Early Autumn

by Robert B. Parker

  PRAISE FOR ROBERT B. PARKER and THE SPENSER NOVELS

  “One of the great series in the history of the

  American detective story!”

  —The New York Times

  “[Spenser is] the sassiest, funniest, most-enjoyable-to-read-about private eye around today.”

  —The Cincinnati Post

  “Spenser novels are addictive.”

  —The Denver Post

  “Robert B. Parker has taken his place beside Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “Spenser probably had more to do with changing the private eye from a coffin-chaser to a full-bodied human being than any other detective hero.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “Parker is now the best writer of this kind of fiction in the business today.”

  —The New Republic

  “The toughest, funniest, wisest private eye in the field these days.”

  —The Houston Post

  Books by Robert B. Parker from Dell

  ALL OUR YESTERDAYS

  CRIMSON JOY

  PALE KINGS AND PRINCES

  TAMING A SEA-HORSE

  A CATSKILL EAGLE

  VALEDICTION

  LOVE AND GLORY

  THE WIDENING GYRE

  CEREMONY

  A SAVAGE PLACE

  EARLY AUTUMN

  LOOKING FOR RACHEL WALLACE

  WILDERNESS

  THE JUDAS GOAT

  PROMISED LAND

  MORTAL STAKES

  GOD SAVE THE CHILD

  THE GODWULF MANUSCRIPT

  THE EARLY SPENCER

  CHAPTER 1

  The urban renewers had struck again. They’d evicted me, a fortune-teller, and a bookie from the corner of Mass. Ave. and Boylston, moved in with sandblasters and bleached oak and plant hangers, and last I looked appeared to be turning the place into a Marin County whorehouse. I moved down Boylston Street to the corner of Berkeley, second floor. I was half a block from Brooks Brothers and right over a bank. I felt at home. In the bank they did the same kind of stuff the fortune-teller and the bookie had done. But they dressed better.

  I was standing in the window of my office looking out at a soft rainy January day with the temperature in the high fifties and no sign of snow. To the right across Boylston I could see Bonwit Teller. To the left Police Headquarters. In Bonwit’s windows there were mannequins wearing tight leather clothes and chains. Police headquarters leaned more to Dacron. In the window bay of the advertising agency across the street a young black-haired woman in high-waisted gray trousers leaned over a drawing board. Her back was toward the window.

  “My compliments to your tailor” I said out loud. My voice sounded odd in the empty room. The black-haired woman went away and I sat at my desk and looked at the picture of Susan Silverman. It was the blowup of a color picture taken last summer in her backyard. Her tanned face and pink blouse were bright against the dark green of the muted trees. I was still looking at Susan’s face when my office door opened and a client came in carrying a belted poplin raincoat over one arm.

  She said, “Mr. Spenser?”

  I said, “I knew my clientele would upgrade when I moved in over a bank.”

  She smiled wonderfully at me. She had blond hair that contrasted handsomely with her black eyes and dark eyebrows. She was small and very trim and elegant. She had on a tailored black suit and vest, white shirt, black bow tie with long ends like Brett Maverick used to wear, and black boots with very high narrow heels. She was wearing gold and it looked real: gold earrings, gold watch, gold chains around the neck, gold chain bracelets, a wide gold wedding band, and a large diamond in a gold setting. I was optimistic about my fee.

  She said, “You are Mr. Spenser?”

  I said, “Yes,” and stood up and held a chair for her. She had a precise walk and a very nicely integrated figure and she sat erect in the chair. I went around behind my desk again and sat down and smiled. Time was they started to undress when I smiled, but I guess the smile had lost a step. The black eyes looked at me very carefully. The hands folded still in the lap. Ankles crossed, face serious. She looked at my face, both shoulders, my chest, and as much of my stomach as showed behind the desk.

  I said, “I have a puckered scar on the back of my right, ah, thigh where a man shot me about three years ago.”

  She nodded.

