“What’s option B?” I said.
“I remove you,” Clark said.
“I’ll take that one,” I said.
“What?”
“I’ll take option B,” I said. “Remove me.”
Clark looked at Heidi. Heidi had an odd look on her face.
“Remove Mr. Spenser, Clark.”
He was so spectacularly big and muscular that it probably didn’t occur to him that he couldn’t. Most times he probably just frightened people into submission. He put his left hand flat against my chest and pushed.
“Okay,” he said. “Move it.”
I brought both hands up and knocked his hand away, which left both my hands up, and in convenient position for step two. Clark initiated step two by throwing a big roundhouse right hand at me. I deflected it with my left and stepped back.
“Clark,” I said. “That’s not the way.”
He lunged at me and I put a stiff jab on his nose.
“Get your feet under you,” I said. “Left one forward.”
I gave him another jab and ducked under his left and moved to my right.
“See, if you don’t have your legs under you, you don’t turn well. Which lets me get around you and bang up your body.”
I hooked him left, then right, to the ribs. I heard him gasp. He wouldn’t last long, even if I didn’t hit him. There’s shape, and there’s fighting shape. Clark was maybe in posing shape. He was already starting to suck air. He was slower throwing the big right again. I brushed it away with my left.
“And don’t loop your punches,” I said. “Lead with your hip. Keep your elbows in. Guy your size, you should be working in close anyway, use your muscle.”
I doubled up on a jab to the nose and then stepped in and hit him a big right-hand uppercut, and Clark fell over.
“See how I started my hip first?” I said. “And let the punch follow it?”
Clark wasn’t out. But he was through. He sat on the floor. I knew his head was swimming. He was breathing as hard as he could.
“The companions you hire,” I said to Heidi, “don’t seem to be working out.”
Her face was a little flushed. Her eyes were shiny. She ran the tip of her tongue along her lower lip. I turned and walked out of the atrium. Behind me the harpist was still playing. As I walked down the hall toward the front door, two security guards came in, walking fast.
“What happened,” one of them said to me.
“Clark just got knocked on his ass,” I said.
“Good,” he said, and kept on past me into the atrium.
20
“Well,”
Susan said. “That worked out swell.”
It was Sunday morning. We were in her kitchen. She was sipping her coffee, watching me make clam hash for breakfast.
“Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” I said.
“And what was gained from this venture?” she said.
“The considerable satisfaction of giving Clark a big smack,” I said.
“That’s why your right hand seems swollen.”
“I deserve it,” I said. “The uppercut was showing off. Another minute or so and he’d have run out of oxygen.”
“It didn’t seem to bother you earlier this morning,” Susan said. “Does it hurt?”
“Only if I punch somebody.”
“Which you do much less of these days,” Susan said.
“I’m maturing,” I said.
“But not aging,” Susan said.
I smiled at her.
“You’re thinking about earlier this morning, aren’t you.”
“Hard not to,” Susan said.
I was chopping onions.
“Is there a pun in there?”
“Not unless you are a lecherous pig,” Susan said.
“Oink,” I said.
“And bless you for it,” Susan said. “You might have learned some things. You said Heidi Bradshaw acted strangely.”
“The fight excited her,” I said.
“Fights can be exciting?”
“There was something wrong with her excitement,” I said. “Her eyes. There was something going on in her eyes.”
“Like what?” Susan said.
I mixed the chopped onions with the clams.
“Like I was peeking in a window and seeing something terrible,” I said.
“I guess you had to be there,” Susan said.
I nodded. I cubed some boiled red potatoes, skins and all, and stirred them in with the chopped clams and onions.
“There’s something else, now that I’m thinking about it,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “I think there is.”
“You know what it is?” I said.
“Yes,” Susan said. “If you’re reporting accurately.”
“I always report accurately,” I said.
She nodded.
“I know,” she said. “Heidi’s behavior is inconsistent with all the things that have happened.”
“Wow,” I said.
