Five Classic Spenser Mysteries (74 page)

“Dennis,” she said, “be nice.”

He squeezed her arm hard with one hand and repeated the question. I answered for her.

“My name’s Spenser.”

He turned his head toward me and looked very hard at me. “I’m talking to her, not you, Jack. Shut up.”

“Dennis!” She said it with more emphasis this time. “Who the hell do you think you are? Let go of my arm.”

I reached over and took hold of his wrist. “Listen,
Goldilocks,” I said, “I bought her a beer and you drank it. On my block that entitles you to get your upper lip fattened.”

He yanked his hand away from me. “You think maybe the long hair makes me soft?”

“Dennis,” Terry said, “he’s a private detective.”

“Freaking pig,” he said, and swung at me. I pulled my head out of the way and slipped out of the booth. The punch rammed against the back of the booth; the kid swore and turned toward me. He was not planning to quit, so I figured it best end swiftly. I feinted toward his stomach with my left hand, then hooked it over his lowered guard and turned my whole shoulder into it as it connected on the side of his face. He sat down hard on the floor.

Terry Orchard went down on her knees beside him, her arms around his shoulders.

“Don’t get up, Dennis. Stay there. He’ll hurt you.”

“She’s right, kid,” I said. “You’re an amateur. I do this kind of thing for a living.”

The big old tough waitress came around and said, “What the hell is going on? You want the cops in here? You want to fight, go outside.”

“No more trouble,” I said. “I’m a movie stunt man and I was just showing my friend how to slip a punch.”

“And I’m Wonder Woman and if you do it again, I’m calling the blues.” She stomped off.

“The beer offer still holds,” I said. The kid got up, his jaw already beginning to puff. He wouldn’t want to chew much tomorrow. He sat down in the booth beside Terry, who still held his arm protectively.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Spenser,” she said. “He isn’t really like that.”

“What’s he really like?” I asked.

His eyes, which had been a little out of focus, were
sharpening. “I’m like I am,” he said. “And I don’t like to see Terry sitting around boozing with some nosy goddamn gumshoe. What are you doing around here anyway?”

The left hook had taken some of the starch out of him. His voice was less assertive, more petulant. But it hadn’t made him any sweeter.

“I’m a private detective looking for a stolen rare book, the Godwulf Manuscript. Ever hear of it?”

“No.”

“How’d you know I was a private cop?”

“I didn’t till Terry said so, but you got the look. If your hair were much shorter it would be a crew cut. In the movement you learn to be suspicious. Besides, Terry’s my woman.”

“I’m not anybody’s woman, Dennis. That’s a sexist statement. I’m not a possession.”

“Oh, Christ,” I said. “Could we cut the polemics a minute. If you know of the manuscript, know this also. It has to be kept in a climate-controlled atmosphere. Otherwise it will disintegrate. And then it will be worthless both to scholars and to you, or whoever the book-nappers may be. The university hasn’t got the money to ransom it.”

“They got the money to buy football players and build a hockey rink and pay goddamn professors to teach three hours a week and write books the rest of the time.”

“I’m not into educational reform this week. Do you have any thoughts on where the missing manuscript might be?”

“If I did I wouldn’t tell you. If I didn’t I could find out, and when I found out I wouldn’t tell you then either. You aren’t peeking over the transom in some flophouse now, snoopy. You’re on a college campus and you stick out like a sore thumb. You will find out nothing at all because no
one will tell you. You and the other dinosaurs can rut around all you want—we’re not buying it.”

“Buying what?”

“Whatever you’re selling. You are the other side, man.”

“We aren’t getting anywhere,” I said. “I’ll see you.”

I left a five on the table to cover the lunch and left. It was getting dark now and the commuter traffic was starting. I felt the beer a little, and I felt the sadness of kids like that who weren’t buying it and weren’t quite sure what it was. I got my car from where I’d parked it by a hydrant. It had a parking ticket tied to the windshield wiper. Eternal vigilance, I thought, is the price of liberty. I tore the ticket up and drove home.

