Five Classic Spenser Mysteries (88 page)

“And the manuscript, what about that?” I twisted a little more shirtfront up in my hand and lifted him up on tiptoe for emphasis.

“I didn’t have nothing to do with that; that was Dennis and Hayden. Hayden arranged it. I never even saw it.”

“Okay, one more: Was Powell dealing hard drugs on campus?”

“Yeah.”

“What?”

“Skag, mostly.”

“Where did he get it?”

“I don’t know.”

I slammed him against the wall again.

“Honest to God, Mr. Spenser, I don’t know. Ask Hayden, him and Dennis were close as a bastard. He might know. I don’t know.”

“How did Dennis get killed?”

“I don’t know.”

“How did Cathy Connelly get killed?”

“I don’t know, honest to Christ, I don’t know about any of that.”

He was shaking and his teeth chattered.

I believed him. But I had some hard facts for the first time. I had Hayden connected with Powell. I had Powell connected with heroin, which meant mob connections. If Powell and Hayden were that close, I had Hayden connected to the mob. I had Hayden and Powell both connected to the Godwulf Manuscript, and I had the Godwulf Manuscript connected to Broz. More than that, I had
Cathy Connelly connected to both Hayden and Terry Orchard. In fact, I had Hayden connected with two murders.

“Let me go, Mr. Spenser. I don’t know anything else.”

I realized I was still holding Tabor half off the ground. I let him go. He sank onto the bed and began to cry.

I said, “Everyone gets scared when they are over-matched in the dark; it’s not something to be ashamed of, kid.”

He didn’t stop crying, and I couldn’t think of anything else to say. So I left. I had a lot of information, but I had an unpleasant taste in my mouth. Maybe on the way home I could stop and rough up a Girl Scout.

It was raining when I came out, a cold rain about a degree above snow, and in the dark the wetness made the city look better than it was. The light diffused and reflected off things that in the daylight were dull and ugly.

It was nearly eight o’clock. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. I went to a steak house and ate. Halfway through my steak I caught sight of myself in the mirror behind the bar. I looked like someone who ought to eat alone. I didn’t look in the mirror again.

It was twenty minutes of ten as I parked in front of my apartment. In front of me was parked an aggressively nondescript car made noticeable by the big whip antenna folded forward over the roof and clipped down. It was Quirk.

When I got out of the car he was waiting for me, and I said, “What the hell do you want, Lieutenant?”

“I want to talk with you. Let’s go inside.”

Quirk was great for small talk. When we got to my apartment I offered him a drink. He said, “Thanks.”

“Okay, Lieutenant, what do you want to talk about? How poor Cathy Connelly fell in the bathtub and hit her little head?”

“What have you got?” Quirk said.

“What do you mean what have I got? You taking a survey for H.E.W.?”

“What have you got on the Connelly thing and on Lowell Hayden and the Powell murder?”

“Say, you must be some kind of investigator; you know all about what I’m up to.”

Quirk stood up, walked across the room, and looked out my window. He took a long pull at the bourbon and water in his hand and turned around and looked at me.

“I’m trying, Spenser, I’m trying to ask you polite, and treat you like you weren’t a wise-ass sonova bitch, because I owe you. Because maybe I need you to do some stuff for me. Why don’t you try to help me through this by trying out your nightclub act on someone else? What have you got for me?”

Quirk was right. I felt lousy about Mark Tabor, and I was taking it out on Quirk. “I got three categories of things,” I said. “What I know and can prove; what I know and can’t prove; and what I don’t know.”

Quirk sat in my armchair and looked at me and listened.

“Here’s what I know and can prove. Lowell Hayden and Cathy Connelly were lovers. They spent at least one night together in a Holiday Inn in Peabody—Peabody, what a romantic!—and I’ve got a note he wrote that locks him up on that one. Lowell Hayden and Dennis Powell were in on the theft of the Godwulf Manuscript. Hayden was an anonymous member of a student radical group called SCACE. Powell was dealing heroin. I’ve got a witness that will confirm that. I told Joe Broz I’d stop messing around with the case if the manuscript were returned. The next day it was returned.”

“But you’re still messing around,” Quirk said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I lied.”

“Broz probably won’t like that.”

“Probably won’t,” I said.

“What else can you prove?”

