Chapter 40
“Why don’t you just ask Sam to give back the record?” Louis asked, not unreasonably. “If she’s holding out, we could always threaten her on your behalf.”
“I’m happy to see her displaying an interest in Laura Nyro,” I said. “It shows good taste. Of course, Sam doesn’t actually own a record player.”
“Say what?”
“She doesn’t own a record player,” I repeated.
“Then why does she need the record?”
“She likes to look at the cover and read the insert while she streams the music. It’s what the kids do these days. I admit it’s odd, but it could be worse.”
Louis took this in. His expression suggested that were the information a morsel of food, he’d have spat it out and shot the chef.
“The world,” he pronounced solemnly, “is doomed.”
“It was always doomed.”
“Okay, more doomed.”
I still hadn’t asked him what he was doing in New York, and he still hadn’t told me. If it was to do with his health, Angel would have shared it with me, which left two possibilities: it was illegal, or it concerned me, and potentially both.
We walked on. By now we were outside one of Angel’s favorite stores, Pinecone+Chickadee on Free Street.
If a man couldn’t find something he didn’t need there, he couldn’t find it anywhere.
We were about to head in and buy stuff none of us needed when a woman came out with a full bag, her hair and forehead concealed by a large wool hat.
Louis, barely registering her, stepped aside to let her pass, but she stopped to stare. It was Angel who recognized her first.
“Well, well,” he said, “if it isn’t the human fortune cookie. If you tell me I’m going to meet a tall dark stranger, you’re decades too late, and don’t think I’m not resentful about the belated warning.”
Sabine Drew smiled. It was an expression of genuine pleasure, but I didn’t manage to return it.
At one time, Sabine was the most famous medium in the Northeast, thanks to her involvement in the recovery of the remains of a missing girl named Verona Walters.
Unfortunately for Sabine, she hadn’t been so successful after, and became known as one of the most famous fake mediums in the Northeast, assuming one was prepared to accept that not all of them were fakes to begin with.
I’d been a skeptic until our paths crossed on a later investigation involving another missing child, after which I judged that whatever else Sabine might be, she wasn’t a charlatan.
But I wouldn’t have called what she had a gift, and I doubted she would either. It brought her too much torment.
But none of that was the reason for my caution.
I had cause to believe she might have killed a man with poison, a woman’s weapon for a woman’s revenge.
This was the first time we’d met since his death, and only Angel and Louis knew of my suspicions.
It wasn’t for me to bring the law to her door, and anyway, as someone who stepped outside the law on occasion, it would have made me a hypocrite.
However, few things dispose a man to be wary around a woman more than an aptitude for toxins.
I couldn’t say the same for Angel and Louis: Sabine’s willingness to administer her own form of justice only seemed to make them admire her more, even if they did their best to hide it.
“They’re still with us, I see,” she said.
“They may always be with us,” I replied, “like the poor. I’ve tried to get rid of them, but they keep finding their way back.”
“You’re not trying hard enough. With the stubborn ones, it can take time, but the effort is worth it in the end.”
She peered at Angel and Louis, who regarded her with amusement, but not mockery.
“You know,” she said, “it’s like they understand every word you say. They’re almost human.”
Sabine was easy to dismiss, with her mismatched thrift-store clothes, the stray hair poking from beneath her hat, and a face she did her best to render unremarkable by making no effort at all to conceal it. At least one man was never going to make the mistake of underestimating her again.
Angel and Louis left us for the joys of the store, though not before Louis requested Sabine’s assistance with locating a missing cuff link.
“Bribe Saint Anthony,” she told him. “He takes all the small jobs.”
She placed her bag at her feet. I asked what she was doing in Portland.
“Before I heeded the siren call of this place, I was out at Easy Aquariums in Westbrook.” Sabine kept exotic fish. It was from these that she might have sourced her toxin. “You didn’t stay in touch.”
“I never said I would.”
“I hoped you might.”
“I thought it better to keep my distance.”
A number of people had died in the course of the investigation that first brought us together—not all of them as bloodlessly as the poisoning victim, though certainly less agonizingly—and it made me the object of unwanted police attention.
All things considered, Angel, Louis, and I were fortunate not to end up facing serious charges.
Whether I was correct about Sabine or not, it was wiser not to give the law any excuse for taking a closer look at her.
As it happened, Sabine was not in the mood for circumspection.
“The police asked me about him, you know, the man who died so unpleasantly.”
“What did you tell them?”
“I said I’d only ever met him at a funeral, and we didn’t speak, but I supposed he wasn’t a very nice person if someone had gone to the trouble of poisoning him.”
“He probably wasn’t, but it caused difficulties for his wife,” I said. “In these instances, the police start at the home and work outward.”
“But she was innocent, wasn’t she? In which case she had nothing to worry about.”
“They’d already tried to jail her once for a crime she didn’t commit, so I admire your continued faith in the criminal justice system.”
“I have no faith at all in the system. I have faith in you.”
