Robert B. Parker: The Spencer Novels 1?6

by Robert B. Parker

  “That would be a problem,” Vinnie said. “So why do it now? Because that Boston cop told you about the FBI prints?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “DeSpain told me that they had no history on him. Said there was no record of Sampson’s prints.”

  “DeSpain?” Vinnie said. “Used to be a state cop named DeSpain.”

  “Same guy,” I said.

  “DeSpain was good,” Vinnie said. “Tough bastard, but good.”

  “So either he’s not good any more or he was lying to me,” I said.

  “So you gotta go over all the ground you thought he’d cover.”

  “Un huh.”

  “This is likely to annoy Lonnie Wu,” Hawk said.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “And maybe DeSpain.”

  “Maybe.”

  “And maybe somebody do something we can catch them at,” Hawk said.

  “That would be nice.”

  “‘Less they shoot your ass,” Hawk said.

  “You and Vinnie are supposed to prevent that,” I said.

  “And if we don’t?” Vinnie said.

  “You don’t like the plan,” I said. “I’m open to suggestions.”

  “Hey,” Vinnie said. “I don’t fucking think. I just shoot people.”

  “Sooner or later,” Hawk said.

  We reached the street where Sampson’s apartment was, and turned into it and parked on a hydrant in front of his building.

  “It’ll probably take me a while,” I said.

  “Probably will,” Hawk said.

  I put a small flashlight in my pocket, and one of those multi-combination survival tools, and got out of the car into the pleasant steady rain. Hawk got behind the wheel and Vinnie came up in the front seat. Hawk shut off the lights and the wipers and turned off the motor. The rain immediately collected on the windows, and I couldn’t see them any more.

  I turned and walked toward the house where Craig Sampson had lived. It was three stories, gray, black shutters, white trim. There was a front porch four steps up, and a front door painted black. Narrow, full-length windows framed the front door. The windows were dirty. There were shabby lace curtains in them. The housepaint had blistered away leaving long, bare patches, but the wood beneath was gray with age and soil so that it nearly matched.

  There were three door bells. The first two had names in the little brass frames beneath. The top frame was empty. I peered in through the murky glass past the ratty curtains. There was a narrow hallway, an interior door on the right, and a staircase rising along the right wall beyond it. I tried the front door. It was locked. I looked at the doorbells. There was no intercom associated with them. I rang all the doorbells and waited. Inside the house the first floor door opened, and a thin, angry-looking woman opened the front door. I checked the name on the first floor bell.

  “Hello,” I said. “Ms. Rebello?”

  “What’s your story,” she said. She was nearly as tall as I was, and high-shouldered, and narrow. Her hair was about the color of the house and tightly permed. She was wearing a flowered dress and sneakers. The little toe of her right sneaker had been cut out, presumably to relieve pressure on a bunion.

  “You the landlady?” I said.

  She nodded. I took out my wallet and opened it and flashed my gun permit at her. It had my picture on it, and looked official. She squinted at it.

  “Police,” I said. “I need to take another look at Craig Sampson’s apartment.”

  I closed my wallet and stowed it. I knew she had no idea what she had just looked at.

  “Well, I wish you’d be a little neater this time,” she said. “I’m going to have to rent that place.”

  “Lady, my heart bleeds,” I said. “All I got to think about is how somebody shot your tenant full of holes.”

  I figured nice didn’t work with her.

  “Yeah, well, you already looked once,” she said. “And I got no rent coming in from the place.”

  I nodded and jerked my thumb up the stairs.

  “Just unlock the deceased’s door,” I said.

  Still muttering, she turned and walked up the stairs ahead of me, limping on her bunion.

  “I got a mortgage to pay . . . I don’t get income out of this place, I still got to pay the mortgage . . . Bank don’t care who got killed, or who didn’t. I don’t pay the mortgage, I’m out in the street . . . You people just take your own sweet damn time about it. . . . What am I supposed to do with his stuff, anyway?”

  At the third floor there was a tiny landing, lit by a 60-watt bulb in a copper-tone sconce. She took some keys from the pocket of her house coat and fumbled at the lock.

  “Don’t even have my glasses,” she said. “Can’t see a damn thing without them.”

  She finally found the keyhole and opened the door and stepped aside.

  “Close the door when you leave,” she said. “Downstairs too. They’ll lock behind you.”

  “Sure,” I said and stepped past her into the apartment and closed the door. I listened for a moment and heard her limp back down the stairs. Then I turned my attention to the apartment.

  •27•

  There was a bathroom directly opposite the front door, a two-stride hallway to the right that led into a bed-sitting room with a huge black-and-white theater poster filling the far wall, and some gray light coming in wearily from the single dormer window. The poster was of Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire. The bed was one of those oak platform deals with storage drawers underneath. There was a green Naugahyde arm chair, and a gray metal desk and chair. At the foot of the bed was a gray metal foot locker. The walls were white, but an old white and one that hadn’t been washed very often.