  “My eyes look maybe a little funny because I used to be a fighter. That’s scar tissue.”

  “Apparently people hit you in the nose quite often too,” die said.

  “Yes” I said.

  She looked at me some more. At my arms, at my hands. Would I seem forward if I offered to drop trou? Probably.

  I said, “Got all my teeth though. See.” I bared them.

  “Mr. Spenser,” she said. “Tell me why I should employ you.”

  “Because if you don’t you’ll have wasted all this sizing up,” I said. “You’ll have spent all this time impressing me with your no-nonsense elegance and your perfect control and gone away empty.”

  She studied my forehead.

  “And I look very dashing in a deer stalker and a trench coat.”

  She looked directly at me and shook her head slightly.

  “And I have a gun,” I said. I took it off my hip and showed it to her.

  She turned her head away and looked out my window, where it had gotten dark and shiny with the lights glistening off the rain.

  I put the gun away and clasped my hands and rested my elbows on the arms of my chair and propped my chin. I let the chair tip back on its spring and I sat and waited.

  “Mr. Spenser, do you have time to waste like this,” she said.

  “Yes, I do,” I said.

  “Well, I do not,” she said and I lip-synched the words with her as she said them. That annoyed her.

  “Don’t you want the job?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what the job is.”

  “Well, I want some evidence of your qualifications before I discuss it with you.”

  “Hell, lady, I showed you my scar tissue and my gun. What else do you need?”

  “This is a sensitive job. It is not a matter of guns. It involves a child.”

  “Maybe you should get hold of Dr. Spock.”

  Silence. She looked at my hands where my chin was resting.

  “Your hands are very strong-looking,” she said.

  “Want to see me crack a walnut?” I said.

  “Are you married?” she said.

  “No.”

  She smiled again. It was a good one. Hundred, hundred-fifty watt. But I’d seen better. Susan could have smiled her right into the woodwork. She moved her body slightly in the chair. She remained trim and upright, but somehow a wiggle came through.

  I said, “If you bat your eyes at me I’m calling a policewoman.”

  She wiggled again, without moving. How the hell does she do that?

  “I’ve got to trust you,” she said. “I have no one else. I must turn to you.”

  “Hard,” I said. “Hard for a woman alone, I’ll bet.”

  Wiggle. Smile. Sigh. “Yes, I’ve got to find someone to help me. Will it be you?” She leaned forward slightly. She moistened her lower lip. “Will you help me?”

  “I would gather stars,” I said, “out of the blue.”

  “Don’t make fun of me,” she said. “I’m desperate.”

  “What are you desperate about?”

  “My son. His father has taken him.”

  “And what would you like me to do?”

  “Bring him back.”

  “Are you divorced?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have custody?”

  “Ye
s, of course. I’m his mother.”

  “Does his father have visitation privileges?”

  “Yes, but this isn’t a visit. He’s taken Paul and he won’t bring him back.”

  “And the court?”

  “There’s a hearing, and Mel’s being subpoenaed but they can’t find him.”

  “Is Mel your husband?”

  “Yes. So I’ve spoken to the police and they said if they could find him they’d serve him a summons. But you know they aren’t going to look for him.”

  “Probably not. They are sometimes busy,” I said.

  “And so I want you to find him and bring my Paul back.”

  “How’s the boy feel about all this?”

  “Naturally he wants to be with his mother, but he’s only fifteen. He has no say. His father has simply taken him and hidden him.”

  “Mel misses Paul that much?”

  “He doesn’t miss him. He doesn’t care about Paul one way or the other. It’s merely his way of getting at me. He doesn’t want me to have Paul.”

  “So he took him.”

  “Yes.”

  “Good deal for the kid,” I said.

  “Mel doesn’t care about that. He wants to hurt me. And he’s not going to.”

  There was no wiggle when she said the last sentence. “I want you to bring that kid back to me, away from his father. Paul is legally mine.”

  I was silent

  “I can pay any reasonable fee,” she said. “I got an excellent alimony settlement” She was quite brisk and business-suity again.

