The Godwulf Manuscript

by Robert B. Parker

  But what did that have to do with the manuscript? I didn’t know. The best connection I had was the dope and the question of the gun. How did they know she’d have a gun there? She’d lived with another girl before she’d lived with Powell. I took another belt of the bourbon. Uncut by bitters or ice and cheap anyway, it grated down into my stomach. Catherine Connelly, Tower had told me. Let’s try her. More bourbon. It wasn’t really so bad, didn’t taste bad at all, made you feel pretty nice in your stomach.

  Made you feel tough, too, and on top of it—whatever it was. The phone rang.

  I picked it up and said, “Spenser industries, security division. We never sleep.”

  There was a pause, and then a woman spoke.

  “Mr. Spenser?”

  “Yeah.”

  “This is Marion Orchard, Terry’s mother.”

  “Howya doing, sweets,” I said, and took another pull on the bourbon.

  “Mr. Spenser, she’s gone.”

  “Me, too, sweets.”

  “No, really, she’s gone, and I’m terribly worried.”

  I put the bottle down and said, “Oh, Christ!”

  “Our lawyer called and said the police wished to speak with her again, and I went to her room and she wasn’t there and she hasn’t been home all day. There’s two hundred thousand dollars bail money, and … I want her back. Can you find her, Mr. Spenser?”

  “You got any ideas where I should look?”

  “I … Mr. Spenser, we have hired you. You sound positively hostile, and I resent it.”

  “Yeah, you probably do,” I said. “I been up a long time and have eaten little, and had a fight with a tough guinea and drank too much bourbon and was thinking about going and getting a sub sandwich and going to bed. I’ll come out in a little while and we’ll talk about it.”

  “Please, I’m very worried.”

  “Yeah, I’ll be along.” I hung up, put the cork in the bottle, put the bottle in the drawer. My head was light and my eyes focused badly and my mouth felt thick. I got my coat on, locked the office, and went down to my car. I parked in a taxi zone and got a submarine sandwich and a large black coffee to go. I ate the sandwich and drank the coffee as I headed out to Newton again. Eating a sub sandwich with one hand is sloppy work, and I got some tomato juice and oil on my shirtfront and some coffee stains on my pant leg. I stopped at a Dunkin’ Donuts shop in West Newton Square, bought another black coffee, and sat in my car and drank it.

  I felt terrible. The bourbon was wearing off, and I felt dull and sleepy and round-shouldered. I looked at my watch. It was a quarter to ten. The snow continued as I sat and forced the coffee down. I had read somewhere that black coffee won’t sober you up, but I never believed it. After bourbon it tasted so awful it had to be doing some good.

  The plows hadn’t gotten to the Orchards’ street; my wheels spun and my car skidded getting up their hill. I had my jacket unbuttoned, but the defrosters were going full blast. And, wrestling the car through the snow, I could feel the sweat in the hollow of my back, and my shirt collar was wet and limp. Sometimes I wondered if I was getting too old for this work. And sometimes I thought I had gotten too old last year. I jammed the car through a snowdrift into the Orchards’ driveway and climbed out. There was no pathway, so I waded through the snow across the lawn and up to the front door. The same black maid answered the door. She remembered me, took my hat and coat, and led me to the same library we’d talked in before. A fire was still burning, but no one was in the room. I got a look at myself in the dark window: unshaven, sub sandwich stains on my shirt, collar open. There was a puffy mouse under one eye, courtesy of old Sonny. I looked like the leg man for a slumlord.

  Marion Orchard came in. She was wearing an ankle-length blue housecoat that zipped up the front, a matching headband, and bare feet. I noticed her toenails were painted silver. She seemed as well groomed and together as before, but her face was flushed and I realized she had been drinking. Me, too. Who hadn’t? The ride and the coffee had sobered me up and depressed me. My head ached, and my stomach felt like I’d been swallowing sand. Without a word Marion Orchard went to the sideboard, put ice in a glass from a silver bucket, added Scotch, and squirted soda in from a silver-laced dispenser. She drank half of it and turned toward me.

  “You want some?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Scotch or bourbon?”

  “Bourbon, with bitters, if you’ve got it.”

