The Professional Part 33

He found a chocolate-cream donut under a cinnamon one, and took it out from under and dusted off the accidental cinnamon and took a careful bite. The donut had a squishy filling, and Belson was very neat.

"She know anybody would kill somebody?" Belson said.

"Her husband did," I said. "She probably met some. She knew Boo and Zel."

"I'll keep it in mind," Belson said.

"Doesn't explain why she's living with Gary and Estelle," I said.

"Nope," Belson said.

I located the cinnamon donut that Belson had put aside in favor of chocolate cream. We ate silently for a moment.

"We don't have any idea what we're doing," I said.

"No," Belson said. "We don't seem to."

Chapter52.

I OPENED THE BPD FOLDER on Beth. She had been born Elizabeth Boudreau in a shabby little town on the Merrimack River, east of Proctor. She was thirty-six. In the month she graduated from Tarbridge High School, she married a guy name Boley LaBonte, and divorced him a year later.

n.o.body was paying me to do anything. On the other hand, no one was paying me to do nothing, either. Business was slow. I was nosy. And I had kind of a bad feeling about this long-running mess I'd wandered into and hadn't done a h.e.l.l of a lot to improve. So I got my car from the alley where I had a deal with the meter maids, and headed north from Boston on a very nice February day with the temperature above freezing and stuff melting gently.

You enter Tarbridge on a two-lane highway from the south. The town is basically three unpainted cinder-block buildings and a red light. A few clapboard houses, some with paint, dwindle away from the cinder block. Up a hill past the red light, maybe a half-mile away, stood a regal-looking redbrick high school. The fact that Tarbridge had a munic.i.p.al ident.i.ty was stretching it a bit. That it had a high school was jaw-dropping. It had to be a regional school. But why they had located a regional high school in Tarbridge could only have to do with available land, or, of course, graft.

The town clerk was a fat woman with a red face and a tight perm. She had her offices in a trailer attached to one of the cinder-block buildings. The plastic nameplate on her desk said she was Mrs. Estevia Root.

I handed her my card, and she studied it through some pink-rimmed gla.s.ses with rhinestones on them, which hung around her neck on what appeared to be a cut-down shoelace.

"What do ya wanna see Mrs. Boudreau for?" the clerk said.

"I'm investigating a case," I said. "In Boston."

"Boston?"

"Uh-huh."

"What the h.e.l.l are you doing up here?"

"Just background stuff," I said. "Where would I find Mrs. Boudreau."

"Probably in her kitchen, where she usually is."

"And where is the kitchen located?"

"Back of the house," Estevia said.

I nodded happily.

"And the house?" I said.

"Pa.s.sed it on the way in, if you come from Boston," Estevia said. "'Bout a hundred yards back, be on your right heading out. Kinda run-down, looks empty, but she'll be in there."

I felt a chill. If Estevia thought it looked run-down . . .

"Did you happen to know her daughter?" I said. "Beth?"

"She run off long time ago, and no loss," Estevia said.

"No loss?"

"Best she was gone, 'fore she dragged half the kids in town down with her."

"Bad girl?" I said.

Estevia's mouth became a thin, hard line. Her round face seemed to plane into angles.

"Yes," she said.

"Bad how?" I said.

"Just bad," Estevia said.

It was all I was going to get from Estevia.

"Thank you for your time," I said.

Chapter53.

IT WAS A very small house. It not only looked empty, it looked like it should be empty. There wasn't enough paint left on the front to indicate what color it might once have been. The roof-line was bowed. The windows were closed and dirty. Something that might once have been curtains hung in tattered disarray in the windows.

I parked and went to the front door. There was no path shoveled. The uncut weeds of summer, now long dead, stuck up through the diminis.h.i.+ng snow. There was no doork.n.o.b, and the hole where there had been one was plugged with a rag. I knocked. No one answered. I pushed on the door. It didn't move. I'm not sure it was locked; it was more likely just warped shut.

I went around to the side of the house and found what might be a kitchen door. There was a screen door and an inner door. The screening had torn loose and was curled up along one side. The inner door had a gla.s.s window that was so grimy, I couldn't see through it. I knocked.

From inside somebody croaked, "Go 'way."

It didn't sound welcoming, but I figured the somebody didn't really mean it, so I opened the inside door and stepped in. She looked like a huge sack of soiled laundry, slouched inertly at the kitchen table, drinking Pastene port wine from a small jelly gla.s.s with cartoon pictures on it. The table was covered with linoleum whose color and design were long since lost. There were pots and dishes in the soapstone sink, piles of newspapers and magazines in various corners. A small television with rabbit ears was playing jaggedly. The scripted conviviality and canned laughter was eerie in the desperate room. A black iron stove stood against the far wall, and the room reeked of kerosene and heat.

"Mrs. Boudreau?" I said.

"Go 'way," she croaked again.

She was very fat, wearing some sort of robe or housedress. It was hard to tell, and in truth, I didn't look very closely.

"My name is Spenser," I said, and handed her a card. She didn't take it, so I put it on the table.

"You're Elizabeth Boudreau's mother," I said.

Her gla.s.s was empty. She picked up the bottle of port with both hands and carefully poured it into the jelly gla.s.s. She put the bottle down carefully, and picked up the gla.s.s carefully with both hands and sipped the port. Then she looked at me as if I hadn't spoken.

"Could you tell me a little about Elizabeth?" I said.

"Elizabeth."

"Your daughter."

"Gone," the woman said.

"Elizabeth's gone?"

Mrs. Boudreau nodded.

"Long time," she said.

"What can you tell me about her?" I said.

"b.i.t.c.h," her mother said.

I nodded. If Beth was thirty-six, this woman was probably sixty, maybe younger. She looked older than Angkor Wat.

"Why b.i.t.c.h?" I said.

"Wh.o.r.e."

This wasn't going terribly well.

"How about Mr. Boudreau?" I said.

She drank port and stared at me.

"He around?" I said.

"No."

"Dead?"

"Don't know."

"Can you tell me anything about him?" I said.

"b.a.s.t.a.r.d," she said.

"Could you tell me where to find him?"

"No."

I had hung around in this reeking trash bin as long as I could stand it. There was nothing I could find out that would be worth staying any longer.

"Thank you," I said, and turned and went out.

I took in some big breaths as I walked to my car. The air felt clean.

Chapter54.

BOLEY LABONTE OWNED a bowling alley and lounge called Kingpin Lanes, which sat in the middle of a big parking lot on South Tarbridge Road. There were two pickups and an old Buick sedan parked outside. Inside, four guys were bowling together. In the lounge three other guys were sitting at the bar, drinking beer and watching a woman with few clothes on dancing at a bra.s.s pole to music I neither recognized nor liked. It was two o'clock in the afternoon.

I sat at the bar and ordered a beer. The bartender was a red-haired woman with an angular face and skin you could strike a match on.

"Boley around?" I said.

"Who wants to know?" the bartender said.

I gave her my card, the understated one, where my name was not spelled out in bullet holes. She looked at it.

"A freaking private eye?" she said.

"Exactly," I said.

"Why you want to talk with Boley?"

"None of your business," I said.

"Yeah, I guess not," she said, and took the card and walked down to the end of the bar and ducked under, which was not easy given how tight her jeans were. She opened a door marked Office and went in; a moment later she came out and ducked back behind the bar.