THERE ARE FEW things deader than a twenty-five-story federal building after hours. Traffic and more rain had hung me up, but now the rain had stopped and Government Plaza had a nickel sheen that caught the rays of a brightening sky. The main entrance to the lobby was locked, so I wandered around outside for a few minutes checking doors before I noticed a cleaning van drawn up to the building. Two men were bulldogging a floor-stripping machine out of the back of the van. A uniformed GSA cop stood by, holding open a glass door. I told him I was expected by Mr. Potter.
“Your name?”
I told him.
“He done axed me you been in. You just missed him.” The cop pointed in the direction of the ramp to the underground garage. “Might still catch him if you hustle.”
My footsteps echoed as I descended the ramp. Gasoline spills made colorful splotches on the wet concrete, like small pieces of a rainbow that had fallen and been run over and was trying to reconstruct itself. When I entered the garage I paused. The place was mostly deserted, lit with yellow halogen lamps. By the far wall I spotted a man unlocking a gray Aries two-door. He had his arms full with a briefcase, folders and a raincoat, and when he had nudged open the door with his knee, he chunked everything onto the front seat. I started moving his way. He heard me and jerked around, the light from the lamps spilling off his spectacle lenses.
“Mr. Potter?”
He was middle-aged, his bushy eyebrows bunched with apprehension. People got mugged in parking garages, and worse. “Yes?”
“I’m Rasmussen.”
He relaxed then, and waited for me. “I wasn’t sure you’d make it,” he said.
He had a plain face with hair like Harris tweed and watery brown eyes behind the Clark Kent glasses. We shook hands and he reached into the car and got a large brown envelope with a government frank in one corner. “Here’s what you’re after, along with the photograph.”
I slipped the picture out and looked at it. “I marked who’s who on the back,” Potter said. “The quality isn’t the greatest.”
It wasn’t, the picture having been photocopied and sent over the wire to INS’s fax machine. Still, the faces were discernible. Mostly they looked tired and uncertain, but grateful too. Suoheang Khoy stood on the end at the left, a handsome man, unexpectedly tall. Unlike the others, he wore American clothes, the sleeves of his U Cal sweatshirt pushed to the elbows on thin arms. I didn’t see any tattoos. I slid the sheet back into the envelope.
“I appreciate what you’ve done,” I told Potter.
“Perhaps it’s mutual. You won’t explain anything more?”
“Later, maybe, if I can.”
He fiddled with his car keys. “I apologize if I sounded uninterested on the phone earlier. I’m not. What you’ve already told me, Mr. Rasmussen, is serious business. The fact is I admire the pluck of people who come here to start a new life. If that’s what they truly want, it’s good for the country. I despair some days of America’s making it. I don’t know, there’s idiocy loose in the land, too much of it right up at the top. But…” he frowned, “this is still the best darn show in the world. If there’s any other way I can help, I hope you’ll ask.”
I thanked him and he gave me a phone number that he promised would get me past the tape loops to him.
It was six-fifteen when I headed for the artery, but as I waited for a traffic light near the base of the on-ramp, I had second thoughts. For as far as I could see, in both directions, the lanes were plugged with traffic. At various points I could make out the twitchy flicker of a blue-and-white struggling through the mass. Deciding against injecting myself into that, I climbed down into the tunnel under Boston Harbor and headed for Logan Airport. The traffic was not much thinner and the air was life-threatening, but the run was shorter.
I stashed the car in central parking, a vast structure out of Dante and Hieronymus Bosch, with sprawling decks of concrete held up by squat pillars, like color-coded circles in Hell. I got yellow H and hoofed across an overpass to the terminal. I found the wing where the auto rental agencies had their booths. The city directory listed as many rental places as roach exterminators, half the names starting with A and climbing all over each other to be first in the listings. I figured the firms with branches at the airport were my best bet. With a one-man gumshoe operation you’re playing percentages. Exhaustive is not in your dictionary; exhausted is.
