The Godwulf Manuscript

by Robert B. Parker

  “Not while I’m tracking down a criminal, I don’t.”

  “I’ll be over,” I said.

  When I got there Iris had a typewritten paper bound in red plastic lying on her desk. It was twenty-two pages long and titled “The Radix Trait: A Study of Chaucer’s Technique of Characterization in The Canterbury Tales.” Underneath it said “Iris Milford,” and in the upper right-hand corner it said “En 308, Dr. Hayden, 10/28.” Above the title in red pencil with a circle around it was the grade A minus.

  “Inside back page,” she said. “That’s where he comments.”

  I opened the manuscript. In the same red pencil Hayden had written, “Good study, perhaps a bit too dependent on secondary sources, but well stated and judicious. I wish you had not eschewed the political and class implications of the Tales, however.”

  I took the note out of my coat pocket and put it down beside the paper. It was the same fancy hand.

  “Can I have this paper?” I asked Iris.

  “Sure—why, want to read it in bed?”

  “No, I’m housebreaking a puppy.”

  She laughed. “Take it away,” she said.

  Near my office there was a Xerox copy center. I went in and made a copy of the note and the comment page in Iris’s paper. I took the original up to my office and locked it in the top drawer of my desk. I put the copies in my pocket and drove over to see Lowell Hayden.

  He wasn’t in his office, and the schedule card posted on his door indicated that he had no more classes until Monday. Across the street at a drugstore I looked for his name in the directory. He wasn’t listed in the Boston books. I looked up the English Department and called them.

  “Hi,” I said, “this is Dr. Porter. I’m lecturing over here at Tufts this evening and I’m trying to locate Lowell Hayden. We were grad students together. Do you have his home address?”

  They did, and they gave it to me. He lived in Marblehead. I looked at my watch. 11:10. I could get there for lunch.

  Marblehead is north, through the Callahan Tunnel and along Route 1A. An ocean town, yachting center, summer home, and old downtown district that reeked of tar and salt and quaint. Hayden had an apartment in a converted warehouse that fronted on the harbor. First floor, front.

  A big hatchet-faced woman in her midthirties answered my ring. She was taller than I was and her blond hair was pulled back in a tight bun. She wore no make-up, and the only thing that ornamented her face were huge Gloria Steinem glasses with gold rims and pink lenses. Her lips were thin, her face very pale. She wore a man’s green pullover sweater, Levi’s, and penny loafers without socks. Big as she was, there was no extra weight. She was as lean and hard as a canoe paddle, and nearly as sexy.

  “Mrs. Hayden?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Is Dr. Hayden in?”

  “He’s in his study. What do you want?”

  “I’d like to speak with him, please.”

  “He always spends two hours a day in his study. I don’t permit him to be bothered during that time. Tell me what you want.”

  “You’re beautiful when you’re angry,” I said.

  “What do you want?”

  I offered her my card. “If you’ll give that to Dr. Hayden, perhaps he’ll break his rules just once.”

  “I will do nothing of the kind,” she said without taking the card.

  “Okay, but if you’ll give him this card when he is through his meditations I’ll be waiting out in my car, looking at the ocean, thinking long thoughts.” I wrote on the back of the card, “Cathy Connelly?” and put the card down on the edge of the umbrella stand by the door. She didn’t slam it, but she closed it firmly. I had the feeling she did everything firmly.

  I went back to my car and watched the sun glint on the water. There weren’t many boats in the harbor in winter, mostly sea gulls bobbing on the cold water and swooping in the bright sky. A lobster boat came slowly into the harbor mouth past the lighthouse on the point of Marblehead Neck. Behind me, the seafood restaurant on the wharf was filling with lunchtime customers, and ahead of me two tourists were taking pictures of the wharf building. I watched the Hayden apartment. Hatchet face never so much as peeked out a window at me. Her husband as far as I could tell continued to meditate. The waves hit the wharf regularly; the interval between waves was about three seconds. After two hours and twenty minutes Lowell Hayden appeared at the front door and looked hard at me. I waved. He shut the door and I sat some more. Another half hour and Hayden appeared again, this time wearing a tan poplin jacket with a fur-lined hood. Other than that he seemed to be dressed just as he had been the last time I saw him. His wife loomed behind him, much taller. She stood in the open door while he came to the car. Making sure I wouldn’t mug him, I guess. He opened the door and got in. I smiled pleasingly.

