”
“Yeah.”
“You know her? The feminist writer? Well, that’s all right in theory. But we both know the reality.”
“Which is?”
“That we get a lot further batting our eyes and wiggling our butts.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Look where it got you.” With a quick sweep of her right hand she knocked the half-full cup of coffee and its saucer off the table and onto the floor. In the same motion she got up out of her chair and left the kitchen. I heard her go up the short stairs to her bedroom and slam the door. She never did try my potato-and-onion omelet. I threw it away.
CHAPTER 11
It was two days after the peignoir that they came for the kid. It was in the evening. After supper. Patty Giacomin answered the doorbell and they came in, pushing her backward as they came. Paul was in his room watching television. I was reading A Distant Mirror, chapter seven. I stood up.
There were two of them and neither was Mel Giacomin. The one doing the shoving was short and dumpy and barrel-bodied. He was wearing the ugliest wig I’ve ever seen. It looked like an auburn Dynel ski cap that he’d pulled down over his ears. His partner was taller and not as bulky. He had a boot camp crew cut and a navy watch cap rolled up so that it looked like a sloppy yarmulke.
The short one said, “Where’s the kid?”
The tall one looked at me and said, “Spenser. Nobody told me about you in this.”
I said, “How are you, Buddy?”
The short one said, “Who’s he?”
Buddy said, “He’s a private cop. Name’s Spenser. You working, Spenser?”
I said, “Yes.”
“They didn’t tell me you’d be here.”
“Mel didn’t know, Buddy. It’s not Mel’s fault.”
“I didn’t say anything about no Mel,” Buddy said.
“Aw, come on, Buddy, don’t be a jerk. Who the hell else would send you for the kid?”
The short one said, “Never mind all the crap. Parade the fucking kid out here.”
I said to Buddy, “Who’s your friend with his head in a bag?”
Buddy made a very small smile.
The short one said, “What the hell’s that remark supposed to mean, douchebag?”
“It means you look like you’re wearing an Astroturf bathing cap for a rug. Funniest looking rug I’ve ever seen.”
