Robert B. Parker: The Spencer Novels 1?6

by Robert B. Parker

  “Listen,” Susan said, and pressed the playback button on her answering machine.

  A voice said, “Dr. Silverman, this is Angela Trickett . . .”

  Susan said, “Nope,” and hit the fast forward. She let it run for a moment and hit it again.

  A voice said, “Susan, it’s Gwenn . . .”

  “Nope.” Fast forward. “This next one is it.”

  “Dr. Silverman. This will be hard to hear, maybe, but you need to know. Your boyfriend is not faithful to you. I know this from personal experience, which I regret. But you have the right to know. I am not the first one.”

  There was a pause, then the sound of the phone hanging up. Susan hit the stop button and looked at me.

  I looked sheepishly at her.

  “That damned Madonna,” I said. “Can’t keep her mouth shut.”

  Susan smiled.

  “I thought I recognized the voice.”

  “Play it again,” I said.

  Susan did. We listened.

  “Again,” I said.

  We listened.

  “Jocelyn Colby,” I said.

  “My God,” Susan said, “I think you’re right.”

  “I’m right,” I said.

  “Then there’s something else. She has called me two or three times asking if you were there, saying that she’d expected to see you, but you weren’t where you were supposed to be.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” I said.

  “Well, first of all, I’m assuming that you’ve not been balling Jocelyn Colby.”

  “This is true,” I said.

  “So she’s lying to make me think you’re unfaithful. Calling me up looking for you was probably a way of planting suspicion. ‘Well, where is he?’ I was supposed to say to myself. In fact, since you are often irregular in your hours, I never thought anything about it, and since she had no message for you, I never bothered to say anything.”

  “She ever speak to you direct?”

  “No, always on the machine. I assume she called during office hours, knowing I wouldn’t pick up.”

  My beer was gone. I went to the kitchen and opened another bottle, looked at my stew, poured a little of the beer into it, gave it a stir, and went back into the living room. Susan was sitting on the couch with her shoes off and her feet tucked under her. She held her wine glass in both hands and stared over the rim of it into the fire. I sat beside her on the couch.

  “So why is she doing this?” Susan said.

  “Last time I saw her she was mad at me, because I told her no one was following her.”

  “And?”

  “And she called me a prick master.”

  “Prick master? What a dandy phrase. But I meant ‘and what resulted from the fact that you said no one was following her?’”

  “I was going to stop being her shadow.”

  “Do you think she knew that no one was following her?”

  “Unless she’s delusional,” I said. “There was no one there.”

  “So why would she tell you she was being followed?”

  “To get my attention?”

  “And eventually your companionship.”

  Pearl shifted on the floor and made a snurffing sound in her sleep. I drank a little of my beer.

  “Just before she was calling me a prick master she was complaining that I was going to spend time with you.”

  Susan nodded. We were quiet. The flames moved in the fireplace. A bubble of residual moisture, squeezed by the heat, oozed out of the end of one log and vaporized with a barely audible hiss.

  “Is this a case of ‘hunk city’ strikes again?” I said.

  “She’s jealous,” Susan said. “She has attached to you in some way, and she’s jealous of me.”

  “Well, any woman would be,” I said.

  Susan went on as if I hadn’t spoken. When she began to think about something, she could think it to a crisp.

  “You are a powerful man—in a protector, rescuer, kind of way.”

  “She talked about being rescued.”

  “It’s a voguish pop psyche jargon phrase at the moment,” Susan said. “I hear it in therapy all the time. And it’s a useful concept, as long as everyone understands that it is shorthand for a much larger and more complicated emotional issue.”

  “Does she seriously think she can break us apart by anonymous accusations of infidelity?” I said.

  Susan smiled.

  “Fancy talk for a guy with an eighteen-inch neck,” she said.

  “I been bopping a shrink,” I said.

  “Lucky you,” Susan said. “A woman like that reflects her own emotional life. She has no depth of commitment; she doesn’t understand it in others. She has no trust; she assumes others don’t either. If he doesn’t want me, it’s because there’s someone else; if I can get rid of someone else, he’ll want me. It’s an adolescent vision of love, which is to say romanticized sexual desire.”

  “Thank you, doctor.”

  “Be sure you understand it. I’ll be passing out blue books before supper.”

  “You have any thoughts on what I should do about this?”

  “Ignore it,” Susan said.

  “You think she’ll keep calling?”

  “Probably, but only on my machine. She won’t want to talk with me.”

  “You shouldn’t have to be bothered.”

  “No bother,” Susan said. “Just another message on my machine at night. It might get exciting. She might give me details on what you and she do.”

  “She’s pretty good-looking,” I said.

  “Un huh.”

  “Maybe, just to help her regain her mental health, if I came across for her?”

  “Or maybe the disappointment would put her over the edge,” Susan said.

  “You never seem disappointed,” I said.

  “I’m a Harvard graduate,” Susan said.

  “Yeah, good point. I guess we’d better not risk it with Jocelyn.”

