Tyler Smithson’s apartment was on the lake front near the point where W. Goethe Street joins the Drive. The march of high Gold Coast apartment buildings along the water was splendid to look at in the late summer sunshine, standing at the near north edge of Chicago. In other times Susan and I had come here and walked through Lincoln Park and hung around the zoo, holding hands and looking at the lions. We’d have dinner at Le Perroquet and go back to the Park Hyatt and make love in an elegant room with dark green walls.
The doorman called up to Tyler Smithson from the lobby phone.
“Gentleman named Spenser,” he said into the phone. “Says it is in reference to Russell Costigan.”
He nodded his head at me and hung up the phone. He was wearing a black uniform with red trim, his round pale face was freshly shaved, and he smelled of cologne.
“Penthouse,” he said. “Elevator is straight back.”
The elevator was lined with beige leather. It went up silently and I stepped out into a small foyer. The walls were papered with something that looked like red velvet and might have been. There was a skylight above and a thick gray carpet below and straight ahead a raised panel door painted ivory and gilded around the perimeter of each panel. I rang the bell and smiled winningly at the peephole in the door. Just a friendly guy, come to visit, cut up a few touches about old Russell, easygoing, charming, welcome everywhere. The door opened. I widened my smile. It deepened the dimples in my cheeks and drove women wild.
“Hello,” I said.
“Mr. Spenser?”
“Yes.” Tyler Smithson Costigan was tall and slender with pale skin and blond hair cut in a Dutch-boy. She was wearing a pink shirt with a round collar, open at the neck, and a green plaid skirt with a pin in it.
“What is it about Russell Costigan?” she said.
“May I come in?”
“Yes, certainly. Sit down. Would you care for coffee, tea? Something to drink?”
“Coffee would be good,” I said. “Black.”
A middle-aged black woman appeared in the archway that apparently led to the kitchen.
“Two coffees, please, Eunice,” Tyler Costigan said.
The black woman smiled and turned away and disappeared. I sat in a pink armchair. It was part of a collection of pink furniture that sat elegantly around on a gray rug like the one in the foyer. The walls were white on three sides of the room, and the fourth side was floor-to-ceiling glass that let you look across Lake Michigan. The view was startling and the light in the room was flood level. Tyler sat across from me on a pink couch and crossed her ankles. Her shoes were pink fabric, with flat heels and no arch. The pink matched her shirt, which matched her furniture. She smiled faintly at me.
“What is it about Russell Costigan, Mr. Spenser?”
“I can’t think of a slick way to say this, Mrs. Costigan. Russell is somewhere with a woman I love. I wish to find them. I’m not convinced that she’s with him by choice.”
Tyler Costigan’s smile disappeared.
“Susan? Whore.”
I nodded my head slightly. “Can you help me find them?”
“My husband and his newest whore,” Tyler Costigan said. It was hard keeping my dimples in place.
“You are separated from your husband, Mrs. Costigan?”
“Yes. His priorities seem muddled.”
“What are his priorities,” I said. Eunice came in with the coffee in a silver pot on a silver tray with silver cream pitcher and sugar bowl and silver spoons and two china cups with gilding on the rim and two china saucers with gilding around the edge. She put the tray on the white coffee table in front of Tyler Costigan, smiled at neither of us, and went out again. Tyler Costigan leaned forward and poured the coffee and handed it across the table to me. I took it and holding the saucer in my left hand took a sip from the cup. It was very good coffee and it had a slight vanilla edge to it. Tyler Costigan sat back without pouring any coffee for herself. She tucked her legs up under her on the couch, smoothing her skirt down over them.
“Russell Costigan’s priorities are cocaine, whores, and whiskey, I believe in that order.”
“By whores you mean women in his life, not necessarily always, ah, professional prostitutes.”
“Decent women do not break up marriages,” Tyler Costigan said. “Decent women do not fuck married men. Men with children and family. Men with homes. I call them whores.”