To a one, the agencies seemed to be manned (I don’t know how else to say it) by young women with Breck hairdos and the graciousness of Stepford wives. Invoking my tenuous link with the Lowell PD, I gave them Khoy’s name and, in a couple of instances, showed the picture, asking about rentals going back three weeks. It almost never works, but I wanted at least to cross the question off the list. The idea was that if Khoy was the killer and had been working his way east, he might have flown in. The report of a small white car on Prather Street the night before Tran died was the only wedge I had.
Fortunately computers have made this kind of question easy to answer, and the answer I kept getting started to sound like an echo. “No, sir, I’m sorry, nothing for that spelling or anything close. Would it be under another name, sir?”
I didn’t know. Changing names made sense only if someone was looking for you and you did not want to be found. For all I knew, Khoy had come here by train, bus, automobile, or thumb. Or he had not come at all. Maybe he was dead. I could almost empathize. After you fished a long spell without a nibble, you reeled in and changed bait. I got a cup of coffee and sat in the main concourse, watching people drag suitcases by like stubborn pets. A Rastafarian, with a custodian’s cap perched atop his dreadlocks like a small tent beset by snakes, emptied ashtrays, the kind where you pressed a button and the butts dropped into a stainless steel canister below, which he dumped into his wheeled barrel, all done to a private reggae beat. Our eyes met and he gave me a stoned smile, which I toasted with my cup. He had his sacrament, I had mine. When the caffeine kicked in, I deposited the cup in his barrel, visited the washroom in preparation for the trek home, and blazed my way back to yellow H.
The logjam on the city side had vanished as neatly as if someone had poked a big button and the ground had opened to let the traffic fall through. I wheeled north on 93 with nary a stomp on the brake. The clouds had broken, and the last of daylight was slanting through inspirationally. I tuned in the Sox, letting my mind fray out. Clemens had taken a break from shaking down kids who were asking for his autograph and was earning a piece of his ridiculous salary. He had six strikeouts after three and a half innings. It must be nice to be that good at something, I thought. Like a Gretzky or Navratilova or Michael Jordan. Or a John Potter. The way the Tran investigation was moving, I was not going to win any sleuthing prizes. Which needled me back to mulling. I shut the game off. The western horizon was ablaze with the sunset, and I moved with the other traffic toward it, like moths drawn to some final conflagration.
At the office I had a message to call someone about a problem a condominium association was having with its property manager. I put it on the blotter for the morning. I fished the business card for the Haskell and MacKay Gallery out of my wallet. Another woman answered but put Syd Keyes on without asking who was calling. Just as well; Ms. Keyes apparently still had me figured for the Castle killing. It took me awhile, but she was a smart enough cookie to agree that I would not be free and phoning if the police felt the same way. I reminded her that she had mentioned she kept evening hours by appointment. “Can I make one for tonight?”
She was silent a moment, then I told her what I needed. I thought I heard a snide little purr in her voice when she asked if I could be there in forty minutes.
I locked up and hiked across Kearney Square to the Sun. Bob Whitaker was off, so I wrote a note for him and sealed it in the brown government envelope with the faxed photograph and printed Bob’s name on the outside. The receptionist promised it would be on the photo department desk waiting for him when he got in for his shift at seven the next morning.
* * *
Haskell and MacKay had a CLOSED sign in the window. No need for Sorry We Missed You, Please Call Again; if you did, you did. I knocked and after a minute Syd Keyes peered through the glass, then unlocked the door. I was wrinkled from rain and driving, and running a few hours behind my next shave, but I could not gauge how far wanting I was in the woman’s cool appraisal. Evidently the notion that I was a killer was gone, at least. Maybe she had checked my Dun and Bradstreet. What I did know was that late hours did not mar her finish at all. The burnished-oak hair swooped smoothly, softening the patrician planes of her face. Her crimson lips gleamed. She relocked the door, and I trailed her across the big oriental rug.