Susan smiled.
“Harvard,” she said, “Ph.D.”
“Yet still sexually active,” I said.
“You should know,” Susan said.
“I should,” I said. “Right after the kidnapping you remarked that her reactions seemed odd, but we both know that shock can cause all sorts of behavior.”
“Yes,” Susan said. “But the shock should have worn off by now. Her current behavior should be far more genuine.”
“Cocktails in the atrium,” I said. “A new companion.”
“Or bodyguard,” Susan said. “However ineffective.”
“I wasn’t too effective, either,” I said.
“Hard to decide that,” Susan said, “without knowing exactly what you were supposed to effect.”
I nodded.
“And it seemed like an inside job,” I said.
“You’ve always wanted to say that, haven’t you?”
“Detectives are supposed to say stuff like that,” I said. “And it had to be inside. Rugar wouldn’t have taken a job without knowing the layout. Who was where. What the security was. What time things were happening.”
“You think Heidi was involved in kidnapping her own daughter?”
“If that’s what it was,” I said.
“What it was?”
“I’m just noodling,” I said. “But what if the kidnapping was a head fake. What if the real business was something else?”
“What?”
“The murder of the clergyman . . . or the son-in-law . . . or a scheme to extract ransom from somebody, like Adelaide’s father.”
“And you think Heidi could be involved?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “That’s why I’m noodling. It doesn’t have to be Heidi. It could be anybody who knew what was going on. Maggie Lane, the famous conductor . . . Adelaide.”
“Wow, you are noodling,” Susan said.
“Better a theory,” I said, “than nothing.”
“Theory is no substitute for information,” Susan said.
“They certainly didn’t teach you that at Harvard,” I said.
Susan smiled.
“No,” she said. “Some things I know, I learned from you.”
21
Lydia Hall College
was north of New York City, near Greenwich, Connecticut. About a three-hour drive from Boston, unless you stopped at Rein’s Deli for a tongue sandwich on light rye. So it was almost four hours after I left home that I was in the alumni office talking to a very presentable woman named Ms. Gold.
“At various times,” I said, “her name has been Heidi Washburn, Heidi Van Meer, and currently, Heidi Bradshaw.”
“Marriages?” Ms Gold said.
“Yes,” I said. “All to men of substance, I believe.”
Ms. Gold smiled.
“The best kind,” she said. “And what is your interest?”
“You know who Heidi Bradshaw is?” I said.
“I’ve heard of her,” Ms. Gold said.
“Then you know of the recent kidnapping?”
“Of her daughter,” Ms. Gold said. “Yes.”
“I’m involved in that investigation,” I said.
“Are you a police officer?” Ms. Gold said.
“Private detective,” I said.
“Do you have any identification?” Ms. Gold said.
I showed her some. She looked at it and handed it back.
“We do not normally give out information about our alumni,” she said.
“I really only want to know that she is an alumna, and what her maiden name is.”
Ms. Gold looked like she approved of my use of
alumna
.
“Well, I think we can tell you that,” she said. “We’ll take up the maiden-name business later.”
“She may have graduated in 1980,” I said.
She turned to the desktop computer and worked it for a while.
“We have no Heidi Van Meer. We have a Heidi Washburn, but she graduated in 1926. And we have a Heidi Bradshaw who graduated in 2001.”
“How about under her husbands’ names,” I said, and gave her the names that were in Healy’s background folder. “Mrs. Peter Van Meer. Mrs. J. Taylor Washburn. Mrs. Harden Bradshaw?”
She did the computer thing again.
“No,” she said.
Her voice lingered on the
no
.
“But?” I said.
“Let me think a moment,” Ms. Gold said.
I waited. She was ash-blonde and slim. She wore a pair of glasses with big blue frames. She was nicely dressed in a tasteful well-tailored cashmere-and-tweed kind of way. There was a wedding ring on the appropriate finger. After a time she exhaled softly.
“Do you suspect Heidi Bradshaw of involvement?” she said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m collecting information.”
