Five Classic Spenser Mysteries

by Robert B. Parker

  “Call him,” I said. “See what he says.”

  She looked at the phone.

  “So there you’ll be,” I said. “Alone and broke. Disco Steve will roll you like a buck’s worth of nickels if he thinks you’re messy.”

  “It’s not neurotic,” she said. “If a man did it, you’d say it was normal.”

  “I wouldn’t, but that doesn’t matter to me. I want that kid out of the middle and I’ll do what needs to be done to get him out. You go along or you’re broke and abandoned like they say in the soap operas.”

  She looked down the hall where Stephen had disappeared. She looked at the phone. She looked down at the river. And she nodded her head.

  “Do I hear a yes?” I said.

  She nodded again.

  “I want to hear it,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said, staring at the river.

  “Okay,” I said. “You and Stephen can go back to watching his jeans fade.”

  I started for the door. “Spenser?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What did Mel do?”

  I shook my head and went out and closed the door.

  CHAPTER 33

  Paul sat astride the ridge pole of the cabin, nailing the final row of cedar shingles four inches to the weather. He was shirtless and tan and the muscles moved on his torso as he took the wide roofing nails one at a time from his mouth and drove them three to a shingle with the hammer. He wore a nailing apron over his jeans and periodically he took some nails from it and put them in his mouth. I put together the ridge cap on the ground. When he was finished with the final row, I climbed the ladder with the ridge cap and we nailed it in place, working from each end and moving toward the center of the ridge. The early fall sun was warm on our backs. At the center I said, “You drive one on that side and I’ll drive one on this.”

  He nodded, took an eightpenny nail out, tapped it into place, and drove it with three hammer swings. I drove mine. We slipped the hammers into his hammer holster and I put out my hand, palm up. He slapped it once, his face serious. I grinned. He grinned back.

  “Done,” I said.

  “On the outside,” he said.

  “Okay, half done,” I said. “Enclosed.”

  We scrambled down the ladder, me first, Paul after, and sat on the steps of the old cabin. It was late afternoon. The sun slanting along the surface of the lake deflected and shimmered in formless patches when we looked at it.

  “I never thought we’d build it,” Paul said.

  “Never thought you’d run five miles either, did you?”

  “No.”

  “Or bench press a hundred fifty pounds?”

  “No.”

  “Or put on twenty pounds?”

  Paul grinned at me. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, you were right. I was wrong. You want to have an award ceremony?”

  I shook my head. There was very little breeze and the sweat on our bodies dried slowly. On the lake someone water-skied behind a hundred hp outboard. There were bird sounds in the close woods. The area was strong with the smell of sawn wood and the faint burnt odor that a power saw produces when the blade dulls.

  I got up and went in the cabin and got a bottle of Moët & Chandon champagne from the refrigerator and two clear plastic cups from the cupboard. I put some ice and water into a cooking pot and stuck the champagne in to keep cold. I brought it and the plastic cups out onto the back steps and set it down.

  “What’s that?” Paul said.

  “Champagne,” I said. “Elegantly presented.”

  “I never had champagne,” Paul said, “except that time at Susan’s.”

  “It’s time again,” I said. I opened the bottle and poured each cup full.

  “I thought the cork was supposed to shoot up in the air.”

  “No need to,” I said.

  Paul sipped the champagne. He looked at the glass. “I thought it would be sweeter,” he said.

  “Yeah, I did too when I first tried it. It grows on you though.”

  We were quiet, sipping the champagne. When Paul’s glass was empty he refilled it. The water skier called it quits and the lake was quiet. Some sparrows moved in the sawdust around the new cabin, heads bobbing and cocking, looking for food, now and then finding it. Grackles with bluish iridescent backs joined them, much bigger, swaggering more than the sparrows, with a funny waddling walk, but peaceable.

  “When do we have to leave tomorrow?” Paul said.

  “Early,” I said. “Eight thirty at the latest. We pick up Susan at eleven.”

  “How long a ride to the school?”

  “Four hours.”

  “How come Susan’s going?”

  “After we drop you, we’re going to have a couple of days together in the Hudson Valley.”

  What breeze there was had gone. It was still, the sun was almost set. It wasn’t dark yet, but it was softer, the light seemed indirect.

  “Do I have to have a roommate?”

  “First year,” I said.

  “When can I come home? Back home? To see you?”

  “Any weekend,” I said. “But I’d stay around out there for a while. You need to get used to it before you come back. You won’t settle in if your only goal is to get out.”

  Paul nodded. It got darker. The champagne was gone.

  “It’s better than that place in Grafton.”

  “Yes.”

  “Everybody there will know everyone and know how to dance.”

  “Not everybody,” I said. “Some. Some will be ahead of you. You’ll have to catch up. But you can. Look what you did in one summer.”

  “Except I wasn’t catching up on anything,” Paul said.

  “Yeah, you were.”

  “What?”

  “Life.”

