Robert B. Parker: The Spencer Novels 1?6

by Robert B. Parker

  “And sometimes they’re not,” I said.

  On the second floor, Hawk said, “Number 208, down here on the right.”

  “You got a pass key?” I said.

  Hawk grinned and produced one.

  “’Course I do,” he said.

  “What did you tell her?”

  “The sister at the desk? Told her she was the most exciting woman I ever had,” he said.

  “And?”

  “Told her you was my boss and it was your first wedding anniversary and you wanted to set up a nice surprise for your wife.”

  “And you needed a key to set it up.”

  “Un huh.”

  “And then you mentioned again how she was very important to you.”

  “Un huh.”

  “This smacks of sexist exploitation,” I said.

  “Do,” Hawk said, “don’t it.”

  We reached 208. Hawk put the key in the lock.

  “She got the chain on, we’ll hit it together,” I said.

  Hawk nodded, turned the key, and pushed. The door opened five inches and held against the chain.

  “Who is it,” a woman said.

  Hawk straightened and stepped back.

  “On three,” I said. “One, two, three.”

  We hit the door together. Hawk with his left shoulder, me with my right, and the chain lock tore out of the door jamb, and the door flew open, and slammed against the wall, and we were in the room with Jocelyn.

  I closed the door behind us.

  Jocelyn Colby, wearing jeans and an oversized tee shirt, was sitting on the bed propped against the pillows with the television on and a copy of Elle magazine open on her lap. She stared at us with her mouth open. I walked past the bed to the windows and looked down and waved Vinnie up from the back parking lot. Then I turned and rested my hips against the window sill and crossed my arms and looked at Jocelyn.

  “We’ve come to your rescue,” I said.

  Jocelyn continued to stare with her mouth open. Then she closed it, and swung her feet to the floor.

  “Oh, thank God you’re here,” she said.

  She stood and pressed herself against me and wrapped her arms around my waist. I looked at Hawk. He grinned.

  “Want me to step outside?” he said.

  The door opened as Vinnie came in. He had his Walkman earphones around his neck. When he looked at me, he seemed even more amused than Hawk.

  “You getting laid?” he said.

  “Vinnie,” I said. “You got the soul of a poet.”

  “Longfellow,” Vinnie said, and chuckled to himself. Hawk liked it.

  “Longfellow,” he said. And he and Vinnie both laughed.

  Jocelyn appeared not to notice. She pressed against me with her head on my chest and her arms tight around me.

  She kept murmuring, “Thank God, thank God, you’ve found me.”

  I assumed she was stalling while she tried to think up a story.

  I looked past her around the room. It was motel standard: beige walls, double bed with a beige spread, bureau with television on it, bathroom and closet in an alcove, bedside table with a beige phone, straight chair.

  “One of you poets mind checking the closet and the bureau,” I said, “see if you can find a clue?”

  Still happy with the Longfellow remark, both of them looked. Hawk went into the bath/closet alcove, and came out with a video camera on a tripod. Vinnie searched the bureau and came up with a black slip, a white silk scarf, and about twenty-five feet of clothesline. Hawk picked up the straight chair, placed it before the blank wall next to the doorway, opposite the window. He put the video camera on its tripod a few feet in front of it. Vinnie draped the black slip and the white scarf over the back of the chair, and put the coiled rope on the seat.

  “Jocelyn,” I said.

  She buried her face harder against my chest. I took hold of her upper arms and separated myself from her and held her away from me at arm’s length.

  “Jocelyn,” I said. “Cut the crap.”

  She started to cry.

  “Okay,” I said. “Good. Now raise your tear-stained face and gaze beseechingly into my eyes.”

  She stepped away from me and looked at all three of us. I took the opportunity to get my butt off the window ledge and stand upright.

  “One woman,” she said, “and three men. And the men standing around laughing. Isn’t that typical?”

  I didn’t know how typical it was, so I let it slide.

  “Don’t you realize I’ve been through hell,” she said.

  “You may have gone through hell, Jocelyn, but you weren’t kidnapped.”

  “I was,” she said. She was crying harder now, though it didn’t seem to impede her speech.

  Hawk went into the bathroom.

  “Nope,” I said. “You checked yourself in to this motel with your own credit card. You videoed yourself tied to the chair, you even copied a theater poster when you did it, though you may not know it.”

  Jocelyn took one step back and sat hard on the edge of the bed. Hawk came out of the bathroom with a handful of Kleenex. He handed them to Jocelyn. She took them without paying any attention and held them crumpled in her hand.

  “Tell me about it,” I said.

  “What’s the use,” she said, with the tears rolling down her face. “You don’t believe me, anyway.”

  “You were the one stalking Christopholous, weren’t you?” I said.

  She buried her face in her hands and cried louder. Now in addition to tears, there was boo-hoo.

  “You had a crush on him, and he didn’t respond, and so you began to follow him around.”

  She turned and lay on the bed and buried her face in the pillow and sobbed.

  “We got time, Jocelyn. We got nowhere to go. When you’re through crying, you can tell me.”

