Dead Heat

by Linda Barnes

  Spraggue wanted to ask why, but said nothing. She would explain; she wouldn’t have made the painful effort to talk to him unless she had a reason. He was prepared for something, but not for what came.

  Sharon Collatos’ lower lip trembled momentarily, then stiffened. Her breathing was so shallow and quick, he was afraid she might faint.

  “What are you going to do about it?” she said.

  If volume had been substituted for intensity, her words would have deafened the remaining mourners. But her tone was just above a whisper and more powerful, more urgent for that.

  “Your partner’s dead, so what are you going to do about it? Almost a week and have I seen you at the police station? Have I seen you at Pete’s apartment? What are you doing?

  Spraggue considered options: Either melting into a puddle at her feet or turning into a pillar of salt seemed preferable to saying, “I was no partner of your brother’s; where did you get that screwy idea?” Particularly since he had a pretty strong inkling that the screwy idea had come from a source that could no longer be impeached. Damn Pete Collatos.

  Pete’s sister took his silence for shame.

  “You know what the police told me?” she said. “Nothing. That they have no single clue, that unless a miracle occurs, my brother’s killer will never be found. That the case will stay open, so I shouldn’t worry my little head. Maybe in ten years or so, they’ll get a break. Then they sent me to see the medical examiner—”

  Spraggue shuddered; he’d been there, too. He hoped the M.E. had been a trifle more politic with this grieving woman.

  “A man in a white coat said to me, ‘isn’t it an interesting case? Like with guinea pigs, with rats, with mice. He says maybe it isn’t even a murder case, just an assault. I ask him how that can be when my brother, my only relative in this world, is lying cold in his coffin. And you know what he said?”

  “Look, Mrs.…” Dammit, why couldn’t he remember that name?

  “Miss Collatos,” she said coldly.

  Oh, Christ, yes. Pete had mentioned separation or divorce. “Miss Collatos, I have a car here. We could sit in it and talk. There’s no need for you to get pneumonia.” Or me, he thought.

  She stared up, noticing the rain as an external phenomenon for the first time, as bewildered as if she had thought that the rain was her own personal misery, unseen, unfelt by others.

  While thus confused, she allowed Spraggue to take her arm and lead her to the warm interior of Mary’s Mercedes. Pierce was in the driver’s seat, Aunt Mary beside him. Spraggue made quick introductions, stopped the flow of Mary’s sympathetic chatter with a glance, spoke to Sharon Collatos.

  “The medical examiner probably told you that the amount of amphetamine in your brother was about twenty milligrams, that ten milligrams is the highest recommended therapeutic dose, that toxic effects begin at fifteen, but that it’s highly unusual for twenty milligrams of speed to kill a man.”

  “Pete’s dead.”

  “But the senator isn’t. So then they told you that there might have been some precondition in your brother, an aneurism, say, or an idiosyncratic reaction to amphetamine …”

  She nodded. “And that’s what they told the police. And all those fancy words had one effect: The police aren’t really looking for my brother’s killer.”

  Aunt Mary turned, knelt on the front seat and took the woman’s hand in hers. “She’s freezing, poor thing. Pierce, don’t we have a blanket or something in the trunk?”

  What they had seemed to be a fur lap robe more suited to a sleigh ride than a stationary auto on an April day. Sharon burrowed into it, gratefully, and for a minute, Spraggue was certain the mask would break, but she shuddered and went on.

  “I can hear the defense attorney now. Just a prank that went wrong, Your Honor. How was I to know a little bit of speed would kill a man? I just thought it would make the senator run faster. All a mistake, Your Honor. Then the judge taps that devil woman on the back of the hand, says ‘naughty girl,’ and that’s the end of it. Except that Pete is dead. And from what he told me about the business you were working on together, about those anonymous notes, I know he didn’t die because of some crazy prank. I know that someone intended to kill Senator Donagher … to—”

  She ran down suddenly, like a clock, overwound and dying.