  The woods had coalesced in the darkness now. You couldn’t see into them. And the insects picked up the noise level. All around us was a thick chittering cloak of forest. We were alone at its center. The cabin was built and the champagne bottle was empty. Biting insects began to gather and swarm. The darkness was cold.

  “Let’s go in and eat,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said. His voice was a little shaky. When I opened the door to the cabin I could see in the light from the kitchen that there were tears on his face. He made no attempt to hide them. I put my arm around his shoulder.

  “Winter’s coming,” I said.

  For David Parker and Daniel Parker,

  with the respect and admiration of their father

  who grew up with them.

  Published by

  Dell Publishing

  a division of

  Random House, Inc.

  New York, New York

  Copyright © 1974 by Robert B. Parker

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, New York, New York.

  The trademark Dell® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-56955-4

  Reprinted by arrangement with Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence

  v3.1

  Contents

  Master - Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter
21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Dedication

  1

  If you leaned way back in the chair and cranked your neck hard over, you could see the sky from my office window, delft-blue and cloudless and so bright it looked solid. It was September after Labor Day, and somewhere the corn was probably as high as an elephant’s eye, the kind of weather when a wino could sleep warm in a doorway.

  “Mr. Spenser, are you listening to us?”

  I straightened my head up and looked back at Roger and Margery Bartlett.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “You were just saying about how you never dealt with a private detective before, but this was an extreme case and there seemed no other avenue. Everybody who comes in here tends to say about that same thing to me.”

  “Well it’s true.” She was probably older than she looked and not as heavy. Her legs were very slim, the kind women admire and men don’t. They made her plumpish upper body look heavier. Her face had a bland, spoiled, pretty look, carefully made up with eye shadow and pancake makeup and false eyelashes. She looked as though if she cried she’d erode. Her hair, freshly blond, was cut close around her face. Gaminelike, I bet her hairdresser said. Mia Farrow, I bet he said. She was wearing a paisley caftan slit up the side and black, ankle-strapped platform shoes with three-inch soles and heels. Sitting opposite me, she had crossed her legs carefully so that the caftan fell away above the knee. I wanted to say, don’t, your legs are too thin. But I knew she wouldn’t believe me. She thought they were wonderful.

  Just below her rib cage I could see the little bulge where her girdle stopped and the compressed flesh spilled over the top. She was wearing huge lavender sunglasses and lavender-dyed wooden beads on a leather thong. Authentic folk art, picked them up in Morocco on our last long weekend, the naiveté is charming, don’t you think?

  “We want you to find our son,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  “He’s been gone a week. He ran away.”

  “Do you know where he might have run?” I asked.

  “No,” her husband answered. “I looked everywhere I could think of—friends, relatives, places he might hang out. I’ve asked everyone I know that knows him. He’s gone.”

  “Have you notified the police?”

  They both nodded. Mr. Bartlett said, “I talked to the chief myself. He says they’ll do what they can, but of course it’s a small force and there isn’t much …”

  He let his voice trail off and sat still and uncomfortable looking at me. He looked ill at ease in a shirt and tie. He was dressed in what must have been his wife’s idea of the contemporary look. You can usually tell when a guy’s wife buys his clothes. He had on baggy white cuffed flares, a solid scarlet shirt with long collar points, a wide pink tie, and a red-and-white-plaid seersucker jacket with wide lapels and the waist nipped. A prefolded handkerchief in his breast pocket matched the tie. He had on black and white saddle shoes and looked as happy as a hound in a doggie sweater. He should have been wearing coveralls and steel-toed work shoes. His hands looked strong and calloused, the nails were broken, and there was grime imbedded that the shower wouldn’t touch.

  “Why did he run away?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Mrs. Bartlett answered. “He isn’t a happy boy; he’s going through some adolescent phase, I guess. Stays in his room most of the time. His grades are falling off. He used to get very good grades. He’s very bright, you know.”

  “Why are you sure he ran away?” I didn’t like asking the question.

  Mr. Bartlett answered, “He took his guinea pig with him. Apparently he came home from school to get it and left.”

  “Did anyone see him leave?”

  “No.”

  “Was anyone home when he came home?”

  “No. I was at work and she was at her acting lessons.”

  “I take my acting lessons twice a week. In the afternoons. It’s the only time I can get them. I’m a very creative person, you know, and I have to express myself.”

  Her husband said something that sounded like “umph.”

  “Besides,” she said, “what has that got to do with anything? Are you saying if I’d been home he wouldn’t have run off? Because that simply isn’t so. Roger is hardly perfect, you know.”

  “I was asking because I was trying to find out if he snuck in and out or not. It might suggest whether he intended to run off when he came home.”

  “If I didn’t express myself, I couldn’t be as good a mother and wife. I do it for my family, mainly.”

  Roger looked like he’d just bitten his tongue.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Creative people simply must create. If you’re not a creative person, you wouldn’t understand.”

