Spenser - 12 - A Catskill Eagle by Robert B. Parker

Author:Robert B. Parker
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Mystery
ISBN: 9780440111320
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 1986-06-01T07:46:32+00:00

CHAPTER 26

THE BOAT WAS GONE NOW, AND THE LIGHT HAD shifted so that it slanted in from the west edge of the picture window. I had drunk six cups of coffee and felt as if maybe my skin would jump off and dance along the baseboard.

“The rich really are very different,” Tyler Costigan was saying. “Especially if they are also unscrupulous.”

“One of the ways they got rich,” I said.

She nodded, but she wasn’t paying me much attention. “They have always gotten what they wished, and after a while they think they are supposed to. If they have a problem they hire someone to solve it. And they become ever more contemptuous of people who cannot. They even become contemptuous of people who have problems. And eventually they are contemptuous of everyone and care only about what they want.”

“Maybe that’s true only of the Costigans,” I said.

She looked at me as if I’d startled her from a reverie. “I believe it’s true in general,” she said.

“Okay,” I said. “But I don’t care about in general. I only care about Russell Costigan. And, in truth, at the moment, I don’t even care about him, only about where he is.”

“If I had to guess,” she said, “I’d guess he’s in Connecticut.” I nodded. “They have an arms manufacturing facility there, which includes a testing and training site. And it is very secure. Russell loves hide-and-seek, if his hiding place is safe.”

“Where in Connecticut,” I said.

“West of Hartford, near a town called Pequod.”

“What’s the name of the company?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know if it goes under Transpan, or they have a subsidiary name.”

“Did they have labor trouble a few years back?”

She shook her head again, impatiently. “I don’t know. I paid as little attention to the family business as I could. Russell didn’t have that much to do with it either. He did some lobbying in Washington for a time. Or that’s what he called it. It was mostly having parties and going to other parties and having lunch at Sans Souci. I think his father sent him there to keep him occupied. His mother loved it. `Rusty deals with the government,‘ she’d say.”

“Rusty?”

“Grace calls him that. Have you seen her?”

“Yes.”

“She’s incredible,” Tyler Costigan said. “She is a fat little dumb woman. She must be sixty-five and still talks baby talk, and she jerks those two men around any way she wants.”

“No other kids?”

Tyler Costigan smiled. “Just Rusty,” she making the R sound almost like a W.

“Probably an adorable baby,” I said.

“In many ways he’s an adorable man,” she said. “Except…” She leaned her head back, thinking of how to say it. “Except he hasn’t got any…” She took a breath and made an aimless gesture. “He hasn’t got any realness. He’s funny and fun and warm and loving, but if anything gets too hard he moves on. He’s never loved a great love. Unless it was Grace, whom he now hates.”

The sun must have moved behind something, off window left, and the room was much dimmer.

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