  “Spraggue,” she said in a painful monotone, “Mr. Spraggue. My brother always called you just by the one name.… I was not a good sister to my brother; we weren’t as close as we should have been. I said to myself, there’s time for that. There are other things I have to do now, more important things. There’ll always be time for Pete. And someone took that time away from me.”

  Aunt Mary opened the car door, got out into the downpour, entered the back seat, and put her arm around Sharon’s quivering shoulders. Sharon turned her head away, closed her eyes to blink back tears, but she let Mary’s hand stay. What, Spraggue wondered, staring at Sharon Collatos’ too white face, made him think of that other woman, the one on Heartbreak Hill, the one who’d handed Senator Donagher a supposedly harmless bottle of water …?

  “From what Pete told me about you,” Sharon said, “I’m sure that it isn’t the way it looks. You wouldn’t just let them pull a cover-up, pretend that it was all an accident, unrelated to his work. But with all the publicity … You know nobody wants this to be a murder. The politicians hate the idea; they think assassinations come in threes and that somehow, by ignoring the first one, by denying it, they can prevent other crazies from copying whoever killed Pete. And the marathon people, they don’t want their happy little race involved in any scandal. So please don’t be insulted, but I had to ask …”

  And then she said it again: “What are you going to do about it?”

  FOURTEEN

  The question buzzed in his ear like an annoying fly through a hectic sold-out matinee, a hurried overcooked dinner, and on into the night. As he smeared his face with greasepaint for his evening role as one of the two interchangeable comic doctors in The Caucasian Chalk Circle, he repeated it to himself. What am I going to do about it?

  Partners … Damn Collatos for using that word, that pat emotion-charged word. Partners: Spade and Archer; Nick and Nora. You risk your neck to save a partner. Even if you hated him, you don’t let him die unavenged. Partners. He swore and rubbed at a wayward smudge of eye shadow, stared at himself critically under the arc of makeup lights, swore again, and glanced down at the numbered tube of Max Factor base on the table in front of him. Wrong color—way too light. He’d make his entrance looking like an escaped extra from Night of the Living Dead.

  Goddammit! he told himself sternly, concentrate!

  Partners.

  He was still cursing the word two and a half hours later as he sponged the makeup off his face, dressed in his street clothes, and marched out the stage door, heading for the police station.

  He half hoped that his best, indeed his only, civil contact on the homicide squad would be out. Captain Frederick Hurley, had he known Spraggue was on his way up, would have gladly arranged the favor.

  Hurley owed Spraggue. An ace cop with a steel-trap mind, Hurley had been interred in Records, shifted there as a tribute to his remarkable memory, unhappy as hell with the inactivity. He’d been dead-ended at his desk until his old acquaintance Spraggue invited him to a murder at a local theater. Spraggue had even set up the denouement of the case in such a way that Hurley, rather than Chief Investigating Officer Hank Menlo, had reaped the rewards. The ensuing publicity sped Hurley out of Records and back onto Homicide, and helped not a little in his later promotion to captain. So Hurley owed.

  Hurley probably wouldn’t feel like paying off the debt on a case as politically charged as this one.

  Halfway up the stone steps of the Berkeley Street Police Station, Spraggue executed a neat turnaround, and crossed the street to an all-night drugstore where he purchased two large coffees, black, and two glazed doughnuts that still had a little give to them when squeezed. He
counted out two dollars and twenty-five cents under the glare of fluorescent bulbs. If Hurley was in his office, exercising the penchant for night work that kept him away from a disintegrating marriage, the offering might grease the opening moments of a tricky encounter. If Hurley was out, the lost investment was certainly of the bearable kind. A minor loss compared to, say, the loss the Spraggue Foundation would have to shoulder should Aunt Mary’s suspicions prove correct and the fire department have to be called out to quell a blaze of suspicious origin at that building on Commonwealth Avenue.

  The graying sergeant at the beat-up desk to the left of the door was a familiar old-timer. He answered Spraggue’s wink, dispensed with the badge, phone call, and escort routine. Good. If Hurley didn’t know of his arrival, he wouldn’t have a chance to play hide-and-seek in someone else’s office.

  Spraggue crossed the linoleum floor to the elevator, punched the top button.