  I took in some air and let it out through my nose. I looked at her.

  She looked back.

  “What’s the matter,” she said.

  I shook my head. “It does not sound like a real good time,” I said.

  “Mr. Spenser,” the lower lip moistened again, mouth open a little, tip of the tongue running along the inner edge of the lip. “Please. I have no one else. Please.”

  “There’s a question whether you need anyone else,” I said, “but I’ll take a whack at it on one condition.”

  “What?”

  “You tell me your name so I’ll know where the bill gets sent”

  She smiled. “Giacomin,” she said, “Patty Giacomin.”

  “Like the old Ranger’s goalie,” I said

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Gentleman of the same name used to be a hockey player.”

  “Oh. I’m afraid I don’t follow sports much.”

  “No shame to it,” I said. “Matter of not being raised properly. Not your fault at all.”

  She smiled again, although this time it was a little unsure, as if now that she had me she wasn’t certain she wanted me. It’s a look I’ve seen a lot

  “Okay,” I said. “Tell me everything you can think of about where old Mel might be.”

  I pulled a lined white pad closer, picked up a pencil, and listened.

  CHAPTER 2

  At 120,000 miles my 1968 Chevy convertible had bought the farm. There’s just so much you can do with duct tape. With some of Huge Dixon’s bounty money I had bought Susan’s maroon MGB with whitewalls and a chrome luggage rack on the trunk lid, and at ten fifteen the next morning I was sitting in it outside an apartment building on Hammond Pond Parkway in Chestnut Hill. According to Patty Giacomin her husband’s girl friend lived there. She knew that because she had once followed her husband out here and seen him go in and come out with a woman from his office named Elaine Brooks.

  I’d asked how she knew it was a girl friend and not just business and Patty Giacomin had given me a look of such withering scorn that I’d let it go. Patty didn’t know where her husband lived. She couldn’t reach him through his office. They didn’t know where he was. The girl friend was all we could think of.

  “He’ll show up there,” Patty had said, “unless he’s got a new one. He’s always got to have a little honey.”

  So I sat with the motor idling and the heater on. The temperature had dropped forty-two degrees since yesterday and January in Boston was back to normal. I turned on the radio. A disc jockey with a voice like rancid lard was describing how much he liked the new record by Neil Diamond. Then Neil began to sing his new record. I shut it off.

  A lot of cars went by heading under Route 9 for the Chestnut Hill Mall. There were two Bloomingdale’s in Chestnut Hill Mall. Susan and I had come shopping there two weeks before Christmas, but she’d complained of sensory overload and we’d had to leave.

  A jogger went by with a watch cap pulled over his ears and a blue jacket on that said TENNNESSEE TECH STAFF. Even in the cold his stride had an easy spring to it. I’d done the same thing along the Charles three hours earlier and the wind off the river had been hard as the Puritan God. I looked at my watch. Ten forty-five. I turned on the radio again and fished around until I found Tony Cennamo’s jazz show. He was doing a segment on Sonny Rollins. I listened.

  At eleven the show was over and I shut the radio off again. I opened my businesslike manila folder and looked at my page and a half of notes. Mel Giacomin was forty. He ran an insurance agency in Reading and until his divorce he had lived on Emerson Road in Lexington. His wife lived there still with their fifteen-year-old son, Paul. As far as his wife knew, the agency did well. He also ran a real estate business out of the same office and owned several apartment houses, mostly in Boston. The marriage had been troubled from the start, in dissolution for the last five years, and husband and wife had separated a year and a half ago. He’d moved out. She never knew where. The divorce proceedings had been bitter, and the decree had become final only three months ago.

