The Professional Part 14

"In fact," she said. "It saved everything."

"Good," I said. "Can you tell me about it?"

Clarice looked at Susan.

"He seems an unusual private detective," she said. "Something of a romantic. Should I trust him?"

"Not if you have something you don't want him to know," Susan said.

"Did he bring you along, and tell me he'd miss you if he didn't, to impress me? So I would, so to speak, lower my guard. Or was he sincere?"

"Both," Susan said. "He is romantic. He understands things. And we love one another. But he is also the hardest man I have ever met, when he thinks it's necessary, and I guess you should know that, too."

"Suze," I said. "I didn't bring you along to blow my cover."

Clarice smiled.

"I'm sorry to discuss you like this, as if you were a wall sconce," she said.

"It's okay," I said. "I understand. Harvard girls."

"Exactly," Clarice said.

"Pappas has a hold on a number of people, such as he had on you," I said. "I'm trying to figure how to get them loose."

"Tell the truth," Clarice said.

"They won't."

Clarice nodded.

"It is idle to tell them they should," she said, and looked at Susan. "Is it not, Dr. Silverman?"

"It is," Susan said.

"So if you can tell me what you can about your experience with Pappas," I said, "maybe it'll help."

She nodded.

"Trudy," she said to the big cop. "It's okay, you can go. I'll be fine."

"I can wait outside, Clarice," Trudy said.

"No, thank you, Trudy. Go ahead."

Trudy nodded and looked at me hard and left. Clarice watched her go and then turned in her chair toward me and crossed her legs.

"How shall we begin," she said.

I fought off the urge to say "Start at the beginning."

Instead I said, "Tell it any way that makes sense to you."

She leaned back a little in her chair and looked for a moment at the pictures on her credenza, and took in a long breath and let it out, and said, "Okay."

Chapter22.

MY HUSBAND'S NAME IS ERIC," she said. "Eric Richardson. I met him in graduate school. We've been married for twenty-five years. He is a professor of history at this college."

As she talked I could look past the family pictures and out onto the campus. The day was overcast. No students were in sight. The maple trees had shed their leaves for the season and looked sort of spectral.

"About seven years ago," Clarice said, "for reasons not relevant to this discussion, Eric and I became estranged. We didn't actually separate. But we separated emotionally. I know we loved one another through the whole time, but we also hated each other."

She looked at Susan. Susan nodded.

"The girls were away at school, and we were"-she paused and glanced out the window-"here."

"Not a lot of options here," I said. "If it isn't working at home."

"No," Clarice said. "Though we both sought them."

"And Goran Pappas was one?"

"Yes," she said. "He was calling himself Gary Astor at the time."

"Gary Astor," I said.

She smiled without much pleasure.

"I know," she said. "Pathetic, isn't it?"

"In retrospect," I said.

She held her smile for a moment.

"I was at an alumnae function in Albany," she said, "when I met him in the hotel bar. He was, of course, charming."

She paused again and looked out at the gray campus.

"And I, of course, was starved for charm," she said. "He was relaxed, he was funny, he obviously thought I was wonderful, and s.e.xy, and amazing. We talked all evening and went our separate ways. But we agreed to have drinks the next night, and we did, and then we went to my room."

We were silent for a time. Until Susan spoke.

"And so it began," she said.

Clarice nodded.

"We began to meet regularly at a hotel in Springfield," she said. "Near the Civic Center. It was quite lovely for several months . . . except for the guilt."

Susan nodded.

"And your husband?" Susan said.

"Eric is," Clarice said, "or he was at that time, the kind of man who tends to hunch his shoulders, and lower his head, and wait for the storm to pa.s.s."

"So no solace there," Susan said.

Clarice nodded.

"No," she said. "I imagine I would have felt better if he had been unfaithful, too."

Susan nodded slowly.

"I'm sorry, but I need to ask. Is there anything in particular you remember about your relationship?"

"For a while it was a joy."

"How about the, ah, s.e.xual part."

"What I remember most was that he seemed very," she said, "very . . . forceful."

"Cruel?" Susan said.

"No, merely strong and forceful."

"And did things change?" I said.

"s.e.xually it didn't, until it stopped," she said. "Three months after we met, he showed me his pictures. He played his audiotapes."

She stopped and sat silently for a moment, looking at nothing. I opened my mouth. Susan shook her head. I closed my mouth.

"After a time," Clarice said, "he wanted money or he said he would ruin me. He was pleasant about it, just a simple business transaction, didn't mean we couldn't be friends, or"-she shook her head-"lovers."

"Did you have money?" I said.

"Not enough," she said. "He wanted me to embezzle from the college."

"And you wouldn't," I said.

She shook her head.

"I had cheated enough," she said. "I went to the police."

"In Hartland?"

She smiled.

"No," she said. "State police. They asked me to wear a listening device. I did, and they arrested him. There was some sort of justice, I think, in that. Like hoisting him upon his own petard."

"Then what?" I said.

"Then I told my husband," Clarice said. "And the college, and finally, at an open meeting, the students."

"My G.o.d," Susan said.

"I had bared pretty much everything else to a con man. I guessed I could bare my soul to the people I loved," Clarice said.

"And they forgave you," Susan said.

"My husband said it was time to get help . . . for both of us. I agreed. I offered to resign from the college. They suggested instead that I take a leave of absence while my husband and I worked on things."

"And the students?" Susan said.

Clarice smiled with some warmth.

"I have found that girls of that age are both more and less judgmental than others," she said. "Some were astounded that a woman over forty could have an explicitly s.e.xual affair. Some were t.i.tillated by it. A large number, I think, sort of shrugged and said, 'Yeah, yeah, you slept around. Doesn't everybody?' No one required me to wear a scarlet letter."

"How did Gary Astor take it?" I said.

"He was really very nice about it. When the detectives were taking him away, he grinned at me and said, 'For a good-looking broad, you got a lot of spine, Richie.' That's what he called me. He said Clarice was too European."

"And he did three in Shirley."

"Yes."

"Did you ever hear from him?" I said.

She flushed a little.

"His first year in prison he sent me flowers on my birthday," she said. "I never acknowledged them."

"Nothing since?"

"He wrote me a letter saying good-bye, that it had been fun while it lasted, that he'd always remember, ah, certain moments we'd had, and he wished me well."

"Anything else?" I said.

"No," she said. "He's a very pleasant man, I think. But he seems to have absolutely no moral or ethical sense. It's like someone with no sense of humor. There's nothing really to say about it, except that it isn't there."

"You ever miss him?" Susan said.