Phil was dead. I realized that Phil and the floor and my leg were sticky with blood—Mrs. Hayden’s blood. I touched her and she didn’t move. I felt for her pulse. She had none. She’d bled to death hanging on to Phil’s arm. Her teeth were still bitten into it. Phil had emptied his gun in desperation. There was no way to tell how many had hit her. I didn’t want to know. I stood up. The room was a shambles. Blood was smeared everywhere. The night stand was tipped over. So was the television set. The bed was broken. I was aware that my side hurt. There was some blood staining my shirt. The wound had opened again.
I remembered Hayden. I looked around. I didn’t see him. He was going to get few merit badges for semper fidelis. I started for the door. The chain lock was still on it. The door that Phil had come through locked from the other side. I went over to the bathroom. It was locked.
I said, “Hayden.”
No answer. I banged on the door. Nothing. I felt crazy and hot. I backed up three steps and ran right through the door. It was thin and tore from its hinges. No Hayden. I pulled the shower curtain aside and there he was. In the tub, sitting down with his knees drawn up to his chest.
He looked at me and said, “Please don’t.”
I reached down, took the front of his shirt in both hands, and yanked him up out of the tub. There was a peculiar smell about him and I realized he’d wet himself. I was revolted. I swung him around, the way a trackman throws the hammer, and slung him into the bedroom. He stumbled, almost fell, and stopped, looking down at his wife. I came beside him. I took his chin in my hand and raised his head. I put my face up against his, so that our noses touched. I could barely speak, and my body was shivering. I said, “I have killed three people to save your miserable goddamn ass. Your wife took about six slugs in the stomach and bled to death in great agony to save your miserable goddamn ass. I will call up Martin Quirk in a minute, and he will come here to arrest you. You will tell him everything that you know and everything that I want you to tell him and everything that he asks you. If you do not, I will get Quirk to put us alone together in a cell in the cellar, and I will beat you to death. I promise you that I will.”
He said, “Yes, sir.” When I let him go he didn’t move—just stood there looking down at his wife with his hands clasped behind his back. I went to the phone and dialed a number I knew too well.
Chapter 25
The room was busy. The people from the coroner’s office had come and taken Phil away, and Mrs. Hayden. The hotel doctor had come and rebandaged my side and told me to go in to outpatient this afternoon and have some new stitches in the wound. Beside the broken TV set Frank Belson stood in front of Lowell Hayden, who sat in the only chair in the room. Hayden was talking and Belson was writing things down as he talked. Quirk was there and three uniformed cops and a couple of plainclothes types were standing around looking shrewd and keeping an eye out for clues. The occupant of the next room had been whacked on the head and locked in a closet and was now planning to sue the hotel. The house man was trying to persuade him not to.
Quirk was as immaculate and dapper as ever. He had on a belted tweed topcoat, pale pigskin gloves.
“Not bad,” he said. “He had a gun and you didn’t and you took him? Not bad at all. Sometimes you amaze me, Spenser.”
“We took him,” I said. “Me and Mrs. Hayden.”
“Either way,” Quirk said.
“How about the kid?” I said.
“Orchard? I already called. They’re processing her out now. She’ll be on the street by the time we get through here.”
“Yates?”
Quirk smiled with his mouth shut. “Captain Yates is at this moment telling the people in the pressroom about another triumph for truth, justice, and the American way.”
“He’s got all the moves, hasn’t he?” I said.
One of the plainclothes dicks snickered, and Quirk looked at him hard enough to hurt.
“How about Joe Broz?”
Quirk shrugged. “We got a pickup order out on him. How long we can keep him when we get him, you can guess as well as I can. In the last fifteen years we’ve arrested him eight times and made one charge stick—loitering. It will help if Hayden sticks to his story.”
I looked at Hayden, sitting in the chair. He was talking now in his deep, phony voice. Lecturing Belson. Explaining in detail every aspect of the case and explaining its connection with the movement, drawing inference, elaborating implications, demonstrating significance, and suggesting symbolic meaning. Belson looked as if he had a headache. Hayden was enjoying himself very much.