  Giacomin was, in his wife’s phrase, “a whoremonger” and, his wife said, was very active among the younger women in his office and elsewhere. I looked at his picture. Long nose, small eyes, big droopy mustache. Hair worn medium length over the ears. On the back I read his wife’s description: 6′1″, 210-225 (weight varied depending on how much he was drinking and exercising and dieting). Had been a football player at Furman and still showed signs of it

  I had a picture of the boy too. He had his father’s nose and small eyes. His face was narrow and sullen. His dark hair was long. His mouth was small and the upper lip formed a cupid’s bow.

  I looked again at my watch. Eleven thirty. He probably wasn’t into morning sex. I didn’t know what she looked like. There was no picture available and Patty Giacomin’s description was sketchy. Blond hair in a curly perm, medium height, good figure. “Busty,” Patty had said. I’d called Giacomin’s office at nine, nine thirty, and ten of ten and she’d not been in. Neither had he. No one knew when to expect either. I looked at my watch again. Eleven thirty-five. I was sick of sitting. I pulled the MG up around the corner onto Heath Street and parked and walked back down to the apartment building. On the directory inside the outer doors Elaine Brooks was listed on the third floor, apartment 315. I pushed the buzzer. Nothing happened. I pushed it again and held it. After nearly a minute a thick female voice said hello through the intercom. The voice had been sleeping one minute prior.

  I said, “Harry?”

  She said, “What?”

  I said, “Harry. It’s me, Herb.”

  She said, “There’s no goddamned Harry here.”

  I said, “What?”

  She said. “You pushed the wrong button, you asshole.”

  I said, “Oh, sorry.” The intercom went dead.

  She was in there and I’d wakened her. She wouldn’t be going right out. I went back and got into my car and drove the two or three hundred yards to Bloomingdale’s and brought a big silver wine bucket for a hundred bucks. It left me two dollars for lunch. If I got a chance for lunch. I was hungry. But I was used to that. I was always hungry. I had the wine bucket gift wrapped and went back to the apartment building. I parked out front this time and went into the foyer and rang Elaine Brooks again. She answered the first buzz and her voice had freshened up some.

  “Package for Ms. Brooks,” I said.

&n
bsp; “Just leave it in the foyer,” she said. “I’ll get it in a while.”

  “Mr. Giacomin said deliver it personal, ma’am. He said don’t leave it in the hall or nothing. He said give it right to you.”

  “Okay,” she said, “bring it up.”

  I said, “Yes, ma’am.” The door buzzed and I went in. I was wearing off-white straight-legged Levi’s cords, and moccasins and a blue wool shirt and a beige poplin jacket with a sheepskin lining and collar. A little slick for a cabbie maybe—if she noticed how much the shirt cost, but she probably wouldn’t.

  I took the elevator to the third floor and counted numbers to 15. I knocked. There was silence while I assume she peeped out through the little spyglass. Then the door opened on a safety chain and a narrow segment of face and one eye looked out at me. I’d figured on that. That’s why I’d bought the bucket. In the box it was much too big to fit through a safety chain opening. I held the box up and looked at the small opening.

  She said, “Okay, just a minute,” and closed the door. I heard the chain slide off and then the door opened The Bloomingdale’s wrapper does it every time. Maybe I should rely on that more and on my smile less.

  The door opened She was as described only better looking. And she was busty. So is Dolly Parton. She’d done her hair and face, but hadn’t dressed yet. She wore a long brown robe with white piping and a narrow white belt tied in front. Her feet were bare. Her toenails were painted It didn’t help much. Never saw a toenail I liked

  “Here you go, ma’am,” I said

  She took the package. “Any message?”

  “Not to me, ma’am. Maybe inside. All Mr. Giacomin told me was see that I put it right in your hands.”

  “Well, thank you,” she said

  “Okay.” I didn’t move.

  She looked at me. “Oh,” she said “Wait a minute.” She closed the door and was gone maybe a minute and then the door opened and she gave me half a buck. I looked at it sort of glumly.

  “Thanks,” I said

  She closed the door without comment and I went on back down to the car. I pulled out of the turnaround in front of the apartment and parked up the road a little so I could see in the rearview mirror. And I waited