  “I know,” I said. “I have the same damned problem. Right now for instance, I’m trying to create some information, and, for heaven’s sake, I’m not getting anywhere at all.”

  Her husband said, “Yeah, will you for crissake, Marge, stop talking about yourself?”

  She looked a little puzzled, but she shut up.

  “Did the boy take anything besides the guinea pig?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Has he ever run away before?”

  There was a long pause while they looked at each other Then, like the punch line in a Frick-and-Frack routine, she said yes and he said no.

  “That covers most of the possibilities,” I said.

  “He didn’t really run away,” Bartlett said. “He just slept over a friend’s house without telling us. Any kid’ll do that.”

  “He did not; he ran away,” his wife said. She was intense and forgot about displaying her legs—the skirt slid over as she leaned forward and covered them entirely. “We called everywhere the next day, and Jimmy Houser’s mother told us he’d been there. If you hadn’t gone and got him at school, I don’t think he’d have come back.”

  “Aw Marge, you make everything sound like a goddamned drama.”

  “Roger, there’s something wrong with that kid, and you won’t admit it. If you’d gone along with it when I wanted him looked at—but no, you were so worried about the money. ‘Where am I going to get the money, Marge, do you think I’ve got a money tree in back, Marge?’ If you’d let me take him someplace, he’d be home now.”

  The mimicry sounded true. Bartlett’s tan face got darker.

  “You bitch,” he said. “I told you, take the money out of your goddamned acting lessons and your goddamned pottery classes and your goddamned sculpturing supplies and your goddamned clothes. You got twenty years psychology payments hanging in your goddamned closet.…”

  I was going to get a chance to check my erosion theory. Tears began to well up in her eyes, and I found I didn’t want to check my theory nor did I want to see her erode. I put my fingers in my ears and waited.

  They stopped.

  “Good,” I said. “Now, let us establish some ground rules. One, I am not on the Parent-of-the-Year committee. I am not interested in assessing your performance. Yell at each other when I’m not around. Second, I am a simple person. If I’m looking for a lost kid, that’s what I do. I don’t referee marriages; I don’t act as creative consultant to the Rog and Margie show. I just keep looking for the kid until I find him. Third, I charge one hundred dollars a day plus whatever expenses I incur. Fourth, I need five hundred dollars as a retainer.”

  They were silent, embarrassed at the spillover I’d witnessed.

  Bartlett said, “Yeah, sure, that’s okay, I mean hey, it’s only money, right? I’ll give you a check now; I brought one with me, in case, you know?”

  He hunched the chair forward and wrote a check on the edge of my desk with a translucent ballpoint pen. Bartlett Construction was imprinted in the upper left corner of the check—I was going to be a business expense. Deductible. One keg of 8d nails, 500 feet of 2 × 4 utility grade, one gumshoe, 100 gall
ons of creosote stain. I took the check without looking at it and slipped it folded into my shirt pocket, casual, like I got them all the time and it was just something to pass along to my broker. Or maybe I’d buy some orchids with it.

  “What is your first step?” Mrs. Bartlett said.

  “I’ll drive up to Smithfield after lunch and look at your house and look at his room and talk to teachers and the local fuzz and like that.”

  “But the police have done that. What can you do that they can’t?” I wondered if I was cutting into her modern dance lessons.

  “I can’t do anything they can’t, but I can do it full time. They have to arrest drunks and flag down speeders and break up fights at the high school and keep the kids from planting pot in the village watering trough. I don’t. All I have to do is look for your kid. Also, maybe I’m smarter than they are.”

  “But can you find him?”

  “I can find him; he’s somewhere. I’ll keep looking till I do.”

  They didn’t look reassured. Maybe it was my office. If I was so good at finding things, how come I couldn’t find a better office? Maybe I wasn’t all that good? Maybe nobody is. I stood up.

  “I’ll see you this afternoon,” I said. They agreed and left. I watched them from my window as they left the building and headed up Stuart Street toward the parking lot next to Jake Wirth’s. An old drunk man with a long overcoat buttoned to his chin said something to them. They stared rigidly past him without answering and disappeared into the parking lot. Well, I thought, the rents are low. The old man stumbled on toward the corner of Tremont. He stopped and spoke to two hookers in hot pants and fancy hats. One of them gave him something, and he shuffled along. A blue Dodge Club van pulled out of the parking lot and headed down Stuart toward Kneeland Street and the expressway. On the side it said Bartlett Construction. I could see one arm in the sleeve of a paisley caftan on the window as it went by.

  2

  I drove north out of Boston over the Mystic River Bridge with the top down on my car. On the right was Old Ironsides at berth in the Navy Yard and to the left of the bridge the Bunker Hill Monument. Between them stretch three-decker tenements alternating with modular urban renewal units. One of the real triumphs of prefab design is to create a sense of nostalgia for slums. At the top of the bridge I paid my toll to a man who took pride in his work. There was a kind of precise flourish to the way he took my quarter and gave me back a dime with the same hand.