Five Classic Spenser Mysteries (92 page)

His legs went out from beneath him, and he dropped to his knees and back onto his heels. “Please don’t. Please don’t. Please don’t.”

Phil liked it. He cackled to himself.

“What are you going to do to my husband?” Mrs. Hayden asked.

Phil cackled again. “I’m going to shoot him.”

Mrs. Hayden jumped at him. The gun made a muffled thud as Phil fired. It must have hit her, but it didn’t stop her. She got hold of his gun arm with both hands and bit into his wrist. She was making a sound that was somewhere between a moan and a growl. The gun thudded again. I went over the bed at Phil. With his left forearm he cuffed me across the face. It was like running into a tree branch. I sprawled on the bed, rolled onto the floor, and came up for him again. Mrs. Hayden had her teeth sunk in his arm. He was pounding the side of her head with his left hand, and trying to get his right loose to use the gun. I got on his back this time and got my right arm around his neck. He moved away from the bed and I rode his back like a kid, wrapping my legs around his middle. I was trying to get my left hand against the back of his head and lock my right hand against my left forearm. If I could do that, I could strangle him.

It was not easy to do. Phil kept his chin tucked down and I couldn’t get my forearm against his windpipe. He reached backward with his left hand and got hold of my hair. He bowed his back and tried to flip me over forward.
He couldn’t, because I had my legs scissored around his middle. But the effort tumbled him forward and all three of us went down in a pile. Mrs. Hayden was beneath us, her teeth still sunk into Phil’s forearm, her hands still clutching the gun. Phil let go of my hair with his left hand and his thumb felt for my eye. I pressed my face against his back to protect it. He had a sweaty, rancid smell. I got the fingers of my left hand hooked under his nostrils and pulled. He grunted and his chin came up an inch. It was enough. My right forearm slipped in against his Adam’s apple. I put the right hand on the left forearm and made a pivot of it, bringing my left hand up behind his head. Then I squeezed.

I could feel the muscles in his neck bulge. It was like trying to strangle a hydrant. He gurgled, and I squeezed harder. He was incredibly strong. He heaved himself up, carrying me on his back and dragging Mrs. Hayden up too. The gun thudded three more times. He tried to break the hold by lunging back against the wall and knocking me loose, but he couldn’t. He clawed left-handed at my forearm, then with his fingernails. The gun thudded again and again until all eight rounds were gone. I had no idea what they were hitting. I was concentrating everything I had on strangling Phil. My whole life was invested in the pressure of my forearm on his throat.

He gurgled again, and I could feel his chest heaving in the struggle to breathe. He was scratching at my forearm like he was digging for the bone. I squeezed. The blood pounded in my ears from the effort and I couldn’t see anything but a dance of dust motes where my face stayed pressed against his shoulder. Phil made a noise like a crow cawing, turned very slowly in a complete turn, and fell over backward on top of me. He stopped clawing at my arm. He made no noise. He was inert. Mrs. Hayden was
inert on top of both of us, her teeth still in his arm. I kept squeezing, unable to see with his back pressed against my face, unable to feel anything but the strain of my arm against his neck. I squeezed. I don’t know how long I squeezed, but it was surely for a long time after it made any difference.

When I let go I could barely open my hand. I was slippery with sweat and too tired to move right away. I lay there panting with the weight of Phil and Judy Hayden on me. When the dancing motes began to dissipate I dragged myself out from under the body.

Phil was dead. I realized that Phil and the floor and my leg were sticky with blood—Mrs. Hayden’s blood. I touched her and she didn’t move. I felt for her pulse. She had none. She’d bled to death hanging on to Phil’s arm. Her teeth were still bitten into it. Phil had emptied his gun in desperation. There was no way to tell how many had hit her. I didn’t want to know. I stood up. The room was a shambles. Blood was smeared everywhere. The night stand was tipped over. So was the television set. The bed was broken. I was aware that my side hurt. There was some blood staining my shirt. The wound had opened again.

I remembered Hayden. I looked around. I didn’t see him. He was going to get few merit badges for
semper fidelis.
I started for the door. The chain lock was still on it. The door that Phil had come through locked from the other side. I went over to the bathroom. It was locked.

I said, “Hayden.”

