Dead Heat

by Linda Barnes

  “I suppose this is now an official inquiry?”

  “You might say so.”

  “Get the stenographer in here, then. Make it nice and legal.”

  “That ain’t necessary.”

  “Oh, but it is. Without one, I do my famous impersonation of a clam.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Menlo’s right hand clenched instinctively into a fist.

  “And my lawyer will find it lamentably easy to demonstrate that you did not bring me here with any official purpose in mind, but were just having a slow night and decided to harass an innocent citizen to pass the time.”

  That brought the steno in. It also got Menlo’s feet tapping in the same drunken rhythm they habitually beat when Spraggue’s needling pierced the skin. Not for the first time, Spraggue thought that he really ought to measure the interval it took to get the captain’s legs shaking. He never clocked it; he continually assumed that each present encounter was the final one—that he’d never have to see Menlo’s big, dumb boxer’s mug again. But there always seemed to be an encore, one more session with Menlo barking harebrained questions and Spraggue managing not to get hit in the mouth.

  “Okay,” Menlo had said once the stenographer was situated, “what were you doing at the reservoir on the afternoon of April 16, 1982?”

  “Running.”

  Menlo’s questions droned on, augmented by dire warnings concerning the fate of private citizens who persisted in screwing up police investigations. Spraggue quit listening and started imagining horrible tortures for Pete Collatos, who’d gotten him into this mess in the first place. But his mind kept picturing Kathleen … Kathleen in Celia’s long flowered dress … Kathleen shrugging out of her clothes in his dressing room … Damn. A night that should have been an occasion to remember, to savor, shot to hell.

  “Where ya want me to drop ya?” the cabbie asked.

  Unwillingly, Spraggue opened his eyes. His fingers closed on a card in his pocket. After all that waste of time, Menlo had actually had the nerve to dole out his card along with the admonition to call with any newly remembered details of the shooting. Spraggue read the embossed face of the card once, ripped it across. “Turn onto Brattle,” he said. “Stop in front of Reading International.”

  Usually he walked to the theater from his house, but today, pressed for time, he’d driven straight in from the reservoir. Found a damn good parking place. A tow zone, true, but he couldn’t recall ever seeing a car towed in the Square. Particularly a car with a Cambridge resident sticker on the windshield. If the cops really needed the parking fee, they victimized a car with New York plates. Vengeance for what the Yankees routinely did to the Red Sox.

  When he’d located the empty space, smack on Brattle, he’d considered it a good omen. Based on the disaster his evening had turned into, his car had probably been stolen.

  He paid off the cabbie and glanced at his watch. No point in calling Kathleen. She’d be deep in dreamless sleep by now—unless she’d invited one of the other actors home as his understudy.

  The Porsche was still there.

  He drove up Brattle, sped by Fayerweather Street, and only realized after he had passed it that he’d never had any intention of going home.

  FOUR

  He caught the tail end of the amber light and veered left at the Fresh Pond Parkway. The normally jammed hairpin turns that would spew him out onto Soldiers Field Road were wide open. He rounded them cautiously in spite of an urge for screeching speed; the Buckingham Browne & Nichols School parking lot was a known cop hangout and he’d had a recent overdose of law enforcement.

  Flicking on the radio, he got static. Most of the decent FM stations had limited broadcasting hours. Before pushing the WBCN button, he switched to an AM all-news station to see what the media was making of the attack on Donagher.

  The WEEI talk show broke for a commercial as soon as he got in tuned in and he hurriedly lowered the volume on an inane, repetitive, advertising jingle. He twisted the knob back up when he recognized the voice on the air.

  Frank Bartolo, no doubt born Francesco, was a fixture in Massachusetts politics. His rasping, heavily accented voice was not the perfect instrument for radio, but he’d done his own commercials for school committee, for district attorney, for state representative, and now that he was after a seat in the U.S. Senate, he saw no need to hire spokesmen. Not that he was actively campaigning at the moment. Oh no. He was merely commenting on the disturbing news that someone had taken a potshot at his rival—ultraliberal, free-spending, anti-religion-family-and-apple-pie Senator Donagher—managing to voice his concern in a way that implied a cheap publicity stunt as the likeliest motivation for such a dreadful, albeit understandable, act. Maybe, in his never-ending quest for equal exposure, Bartolo would be forced to run the marathon. Spraggue envisioned the pear-shaped, balding, fiftyish Bartolo panting up Heartbreak Hill and one corner of his mouth turned up in a wry grin. Do him good.

