Robert Parker - Rough Weather

“In the city?”

“Yes,” Washburn said, “downtown. One of my teaching assistants was having a show. Sadly, it was not very good.”

Washburn appeared to be about sixty, with wavy snow-white hair worn longish. His complexion was red, and his thick white mustache was carefully trimmed.

“When were you married?”

“Nineteen eighty,” Washburn said.

“How long did it last?”

Washburn looked out the window at the open quadrangle in the center of the campus with the redbrick Georgian library at one end and the redbrick Georgian student union at the other.

“Two years,” he said.

“What occasioned the breakup,” I said.

He kept looking out the window.

“She asked me for a divorce,” he said. “She told me she’d been having an affair with a man named Van Meer.”

“Must have been hard to hear,” I said.

“Yes.”

I took a picture of Heidi from my pocket and put it on his desk.

“Is this Hilda Gretsky?” I said.

He looked at the photograph.

“Yes,” he said.

“Are you aware of who she’s become?” I said.

“Yes.”

“Do you know when she began to call herself Heidi?” I said.

“When I knew her she called herself Heidi. The name on her birth certificate and her marriage license was Hilda, but she always hated the name, and always introduced herself as Heidi.”

“How old is she?” I said.

“She was born in 1959,” Washburn said.

“She from New York?” I said.

He shook his head.

“ Dayton, Ohio,” he said.

“Why did she come to New York?” I said.

He stopped looking out the window and turned to me and smiled without much pleasure.

“To make her fortune,” he said.

“Doing what?” I said.

“Marrying well,” he said.

“Starting with you?”

“I suppose,” Washburn said. “One achieves, in some circles, a certain, ah, tone, I guess. Also, in addition to my academic earnings, there is a considerable trust fund. My father was aggressive in banking.”

“Prestige and money,” I said. “Good start.”

“Yes.”

“Love?” I said.

“She was not unkind,” Washburn said.

I had a drink at the bar in Lock-Ober with the Special Agent in Charge at the Boston FBI office. He was a smallish guy with glasses, and he didn’t look like much of a crime fighter. Which often worked for him. His name was Epstein.

“You on the kidnapping deal on the south coast?” I said.

“Heidi Bradshaw’s daughter,” Epstein said. “Yeah, we’re on it, too.”

“Know anything Healy doesn’t?”

“Nope, we’re sharing.”

“That’s so sweet,” I said.

“We try,” Epstein said, and sipped some bourbon. “People aren’t liking federal agencies much these days.”

“Is it because we’re being governed by a collection of nincompoops?” I said.

Epstein grinned at me.

“Yeah,” he said. “Pretty much.”

“It’ll pass,” I said. “We got through Nixon.”

“I know,” Epstein said. “You got anything for me?”

“Heidi Bradshaw’s birth name was probably Hilda Gretsky,” I said. “She might have been born in 1959 in Dayton, Ohio.”

“Busy, busy,” Epstein said.

“I got nothing else to do,” I said.

Epstein nodded.

“You been out there?” he said.

“ Dayton? Not yet. I was hoping maybe you could enlist one of your colleagues out there to run it down.”

“Where’d you get your information?” Epstein said.

“Heidi’s first husband, a professor at Lydia Hall College in New York.”

“Name?”

“J. Taylor Washburn.”

Epstein nodded. He didn’t write anything down, but I knew everything was filed.

“Yeah,” he said. “We’ll run that down for you.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“It’s our case, too,” Epstein said. “She go to Lydia Hall?”

“No,” I said. “But I suspect she has claimed to.”

“Some reinvention going on?” Epstein said.

“It’s the American way,” I said.

“Sure,” Epstein said. “You told Healy this?”

“Yeah, but we both figured your resources in the Dayton area were better than his.”

“Or yours,” Epstein said.

“Much better than mine,” I said.

“You were there,” Epstein said, “at the wedding when the whole thing went down.”

“Yep.”

“Why?”

“Her story is that she was at the moment between husbands and needed an adequate substitute for the wedding,” I said.

“So if, say, the wine wasn’t chilled, she could ask you to fix it?”

“I guess.”

“You believe her?”

“No.”

“There are women like that,” Epstein said. “I’m Jewish, I know a lot of them.”

“Isn’t that anti-Semitic?” I said.

“Only female Semites,” Epstein said.

“You’ve not had good fortune with the women of your kind?” I said.

“Or any other,” he said.

“So it’s more misogyny,” I said.

“You’re right,” he said. “I was imprecise. Anybody paying you on this case?”

“I’m looking into it on my own,” I said.

“Because they kidnapped somebody on your watch,” Epstein said. “So to speak.”

“Something like that. I wasn’t very useful.”

“You were looking out for Susan,” Epstein said. “That’s useful.”

“How do you know?” I said.

“Because she was there. Because I am a skilled investigator. And because I know what you’re like.”

“Didn’t do the kidnap victim much good,” I said.

“What I hear, no one could. If you had it to do over again, would you do it different?”

“No,” I said.

Epstein grinned.

“That’s right,” he said. “You wouldn’t.”

Peter Van Meer lived in a very big condominium on top of the Four Seasons, with a view of the Public Garden and eternity. I had a long time to study eternity because Van Meer kept me waiting for at least twenty minutes in the room where the maid left me. It was a big room with heavy furniture and leather-bound books. Many of the books had Latin titles and looked as if they had been printed in the nineteenth century. Van Meer probably called the room his study. Everything was expensive and perfectly matched and color-coordinated, and arranged, and appropriate, and as warm as a display room in Bloomingdale’s.

I turned from the window when he came in.

He said, “Sorry to keep you waiting, my man.”

He put out his hand as he walked toward me.

“Pete Van Meer,” he said.

He was a large man with a big, square face, gray hair, and a swell tan. He wore a black shirt with several buttons undone, and a black watch plaid sport coat over pearl-gray slacks. We shook hands and I sat down in a dark brown leather armchair on the far side of a low mahogany coffee table with fat curved legs. Van Meer stood beside his desk.

“Drink?” Van Meer said.

“No, thanks,” I said.

Van Meer grinned.

“Don’t mind if I do,” he said.

He went to a sideboard, which concealed a refrigerator, and made himself a tall Courvoisier and soda. He brought it back with him and sat on the edge of his desk. He made a faint toasting gesture toward me and took a pull.

“First of the day,” he said.

“Always the best,” I said. “You were married to Heidi Washburn.”

He smiled down at me happily.

“Man,” he said. “What a ride that was.”

“Tell me about it,” I said.

He took another pull.

“She could fuck the hinges off a firehouse door,” Van Meer said.

“Good to know,” I said.

“Oh, momma,” he said, and drank some more cognac.