Back Story. Part 23

Of the 3,180 students that entered Taft in the fall of 1963, 954 of them were from greater Boston. The alumni directory had addresses for 611. At the rate of one minute per phone call, it would take me ten hours to call them all. If I didn't go to the bathroom. On the a.s.sumption that she would have more girlfriends than boyfriends, I went through the list again and winnowed out 307 female names.

"You wanna make some of these calls?" I said to Hawk.

"No."

"Maybe I'll be lucky," I said. "Maybe she was pals with Judy Aaron."

"You got one chance in three hundred seven," Hawk said.

"I thought you didn't do math."

"I do when I want to," Hawk said.

"They'll chisel that on your headstone," I said.

I picked up my cordless phone and leaned back and put my feet up and began. Most of the calls took longer than a minute. Who was I again? Why did I wish to locate Bonnie Lombard? Was I authorized by the university? This was compensated to some extent by the people who hung up on me or who weren't home. Still, I'd been at it almost three hours when I talked to Anne Fahey. "Bonnie? Sure, I remember Bonnie."

"May I come and see you about her," I said.

"Sure. You got my phone number, does that mean you got my address?"

I read her address to her. "That's it. When do you want to come?"

"I'll be there in an hour," I said.

"Okay," she said. "Maybe I can rummage around, find some pictures or something. Should I do that?"

"Anything you have would be helpful," I said.

Anne Fahey lived in Sudbury, in a very large house of the kind that Susan called McMansions. There were Palladian windows and a number of roof peaks and an a.s.sortment of architectural conceits, all overlooking a vast lawn devoid of ornamentation.

Anne herself was a handsome woman in her fifties, with a lot of curly silver blond hair and a strong, graceful body. I introduced myself.

"And this is Mr. Hawk," I said. "My driver."

Hawk would be more easily mistaken for Santa Claus than someone's driver, but Anne smiled widely as she held the door open, as if she were unaware of my small deceit. We went into the front hall and then to the living room on the left. It appeared that, having spent far too much for the house, they had nothing left to furnish it. There were no rugs on the floor. There was a couch and three armchairs in the living room. The windows were undraped. There were no pictures on the walls. The huge slate-framed fireplace was ash-free, soot-free, and perfectly clean. There was nothing on the mantel. I sat on the couch. Hawk sat in an armchair with a view out the front window. Anne offered coffee. We declined.

"I found a few pictures of Bunny Lombard," she said.

"So her nickname was in fact Bunny?" I said.

"Yes. While I was waiting for you, I checked our yearbook."

She picked up a thick, white leatherette yearbook from the floor beside her chair. It read TAFT 1967 in blue script on the cover. Bunny had not stayed to graduate, so there was no individual head shot. But she had been in the drama club and the Sigma Kappa sorority, and she appeared in a group photo of each. There was also a candid of her at some sort of picnic, a very young woman wearing a tie-dyed T-s.h.i.+rt, her long dark hair cut straight across her forehead in bangs.

"That's me," Anne said, "with her. The one with the huge cup of beer." She had been plumper then, with a big head of frizzy blond hair.

"I did a lot of beer in those days," Anne said. "Among other things."

"And now?" I said.

"A martini with my husband when he comes home from work."

"Adjusted to your environment," I said.

Anne grinned. "That would be me," she said. "Adjustable Annie. If people were eating smoked worms for supper, I'd be gobbling them right down."

"Nothing wrong with flexible," I said. "Did you know Bunny well?"

"Yes. We were both into causes. Did a lot of marches and sit-ins. Very serious. Smoked a lot of dope together, but very seriously. It was a political position to smoke dope then."

"How fortunate," I said.

"Yes. I notice as I grow older that if you have deeply felt political convictions, you can make pretty much everything fit them, if you need to."

"Yes," I said. "I've noticed that, too. She have any pet causes?"

"Mostly what we all had. The war! The establishment! The moral imperative of acid! She and I and about four other kids formed a prison outreach group. We figured all prisoners were political prisoners."

"Tell me about that," I said.

"We used to go down to Walpole two nights a week and give seminars on revolutionary politics with one of the professors."

"Whose name was?"

"Nancy Young."

"Do you know where she is?"

"Probably dead. She must have been in her fifties then. Big woman with a lot of gray hair. In retrospect, she was probably a lesbian. But we didn't think about that much at the time."

