Thin Air

"I know," I said.

"You know why?"

"Needed a rest."

"You know about his wife?"

"Yes."

"Me too," I said.

"What do you know?"

"I know she's gone."

Quirk nodded.

"Okay," he said. "So I don't have to be cute."

"Is that what you were being?"

"Yeah."

"He's afraid she left him," I said.

"Happens," Quirk said.

"You've never had the experience," I said.

"You have."

"Yeah."

"I remember."

"There's nothing logical about your first reactions," I said.

"Must be why they call it crazy time."

"That's why," I said. "What do you know about her?"

"No, you got it wrong," Quirk said. "I'm the copper. I say stuff like that to you."

"Frank won't talk about her."

Quirk nodded. "But you, being a fucking Eagle Scout, are nosing around."

"That's how I like to think of it," I said.

"Frank's kind of fucked up about this."

"So what do you know about her?"

"Her name's Lisa St. Claire. She's a disc jockey at a station in Proctor, which is one of those jerkwater cities up by New Hampshire."

"I know Proctor," I said.

"Good for you," Quirk said. "Frank met her about a year ago. In the bar at the Charles Hotel. Frank had just gone through the divorce. The old lady didn't let go easy. You ever meet adorable Kitty?"

I nodded.

"So Lisa looked good to him. Hell, she looks good to me, and I'm happily married. Frank probably did the I'm-a-police-detective trick, always works great."

"How the hell do you know?" I said.

"Used to work great for me."

"You got married before you were a detective."

Quirk gri

"I used to lie," he said. "Anyway, she and Frank started going out. They moved in together about a month later, his old lady had the house. Maybe six months ago they got married and bought that place out near the pond."

"She got money?"

Quirk shrugged.

"How much does a disc jockey make?"

"More than a cop."

"'Cause they're more valuable," he said. "Frank worked a lot of overtime, probably had a little something put away, himself."

"That his wife didn't get?"

"He saw that coming for a long time," Quirk said. "Might have had a few bearer bonds someplace."

"You know how old Lisa is?"

"Nope, I'd guess around thirty. What do you think?"

"Lot younger than Frank," I said.

"And better looking. Frank was fucking blown away by how good looking she was."

"Yeah," I said, "but is she a nice person?"

"Maybe we'll find that out," Quirk said.

"You know where she's from?"

Quirk shrugged.

"Family?"

Shrug.

"You know where she worked before Proctor?"

"No."

"Ever hear her program?"

"No. I'm too busy listening to my Prince albums."

"He doesn't call himself Prince anymore."

"Who gives a fuck," Quirk said.

"Nobody I know," I said. "She been married before?"

"I don't know."

"Thirty's kind of old for a first marriage," I said.

"For crissake, Spenser, you've never been married at all."

"Sure, that's odd, too. But I'm not missing."

"Kids get laid now. They live with people. They don't marry as early."

"How old were you?" I said.

"Twenty," Quirk said.

"Better to marry than burn," I said.

"Worked out okay for me," Quirk said. "But a lot of people got married so they could fuck six times a week. Then in a while they only felt like fucking once a week and had to talk to each other in between. Created a lot of drunks."

"You think she left him?" I said.

"I don't know," Quirk said. "If she left him it'll kill him. If she didn't leave him… where the fuck is she?"

"Hard to know what to root for," I said.

The window behind Quirk looked out into Stanhope Street, which was little more than an alley. If you stood up and looked, you could see Bertucci's Pizza, where the Red Coach Grill once was. A pigeon settled on Quirk's window ledge and sidled across it, puffing up his feathers as he went. He turned sideways and looked in at us with one eye. Behind me in the squad room the phone rang periodically, sometimes only once, sometimes for much too long. A phone call to Homicide didn't usually bring good news.

I stood up. The pigeon watched me.

"I hear anything, I'll let you know," Quirk said.

I opened Quirk's door. As I went out, the pigeon flew away.

She was out of bondage. And she was alone. On the monitors were images of him, carefully untying the scarves. The release helped reduce her panic a little. She could at least move. She could speak, though there was no one but him to speak to.

"We will save these scarves, amor mio," he said on the monitors. "They are part of our reuniting. "

She sat on the edge of her bed waiting for the pins and needles of reawakened circulation to subside. It was a huge, four-poster Victorian bed fitted with pale lavender satin sheets covered with a thick damask canopy. Around the bed were theater flats, creating a tarnished and shabby illusion of green meadows, and willow trees, archaic stone walls, and an elongated English pointer in field pose. In the distance, lambs grazed under the gaze of a young shepherd with no shoes and a crook. A winding road dwindled in geometric perspective through the meadow, and curved out of sight behind the wall. Some of the flats she knew were from a Children's Theater production of Rumpelstiltskin. How he had gotten them she didn't know. Behind the flats the windows were boarded up, and the light came from a series of clamp lights on the web of pipes near the black painted ceiling, as well as the glow of the television monitors, which looped the same sequences over and over. The monitors were silent again. He seemed to control the sound whimsically. There were gauze cloths draped among the lights, masking the ceiling and creating a tattered semblance of gossamer eternity above. A big oak wardrobe stood against the wall opposite the foot of the bed. Its double doors were open, and the wardrobe was packed with theatrical costumes. In the far wall to the right of the bed was a doorway. She got up when she could and went to it, walking with difficulty, her legs still numb and tingling. The door was locked. She hadn't thought it would be open. She turned and began to circle the room, ru