"He will not find you," Luis said.
"He will, Luis, and when he does you will be in a shitload of trouble."
Luis seemed almost serene.
"He will not find you," he said.
Chapter 7
Proctor was inland, well north of Boston, near the New Hampshire border, at a bend in the Merrimack River, where a series of falls and rapids had supplied power to the nineteenth-century textile industry, which had created the city. Before the war the city had belonged to the Yankees who ran the mills, and the French-Canadian and Irish immigrants who worked them. The Yankees had never lived there. Most of the mill management lived in company-built suburbs outside of Proctor. Now the name of the city was the only hint of its Yankee beginnings. The mills had followed the labor market to the sunbelt after the war. The Yankees had shifted gears and, without having to leave their suburbs, had clustered south in homage to the new transistor culture, an easy commute along route 128. City Hall belonged now to the Irish, the Canucks had scattered, and the rest of the city was a porridge of South and Central American immigrants.
I drove into Proctor over a bridge from south of the city, where the dirty water of the Merrimack snarled over the rapids below and churned up a yellowish foam. The mills were still there. Red brick, chain link, imposing, permanent, and largely empty. There were discount clothing outlets in some, and cut-rate furniture stores in others.
Everywhere there was graffiti-ornate, curvilinear, colorful, and defiant, on brick, on city buses, on the plywood with which windows had been boarded, on mail boxes, on billboards, swirling over the many abandoned cars, most of them stripped, some of them burned out, that decayed at the curbside. There were only Latino faces on the streets. Some old men, mostly adolescent boys, clustered on street corners and in doorways, hostile and aimless. The signs on the store fronts were in Spanish. The billboards were Spanish. The only English I saw was a sign that said: "Elect Tim Harrington, Mayor of All the People." I wondered how hard Tim was working for the Hispanic vote.
East along the river the factories thinned out, and there were tenements, three-deckers with peeling paint and no yards. The tenements gave way to big square ugly frame houses, many with asbestos shingles and aluminum siding. WPOM was about a half mile out along the river, in a squat brick building with a chain-link fence around it, next to a muffler shop. There was a ten-story transmission antenna sticking up behind it, and a big sign out front that said it was the voice of the Merrimack Valley. The gate was open and I drove in and parked in the muddy lot to the right of the station. A receptionist buzzed me in. There was a security guard with a gun in the lobby. The station's programming was playing implacably on speakers in the reception area. It was a rock station, and the music was a noise I didn't know.
The receptionist was a young woman with sadistically teased blonde hair and lime-green sneakers. The rest of her outfit seemed to be a large black bag, which she was wearing like a dress. She had a gold nose ring, and six very small gold rings in her right ear. When I came to her desk she was working on her horoscope and chewing some gum. Both. I smiled at her, about half wattage. Full wattage usually made them rip off their clothes and I didn't want this one to do that. She put down the horoscope magazine and looked up at me and chewed her gum. Both, again. Maybe I'd underestimated her.
"My name is Spenser," I said. "I'd like to talk with the station manager."
"Concerning what?" she said. Her voice sounded like a fan belt slipping.
"I'm a detective," I said. "I'm looking for someone."
"Excuse me?"
"I'm a detective, a sleuth, an investigator."
I took out my wallet and showed her my license. She stared at it blankly. It could have said "Maiden Spoiler" on it for all the difference it made to her.
"Do you have an appointment?"
"Not yet," I said. "What is the manager's name?"
"Mister Antonelli."
"Could you tell Mister Antonelli I'm here, please."
She stared at me and chewed her gum. That was two things. I knew that calling Mister Antonelli on the intercom would be one thing too many. So I waited. I was hoping she'd get through staring in a while. Nothing happened. I pointed at the intercom and smiled encouragingly.
"What was your visit concerning?"
"Lisa St. Claire," I said.
"Lisa isn't in," she said.
"And I want to know why," I said.
"You'd have to ask Mr. Antonelli about that," she said. "I just work here."
"Okay," I said. "Give him a buzz."
She nodded and picked up the phone.
"A gentleman to see you, Mister Antonelli… No, I don't know… he didn't say. He's mad because Lisa isn't here… Yes Sir."
She hung up.
"Mister Antonelli will be out in a moment, sir."
"Thank you for your help."
The receptionist smiled like it was nothing and went back to her horoscope. I watched her while I waited for Antonelli. After a moment she stopped chewing her gum. Probably needed to concentrate.
A short, overweight guy came down the hall toward me, wearing a black-checked vest over a white shirt, which he'd buttoned to the neck. He had on black jeans and gray snakeskin cowboy boots, and he flashed a diamond ring on the little finger of his left hand that would have been worth more than the station if it were real. He was bobbing slightly to the rock music as he came toward me.
"You the one here about Lisa St. Claire?" he said.
"Yeah, Spenser, I'm a private detective."
"John Antonelli, I'm the station manager. What's the buzz on Lisa?"
"Can we go somewhere?"
"Oh yeah, sure, come on down to the office."
I followed him into the office-beige rug, ivory walls, walnut furniture, award plaques on the wall. I'd never been in a broadcaster's office that didn't have award plaques. If you were running a pro-slavery hot line, someone would probably give you an award plaque.
Antonelli sat in his swivel chair, and put one foot on an open desk drawer and tilted his chair back. Through the big window behind him I could see the full panorama of the transmission repair shop. The station on-air was grating through the speaker system into the office, though at less volume than in the lobby.
"So where's Lisa?" he said. "The other jocks have been splitting shifts to cover her. We're not a big station. We got a big audience, but we don't have a lot of stand-by people, you know?"
Antonelli smiled at me without meaning it. "Lean and mean," he said.
"Is there a way to shut the noise off?" I said.
"You don't dig that sound? That's Rat Free, man. Group of the Year."
"Gee, they finally beat out the Mills Brothers?"
Antonelli smiled again. It was like the light in a refrigerator. On. Off.
"Kids love Rat Free," he said. "They been platinum three years in a row."
"How nice for them," I said. "Could we lose them for a few minutes while we talk?"
Antonelli shrugged. He leaned forward and turned a dial on his desk and the music faded away.
"So what's the chatter?" he said.
"Lisa left home three days ago and her whereabouts Are unknown."
"She ditch the old man?"
"I don't know. Did she talk about that?"
"Lisa? No. Lisa was a very private person, you know. She never said much of anything about her personal life."
"Not even to you," I said. "So why do you think she might have ditched the old man?"
"That's what you usually think, isn't it, broad like Lisa? Real spunky, good looking, you seen her?"
"Yes."
"Girl like that, man. Most female jocks are kinda happy, you know what I mean, that's why they're in radio. But Lisa, with those looks, man she's television Stuff. I'll tell you right now, you heard it here, baby, She'll be on TV inside a year."