  She turned and mixed me bourbon and soda with bitters in a big square-angled glass. I drank some and felt it begin to combat the coffee and the fatigue. I’d need more, though. From the looks of Marion Orchard, she would, too, and planned on getting it.

  “Where’s Mr. Orchard?” I asked.

  “At the office. Sitting behind his big masculine desk, trying to feel like a man.”

  “Does he know Terry’s gone?”

  “Yes. That’s why he went to the office. It makes him feel better about himself. All he can cope with is stocks and bonds. People, and daughters and wives, scare hell out of him.” She finished the drink, took mine, which was still half-full, and made two fresh ones.

  “Something scares hell out of everybody,” I said. “Have you any thoughts on where I should look for Terry?”

  “What scares hell out of you?” she asked.

  The bourbon was making a lot of headway against the coffee. I felt a lot better than I had when I came in. The line of Marion Orchard’s thigh was tight against the blue robe as she sat with her legs tucked up under her on the couch.

  “The things people do to one another,” I answered. “That scares hell out of me.”

  She drank some more. “Wrong,” she said. “That engages your sympathy. It doesn’t scare you. I’m an expert on what scares men. I’ve lived with a scared man for twenty-two years. I left college in my sophomore year to marry him, and I never finished. I was an English major. I wrote poetry. I don’t anymore.” I waited. She didn’t really seem to be talking to me anymore.

  “About Terry?” I prodded softly.

  “Screw Terry,” she said, and finished her drink. “When I was her age I was marrying her father and nobody with wide shoulders came around and got me out of that mess.” She was busy making us two more drinks as she talked. Her voice was showing the liquor. She was talking with extra-careful enunciation—the way I was. She handed me the drink and then put her hand on my upper arm and squeezed it.

  “How much do you weigh?” she asked.

  “One ninety-five.”

  “You work out, don’t you? How much can you lift?”

  “I can bench press two-fifty ten times,” I said.

  “How’d you get the broken nose?” She bent over very carefully and examined my face from about two inches away. Her hair smelled like herbs.

  “I fought a ranked heavyweight once.”

  She stayed bent over, her face two inches away, her fragrant hair tumbling forward, one hand still squeezing my arm, the other holding the drink. I put my left hand behind her head and kissed her. She folded up into my lap and kissed back. It wasn’t eager. It was ferocious. She let the glass drop from her hand onto the floor, where I assume it tipped and spilled. Under the blue robe she was wearing nothing at all, and she was nowhere near as sinewy as she had looked to me the first time I saw her. Making love in a chair is heavy work. The only other time I’d attempted, I’d gotten a charley horse that damn near ruined the event. With one arm around her back I managed to slip the other one under her knees and pick her up, which is not easy from a sitting position in a soft chair. Her mouth never left mine, nor did the fierceness abate as I carried her to the couch. She bit me and scratched me, and at climax she pounded me on the back with her clenched fist as hard as she could. At the time I barely noticed. But when it was over, I felt as if I’d been in a fight, and maybe in some sense I had.

  She had shed the robe during our encounter and now she walked naked over to the bar to make another drink for each of us. She had a fine body, t
anned all over except for the stark whiteness of her buttocks and the thin line her bra strap had made. She returned with a drink in each hand. Gave one to me and then stroked my cheek once, quite gently. She drank half her drink, still standing naked in front of me, and lit a cigarette, took in a long lungful of smoke, let it out, picked up her robe, and slipped into it. There we were, all together again, neat, orderly, employee and employer. Here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson.

  “I think Terry is with a group in Cambridge that calls itself the Ceremony of Moloch. In the past, when she would get in trouble or be freaked out on drugs or have a fight with her father, she’d run off there, and they let her stay. One of her friends told me about it.”

  She’d known that when she’d called me. But she’d gotten me out here to tell me. She really didn’t like her husband.

  “Where in Cambridge is the Ceremony of Moloch?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t even know if she’s there, but it’s all I could think of.”

  “Why did Terry take off?” I didn’t use her name. After copulation on the couch, Mrs. Orchard sounded a little silly. On the other hand, we were not on a “Marion” basis.

