Robert B Parker - Spenser 15 - Crimson Joy

by Crimson Joy(lit)

  After a moment Quirk said to me, "Okay, he's the right color."

  "Now if Belson doesn't lose him," I said.

  "Belson won't lose him," Quirk said. "And the guy won't make him."

  I nodded. "And if he gets in a car, Frank gets the number."

  "And we ID him that way," Quirk said. "When's the next one?"

  "Should arrive any minute, and come out about ten of twelve."

  "The fifty-minute hour," Quirk said.

  We watched the rain slide along the windows. At five of eleven a woman in a tan trench coat with a violet kerchief over her head went up the four steps to Susan's front door, rang the bell, and went iv "Shit," Quirk said.

  "Nothing now until ten of one," I said. "Might as well get some coffee."

  We left the car so we wouldn't lose the spot and walked up Linnaean to Mass. Ave. and had coffee in a bakery. Also a bagel each. With cream cheese. By twelve-thirty we were back in the car waiting. At six minutes to one a woman in a belted red raincoat came out and opened a black umbrella on Susan's porch. Quirk and I said nothing.

  "If there's many that fit the requirements," Quirk said, "this will take a while. We could use more manpower." "Not Hawk," I said. "He stays where he is."

  Quirk nodded. "I can't use any of my people."

  "Unofficially?" I said. "Sort of a favor?"

  Quirk shook his head. "It would cost them. I'm excommunicated, until I agree with the official version." "You and Galileo," I said.

  "Didn't he throw his balls off the leaning tower?" Quirk said.

  "That too," I said.

  At two minutes of one a burly man wearing a fingertip length black leather jacket and a Totes crush rain hat went into Susan's office.

  "Charley Mahoney," Quirk said. "Vice." "Nope," I said. "Too heavy. I could catch him in half a block." "When you do, you better be ready," Quirk said.

  We lapsed into silence again. The next two clients were women. At two minutes past four a man with an open golf umbrella turned into Susan's front walk and up the steps.

  "Could be him," I said.

  "Late too," Quirk said. "I'll take him when he comes out."

  At 4:53 the guy came out, opened his umbrella, and headed back down Linnaean Street toward Mass. Ave. with Quirk behind him.

  At 4:56 a middle-sized tallish guy came along wearing a khaki bush jacket and one of those Australian campaign hats with one side of the brim tied up against the crown. I didn't suspect him of being an Aussie soldier. This was Cambridge.

  He came out of Susan's at three minutes to six and started down Linnaean Street toward Mass. Ave. He was on the left side of the street. I got out and headed down the right side, maybe three car lengths back of him. It was still raining and it was beginning to get darker. I studied his walk through the rain, trying to catch a familiar movement. But walking and running are different movements. He was the right size and he had an easy athletic walk. The rain was coming down as if it planned on staying forever. I had on jeans, white leather Reeboks, a gray Tshirt, a leather jacket, and a felt hat that Paul Giacomin had bought me, which looked like you would wear it in Kenya if you were Stewart Granger. The Reeboks were wet through quickly, but the rest stood up to the rain pretty well. Tailing him was easy because he hunched into the rain with his head down and, except when he crossed Linnaean in front of me to head down Mass. Ave. toward Harvard Square, I didn't have to do anything very wily.

  If a guy doesn't know he's being tailed, or doesn't care, tailing is not brain surgery. Mostly it takes a little concentration not to get caught staring at your man in the reflection from a store window, or getting too far behind so that if he gets on a subway, or a bus, you're left standing. Ideally you have a backup so that the tail keeps changing, and you have somebody in a car in case the guy has one or grabs a cab. I've yet to find a cabbie that responds when you say "Follow that cab." The last guy I tried slammed on the brakes and slapped down his meter and told me to take a walk. "I look like fucking James Bond to you?" he said.

  On the right, Cambridge Common was soggy and unattended. The only movement was a kid in a plaid skirt and a yellow hip-length slicker, walking a big black Lab wearing a red kerchief for a collar. The kid had no hat on and her long black hair was plastered to her scalp and neck. The dog sniffed rapidly in a large circle around the base of the war memorial statue and then lay down on his side in a large puddle, his feet straight out before him, his tongue lolling.

  "Othello, you asshole," the kid said.

  At Harvard Square, Mass. Ave. turns off east toward Boston. Brattle Street heads west toward Watertown, and John F. Kennedy Street goes on down to the river. In the distorted triangle formed at this point is the famed out-of town newsstand, and the Harvard Square subway entrances. A couple of small round kiosks that look vaguely Byzantine dispense information and theater tickets. The kids who drifted in tattered clusters in and around the triangle were mostly scrawny and pale and very young. They wore silly clothes and ludicrous haircuts and listened to tiring music on portable radios. Occasionally there was a guitar, a kind of nod toward tradition, which for them was the sixties. They were there, perhaps, because they had nowhere else to be, even in the cold spring rain, sheltered beneath the subway entrance, struggling to look aloof from middle-class values.