No answer. I banged on the door. Nothing. I felt crazy and hot. I backed up three steps and ran right through the door. It was thin and tore from its hinges. No Hayden. I pulled the shower curtain aside and there he was. In the tub, sitting down with his knees drawn up to his chest.

He looked at me and said, “Please don’t.”

I reached down, took the front of his shirt in both hands, and yanked him up out of the tub. There was a peculiar smell about him and I realized he’d wet himself. I was revolted. I swung him around, the way a trackman throws the hammer, and slung him into the bedroom. He stumbled, almost fell, and stopped, looking down at his wife. I came beside him. I took his chin in my hand and raised his head. I put my face up against his, so that our noses touched. I could barely speak, and my body was shivering. I said, “I have killed three people to save your miserable goddamn ass. Your wife took about six slugs in the stomach and bled to death in great agony to save your miserable goddamn ass. I will call up Martin Quirk in a minute, and he will come here to arrest you. You will tell him everything that you know and everything that I want you to tell him and everything that he asks you. If you do not, I will get Quirk to put us alone together in a cell in the cellar, and I will beat you to death. I promise you that I will.”

He said, “Yes, sir.” When I let him go he didn’t move—just stood there looking down at his wife with his hands clasped behind his back. I went to the phone and dialed a number I knew too well.

The room was busy. The people from the coroner’s office had come and taken Phil away, and Mrs. Hayden. The hotel doctor had come and rebandaged my side and told me to go in to outpatient this afternoon and have some new stitches in the wound. Beside the broken TV set Frank Belson stood in front of Lowell Hayden, who sat in the only chair in the room. Hayden was talking and Belson was writing things down as he talked. Quirk was there and three uniformed cops and a couple of plainclothes types were standing around looking shrewd and keeping an eye out for clues. The occupant of the next room had been whacked on the head and locked in a closet and was now planning to sue the hotel. The house man was trying to persuade him not to.

Quirk was as immaculate and dapper as ever. He had on a belted tweed topcoat, pale pigskin gloves.

“Not bad,” he said. “He had a gun and you didn’t and you took him? Not bad at all. Sometimes you amaze me, Spenser.”

“We took him,” I said. “Me and Mrs. Hayden.”

“Either way,” Quirk said.

“How about the kid?” I said.

“Orchard? I already called. They’re processing her out
now. She’ll be on the street by the time we get through here.”

“Yates?”

Quirk smiled with his mouth shut. “Captain Yates is at this moment telling the people in the pressroom about another triumph for truth, justice, and the American way.”

“He’s got all the moves, hasn’t he?” I said.

One of the plainclothes dicks snickered, and Quirk looked at him hard enough to hurt.

“How about Joe Broz?”

Quirk shrugged. “We got a pickup order out on him. How long we can keep him when we get him, you can guess as well as I can. In the last fifteen years we’ve arrested him eight times and made one charge stick—loitering. It will help if Hayden sticks to his story.”

I looked at Hayden, sitting in the chair. He was talking now in his deep, phony voice. Lecturing Belson. Explaining in detail every aspect of the case and explaining its connection with the movement, drawing inference, elaborating implications, demonstrating significance, and suggesting symbolic meaning. Belson looked as if he had a headache. Hayden was enjoying himself very much.

“He’ll stick,” I said. “Imagine him lecturing a jury. Your only problem will be getting him to stop.”

The phone rang. One of the plainclothes cops answered and held it out to Quirk.

“For you, Lieutenant.”

Quirk answered, listened, said “Okay,” and hung up.

“Orchard’s parents can’t be located, Spenser. She says she wants you to come down and pick her up. How’s your side?”

“It only hurts when I laugh.”

“Okay, beat it. We’ll be in touch about the coroner’s inquest.”

I looked at Hayden again. He was still talking to Belson, his rich voice rolling out and filling the room. For him, a big, homely, masculine woman had taken six .45 slugs in the stomach. The press arrived and a photographer in what looked like a leather trench coat was snapping Hayden’s picture. Hayden looked positively triumphant.
Le mouvement, c’est moi.
Jesus!

Outside the room the corridor was crowded with people. Two uniformed cops kept them at bay. As I shoved through, someone asked what had happened in there.

“It was a lover’s quarrel,” I said, “with the world.”