"How about the folks in charge at the prison," I said. "They didn't mind you teaching revolution to the inmates?"

"They thought we were just teaching American history. n.o.body ever monitored us. We loved it. We thought we were revolutionaries. We decided to organize with some of the prisoners. Make a cell to help them when they got out or if they escaped. Like an underground railroad."

"What fun," I said.

"It was heaven," Anne said. "We wanted to help them escape, but we didn't really know how, and we never freed one. But several of them joined us when they got out. We felt so authentic, we nearly wet our pants."

"Can you remember who the prisoners were?"

"One of them called himself Shaka. We loved that. Shaka. It was so primeval."

"Can you remember his real name?"

"We would have called it his slave name in those days."

"Can you remember?"

"It was a funny name. Made me think of a comic strip."

"Abner Fancy?" I said.

"Yes, that's it. Abner Fancy. Always made me think of Li'l Abner."

"Any other prisoners?"

"There was another man, a friend of Shaka's, I think. We called him Coyote. I really can't remember his actual name. I probably never knew it."

I looked at the yearbook pictures for another minute.

"How about Emily Gold?" I said. "Any pictures of her?"

"Emily? Oh G.o.d, Emily. She was killed a long time ago. Murdered."

"Was she in your group?" I said.

"Yes. She was Bunny's best friend."

"She was in the group with Shaka and Coyote?"

"Yes."

"When did you last see any of these people?"

Anne was thumbing through the yearbook.

"Oh, G.o.d. Years. I'm a nice Irish Catholic girl from Milton. Once there were actually ex-convicts in the Brigade, I got scared. My only close friends in the Brigade were Bunny and Emily. They both dropped out of school, and I didn't. We just sort of drifted apart."

"Brigade?"

"Yes, we called ourselves the Dread Scott Brigade. D-r-e-a-d, isn't that so college kid?"

She pointed at a picture in a montage of photos.

"Oh, sure," she said, "here's Emily."

She looked like Daryl. Her hair was sixties straight, and she had the funked-out sixties look in a granny dress, but it could have been Daryl with a protest sign. The picture was too small for me to read the sign.

"And now she's been dead for. what?"

"Twenty-eight years," I said. "Her daughter looks just like her."

"She had a daughter? I didn't even know she was married. listen to me-as if she would have had to be married to have a child. G.o.d, am I middle-aged suburban or what?"

"It happens," I said. "Do you know where Bunny Lombard is now?"

"No idea," Anne said. "When I knew her, she was from the North Sh.o.r.e someplace. Paradise, maybe."

"When did you last see her?"

"She left in the middle of soph.o.m.ore year, so 1965, I guess, probably in the winter. Why are you looking for her?"

"I wanted to ask her about Emily Gold," I said.

"Because of the murder?"

"Yes."

"I thought she was shot, like at random, by some guy holding up a bank."

"We'd like to find out who that was," I said.

"Are you working for Emily's daughter?" Anne said.

"I am."

"Jesus Christ," Anne said. "How are you going to find out a murder that happened twenty-eight years ago."

"Diligence," I said.

She smiled and shrugged. "Well," she said. "You found me."

41.

It was a little after 3:30 in the afternoon when Hawk and I carefully opened up my office for a new business day. Hawk looked around the empty room. "Harvey don't show me s.h.i.+t," Hawk said. "I working for Sonny, you be dead now."

"You wouldn't work for Sonny," I said.

"Beside the point," Hawk said.

I opened the windows behind my desk and looked out at the Back Bay. There was a group of three young women, rigorously conforming to the current look: cropped T-s.h.i.+rt, low-slung jeans, and a clear view of the navel. None of the three was slim enough to carry it off. Most people weren't. I listened to my messages.

While I listened, Hawk unlocked my closet door, got the sawed-off, put it beside him on the couch, put his feet up on the coffee table, and began to read some more about evolution. I called Samuelson.

"Remember Ray Cortez?" he said.

"Leon Holton's PO," I said.

"Well, Ray appears to be a man of pa.s.sionate convictions," Samuelson said. "He knows Leon is swimming in an ocean of drug money, and he seems to be getting away with it, and Ray's dying to violate him right back inside."

"I got no problem with that," I said.