“He’ll stick,” I said. “Imagine him lecturing a jury. Your only problem will be getting him to stop.”
The phone rang. One of the plainclothes cops answered and held it out to Quirk.
“For you, Lieutenant.”
Quirk answered, listened, said “Okay,” and hung up.
“Orchard’s parents can’t be located, Spenser. She says she wants you to come down and pick her up. How’s your side?”
“It only hurts when I laugh.”
“Okay, beat it. We’ll be in touch about the coroner’s inquest.”
I looked at Hayden again. He was still talking to Belson, his rich voice rolling out and filling the room. For him, a big, homely, masculine woman had taken six .45 slugs in the stomach. The press arrived and a photographer in what looked like a leather trench coat was snapping Hayden’s picture. Hayden looked positively triumphant. Le mouvement, c’est moi. Jesus!
Outside the room the corridor was crowded with people. Two uniformed cops kept them at bay. As I shoved through, someone asked what had happened in there.
“It was a lover’s quarrel,” I said, “with the world.”
I wondered what I meant. I didn’t even remember where I got the phrase. Downstairs the lobby was as refined and ornate as ever. I went through it into the midafternoon sunshine. The hotel was dwarfed by the enormous insurance building that rose behind it. The sides of the skyscraper were reflecting glass, and the sun off the glass was dazzling. Tallest building in Boston. Excelsior, I thought. Tower of Babel, I thought. My car was parked in front of the library. I got in and drove the short block to police headquarters. I parked out front by the yellow curb on Berkeley Street. It’s the only place in the area where there are always parking spaces.
I got out of the car arthritically. When I straightened up she was outside the building, on the top step. Squinting against the light, she was wearing a dapple gray suede coat with white fur trim at collar, cuffs, hem, and down the front where it buttoned. Her hands were thrust deep in her pockets and a shoulder purse hung against her left side. She was wearing black boots with three-inch heels, and looking up at her from street level, she looked a lot taller than I knew she was. Her hair was loose and dark against the high white fur collar.
Neither of us moved for a minute. We stood in silence in the bright afternoon and looked at each other. Then she came down the steps.
I said, “Hi.”
She said, “Hi.”
I went around and opened the door to my car on her side. She got in, tucking the skirt of her long coat modestly under as she slid in. I went around and got in my side.
She said, “Do you have a cigarette?”
I said, “No. But I can stop and pick some up. There’s a Liggett’s on the corner.”
She said, “If you would. I’d like to buy some make-up too.”
I pulled over and parked in the alley between the parking garage and the drugstore at the corner of Berkeley and Boylston streets. As we got out she said, “I don’t have any money, can you lend me some?”
I nodded. We went into the drugstore. It was a big one—a soda fountain down one side, bottles of almost everything on the other three walls, three wide aisles with shelves selling heating pads and baby strollers, paperback books and candy and Christmas lights. Terry bought a package of Eve cigarettes, opened it, took one out, lit it, and inhaled half of it. She let the smoke out slowly through her nose.
I paid. Then we went to the make-up counter. She bought eye liner, eye shadow, make-up base, rouge, lipstick, and face powder. I paid.
I said, “Would you like an ice cream cone?”
She nodded and I bought us two ice cream cones. Vanilla for me, butter pecan for her. Two scoops. We went back out to my car and got in.
“Could we drive around for a little while?” she asked.
“Sure.”
I drove on down Berkeley Street and onto Storrow Drive. At Leverett Circle I went over the dam to the Cambridge side and drove back up along the river on Memorial Drive. When we got to Magazine Beach we parked. She used the rearview mirror to put on some of the make-up. I looked across the gray river at the railroad yards. Behind them, half-hidden by the elevated extension of the Mass Turnpike, was Boston University Field, with high-rise dorms built up around the stadium. When I was a kid it had been Braves Field until the Braves moved to Milwaukee and B.U. bought the field. I remembered going there with my father, the excitement building as we went past the ticket taker and up from the dark under stands into the bright green presence of the diamond. The Dodgers and the Giants used to come here then. Dixie Walker, Clint Hartung, Sibbi Sisti, and Tommy Holmes. I wondered if they were still alive.
