Nelson bent his head to the side trying to see past me to the screen. I seemed to have no meaning to him. He seemed to know only that I was an object between him and the picture.
“He ain’t going to talk, Mr. Spenser,” Jefferson said. “He don’t talk much anymore.”
“Then you’ll have to talk, Jefferson,” I said. “One way or another, I’m going to find out about Cheryl Anne Rankin. And if that includes getting an extradition warrant on Jumper Jack, then I’ll do it.”
Jefferson turned a switch somewhere and indirect lighting brightened the room somewhat. Nelson seemed oblivious of it. Jefferson nodded at a couch against the inner wall of the conservatory. We went and sat on it, he at one end, me at the other. Across the room Nelson sat and watched the wrestling match and drank whiskey among his dogs.
“Been with Mr. Jack more than sixty years,” Jefferson said. “Fourteen years old, graduate eighth grade, going to be a carpenter.”
Jefferson stood suddenly and walked over to the table by Nelson’s chair and made himself a drink and one for me and brought them back. He handed me mine and remained standing, holding his in both of his still-strong hands, looking out at the dark rain beyond the conservatory glass.
“Always like tools,” he said. “Like to make a miter fit snug. Like things square.”
He looked around the conservatory slowly. “Started working for Mr. Jack’s father on this room. Apprentice. But I was good at it, even then, and Mr. Jack’s father he say, `Boy, you a hard worker. Need a boy to work ‘round here.’ He say, `You want to work for me?‘ and I say, `Sure enough, Mr. Nelson.’ And I worked here ever since.”
He was looking at the darkness again, and through it probably, back down the corridor of his past.
“Cheryl Anne,” I said softly.
“Sure, you right. She Mr. Jack’s daughter. Mr. Jack, he a hand with the ladies. And maybe Miss Abby knew it, and maybe she didn’t, but nothing come of it, ‘cause Mr. Jack, he don’t never embarrass her, you understand? He maybe have a fling with a lady, but it always a lady of breeding and position, nobody gonna embarrass Miss Abby.”
“Miss Abby was Jack’s wife?”
“Yessir.”
Jefferson shook his head. Across the room Nelson fumbled together another drink for himself.
“Bertha come here to work in the kitchen. Not a cook, just to peel vegetables, and wash up, that sort of thing. She from Batesburg. She come over on the bus every morning, go home on it every night.”
One of the dogs wandered across the room as we talked and jumped up on the couch and turned around three times and lay down between us. Jefferson patted her head absently.
“She don’t look like much no more, but she look like something then all right. And she had that thing, you know, Mr. Spenser. She… she had a wiggle. She… hot, you know?”
“Yeah, I know.”
“And Mr. Jack, he can’t keep his hands off her.”
“It wasn’t his hands got him in trouble,” I said.
“Yessir. And when she have the baby, Mr. Jack was ashamed. He felt real bad about it and he didn’t want Miss Abby to know, and he don’t want anyone else to know either. So he give her some money, and he say it is a secret, and long as it stayed a secret, he’d keep giving her the money.”
“Hundred bucks a month,” I said.
Jefferson shrugged.
“Those times that a lot of money to somebody like Bertha Voss,” he said. “And she gets married to Hilly Rankin and she lets him think it’s his kid. So it worked out that it stayed secret.”
“Except she told her daughter,” I said. “And she told her to be proud of who her father was and she told her how rich her father was and the daughter always remembered that, and always hated that he wouldn’t acknowledge her, and for reasons that probably have to do with her being crazy, she took the legitimate daughter’s name and history.”
“Yessir.”
“And when she was forty-three years old and broke, she remembered about how rich he was, and she came to him for money.”
“Yessir.”
The hokum noise of the wrestling match on the television made the silence in the rest of the vast atrium seem somehow more intense. Jefferson went and got two more drinks and brought them back and gave me one. Jumper Jack never stirred. His gaze remained fixed on the television screen.
“Did he pay her?” I said.