  “A fight with her father.” She didn’t use my name either.

  “About what?”

  “What’s it ever about? He sees her as an extension of his career. She’s supposed to adorn his success by being what he fantasizes a daughter is. She does everything the opposite to punish him for not being what she fantasizes a father is … and probably for sleeping with me. Ever read Mourning Becomes Electra, Spenser?”

  That’s how she solved her problem with names; she dropped the Mister. I wondered if I should call her Orchard. I decided not to. “Yeah, a long time ago. But is there anything you could tell me about Terry, or the Ceremony of Moloch, that might turn out useful? It is past midnight, and I’ve gotten a lot of exercise today.”

  I think she colored very slightly. “You are like a terrier after a rat. Nothing distracts your attention.”

  “Well,” I said, “there are things, occasionally, Marion.”

  Her color got a little deeper and she smiled, but shook her head.

  “I wonder,” she said. “I wonder whether you might not have been thinking of a way to run down my dear daughter Terry, even then.”

  “Then,” I said, “I wasn’t thinking of anything.”

  She said, “Maybe.”

  I was silent. I was so tired it was an effort to move my mouth.

  She shook her head again. “No, there’s nothing. I can’t think of anything else to tell you that will help. But can you look? Can you find her?”

  “I’ll look,” I said. “Did your lawyer tell you what the cops wanted?”

  “No. He just said Lieutenant Quirk wanted her to come down tomorrow and talk with him some more.”

  I stood up. Partly to see if I could. Marion Orchard stood up with me.

  “Thank you for coming. I know you’ll do your best in finding Terry. I’m sorry to have kept you up so late.” She put out her hand, and I took it. Christ, breeding. Here she was, upper crust, Boston society, yes’m. Thank you very much, ma’am, for the drink and the toss on the couch, ma’am, it’s a pleasure to be of service to you and the master, ma’am. I gave her hand a squeeze. I was goddamned if I was going to shake it.

  “I’ll dig her up, Marion. When I do, I’ll bring her home. It’ll work out.”

  She nodded her head silently and her face got congested-looking and red around the eyes, and I realized she was going to cry in a minute. I said, “I’ll find my way out. Try not to worry. It’ll work out.”

  She nodded again, and as I left the library she touched my arm but said nothing. As I closed the door behind me I could hear the first stifled sob burst out. There were more before I got out of earshot. They would probably last most of the night. I went out the front door and into the dead, still white night, got in my car, and went back to town. Every fiber of my being felt awful.

  Chapter 12

  It was about one thirty when I got back to my apartment. I stripped off my clothes and took a long shower, slowly easing the water temperature down to cool. In the bedroom, putting on clean clothes, I looked at the bed with something approaching lust, but I kept myself away from it. Then I went to the living room in my socks and called a guy I knew who did night duty at the Globe. I asked him where I could find the Ceremony of Moloch. He gave me an address in Cambridge. I asked him what he knew about the group.

  “Small,” he said. “Freaky. Robes and statues and candlelight. That kind of crap. Moloch was some kind of Phoenician god that required human sacrifice. In Paradise Lost, Milton lumps him in with Satan and Beelzebub among the fallen angels. That’s all I know about them. We did a feature once on the Cambridge–Boston subculture and they got about a paragraph.”

  I thanked him and hung up and went back into the bedroom for my shoes. I sat down on the bed to put them on, and that was where I lost it. As long as I was up I could move, but from sitting to lying was too short a distance. I lay back, just for a minute, and went to sleep.

  I woke up, in the same position, nine hours later in broad daylight, with the morning gone. I went out to the kitchen, measured out the coffee, put the electric percolator on, went back, stripped down, shaved, showered, put on my shorts, and went out to the kitchen again. The coffee was ready and I drank it with cream and sugar while I sliced peppers and tomatoes for a Spanish omelet.

  I felt good. The sleep had taken care of the exhaustion. The snow had stopped, and the sunlight, magnified by reflection, was pure white as it splashed about the kitchen. I greased the omelet pan and poured the eggs in. When the inside was right I put in the vegetables and flipped the omelet. I’m very good at flipping omelets. Finding out what was happening with Terry Orchard and the Godwulf Manuscript seemed to be something I wasn’t very good at.

