Dutch Blue Error by William G. Tapply Page A

seems.” She smiled ironically. “He loved these French doors.”
    She stood there, staring out the doors, lifting the hair off the nape of her neck with both hands. Without looking at me she said, “He thought he was so safe. And then someone smashes in his skull.”
    “What,” I said softly, “did he get hit with, do you know?”
    She turned to face me. Her smile was both wistful and ironic. “‘The Dreamer.’ A piece of sculpture. It happened to be the one thing my father kept because he liked it. It was created for him by an artist he knew. It was pieces of scrap iron welded together. That’s why he kept it in his library. The things he cared about he kept there. The police have it now.”
    “‘The Dreamer,’” I repeated.
    “It was an abstract, of course.”
    “Yes, of course,” I said.
    She shivered. “Can we go now?”
    We walked out of the building. She locked the front door and offered me a ride in her Karmann Ghia. I declined. She climbed in and rolled down the window. “I do appreciate your coming,” she said, peering up at me.
    “My pleasure,” I said.
    “Sure,” she replied, nodding. “The pleasure of my company, and all that.”
    I grinned, and didn’t answer.
    “For someone who’s basically a bastard, you’re a relatively easy bastard to get on with,” she said.
    “You’re too kind.”
    I was standing beside the car, my hand resting on the ledge of the opened window. Deborah put her hand on top of mine. “You know, I feel a little better. It’s funny, but knowing that there’s a reason for this, that it wasn’t some random thing, a freak—it helps. Does that make any sense?”
    “Yes, I suppose it does. We’re assuming it was the stamp.”
    “That is what I assume,” she said firmly.
    I moved my hand away from hers. “Why don’t you hire someone to go in there and clean up?”
    She bent forward, fumbling with the ignition key. Then she started up the engine. She looked up at me. “I will. And I’ll call you if I find the stamp.”
    “Do that,” I said. I turned and started walking back to my office.
    I read recently that the island of Manhattan has twenty thousand restaurants. I figured out that a person who started at the age of twenty taking his dinner in a different restaurant every night of the week would be seventy-five by the time he went through all of them. By which time, of course, there would be several thousand new ones to try.
    I don’t have the figures to prove it, but I’d guess that a man would have the same problem sampling just the Italian restaurants in and around Boston. I tried it a few years ago and gave up. There are too many and too many of them are good.
    I settled on Marie’s, a little cellar five steps below street level just outside Kenmore Square. It’s the only place I need to know to appease my periodic cravings for pasta. Marie scribbles her daily offerings on a blackboard. She has twelve little tables with red and white checked tablecloths lined up along the brick walls. The smells when you walk in are enough to reduce Mahatma Gandhi himself to a slobbering glutton. You can’t get pizza there, or fancy veal entrees. Mainly pasta and sauces and breads and pastries and good beer and wine. Marie hires B. U. undergraduates to wait on tables. Her sons do most of the cooking nowadays, but Marie is always there to supervise and greet her “guests,” as she calls us.
    Leo Kirk and I met at Marie’s in the afternoon after I’d seen Deborah Martinelli. He had already eaten. I had a spinach linguini al dente with a light clam and squid sauce, and a bottle of Heineken’s. Kirk settled for a cannoli and a cup of espresso.
    He seemed singularly unimpressed with my revelation that Shaughnessey owned a priceless postage stamp. Nor did the fact that it appeared to be missing cause him to lift his eyebrows. “Not the sort of thing one keeps around the house,” he said.
    “The daughter said he kept it there.”
    Kirk shrugged. “We’ve