“No more than you are, shrink girl.”
She smiled and sipped her wine.
She said, “We both uncover secrets, I guess.”
“And chase after hidden truths,” I said.
“And people are often better for it,” she said.
“But not always.”
“No,” she said. “Not always.”
We ate our plum soup happily and sipped our wine.
“You don’t like divorce cases, do you?” she said.
“Make me feel like a Peeping Tom,” I said.
Susan smiled, which is a luminous sight.
“Is that different than a private eye?” she said.
“I hope so,” I said.
“You feel intrepid, chasing bad guys,” Susan said.
“Yes.”
“And sleazy, chasing errant mates.”
“Yes.”
“But you do it,” she said.
“It’s work.”
“It’s good work,” Susan said. “The pain of emotional loss is intense.”
“I recall,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “We both do. Half my practice comes from people like that.”
“Despite similarities, our practices are not identical.”
“Mine requires less muscle,” she said. “But the point is, you can rescue people in different ways. Leaping tall buildings at a single bound is not the only way.”
“I know,” I said.
“Which is why you’ll work divorce cases,” she said, “even though they make you feel sleazy.”
“Heroism has its downside,” I said.
“It has its upside too,” Susan said.
Susan’s eyes had a small glitter.
“Speaking of which . . .” I said.
“Could we maybe fi nish dinner?” she said.
“Of course,” I said. “The upside is patient.”
“And frequent,” Susan said.
3.
Iknew Doherty’s name and address. It would not be very hard to find out more about him. He had not, however, hired me to find out anything about him. So I decided to find out about his wife.
Concord College was not in Concord. It was in Cambridge. Three recent high-rise buildings with a lot of windows, just across the Longfellow Bridge in Kendall Square. A software tycoon with a streak of vestigial hippie- ness had endowed the place with a sum larger than the GNP of several small countries. And the college, perhaps respectful of its financial base, was an exfoliating swamp of unusual ideas. It cost about $40,000 a year to go there.
I went into Foss Hall, which was the middle high-rise, and up to the fourth floor. Aside from my adulthood, I was too neat to be mistaken for a student. Most of them wore very sloppy clothes that had cost a lot. Chronologically, I could have passed for faculty, but once again the neatness factor gave me away. The faculty was no neater than the students, but their clothes had cost less. Hoping to pass anyway, I was carrying a green book bag. Deep cover.
According to the schedule Doherty had given me, Jordan Richmond’s office was in room 425, and her office hours began in ten minutes. I strolled past the office. It had an oak door with a window. There was no one in there. I wandered past the door and stopped to study a bulletin board, beyond the next offi ce.
Her picture didn’t do her justice. There was a time in my life when I would have thought that admiring the butt