I was living that year on Marlborough Street, two blocks up from the Public Garden. I made myself hash and eggs for supper and read the morning’s
New York Times
while I ate. I took my coffee with me into the living room and tried looking at television. It was awful, so I shut it off and got out my carving. I’d been working on a block of hard pine for about six months now, trying to reproduce in wood the bronze statue of an Indian on horseback that stands in front of the Museum of Fine Arts. The wood was so hard that I had to sharpen the knives every time I worked. And I spent about half an hour this night with whetstone and file before I began on the pine. At eleven I turned on the news, watched it as I undressed, shut it off, and went to bed.

At some much later time, in the dark, the phone rang. I spiraled slowly upward from sleep and answered it after it had rung for what seemed a long time. The girl’s voice at the other end was thick and very slow, almost like a 45 record played at 33.

“Spenser?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s Terry … help me.”

“Where are you?”

“Eighty Hemenway Street, apartment three.”

“Ten minutes,” I said, and rolled out of bed.

It was 3:05 in the morning when I got into my car and headed for Hemenway Street. It wasn’t till 3:15 when I got there. Three
A.M.
traffic in Boston is rarely a serious problem.

Hemenway Street, on the other hand, often is. It is a short street of shabby apartment buildings, near the university, and for no better reason than Haight-Ashbury had, or the East Village, it had become the place for street people. On the walls of the building Maoist slogans were scrawled in red paint. On a pillar at the entrance to the street was a proclamation of Gay Liberation. There were various recommendations about pigs being offed scrawled on the sidewalk. I left my car double-parked outside 80 Hemenway and tried the front door. It was locked. There were no doorbells to push. I took my gun out, reversed it, and broke the glass with the handle. Then I reached around and turned the dead lock and opened the door from the inside.

Number three was down the hall, right rear. There were bicycles with tire locks lining both walls, and some indeterminate litter behind them. Terry’s door was locked. I knocked; no answer. I knocked again and heard something faint, like the noise of a kitten. The corridor was narrow. I braced my back against the wall opposite the door and drove my heel, with 195 pounds behind it, against the door next to the knob. The inside jamb splintered, and the door tore open and banged violently against the wall as it opened.

Inside all the lights were on. The first thing I saw was Dennis Goldilocks lying on his back with his mouth open, his arms outspread, and a thick patch of tacky and blackening blood covering much of his chest. Near him on her hands and knees was Terry Orchard. Her hair was loose
and falling forward as though she were trying to dry it in the sun. But it wasn’t sunny in there. She wore only a pajama top with designs of Snoopy and the Red Baron on it, and it was from her that the faint kitten sounds were coming. She swayed almost rhythmically back and forth making no progress, moving in no direction, just swaying and mewing. Between her and Dennis on the floor was a small white-handled gun. It or something had been fired in the room; I could smell it.

I knelt beside the blond boy and felt for the big pulse in his neck. The minute I touched his skin I knew I’d never feel the pulse. He was cool already and getting colder. I turned to Terry. She still swayed, head down and sick. I could smell something vaguely medicinal on her breath. Her breath was heaving and her eyes were slits. I pulled her to her feet, and held her, one arm around her back. She was almost all the way under. I couldn’t tell from what, but whatever it was, it was an o.d.

I walked her into the bathroom, got her pajama shirt off, and got her under the shower. I turned the water on warm and then slowly to full cold and held her under. She quivered and struggled faintly. The sleeves of my jacket were wet up past the elbows and my shirtfront was soaked through. She pushed one hand weakly at my face and began to cry instead of mew. I held her there some more. As I held her I kept listening for footsteps behind me. The door had made a hell of a lot of noise when I kicked it open, and the gunshot must have been a loud one long before that. But the neighborhood was not, apparently, that kind of neighborhood. Not the kind to look into gunshots and doors splintering and such. The kind to pull the covers up over the head and burrow the face in the pillow and say screw it. Better him than me.

I got a hand up to her neck and felt her pulse. It was
quicker—I guessed about sixty. I got her out of the shower and across to the bedroom. I didn’t see a robe, so I pulled the blanket off the bed and wrapped it around her. Then we waltzed to the kitchen. I got water boiling and found some instant coffee and a cup. She was babbling now, nothing coherent, but the words were intelligible. I made coffee with her balanced half over one hip, my arm around her and the blanket caught in my fist to keep her warm. Then back to the living room to the day bed—there were no chairs in the kitchen—and sat her down.

