Five Classic Spenser Mysteries (51 page)

Patty Giacomin let me in. Stephen was there too in a faded Levi’s shirt and jeans, and artfully broken-in over-the-ankle moccasins with big leather stitching. There was a leather thong tight around his neck. He was sipping from an enormous brandy snifter.

“What do you want?” she said. She was carrying a snifter twin to Stephen’s.

“Christ, it must run in the family,” I said.

“What?”

“Clever repartee.”

“Well, what
do
you want?”

“We need to talk alone.”

“I have no secrets from Stephen.”

“I bet you do,” I said. “I bet you don’t share too many of your adventures in the New York Hilton with Old Disco.”

Her head lifted a little. “I beg your pardon?” she said.

“Can we speak privately for about five minutes?”

She paused for a long time then she said, “Certainly, if you insist. Stephen? Could you?”

“Certainly,” he said. “I’ll be in the bedroom if you need me.”

I let that pass.

When he was gone, she walked over to the window and looked down at the river. I walked with her. When we were as far as we could get from where Stephen could hear, she said softly, “You rotten bastard, what are you doing to me?”

“I’m telling you I know about how you used to go down to the New York Hilton once a month and screw whatever came by.”

“You rotten prick,” she said softly.

“Oh,” I said. “You’ve found out.”

She didn’t speak. Her face was very red. She drank some brandy.

I said, “I’ve made a deal with your husband on whom I also have the goods. He stays away from Paul and pays his bills, and I keep my mouth shut. I’m offering you an even better deal. You stay away from him and I keep my mouth shut. You don’t even have to pay any money.”

“What goods have you got on him?”

“Zero in on the important stuff, babe.”

“Well, what?”

“That’s not your problem. Your problem is whether you do what I ask or I start blabbing to the like of Disco Darling down the hall.”

“Don’t call him that. His name is Stephen,” she said.

“Will you stay away from the kid?”

“My own son?”

“That’s him, you’ve got the right one. Will you?

“What do you mean, stay away?”

“I mean let him go away to school, let him spend holidays with me, or where he wants to, make no attempt to claim custody or make him live with you or your husband.”

“My God, just so you won’t tell about one indiscretion?”

“Monthly indiscretions—random, promiscuous. Actually, probably neurotic. If I were you, I’d get some help. Also, if you don’t do what I say, you get not another penny from your husband, alimony, nothing.”

“How can you …”

“Call him,” I said. “See what he says.”

She looked at the phone.

“So there you’ll be,” I said. “Alone and broke. Disco Steve will roll you like a buck’s worth of nickels if he thinks you’re messy.”

“It’s not neurotic,” she said. “If a man did it, you’d say it was normal.”

“I wouldn’t, but that doesn’t matter to me. I want that kid out of the middle and I’ll do what needs to be done to get him out. You go along or you’re broke and abandoned like they say in the soap operas.”

She looked down the hall where Stephen had disappeared. She looked at the phone. She looked down at the river. And she nodded her head.

“Do I hear a yes?” I said.

She nodded again.

“I want to hear it,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, staring at the river.

“Okay,” I said. “You and Stephen can go back to watching his jeans fade.”

I started for the door. “Spenser?”

“Yeah?”

“What did Mel do?”

I shook my head and went out and closed the door.

Paul sat astride the ridge pole of the cabin, nailing the final row of cedar shingles four inches to the weather. He was shirtless and tan and the muscles moved on his torso as he took the wide roofing nails one at a time from his mouth and drove them three to a shingle with the hammer. He wore a nailing apron over his jeans and periodically he took some nails from it and put them in his mouth. I put together the ridge cap on the ground. When he was finished with the final row, I climbed the ladder with the ridge cap and we nailed it in place, working from each end and moving toward the center of the ridge. The early fall sun was warm on our backs. At the center I said, “You drive one on that side and I’ll drive one on this.”

He nodded, took an eightpenny nail out, tapped it into place, and drove it with three hammer swings. I drove mine. We slipped the hammers into his hammer holster and I put out my hand, palm up. He slapped it once, his face serious. I grinned. He grinned back.

