Paper Doll (13 page)

“Everything essential,” I said. “I used my full fifty minutes, but the rest of it was just her doing Orson Welles.”

We were having a drink at the Charles Hotel, which was an easy walk from Susan’s home. Susan had developed a passion for warm peppered vodka, olives on the side. In an evening she would often polish off nearly half a glass.

“She did say that Olivia was obsessed with money, and that apparently the family business was slipping.”

“That would support the bounced check and the checkbook with no running balance,” Susan said.

“Yeah. Cockburn said she had some sort of desperate plan, but Olivia wouldn’t tell her what it was.”

“Plan to get money?”

“Apparently. Cockburn doesn’t know, or won’t say.”

“Dr. Cockburn has, in effect, waived her patient-therapist privilege already. I assume she’d have no reason to withhold that.”

“Agreed,” I said. “What do you think.?”

“Dr. Cockburn’s theory about Olivia Nelson is probably accurate. It doesn’t require a great deal of psychological training to notice that many young people attempt to reclaim a parent’s love by sleeping with surrogates. Often the objects of that claim are in some way authority figures.”

“Like a U.S. Senator,” I said.

“Sure,” Susan said. “Sometimes it’s apparent power like that, sometimes it’s more indirect. Money maybe, or size and strength.”

“Does this explain our relationship?” I said.

“No,” Susan said. “Ours is based, I think, on undisguised lust.”

“Only that?” I said.

“Yes,” Susan said and guzzled half a gram of her peppered vodka. “I always wanted to boff a big goy.”

“Anyone would,” I said.

“Why,” Susan said, “if she were sleeping with all these prominent men, would the police not discover it?”

“Partly because they were prominent,” I said. “The affairs were adulterous, and prominent people don’t wish to be implicated in adulterous affairs.”

Susan was nodding her head.

“And because they were prominent,” she said, “they had the wherewithal to keep the event covered up.”

“She wasn’t telling,” I said, “and they weren’t telling, and apparently they were discreet.”

I shrugged, and spread my hands.

“What’s a cop to do?” Susan said.

“Especially when the cop is being told by everyone involved that the victim was Little Mary Sunshine.”

“So they weren’t looking for infidelity,” Susan said.

“Cops are simple people, and overworked. Most times the obvious answer is the right answer. Even, occasionally, when it’s not the right answer, it’s the easy one. Especially in a case like this where a lot of prominent people seem to be pushing you toward the easy answer.”

“Even Martin?” Susan said.

“You can’t push Quirk, but he’s a career cop. It’s his nationality-cop. If the chain of command limits him, he’ll stay inside those limits.”

“And not say so?”

“And not even think there are limits,” I said.

“But he sent Loudon Tripp to you.”

“There’s that,” I said.

“But could Tripp really have been so oblivious?” Susan said.

“And if he wasn’t, why did he hire me?”

Susan sampled a bit of olive, and washed it down with a sip of peppered vodka. She seemed to like it.

“It is, as you know, one of the truisms of the shrink business that people are often several things at the same time. Yes, Tripp probably is as oblivious as it seems, and no, he wasn’t. Part of him perhaps feared what the rest of him denied and he wanted to hire you to prove that she was what he needed to think she was.”

“So, in effect, he didn’t really hire me to find out who killed her. He hired me to prove she was perfect.”

“Perhaps,” Susan said.

“Perhaps?” I said. “Don’t you shrinks ever say anything absolutely?”

“Certainly not,” Susan said.

“So maybe the murder was the excuse, so to speak, for him to finally put his fears to rest, even if retrospectively.”

Susan nodded.

“He would have a more pressing need, in fact, once she was dead,” she said. “Because there was no chance to fix it, now. What it was, was all that he had left.”

The bar was almost empty on a mid-week night. The waitress came by and took my empty glass and looked at me. I shook my head and she went away. The other couple in the bar got up. The man helped the woman on with her coat, and they went out. In the courtyard outside the hotel, a college-age couple went by holding hands, with their heads ducked into the wind.