  He punched the WBCN button and got blasted by New Wave rock. Late at night, the tamest of radio stations loosened up; WBCN went wild.

  He swung into a legal U-turn, then cut a right onto Parsons Street. Because Aunt Mary lived there, he knew every shortcut to Chestnut Hill. For most of the ride, he tried to convince himself that the family mansion, Mary’s home, was his destination; never too late to call on Aunt Mary. But he felt drawn to the site of the afternoon’s shooting, probably, he realized with a grimace, by Menlo’s arrogant command to steer clear.

  The area was as dead as the denizens of the Boston College graveyard across the road, pitch dark in contrast to the cemetery’s brightly lit boundaries. Was B.C. concerned about the possible desecration of tombstones? Or were courting couples rather than midnight vandals the object of the excess wattage? Did glowing lights instead of college deans now serve in loco parentis at the predominantly Catholic school? Briefly, Spraggue considered the residents of the graveyard; was it true that, once granted tenure, Boston College professors never left the grounds?

  The eerie solitude prickled at the back of his neck, made him press the car door gently shut instead of slamming it. He yanked open the trunk and pulled a flashlight out of the toolbox that he considered his “scene of the crime” kit even though he was careful, since his retirement, not to refer to it as such. The flashlight issued a strong clear beam. To save the aged batteries, he clicked it off and waited for his eyes to adjust to darkness.

  Only distant high-rise apartment house lights coupled with the occasional honk of a riled automobile reminded him that he was on the edge of a major city, in the middle of an urban sea. The wind sent gooseflesh up his arms. He zipped his jacket, turned up his collar, spat out the last sour taste of police headquarters’ vending machine coffee.

  When he finally moved, his footsteps echoed, shuffling against the hard ground, the tufted grass.

  He located the gnarled elm behind which Donagher had taken refuge through a mixture of memory and dead reckoning. The cops had altered the landmarks; the battered, metal garbage can knocked down and used as a vaulting block to aid in scrambling over the high fence had been righted. It had left its mark: a mound of crumpled, brown paper bags, beer bottles, orange peels. And its unappetizing scent. Spraggue shut his eyes and recreated the scene on the inside of his eyelids until he was certain that he could direct a group of actors in a docu-drama reconstruction of the sniping. He tried to confirm his memory by using the flashlight to check footprints, but cops had plodded over the site, their hard-soled shoes unique in a forest of running sneakers.

  He drew an imaginary line from Donagher’s tree to the path, inched along it, shining a cone of light at the ground, stooping to shift marble-sized pebbles, examine wormlike twigs.

  Then he climbed the fence and began a survey of the trees surrounding the target elm. More likely to find the track of a bullet here, if the sniper had been a decent shot … if he’d used bullets, not blanks.

  He was crouched in dense underbrush, poking a knothole with the point of his pocketkn
ife, when he heard the footsteps.

  Smothering the flashbeam in the soft earth, he froze. The ground was blanketed with fallen leaves, brittle branches; they would raise a crackling alarm if he moved. He craned his neck and waited, his night-blind eyes fastened on the path.

  Some ill-advised insomniac runner? A night-shift cop on casual patrol? An ardent journalist with photographer in tow? Spraggue had never run into any of those obliging criminals who are irresistibly drawn back to the scene of the crime. Neither had any of his cop acquaintances. Still, he stayed crouched out of sight; it was too late to spring back onto the path and declare himself. The footsteps drew nearer. Instead of passing, stopped.

  A street lamp, a full moon, a decent complement of stars—even the dimmest of lights might have made identification possible. Spraggue regretted ever using his flashlight; its brightness had ruined his night vision and only time would restore it. He inhaled softly, held the breath for a count of ten, blew it out, listened to the shuffling footsteps, peered steadfastly, unblinkingly, in their direction, as if he could defeat the darkness by the very intensity of his stare.

