Painted Ladies by Robert B. Parker Page B

Jewish, and Dutch, and art. But if I knew some of the ingredients, I still didn’t know the design, except that it might well be of darkness to appall. I was used to that. I’d spent most of my life looking around in dark places that were often appalling. But oddly, I was never really appalled. I looked where I needed to look to do what I did. And what was there was there. I’d done it too long to speculate much on why it was there. When I needed to, I could flatten out my emotional response until it was simply blank. I liked what I did, probably because I was good at it. And sometimes I won. Sometimes I slew the dragon and galloped away with the maiden. Sometimes I didn’t. Sometimes the dragon survived. Sometimes I lost the maiden. But so far the dragon hadn’t slain me . . . and I was never terminally appalled. And I was with Susan.
    I smiled to myself and made a little self-congratulatory gesture with my whiskey glass.
    “Sometimes solitary,” I said to no one. “But never alone.”
    I celebrated that singular fact in the happy darkness until my glass was empty.
    Then I went to bed.

30
    I n the morning, I stopped by the Boston Public Library on my way to work and picked up a copy of Aesthetics and Greed in the Second Great War and took it with me while I picked up two large coffees and a whole-wheat bagel and went up to my office.
    I drank my coffee and ate my bagel, which was pretty good, and dipped into Prince’s book. Which was not pretty good. He was an academic. He never used a short word when a long one would do nearly as well. His prose style was so pretentious that it obscured his meaning. After the first page I could feel my head beginning to nod. I plugged through the first chapter, taking solace in my coffee and my bagel, and stopped. I didn’t want to solve his murder badly enough that I would read more than one chapter at a time. In chapter one, I learned that Germany had invaded the Netherlands in 1940.
    I couldn’t wait for chapter two to find out who won.
    I checked out the length of the book and the approximate size of each chapter, and made a deal with myself that I’d read a chapter a day. More than that and I wouldn’t know what I had read, anyway.
    It was ten in the morning. I had read a chapter, eaten a bagel, and drunk two cups of Guatemalan coffee, and the day stretched out ahead of me like an empty road. I invoked Spenser’s crime-stopper tip #5: When you have nothing else to do, follow someone.
    I drove out to Walford and set up outside Missy Minor’s dorm. It was not yet eleven. Many college students avoided classes that early in the day. Some, as I recall, avoided them altogether. But in most cases, they were just beginning to surface in the hour before lunch.
    At about one-thirty in the afternoon, Missy Minor came out, ready to face the day. She was wearing her fleece-lined coat again. Very tight black jeans again, though not perhaps the same ones. The jeans were tucked into Uggs today. On her head was a white knit cap with a big white ball on top. The cap was pulled down carefully over her ears, allowing her blonde hair to frame her face. Warm yet fashionable. She was carrying no books as she cut across campus, with me discreetly behind her. She went into the library and up to the big reading room on the second floor. Missy went straight across the big room and sat down at an otherwise empty table across from a guy in a navy peacoat.
    With my hands in my pockets and my head down, I went to the back end of the reading room, where there was a newspaper rack, got a New York Times, opened it up, and sat in a chair behind it, and peeked around.
    The guy in the peacoat didn’t look like a student. No shame to it. I didn’t, either. And maybe he was an older student. He looked to be in his middle forties, with a flat, expressionless face and short blond hair. There was something about him that reminded me of the kind of guy I sometimes did business with. But it was an intangible