“What is it about Russell Costigan?” she said.
“May I come in?”
“Yes, certainly. Sit down. Would you care for coffee, tea? Something to drink?”
“Coffee would be good,” I said. “Black.”
A middle-aged black woman appeared in archway that apparently led to the kitchen.
“Two coffees, please, Eunice,” Tyler Costigan said.
The black woman smiled and turned away and disappeared. I sat in a pink armchair. It was part of a collection of pink furniture that sat elegantly around on a gray rug like the one in the foyer. The walls were white on three sides of the room, and the fourth side was floor-to-ceiling glass that let you look across Lake Michigan. The view was startling and the light in the room was flood level.
Tyler sat across from me on a pink couch and crossed her ankles. Her shoes were pink fabric, with flat heels and no arch. The pink matched her shirt, which matched her furniture. She smiled faintly at me.
“What is it about Russell Costigan, Mr. Spenser?”
“I can’t think of a slick way to say this, Mrs. Costigan. Russell is somewhere with a woman I love. I wish to find them. I’m not convinced that she’s with him by choice.”
Tyler Costigan’s smile disappeared.
“Susan? Whore.”
I nodded my head slightly. “Can you help me find them?”
“My husband and his newest whore,” Tyler Costigan said. It was hard keeping my dimples in place.
“You are separated from your husband, Mrs. Costigan?”
“Yes. His priorities seem muddled.”
“What are his priorities,” I said.
Eunice came in with the coffee in a silver pot on a silver tray with silver cream pitcher and sugar bowl and silver spoons and two china cups with gilding on the rim and two china saucers with gilding around the edge. She put the tray on the white coffee table in front of Tyler Costigan, smiled at neither of us, and went out again. Tyler Costigan leaned forward and poured the coffee and handed it across the table to me. I took it and holding the saucer in my left hand took a sip from the cup. It was very good coffee and it had a slight vanilla edge to it. Tyler Costigan sat back without pouring any coffee for herself. She tucked her legs up under her on the couch, smoothing her skirt down over them.
“Russell Costigan’s priorities are cocaine, whores, and whiskey, I believe in that order.”
“By whores you mean women in his life, not necessarily always, ah, professional prostitutes.”
“Decent women do not break up marriages,” Tyler Costigan said. “Decent women do not fuck married men. Men with children and family. Men with homes. I call them whores.”
The inelegant four-letter word was startling when she used it. I’d heard it almost hourly since I was a little boy, but from her it sounded dirty.
“Well, we have a common goal here, I think,” I said. “We’d like to terminate this affair.”
“How?”
“As I say, I think Susan is not with Russell entirely by choice. If I can find them, I’ll help her to leave.”
“They are always there by choice, Spenser. They love him. He’s funny, and loose, and richer than you can imagine. He takes them places they’ve never been, he has them doing things they once blushed to think about. And after a while, he gets tired of them. Tired of fucking them, tired of feeding them dope and booze and teaching them things, and he kicks them loose and comes home.”
“And you welcome him?”
“He makes himself welcome. The Costigans are very rich. Do you remember what somebody said about rich people? That they are different?”
“Fitzgerald,” I said.
She shrugged. “The Costigans own everything they want. They have power. They’ll know you were here, for instance. I’m always watched.”
“That thought occurred to me,” I said.
“If you persist, they will kill you,” Tyler Costigan said.
“Russell is that potent?”
“His father is,” she said. “Russell’s potency is more narrowly specific.”
“Is that why you welcome him back each time,” I said.
She shook her head. “You love him?”
“Yes,” she said, “but I could learn not to. It’s…” She stopped talking and turned her head away toward the bright window wall where the light poured in. I was quiet. Way out on the lake a boat moved by itself. There was nothing else in sight on the surface of the lake, which stretched away to the horizon.
Tyler Costigan turned her face back toward me. “They let me keep the children,” she said.
I nodded. Tyler Costigan leaned forward without untucking her legs and poured more coffee into my cup. I drank some.