The inelegant four-letter word was startling when she used it. I’d heard it almost hourly since I was a little boy, but from her it sounded dirty.
“Well, we have a common goal here, I think,” I said. “We’d like to terminate this affair.”
“How?”
“As I say, I think Susan is not with Russell entirely by choice. If I can find them, I’ll help her to leave.”
“They are always there by choice, Spenser. They love him. He’s funny, and loose, and richer than you can imagine. He takes them places they’ve never been, he has them doing things they once blushed to think about. And after a while, he gets tired of them. Tired of fucking them, tired of feeding them dope and booze and teaching them things, and he kicks them loose and comes home.”
“And you welcome him?”
“He makes himself welcome. The Costigans are very rich. Do you remember what somebody said about rich people? That they are different?”
“Fitzgerald,” I said.
She shrugged. “The Costigans own everything they want. They have power. They’ll know you were here, for instance. I’m always watched.”
“That thought occurred to me,” I said.
“If you persist, they will kill you,” Tyler Costigan said.
“Russell is that potent?”
“His father is,” she said. “Russell’s potency is more narrowly specific.”
“Is that why you welcome him back each time,” I said.
She shook her head.
“You love him?”
“Yes,” she said, “but I could learn not to. It’s …” She stopped talking and turned her head away toward the bright window wall where the light poured in. I was quiet. Way out on the lake a boat moved by itself. There was nothing else in sight on the surface of the lake, which stretched away to the horizon.
Tyler Costigan turned her face back toward me. “They let me keep the children,” she said.
I nodded. Tyler Costigan leaned forward without untucking her legs and poured more coffee into my cup. I drank some.
“If you help me,” I said, “I’ll try not to hurt him.”
She made a small laugh. “I would be better off if you killed him,” she said. “But there’s not much danger of that. The Costigans don’t get killed, or hurt. Though I’m afraid you very well might.”
“Where do you think he and Susan might be?” I said.
“Where have you looked?” she said.
“The Costigan house in Mill River. The lodge in Washington.”
Tyler Costigan widened her eyes. “Do the Costigans know?”
“Yes,” I said. “Jerry was in the house when we went in. We talked.”
“You forced your way in?”
I nodded.
“You must have,” she said, as I nodded. “Well, you are an interesting man.”
“My friend helped me,” I said.
“Your friend? My God. I’d have said the Marine Corps couldn’t force their way into The Keep.”
I drank some coffee.
“And the lodge?”
“We burned it down,” I said. “Susan wasn’t there.”
Tyler Costigan opened her mouth and closed it and opened it again and didn’t speak. The boat was almost to the left edge of the picture window, moving away at an angle.
Finally she said, “You must be as good as you look.”
“Better,” I said.
“Russell must love it,” she said. “He loves to see his father lose.”
I waited. The boat went out of sight.
“And, he must be having a wonderful time playing hide-and-seek with you.”
“There’s no allie-in-free,” I said.
“He doesn’t care. If it gets too bad his daddy will bail him out.”
“How bad is bad?”
“If he starts to lose,” she said. “Then he’ll call his fat little momma and she’ll speak to Jerry, and Jerry will send some people out to fix it. And”—she looked at me hard—“they will.”
“They always can,” she said.
“We’ll see,” I said. “Where do you think they might be now?”
“You really believe you can win this, don’t you?”
“Yes. I’m highly motivated.”
“You want her back.”
“Yes.”
“And you think if you can get her away from Russell, she’ll come back?”
“I’ll get her away from Russell because she doesn’t want to be with him. Once that’s done we’ll see about us.”
“But you’d have her back.”
“Yes.”
“Because you love her?”
“Yes.”
Tyler Costigan laughed. There was no pleasure in the sound and no humor. “I understand that perfectly,” she said. She turned again to stare out into the bright afternoon. “I got Russell,” she said without turning from the window. “She got you.”
“The ways of the Lord are often dark,” I said. “But never pleasant.”