Five Classic Spenser Mysteries

by Robert B. Parker

  She smiled her thanks at me. “So, sticking your nose into things and getting it broken allows you to live life on your own terms, perhaps.”

  “Jesus, I wish I’d said that,” I said. “Want to eat?”

  “I think we’d better; I’m beginning to feel the gimlets.”

  “In that case, my dear, let me get you another.” I raised my eyebrows and flicked an imaginary cigar.

  “Oh, do the funny walk, Groucho,” she said.

  “I haven’t got that down yet,” I said. I gestured toward the pitcher, and she shook her head. “No thank you, really.”

  I held her chair as she sat down, sat down opposite her, and poured some wine in her glass.

  “A self-effacing little domestic red,” I said, “with just a hint of presumption.”

  She took a sip. “Oh, good,” she said, “it’s cold. I hate it at room temperature, don’t you?”

  I said, “Let’s elope.”

  “Just like that,” she said. “Because I like cold wine?”

  “Well, there are other factors,” I said.

  “Let’s eat first,” she said.

  We ate. Largely in silence. There are people with whom silence is not strained. Very few of them are women. But Susan Silverman was one. She didn’t make conversation. Or if she was making conversation she was so good at it that I didn’t notice. She ate with pleasure and impeccable style. Me too.

  She accepted another slice of the roast and put sauce on it from the gravy boat.

  “The sauce is super,” she said. “What is it?”

  “Cumberland sauce,” I said. “It is also terrific with duck.”

  She didn’t ask for the recipe. Style. I hate people who ask for recipes.

  “Well, it is certainly terrific with pork.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “You’re Jewish.”

  “Yes?”

  “You’re not Orthodox?”

  “No.”

  “Serving a pork roast on your first date with a Jewish lady is not always considered a slick move.”

  She laughed. “I didn’t even think of that. You poor thing. Of course it is not a slick move. But is this a date? I thought I was going to be questioned.”

  “Yeah. That’s right. I’m just softening you up now. After dessert and brandy I break out the strappado.”

  She held out her wineglass. “Well then, I’d better fortify myself as best I can.”

  I poured her more wine.

  “What about Kevin Bartlett? Where do you think he is?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. How could I? Haven’t you got any clues at all?”

  “Oh yeah, we got clues. We got lots of clues. But they don’t lead us to anything. What they tell us is that we’re into something weird. It’s freak-land again.”

  “Again?”

  “That’s just nostalgia, I guess. Used to be when you got a kidnapping you assumed the motive to be greed and you could count on that and work with it. You ran into a murder and you could figure lust or profit as a starter. Now you gotta wonder if it’s political, religious, or merely idiosyncratic. You know, for the hell of it. Because it’s there.”

  “And you yearn for the simple crimes like Leopold-Loeb?”

  “Yeah,” I grinned. “Or Ruth Judd, the ax murderess. Okay, so maybe there was always freaky crime. It just seems more prevalent. Or maybe I grow old.”

  “Maybe we all do,” she said.

  “Yeah, but I’d like to find Kevin Bartlett before I get senile. You know about the kidnapping note and the hearse and the dummy?”

  “Some. The story was all over the school system when they found the hearse behind the junior high. But I don’t know details.”

  “Okay,” I said, “here they are.” I told her. “Now,” I said, and gestured with the wine bottle toward her glass.

  “Half a glass,” she said. I poured. “That’s good.”

  “Now,” I said again, “do you think he was kidnapped? And if he was kidnapped, was it just for money?”

  “In order,” she said, “I don’t know, and no.”

  “Yeah, that’s about where I am,” I said. “Tell me about this group he ran with.”

  “As I said when you saw me the other day in my office, I really know very little about them. I’ve heard that there is a group of disaffected young people who have formed a commune of some sort. Commune may be too strong a word. There is a group, and I only know this from gossip in the high school, which chooses to live together. I don’t want to stereotype them. They are mostly, I’ve heard, school- and college-age people who do not go to school or work in the traditional sense. I’ve heard that they have a house somewhere around Smithfield.”

  “Who owns the house?”

  “I don’t know, but there is a kind of leader, an older man, maybe thirty or so, this Vic Harroway. I would think he’d be the owner.”

  “And Kevin was hanging around with this group?”

  “With some of them. Or at least with some kids who were said to be associated with this group. I’d see him now and then sitting on the cemetery wall across from the common with several kids from the group. Or maybe from the group. I’m making this sound a good deal more positive than it is. I’m not sure of any of this or of even the existence of such a group. Although I’m inclined to think there is a group like that.”

  “Who would know?”

  She frowned. “I don’t know. Chief Trask, I suppose.”

  “How bizarre is this group?”

  “Bizarre? I don’t know. I hadn’t heard anything very bizarre about them. I imagine there’s grass smoked there, although not many of us find that bizarre anymore. Other than that I can’t think of anything particularly bizarre. What kind of bizarre do you mean?”