  He said, “Spenser, you’d better leave me alone.” His little pale face was clenched and there was a flush on each cheekbone. He looked a bit like Raggedy Andy.

  “Why is that?” I said.

  “Because you’ll get hurt.”

  “No,” I said. “You’re not saying it right. Keep the lips almost motionless, and squinch your eyes up.”

  “I’m warning you now, Spenser. You stay away from me. I have friends who know how to deal with people like you.”

  “You gonna call in some hard cases from the Modern Language Association?”

  “I mean people who will kill you if I say so.”

  “Oh, Mrs. Hayden, you mean.”

  “You leave her out of this. You’ve upset her enough.” He looked nervously at the motionless and implacable figure in the doorway.

  “She asking you funny questions about Cathy Connelly?”

  “I don’t know anything about Cathy Connelly.”

  “Yeah, you do,” I said. “You know about spending the night with her in a motel in romantic Peabody. You know that she’s dead, and you know how she died.”

  “I do not.” His resonant voice was up about three octaves; for the first time it matched his appearance. He glanced back at the woman in the doorway. “I’ll have you killed, you bastard. I don’t know anything about this. You leave me alone or you’ll be so sorry—you can’t imagine.”

  “You don’t really think Joe Broz will kill me on your say-so, do you?”

  His pale face went chalk white. The flush left his cheeks and his left eyelid began to flutter. My right hand was resting on the steering wheel and he suddenly dug his fingernails into it. I yanked my hand away and Hayden jumped out of the car and walked very fast to the house.

  “You’ll see,” he shouted back to me. “You’ll see, you bastard. You’ll see.”

  He went in past his wife, who closed the door. Firmly.

  There were four red scratches on the back of my hand. Lucky it wasn’t the wife; they would have been on my throat. I leaned back in the car and took a big lungful of air and let it out slowly. I knew something. I knew that Hayden was it, or at least part of it. He’d overreacted. And he’d made a big mistake threatening me with tough-guy connections. It had to be Broz, and his reaction to the name made it certain. English professors don’t know hired muscle unless there’s something funny. Here there was something very funny. But exactly what? What was Lowell Hayden’s connection with Joe Broz? What did either one have that the other would want? Hayden didn’t have money, which was all Broz would want. The connection had to be dope somewhere. Powell was reputed to be a contact for heroin. Powell might be connected with Hayden. Hayden was connected to Cathy Connelly, who was connected to Terry Orchard, who was connected to Powell.

  My head began to feel like a mare’s nest. I could connect Hayden to Cathy Connelly for sure. The rest was just speculation, and what I knew in my gut wasn’t going to get Terry Orchard out of jail. My best hope was Hayden’s hysteria. He panicked pretty easily, and if I kept pushing at him, who knows what else might boil to the surface? But first I needed another point of view, a third party, you might say. It was time to go call on old Mark T
abor again. And this time maybe I’d stay longer and lean a little heavier.

  Chapter 18

  Mark Tabor was not home when I got to Westland Avenue. I had to walk up four flights of stairs to find that out. I walked back down and sat outside in my car. I spent a lot of time doing that. It was getting dark and colder; I kept the motor running and the heater going. My stomach was making great cavernous noises at six thirty when Tabor showed up. He came down from Mass Ave with his hands deep in the pockets of a pea jacket, the collar up, and his red corona of hair blossoming about the dark coat like an eruption. He turned in at his building and I came up behind him, reaching his door as he was closing it. I hit it hard with my shoulder and it flew open, propelling Tabor across the room. He tripped over the bed as he staggered backward and fell on it. I shut the door hard behind me, for effect. I wanted him scared.

  “Hey, man, what the hell,” he said.

  “The hell is this, stupid,” I said. “If you don’t answer what I ask I’m going to pound you into an omelet.”