  My man stopped under the roof of the subway entrance and looked at a group of five punkers across the entrance from him. A thin kid with skinny white arms left the others and came out and spoke with my man. The kid wore a short-sleeved leather jacket over his narrow bare chest. He had on black tights, probably made from polyester, tucked inside black motorcycle boots. The jacket and the boots were both studded with silver. The kid's hair was pink and cut in a high mohawk and he had maybe nine silver earrings in one ear. Bravado.

  My man nodded and stepped out into the rain, and the kid went with him. They continued up Mass. Ave. together in the rain. The kid's Mohawk wilted a little, but didn't run. Even in the rain there was a lot of street activity. People coming home from work, students going to the library, or the barroom, or the movies, a scattering of tourists coming to see the famous Harvard Square and looking vaguely puzzled when they found it. On the north side of Mass. Ave." Harvard did its red brick loom, while on the south side the Holyoke Center, which was also Harvard, seemed grayer than usual in the wet evening.

  At Putnam Street, where Mount Auburn merges with Mass. Ave." we three turned toward the river, past the big furniture store and into a sort of shabby neighborhood where there wasn't much foot traffic. I dropped farther back. It was getting tricky now. Most of the homes here were multiple dwellings, and if he turned into one, I might end up with a choice of six names. I closed up. My man stopped before a green two-story, and gave a quick glance about. Furtive, since he'd joined the kid.

  I walked past them, my head ducked into the rain that seemed to be coming straight up Putnam Street off the river. A few steps beyond, I stopped and looked in the window of an Italian delicatessen and watched them by turning my eyes while I kept my head straight. My man watched me for a moment. The boy shook his arm and said something, and my man nodded and headed in the walk along the side of the building.

  I waited a full minute and walked back up Putnam Street. There was no one in sight. I turned in the same walkway that my man had taken and there was a side entrance. It was closed. As I stopped in front of it a light went on above me on the second floor. I bent close and looked at the nameplate. It was not dark yet, but it had gotten murky and I couldn't read it. There was no one else in sight. I reached inside my leather jacket and took out a pair of twelve-dollar magnifiers and put them on and looked again. The nameplate said PHILIP ISELIN, PH.D. If it had been sunny, I could have read it without glasses.

  CHAPTER 17.

  When I got back from following Philip Iselin, Hawk and Susan were standing in her waiting room on the first floor, looking at the fish tank. The tank hood was off, there was something that looked like oil slick on the surface of the water and in the o
il slick floated a red rose. In various stages of suspension in the water beneath the surface, the tropical fish floated dead, or in two instances dying.

  "Probably gasoline," Hawk said. "Smells like it."

  I nodded, looking at Susan. The filter apparatus in the fish tank continued to bubble pointlessly, easily overmatched by the gasoline.

  "I don't know when it happened," Susan said. "The front door is unlocked during the day, obviously, and anyone could walk in while I was with a patient."

  "No way to hear him?" I said.

  "No. Patients normally ring the bell and walk into the waiting room. There is a double door system to my office to ensure privacy."

  Hawk looked over at the office doors. There were two of them. One opened out, into the waiting room; the other opened into the office. Privileged information.

  "But it would require a patient to know the routine," I said.

  "Most therapists probably have a not dissimilar routine," Susan said.

  "Aw, come on, Susan," Hawk said. "If it not one of your patients we got to imagine somebody walking around with gasoline in his pocket and a red rose, looking for working fish tank." "And being lucky enough," I said, "to wander in here by accident and find one."

  Susan nodded.

  "Wishful thinking," she said. "But it doesn't mean he or she is the Red Rose killer." "She is wishful thinking too," I said. "Unless you want to believe that this is a different person than the one who broke in here the other night and left a rose."

  Susan took in a long, slow breath.

  "That would be asking a lot of coincidence," she said. "So it's probably a he, and it's probably one of my patients. But it doesn't have to be probably the killer."

  "But we can't act as if it weren't," I said. "Can we get a list of your patients today?"

  She shook her head.

  "God, you're stubborn," I said.

  "Yes, but it's more than that," Susan said. "It seems to me that anyone planning to do this would do so on a day he wasn't scheduled. And it seems to me that it is someone trying to say something to me that he can't yet say in therapy. If it is the killer, our best hope may be to keep him in therapy until he tells me he's the one. If it is not the killer, the reasons to keep him anonymous must be obvious."

  I looked at Hawk. He shrugged very slightly. "Smart too," he said.

  "If the Red Rose killer does, in fact, surface in therapy, could you take the time to mention it to one of us," I said.

  "Oh, don't be so pissy," Susan said. "You know I will when I'm sure. I don't want anyone else killed, including me."

  "Pissy?" I said.

  "Pissy," Susan said. "I shouldn't expect you to understand all the technical terms of my profession."

  "You want to clean out the tank?" I said.

  "Yes," Susan said. "And I want to put more fish in."

  "Don't disturb the patients?"