“Don’t even know who she is,” Jefferson said. “Or he says he don’t. Hard to say what Mr. Jack know and don’t know anymore.”
“You pay her?” I said.
“Did for a while. Then no more.”
“Why’d you stop?”
Jefferson shook his head softly. “Ain’t no money,” he said.
“Jack too?” I said.
“Mr. Jack never had as much as everybody think,” Jefferson said. “And he spend what he got.”
Jefferson smiled thoughtfully, thinking back over the spending.
“Bought cars and horses, and whiskey and food and presents for Miss Abby and Miss Livvie, and he spent a lot on women. Mr. Jack always say he didn’t waste none. He say he didn’t get cheated. Horse players die broke, he say.”
“So he’s broke?”
“Yessir. This house free and clear, ‘bout all.”
“What’s he use for cash?” I said.
“Don’t need much. Feed the dogs, buy whiskey. ‘Bout all.”
“You get a salary?”
“I still do a little carpentry work, part-time, when Mr. Jack sleeping. My grandson come in, watch him for me. Put in some cabinets for people, do some finish work, that sort of thing. Can’t do too much heavy stuff anymore, but I still got the touch for finish.”
“You support him,” I said.
Jefferson took in some of his drink. I sipped mine. Bourbon wasn’t my favorite, but one made do.
“Yessir,” Jefferson said.
“And you told Cheryl Anne that there wasn’t money to give her.”
Jefferson nodded. He was looking out again past the dark fields beyond the atrium. He raised his glass and drank slowly. From the look of the drink it was mostly bourbon, but he drank as if it were milk. The rain washed down along the glass walls of the room.
“And she was unable to hide her disappointment,” I said.
“Say she don’t believe me,” Jefferson said. “Call me a thieving nigger. And she scream at Mr. Jack. He ain’t right anymore. You can see that. Anybody see that. Say he her father and he owe her the money. Say he got one week to get her some money. It upset him, her screaming at him like that.”
I sipped a little more bourbon. Jefferson finished his and looked at mine. I shook my head. Jefferson went for another and made one too for Jumper Jack. I scratched the hound’s ear that lay curled next to me on the couch. I looked at the rain that slid along the curving glass. I looked at Jefferson. He returned the look and we were silent. We both knew. It seemed as if I had known for a long time.
Seeing me scratch the hound’s ear, another dog got up and came over and put his head on the edge of the couch. The rest of the dogs noticed this change of position and stood and moved silently around the room, as if ordered by an unseen trainer, and settled back down in realigned order.
“And she left,” I said.
Jefferson nodded.
“And went back to Boston.”
Nod.
“And you took a framing hammer, with a long handle for leverage, because you’re not as strong as you used to be, and you went up there too.”
“On the bus,” Jefferson said, looking straight at me with no expression I could see. “Three days on the bus.”
“And found her address and waited until it was dark and when she walked by you beat her to death.”
“Yessir.”
Across the room Jumper Jack sat staring at his television, with three dogs in various positions of sleep on the floor around him. He drank half a glass of whiskey as I watched him and dribbled some down his chin and wi
ped it away with the back of his hand. It was the most active I’d seen him. He never glanced at us. It was as if he were alone in the room with his dogs and his whiskey, except that as I watched, tears rolled slowly down his face.
I put my drink down and rubbed my temples with both hands. The dog whose ear I’d been scratching looked up at me. I scratched his ear again, and he put his head back down on the couch.
“Jefferson,” I said, “I’ll get back to you.”
chapter forty-two
I STOOD AT my stove pouring a thin stream of cornmeal into simmering milk. As it went in, I stirred with a whisk.
“Cornmeal mush?” Susan said.
“We gourmets prefer to call it polenta,” I said.
I put the whisk down and picked up a wooden spoon and stirred the cornmeal more slowly as it thickened.
“What are those crumby things on the platter?” Susan said.
