I overslept the next morning; was up late playing chess with Jack, who told me Tony suspected he'd caught the clap. I told Mary and Jack shot me a look as if we had betrayed his brother. Mary took it in passively. After confronting kidney failure, cardiac arrest, and terminal cancer every working day, gonorrhea was a minor affliction. Her face remained impassive, and beautiful. Dark olive skin, wide-set eyes, arched cheekbones, and mountains of black hair, still no gray at forty-three. Her nose and profile look as if they've been taken off a Roman statue. She cleared her throat.
"Have him call us and describe his symptoms to me or Dad, and then he should have a culture taken at the nearest clinic. Tell your brother he should be more choosy about whom he sleeps with-God knows he's handsome enough to be picky. And tell him to wear a condom too, that way we won't have to worry about pregnancy as well. Clear?"
There was a husky grunt in response from Jack, who said he had no idea she knew so much about it.
"About 'it'? Look, buster, I'm a nurse; I've been married twenty-five years with two sons. Don't tell me about 'it.' "
I suggested we call Tony and extend our sympathy and understanding. We did, and he seemed relieved.
"Thanks, Mom and Dad, And don't worry; it'll never happen again."
"Of course not," said Mary, "and if they give you medication, don't skip any pills; take them all."
Mary decided she'd go over to say good-bye to Sarah Hart, who was leaving for Pasadena. Just after she left I dialed the police station and spoke with Lieutenant Disbrow briefly. He said they were treating Allan Hart's death as accidental. Did I have anything to add or suggest? I said not at the present, but that I was looking for the trawler Penelope, and if Disbrow or any of the department saw her, could they let me know?
"Mr. Adams, we cannot do this unless you file a complaint or give us sufficient justification-"
"I understand. OK, forget it."
I called Bill Larson at the shack and told him to keep an eye out. If Penelope reappeared, he was to call me at The Breakers or up in Concord, pronto. This he agreed to. I showed Jack the photographs and told him to do the same if she surfaced in Woods Hole. Then I tried Murdock's boatyard again. The woman answered, her voice slurred and heavy. When I mentioned the word Penelope the line went dead. There was no other avenue to follow. Obviously the only way I was going to make contact with Murdock was to skulk about and sneak up behind him and grab him. I just might do that.
Meanwhile I had another idea. It was perhaps foolish, but it was something, and the weather looked lousy again. I might as well drive up to Boston.
"Did you tell me you needed a new sportcoat?" I asked Jack.
"Uh huh."
"Come up to Boston with me. We'll leave a note for Mom. I'll take you to Louis's; they've got Harris tweed coats on sale."
"You wanna go now?"
"Yes. The sale ends soon. Besides that, I want to go to Post Office Square. I want to peek inside a post office box. Let's get moving."
We spun out of the gravel drive as it started to drizzle. I uncorked the vacuum bottle and poured coffee for both of us. When we got into the city we parked in the underground below the Boston Common. At Louis's Jack bought a steelgray jacket flecked with blue and black. Having been thus bribed he was sent on two errands for me while I walked over to the post office. One errand was to buy some pipe tobacco at Ehrlich's. The other was to visit the Kirstein Business Library just around the comer and find out all he could about Walter Kincaid's Wheel-Lock Corporation;
Nothing in downtown Boston is far away; you can walk across all of it in twenty minutes. In less than ten I was inside the post office, my eyes scanning the ranks of postal boxes. Gee, there were lots and lots of them. Finally, I located 2319, and enjoyed the first piece of good luck I'd had. It was a lower box, barely three feet from the floor. I dropped to one knee and peeked inside. Past the gilded decals of big numbers I could see several envelopes. The one on top was dark navy blue with a white border. The name on the label said Wallace Kinchloe. Well, he wasn't lying about the PO box anyway. The return address on the envelope was interesting though: Queen's Beach Condominiums, Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas. I took out pad and pen and wrote it down.