“Done,” I said.

“On the outside,” he said.

“Okay, half done,” I said. “Enclosed.”

We scrambled down the ladder, me first, Paul after,
and sat on the steps of the old cabin. It was late afternoon. The sun slanting along the surface of the lake deflected and shimmered in formless patches when we looked at it.

“I never thought we’d build it,” Paul said.

“Never thought you’d run five miles either, did you?”

“No.”

“Or bench press a hundred fifty pounds?”

“No.”

“Or put on twenty pounds?”

Paul grinned at me. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, you were right. I was wrong. You want to have an award ceremony?”

I shook my head. There was very little breeze and the sweat on our bodies dried slowly. On the lake someone water-skied behind a hundred hp outboard. There were bird sounds in the close woods. The area was strong with the smell of sawn wood and the faint burnt odor that a power saw produces when the blade dulls.

I got up and went in the cabin and got a bottle of Moët & Chandon champagne from the refrigerator and two clear plastic cups from the cupboard. I put some ice and water into a cooking pot and stuck the champagne in to keep cold. I brought it and the plastic cups out onto the back steps and set it down.

“What’s that?” Paul said.

“Champagne,” I said. “Elegantly presented.”

“I never had champagne,” Paul said, “except that time at Susan’s.”

“It’s time again,” I said. I opened the bottle and poured each cup full.

“I thought the cork was supposed to shoot up in the air.”

“No need to,” I said.

Paul sipped the champagne. He looked at the glass. “I thought it would be sweeter,” he said.

“Yeah, I did too when I first tried it. It grows on you though.”

We were quiet, sipping the champagne. When Paul’s glass was empty he refilled it. The water skier called it quits and the lake was quiet. Some sparrows moved in the sawdust around the new cabin, heads bobbing and cocking, looking for food, now and then finding it. Grackles with bluish iridescent backs joined them, much bigger, swaggering more than the sparrows, with a funny waddling walk, but peaceable.

“When do we have to leave tomorrow?” Paul said.

“Early,” I said. “Eight thirty at the latest. We pick up Susan at eleven.”

“How long a ride to the school?”

“Four hours.”

“How come Susan’s going?”

“After we drop you, we’re going to have a couple of days together in the Hudson Valley.”

What breeze there was had gone. It was still, the sun was almost set. It wasn’t dark yet, but it was softer, the light seemed indirect.

“Do I have to have a roommate?”

“First year,” I said.

“When can I come home? Back home? To see you?”

“Any weekend,” I said. “But I’d stay around out there for a while. You need to get used to it before you come back. You won’t settle in if your only goal is to get out.”

Paul nodded. It got darker. The champagne was gone.

“It’s better than that place in Grafton.”

“Yes.”

“Everybody there will know everyone and know how to dance.”

“Not everybody,” I said. “Some. Some will be ahead of you. You’ll have to catch up. But you can. Look what you did in one summer.”

“Except I wasn’t catching up on anything,” Paul said.

“Yeah, you were.”

“What?”

“Life.”

The woods had coalesced in the darkness now. You couldn’t see into them. And the insects picked up the noise level. All around us was a thick chittering cloak of forest. We were alone at its center. The cabin was built and the champagne bottle was empty. Biting insects began to gather and swarm. The darkness was cold.

“Let’s go in and eat,” I said.

“Okay,” he said. His voice was a little shaky. When I opened the door to the cabin I could see in the light from the kitchen that there were tears on his face. He made no attempt to hide them. I put my arm around his shoulder.

“Winter’s coming,” I said.

If you leaned way back in the chair and cranked your neck hard over, you could see the sky from my office window, delft-blue and cloudless and so bright it looked solid. It was September after Labor Day, and somewhere the corn was probably as high as an elephant’s eye, the kind of weather when a wino could sleep warm in a doorway.

“Mr. Spenser, are you listening to us?”

I straightened my head up and looked back at Roger and Margery Bartlett.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “You were just saying about how you never dealt with a private detective before, but this was an extreme case and there seemed no other avenue. Everybody who comes in here tends to say about that same thing to me.”