Terry Orchard finished her make-up and stowed it all away in her shoulder purse.
“Spenser?”
“Yeah?”
“What can I say? Thank you seems pretty silly.”
“Don’t say anything, kid. You know and I know. Let it be.”
She leaned forward and held my face in her hands and kissed me hard on the mouth and held it for a long time. The fresh make-up was sweet smelling. When she finished, her lipstick was badly smeared.
“Gotcha,” I said. “Let’s go home.”
We drove on out Soldier’s Field Road toward Newton. She slid over in the seat beside me and put her head against my shoulder while I drove, and smoked another cigarette. There was a maroon car in the driveway of her house when we got there.
“My father,” she said. “The police must have reached him.” As I pulled up to the curb the front door opened and Terry’s mother and father appeared on the porch.
“Shit,” she said.
“I’ll let you out here and keep going, love,” I said. “This is family business.”
“Spenser, when am I going to see you again?”
“I don’t know. We don’t live in the same neighborhood, love. But I’m around. Maybe I’ll come by sometime and take you to lunch.”
“Or buy me an ice cream,” she said.
“Yeah, that too.”
She stared at me and her eyes filled up.
She said, “Thank you,” and got out of the car and walked up toward her house. I drove back to town, got my side stitched at Boston City by the same doctor, and went home.
It was dark when I got there, and I sat down in my living room and drank bourbon from the bottle without turning on the lights. They’d given me two pills at the hospital and combined with the bourbon they seemed to kill the pain pretty well.
I looked at the luminous dial of my wristwatch. 6:45.
I felt as if I’d wrung out, and was drip-drying. I also felt that spending the night alone would have me screaming incoherently by 3 A.M.
I looked at my watch again. 6:55.
I turned the light on and took off the watch. Inside, it still said Brenda Loring, 555-3676.
I dialed the number. She answered.
I said, “Hello, my name is Spenser; do you remember me?”
She laughed, a terrific laugh, a high-class laugh. “With the shoulders, and the nice eyes, yeah, I remember.” And she laughed again. A good laugh, full of promise. A hell of a laugh when you thought about it.
Here’s a preview of Spenser’s next case—
his first case with Susan Silverman.
You’ll want to read it all
in GOD SAVE THE CHILD,
now available from Dell.
It was sunny, and the first hint of a New England fall murmured behind the sunshine. Warm enough for the top down on my convertible. Cold enough for a pale denim jacket. I drank a large paper cup of black coffee on the way and finished it just before I got to the Smithfield cutoff.
I found a space in the high-school parking lot and went in.
The receptionist in the guidance office was in brown knit today and displaying a lot of cleavage. I admired it. She wasn’t Susan Silverman, but she wasn’t Lassie either and there was little to be gained in élitist thinking.
Susan Silverman came out of her office with a red, blue, and green striped blazer on.
“I’ll be back in about half an hour, Carla,” she said to the redhead and to me, “Why don’t we take my car? It’ll be easier than giving you directions.”
I said, “Okay,” and we went out of the office and down a school corridor I hadn’t walked before. But it was a school corridor. The smell of it, and the long rows of lockers and the tone of repressed energy was like it always was. The guidance set-up was different though. Guidance counseling in my school meant the football coach banged your head against a locker and told you to shape up.
Susan Silverman said, “Were you looking down the front of my secretary’s dress when I came out?”
“I was looking for clues,” I said. “I’m a professional investigator.”
Susan’s car was a two-year-old Nova. I opened the door for her and she slipped into the seat tucking her blue skirt under her.
We drove out of the parking lot, turned left toward the center of town, and then right on Main Street and headed north.
“How’d you locate this place so quickly?”