There were several other envelopes under this one, including what appeared to be a magazine wrapped in brown paper near the bottom. A New Yorker? No, not quite the same. Then I noticed that the second envelope from the top, the one directly beneath the blue one, had its upper edge peeking out. All._I could read was the top line of the return address: A. J. Liebnitz and Sons, Ltd. Where it came from I couldn't tell. But I could tell this: the envelope was certainly classy looking. The paper was the thick parchment type with lots of little fibers in it, sort of like the kind in U.S. dollar bills. Also, the name A. J. Liebnitz was embossed as well as printed. It was obviously not your standard junk mail, the kind telling you that Finast has weiners on sale for 79? a pack. I wrote down the name A. J. Liebnitz and replaced pad and pen.
Finally, I took note of the date on the postmark on the letter from the Virgin Islands. August 12. Almost a month ago. Wherever Wallace Kinchloe was, he hadn't visited his mail box in quite some time. And the letter on top was the most recent one too. How long had the ones at the bottom of the heap been lying there?
At three o'clock exactly I met Jack at Brookstone's, as arranged. We looked at the fine woodworking and gardening tools from England and Germany, and I bought a big hurricane lamp with a walnut base and big crystal chimney for the porch at the cottage. Mary would love it. Less than two hours later I was sitting in the sauna bath turning over the events and discoveries of the past week. One thing kept rising uppermost in my thoughts: whether Allan's death was accidental or not, it was beginning to look more and more suspicious. This only increased my desire to find Penelope and her captain. And that boat was proving to be, at each tum of the path, more and more elusive and mysterious.
Later in the week I kept my promise to Mary. After doing two hours of paperwork in the office I walked two doors down the corridor and entered Moe Abramson's office.
Soon I was reclining in a two-thousand-dollar belting leather Eames chair, watching the thirty-gallon aquarium. Two cardinal tetras chased each other from territory to territory. Small iridescent schools of neon tetras and zebra dianos winked about under the fluorescent light. A Mozart concerto hummed and danced in the background. Moe's office was plush indeed. Sitting there, one would never guess that he resided in an ancient Airstream motor home in Walden Breezes Trailer Park. In short, most patients assume that psychiatrist Morris Abramson is sane. If fact he's a nut. He gives almost every penny he makes to one charitable organization or another. He keeps trying to save the world. The last guy who did that got nailed up to two pieces of wood.
He glared up at me.
"So you're feeling better?"
"Much," I answered, noticing a slimy, eellike creature emerge from under a conch shell and slither along the sand on the bottom of the tank. "What the hell is that?"
He smiled at the creature. It had no eyes and feathery whiskers around its sucking mouth.
"That's Ruth, my loach."
"Well, Ruth's got a bad case of the uglies-"
"Look, Doc, it relaxes the patients. Gets their minds off themselves just a bit. They find they're so busy staring at the tank they open up more-tell me things they wouldn't ordinarily."
"You should keep a vomit bag taped to the side of the glass for people who have the misfortune to look at that thing too long. It's worse looking than a sand worm."
The slender, bearded man advanced a pawn on the board that sat on the desk made of solid teak with brushed chrome trim.
"Your move, Doc. So you're happier. Ah, you feel better about your job."
"Wrong. As you can see by the damaged arm I'm not currently practicing. Maybe that's why I feel better about it. I've been spending my time tracking down a boat and a man. Both are elusive. Of course it's. probably nothing except my overactive imagination and sense of guilt."
Moe sat up straight in his chair and arched his eyebrows at me behind his wire-rims. He stroked the beard.
"But I'll tell you one thing Moe: it's not boring."
"So tell me…"
"How much will it cost?"
"Plenty."
"Who are you giving it to?"
"The Hadley School for the Blind and the Kidney Foundation."
"Who do you know who's blind?"
"Do I have to personally know someone who's blind to help? Someone's got to do it. Why not me?".
"OK," I said, and cleared my throat to begin. Ruth sliggered over to the edge of the tank and smushed her prehistoric snout up against the glass nearest me as if she, too, couldn't wait to hear.
"Cute isn't she? Kind of grows on you, like a wart," said Moe. "So begin already; I haven't got all day!"