8
THE NEXT DAY, I drove down to Boston in about two hours but got snarled up in the city's horrific traffic for almost another hour. They were calling Boston's never-ending roadworks “The Big Dig” and signs dotted around various large holes in the ground promised: It'll be worth it. If you listened hard enough, you could hear millions of voters hissing that it had better be.
Before I left, I called Curtis Peltier at home. He had been out to dinner with some friends the night before, he told me, and when he got back the police were at his house.
“Someone tried to break in the back door,” he explained. “Some kids heard the noise and called the police. Probably damn junkies from Kennedy Park or Riverton.”
I didn't think so. I told him about the missing notes.
“You think there was something important in them?”
“Maybe,” I replied, although I couldn't think what it might be. I suspected that whoever took them—Mr. Pudd or some other person as yet unknown—simply wanted to make things as difficult as possible for me. I told Curtis to look after himself and he assured me that he would.
Shortly before noon I reached Exeter Street, just off Commonwealth Avenue, and parked outside Rachel's building. She was renting in a four-story brownstone across the street from where Henry Lee Higginson, the founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, once lived. On Commonwealth, people jogged and walked their dogs or sat on the benches and took in the traffic fumes. Close by, pigeons and sparrows fed before paying their respects to the statue of the sailor-historian Samuel Eliot Morison, who sat on his plinth with the vaguely troubled look of a man who has forgotten where he parked his car.
Rachel had given me my own key to the apartment, so I dumped my overnight bag, bought some fruit and bottled water in Deluca's Market at Fairfield, and headed up Commonwealth Avenue until I reached the Public Garden between Arlington and Charles. I drank my water, ate my fruit, and watched children playing in the sunlight and dogs chasing Frisbees. I wanted a dog, I thought. My family had always had them, my grandfather too, and I liked the idea of keeping a dog around the house. I guessed that I wanted the company, which made me wonder why I wasn't asking Rachel to move in with me. I thought that Rachel might have been wondering about it herself. Lately there seemed to be an edge to her voice when the subject came up, a new urgency to her probings. She had been patient for over fourteen months now, and I guessed that she was feeling the strain of being trapped in relationship limbo. That was my fault: I wanted her near me, yet I was still afraid of the potential consequences. She had almost died once because of me. I did not want to see her hurt again.
At 2 P.M. I took the Red Line out to Harvard and headed for Holyoke Street. Ali Wynn was due to finish her lunchtime shift at two-thirty and I'd left a message to say that I'd be coming by to talk to her about Grace. The red-brick building in which the restaurant was housed had ivy growing across its face and the upstairs windows were decked with small white lights. From the room below came the sound of tap dancers practicing their moves, their rhythms like the movements of fingers on the keys of an old Underwood typewriter.
A young woman of twenty-three or twenty-four stood on the steps of the building, adjusting a stud in her nose. Her hair was dyed a coal black, she wore heavy blue black makeup around her eyes, and her lipstick was so red it could have stopped traffic. She was very pale and very thin, so she couldn't have been a regular eater at her own restaurant. She looked at me with a mixture of expectancy and unease as I approached.
“Ali Wynn?” I asked.
She nodded. “You're the detective?”
“Charlie Parker.” She reached out and shook my hand, her back remaining firmly against the brickwork of the building behind her.
“Like the jazz guy?”
“I guess.”
“He was pretty cool. You listen to him?”
“No. I prefer country music.”
She wrinkled her forehead. “Guess your mom and dad had to be jazz fans to give you a name like that?”
“They listened to Glenn Miller and Lawrence Welk. I don't think they even knew who Charlie Parker was.”
“Do people call you Bird?”
“Sometimes. My girlfriend thinks it's cute. My friends do it to irritate me.”
“Must be kind of a drag for you.”
“I'm used to it.”
The deconstruction of my family's naming procedures seemed to make her a little less wary of me, because she detached herself from the wall and fell into step beside me. We walked down to the Au Bon Pain at Harvard Square, where she smoked four cigarettes and drank two espressos in fifteen minutes. Ali Wynn had so much nervous energy she made electrons seem calm.