  I could hear the rain on the roof. I looked out of the one window for a moment and watched the rain fall gently past me and down three stories and onto the roof of my convertible. The rain had hurried the fall of leaves along the street. They plastered the roadway with limp, green-tinged yellow spatters, and collected in the storm culverts and backed up the water. A gray and white municipal bus moved past, sending spray up from the puddles onto the sidewalk. I turned back to the room. Everything was neat. Ms. Rebello had probably stepped in after the cops had tossed it. Funny they should have left it messy. Usually they don’t.

  I started at the bathroom and went through the room slowly. Even in a bath-and-bed apartment there are lots of places to look when you don’t know what you’re looking for. I looked under the rug and in the toilet tank. I felt inside the water spout in the tub. I used the plier part of my combination tool to take off the shower head. I pulled the stopper from the drain and shined my flashlight in. I shook out the towels, and felt carefully over the shower curtain. I checked the tiles in the shower to make sure there wasn’t a loose one with something hidden behind it. I did the same with the baseboard, and the ceiling molding. I removed the nut from the tap in the sink drain and found a wet soap-and-hair ball. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I knew that wasn’t it. I shined my light into the sink drain. I emptied the wastebasket and put the stuff back in. I smelled the shaving lotion and looked at the bottle against the light. I tasted the baby powder and then emptied the container into the toilet. There was nothing in there but talc. I flushed the toilet and threw the container in the wastebasket. I held the shampoo bottle up to the light. I examined the toothpaste tube, and the deodorant stick and the shaving cream can. All of them were what they appeared to be. I took the toilet paper off the roll and looked at it carefully from each end. There was nothing rolled into it. I shined my light between each vane on the radiator. I checked the medicine cabinet. When I was satisfied that there was nothing that would do me any good in the bathroom, I moved to the big room. And in about ten minutes I found it.

  Taped to the bottom of one of the storage drawers in the pla
tform bed was a white envelope and in the envelope were eight Polaroid pictures, seven of a woman with no clothes on, one, taken in a mirror, of a man and woman with no clothes on. The man was Craig Sampson. The woman was holding a towel in front of her face.

  I took the pictures over to the desk and sat down and spread them out on the desk and turned on the gooseneck lamp that sat on the back corner of the desk. I studied them in an entirely professional way. She was lying on, or standing beside, a bed in what was probably a hotel room. She was either stark naked (five pictures, including the one with Sampson) or wearing the kind of garter belt and stockings get-up that has so successfully weathered the test of time in Playboy (three pictures). I was comforted by the garter belt poses. I’d begun to think only Hef and I still cared for that sort of thing.

  The room was very still while I looked at the pictures. There was the white sound of the rain on the roof, the occasional settling creak of an old house responding to the steady weight of gravity, and an occasional sound of steam heat knocking tentatively in the pipes.

  The woman looked as if she exercised often. Her body was firm, and her stomach was flat. With the towel always concealing her features, there was nothing to tell me who she was. Well, not quite nothing. Though it was hard to be sure in a Polaroid, she appeared to have no body hair. Theoretically this oddity would be an excellent identity clue. But it was of limited practical value.

  The pictures didn’t have to mean much. Lots of people liked to take nude pictures of themselves and their partners. Some of them even concealed their face. Still it told me that Sampson had a relationship which he concealed. No one knew of it. Everyone said he had no girlfriends. And the fact that this girlfriend concealed her identity was at least mildly interesting. What was more interesting was that the cops had missed it. It wasn’t that hard to find, and any cop would know to look under a drawer when searching a place. These cops had searched it so thoroughly that they’d made a mess, and they hadn’t found these pictures?

  It gave one pause. But here was not the place for pausing. I put the pictures back in the envelope and put the envelope in my inside jacket pocket, and went through the rest of the room. I unmade the bed and remade it. I felt under every drawer, behind the poster, all the usual moves, and didn’t find anything else that mattered. I put everything back carefully. I was neat and polite and generally swell, for a gumshoe. But it is also easier to search a place if you don’t make a mess. You’re not pawing through the jumble you just created.

  I left Sampson’s room, pulled the door shut and heard it latch behind me. Then I went down the two dark flights of narrow stairs and knocked on Ms. Rebello’s door. She must have been making late breakfast or early lunch. I could smell bacon cooking in there. I did not think it cooked for me.

  The door opened on the safety chain.

  “Yuh?”

  “I wish to take action on this,” I said. “Just how messy were the police who searched that room earlier?”

  “Messy,” she said. “A couple goddamn pigs, excuse my French.”

  “Emptied out drawers, that sort of thing?”

  “Clothes all over the floor. Papers, bedclothes. Pigs.”

  “Well, they’re going to regret it,” I said.

  “That all?” she said. “Can I pack the place up and rent it?”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “And please accept my apologies for the mess and the delay as well.”

  “Yeah,” she said, “sure,” and closed the door.

  I smiled to myself in the ugly little hall. Got to take fun where you find it. I went out the front door and pulled it carefully shut behind me and heard the latch click. I glanced up and down the street. There was no one in sight. In front of the house my car started with a small puff of smoke from the exhaust and the window washers began to move. I turned the collar up on my leather jacket, and went down the four front steps into the rain, and across the sidewalk and into my car.