  "No, in fact I wish to disturb one. I wish to thwart and frustrate whoever poisoned the fish. It will force him to rechannel whatever he's trying to express, and perhaps he'll rechannel it my way." "You shrinks are a devious bunch," I said. "What if he re channels it violently?" Susan smiled sweetly.

  "Why, then you or Hawkie-poo will intervene," she said. "Why else are you hanging around?"

  I had nothing to say to that. Neither did Hawkie-poo.. Was she scared? She must be scared. They were all scared when it came down to it. Any woman could be frightened. Had she guessed it was him? Had her boyfriend seen him clearly? The thought that she might know nearly smothered him with its lovely frenzy. Maybe someday...

  "I saw your name in the paper." She said, "Um hmm."

  Maybe someday...

  "Your boyfriend's working on the Red Rose case."

  "Um hmm."

  Maybe someday... The fear slivered through him.

  "Why would a guy do something like that?"

  She merely looked interested. She didn't speak.

  The sensation he felt as he talked with her was reminiscent of the way it felt to wiggle a loose tooth when he was small. She suspected him. It was like undressing in front of her. Look at this.

  "I'm sort of fascinated with this guy, this Red Rose guy." "Um hmm?" she said. There was encouragement in her voice, no disapproval.

  "You don't mind me talking about it?" "No," she said. "See what it leads to."

  "My mother would have been.. He did an imitation of his mother's uncomfortable disapproving frown. "She hated anything dirty."

  "What kinds of things did she consider dirty?"

  "You know, sex, anything about sex."

  She nodded. She understood.

  "And your father?" she said.

  "He loved her so much. He did everything she wanted. except stop drinking."

  "So she was the power in the family," she said.

  "No, yes, well, it was funny. We all pretended she was, and we said how smart she was, and how she could always fix things and find things and figure out things. But in fact she was weak and stupid and scared of everything, and it was like a game my father and me played. Except we never said."

  "Did you know?" She sat very quietly, her big eyes on his face. She was very interested and very kind.

  "Not then, except I did. I guess I did and I didn't, does that make sense?"

  She nodded her head. "Sure," she said.

  "I mean, she'd be telling you absolutely how things were and ought to be and you believed her and at the same time you knew she didn't know anything about it. I mean, she couldn't tell you where Brazil was. And she couldn't read very well, and she lived at home until she married my father and lived with him the rest of the time, until he died."

  She was sitting a little forward in her chair now, her knees together, her hands in her lap.

  "And she was never really interested in either one of us. She said she was, but she never really paid any attention to what you said, or had any sense of what you cared about. I don't think she understood much, and when anyone talked about things it made her scared."

  The room was quiet. She sat, wearing a black suit. He thought of her putting on the suit in the morning. He could feel tears at the edge of crying. He was breathing only a little air at a time, small breaths, rapidly.

  "But she loved me," he said.

  "And if you didn't play the game, she wouldn't," she said.

  He couldn't speak. He nodded. They sat quietly together while he struggled with his breathing and his tears.

  "Weakness," she said, "can be powerful, can't it?"

  He nodded again.

  "And frightening."

  "Yes," he said. His voice sounded strangled. He wanted to tell her the other thing. The thing he never told. He opened his mouth. He could feel the thing close on him. He couldn't. He never had. He couldn't.

  CHAPTER 18.

  In seven days Quirk and Belson and I had gotten up a list of seven suspects. Everyone else was too female, or too old, the wrong color, or the wrong size.

  We sat in my office on a lovely bright Saturday morning and drank coffee while Quirk listed the seven possibilities on the blackboard.

  "Okay," Quirk said, "here's what we got." His excommunication hadn't made a dent in his lieutenant-ness. "In order we spotted them: The first guy Belson tailed is named Gordon Felton, lives in Charlestown, near Thompson Square. Works as a security guard for an outfit in Boston called Bullet Security Systems, Inc."

  Belson grinned. "Probably got crossed Uzis on their calling cards," he said.

  "Makes him sort of a cop," I said.

  "Sort of," Quirk said. "Your man is Phil Iselin, instructor in Eastern studies at Harvard, lives where you found him on Putnam Street. Third one is Mark Charles, intern at Boston City Hospital, lives in the South End, West Newton Street. Number four is Lewis Larson, he's a cop, works out of station fifteen in a cruiser. Number five is a guy runs a gourmet food store in Wellesley, Edward Eisner lives next to the store. Number six is Ted Sparks, teaches math at MIT, lives in Boston on Lime Street. Number sev
en is a French national named Emil Gagne, who's a graduate student in politics at the Kennedy School and lives in a condo on Mount Auburn Street."

  Quirk paused and looked at us. We looked back. So far Quirk was just getting his ducks in a row. There wasn't much cause for excitement. "So one of these seven is probably the guy you chased," Quirk said.

  "Been a hell of a lot easier if you'd caught him," Belson said, "or at least got a good look."

  "Maybe we should line them up and have them race me," I said. "The ones I beat aren't it." "Nothing from Susan?" Quirk said.