  “Who the Christ are you, man?”

  “My name’s Spenser. I was here before, and you proved too tough for me to break. I’m back for another try, boy, only this time I’ll try harder.”

  “I don’t know nothing you care about, man.”

  “Oh, yeah, you do. You know about Lowell Hayden. Tell me. Tell me everything you know about Lowell Hayden.”

  “Hey, man, all I know is he’s a professor, you know. That’s all I know.”

  “No, you know more than that. You know he’s in SCACE with you, don’t you?” I moved toward him and he scrambled off the bed and backed toward the wall.

  “No, man, honest. …”

  “Yeah, you know that. And you’ll tell me. But there’s something else.”

  I was on his side of the bed now and close to him. He tried to jump onto the bed and away from me. I grabbed him by the shirtfront and slammed him back up against the wall.

  “Before you tell me about Hayden, I want to speak to you about the manner in which you address me.”

  I had my face very close to his and was holding him very tight up against the wall. “I want you to address me as Mr. Spenser. I do not want you to address me as ‘man.’ Do you understand that?”

  “Aw, man …” he began, and I slapped him in the face.

  “Mr. Spenser, boy,” I said.

  “Lemme go, Mr. Spenser. You got no right to come in here and hassle me.”

  I jerked him away from the wall and slammed him back up against it.

  “We’re not here to discuss my rights, stupid, we’re here to talk about Lowell Hayden. Is he in SCACE?”

  “No, man … Mr. Spenser.”

  I slapped him across the face again, a little harder, twice.

  “I’ll kill you if I have to, stupid,” I said.

  “Okay, okay, yeah, he was in SCACE, but he was like a secret member, you know? Dennis Powell brought him in; he said this dude would be like a faculty contact only under cover, you dig? And me and Dennis would be like the only ones to know.” He was beginning to sniffle a little as he talked.

  “And the manuscript, what about that?” I twisted a little more shirtfront up in my hand and lifted him up on tiptoe for emphasis.

  “I didn’t have nothing to do with that; that was Dennis and Hayden. Hayden arranged it. I never even saw it.”

  “Okay, one more: Was Powell dealing hard drugs on campus?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What?”

  “Skag, mostly.”

  “Where did he get it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I slammed him against the wall again.

  “Honest to God, Mr. Spenser, I don’t know. Ask Hayden, him and Dennis were close as a bastard. He might know. I don’t know.”

  “How did Dennis get killed?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How did Cathy Connelly get killed?”

  “I don’t know, honest to Christ, I don’t know about any of that.”

  He was shaking and his teeth chattered.

  I believed him. But I had some hard facts for the first time. I had Hayden connected with Powell. I had Powell connected with heroin, which meant mob connections. If Powell and Hayden were that close, I had Hayden connected to the mob. I had Hayden and Powell both connected to the Godwulf Manuscript, and I had the Godwulf Manuscript connected to Broz. More than that, I had Cathy Connelly connected to both Hayden and Terry Orchard. In fact, I had Hayden connected with two murders.

  “Let me go, Mr. Spenser. I don’t know anything else.”

  I realized I was still holding Tabor half off the ground. I let him go. He sank onto the bed and began to cry.

  I said, “Everyone gets scared when they are over-matched in the dark; it’s not something to be ashamed of, kid.”

  He didn’t stop crying, and I couldn’t think of anything else to say. So I left. I had a lot of information, but I had an unpleasant taste in my mouth. Maybe on the way home I could stop and rough up a Girl Scout.

  It was raining when I came out, a cold rain about a degree above snow, and in the dark the wetness made the city look better than it was. The light diffused and reflected off things that in the daylight were dull and ugly.

  It was nearly eight o’clock. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. I went to a steak house and ate. Halfway through my steak I caught sight of myself in the mirror behind the bar. I looked like someone who ought to eat alone. I didn’t look in the mirror again.

  It was twenty minutes of ten as I parked in front of my apartment. In front of me was parked an aggressively nondescript car made noticeable by the big whip antenna folded forward over the roof and clipped down. It was Quirk.

