At 120,000 miles my 1968 Chevy convertible had bought the farm. There’s just so much you can do with duct tape. With some of Huge Dixon’s bounty money I had bought Susan’s maroon MGB with whitewalls and a chrome luggage rack on the trunk lid, and at ten fifteen the next morning I was sitting in it outside an apartment building on Hammond Pond Parkway in Chestnut Hill. According to Patty Giacomin her husband’s girl friend lived there. She knew that because she had once followed her husband out here and seen him go in and come out with a woman from his office named Elaine Brooks.
I’d asked how she knew it was a girl friend and not just business and Patty Giacomin had given me a look of such withering scorn that I’d let it go. Patty didn’t know where her husband lived. She couldn’t reach him through his office. They didn’t know where he was. The girl friend was all we could think of.
“He’ll show up there,” Patty had said, “unless he’s got a new one. He’s always got to have a little honey.”
So I sat with the motor idling and the heater on. The temperature had dropped forty-two degrees since yesterday and January in Boston was back to normal. I turned on the radio. A disc jockey with a voice like rancid lard was describing how much he liked the new record by Neil Diamond. Then Neil began to sing his new record. I shut it off.
A lot of cars went by heading under Route 9 for the Chestnut Hill Mall. There were two Bloomingdale’s in Chestnut Hill Mall. Susan and I had come shopping there two weeks before Christmas, but she’d complained of sensory overload and we’d had to leave.
A jogger went by with a watch cap pulled over his ears and a blue jacket on that said TENNNESSEE TECH STAFF. Even in the cold his stride had an easy spring to it. I’d done the same thing along the Charles three hours earlier and the wind off the river had been hard as the Puritan God. I looked at my watch. Ten forty-five. I turned on the radio again and fished around until I found Tony Cennamo’s jazz show. He was doing a segment on Sonny Rollins. I listened.
At eleven the show was over and I shut the radio off again. I opened my businesslike manila folder and looked at my page and a half of notes. Mel Giacomin was forty. He ran an insurance agency in Reading and until his divorce he had lived on Emerson Road in Lexington. His wife lived there still with their fifteen-year-old son, Paul. As far as his wife knew, the agency did well. He also ran a real estate business out of the same office and owned several apartment houses, mostly in Boston. The marriage had been troubled from the start, in dissolution for the last five years, and husband and wife had separated a year and a half ago. He’d moved out. She never knew where. The divorce proceedings had been bitter, and the decree had become final only three months ago.
Giacomin was, in his wife’s phrase, “a whoremonger” and, his wife said, was very active among the younger women in his office and elsewhere. I looked at his picture. Long nose, small eyes, big droopy mustache. Hair worn medium length over the ears. On the back I read his wife’s description: 6′1″, 210–225 (weight varied depending on how much he was drinking and exercising and dieting). Had been a football player at Furman and still showed signs of it.
I had a picture of the boy too. He had his father’s nose and small eyes. His face was narrow and sullen. His dark hair was long. His mouth was small and the upper lip formed a cupid’s bow.
I looked again at my watch. Eleven thirty. He probably wasn’t into morning sex. I didn’t know what she looked like. There was no picture available and Patty Giacomin’s description was sketchy. Blond hair in a curly perm, medium height, good figure. “Busty,” Patty had said. I’d called Giacomin’s office at nine, nine thirty, and ten of ten and she’d not been in. Neither had he. No one knew when to expect either. I looked at my watch again. Eleven thirty-five. I was sick of sitting. I pulled the MG up around the corner onto Heath Street and parked and walked back down to the apartment building. On the directory inside the outer doors Elaine Brooks was listed on the third floor, apartment 315. I pushed the buzzer. Nothing happened. I pushed it again and held it. After nearly a minute a thick female voice said hello through the intercom. The voice had been sleeping one minute prior.
I said, “Harry?”
She said, “What?”
I said, “Harry. It’s me, Herb.”
She said, “There’s no goddamned Harry here.”
I said, “What?”
She said. “You pushed the wrong button, you asshole.”
I said, “Oh, sorry.” The intercom went dead.
She was in there and I’d wakened her. She wouldn’t be going right out. I went back and got into my car and drove the two or three hundred yards to Bloomingdale’s and brought a big silver wine bucket for a hundred bucks. It left me two dollars for lunch. If I got a chance for lunch. I was hungry. But I was used to that. I was always hungry. I had the wine bucket gift wrapped and went back to the apartment building. I parked out front this time and went into the foyer and rang Elaine Brooks again. She answered the first buzz and her voice had freshened up some.
“Package for Ms. Brooks,” I said.
“Just leave it in the foyer,” she said. “I’ll get it in a while.”
“Mr. Giacomin said deliver it personal, ma’am. He said don’t leave it in the hall or nothing. He said give it right to you.”
“Okay,” she said, “bring it up.”
I said, “Yes, ma’am.” The door buzzed and I went in. I was wearing off-white straight-legged Levi’s cords, and moccasins and a blue wool shirt and a beige poplin jacket with a sheepskin lining and collar. A little slick for a cabbie maybe—if she noticed how much the shirt cost, but she probably wouldn’t.
I took the elevator to the third floor and counted numbers to 15. I knocked. There was silence while I assume she peeped out through the little spyglass. Then the door opened on a safety chain and a narrow segment of face and one eye looked out at me. I’d figured on that. That’s why I’d bought the bucket. In the box it was much too big to fit through a safety chain opening. I held the box up and looked at the small opening.
She said, “Okay, just a minute,” and closed the door. I heard the chain slide off and then the door opened. The Bloomingdale’s wrapper does it every time. Maybe I should rely on that more and on my smile less.
The door opened. She was as described only better looking. And she was busty. So is Dolly Parton. She’d done her hair and face, but hadn’t dressed yet. She wore a long brown robe with white piping and a narrow white belt tied in front. Her feet were bare. Her toenails were painted. It didn’t help much. Never saw a toenail I liked.
“Here you go, ma’am,” I said.
She took the package. “Any message?”
“Not to me, ma’am. Maybe inside. All Mr. Giacomin told me was see that I put it right in your hands.”
“Well, thank you,” she said.
“Okay.” I didn’t move.
She looked at me. “Oh,” she said. “Wait a minute.” She closed the door and was gone maybe a minute and then the door opened and she gave me half a buck. I looked at it sort of glumly.
“Thanks,” I said.
She closed the door without comment and I went on back down to the car. I pulled out of the turnaround in front of the apartment and parked up the road a little so I could see in the rearview mirror. And I waited.
I’d accomplished a couple of things maybe. One, for certain, I knew what she looked like so if she left I could follow; otherwise, I had to wait for old Mel to show up. The second thing, maybe, was she’d call to thank him for the gift and he’d say he never sent it and that would stir them up and one would go to the other. Or it would make them especially careful and I wouldn’t be able to find him through her. The odds were with me though. And if his wife was right, he was too randy to stay away from her forever.
Over the years I’d found that stirring things up was better than not. When things got into motion I accomplished more. Or I seemed to.