  The wine was gone, and I was looking a little wistfully at the empty bottle. It was hard concentrating on business. I was also looking a little wistfully at Susan Silverman. Neither rain nor sleet nor snow nor dark of night maybe, but red wine and a handsome woman—that was something else.

  She said, “What kind of bizarre are you looking for?”

  “Any kind at all. The kind of bizarre that would be capable of that dummy trick in the coffin, the kind of bizarre that would make a singing commercial out of the telephone call. The kind of bizarre that would do the ransom note in a comic strip. Would you like some brandy?”

  “One small glass.”

  “Let’s take it to the living room.”

  She sat where she had before, at one end of the couch. I gave her some Calvados and sat on the coffee table near her.

  “I don’t know anything bizarre about the group. I have the impression that there is something unusual about Vic Harroway, but I don’t know quite what it is.”

  “Think about it. Who said he was odd? What context was his oddness in?”

  She frowned again. “No, just an idea that he’s unusual.”

  “Is he unusual in appearance?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Size?”

  “Really, I can’t recall.”

  “Is he unusual in his sex habits?”

  She shrugged and spread her hands, palms up.

  “Religious zealot?”

  She shook her head.

  “Unusual family connections?”

  “Damn it, Spenser, I don’t know. If I knew, I’d tell you.”

  “Try picturing the circumstances when you got the impression he was unusual. Who said it? Where were you?”

  She laughed. “Spenser, I can’t do it. I don’t remember. You’re like a hammer after a nail.”

  “Sorry, I tend to get caught up in my work.”

  “I guess you do. You’re a very interesting man. One might misjudge you. One might even underrate you, and I think that might be a very bad error.”

  “Underrate? Me?”

  “Well, here you are a big guy with sort of a classy broken nose and clever patter. It would be easy to as
sume you were getting by on that. That maybe you were a little cynical and a little shallow. I half figured you got me in here just to make a pass at me. But I just saw you at work, and I would not want to be somebody you were really after.”

  “Now you’re making me feel funny,” I said. “Because half the reason I invited you in here was to make a pass at you.”

  “Maybe,” she said and smiled. “But first you would work.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I worked. I am a sleuth, and being a sleuth I can add two and two, blue eyes. If you half expected me to make a pass and you came anyway, then you must have half wanted me to do so … sweetheart.”

  “My eyes are brown.”

  “I know, but I can’t do Bogart saying ‘brown eyes.’ And don’t change the subject.”

  She took the final sip from her brandy glass and put it on the coffee table. When she did she was close to my face. “See?” she said looking at me steadily. “See how brown they are?”

  “Black, I’d say. Closer to black.”

  I put my hands on either side of her face and kissed her on the mouth. She kissed me back. It was a long kiss, and when it ended I still held her face in my hands.

  “Maybe you’re right,” she said. “Maybe they are more black than brown. Perhaps if you were to sit on the couch you might be able to see better.”

  I moved over. “Yes,” I said, “this confirms my suspicion. Your eyes are black rather than brown.”

  She leaned forward and kissed me. I put my arms around her. She turned across my lap so I was holding her in my arms and put her arms around my neck. The kiss lasted longer than the first one and had some body English on it. I ran my hand under her sweater up along the depression of her spine, feeling the smooth muscles that ran parallel. We were lying now on the couch, and her mouth was open. I slid my hand back down along her spine and under the waistband of her pants. She groaned and arched her body against me, turning slightly as I moved my hand along the waistband toward the front zipper. I reached it and fumbled at it. Old surgeon’s hands. She pulled back from the kiss, reached down, and took my hand away. I let her. We were gasping.

  “No, Spenser,” she managed. “Not the first time. Not in your apartment.”

  I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t think of anything to say, and I was concentrating on breathing.

  “I know it’s silly. But I can’t get rid of upbringing; I can’t get rid of momma saying that only dirty girls did it on the first date. I come from a different time.”

  “I know,” I said. “I come from the same time.” My voice was very hoarse. I cleared my throat. We continued to lie on the couch, my arm around her.

  “There will be other times. Perhaps you’d like to try my cooking. In my house. I’m not cold, Spenser, and I would have been hurt if you hadn’t tried, but not the first time. I just wouldn’t like myself. Next time …”

  “Yeah,” I said. Clearing my throat hadn’t helped, but I was getting my breathing under control. “I know. I’d love to try your cooking. What say we hop in the car and drive right out to your place now for a snack?”

  She laughed. “You’re not a quitter, are you.”

  “It’s just that I may be suffering from terminal tumescence,” I said.

  She laughed again and sat up.

  I said, “How about dinner together next week? That way you won’t feel quite so hustled, maybe?”

  She sat and looked down at me for some time. Her black hair falling forward around her face. Her lipstick smeared around her mouth. “You’re quite nice, Spenser.” She put her hand against my cheek for a moment. “Will you come and have dinner with me at my home next Tuesday evening at eight?”

