Authors: Jeremiah Healy
I crossed over Storrow Drive on the pedestrian ramp and did a fairly leisurely two miles upriver and two miles back. As I recrossed the ramp toward Charles Street and the apartment, I watched the commuters inch by below me.
It had been only five months since I’d missed that kid on the bike, but I wasn’t really struggling. In terms of conditioning (or reconditioning), I’d been running three days a week, three to six miles each time. I’d been doing push-ups, sit-ups, and a little weight lifting. To regain some capacity for danger, I began relearning jukado (a combination of judo, karate, and a number of other disciplines), which I’d picked up in the army. I even persuaded a police-chief friend of mine from Bonham (pronounced “
Bon
-uhm,” if you please), a town south and west of Boston, to let me use his department’s firing range.
In terms of business, the advent of no-fault divorce in Massachusetts had cut back considerably on that aspect of private investigating, which was fine by me. A friend in the trade had told me that the secret to survival was keeping the overhead down. He suggested I use a tape device on my telephone instead of an answering service, and he was proving to be right. I also operated out of my apartment, so I had no office expense.
A retired Boston cop who’d known my family was the director of security for a suburban department store. He threw a few “inside-job” surveillances my way, and on one we actually nailed the dipping employee. I had been quietly blackballed in Boston insurance circles, which kept my unemployment compensation coming. However, one maverick investigator brought me in as a consultant on the problem of virgin computers walking out the back door of a warehouse. I sewed it up nicely in enough days to pay my next three months’ rent. In other words, although I wasn’t exactly pressed for free time, I was getting by.
I stopped at the grocery store on the corner and bought a quart of orange juice, some doughnuts, a
Boston Globe,
and a
New York Times.
I politely stayed downwind (actually, down-air-conditioner) from the cashier. After I climbed the three flights to my apartment, I duplicated the pre-run exercises. I showered, shaved, and downed the doughnuts. Dressing in my only gray slacks and blue blazer, I even wore a regimental tie. Peter Prep School primps toward luncheon.
I sat in the Public Garden for two hours, reading my papers thoroughly in a way I’d never seemed able to while I was working. Funny, but with my time mine own and only food, shelter, and car insurance to worry about, I couldn’t really look on my present occupation as “working.” By the time I finished the
Times,
it was 12:45, and I’d been panhandled three times. I walked down Arlington Street and toward the restaurant.
L’Espalier was then on the second floor of a building between Arlington and Berkeley streets on Boylston. It has since moved to Gloucester Street between Newbury and Commonwealth. It’s also ceased serving lunch, to allow concentration on the magnificent dinner menu. The couple who owns and manages the restaurant had lived above Beth and me in the condominium building. After Beth died, I’d wasted some beautiful late afternoons over a carafe of house Bordeaux while Donna and Moncef patiently looked on.
Donna greeted me at the entranceway and gave me a table for two in the corner. I’d just ordered a piña colada (without the kick) when Valerie Jacobs walked in. I recognized her, but I realized I would have been hard put to describe her beforehand.
Valerie stood about five-seven without the heels. She had long, curly-to-the-point-of-kinky auburn hair, a broad, open face, and a toothy smile. That may sound unkind; I don’t mean it to be. In her late twenties, a sundress hinted at small but nicely shaped breasts. The dress also hid most of her legs, which were slightly heavier than I would have recalled but appeared, thankfully, to be shaved. She was burdened with at least four store bags.
From the door, Valerie gave me a wave that was a little too much “I’m-meeting-someone-in-a-nice-Boston-restaurant” and therefore not entirely for my benefit. She smiled at and said something to Donna, then strode over toward my table. I noticed that Donna was giving me a sardonic grin. I also noticed, as Valerie cleared the table before mine, that the bags she carried were from Lord & Taylor and Saks Fifth Avenue, labels out. I stood up.
“John, you’ve lost weight!”
“And teaching must be fairly profitable,” I replied, nodding at her packages.
“Oh,” she said with her smile, “this is my annual showboat excursion into the Big City. Usually I just barter my wares for dry goods at the general store.”
Valerie giggled, and so did I. Despite first appearances, I remembered her as a pretty regular kid, and I decided she hadn’t changed.
Valerie declined a cocktail. We ordered a bottle of white wine and chicken entrée for two, to be followed by a salad course. Valerie said what she had to about Beth, and I did the same. The waiter brought and poured our wine. We talked about classrooms, the declining birth rate, and teacher lay-offs.
