“It’s not his fault,” Ticknor said. “We get all sorts of deliveries from the printers—galleys, pages, blues—as well as manuscripts from agents, authors, and readers, artwork, and half a dozen other kinds of material at the desk every day. Walt isn’t expected to pay attention to who brings it.”
I nodded. “Doesn’t matter. Probably someone hired a cabby to bring it in anyway, and descriptions don’t help much, even if they’re good ones.”
Belson nodded. “I already got somebody checking the cab companies for people who had things delivered here. But they could just as easy have delivered it themselves.”
“Should the press be in on this?” Ticknor said.
“I don’t think it does much harm,” I said. “And I don’t think you could keep them out of here if Cronin has any say. This sounds like an organization that wants publicity. They said nothing about keeping it from the press, just as they said nothing about keeping the police out.”
“I agree,” Belson said. “Most kidnapings have something about ‘don’t go to the police,’ but these political or social or whatever-the-hell-they-are kidnapings usually are after publicity. And anyway Cronin has already told the press so the question is—what? What word am I after?”
Ticknor said, “Academic. Hypothetical. Aimless. Too late. Merely conjectural.”
“Okay, any of those,” Belson said.
“So what do we do?” Ticknor said.
“Nothing much,” Belson said. “We sit. We wait. Some of us ask around on the street. We check with the FBI to see if they have anything on RAM. We have the paper analyzed and the ink, and learn nothing from either. In a while somebody will get in touch and tell us what they want.”
“That’s all?” Ticknor was offended. He looked at me.
“I don’t like it either,” I said. “But that’s about all. Mostly we have to wait for contact. The more contact the better. The more in touch they are, the more we have to work on, the better chance we have to find them. And her.”
“But how can we be sure they’ll make contact?”
Belson answered. “You can’t. But you figure they will. They said they would. They did this for a reason. They want something. One of the things you can count on is that everybody wants something.” The cigar had burned down far enough now so that Belson had to tilt his head slightly to keep the smoke from getting in his eyes.
“But in the meantime—what about Rachel? My God, think how she must feel. Suppose they abuse her? We can’t just sit here and wait.”
Belson looked at me. I said, “We haven’t got anything else to do. There’s no profit in thinking about alternatives when you don’t have any. She’s a tough woman. She’ll do as well as anyone.”
“But alone,” Ticknor said, “with these maniacs … ”
“Think about something else,” Belson said. “Have you any idea who this group might be?”
Ticknor shook his head briskly, as if he had a fly in his ear. “No,” he said. “No. No idea at all. What do they call themselves? RAM?”
Belson nodded. “Anyone in the publishing community that you know of that has any hostility toward Ms. Wallace?”
“No, well, I mean, not like this. Rachel is abrasive and difficult, and she advocates things not everyone likes, but nothing that would cause a kidnaping.”
“Let us decide that. You just give me a list of everybody you can think of that didn’t like her, that argued with her, that disagreed with her.”
“My God, man, that would include half the reviewers in the country.”
“Take your time,” Belson said. He had a notebook out and leaned back in his chair.
“But, my God, Sergeant, I can’t just start listing names indiscriminately. I mean, I’ll be involving these people in the investigation of a capital crime.”
“Aren’t you the one was worried about how poor Rachel must be feeling?” Belson said.
I knew the conversation. I’d heard variations on it too many times. I said, “I’m going to go out and look for Rachel. Let me know when you hear from them.”
“I’m not authorized to employ you on this, Spenser,” Ticknor said.
Belson said, “Me either.” His thin face had the look of internal laughter.
“All part of the service,” I said.
I went out of Ticknor’s office, past two detectives questioning a secretary, into the elevator down to the street, and out to start looking.
16
The Boston Globe is in a building on Morrissey Boulevard which looks like the offspring of a warehouse and a suburban junior high school. It used to be on Washington Street in the middle of the city and looked like a newspaper building should. But that was back when the Post was still with us, and the Daily Record. Only yesterday. When the world was young.
It was the day after they took Rachel and snowing again. I was talking to Wayne Cosgrove in the city room about right-wing politics, on which he’d done a series three years earlier.
“I never heard of RAM,” he said. Cosgrove was thirty-five, with a blond beard. He had on wide-wale corduroy pants and a gray woolen shirt and a brown tweed jacket. His feet were up on the desk. On them he wore leather boots with rubber bottoms and yellow laces. A blue down parka with a hood hung on the back of his chair.
“God you look slick, Wayne,” I said. “You must have been a Nieman Fellow some time.”
“A year at Harvard,” he said, “picks up your taste like a bastard.” He’d grown up in Newport News, Virginia, and still had the sound of it when he talked.
“I can see that,” I said. “Why don’t you look in your files and see if you have anything on RAM?”
“Files,” Cosgrove said, “I don’t need to show no stinking files, gringo.” He told me once that he’d seen The Treasure of the Sierra Madre four times at a revival house in Cambridge.
“You don’t have any files?”
He shrugged. “Some, but the good stuff is up here, in the old coconut. And there ain’t nothing on RAM. Doesn’t matter. Groups start up and fold all the time, like sub sandwich shops. Or they change the name, or a group splinters off from another one. If I had done that series day before yesterday, I might not have heard of RAM, and they might be this week’s biggie. When I did the series, most of the dippos were focused on busing. All the mackerel-snappers were afraid of the niggers’ fucking their daughters, and the only thing they could think of to prevent that was to keep the niggers away from their daughters. Don’t seem to speak too highly of their daughters’ self-control, but anyway if you wanted to get a group started, then you went over to Southie and yelled nigger nigger.”
He pronounced it niggah.
“Isn’t that a technique that was developed regionally?”
“Ahhh, yes,” Cosgrove said. “Folks down home used to campaign for office on that issue, whilst you folks up north was just a tsk-tsking at us and sending in the feds. Fearful racism there was, in the South, in those days.”
“Didn’t I hear you were involved in freedom riding, voter registration, and Communist subversion in Mississippi some years back?”
“I had a northern granddaddy,” Cosgrove said. “Musta come through on a gene.”
“So where are all the people in this town who used to stand around chanting never and throwing rocks at children?”
Cosgrove said, “Most of them are saying, ‘Well, hardly ever.’ But I know what you’re after. Yeah, I’d say some of them, having found out that a lot of the niggers don’t want to fuck their daughters, are now sweating that the faggots will bugger their sons and are getting up a group to throw rocks at fairies.”