  There. A shadow moved. A beam of startlingly clear yellow light shot out. The intruder had a flashlight of his own. It shined briefly in Spraggue’s squinted eyes, focused on the path.

  From the whispery noises, from the changes in elevation of the beam’s source, the intruder seemed to be echoing Spraggue’s earlier movements, searching for a pebble, a button, a bullet.

  A cop?

  The muscles in Spraggue’s calves and thighs, already strained from the afternoon’s run, protested his awkward crouch. He rested his right hand, palm flat, on the ground in front of him and shifted his weight forward to the hand. Mistake. His left leg cramped suddenly and he drew a sharp involuntary breath.

  The shadow on the path straightened; the flashlight beam hovered perilously near.

  “Who’s there?” the shadow said in a nervous low voice.

  Spraggue turned his flashlight full on the path, using the other beam as a target, aiming at a point six feet high, aiming to blind.

  The man wore a dark business suit, appropriate for the chilly April night, but hardly de rigueur for running. He was tall, extremely thin, with hunched shoulders, a gawky neck, and a standout Adam’s apple. His wire-rimmed glasses reflected the light for an instant. Then, with an inarticulate cry, he took to his heels, fleeing clockwise around the reservoir, out towards Beacon Street.

  Spraggue gave agonized chase, cramped calf muscle and all. Dammit, was he going to spend his entire life racing around this accursed body of water, pursuing futilely, foolishly, those who could, with no effort, outrun him every time? He kept on in dogged anguish, hoping the man in front of him would stumble, trip over some snaky tree root. Maybe he’d be able to outrun a prone opponent.

  By the time he arrived, panting, in front of the public swimming pool, he heard the motor roar. The dark car made a screeching illegal U-turn, swung back toward downtown Boston. Spraggue, bent with pain, drenched in sweat, watched it veer out of sight with growing satisfaction.

  This driver hadn’t had the foresight to smear his license plate with mud. The tiny light over the plate picked out the red letters and numbers on the white metal like neon in the dark. Spraggue repeated the sequence aloud, fumbled in his pocket for a pencil, wrote it on the back of a bank deposit slip.

  Tomorrow, he’d present it to Captain Hurley, his old police department buddy and Menlo’s chief rival. And then he’d quit involving himself in matters that didn’t concern him, go back to concentrating on acting and Kathleen, possibly in reverse order.

  But as he trudged back toward his car, after massaging his legs for a good five minutes, he couldn’t resist one last peek at the scene of the sniping, one more look for the elusive bullet.

  He didn’t find it, but he did find where it had been. Two feet from the ground, in the trunk of a tree two yards to the right of the target, a knife had hacked away at the bark and removed something cylindrical in shape. The cut was a good three inches deep in the wounded bark.

  Back in the Porsche, he checked the glow of the dashboard clock: 3:10.

  Never too late to call on Aunt Mary.

  FIVE

  Golden lamplight filtered through sheer curtains in the ground floor windows of the Chestnut Hill mansion, evidence of Aunt Mary’s wakefulness. Spraggue had once believed that she slept from 5 A.M. till 9 A.M., that for those four hours the ticker-tape machine stayed silent, the computer ceased to hum, the playing cards and crossword puzzles rested idly on the shelves. But he’d shown up at seven thirty one morning, right in the middle of the supposed rest time, and discovered her in the act of smacking a croquet ball around the grounds to the horror of the gardener. A remarkably stodgy man for one so young, said gardener was in grave jeopardy of losing his job.

  As he flipped off the ignition, the porch lights blazed and Mary Spraggue Hillman tugged open the heavy oak door. Pierce, the butler, loomed behind her; in spite of her seventy-odd years, he rarely beat her to the door.

  She wore an Icelandic wool shawl tossed over a scarlet dressing gown with the flair of an aging patrician gypsy. Etched with countless feathery wrinkles, her skin had stayed taut to her fine bones and retained the pink-and-white coloring of youth. Deep crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes and mouth slashed upward, imparting an aura of perpetual good humor. The red warred with the silver in her curly hair.