Which was flattering, even allowing for the source.
“Are you engaged in anything interesting right now?”
“A case in The Plains,” I said.
I could almost hear the Rolodex in her brain flipping through cards.
“The missing Norton girl?”
“The dead Theriault boy.”
“Yes, that was odd,” said Sabine. “He must have hated the school a great deal if the wilds were preferable. Of course, there has to be more to it than that.”
“Does there?”
“You wouldn’t be involved otherwise, would you?”
As she picked up her bag and prepared to be on her way, I asked whether anything had changed in her life.
“I’m studying to become a psychotherapist,” she said.
“I was always good at listening, but I have to work on my patience. Meeting your two friends just now was good practice. I think I handled them with forbearance. ‘The human fortune cookie’: I shall have to remember that. The drowned boy and the Norton girl, are they linked?”
“Only by conjecture.”
“That’s how it starts. You know, I’ve never been to The Plains.”
“Are you offering to help?”
“Are you asking?”
“No.”
“Not to worry,” she said. “I won’t take it amiss.”
Bag in hand, she walked away.
Inside the store, Angel was examining a Fruit Loops-scented candle. Louis had found a brass Chinese ashtray, though he didn’t smoke.
“What did she say?” Angel asked as I joined them.
“That she wasn’t annoyed I didn’t seek her help with the Theriault business.”
“That’s a relief,” said Angel, “given what happens to people who upset her. Do you think she’s nuts?”
“No.”
“Me neither. I can’t decide if that makes her more frightening or less.”
“She’s training to be a psychotherapist.”
“For the living or the dead?”
“I forgot to ask, but I imagine the living pay better.”
I took in the candle and the ashtray.
“You don’t need a Fruit Loops-scented candle,” I told Angel. “And you don’t need a Chinese ashtray,” I told Louis.
“Great,” said Angel. “We’ll pay for them, then we’re good to go.”
We ate an early dinner at Boda on Congress.
Angel opted for a beer, I had a glass of wine, and Louis ordered a margarita made to his own specifications, which turned out to be a combination of fruit, mezcal, and habanero tincture; heavy on the tincture, at his insistence, but not, he emphasized, too heavy.
“You need to taste it,” he said, “not feel it.”
“Feel it how?” I asked.
“So you get the burn on your lips, not lower down. You don’t want to end up with, y’know, an ass like the Japanese flag.”
“Thank you,” I said. “That’s an image to cherish.”
The drinks arrived, along with wings on the house as a reward for Louis’s regular custom. Once Louis’s lips and tongue had returned to normal after the first sip of his drink, I told them of my plan to base myself closer to The Plains for a few days while I looked into the death of Scott Theriault.
“You think you’re going to be given the red-carpet treatment at that school?” Louis asked.
“They may be smart enough to realize hostility won’t help them. But from what I’ve seen in the newspapers and online, they’ve tried to be open to questions.”
“Any sign of Spero being sued by the boy’s parents?” asked Angel.
Trust Angel to spot a detail I’d missed.
Ward Vose hadn’t raised the prospect of litigation, and neither had Alcock, but if it was their intention to sue, I’d like to be told.
Investigating how and why Scott Theriault died was not the same as establishing culpability that might assist in a civil action.
I had no objection to working on either inquiry, but I didn’t want to have to go over the same ground twice.
If I was clear on what Alcock wanted from the start, I could ensure my questions were framed correctly, and whatever I gleaned from witnesses or interview subjects would cover everything.
Of course, any decision on a lawsuit might not be Vose’s alone to make.
Even if he didn’t want to sue Spero, Scott’s mother and stepfather might.
While I’d be talking to them soon, they weren’t my clients, and would have their own lawyer.
Regardless, it was another complicating factor to bear in mind.
Over food we spoke of somethings and nothings, as old friends will.
Angel told us of a man from Rochester, New York, named Miguel Himes who once dreamed of setting up an agency supplying minority individuals to serve as guests at the parties and dinners of WASP liberals, enabling the hosts to appear more inclusive and so impress friends and associates with their progressiveness.
“Himes had them all on his books,” Angel said.
“Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Jews—Orthodox and Reform. He knew a lot of unemployed people who could hold a conversation. He figured he just had to give them a fake history based on interviews with the hosts, and make sure they didn’t drink too much, because that’s when it all starts to go wrong at dinner parties. ”
“What about white guests for Black dinner parties?” I asked.
“Yeah,” said Louis, “like anyone has ever said, ‘You know what this party needs? More white people.’”
I told him he wasn’t going to be invited to any more of my parties. He reminded me that I didn’t hold parties, and even if I did, I’d struggle to find a suitable venue now that all the phone booths were gone.
“So what happened to Miguel Himes and his great idea?” I asked Angel.
“He went to jail in Florida,” said Angel. “Can’t remember why. I think it was for fraud. In Florida, it usually is.”
And so a pleasant evening passed, and still Louis did not say what he had been doing down in New York.