  As the aging cage made lurching progress toward the sixth floor, he idly envisioned Sharon Collatos with a smile turning up the corners of her wide mouth.…

  He waved the white coffee-and-doughnut sack aloft like a flag of surrender as he tapped on the fingerprint-smeared glass panel of Hurley’s door.

  The slouching figure in the chair, telephone clamped to one ear, fingers twirling a cigarette butt, swung around in his swivel chair at the noise, grimaced, and motioned the bearer of gifts inside. Spraggue twisted the knob and entered the claustrophobic closet Hurley called home.

  The captain was speaking to his wife and, from one end of the conversation, Spraggue could tell that all was not billing and cooing. Hurley held the receiver distastefully away from his ear and issued imprecations to the heavens with his shaggy eyebrows.

  “Trouble?” Spraggue asked, when the frown lingered after Hurley hung up.

  “Same old theme song: When you got to be a captain, I thought you’d work civilized hours. Now, can I help it if I like night work? Why be a cop in the daylight? What the hell kind of asshole crook works nine to five?”

  “Housebreakers.”

  “Exactly. Boring crooks work in the daytime. What’s in the bag?”

  Spraggue drew out the coffee cups and set the doughnuts on a hastily cleared square of Hurley’s ancient desk.

  “Think I don’t know a bribe when I see one?” The captain sipped the hot liquid gratefully, tapped the Styrofoam cup. “How much you think this fucking cup of coffee is going to get you?”

  “Well—”

  “Wait until I turn on this tape recorder,” Hurley said. “The D.A. told me to tape all potentially compromising conversations.”

  “I heard Boston cops were hard up, but I had no idea you could buy them so cheap.”

  Hurley laughed and bit into his doughnut. “Hard as a bullet,” he observed. “I’m not as broke as a lot of my fellow officers. I don’t come across for stale doughnuts.”

  “Pete Collatos,” Spraggue said.

  “Shit.” Hurley slammed the top drawer of his desk shut so hard that the desk rattled and coffee spilled over two files and a newspaper clipping. “What’s old Caesar say to Brutus when he sticks the knife in? Et tu, Brutus?”

  “Something like that.”

  “What I really needed right now was one more person to ask me why the hell I’m not out solving that lousy case. What about the twenty other unsolved murders we got on the books? This Collatos business is barely a week old.”

  “But if a case isn’t broken within twenty-four hours—”

  “I know. I fucking taught you that. The more time goes by, the less chance of closing a case. What do you think I ought to be doing? Exactly?”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Number one: I’m not in charge. Number two: I understand they’ve got a twenty-four-hour guard on Donagher.”

  “So if the murderer tries again, you’ll get him.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. If somebody wants to kill you, make out a will. That’s what I tell guys who come in here wanting bodyguards. I say, sure, we’ll protect you, but don’t invest in any long-playing records.”

  “Clever.”

  “Look, Spraggue, nothing we can do to bring Collatos back. I liked that kid. I did. He was a pain. He overdramatized. He was shitty on routine. But he was fun to shoot the bull with, you know?”

  Spraggue nodded. “How’s your file on anonymous letter writers?”

  “I know what you’re thinking, Spraggue, and believe me, we’re ahead of you. We’ve been over those letters, and the only way we’re going to trace them is if the guy starts writing again and puts his return address on the back of the envelope.”

  “Great.”

  “By the way,” Hurley said, elaborately unconcerned, “a guy came in to ask me about you the other day, before this Donagher business broke. Guy named Heineman. Mean anything to you?”

  “No.”

  “Hah. You wouldn’t tell me if he were your long lost brother. Your automatic reaction to talking to a cop: say nothing.”

  Even better than saying nothing, Spraggue thought, was changing the subject.

  He said, “Have the doctors come up with anything new on the autopsy report?”

  Hurley snorted, took a sip of coffee as if he wanted to wash a bad taste out of his mouth. “You remember that article in the Globe last year, the one that said that if you want to commit a murder, come to Boston to do it? They had a point. The M.E. is now trying to find out whether Collatos was on drugs.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “They’re trying to prove he took something before the race, that he was dosing up on speed anyway, and that his first hit, combined with the stuff he drank during the race, was enough to kill him.”

