Valediction Read Free Page B

is 2616. Call her in a half-hour or so. I'll have talked with her by then."
    "Unless she's out on assignment," I said.
    "Assignment? It's ten thirty in the morning. How many fucking dance recitals you see at ten thirty in the morning?"
    "Okay," I said. "I'll call her at eleven."
    I hung up and looked out my window some more. It was sunny. The art director and her colleagues had moved away from her board and out of sight somewhere back in the office across the street.
    At eleven I called Nancy Quentin.
    "A detective," she said. "Very exciting for us arts-and-leisure types."
    "I imagine so," I said. "Would you have lunch with me at the Ritz Cafe?"
    "Today?"
    "Yes."
    "I'll be there in an hour. How will I recognize you?"
    "I'll be in the lobby by the cafe looking out of place," I said.
    "See you there," she said, and hung up.
    I walked down Berkeley Street to my apartment on Marlborough and put on a tie and my blue blazer with the tattersall lining, and strolled up Arlington to the Ritz. They'd put up a second tower beside the hotel and filled it with condominium apartments that sold for a lot. The new building blended pretty well with the original. It didn't improve anything but it didn't look like a bad case of mange either. When I turned in through the revolving doors it was 11:40. Time for a drink.
    I sat at the bar and had an Irish whiskey on the rocks with a twist and ate some peanuts and sipped the drink. I looked at my watch. Eleven fifty. Almost nine o'clock in San Francisco. At 11:55 I finished the drink and walked out into the lobby. A big hard-looking guy with gray hair and a large stomach was going up the curving rose-carpeted stairway toward the dining room. He paused on the stairs and looked at me and nodded.
    "Callahan," I said. "Still got that roll of dimes?"
    He smiled and nodded. "Business or pleasure?" he said to me.
    "Lunch with a client," I said. "Nothing to do with the house."
    Callahan nodded again, pleasantly. "Enjoy," he said.
    I went and stood outside the cafe, near the desk, and waited. At ten past noon a woman about the size of the Gadsden Purchase came up to me and said, "Mr. Spenser."
    I said yes and she said she was Nancy Quentin and I said, "Shall we to the cafe?" and in we went.
    The cafe at the Ritz would be the coffee shop in another hotel, but here it really was a cafe. The food was good, the service elegant, the menu brief but interesting. It was a ground-floor room and there were windows to sit by. In the evening a young woman in a gown played the harp.
    The waiter asked if we'd like a cocktail. Nancy had Campari and soda. I had another Irish whiskey.
    Nancy looked over at me. "You're right," she said. "You do look out of place."
    "And I'm wearing a Brooks Brothers tie too."
    "It's not enough," she said.
    "I went to the Harvard commencement this year."
    "That would help," she said. "But only if you were still wearing your little Harvard commencement badge."
    "Yeah. I thought about it but was afraid I'd get caught. People would start asking me smart questions and they'd find out I'd never been."
    "Yes," she said. "That is a danger."
    She was a very large-boned, tall woman, and she had managed to keep her weight up. She was probably fifty-five and wore a loosefitting dress with a small gray print in it, and a large straw hat. For her to find a loose-fitting dress was something of a triumph, I thought. She wore a lot of makeup, badly applied. There was lipstick on her teeth. If she'd been a dancer, it must have been in Fantasia .
    "At the commencement, people were asking really tough ones," I said. "Who's your broker? Where can I get a deal on Volvo station wagons, that kind of stuff. I felt really humble."
    She laughed. "I went to Wellesley," she said. "I could have answered those questions easily."
    "And now you write for the Globe ? My God."
    "Yes, plucky of me, I think."
    The waiter took our order. I had lobster salad. Nancy had the minute steak. We had another round of drinks as