  “I agree,” Susan said.

  “Another thing about her,” I said. “She says she and Christopholous are, or were, lovers, that whoever was following Christopholous was probably jealous of his love for her, or hers for him, she wasn’t clear about that.”

  “Really,” Susan said. “I didn’t know about that.”

  “Apparently Christopholous didn’t either,” I said. “He was puzzled at the suggestion.”

  “What did he say when you quoted Jocelyn?”

  “I didn’t. I’m trying not to say more than I need to say in this deal. At least until I get some idea of what I’m talking about.”

  “That seems prudent,” Susan said.

  “I don’t think Christopholous was lying,” I said. “Why would he? There’s no reason he shouldn’t date Jocelyn. He’s divorced. She’s divorced.”

  “She’s widowed,” Susan said, “not that it makes any difference, I guess.”

  “She told me she was divorced.”

  Susan widened her eyes.

  “Really,” she said. “She told me she was widowed.”

  “You know any details? Husband’s name? Where they were married? How he died?”

  Susan shook her head. One of the logs settled in the fireplace. The momentary flare brightened Susan’s face, and threw a shadow that made her eyes seem even bigger than they were.

  “No. Just that he died ‘tragically’ before she joined the company.”

  I leaned back a little and stretched my legs out toward the fire and put my arm around Susan’s shoulder.

  “Jocelyn appears to lie,” I said.

  “True,” Susan said.

  On the floor Pearl opened her eyes and stared at me with my arm around Sus
an. She thought about that for a moment, then, seemingly from the prone position, jumped up on the couch and insinuated herself vigorously between us.

  “Pearl appears to be jealous.”

  “Also true,” Susan said.

  Pearl leaned into Susan in such a way as to get most of my arm off of Susan and around Pearl. I looked at her. She lapped me on the nose.

  “As a mental health professional,” I said, “do you have a view on Jocelyn?”

  “I think she might be nuts,” Susan said.

  “Could you put that in terms a layman can understand?”

  “Well, she seems to have some unresolved conflicts which center on men, particularly men in positions of power or authority, or perhaps merely older men.”

  “Is it too early to suggest that she might have some sort of problem with her father?”

  Susan smiled at me.

  “Yes,” she said. “It is too early.”

  Half sitting, half sprawled between us, Pearl shifted her weight from me onto Susan.

  “Is it too early to suggest that Pearl has unresolved issues about being a Canine American Princess?”

  “No. I think we have empirical support for that diagnosis,” Susan said. Pearl lapped Susan’s ear. Susan turned her head, trying to escape. Pearl persisted. “Though perhaps it is not an unresolved issue.”

  We sat quietly for a while.

  “Maybe she was following Christopholous,” I said.

  “You think?”

  “One of the things stalkers get out of stalking is a sense of power over the person they are stalking.”

  Susan nodded.

  “And, thinking of it in this light, it was an odd remark, that the stalker was stalking Christopholous because the stalker was jealous.”

  “Unless it was true,” Susan said.

  “And she were the stalker,” I said.

  “She forms an obsessive attachment to Jimmy, because he’s older and he’s the head of her acting company, and she tends to form such attachments,” Susan said.

  She was staring into the fire. Her wine glass was still nearly full in her hands. I knew she’d forgotten about it as she tracked her hypothesis.

  “And he doesn’t reciprocate. She assumes there’s another woman, and trails him to see if there is.”

  “And maybe,” I said, “because it makes her feel good to trail him.”

  “Yes.”

  “And then I come along and, being entirely irresistible, as you well know, replace Christopholous in her affections.”

  “And she tells you she’s being followed so you’ll pay attention to her.”

  “If we’re right,” I said, “this is not a healthy woman.”

  “No, she must be very unhappy.”

  “So maybe I’ve got the stalker,” I said.

  “Maybe. So who killed Craig?”

  “I have no idea,” I said.

  Susan leaned over and kissed me on the mouth.

  “But you will,” she said. “What’s for supper?”

  “Brunswick stew, French bread, tomato chutney,” I said.

  “Shall we eat some?”

  “That was part of my plan,” I said.

  “What was the rest?”

  “Well,” I said. “If I can’t help Jocelyn out . . .”

  Susan smiled at me.

  “The last boy scout,” she said.

  •33•

  We were in my office. Vinnie was listening to doo wop on his head phones, Hawk was still reading Cornel West, and I sat at my desk looking at Craig Sampson’s FBI file. When I got through, I passed it over to Hawk. He dog-eared the page in his book and put it on the corner of my desk and took the file and read it. When he was through, he passed it back.

  “Where you say the Chinese broad from?” Hawk said.

  “Rikki Wu? T’ai-pei.”

  Hawk nodded and picked up his book again. I sat and stared at the file folder. Vinnie was bobbing his head to the music only he could hear. Behind me the window rattled. I swiveled my chair and, for a change of pace, stared out the window for a while. It was bright outside, and very warm for November, but the wind was strong. Where I could see the sky between the buildings, it was a weak blue, and the off-white clouds were tattered-looking as they trailed east toward the harbor.