She was sitting at my counter going through a glass of Gewurztraminer at the speed of erosion. She was wearing a pair of fitted tan slacks, a lemon sweater, and a matching tan coat that was part of the outfit and reached to her knees. She looked like Hollywood’s vision of the successful female executive.
“Those are chicken breasts pounded flat and coated with cornbread crumbs,” I said. “And flavored with rosemary.”
“Will you fry them in lard?” Susan said.
“I will coat a fry pan with corn oil and then pour it out, leaving a thin film in the pan, then I will gently saute the breast cutlets until golden brown,” I said.
“Exactly,” Susan said.
“And for dessert,” I said, “there’s sour cherry pie.”
She poured a teaspoon more wine into her glass. Pearl reared up beside her and put her front paws on the counter and made a try for the chicken cutlets. She missed and I picked up a scrap from the cutting board and gave it to her.
“You are rewarding inappropriate behavior,” Susan said.
“Yes.”
Pearl dashed into the bedroom to eat the chicken scrap. I kept stirring the polenta waiting for it to be right.
“You haven’t said a word about things in Alton,” Susan said.
“I know. I need to think about it,” I said.
“Before you talk to me?” Susan said.
“Yes.”
Susan raised her eyebrows and widened her eyes.
“You know,” I said, “since I saw you in that guidance office in Smithfield in 1974, I have never looked at you without feeling a small thrill of electricity in my solar plexus.”
The polenta was done. I took it off the stove and let it rest on a trivet on the counter.
“Even first thing in the morning when I don’t have my face on and I have my hair up?” Susan said.
“Even then,” I said. “Although in those circumstances I’m probably reacting to potential.”
Susan leaned forward over the counter and kissed me. I kissed her back and felt the residual darkness of that atrium room begin to recede. She pressed her mouth against mine harder as if she could feel my need and put her hands gently on each side of my face and opened her mouth. I put my hands under her arms and lifted her out of the chair and over the counter. It knocked her wineglass over and it broke on the floor. Neither of us paid it any attention. The feel of her against me was rejuvenating, like air long needed, like thirst quenched. We stood for a long time, fiercely together. We never made it to the bedroom. We did well to make the couch.
Afterwards we lay quietly with each other, and Pearl, who had managed to find room on the couch where I would have said there was none.
“In front of the baby,” Susan said.
Her voice had that quality it always had after lovemaking. As if she were on her way back from somewhere far that she’d been.
“Maybe she showed a little class,” I said, “and looked away.”
“I seem to recall her barking at a very critical juncture.”
“For heaven’s sake,” I said. “I thought that was you.”
Susan giggled into my shoulder where she was resting her head.
“You yanked me right over the counter,” she said.
“I didn’t yank,” I said. “I swept.”
“And spilled the wine and broke the wineglass.”
“Seemed worth it at the time,” I said.
“Usually I like to undress and hang my clothes up neatly.”
“So why didn’t you resist?” I said.
“And miss all the fun?”
“Of course not.”
“When do you think you’ll talk about Alton?”
“Pretty soon,” I said. “I just have to give it a little time.”
Susan nodded and kissed me lightly on the mouth.
“Let’s leap up,” she said. “And guzzle some polenta.”
“Guzzle?”
“Sure.”
“We gourmets usually say savor,” I said.
Susan nodded and got off the couch and got her clothes rearranged. Then she looked at me and smiled and shook her head.
“Right over the goddamned counter,” she said.
chapter forty-three
THE RAIN HAD come up the coast behind me. It had traveled more slowly than I had and arrived in Boston only this morning, when Susan and I, with still the taste of polenta and chicken and Alsatian wine, went to a memorial service for Farrell’s lover, whose name had been Brian, in a white Unitarian church in Cambridge. Farrell was there, looking sleepless. And the dead man’s parents were there. The mother, stiff with tranquilizers and pale with grief, leaned heavily on her husband, a burly man with a large gray moustache. He looked puzzled, as much as anything, as he held his wife up.