  I ate the omelet with thick slices of fresh pumpernickel and drank three more cups of coffee while I looked at the morning Globe. I felt even better. Okay, Terry Orchard, here I come. You can run, but you can’t hide. I considered stopping by to frighten Joe Broz some more but rejected the plan and headed for Cambridge.

  The address I had for the Ceremony of Moloch was in North Cambridge in a neighborhood of brown and gray three-decker apartment buildings with open porches across the back of each floor where laundry hung stiff in the cold. I went up the unshoveled path without seeing the print of cloven hoofs. No smell of brimstone greeted me. No darkness visible, no moans of despair. For all I could tell the house was empty, and its inhabitants had gone to work or school. Every third person in Cambridge was a student.

  In the front hall there were three mailboxes, each with a name plate. The one for the third floor apartment said simply MOLOCH. I went up the stairs without making more noise than I had to and stood outside the apartment door. No sound. I knocked. No answer. I tried the door. Locked. But it was an old door, with the frame warped. About thirty seconds with some thin plastic was all it took to open it.

  The door opened onto a narrow hall that ran right and left from it. To the left I could see a kitchen, to the right the half-open door of a bathroom. Diagonally on the other wall an archway opened into a room I couldn’t see. The wallpaper in the hall was faded brown fern leaves against a dirty beige background. There were large stains of a darker brown here and there, as if someone had splashed water against the walls. The floor was made of narrow hardwood painted dark brown, and there was a threadbare red runner the length of the hall. The woodwork was white and had been repainted without being adequately scraped first, so that it looked lumpy and pocked. It had not been repainted recently, and there were many nicks and gouges in it. I could see part of the tub and part of the water closet in the bathroom. The tub had claw and ball feet, and the water closet had a pull chain from the storage tank mounted up by the ceiling. The place was dead still.

  I walked through the arch into what must have been the living room. It no longer was. In the bay of the three-w
indow bow along the right-hand wall there was an altar made out of packing crates and two-by-fours which reminded me of the fruit display racks in Faneuil Hall market. It was draped with velveteen hangings in black and crimson and at its highest reach was inverted a dime store crucifix. The crucifix was made of plastic, with the Sacred Heart redly exposed in the center of the flesh-tinted chest. On each side of the crucifix were human skulls. Beside them unmatched candelabra with assorted candles, partially burned. The walls were hung with more of the black velveteen, shabby and thin in the daylight. The floor had been painted black and scattered with cushions. The room smelled strongly of incense and faintly of marijuana and faintly also of unemptied Kitty Litter.

  I went back down the corridor, through the kitchen with its oilcloth-covered table and its ancient black sink, and into a bedroom. There were no beds, but five bare mattresses covered the floor. Three of them had sleeping bags rolled neatly at the wall end. In the closet were two pairs of nearly white jeans, a work shirt, something that looked like a shift, and an olive drab undershirt. I couldn’t tell if the owners were male or female. The two other bedrooms were much the same. In a pantry closet off the kitchen were maybe a dozen black robes, like graduation costumes. On the shelves were a five-pound bag of brown rice, some peanut butter, a loaf of Bone Bread, and a two-pound bag of granola. In the refrigerator there was a plastic pitcher of grape Kool-Aid, seven cans of Pepsi, and three cucumbers. Maybe they had a bundle in a numbered account in Switzerland, but on the surface it didn’t look like the Ceremony of Moloch was a high-return venture.

  I went back out, closed the door behind me, and went to my car. The noon sun was making the snow melt and heating the inside of my car. I sat in it, two doors up from the house of Moloch, and waited for someone to come there and do something. It was cold, and the snow had begun to crust over when someone finally showed up. Eight people, in a battered Volkswagen bus that had been hand-painted green. Three of the eight were girls, and one of them was Terry. They all went into what they probably called the temple. It occurred to me that I wasn’t exactly sure what to do with Terry now that I’d found her. There wasn’t much point in dragging her out by the hair and taking her home locked in the trunk. She’d just take off again and after a while I’d get sick of chasing and fetching.