She pushed aside the coffee and spilled some on herself and cried out at the pain, but I got her to drink some. And again some. And one more time. Her eyes were open now and her breath was much less shallow. I could see her rib cage swell and settle regularly beneath the blanket. She finished the coffee.

I stood her up and we began to walk back and forth across the apartment, which wasn’t much of a walk. There was the living room, a small bedroom, a bath, and a kitchenette, barely big enough to stand in. The living room, in which the quick and dead were joined, held only a card table, a steamer trunk with a lamp on it, and the studio couch on whose bare mattress Terry Orchard had drunk her coffee. The blanket I had pulled off the bed had been its only adornment, and as I looked into the bedroom I could see a cheap deal bureau beside the bed. On it was a candle stuck in a Chianti bottle beneath a bare light bulb hanging from a ceiling.

I looked down at Terry Orchard. There were tears running down her cheeks, and less of her weight leaned on me.

“Sonova bitch,” she said. “Sonova bitch, sonova bitch, sonova bitch.”

“When you can talk to me, talk to me. Till then keep walking,” I said.

She just kept saying sonova bitch, in a dead singsong voice, and I found that as we walked we were keeping time to the curse, left, right, sonova bitch. I realized that the broken door was still wide open and as we sonova-bitched by on the next swing I kicked it shut with my heel. A few more turns and she fell silent, then she said, half question—

“Spenser?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh my God, Spenser.”

“Yeah.”

We stopped walking and she turned against me with her face hard against my chest. She clenched onto my shirt with both fists and seemed to be trying to blend into me. We stood motionless like that for a long time. Me with my arms around her. Both wet and dripping and the dead boy with his wide sightless eyes not looking at us.

“Sit down,” I said after a while. “Drink some more coffee. We have to talk.”

She didn’t want to let go of me, but I pried her off and sat her on the day bed. She huddled inside the blanket, her wet hair plastered down around her small head, while I made some more coffee.

We sat together on the day bed, sipping coffee. I had the impulse to say, “What’s new?” but squelched it. Instead I said, “Tell me about it now.”

“Oh, God, I can’t.”

“You have to.”

“I want to get out of here. I want to run.”

“Nope. You have to sit here and tell me what happened. From the very first thing that happened to the very last thing that happened. And you have to do it now,
because you are in very big trouble and I have to know exactly how big.”

“Trouble? Jesus, you think I shot him, don’t you?”

“The thought occurred to me.”

“I didn’t shoot him. They shot him. The ones that made me take the dope. The ones that made me shoot the gun.”

“Okay, but start with the first thing. Whose apartment is this?”

“Ours, Dennis’s and mine.” She nodded at the floor and then started and looked away quickly.

“Dennis is Dennis Powell, right?”

“Yes.”

“And you live together and are not married, right?”

“Yes.”

“When did the people come who did this?”

“I don’t know exactly—it was late, about two thirty maybe.”

“Who were they?”

“I don’t know. Two men. Dennis seemed to know them.”

“What did they do?”

“They knocked on the door. Dennis got up—we weren’t asleep, we never go to sleep till very late—and asked, ‘Who is it?’ I couldn’t hear what they said. But he let them in. That’s why I think he knew them. When he opened the door they came in very fast. One of them pushed him against the wall and the other one came into the bedroom and dragged me out of bed. Neither one said anything. Dennis said something like, ‘Hey, what’s the idea?’ Or ‘Hey, what’s going on?’ One of them had a gun and he held it on both of us. He never said anything. Neither one. It was spooky. The other guy reached in his coat pocket and came out with my gun.”

“Is that your gun on the floor?” I asked.

She wouldn’t look but nodded.

“Okay, then what?” I asked.

“He handed my gun to the first man, the man with the gun, and then he grabbed me and turned me around and put his hand over my mouth and bent my arm up behind me and the other man shot Dennis twice.”

“With your gun?”

“Yes.”

“Then what?”

“Then—” She paused and closed her eyes and shook her head.

“Go on,” I said.

“Then the man that shot Dennis made me hold the gun in my hand and shoot it into Dennis. He held my wrist and squeezed my finger on the trigger.” She said it in a rush and the words nearly ran together.