Susan and I sat near the back of the small plain church, while the minister blathered. It was probably not his fault that he blathered. Ministers are expected to speak as if death were not the final emperor. But it came out, as it usually did, blather. Farrell sat with a guy that looked like him, and a woman and two small children. Brian’s mother and father sat across the aisle.
There were maybe eight other people in the church. I didn’t recognize any of them except Quirk, who stood in the back, his hands folded calmly in front of him, his face without expression. The church doors stood open and the gray rain came bleakly down on the black street. Susan held my hand.
After the service, Farrell came out of the church and introduced us to the guy that looked like him. It was his brother. The woman was his brother’s wife, and the kids were Farrell’s nephews.
“My mother and father wouldn’t come,” he said.
“How too bad for them,” Susan said.
Quirk came to stand beside us.
“Thank you for coming, Lieutenant,” Farrell said.
“Sure,” Quirk said.
Farrell moved on with his brother on one side and his sister-in-law on the other. His nephews, small and quiet, frightened by death, probably, each held a parental hand.
“Tough,” Quirk said. “You back from another visit to South Carolina?”
We were standing under an overhang out of the cold rain, which came grimly down.
“Yeah.”
“You got anything?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Quirk frowned.
“What the hell does that mean?” he said.
“Means I don’t know yet.”
Quirk looked at Susan. She smiled like Mona Lisa.
“Christ,” Quirk said to her. “You get better every time I see you.”
“Thank you, Martin,” she said. He looked back at me.
“Call me when you know,” he said, and turned his raincoat collar up and went down the steps to an unmarked police car and drove away. I turned up my collar too, and took Susan’s hand, and walked down the steps and away from the church in the rain, which was cold and hard and without respite.
chapter forty-four
THE MORNING WAS overcast, and hardlooking. I was in my office, thinking about Jefferson, and feeling like Ham
let, but older, when Farrell came in carrying two coffees in a white paper bag. He took them out, handed me one, and sat down.
“It bother you that Stratton was so interested in this case?” he said.
“He wants to be President,” I said.
“And all he was trying to cover up was adultery?”
I shrugged.
“The cover-up was more dangerous to him than what he was trying to cover up,” Farrell said.
“Guys like Stratton don’t think that way. They think about fixing, about putting a new spin on it, about reorganizing it so it comes out their way.”
“He stole most of the Tripps’ money,” Farrell said.
I sat back in my chair.
“Why do you know that and I don’t?” I said.
Farrell was carefully prying the plastic cap off his paper coffee cup, holding it away from him so it wouldn’t spill on him. He got the cover off and blew on the coffee gently for a moment, and then took a swallow. His face was still tight with grief, but there was also a hint of self-satisfaction.
“You been thinking about who killed the woman,” Farrell said. “I been thinking about other stuff like Stratton, like what the hell happened to all that money. Everybody says Mrs. Tripp spent it all, but on what? It’s hard to go through that kind of money at Bloomingdale’s.”
“So you chased Tripp’s expenditures,” I said.
“Yeah. Checks written by him, or her. They had a joint account. His didn’t show us anything unusual. He kept writing them even when there was no money. But you already knew that.”
“Mine bounced,” I said.
“There’s a clue,” Farrell said. He drank some more coffee. “Her checks were more interesting.”
“I didn’t see any of hers when I looked at his checkbook,” I said. “But she’d been dead awhile, probably hadn’t written any.”
“Good point,” Farrell said. “I went back about five years.”
“Tripp didn’t object?”
Farrell shook his head. “Didn’t talk to him,” he said. “I went through the bank’s records. She wrote regular, like monthly, large checks to an organization called The Better Government Coalition, which is located in a post office box in Cambridge, and headed by a guy named Windsor Freedman. We’re having a little trouble locating Windsor. He lists his address as University Green on Mt. Auburn Street. It’s a condo complex, and nobody there ever heard of him. But the Mass. Secretary of State’s office lists The Better Government Coalition as a subsidiary of The American Democratic Imperative in D.C. And the president of that operation is a guy named Mal Chapin.”
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