“He doesn’t want the truth,” I said.

“Probably not,” Susan said. “He has probably hired you to support his denial.”

“Maybe he should get the truth anyway.”

“Maybe,” Susan said.

“Or maybe not?” I said. “Hard to say in the abstract.”

Susan smiled at me. There was compassion and intelligence in the smile, and sadness.

“On the other hand; you have to do what you do, which may not be what he wants you to do.”

I stared out at the courtyard some more. It was empty now, with a few dead leaves being tumbled along by the wind.

“Swell,” I said.

“You got a drink?” he said.

I rinsed the glasses in the sink and got out the bottle and poured each of us a shot. I didn’t really want one, but he looked like he needed someone to drink with. It was a small sacrifice.

“First we went back over Cheryl Anne Rankin again,” Farrell said.

He held his whiskey in both hands, without drinking any.

“And we found nothing. No birth record, no public school record, no nothing. The woman who worked in the track kitchen is gone, all we got is that her name was Bertha. Nobody knows anything about her daughter. There’s no picture there like you describe, just one picture of Olivia Nelson with a horse, and nobody remembers another one.”

“Anyone talk to the black woman that worked there?”

“Yeah. Quirk talked with her while he was there. She doesn’t know anything at all. She probably knows less than that talking to a white Northern cop.”

“Who’s doing the rest of the investigating?”

“Alton County Sheriff’s Department,” Farrell said.

“You can count on them,” I said.

Farrell shrugged.

“Per diem’s scarce,” he said.

He was still holding the whiskey in both hands. He had yet to drink any.

“You hit one out, though, on Tripp,” he said. “He’s in hock. First time around we weren’t looking for it, and nobody volunteered. As far as we can find out this time, he has no cash, and his only assets are his home and automobile. He’s got no more credit. He’s a semester behind in tuition payments for each kid. His secretary hasn’t been paid in three months. She stays because she’s afraid to leave him alone.”

“What happened?” I said.

“We don’t know yet how he lost it, only that he did.”

“How about the family business?”

“He’s the family business. He managed the family stock portfolio. Apparently that’s all he did. It took him maybe a couple hours, and he’d stay there all day, pretending like he’s a regular businessman.”

“Secretary sure kept that to herself,” I said.

“She was protecting him. When we showed her we knew anyway, she was easy. Hell, it was like a relief for her; she couldn’t go on the rest of her life taking care of him for nothing.”

“What’s he say about this?”

“Denies everything absolutely,” Farrell said. “In the face of computer printouts and sworn statements. Says it’s preposterous.”

“He’s been denying a lot, I think.”

Farrell nodded and looked down at the whiskey still held undrunk in his two hands. He raised the glass with both hands and dropped his head and drank some, and when he looked up there were tears running down his face.

“Brian?” I said.

Farrell nodded.

“He died,” I said.

Farrell nodded again. He was struggling with his breathing.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Farrell drank the rest of his drink and put the glass down on the edge of the desk and buried his face in his hands. I sat quietly with him and didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything to say.

“Loudon lost almost everything in October 1987, when the market took a header,” Beale said. “I wouldn’t, under normal circumstances, speak so frankly about a client’s situation. But Loudon…” Beale shook his head.

“He’s in trouble, isn’t he?” I said.

“Bad,” Beale said. “And it’s not just money.

“I didn’t know brokers said things like `it’s not just money.”‘

Beale grinned.

“Being a good broker is taking care of the whole client,” he said. “It’s a service business.” Beale was square-built and shiny with a clean bald head, and a good suit. He looked like he probably played a lot of handball.

“He lost his money in ‘87?” I said.

“Yeah. In truth, I didn’t help. I was one of a lot of people who couldn’t read the spin right. I didn’t think the market was going to dive. But mostly he lost it through inattention. He always insisted on managing the money himself. Gave him something to do, I suppose. Let him go to the office at nine in the morning, come home at five in the afternoon, have a cocktail, dine with the family. You know? Like Norman Rockwell. But he wasn’t much of a manager, and when the bottom fell out he was mostly on margin.”