“Nothing. But here’s what I know anyway. Hayden is tied to Broz. It was after I talked to him the first time that Broz warned me off. This afternoon when I talked to him he said he had people who would kill me if he said so. You and I know where to find people like that, but your average teacher of medieval lit doesn’t. If Powell was dealing heroin, he was tied to the mob too. That’s too big a coincidence—that Powell and Hayden should both be mob connected and connected to each other and not have it mean something. Hayden had to have something to do with drug pushing. That’s the only thing that Broz would have in common with a university community. More connection: Hayden’s girl friend was a roommate of Powell’s girl friend, Cathy Connelly and Terry Orchard, and if Terry’s story is true, it would be Cathy Connelly who would have known that Terry had a gun, and where she kept it, and how to get it. If Terry’s story is true, the killing of Powell was not amateur work. Now who would have both professional connections and access to knowledge of Terry’s gun?”

Quirk said, “Hayden.”

“And,” I said, “the killing of Cathy Connelly was an amateur production, even though Yates seemed to like it. Powell was dead and Terry was in Charles Street at the time. Of this interlocking quartet who does that leave?”

“Hayden.”

“Clues must be your game, Lieutenant,” I said. “You’re two for two.”

“Got some more?”

“Yeah, here’s the hard stuff. Why did Powell get killed? Why did Terry get framed? Why did Cathy Connelly get killed? One point—Hayden is not playing with fifty-two
cards. I talked to him today, there’re pieces missing. Kidnaping that manuscript sounds just about right for him. So if he’s it in this game, it may be harder to explain because he is not normal. The reasons he would do things are not predictable reasons.”

“You got a nice assortment of possibilities,” Quirk said. “So far you’re into organized crime, dope pushing, theft, radical politics, adultery, and murder. I’m not saying I agree with you. But if I did, Hayden would look good to me. He would be the handle, and I’d keep turning it until something opened.” Quirk stood up. “If you’re messing with Joe Broz, you might turn up dead some morning. I’d better know the name of this witness in case you do.”

“Tabor,” I said. “Mark Tabor, seventy-seven Westland Ave, apartment forty-one.”

“Thanks,” Quirk said. “Thanks for the drink, too. See you.”

I let him out. He was clearly sick with worry about me getting killed.

The next morning I went over to the university and put a tail on Hayden. I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I knew he was involved in two killings and that Terry was involved in none, but I couldn’t prove it. I could nail him for manuscript-naping or whatever, but I was willing to bet that the university wouldn’t press charges, and even if they did, with a good lawyer and a first offense what would happen to him? I could threaten to tell his wife about Cathy Connelly, but he wasn’t likely to confess to murder to placate his wife. But he knew I knew, and it had to bother him. He might do something stupid, and if I kept after him I might catch him doing it.

So in the fresh of morning when Hayden showed up for his nine o’clock class in pre-Shakespearean drama I was lurking about the north end of the corridor, and when he came out fifty minutes later, I was at the south end of the corridor getting a drink from the bubbler. While he conferred with students in his office about image patterns in
The Play of the Weather
and
Gammer Gurton’s Needle,
I studied the announcements and grad school advertisements on the bulletin board down the corridor.

Surveillance on a guy that knows you is hard, and it’s much harder when you’re trying to do it alone. In the long run it’s not possible. Eventually Hayden would catch me
and there was nothing to do about it. On the other hand, before he did I might catch him, and anyway, I didn’t know what else to do.

Hayden ate lunch in his office from a brown paper bag and a thermos. I didn’t. By three o’clock that afternoon I was pretty sure how Hayden would spot me. He’d hear my stomach rolling. At four Hayden went to his
Beowulf
class. As soon as he was safely into his lecture I ducked out and bought half a dozen hamburgers at McDonald’s. On the way back I bought a pint of Wild Turkey bourbon at a package store and was back in time to pick Hayden up after class and follow him to the parking lot.

Following him through the rush hour traffic was two-handed work, and I didn’t get to my supper until we were through the Callahan Tunnel and into East Boston. By the time we got to Lynn Shore Drive I’d eaten three cold hamburgers and swallowed about two inches of the pint. A cold McDonald’s hamburger is halfway between a jelly doughnut and a hockey puck, but the nine-dollar bourbon helped.