  According to the file that Lee Farrell had dropped off, Craig Sampson would be forty-one were he still alive. He had enlisted in the army, in August of 1971, had basic training at Ft. Dix, gone to the army language school at Monterey, and spent a year and a half with a Military Assistance Group in Taiwan. He had the rank of Specialist 3rd class when he was honorably discharged in July 1974.

  From somewhere I heard a siren. Police Headquarters was up Berkeley Street a couple of blocks, and beyond that, facing onto Columbus, was a firestation. Sirens were the sound of the city; urban be-bop.

  I swiveled my chair back around. Hawk looked up, dog-eared his book again, and put his feet up on the corner of my desk. His cowboy boots were gleaming with polish.

  “Everywhere we look,” Hawk said, “there’s a goddamned Chinaman.”

  “I don’t think we’re supposed to call them that,” I said.

  “Okay, how ’bout ‘a Asian gentleman.’”

  “I think you need to get the phrase ‘Pacific Rim’ in there somewhere,” I said.

  “Lemme practice,” Hawk said, “I know I can get it right.”

  “Okay,” I said. “For the moment, anyway, everywhere we look there’s a goddamned Chinaman.”

  “What we know is Rikki Wu from Taiwan. Craig Sampson stationed in Taiwan. Rikki Wu pretty surely bopping Craig Sampson. Rikki Wu’s husband’s Kwan Chang’s man in Port City. He tell you to buzz off. You don’t and various people from the Pacific Rim trying to blow your brains out. You know where Lonnie Wu is from?”

  “No.”

  “You figure maybe Craig been buzzing Rikki longer than we thought?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You figure DeSpain know that and tell you there’s no record on Sampson so you won’t follow it up?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe he just went to Triple I and it wasn’t there, so he didn’t go further.”

  “Like he don’t know that there can be clerical errors,” Hawk said. “You know DeSpain, you think he that sloppy in a homicide?”

  “No.”

  “And they toss Sampson’s room,” Hawk said. “And they don’t find the nude pictures under the bed that a fucking girl scout would find in ten minutes.”

  “I know,” I said. “That’s been bothering me too.”

  Vinnie took one tape out of his Walkman and put in another. He evinced no interest in our conversation.

  “So you got a theory?” Hawk said.

  “About the pictures, yeah. I figure Port City didn’t really search Sampson’s room. They just went in and emptied a few drawers and made a mess so that it would look like they searched it. Probably took them five minutes.”

  “Which explains why they made such a mess,” Hawk said.

  “Un huh. Of course DeSpain could have sent a couple guys over and they didn’t want to bother,” I said.

  “And DeSpain didn’t know they fucking off on him,” Hawk said.

  “Yeah.”

  “You think DeSpain’s people fuck off on him and he don’t know it?”

  “No and no,” I said.

  “So?”

  “DeSpain’s covering up,” I said.

  “And one of the things he covering up is Wu’s connection to Sampson.”

  “Yes.”

  “You know why?”

  “No.”

  “You see any connection with the stalker?”

  “No, but I think I’ve
got that one figured out.”

  I told him about Jocelyn and the phone calls.

  “She is neurotic,” Hawk said. “Be obsessed with you, when I on the scene?”

  “Before me she was obsessed with Christopholous,” I said. “If we’re right.”

  Hawk shook his head.

  “Must be a honkie thing,” he said. “You figure Lonnie had Sampson killed?”

  “Possibility,” I said. “Found out he was taking nude pictures of Rikki’s flower and sent somebody to pop him on stage so Rikki’d be sure to notice.”

  “So,” Hawk said. “You got a pretty good idea about the stalker. You got a pretty good idea on who killed Sampson. Why don’t we declare everything solved and get the hell out of there?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “’Cause you like hanging around with me and Vinnie every day.”

  I shrugged.

  “It’s all theory,” I said. “We got no case against Lonnie. Even if we turn what I know over to DeSpain, is he going to follow it up?”

  “Not likely,” Hawk said.

  “We don’t know Jocelyn was following Christopholous.”

  “We know,” Hawk said. “We just can’t prove it.”

  “Same thing.”

  “Not in my world,” Hawk said.

  “Yeah, but we’re working in mine.”

  “Which do make it tiresome,” Hawk said. “We working in mine, we solve this problem a lot quicker.”

  “I know, but even if we did it your way, there’s something wrong in Port City. We remove Lonnie Wu, say, ah, surgically, Kwan Chang will have another dai low in place the next day.”

  “Gonna happen however Lonnie’s removed,” Hawk said.

  “I know,” I said.

  “So what’s the difference?”

  “A real police department can sort of counterweight the tong,” I said. “I gotta know about DeSpain.”

  Hawk grinned.

  “And?” he said.

  I shrugged. “And I told Susan I’d clean it up.”

  “Un huh,” Hawk said.

  Both of us grinned.