“And had to come up with the cash,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Why was he on margin?” I said. “I thought the Tripp fortune was exhaustive.”

Beale shrugged and gazed out the window, across the Back Bay, toward the river. The sky was bright blue and patchy with white clouds. In the middle distance I could see Fenway Park, idiosyncratic, empty, and green.

“Are the Rockefellers on margin?” I said. “Harvard University?”

Beale’s gaze came slowly back to me. “None of them was married to Olivia,” he said.

“She spent that much?”

“Somebody did. More than the capital generated.”

“So he began to erode the capital,” I said.

Beale nodded.

“The first sure sign of disaster for rich people,” he said. “Rich people don’t earn money. Their capital earns money. If they start snacking on the capital, there’s less income earned, and then, because they have less income, they take a bigger bite of capital, and there’s even less income, and, like that.”

“He tell you this?”

“No,” Beale said. “He wouldn’t say shit if he had a mouthful. As far as he was concerned, she was perfect. The kids were perfect. Christ, the son is an arrogant little thug, but Loudon acts like he’s fucking Tom Sawyer. Buys the kid out of every consequence his behavior entails. Or did.”

“And the daughter?”

“Don’t know. No news is probably good news. Loudon never had much to say about her, so she probably didn’t get in much trouble.”

“And he’s been economically strapped since 1987?”

“Broke,” Beale said. “Getting broker.”

“What are they living on?” I said. “They’ve got two kids in college, a mansion on the Hill, fancy office. How are they doing that?”

Beale shook his head.

“Margin.” he said.

“So why is everyone telling me otherwise?” I said.

“I can’t imagine,” Tripp said.

“Your secretary hasn’t been paid her salary,” I said.

“Of course she has.”

He took his checkbook from its place on the left-hand corner of the desk and opened it up and showed me the neat entries for Ann Summers.

“And the check you gave me bounced,” I said.

He turned immediately to the entry for my check.

“No,” he said. “It’s right here. Everything is quite in order.”

“There’s no running balance,” I said.

“Everything is in order,” Tripp said again.

“Do you know that your wife was unfaithful?” I said.

“By God, Spenser,” he said, “that’s enough.” His voice was full of sternness but empty of passion.

“I fear that I have made a mistake with you, and it is time to rectify.it.”

“Which means I’m fired,” I said.

“I’m afraid so. I’m sorry. But you have brought it on yourself. You have made insupportable accusations. My wife may be dead, Mr. Spenser, but her memory is alive, and as long as I’m alive, no one will speak ill of her.”

“Mr. Tripp,” I said. “Your wife was not what she appeared to be, not even who she said she was. Your life is not what you say it is. There’s something really wrong here.”

“Good day, Mr. Spenser. Please send me a bill for your services through”-he looked at his watch-“through today,” he said.

“And you’ll pay it with a rubber check,” I said. “And enter it carefully and not keep a balance so you won’t have to know it’s rubber.”

“Good day, Mr. Spenser!”

I was at a loss. It was like talking to a section of the polar ice cap. I got up and went out, and closed the door behind me.

“He’s crazy,” I said to Ann Summers. She shook her head sadly.

“Why didn’t you tell me about him right off?”

“I don’t know. He’s, he’s such a sweet man. And it seemed gradual, and he seemed so sure everything was all right, and…” She spread her hands.

“Even when you weren’t getting paid?” I said.

“I felt sorry, no, not that, quite, I felt… embarrassed for him. I didn’t want anyone to know. I didn’t want him to know that I knew.”

“Anything else you haven’t told me?” I said.

She shook her head. We were quiet for a while. Then she spoke.

“What are you going to do?” she said.

“I’m going to find out,” I said. “I’m going to keep tugging at my end of it until I find out.”

She looked at me for a long time. I didn’t have anything to say. Neither did she. Finally she nodded slowly. In its solemnity, her face was quite beautiful.

“Yes,” she said. “You will, won’t you.”