"Masterful questioning," I said, "brings it out. You have any thoughts at all about where Patty Giacomin might be?"
"No. Really," Nancy said, "I can't imagine."
"You find the boyfriend," PJ said, "you'll probably find her. Patty doesn't do much without a man. Usually not that good a man."
"Thank you," I said. "The kid's worried. If you hear anything, please call me."
"Certainly," Nancy said.
PJ grinned so that her eyes crinkled a little.
"You had lunch?" she said.
"Can't," I said. "I got a dog in the car."
"An actual dog or is that an unkind euphemism?"
"An actual dog, named Pearl. Can euphemisms be unkind?"
"I don't know. There's always dinner? Or are you married?"
"Well, I have a friend."
"Don't they all," PJ said. "Too bad. We'd have had fun."
"Yeah," I said. "We would have in fact."
I went out of Chez Vous, and went back to the car.
CHAPTER 7
WHEN I got to my car, Pearl was curled tightly in the driver's seat. She sprang up when I opened the door and insinuated herself between the bucket front seats into the back. When I got in she lapped the side of my face vigorously.
"I thought you were Susan's dog," I said.
She made no response.
Back in my office she guzzled down some water from a bowl placed for that purpose by Paul.
"Did you know that they drink by curling their tongue backwards?" I said.
"Under?"
"How exciting," Paul said. "Thank you for sharing that with me."
"How'd you do on the phone?"
"Not very well," he said. "No one knew where she was. Some of the calls were from real estate customers who don't know anything about her. One woman said she was my mother's best friend. I figure she's worth a visit."
"She know anything?"
"She was late for aerobics, she said. But I could call later."
"Better to visit," I said. "Where is she?"
"Lives in Concord. She gave me the address."
"Okay. I'll run out and have a talk with her," I said.
"I'll go with you."
"No need to."
"Yes," Paul said. "There is a need to."
"Okay."
"You took care of everything when I was fifteen," he said. "I'm not fifteen now. I need to do part of this."
"Sure," I said. Paul's presence would make it harder. People would be less frank about Patty in front of her son. But he wasn't fifteen anymore and it was his mother. Pearl had gotten herself up onto the narrow client's chair and was curled precariously, mouthing the yellow tennis ball she'd tracked down on a walk in Cambridge. Her eyes followed every movement I made. I got her leash and snapped it on and took her to the car and drove her and Paul to Concord.
Most of the way up Route 2 she had her head on my left shoulder, her nose out the open window, sampling the wind.
"It is not entirely clear," I said to Paul, "why I am bringing this hound with me everywhere I go."
"Cathexis," Paul said.
"I knew you'd know."
"What did they say about my mother?" he said.
"The people at Chez Vous?"
"Oui. "
"They had no real idea where she might be."
"I know, you told me that. But what did they say?"
"They said she worked, usually, three or four days a week, on commission.
That she had brought Rich to a Christmas party last year and that he was very good looking."
"That all?"
"They didn't exactly say, but made it quite clear that they thought that your mother's choices of men were often ill-advised."
"Many men?"
"They suggested that she needed to be with a man, and that if we found Rich we'd find her."
"Did they talk about her need to be with men?"
"Not a lot. They seemed to record it as a fact of your mother's nature that she wasn't likely to go very far, very often, without the company of a man."
"That could get you in trouble," Paul said.
I nodded. We left Route 2, onto 2A, which was the old Revolutionary War road, where the embattled farmers sniped at the redcoats from behind the fieldstone walls. We passed historic houses-the Wayside, the Alcott
House-all the way into Concord center.
Not all of the historical places in Massachusetts look the way you'd like them to. But Concord does. It has overarching trees, spacious colonial homes, a green, a clean little downtown made mostly of red brick, a rambling white clapboard inn that looks as if stagecoaches should still be stopping there. There are the historic sights, the academy, the river where one can rent a canoe and spend a day of transcendental paddling, as Susan and I had occasionally done, pausing to picnic one day almost beneath the rude bridge that arched the flood.
The address we wanted was a recycled jelly factory in downtown Concord.
They'd sandblasted the brick and cleaned up the clock tower and gutted the interior and built blond-wood-with-white-walls condominium apartments inside. Out back was a big parking lot. A hopeful sales office was still open on the first floor of the building.
The woman's name was Caitlin Moore. She answered the bell in a pink spandex leotard, white sneakers, and a pink sweatband. She was built like the cheerleaders of my youth, chunky, bouncy, not very tall. Her extremely blonde hair was caught into a ponytail. She had on green eye shadow and false eyelashes and whitish lip gloss, which made her look a little spectral.
"Hi," she said, friendly. "I'm Caitlin. You must be Paul, who I talked with on the phone."
Paul said he was, and introduced me.
"You're a detective?"
"Yes."
"Could I see something?"
"Sure." I gave her my license, she looked at it for a moment, then went to a bleached oak table and got a pair of half-glasses and put them on and came back looking further at my license. "Well," she said. "A hard man is good to find."
She smiled. I smiled. Paul smiled.
"Come on in," Caitlin said. "Want some coffee? All I got is instant, but I can microwave it in no time."
Paul and I declined. Caitlin led us into her sitting room, her prominent little butt waggling ahead of us as we followed her. With its bleached woodwork and stark white walls and ceiling, and anodized combination windows, the room was standard condo modern. It appeared to have been furnished by Betsy Ross. There was an old maple standup desk, an antique pine harvest table, a pine thumbback rocker, a coffee table made from a cobbler's bench. It went with the room the way Liberace goes with Faust.
"I love early American," she said as we sat down. Paul and me on the sofa.
Caitlin on the thumbback rocker, where she crossed both legs under her.
"When I got divorced I made the bastard give me all the furniture."
"Great," I said.
"You're my mother's best friend?" Paul said.
"Oh, absolutely," Caitlin said. "Patty and I are like twins. She's always talking about you."
"What does she say?"
"She talks about how successful you are. You're in the movies, I think?"
"I'm a dancer in New York," Paul said. "I was on screen for a minute and twenty-six seconds in a film about American Dance that played on PBS."
"Yuh, I knew it was something like that. Anyway, we been really close ever since we were in aerobics together at Sweats Plus. Something about us, you know, we just hit it off. Both been divorced and all. I don't have any kids, but, well, we knew something about pain, and recovery."
"Know her current boyfriend?" I said.
"I introduced them."
"Tell us a little about him," Paul said.
"He's a real doll. Friend of my brother's. I knew Patty was looking to go out, and I knew Rich was single. So I…" Caitlin spread her hands and shrugged. "They really connected, you know, right from the start. It was something. You worried about her? Maybe she and Rich just went off, they were crazy like that, I don't mean anything bad about your mom, Paul, she was just ready for fun anytime. I bet they just went off somewhere for a while on the spur.
"They have a place they usually go?" I said.