demented laughter echoed from its corridors.
The streetlights went on, and lights in the windows up and down Beacon Street. At about 5:15-the front porch light went on at Amy's. At a little after six the same fat guy I'd seen before came trundling down Fairfield from the same alley as before and went up the steps and let himself in. He had on a plaid overcoat that looked like the saddle blanket for a hippopotamus. Then the light went out on the front porch and that was it. I hung on until nearly eleven at night and then went home and ate a baked bean sandwich on whole wheat with mayonnaise and lettuce and went to bed.
I was back on the job on Beacon Street before eight the next morning. It was the day before Thanksgiving and the street was busy with college kids going home for the holiday. I was prepared for a long siege today. I had some caponata from Rebecca's and some feta cheese and black olives and Syrian bread. I also had a large Thermos of coffee and a portable radio. I ate and listened to jazz and drank coffee and watched the coeds in their designer jeans and thought about what Susan and I would do for Thanksgiving dinner, and the day wore on.
I was listening to Ron Della Chiesa on WGBH. He was playing an album by Anita Ellis when the fat man came his usual route and went into the house. Early. I looked at my watch. 3:20. Out of work early for the holiday. I was listening to Teddi King with Dave McKenna's thumping piano behind her, when Fatso came out of the house with Amy and two suitcases. Off to Grandma's for a turkey dinner? Off to a country inn for roast goose with plum sauce? They went around the corner, up Fairfield Street, down the alley, and in maybe two minutes came driving out in a Volvo station wagon that fit the fat guy like a tailored shirt. They headed up Beacon while I decided what to do. By the time they reached the corner of Gloucester I knew what I'd do. I'd sit here for a while and if they didn't come back I'd burglarize their home and see what was what.
Chapter 19
Carol Sloan was just beginning to sing when I regretfully snapped off the radio and climbed out of the MG. I got a Speedo gym bag out of the trunk and went up Fairfield and down the alley behind the buildings and counted until I was behind Amy's. There was a small yard with a cast-iron fence around it, a gate that closed off a parking space, three green plastic trash barrels with lids, and beyond the little yard the French doors that I'd seen from the inside.
I stepped over the low fence and went to the French doors. They were locked. I knocked on the door and then smiled and waved through the glass at the empty living room. That was for anyone watching. Then I made a gesture at the doors, nodded, and set down my bag. I took a thin chisel and a hammer out of it and began, quite carefully, to chip away the glazing compound around the frame of one pane in the French doors. The pane next to the latch. The process took maybe half an hour. The putty was old and dried hard. When I had it cleaned away, I put the hammer and chisel back in the bag and got out some long-nosed pliers and a screwdriver with a thin head and pried out the little V-shaped wedges they use to hold the glass in place under the putty. I got them out without bending them badly and put them in the bag. Then I took out a roll of adhesive tape, tore off a length, pressed about half of the length against the loosened pane, used the other half for a handle, and prying carefully with my screwdriver, I took the pane out without breaking it. I put it down out of the way and reached in through the opening and unlatched the French doors. With the door ajar I put the pane back into the frame, tapped the glaziers' wedges back into place, got out a can of glaziers' putty, and reputtied the pane into place. When I was done, you'd have to be very alert to notice it had happened. Then I put my tools back in the bag and picked up the bag and went into the living room and shut the door behind me and relocked it.
The house was as neat as I remembered. I took off my coat and laid it over a chair and walked through once to make sure it was empty. Walking quietly, listening hard, my gun offering a reassuring weight in my right hip pocket. I'd probably burgled a hundred homes in my life, but it was always the same, the tense feeling of intrusion. Uncertain, concentrated, full of tiny building sounds that you only heard when you were breaking and entering. And always in part listening for the distant siren getting louder. There was no one home.
Back in the living room I started to search. I took my time, one room at a time. If you don't want it known that you've searched a place it takes a lot longer. But I had time and I saw no reason to let anyone know I was still interested in Amy-or April. What Tony Marcus didn't know wouldn't hurt me.
The place looked like the world according to Bloomingdale's-wineglasses and bread baskets and copper cookware, Irish linen and English china and Scotch whisky and cookbooks by Julia Child, lacquerware and unglazed earthenware and brass umbrella stand and silver champagne buckets and crystal chandeliers and a wine rack full of French wines and chopping block counters and delft tile bathrooms.
On the second floor was an office with a rolltop desk and big black leather executive chair and a dictating machine and an IBM Selectric typewriter. On a coffee table was a briefcase in black leather that said MITCHELL POITRAS in gold embossing on the top. I opened it. It was full of correspondence on stationery headed Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Department of Education. The letters were full of gobbledygook about Chaptr 762 and Title IX and programs impacting student populations, and people developing the pedagogical strategies, and a lot of stuff much less exciting than that. Most of them were addressed to Poitras. His title was Executive Coordinator, Student Guidance and Counseling Administration. I felt humble. The desk was full of more of the same, including a lot of Core Evaluation forms, some of which seemed to have been coded in different-colored inks. There were also bills and a checkbook that indicated a balance of $23,000. Not bad for a state worker. Neither was the house. In the middle drawer there was a set of spare keys on a key ring. I pocketed them.
The master bedroom was pink silk, velvet, and satin with an enormous canopied bed. The other furniture was white and gold. The place looked like one of those bedrooms in the Pocono Mountain resorts with names like Honeymoon Haven and Wedding Night Manor-all it lacked was a heart-shaped bathtub. In the bottom drawer of the bureau was a matched set of vibrators. I was getting embarrassed. There was also a batch of nude pictures of Amy Gurwitz. She looked like a contestant in a Brooke Shields look-alike contest. High voltage.
I felt something like relief when I got out of the bedroom and up to the third floor. Maybe there'd be something to cleanse the palate up here-a woodworking set, or a model train collection. When I went in it looked encouraging. It seemed a photo setup. But it wasn't encouraging, it was a place for taking and processing dirty pictures. For an hour and a half I waded through a variety of glossy photos, video-tapes, and 8-millimeter reels. The room had it all-video-tape camera and recorder, movie camera, an old Rolleiflex on a tripod for still work, and files upon files of the product.
There is a limit to human invention, and pornographers seem to reach it early, but besides the sameness of pornography this collection had a special unifying theme. All the actors were young-high school age or less-both genders, and aimed at all sexual preferences. 'Ah, sweet bird of youth,' I said out loud. I was trying to work back up to embarrassment. My voice in the empty house was hoarse. Obviously some of the scenes had been shot in this town house. Some on the ornate canopied bed downstairs. Some in the living room where Amy had so properly served me a glass of beer on a walnut tray. Some you couldn't tell. I looked at all the snapshots to see if April was in any of them. She wasn't. I sampled a couple of tapes and a couple of films and didn't see her. It would liave taken a week to go through the tapes and films.
I put everything back and went out and down the stairs. There was nothing more to do there. I went back and checked the French doors to be sure they were latched. Then I put my coat on and went out the front door, which locked behind me. I took the spare keys to a Sears store and had copies made. Then I went back to Poitra's place,