“I collected a favor,” she said, “from a girl in school.”
We turned left off Main Street and headed east. The road was narrow and the houses became sparser. Most of the road was through woods and it seemed incredible that we were but fifteen miles from Boston and in the northern reaches of a megalopolis that stretched south through Richmond, Virginia. On my right was a psture with black and white Ayrshire cows grazing behind a stone wall piled without benefit of mortar. Then more woods, mostly elm trees with birch trees gleaming through occasionally and a smattering of white pine.
“It’s along here somewhere,” she said.
“What are we looking for?”
“A dirt road on the left about a half mile past the cow pasture.”
“There,” I said, “just before the red maple.”
She nodded and turned in. It was a narrow road, rocky and humpbacked between the wheel ruts. We pulled around a bend about two hundred yards in and stopped. The land before us was cleared and might once have been a lawn. Now it was an expanse of gravel spattered with an occasional clump of weeds some of which, coarse and sparse-leafed, looked waist-high. Behind one clump was a discarded bicycle on its back, its wheelless forks pointing up. The scavenged shell of a 1937 Hudson Terraplane rusted quietly at the far edge of the clearing. The remnants of a sidewalk, big squares of cracked cement, heaved and buckled by frost, led up to a one-story house.
A plump brown-haired girl of maybe fourteen sat on the front steps. She had big dark eyes that looked even bigger and darker in contrast with her white, doughy face. She had on a white T-shirt, blue dungarees with a huge flare at the bottom, and no shoes. She was eating a Twinkie, and in her right hand held an open can of Coke and a burning filter tip cigarette. She looked at us without expression as we got out of the car and started up the walk.
“I don’t like it here,” Susan Silverman said.
“That’s the trouble with you urban intellectuals,” I said. “You have no sense of nature’s subtle rhythms.”
The girl finished her Twinkie as we reached her and washed it down with the rest of the Coke.
“Good morning,” I said.
She looked at me without expression, inhaled most of her filter tip cigarette and, without taking it from her mouth, let the smoke out through her nose. Then she yelled, “Vic.”
The screen door behind her scraped open—one hinge was loose—and out he came. Susan Silverman put her hand on my arm.
“You were right,” I said. “He is unusual, isn’t he.”
Vic Harroway was perhaps 5′10˝, three inches shorter than I, and twenty pounds heavier. Say, 215. He was a body builder, but a body builder gone mad. He embodied every excess of body building that an adolescent fantasy could concoct. His hair was a bright cheap blond, cut straight across the forehead in a Julius Caesar shag. The muscles in his neck and chest were so swollen his skin looked as if it would burst over them. There were stretch marks pale against his dark tan where the deltoid muscles drape over the shoulder, and stretch marks over his biceps and in the rigid valley between his pectoral muscles. His abdominal muscles looked like cobblestones. The white shorts were slit up the side to accommodate his thigh muscles. They too showed stretch marks. My stomach contracted at the amount of effort he’d expended, the number of weights he’d lifted to get himself in this state.
He said, “What do you turds want?” Down home hospitality.
I said, “We’re looking for Walden Pond, you glib devil you.”
“If you came out here looking for trouble, you’re gonna find it, Jack. Take your slut and get your ass out of here or I’ll bend you into an earring.”
I looked at Susan Silverman. “Slut?” I said.
Harroway said, “That’s right. You don’t like it? You want to make something out of it?” He jumped lightly off the steps and landed in front of me, maybe four feet away, slightly crouched. I could feel Susan Silverman lean back but she didn’t step back. A point for her. A point for me too, because as Harroway landed I brought my gun out and as he went into his crouch he found himself staring into its barrel. I held it straight out in front of me, level with his face.
“Let’s not be angry with each other, Vic. Let us reason together,” I said.
“What the hell is this? What do you want?”
“I am looking for a boy named Kevin Bartlett …”
This, like everything else, is for Joan, David, and Daniel.
The Godwulf Manuscript Page 17