“So, how goes the private-eye business?” Valerie asked.
I exaggerated a little. I was relieved that she didn’t ask for details.
“I’m sorry,” I said finally, “but I don’t recall exactly where it is that you’re teaching.”
A flicker of disappointment at the corners of her eyes? “Um, Meade. The Lincoln Drive Middle School. And that brings me to what I wanted to see you about. Do you know where Meade is?”
I did. “Right next to Bonham, isn’t it?”
Valerie nodded as the waiter arrived with our chicken.
I said, “If it’s particularly gory, why don’t we wait until after the meal?” I said.
“Oh, it’s not,” she replied quickly, and glanced down at the waiter’s tray. “But let’s not be rude to the chicken.” I laughed and motioned to the waiter to begin serving.
The entree was delightful, punctuated by few words. Valerie finished a bit before I did and fixed me with deep-brown eyes. “I can’t really start at the beginning because I didn’t know the family then,” she said. “But this past year in class—I teach the eighth grade—I had a boy named Stephen Kinnington in my homeroom and English classes.”
“Familiar name,” I interjected, finishing the last of my chicken.
“I’m not surprised. His father, Judge Willard J. Kinnington, was one of the youngest men ever to go on the bench, and his family has sort of, well,
ruled
Meade since long before I arrived. Anyway, Stephen’s mother, Diane Kinnington, killed herself about four years ago by driving her Mercedes off a bridge and into the river. Apparently she boozed it up a lot, so no one knows whether it was accidental or suicidal. It hit Stephen pretty hard, as you can imagine. I’ve talked with his fifth-grade teacher, Miss Pitts, who’s retired now, and she said that his mother’s ‘activities,’ as Miss Pitts put it, had been affecting Stephen for a long time prior to Mrs. Kinnington’s actual death. I got the impression from Miss Pitts that by ‘activities’ something more than simple alcoholism was involved, if you know what I mean.”
“I’ve read of such goings on in France,” I said.
Valerie made a face and plowed on. “Anyway, by the time I got Stephen this year, he seemed to be perfectly normal, though a little reserved around the other kids. By all tests, he was exceptionally bright. I mean a real brain-trust. At the beginning of the year, he would ask me whether I’d read certain books. He obviously had read them, and they were way beyond eighth-grade level. He’d missed a year of school because of sickness—hospitalized, even—but he’s still only fourteen. I sort of took it on myself to suggest to his father that perhaps Stephen should go to a private school with an accelerated program. But whenever I called his office at the courthouse, he wasn’t available, and he never returned my calls.”
The word that stood out for me was “hospitalized,” but instead I said, “Don’t you have some sort of parent-teacher conference during the year?”
“Yes, but the judge didn’t appear for the first one I scheduled, and when I called his home that evening, he wasn’t in. I was pretty upset, since those conferences are scheduled on my time, so I kind of demanded to speak with someone—the housekeeper answered the phone, you see—and that’s how I came to meet Mrs. Kinnington.”
“The judge remarried?” I asked.
“Oh, no, his mother—that is, the judge’s mother and Stephen’s grandmother, Eleanor Kinnington. Everyone calls her Mrs. Kinnington. She’s a little tower of power, and she was ripping mad that her son had skipped the appointment. She asked if it was convenient for me to come there for dinner the next evening to discuss Stephen. I said I’d be happy to come, but the judge wasn’t there the next night, either, and Mrs. Kinnington apologized for him through clenched teeth.
“I had a terrific dinner and talk with her, though. She must be nearly eighty and needs hand braces—the kind polio victims use?—to walk around. But she’s really sharp. Anyway, Mrs. Kinnington said the judge would never allow his son to go to a private school. I got the impression that it was for local political reasons, as if it would seem that the town’s public schools weren’t good enough for a Kinnington. She encouraged me to help Stephen as much as I could. I also got the feeling that she thought the wife’s—or mother’s—death was really a blessing in disguise.
“Anyway, after that I began giving Stephen some separate reading assignments that he really enjoyed. I also got to be good friends, in a formal sort of way, with Mrs. Kinnington, because we’d discuss Stephen from time to time.”