“Who are you working for?”
“This is pro bono,” I said.
“Really? I was under the impression that everyone involved is wealthy.”
“I was there when the kidnapping went down, and couldn’t prevent it,” I said.
“And it rankles you?” she said.
“It does.”
“So you are investigating basically in service to your own self-regard?” she said.
“You could say so.”
“Your self-regard seems very high,” she said.
“And I want to keep it that way,” I said.
She nodded and smiled and sat another moment.
“We have a senior faculty member named J. Taylor Washburn,” she said.
“Was he married to someone named Heidi?” I said.
“I don’t know. It just seemed a sufficient coincidence that I should tell you.”
“Would it be in your best interest,” I said, “if I didn’t tell anyone how I learned of Professor Washburn?”
“His existence is hardly a secret,” Ms. Gold said. “He’s listed in our catalog.”
“Can you tell if she ever attended this college?” I said.
“If she did, it is unlikely that we wouldn’t have her,” Ms. Gold said.
“Even if she didn’t graduate?”
“This office is about acquiring money for the college,” Ms. Gold said. “Once you are no longer a student, you become alumni, which is to say a source of revenue.”
“So you are quite assiduous,” I said.
Ms. Gold smiled.
“Like wolverines,” she said.
22
Professor J. Taylor Washburn
had a B.A. from Penn and a Ph.D. from Columbia. He was an art historian. He taught a graduate seminar in low-country realism, and was the chairman of the Fine Arts Department.
I learned all of this in the first five minutes of our conversation. I also learned that he had once been married to a young woman named Hilda Gretsky.
“Was she a student here?” I said.
“No,” Washburn said. “I met her at a gallery.”
“In the city?”
“Yes,” Washburn said, “downtown. One of my teaching assistants was having a show. Sadly, it was not very good.”
Washburn appeared to be about sixty, with wavy snow-white hair worn longish. His complexion was red, and his thick white mustache was carefully trimmed.
“When were you married?”
“Nineteen eighty,” Washburn said.
“How long did it last?”
Washburn looked out the window at the open quadrangle in the center of the campus with the redbrick Georgian library at one end and the redbrick Georgian student union at the other.
“Two years,” he said.
“What occasioned the breakup,” I said.
He kept looking out the window.
“She asked me for a divorce,” he said. “She told me she’d been having an affair with a man named Van Meer.”
“Must have been hard to hear,” I said.
“Yes.”
I took a picture of Heidi from my pocket and put it on his desk.
“Is this Hilda Gretsky?” I said.
He looked at the photograph.
“Yes,” he said.
“Are you aware of who she’s become?” I said.
“Yes.”
“Do you know when she began to call herself Heidi?” I said.
“When I knew her she called herself Heidi. The name on her birth certificate and her marriage license was Hilda, but she always hated the name, and always introduced herself as Heidi.”
“How old is she?” I said.
“She was born in 1959,” Washburn said.
“She from New York?” I said.
He shook his head.
“Dayton, Ohio,” he said.
“Why did she come to New York?” I said.
He stopped looking out the window and turned to me and smiled without much pleasure.
“To make her fortune,” he said.
“Doing what?” I said.
“Marrying well,” he said.
“Starting with you?”
“I suppose,” Washburn said. “One achieves, in some circles, a certain, ah, tone, I guess. Also, in addition to my academic earnings, there is a considerable trust fund. My father was aggressive in banking.”
“Prestige and money,” I said. “Good start.”
“Yes.”
“Love?” I said.
“She was not unkind,” Washburn said.
23
I had a drink
at the bar in Lock-Ober with the Special Agent in Charge at the Boston FBI office. He was a smallish guy with glasses, and he didn’t look like much of a crime fighter. Which often worked for him. His name was Epstein.
“You on the kidnapping deal on the south coast?” I said.
“Heidi Bradshaw’s daughter,” Epstein said. “Yeah, we’re on it, too.”