“Did you know Grace well?” I asked when she was about halfway through cigarette number two.
She blew out a stream of smoke. “Sure, pretty well. We were friends.”
“Her father told me that she used to live with you and that she stayed with you sometimes even after she moved out.”
“She used to come down at weekends to use the library and I let her crash on my couch. Grace was fun. Well, she used to be fun.”
“When did she stop being fun?”
Ali finished number two and lit number three with a matchbook from the Grafton Pub. “About the time she started her thesis.”
“On the Aroostook Baptists?”
The cigarette made a lazy arc. “Whatever. She was obsessed with them. She had all of these letters and photographs belonging to them. She'd lie on the couch, put some mournful shit on the stereo, and stay like that for hours, just going through them over and over again. Can you get me another coffee?”
I did as I was asked. I figured that she wasn't going to run away until she'd finished her cigarette.
“You ever worry about the effects of too much caffeine?” I asked when I returned.
She tugged at her nose stud and smiled. “Nah, I'm hoping to smoke myself to death first.”
There was something very likable about Ali Wynn, despite the veneer of Siouxsie and the Banshees-era cool. The sunlight made her eyes sparkle and the right side of her mouth was permanently raised in an amused, faux-cynical grin. She was all front; the cigarette smoke didn't stay in her mouth long enough to give a gnat a nicotine buzz and her makeup was too carefully applied to be truly scary. I guessed that she probably inspired fear, lust, and irritation in her male classmates, all in roughly equal measure. Ali Wynn could have wrapped the world around her little finger if she'd had the self-confidence to do it. It would come, in time.
“You were telling me about Grace,” I prompted, as much to get myself back on track as Ali.
“Yeah, sure. There's not much more to tell. It was like the whole family history thing was draining her, sucking the life from her. It was all ‘Elizabeth’ this and ‘Lyall’ that. She became a real drag. She was obsessed by Elizabeth Jessop. I don't know, maybe she thought Elizabeth's spirit had entered into her or something.”
“Did she think Elizabeth was dead?”
Ali nodded.
“Did she say why?”
“She just had a feeling, that was all. Anyway, like I said, it was all getting too heavy. I told her she couldn't stay anymore because my roomie was complaining, which was, like, a total lie. That was in February. She stopped coming and we didn't really talk much between then and . . .” She let the end of the sentence hang, then stubbed the cigarette out angrily.
“I suppose you think I'm a bitch,” she said softly when the last trace of smoke had disappeared.
“No, I don't think you're a bitch at all.”
She didn't look at me, as if afraid that my expression might give the lie to my words. “I was going to go up to the funeral but . . . I didn't. I hate funerals. Then I was going to send a card to her dad—he was a nice old guy—but I didn't do that either.”
At last, she raised her eyes and I was only half-surprised to see that they were wet. “I prayed for her, Mr. Parker, and I can't remember the last time I ever prayed. I just prayed that she'd be okay and that whoever was on the other side—God, Buddha, Allah—would look after her. Grace was a good person.”
“I think she probably was,” I said, as she lit a final cigarette. “Did she take drugs?”
Ali shook her head vehemently. “No, never.”
“Apart from getting overinvolved with her thesis, did she seem depressed or anxious?”
“No more than any of us.”
“Was she seeing anyone?”
“She'd had a couple of flings, but nothing serious for at least a year. She would have told me.”
I watched her quietly for a time, but I knew she was telling the truth. Ali Wynn hadn't been in the car with Grace on the night that she died. More and more, Marcy Becker was looking like the most likely candidate. I sat back and examined the crowds entering and leaving the T, the tourists and locals with bags of wine and candies from Cardullos, Black Forest ham and exotic teas from Jackson's of Picadilly, bath salts and soaps from Origins. Grace should have been among them, I thought. The world was a poorer place for her passing.
“Has that helped you?” asked Ali. I could see that she wanted to leave.
“It's cleared a few things up.” I handed her my card, after writing my home telephone number on the back. “If you think of anything more, or if someone else comes around asking about Grace, maybe you'll give me a call.”
“Sure.” She picked up the card and placed it carefully in her purse. She was about to move away when she paused and placed her hand lightly on my arm.