  “Any luck?” Hawk said.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  I took out the nude pictures and passed them around.

  “The guy Sampson?” Vinnie said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Know the woman?”

  “No.”

  “She’s got no pussy,” Vinnie said.

  “Observant,” I said.

  “And eloquent,” Hawk said.

  Neither Vinnie nor Hawk had anything meaningful to contribute to the absent body hair question. There was a lively discussion of nude women we had known. The consensus was that, while body hair varied considerably, none of us had ever known anyone with none. Vinnie handed me back the pictures, and I put them back in my pocket.

  “Better count them,” Hawk said, and put the car in drive and eased away from the curb.

  •28•

  Ocean Street in Port City starts at the foot of Hill Street and runs parallel to the harbor for maybe a mile and a half, before it curves around an inlet and turns into Seaside Drive. One on each side of the street, Hawk and I started at the south end, near the theater, and began to ask people if they knew Craig Sampson. We each had a publicity still from the theater to show. We kept an eye on each other as we worked, and Vinnie dawdled along behind us in the car with a shotgun leaning against the front passenger seat.

  The Port City Tap was my fifth stop. On a wet afternoon it was a haven of good cheer. Three guys were sitting at the bar not talking to each other, and a woman wearing a black cowboy hat, with a big feather, was in a booth by herself with a stack of quarters in front of her on the table next to something that looked like a strawberry soda, but probably wasn’t. The jukebox was playing some kind of country western music that sounded to me like a chicken being strangled, though Susan would probably have liked it. A television set above the bar was silently showing a soap opera. The guy behind the bar looked like a reject from the World Wrestling Federation. He was large with a shaved head and a big, droopy moustache. He was wearing a black tee shirt with the sleeves cut off, and a Harley-Davidson logo on the front. Across his thick upper arm, just below the right shoulder, was a surprisingly neat tattoo which read Born to Raise Hell.

  The three guys at the bar didn’t appear to be listening to the music or watching the television. They weren’t with each other, and maybe weren’t with anyone. Ever. None of them paid any attention to the woman in the booth. I slid onto a stool next to one of them, and took out my picture of Craig Sampson.

  “Ever see this guy?” I said and held the picture in front of him.

  The guy was wearing a yellow rain slicker over a red plaid flannel shirt. He had a half-full beer mug in front of him and an empty shot glass beside it. He stared at the picture and back at his beer and shook his head. The bartender moved down the bar.

  “What’ll it be, pal?”

  I held up the picture.

  “Know this guy?” I said.

  “We don’t ’low no solicitation in here,” the bartender said.

  “Why not?” I said.

  “Annoys the customers.”

  “More than the music?” I said.

  “You want a drink, I’ll sell you a drink,” the bartender said. “Otherwise hit the road, Jack.”

  “‘And never come back no mo’ no mo’.’”

  “You got that right, pal. We ain’t running no fucking information booth here, you know?”

  “Gee,” I said, “and the place seemed so inviting.”

  The bartender had a white apron tied around his waist. He stared at me with his big arms folded across his chest.

  “I’ll have a draught beer,” I said.

  The bartender drew it and put it in front of me.

  “Three and a quarter,” he said.

  “I’ll run a tab,” I said.

  “No you won’t.”

  I too
k a five from my wallet and put it on the bar. The bartender made change and slapped it down on the bar in front of me. All his motions were harsh.

  I held up Sampson’s picture again.

  “Ever see him in here?” I said.

  “Who wants to know?”

  I looked carefully over each shoulder and slowly around the room, and back at the bartender.

  “Must be me,” I said.

  “You looking for trouble?”

  I grinned at him.

  “If I say yes, will you tell me I’ve come to the right place?”

  The bartender opened and closed his mouth. I knew I had stepped on his next line. I was still holding Sampson’s picture up.

  “Ever see him in here?” I said.

  “Jesus,” the bartender said, “you’re a persistent bugger.”

  “Thanks for noticing,” I said.

  “And a real wiseass too.”

  I smiled modestly.

  “What about this guy?” I said.

  “Don’t know him.”

  “Never saw him in here?”

  “No.”

  “Ever hear of a street gang named the Death Dragons?”

  “Are you some kind of cop or something?” the bartender said.

  “Some kind,” I said. “Ever hear of the Death Dragons?”

  “No. It’s not bike guys.”

  “No. Chinese.”

  “Oh, fuck, that’s Chinatown shit. I don’t know nothing about Chinatown.”

  “Ever hear of a guy named Lonnie Wu?”

  “No.”

  “Kwan Chang?”

  “Who?”

  “It’s a what. Kwan Chang.”

  He shook his head.

  “How come you were so hostile when I came in?”

  “I wasn’t hostile, I just didn’t know you.”

  “You’re hostile to everyone you don’t know?”

  He looked at me as if I were disputing the law of gravity.