  She cried louder and buried her head deeper into the pillow. I waited. Hawk was leaning on the wall watching Jocelyn, the way you’d watch an interesting but not very affecting movie. Vinnie had his arms folded, leaning against the door, looking out the window across the room. His earphones were back over his ears. He was listening to music. Jocelyn’s fists were tightly clenched, the unused Kleenex still held in her right fist. She began to pound on the mattress as she cried. Then she kicked her feet. The crying began to wear down after a time. The pounding stopped and the kicking became desultory. She began to moan, “Oh God, oh God” and twist on the bed as if she were in pain. And finally that stopped and she lay still, her face still in the pillow, as her breathing began to normalize. She needed more air so she took her head out of the pillow and turned it away from us, toward the window. The room was quiet.

  “So how come you kidnapped yourself?” I said.

  I could see Jocelyn thinking about my question and thinking about her answer, and I could see her body go almost limp in a kind of physiological surrender.

  “You wouldn’t believe me,” Jocelyn said. Her voice was shaky. “I had to convince you that I needed help.”

  “Help with what?” I said.

  “Oh, God,” she said.

  “We all need help with him,” I said. “What else.”

  “It’s what . . .” she paused and struggled with her breath. “. . . it’s what every woman needs.”

  “The love of a good man,” I said. I was falling into her speech patterns.

  “Yes,” she said. The final sibilant came out in a long hiss. “You were everything I ever wanted, but you had her!”

  The way she said her sounded like she might have been speaking of Vlad the Impaler.

  “Susan,” I said.

  “Yes. Susan. Susan, Susan, Susan. There’s always a goddamned Susan.”

  “What a drag,�
� I said. “DeSpain have a Susan?”

  Her whole body stiffened. She turned her head toward me and rolled over on her side and looked at me as if I had spoken in tongues.

  “DeSpain?”

  “Yeah. Didn’t you and he have a fling in Framingham? About ten years ago? You were with the Metro West Theater Group. Somebody was stalking you. He was the investigating officer.”

  Jocelyn sat up on the edge of the tangled bed. Her eyes were red and puffy, her face was lined with the fabric of the bedspread. She patted at her hair, trying to get her appearance back into line.

  “I can barely recall the incident,” she said.

  “Even though the same DeSpain is now Chief of Police in Port City, where you are working and living when not tying yourself up in hotel rooms?”

  “It’s something I’ve put behind me. It was a long time ago and it was very distasteful.”

  “He was married, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes. To a hideous travesty of womanhood.”

  “And he left her for you.”

  “He wanted me, he needed me.”

  “So what happened?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How come you and DeSpain aren’t cheek by jowl ever after?” I said.

  She frowned.

  “I told you,” she said. “It’s over.”

  “He turned out not to be everything you ever wanted? He was a pig?”

  I waited. She looked at me and past me and past Hawk and Vinnie at things that none of us had ever seen. She took in a deep breath and let it out in a long sigh.

  “I wanted love,” she said. “He wanted sex.”

  “That combo would never work,” I said.

  “No.”

  I waited again. She didn’t elaborate.

  “So how come you both ended up in Port City?” I said.

  “I came here to work,” she said.

  “And DeSpain?”

  “You’ll have to ask him.”

  “Who was stalking you in Framingham?” I said.

  “I was working part-time at a child care center,” she said. “My supervisor was stalking me.”

  “They convict him?”

  She laughed. It was a surprising laugh, guttural and humorless.

  “The old boy system doesn’t convict its kind,” she said.

  “Must be a glitch somewhere,” I said. “Lots of guys doing time.”

  “You know what I mean,” she said.

  “Sure.”

  We were quiet. The day had dwindled into late afternoon. The motel window, facing east, looked out on a darkening parking lot. There were no lights on in the room except the lamp by the bed and its small yellow illumination served only to make the rest of the room look grayer.

  “Tell me about Christopholous,” I said.

  “It’s not like you think it was,” she said.

  I didn’t say anything. Her voice seemed steady; and, though still quite small, gaining strength. I realized she was beginning to warm to her performance. Alone, in the center of three men’s attention, she was beginning to like it.

  “We were mad about each other,” she said. “It was all we could do to keep from falling into each other’s arms in public.”

  “Why shouldn’t you fall into each other’s arms in public?” I said.

  “He wanted me passionately,” Jocelyn said. “And I loved him more than life itself.”

  “But now you don’t?”

  She paused for a long time.

  “It’s over,” she said finally.

  “Because?”

  “Because he found someone else,” she said.

  “Another Susan,” I said.

  Jocelyn nodded so slowly, as to be ponderous.

  “Exactly,” she said. “Another goddamned Susan.”

  “You knew her?”

  Jocelyn shook her head.

  “But it had to be someone else, didn’t it?”

  “He adored me,” she said, “until some bitch got her claws into him.”

  “So you had to follow him around, see who it was.”

  Jocelyn nodded vigorously.

  “And to be near him. To be able to look at him even if only from afar. To be there for him if he ever needed me.”

  “Nothing wrong with making him a little uncomfortable, the sonovabitch,” I said.

  “The bastard,” Jocelyn said.

  “Ever find out who the Susan was?” I said.

