Rough Weather - By Robert B. Parker Page 0,23

the first five minutes of our conversation. I also learned that he had once been married to a young woman named Hilda Gretsky.

“Was she a student here?” I said.

“No,” Washburn said. “I met her at a gallery.”

“In the city?”

“Yes,” Washburn said, “downtown. One of my teaching assistants was having a show. Sadly, it was not very good.”

Washburn appeared to be about sixty, with wavy snow-white hair worn longish. His complexion was red, and his thick white mustache was carefully trimmed.

“When were you married?”

“Nineteen eighty,” Washburn said.

“How long did it last?”

Washburn looked out the window at the open quadrangle in the center of the campus with the redbrick Georgian library at one end and the redbrick Georgian student union at the other.

“Two years,” he said.

“What occasioned the breakup,” I said.

He kept looking out the window.

“She asked me for a divorce,” he said. “She told me she’d been having an affair with a man named Van Meer.”

“Must have been hard to hear,” I said.

“Yes.”

I took a picture of Heidi from my pocket and put it on his desk.

“Is this Hilda Gretsky?” I said.

He looked at the photograph.

“Yes,” he said.

“Are you aware of who she’s become?” I said.

“Yes.”

“Do you know when she began to call herself Heidi?” I said.

“When I knew her she called herself Heidi. The name on her birth certificate and her marriage license was Hilda, but she always hated the name, and always introduced herself as Heidi.”

“How old is she?” I said.

“She was born in 1959,” Washburn said.

“She from New York?” I said.

He shook his head.

“Dayton, Ohio,” he said.

“Why did she come to New York?” I said.

He stopped looking out the window and turned to me and smiled without much pleasure.

“To make her fortune,” he said.

“Doing what?” I said.

“Marrying well,” he said.

“Starting with you?”

“I suppose,” Washburn said. “One achieves, in some circles, a certain, ah, tone, I guess. Also, in addition to my academic earnings, there is a considerable trust fund. My father was aggressive in banking.”

“Prestige and money,” I said. “Good start.”

“Yes.”

“Love?” I said.

“She was not unkind,” Washburn said.

23

I had a drink at the bar in Lock-Ober with the Special Agent in Charge at the Boston FBI office. He was a smallish guy with glasses, and he didn’t look like much of a crime fighter. Which often worked for him. His name was Epstein.

“You on the kidnapping deal on the south coast?” I said.

“Heidi Bradshaw’s daughter,” Epstein said. “Yeah, we’re on it, too.”

“Know anything Healy doesn’t?”

“Nope, we’re sharing.”

“That’s so sweet,” I said.

“We try,” Epstein said, and sipped some bourbon. “People aren’t liking federal agencies much these days.”

“Is it because we’re being governed by a collection of nincompoops?” I said.

Epstein grinned at me.

“Yeah,” he said. “Pretty much.”

“It’ll pass,” I said. “We got through Nixon.”

“I know,” Epstein said. “You got anything for me?”

“Heidi Bradshaw’s birth name was probably Hilda Gretsky,” I said. “She might have been born in 1959 in Dayton, Ohio.”

“Busy, busy,” Epstein said.

“I got nothing else to do,” I said.

Epstein nodded.

“You been out there?” he said.

“Dayton? Not yet. I was hoping maybe you could enlist one of your colleagues out there to run it down.”

“Where’d you get your information?” Epstein said.

“Heidi’s first husband, a professor at Lydia Hall College in New York.”

“Name?”

“J. Taylor Washburn.”

Epstein nodded. He didn’t write anything down, but I knew everything was filed.

“Yeah,” he said. “We’ll run that down for you.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“It’s our case, too,” Epstein said. “She go to Lydia Hall?”

“No,” I said. “But I suspect she has claimed to.”

“Some reinvention going on?” Epstein said.

“It’s the American way,” I said.

“Sure,” Epstein said. “You told Healy this?”

“Yeah, but we both figured your resources in the Dayton area were better than his.”

“Or yours,” Epstein said.

“Much better than mine,” I said.

“You were there,” Epstein said, “at the wedding when the whole thing went down.”

“Yep.”

“Why?”

“Her story is that she was at the moment between husbands and needed an adequate substitute for the wedding,” I said.

“So if, say, the wine wasn’t chilled, she could ask you to fix it?”

“I guess.”

“You believe her?”

“No.”

“There are women like that,” Epstein said. “I’m Jewish, I know a lot of them.”

“Isn’t that anti-Semitic?” I said.

“Only female Semites,” Epstein said.

“You’ve not had good fortune with the women of your kind?” I said.

“Or any other,” he said.

“So it’s more misogyny,” I said.

“You’re right,” he said. “I was imprecise. Anybody paying you on this case?”

“I’m looking into it on my own,” I said.

“Because they kidnapped somebody on your watch,” Epstein said. “So to speak.”

“Something like that. I wasn’t very useful.”

“You were looking out for Susan,” Epstein said.