  “Doesn’t that smack of blaming the victim? Just a little?”

  “Look, Spraggue, at least they’re still trying to make sense out of it. That won’t last long. They’ll have to move on to someone else soon, seal up all those little jars, file them in cold storage and that will be that.”

  “And you? You going to file it away in one of these coffee-stained folders and forget it? He was a cop.”

  “You come here to bribe me or just to rile me? What have I got to go on?”

  “You could start with the woman who gave Donagher the water.”

  “Thanks a lot. You know, she hasn’t bothered to waltz her ass by and explain why that water was dosed with dextroamphetamine. She’s heard all about it on the news, read all about it in the Herald, and yet she hasn’t come in. So from that, we can draw the inference that this woman was no innocent bystander. Or that she was an innocent bystander, but now she’s scared. Or she doesn’t read the Herald or watch the news—”

  “Dammit, you’ve got a good description—”

  “Christ! Descriptions! It’s hard enough to describe a man, but a woman! Suppose she had a wig on, dyed her hair? She could have been my sister, for Chrissake, with different clothes and hair and makeup. None of the eyewitnesses gave us the same details—”

  “I saw her.”

  “You mean nobody’s taken your statement yet?”

  “Nope.”

  “Shit.”

  “Who’s in charge of the investigation?” Spraggue asked quietly.

  “You’ve already guessed. Menlo. And he wouldn’t ask you for a dime to call the fire department if his house was burning down. Look, before you go, why don’t I get your statement, and if I think it’s any good, I’ll send you down to the police artist who’s trying to do a composite.”

  “Sure.”

  “And while you’re at it, tell me exactly why you’re here, so when Menlo asks me, I can lie to him. If you don’t, I might guess the truth and just blurt it out to the bastard.”

  Spraggue took his time chewing stale doughnut, finally had to help it down with a sip of coffee. “I’m asking myself the same question,” he said finally. “Why am I here?”

  “Are you working for Donagher?”

  “No.”

  “For Collatos’ sister? A
nybody? Because your license is sadly out of date and Menlo could crucify you.”

  “Let’s say I’m investigating on my own. No client.”

  “Okay. If he asks, I’ll tell Menlo you got lost and came up to ask me the way home.”

  “Tell him I’m interested in a suspected arson at 312 Commonwealth Avenue.”

  “Are you?”

  “My aunt is. She owns the place next door.”

  Hurley made some marks on a file card. “I’ll see what I can find out.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Is that what you really came here for? Is this bit about Collatos a blind?”

  “Tell me, is your artist better than a TV camera?”

  “Huh?”

  “Heineman. Wasn’t that the name you mentioned? He’s a newscaster on Channel 4. TV cameras follow Donagher. They were trained on him when he came up Heartbreak Hill, when he ran over and took the bottle from that woman. Have you put out a call for pictures? Have you gotten tapes from all the stations?”

  “I told you, I’m not handling the investigation.”

  “Could you find out?”

  “I guess so.”

  Spraggue smiled.

  “Now,” Hurley said, “let’s get a steno in here and hear what the lady looked like.”

  Spraggue did his best.

  Closing his eyes, isolating himself from the reality of the hard chair beneath him, the stale cigarette smell of Hurley’s domain, he envisioned the chaotic marathon scene. He played it like an acting exercise, starting with himself, recreating his mood, recalling the clothes he’d been wearing with such clarity that he could feel them against his body. Then he moved outside himself, using senses developed by years of training. What had he felt? The baking sunshine, the dry breeze. Smelled? The nearby barbecue, the piney tang of a cone-shaped tree. Touched? Heard? The drone of distant automobiles, the bright chatter of friends, the rushing swelling cheers. Always he worked from the general to the specific, and when he had dressed his inner stage with sound and smell, he opened an inner eye and saw.

  The man with the bandaged ankle … the college students … the small unshaven man … and across the road, twenty feet away, the tall woman. All this took only seconds; it was the work of a professional actor, craft rather than talent.