“Would you care for some sherry?” she asked.
I said I didn’t mind and she poured. Amontillado. It went with the objets d’art: the table with its tooled-leather-inlay top and the Tiffany lamp and the French telephone. An antique chessboard had been added, carved ebony and ivory pieces arranged on the sides near which we settled facing one another.
“So, what did you want to know about the Stewart fortune?” she asked, her breath misting the rim of the crystal glass poised before her lips.
“Whatever you can tell me.”
Some of it I knew already from Ada, the rest was news. The family seemed to have inherited its seed money from King Solomon, but Charles Blaine Stewart had turned it to Big Money with his clipper ships. His descendants had expanded into investments and real estate. With the generation of Ada’s father, however, the old Scottish drive had lost momentum, and with Ada and her brother it had hit an abutment.
“The brother, Chad, took up anthropology,” Syd Keyes said with dramatic distaste. “The last thing I knew, he was in Africa someplace, or South America. Living among primitives.”
“Like Ada,” I said.
She gave me an arch look. “You have to admit, to turn one’s back on that kind of destiny is both irresponsible and rash.”
“At least.”
“And to compound irresponsibility the way Ada did…”
She paused, checking me closely to see how much I knew. I took a shot. “With her marriage.”
“Her father disapproved, of course. Ada’s parents had been the example of where that kind of marriage usually goes. They’d divorced when Ada and Chad were barely in their teens. So when Ada married—which must have seemed to flout him—he reacted.”
I thought about Ada’s overdue bills and her checkbook balance. “Cut off her inheritance?”
“What other leverage did he have? The family had long since lost physical control of her. Ada had grown up to be totally independent.” Syd made it sound like a felony. “Of course, the inheritance could be restored someday, I suppose. That could be dangled like a carrot. God knows there’s more money than her parents could have squandered. But any reinstatement would have to be at Ada’s initiation, and when I remember that little girl who refused to come down out of the beech tree … well, I’m doubtful.”
She angled her glass, gazing at the amber liquid as if it contained all the important answers to life—which is to say the ones pertaining to money. I tasted mine, but it was only old Spanish wine.
“When you said her parents’ marriage was ‘that kind,’ you meant the fact that her mother was Chinese?”
“And the daughter of a servant. But at least they married for love. In Ada’s case I’ve heard it was neither love nor money. No one knows for sure, because it happened out West a number of years ago, and Ada never kept any ties to Andover—but the rumor was they married to avoid trouble.”
“She was pregnant?”
“No. The trouble was his. I had no idea what kind before you called tonight, so I made a call of my own. I’ve got a reliable source who makes a hobby of keeping track of the old families. Ada knew the man from Berkeley. The trouble he was in was for drugs.”
“He was arrested?”
“For cocaine. He was going to be deported. Ada married him to give him citizenship.”
I don’t know if my jaw fell open or not. “Do you know his name? Or what nationality he was?”
“Those particular details weren’t available.”
I sat there, letting it all sink in. In her cool voice, Sydney Keyes said, “Rasmussen, I’ve been making all the moves so far. You haven’t told me what your interest in this is.”
“I’m hoping to keep some people out of trouble.”
“That’s rather ambiguous. Even noble perhaps. Would it do any good to ask you to go on?”
“I can’t. Sorry.”
She sipped amontillado, her long fingers with their blood-red nails curled around the glass’s thin stem, and I had a helpless feeling for Ada, an ugly feeling about myself for having done it this way. Sydney Keyes’s eyes were on mine. I slid a chess piece forward, set my glass on the vacant square and stood up. “I think you’ve answered my questions. Thanks.”
“You weren’t … looking for anything else?” she asked in a voice that made the words tickle my underbelly.
“Nothing I can think of.”
She lowered her eyes and smiled with faint disappointment, like a teacher brought to frustration by a dim pupil. She locked the door behind me.