  When I got out of the car he was waiting for me, and I said, “What the hell do you want, Lieutenant?”

  “I want to talk with you. Let’s go inside.”

  Quirk was great for small talk. When we got to my apartment I offered him a drink. He said, “Thanks.”

  “Okay, Lieutenant, what do you want to talk about? How poor Cathy Connelly fell in the bathtub and hit her little head?”

  “What have you got?” Quirk said.

  “What do you mean what have I got? You taking a survey for H.E.W.?”

  “What have you got on the Connelly thing and on Lowell Hayden and the Powell murder?”

  “Say, you must be some kind of investigator; you know all about what I’m up to.”

  Quirk stood up, walked across the room, and looked out my window. He took a long pull at the bourbon and water in his hand and turned around and looked at me.

  “I’m trying, Spenser, I’m trying to ask you polite, and treat you like you weren’t a wise-ass sonova bitch, because I owe you. Because maybe I need you to do some stuff for me. Why don’t you try to help me through this by trying out your nightclub act on someone else? What have you got for me?”

  Quirk was right. I felt lousy about Mark Tabor, and I was taking it out on Quirk. “I got three categories of things,” I said. “What I know and can prove; what I know and can’t prove; and what I don’t know.”

  Quirk sat in my armchair and looked at me and listened.

  “Here’s what I know and can prove. Lowell Hayden and Cathy Connelly were lovers. They spent at least one night together in a Holiday Inn in Peabody—Peabody, what a romantic!—and I’ve got a note he wrote that locks him up on that one. Lowell Hayden and Dennis Powell were in on the theft of the Godwulf Manuscript. Hayden was an anonymous member of a student radical group called SCACE. Powell was dealing heroin. I’ve got a witness that will confirm that. I told Joe Broz I’d stop messing around with the case if the manuscript were returned. The next day it was returned.”

  “But you’re still messing around,” Quirk said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I lied.”

  “Broz probably won’t like that.”

  “Probably won’t,” I said.

  “What else can you prove?”

  “Nothing. But here
’s what I know anyway. Hayden is tied to Broz. It was after I talked to him the first time that Broz warned me off. This afternoon when I talked to him he said he had people who would kill me if he said so. You and I know where to find people like that, but your average teacher of medieval lit doesn’t. If Powell was dealing heroin, he was tied to the mob too. That’s too big a coincidence—that Powell and Hayden should both be mob connected and connected to each other and not have it mean something. Hayden had to have something to do with drug pushing. That’s the only thing that Broz would have in common with a university community. More connection: Hayden’s girl friend was a roommate of Powell’s girl friend, Cathy Connelly and Terry Orchard, and if Terry’s story is true, it would be Cathy Connelly who would have known that Terry had a gun, and where she kept it, and how to get it. If Terry’s story is true, the killing of Powell was not amateur work. Now who would have both professional connections and access to knowledge of Terry’s gun?”

  Quirk said, “Hayden.”

  “And,” I said, “the killing of Cathy Connelly was an amateur production, even though Yates seemed to like it. Powell was dead and Terry was in Charles Street at the time. Of this interlocking quartet who does that leave?”

  “Hayden.”

  “Clues must be your game, Lieutenant,” I said. “You’re two for two.”

  “Got some more?”

  “Yeah, here’s the hard stuff. Why did Powell get killed? Why did Terry get framed? Why did Cathy Connelly get killed? One point—Hayden is not playing with fifty-two cards. I talked to him today, there’re pieces missing. Kidnaping that manuscript sounds just about right for him. So if he’s it in this game, it may be harder to explain because he is not normal. The reasons he would do things are not predictable reasons.”

  “You got a nice assortment of possibilities,” Quirk said. “So far you’re into organized crime, dope pushing, theft, radical politics, adultery, and murder. I’m not saying I agree with you. But if I did, Hayden would look good to me. He would be the handle, and I’d keep turning it until something opened.” Quirk stood up. “If you’re messing with Joe Broz, you might turn up dead some morning. I’d better know the name of this witness in case you do.”