  “I never caught them,” Jocelyn said. “But I had my suspicions. The way they talked together, the way she looked at him. How she’d leave early from a board meeting or come late to a show case. And he wouldn’t be in his office, the way she wasn’t always where she said she’d be. I had my suspicions.”

  My heart felt like a stone in my chest. I saw where we were going.

  “Rikki Wu,” I said.

  “Absolutely,” Jocelyn said. “She had her hooks into him down to the bone.”

  “So you made an anonymous call,” I said.

  She looked a little surprised.

  “Like the kind you made to Susan about me,” I said.

  She looked more surprised.

  “You called Lonnie Wu and hinted his wife was fooling around.”

  “She had to be stopped,” Jocelyn said. “He was everything I ever wanted.”

  The phrase was like a password. Her eyes were bright and her face had a mild flush to it. The tip of her tongue trembled on her lower lip. A lot of he’s had been everything she ever wanted. I wasn’t even sure she knew who this he was as she spoke.

  “Jesus Christ,” Hawk said behind me.

  Without turning I nodded yes.

  “So Lonnie looked into it and found out you were right. His wife was fooling around, but not with Christopholous. Who was she balling, Hawk?”

  “Craig Sampson,” Hawk said behind me.

  “Bingo,” I said.

  “So Lonnie send one of the kids up,” Hawk said, “and had him sloped.”

  “Just as he launched into a chorus of ‘Lucky in Love,’” I said. “Lonnie must have liked the symbolism.”

  “Better than Sampson did,” Hawk said.

  The room was quiet. The three of us stood looking at Jocelyn. Outside there was no more daylight. In the darkened room only Jocelyn’s face was lit by the bedside lamp. I looked at it for a long time. Pretty in a blurred sort of way, not leading-lady looks, someone to play the maid, maybe, the gangster’s girlfriend. Not very old, not very smart. Innocuous, mostly empty, an idle face upon whose blank facade life had etched no hint of experience. She had noticed nothing tangible. She had lived a life of clichéd fixations. If she felt anything about the way things had worked out, she didn’t feel it very deeply. Even her obsessions seemed shallow . . . She heaved a slow sigh.

  “You know what’s so tragic?” she said. “After all I’ve done, all I’ve been through, I’m still alone.”

  I didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything to say. I just looked at her vapid, empty, uncomprehending face, bottomless in its self-absorption, a monster’s face.

  “Get your stuff together,” I said to Jocelyn. “We’re going.”

  She seemed to shake herself from a reverie for a moment, and stared at all of us in the dark room as if she hadn’t known we were there. Everything she did seemed done in front of a camera. Vinnie went to the closet and took out her suitcase and opened it on the bed for her. He pointed at it. She made a pulling-herself-together shrug as she stood up and began to gather her things.

  “You got a thought on who pounded Lonnie?” Hawk said. In the darkness he was an invisible presence still leaning motionless on the wall.

  “Yeah.”

  “A
nd you don’t like it much.”

  “No.”

  “Not too many choices left,” Hawk said.

  “Not many,” I said.

  “So we be going up to Port City again,” Hawk said.

  “Yeah.”

  “What we going to do with Norma Desmond?” Hawk said.

  “We’ll bring her along. Maybe she’ll be useful.”

  “Sure,” Hawk said. “There a first time for everything.”

  •50•

  I was in the Port City Police Station, in DeSpain’s office with the door closed. DeSpain looked red-eyed and raw sitting behind his desk. He tipped his head forward and began to rub the back of his neck with his left hand.

  “I found Jocelyn Colby,” I said.

  He stopped rubbing but kept his head tipped forward.

  “She all right?” he said. His voice sounded hoarse, as if he had brought it up from a dark place.

  “She’s not hurt,” I said.

  “Good.”

  We sat silently for a time. DeSpain still looking down, his left hand motionless on the back of his neck. There was light from the squad room drifting in through the pebble glass door to DeSpain’s office. And the green-shaded banker’s lamp was lit on his desk. So the room wasn’t dark. But it was shadowy, and felt like offices do at night, even a cop office.

  “She faked the kidnapping,” I said after a while.

  DeSpain thought about that for a moment, then he looked up slowly, his left hand still on the back of his neck, the thick fingers digging into the muscles at the base of his neck.

  “Oh, shit,” he said.

  “Exactly,” I said.

  I reached into my inside pocket and took out the envelope that Healy had given me containing DeSpain’s file. I tossed it on the desk between us. DeSpain looked down at it, at the Department of Public Safety return address. He picked it up, slowly, and took his hand away from the back of his neck, slowly, and opened the envelope, slowly, and took out the file, and unfolded it, and read it, slowly. We were in no hurry, DeSpain and I. Port City was eternal and there was no reason to rush. DeSpain looked carefully at the photocopy of his record with the state police, at the copy of the sexual harassment complaint filed by Victor Quagliosi, Esq. on behalf of Jocelyn Colby, which was attached. He read, though he probably could recite it, his letter of resignation, also attached. When he was through, he evened the papers out, folded them carefully back the way they had been, and put them in their envelope. He slid the envelope back across the desk toward me. I took it and put it back in my pocket. DeSpain leaned back in his swivel chair and folded his arms and looked straight at me.