Rachel Wallace shook her head and smiled sadly. “Everywhere,” she said, “nowhere. He has estab lishments and redoubts and hideaways and retreats and castles and keeps everywhere. I can, and will, add to the list I gave you by phone in California, but there’s no way to know that the places I know of are all there are and less way than that to know if he’s there, or when he will be. We know for sure only that he’s not here in this room.”
“Gee, that a start,” Hawk said.
“Christ,” I said, “we’ve got him cornered.”
“Perhaps the government people can add to what I’ve got,” Rachel Wallace said.
“As far as I can tell,” I said, “they wouldn’t even he certain he wasn’t in this room.”
“But they’d manage to let Costigan know that we were,” Hawk said.
Rachel Wallace nodded. “So we’re on our own,” she said.
“I appreciate the we, ” I said.
“I had occasion to appreciate it some years ago,” she said. “Susan, do you have anything to add.” Susan was looking at her sandwich. She picked up a half slice of tomato and ate it carefully.
“I don’t know where to look either,” she said.
We were quiet. Hawk began on his second sandwich. Corned beef. I finished my beer and opened another.
“I don’t want to talk about Russell,” Susan said.
“Talk about whatever you want to,” I said. “Anything we know will put us ahead of where we are now.”
“Russell is not like his father,” Susan said. She foraged a small piece of bacon from the sandwich and ate it. “I…”
I leaned a little forward toward her. “I won’t hurt him,” I said.
“Do you promise,” Susan said.
“I just did,” I said.
Susan raised her eyes from her plate. “Yes,” she said. “You did. I’m sorry.” She shifted her glance to Hawk. He was lying on the bed fully invested in his corned beef sandwich. He looked back at Susan.
“You tough lady,” he said. Susan was silent.
Hawk grinned. “Okay, since you put it that way. I won’t hurt him either.”
Susan nodded her head, almost as if to herself.
“Less of course you change your mind,” Hawk said.
CHAPTER 46
“IN HIS PERSONAL HABITS JERRY IS QUITE ascetic,” Susan said, “He doesn’t drink, he doesn’t smoke. He doesn’t drink coffee or tea. Of course he does not ingest drugs. He runs five miles every morning. He avoids red meat. He is self-educated, and quite well. He reads a great deal, and he is very intelligent, but very rigid. He is devoted to his son, and devoted to his wife. Other than those two devotions, I have no reason to think he has any feelings whatsoever.”
“How did he treat you?” I said.
“His anti-Semitism is virulent. It must have deeply offended him that I was with his son, though it’s probably one of my charms for his son, but he never showed it. He was always polite, almost courtly, to me. If his son chose me, then he could forgive even my Jewishness.”
“My son right or wrong but still my son,” Rachel Wallace said.
“His love for his son is unflinching,” Susan said, “and his son often did not make that easy.”
“And his wife?” I said.
Susan shook her head. “Grace,” she said.
“He not infatuated with her beauty,” Hawk said.
Susan continued to shake her head. “I’ve always known that love was a compendium of needs. You learn that in your introductory psych course, but what complex of needs and pathologies binds those two people together…” She shrugged. “Yes, he loves her.”
“And she loves him?”
“I don’t know. She needs him, she manipulates him. She loves Russell,” Susan said. “I don’t know all the dynamics in that family. But I know… I know that Grace is the worm in that apple.”
Susan’s club sandwich lay unattended on her plate. I eyed it. Maybe if I reassembled it. No, it was hers. I looked at the sandwich platter. It was empty. I looked at Susan’s disorganized sandwich again. Hell, she wasn’t going to eat it. Susan took a piece of lettuce in her fingers and tore off a small triangle and ate it. She held the rest of the leaf poised in front of her.
“Talk a little more about Grace,” I said.
“She’s not very bright,” Susan said. “And she affects a kind of Iittle-girlishness that is simply incongruous with her bulk. She’s… what is the phrase Jerry used about her once… often wrong, but never uncertain. She’s overbearing and full of fear. She’s infantile and tyrannical at the same time. She’s weak and silly and her husband and her son are neither and she controls both of them.”
Susan shook her head. “Remarkable,” she said.
“Why,” Rachel Wallace said.
