Chapter 7
Proctor was inland, well north of Boston, near the New Hampshire border, at a bend in the Merrimack River, where a series of falls and rapids had supplied power to the nineteenth-century textile industry, which had created the city. Before the war the city had belonged to the Yankees who ran the mills, and the French-Canadian and Irish immigrants who worked them. The Yankees had never lived there. Most of the mill management lived in company- built suburbs outside of Proctor. Now the name of the city was the only hint of its Yankee beginnings. The mills had followed the labor market to the sunbelt after the war. The Yankees had shifted gears and, without having to leave their suburbs, had clustered south in homage to the new transistor culture, an easy commute along route 128. City Hall belonged now to the Irish, the Canucks had scattered, and the rest of the city was a porridge of South and Central American immigrants.
I drove into Proctor over a bridge from south of the city, where the dirty water of the Merrimack snarled over the rapids below and churned up a yellowish foam. The mills were still there. Red brick, chain link, imposing, permanent, and largely empty. There were discount clothing outlets in some, and cut-rate furniture stores in others.
Everywhere there was graffiti-ornate, curvilinear, colorful, and defiant, on brick, on city buses, on the plywood with which windows had been boarded, on mail boxes, on billboards, swirling over the many abandoned cars, most of them stripped, some of them burned out, that decayed at the curbside. There were only Latino faces on the streets. Some old men, mostly adolescent boys, clustered on street corners and in doorways, hostile and aimless. The signs on the store fronts were in Spanish. The billboards were Spanish. The only English I saw was a sign that said: 'Elect Tim Harrington, Mayor of All the People.' I wondered how hard Tim was working for the Hispanic vote.
East along the river the factories thinned out, and there were tenements, three-deckers with peeling paint and no yards. The tenements gave way to big square ugly frame houses, many with asbestos shingles and aluminum siding. WPOM was about a half mile out along the river, in a squat brick building with a chain-link fence around it, next to a muffler shop. There was a ten-story transmission antenna sticking up behind it, and a big sign out front that said it was the voice of the Merrimack Valley. The gate was open and I drove in and parked in the muddy lot to the right of the station. A receptionist buzzed me in. There was a security guard with a gun in the lobby. The station's programming was playing implacably on speakers in the reception area. It was a rock station, and the music was a noise I didn't know.
The receptionist was a young woman with sadistically teased blonde hair and lime-green sneakers. The rest of her outfit seemed to be a large black bag, which she was wearing like a dress. She had a gold nose ring, and six very small gold rings in her right ear. When I came to her desk she was working on her horoscope and chewing some gum. Both. I smiled at her, about half wattage. Full wattage usually made them rip off their clothes and I didn't want this one to do that. She put down the horoscope magazine and looked up at me and chewed her gum. Both, again. Maybe I'd underestimated her.
'My name is Spenser,' I said. 'I'd like to talk with the station manager.'
'Concerning what?' she said. Her voice sounded like a fan belt slipping.
'I'm a detective,' I said. 'I'm looking for someone.'
'Excuse me?'
'I'm a detective, a sleuth, an investigator.'
I took out my wallet and showed her my license. She stared at it blankly. It could have said 'Maiden Spoiler' on it for all the difference it made to her.
'Do you have an appointment?'
'Not yet,' I said. 'What is the manager's name?'
'Mister Antonelli.'
'Could you tell Mister Antonelli I'm here, please.'
She stared at me and chewed her gum. That was two things. I knew that calling Mister Antonelli on the intercom would be one thing too many. So I waited. I was hoping she'd get through staring in a while. Nothing happened. I pointed at the intercom and smiled encouragingly.
'What was your visit concerning?'
'Lisa St. Claire,' I said.
'Lisa isn't in,' she said.
'And I want to know why,' I said.
'You'd have to ask Mr. Antonelli about that,' she said. 'I just work here.'
'Okay,' I said. 'Give him a buzz.'
She nodded and picked up the phone.
'A gentleman to see you, Mister Antonelli… No, I don't know… he didn't say. He's mad because Lisa isn't here… Yes Sir.'