Valerie paused for a moment to take a sip of wine. I found her way of running parenthetical thoughts and sentences together to be a mite tough to follow, but oddly not tiresome.
“Um, I have to stop drinking this wine or I’ll never stay straight enough to finish the story. Anyway, about two weeks ago, Stephen disappeared.”
“Kidnapped?”
“Apparently not. It seems that he packed his things one afternoon and, well, left.”
“You mean he ran away from home?”
“Well, yes, but not exactly. I mean, no neighbor saw him shuffling along the sidewalk with a stick and stuffed handkerchief over his shoulder. And Stephen packed really thoroughly, as if he expected to go a long way for a long time.
“Has he been heard from?”
Valerie shook her head as she took another gulp of wine. “No, and the police haven’t found a trace in two weeks.”
“What police?”
“The local Meade department. Technically, I guess Stephen’s just ‘a missing person,’ since there’s no evidence of kidnapping. But there’s also been no publicity, so nobody is on the lookout for him except some agency the judge hired. You see—”
“Wait a minute. What agency?”
“Oh, somebody and Perkins on State Street.”
“Sturney and Perkins, Inc. They’re one of the best, Val.”
She smiled. “But they haven’t found anything. And I bet they’re not nearly as good as you.”
I set down my wine glass and gave her my best counselor’s look. “Sturney and Perkins have a substantial staff. In a specific-crime case, sometimes one operative is better than an entire posse. That’s because he or she can get inside the investigation without causing ripples until the operative wants to make something happen. But a missing-person case requires a computer-type approach, assembling all the information you can from all sources and trying to blanket the areas he might be in with investigators, both police and private.”
“But then why haven’t there been any newspaper articles with pictures of him to help?” Valerie asked, her eyes glittering.
“Maybe the police and Sturney,
et alia,
feel that publicity would just invite a lot of crank calls or start the wrong people looking for him.”
“You mean like criminals the judge put in jail?”
“One example,” I said.
“But right now Stephen’s out there with them anyway. I mean, he’s in their element, where he’s more likely to be hurt by someone who doesn’t even know who he is.”
Valerie was becoming upset, so I decided to shift gears a little. “By the way, if Stephen’s disappearance has been kept so much under wraps, how do you know about his packing and so forth?”
She blinked a few times and played with her nearly empty wine glass. “Well, that’s how I came to call you.
“Stephen didn’t come to school for two days—you see, he took off just after final exams. Anyway, I called his house—I’d given up trying to reach his father—and Mrs. Kinnington told me all about it. We’ve talked almost every day since, and she was so upset last night, because nothing has happened, and we all know I don’t have the money to pay you, so …”
“… so you sort of volunteered to be Mrs. Kinnington’s cat’s-paw and bring me into the case for her.”
Valerie looked at me with a smile somewhere between bleakness and mischief. “At least you think it’s a case, huh?”
I put on a fake frown, and she laughed. “Oh, please, John, Stephen’s such a good, bright boy. And despite the family money, he’s had a really tough time of it in life. Plus, I’m so afraid for him out there.”
“Okay, okay,” I said, and motioned to the waiter. “Let’s have our salad, and then you can telephone Mrs. Kinnington to set up an appointment.”
Valerie Jacobs smiled, shook her hair and poured herself another glass of wine.
“Today’s the judge’s afternoon for tennis, so he won’t be home until at least seven. Mrs. Kinnington’s expecting you at four-fifteen.”
V
ALERIE WANTED TO CHAUFFEUR
me out to the Kinnington place, but I insisted that she merely lead me there and let me see the grandmother alone. Valerie reluctantly walked with me to the rent-a-car place in Copley Square (my ancient Renault Caravelle being in the shop awaiting a used A-frame from North Carolina). I signed for a Mercury Monarch, and we bailed her car out of a parking garage.
Valerie took the Mass Turnpike to Route 128, the elongated beltway around Boston. We were beating the high-tech rush hour by thirty minutes. After about six miles she turned at the exit after the one I used for Bonham and continued into Meade.
As we wound down the stylish country road, I began to get a better sense of the town. Meade was about as rural as its neighbor, but a good deal ritzier. In Bonham, there were big old farmhouses flanked by peeling, musty-looking sheds with rusting agricultural machinery slumped in their yards. In Meade, there were big, skylighted farmhouses flanked by newly painted, too-red barns with burnished BMW’s and Jags in their yards.