I wondered what I meant. I didn’t even remember where I got the phrase. Downstairs the lobby was as refined and ornate as ever. I went through it into the midafternoon sunshine. The hotel was dwarfed by the enormous insurance building that rose behind it. The sides of the skyscraper were reflecting glass, and the sun off the glass was dazzling. Tallest building in Boston. Excelsior, I thought. Tower of Babel, I thought. My car was parked in front of the library. I got in and drove the short block to police headquarters. I parked out front by the yellow curb on Berkeley Street. It’s the only place in the area where there are always parking spaces.

I got out of the car arthritically. When I straightened up she was outside the building, on the top step. Squinting against the light, she was wearing a dapple gray suede coat with white fur trim at collar, cuffs, hem, and down the front where it buttoned. Her hands were thrust deep in her pockets and a shoulder purse hung against her left side. She was wearing black boots with three-inch heels, and looking up at her from street level, she looked a lot taller
than I knew she was. Her hair was loose and dark against the high white fur collar.

Neither of us moved for a minute. We stood in silence in the bright afternoon and looked at each other. Then she came down the steps.

I said, “Hi.”

She said, “Hi.”

I went around and opened the door to my car on her side. She got in, tucking the skirt of her long coat modestly under as she slid in. I went around and got in my side.

She said, “Do you have a cigarette?”

I said, “No. But I can stop and pick some up. There’s a Liggett’s on the corner.”

She said, “If you would. I’d like to buy some make-up too.”

I pulled over and parked in the alley between the parking garage and the drugstore at the corner of Berkeley and Boylston streets. As we got out she said, “I don’t have any money, can you lend me some?”

I nodded. We went into the drugstore. It was a big one—a soda fountain down one side, bottles of almost everything on the other three walls, three wide aisles with shelves selling heating pads and baby strollers, paperback books and candy and Christmas lights. Terry bought a package of Eve cigarettes, opened it, took one out, lit it, and inhaled half of it. She let the smoke out slowly through her nose. I paid. Then we went to the make-up counter. She bought eye liner, eye shadow, make-up base, rouge, lipstick, and face powder. I paid.

I said, “Would you like an ice cream cone?”

She nodded and I bought us two ice cream cones. Vanilla for me, butter pecan for her. Two scoops. We went back out to my car and got in.

“Could we drive around for a little while?” she asked.

“Sure.”

I drove on down Berkeley Street and onto Storrow Drive. At Leverett Circle I went over the dam to the Cambridge side and drove back up along the river on Memorial Drive. When we got to Magazine Beach we parked. She used the rearview mirror to put on some of the make-up. I looked across the gray river at the railroad yards. Behind them, half-hidden by the elevated extension of the Mass Turnpike, was Boston University Field, with high-rise dorms built up around the stadium. When I was a kid it had been Braves Field until the Braves moved to Milwaukee and B.U. bought the field. I remembered going there with my father, the excitement building as we went past the ticket taker and up from the dark under stands into the bright green presence of the diamond. The Dodgers and the Giants used to come here then. Dixie Walker, Clint Hartung, Sibbi Sisti, and Tommy Holmes. I wondered if they were still alive.

Terry Orchard finished her make-up and stowed it all away in her shoulder purse.

“Spenser?”

“Yeah?”

“What can I say? Thank you seems pretty silly.”

“Don’t say anything, kid. You know and I know. Let it be.”

She leaned forward and held my face in her hands and kissed me hard on the mouth and held it for a long time. The fresh make-up was sweet smelling. When she finished, her lipstick was badly smeared.

“Gotcha,” I said. “Let’s go home.”

We drove on out Soldier’s Field Road toward Newton. She slid over in the seat beside me and put her head
against my shoulder while I drove, and smoked another cigarette. There was a maroon car in the driveway of her house when we got there.

“My father,” she said. “The police must have reached him.” As I pulled up to the curb the front door opened and Terry’s mother and father appeared on the porch.

“Shit,” she said.

“I’ll let you out here and keep going, love,” I said. “This is family business.”

“Spenser, when am I going to see you again?”

“I don’t know. We don’t live in the same neighborhood, love. But I’m around. Maybe I’ll come by sometime and take you to lunch.”