  “Well, dear,” she said crisply, her voice splitting the darkness like a homing beacon, “Pierce is delighted that you’ve arrived. Without intervention, he would certainly have lost yet another hand of gin rummy. Soon he will owe me his salary unto all eternity and I shall have to collect debts from his grandchildren.”

  “Winning agrees with you; you look lovely.” Spraggue mounted the front steps and aimed a kiss at her offered cheek.

  “They do say antiques are in vogue this season,” she said drily. As they entered the foyer, she stared at him critically and made a noise that in anyone less refined would have been a grunt.

  Spraggue lifted one eyebrow inquiringly.

  “You have elm leaves in your hair, my dear,” she said. “Just bits and pieces of them, really. I am trying to deduce what revelry you could have indulged in that would cause a four-hour delay between the termination of your performance and your arrival at my front door replete with elm leaves. I am far too tactful to inquire, but even at my advanced age, I possess an active imagination.… What would you like to drink, and are you at all hungry after your evening’s whatever?”

  Spraggue let her take his arm and draw him into the library, his favorite room, unchanged since his boyhood, probably unchanged since his great-grandfather, robber-baron Davison Spraggue, had built the massive Georgian structure to the confounding of his enemies and to their secret admiration. The vast room was two stories high with a system of wrought-iron balconies and spiral staircases that enabled one to reach the towering bookshelves that covered three walls. The Oriental rug was a twenty-by-twenty-four-foot Kashan with plenty of parquet border surrounding it. One wall of books was broken up by a huge bay window that overlooked the front lawn as it swept down to the wading pool. The fourth wall was the focal point of the room: over the marble mantelpiece, skillfully lighted, hung the Cezanne landscape that was the pride of the Spraggue Post-Impressionist Collection.

  Mary made a beeline for her favorite chair, a green velvet wingback near the bay window. Spraggue sprawled on the matching sofa. Pierce, with a distinct air of relief, began collecting cards off the game table, melding them into a pack.

  “See that?” Mary murmured softly. “Didn’t even ask me if I wanted to play out the hand. Imagine what rotten cards he must have had!” She shifted her focus abruptly to her nephew. “You look sleepy,” she said, as if the very idea of sleep at three in the morning was absurd. “Coffee to keep you awake or wine to further sedate you?”

  “No coffee.”

  “Wine, then. If you overindulg
e, you can sleep it off in the tower room.”

  “No.”

  “Seems a logical plan to me.”

  “No.”

  “It is your room, in your house—”

  “Aunt Mary, I don’t want breakfast in bed tomorrow. I don’t want all my clothes to mysteriously disappear during the night and turn up tomorrow morning washed, pressed, and brushed, with all the missing buttons sewn on. I want to go home and collapse on my unmade bed in my own disarray and wake up and find everything just where I left it.”

  “I’ll explain to Dora that you prefer to—”

  “Why not get me drunk first and then try to persuade me to stay?”

  Her eyes accepted the challenge. She hesitated for perhaps five seconds, smiled sweetly, and said, “How long has it been since you’ve tasted any of your very own 1968 Holloway Hills Private Reserve Cabernet?”

  He smiled, recalling more than the rich, earthy taste of wine, remembering an entire hectic autumn laced with the heady smell of crushed grapes, the musky scent of Kate Holloway’s perfume. “It’s long gone,” he said. “I doubt we made over a hundred cases that year.”

  “I received a present today.”

  “It’s not your birthday.”

  “At my age, one celebrates whenever one can. For instance, I intend to celebrate the receipt of a half case of ’68 Private Reserve Cabernet direct from Miss Holloway herself.”

  “And why is Kate so nice to you and so rotten to me?”

  “Sex rears its ugly head. But, alas, I must tell the truth. I was instructed to share the booty with you.”

  “In a letter I’m not supposed to read?”

  “Personal, I believe she termed it.”

  “Personal about her or personal about me?”

  Aunt Mary arched one eyebrow. “Where were you tonight, my dear?”

  “You’re too polite to ask, remember? Don’t you think the Cabernet should be saved for a dinner? What about something lighter for tonight?”