I sat at the head of Hayden’s street with the motor idling and the heater on until nine o’clock, when I ran low on gas and had to shut off the motor. By ten fifteen I was cold. The hamburgers were long gone, though the memory lingered on the back of my throat, and I was almost through the bourbon. During that time Hayden had not come to me and confessed. He had not had a visit from Joe Broz or Phil, or the Ghost of Christmas Future. The Ceremony of Moloch had not shown up and sung “The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi” under his window. At eleven o’clock the lights in his living room went out and I went home—stiff, sore, tired, crabby, dyspeptic, cold, and about five-eighths drunk.

The next day we did it all again. This time I brought
along a satchel of sandwiches and a large thermos of coffee. At the end of the day my stomach felt better, but I didn’t know anything more, and I had discovered new dimensions of boredom.

On the third day things picked up. It was raining again. Hard and steady. Everything was frosted with slush. Hayden had a class from four to five, and it was dark when I stood in a doorway across the street and watched him get in his car in the parking lot. He was turning over the engine when two guys got in with him. One in front, one in back. The windshield wipers went on, then the headlights. The car began to back out of its space. My car was parked on a hydrant one hundred feet from the doorway and I was in it with the motor running when Hayden’s car turned out of the parking lot. I stayed close behind him. Too close really, but it was dark and wet and I was worried. The two guys that got in his car didn’t look like poets to me, and I didn’t want to lose Hayden. He was all I had, and if something became of him, nothing much good would become of Terry Orchard.

We turned south on Huntington Avenue, past the new high-rise apartments, a hospital, another college, and out onto the Jamaicaway. Big houses, mostly brick, set well back and sumptuous, lined the road. Elms that had survived the Dutch disease arched over it, and to the right in an extended hollow was Jamaica Pond, wooded and grassy under the gray slush. Hayden’s car pulled off the road and parked on the shoulder. I drove on by, turned left into a side street beyond, and parked.

I cut through the backyard of a large brick Dutch colonial house on the corner and came out opposite where Hayden’s car was parked on the shoulder across the street. I didn’t see any of them. The hard rain and warm weather were causing the wet slush to steam and a fog to rise from
the rotting ice on the pond. I ran across the street and came up behind Hayden’s car. It was empty. I realized that I had my gun in my hand though I didn’t recall taking it from the hip holster. I stopped and listened. No sound but the rain and the cars on the Jamaicaway whooshing past on their way to Dedham and Milton. My stomach buzzed with tension.

There were tracks in the slush leading down toward the pond. I followed them into the mist. Closer to the pond it was so dense I could only see a few feet ahead.

I half expected to see Beowulf jump out of the bog and rip the arm off something.… “My God, Holmes, those are the footprints of a gigantic hound.…” I was wearing a hip-length wool jacket, and the rain was soaking through along my shoulders. The wet wool smelled like a grammar school coatroom. Ahead of me I heard a kind of low wail. I stopped still in the dark. In front of me there were indistinct figures. I looked at them obliquely as I’d learned to do a long time ago in Korea, and they came into sharper focus. Hayden was the one making the mournful noise. He seemed to be having trouble standing, and one of the other men had him under the arms. He stepped away and Hayden slumped to his knees and began to wail louder. The man who hadn’t been holding him brought a long-barreled pistol from his side and placed it against the back of Hayden’s head. I turned sideways as you do on the pistol range, and yelled, “Freeze!”

The guy with the gun snapped around and I felt the thump in my side simultaneous to the muzzle flash and before I heard the shot. It felt like I’d been hit in the ribs with a brick. I staggered, steadied myself, let out my breath, and brought my gun down on the middle of his chest … slack … squeeze … and my own shot
exploded. He fell over backward. His buddy was shooting now, and a bullet thunked into a tree beside me. Out of the edge of my vision I saw Hayden crawling for some bushes. I ducked behind the tree. There was no pain yet, but my whole left side was numb and I felt a little dizzy. It was quiet again. Up on the Jamaicaway the headlights were fuzzy in the fog and the whoosh of their passage was cottony. The rain droned down. I slid down the tree and stretched out, belly down in the slush, and peered around the edge of the tree. I couldn’t see anyone. Still on my belly I began to inch backward.