  “I will be very pleased to,” I said.

  We stood up. She put her hand out. I shook it. I walked to the door with her She said, “Good night, Spenser.”

  I said, “Good night, Susan.”

  I opened the door for her, and she went out. I closed it. I breathed as much air as I could get into my lungs and let it out very slowly. Next time, I thought. Tuesday night. Dinner at her house. Hot dog.

  10

  Susan Silverman called me at my office at nine thirty the next morning.

  “I’ve found out about that commune,” she said.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  “It’s an old house in the woods back from Lowell Street near the Smithfield-Reading line.”

  “Can you tell me how to get there?”

  “I’ll take you.”

  “I was hoping you would. I’ll be out in an hour.”

  “Come to my office,” she said.

  “At the school?” I said.

  “Yes, what’s wrong?”

  “Mr. Moriarty might assault me with a ruler. I don’t want to start up with no assistant principal.”

  “He probably won’t recognize you without your white raincoat,” she said. “The sun’s out.”

  “Okay,” I said, “I’ll run the risk.”

  It was sunny, and the first hint of a New England fall murmured behind the sunshine. Warm enough for the top down on my convertible. Cold enough for a pale denim jacket. I drank a large paper cup of black coffee on the way and finished it just before I got to the Smithfield cutoff.

  I found a space in the high school parking lot and went in.

  The receptionist in the guidance office was in brown knit today and displaying a lot of cleavage. I admired it. She wasn’t Susan Silverman, but she wasn’t Lassie either, and there was little to be gained in elitist thinking.

  Susan Silverman came out of her office with a red, blue, and green striped blazer on.

  “I’ll be back in about half an hour, Carla,” she said to the redhead and to me. “Why don’t we take my car? It’ll be easier than giving you directions.”

  I said, “Okay,” and we went out of the office and down a school corridor I hadn’t walked before. But it was a school corridor. The smell of it and the long rows of lockers and the tone of repressed energy were like they always were. The guidance setup was different, though. Guidance counseling in my school meant the football coach banged your head against a locker and told you to shape up.

  Susan Silverman said, “Were you looking down the front of my secretary’s dress when I came out?”

  “I was looking for clues,” I said. “I’m a professional investigator.”

  She said, “Mmmm.”

  We went out a side door to the parking lot. Behind it the lawn stretched green to a football field ringed with new-looking bleachers and past that a line of trees. There was a group of girls in blue gym shorts and gold T-shirts playing field hockey under the eye of a lean tan woman in blue warm-up pants and a white polo shirt with a whistle in her mouth.

  “Gym class?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  Susan’s car was a two-year-old Nova. I opened the door for her, and she slipped into the seat, tucking her blue skirt under her.

  We drove out of the parking lot, turned left toward the center of town, and then right on Main Street and headed north.

  “How’d you locate this place so quickly?”

  “I collected a favor,” she said, “from a girl in school.”

  We turned left off Main Street and headed east. The road was narrow, and the houses became sparser. Most of the road was through woods, and it seemed incredible that we were but fifteen miles from Boston and in the northern reaches of a megalopolis that stretched south through Richmond, Virginia. On my right was a pasture with black and white Ayrshire cows grazing behind a stone wall piled without benefit of mortar. Then more woods, mostly elm trees with birch trees gleaming through occasionally and a smattering of white pine.

  “It’s along here somewhere,” she said.

  “What are we looking for?”

  “A dirt road on the left about a half mile past the cow pasture.”

  “There,” I said, “just before the red maple.”

  She nodded and turned in. It was a narrow road, rocky and humpbacked beneat
h the wheel ruts. Tree branches scraped the sides and roof of the car as we drove. Dogberry bushes clustered along the edge of the path. A lot of rust-colored rock outcroppings showed among the greenery, and waxy-looking green vines grew among them in the shade, putting forth tiny blue flowers. All that waxy green effort for that reticent little flower.

  We pulled around a bend about two hundred yards in and stopped. The land before us was cleared and might once have been a lawn. Now it was an expanse of gravel spattered with an occasional clump of weeds, some of which, coarse and sparse-leafed, looked waist-high. Behind one clump was a discarded bicycle on its back, its wheelless forks pointing up. The scavenged shell of a 1937 Hudson Terraplane rusted quietly at the far edge of the clearing. The remnants of a sidewalk, big squares of cracked cement, heaved and buckled by frost, led up to a one-story house. Once, when it was newly built, an enthusiastic real estate broker might have listed it as a contemporary bungalow. It was a low ranch built on a slab. The siding was asphalt shingle faded now to a pale green. A peak over the front door had been vertically paneled with natural planks, and a scalloped molding, showing traces of pink paint, ran across the front. Attached to the house was a disproportionate cinder block carport, partly enclosed, as if the owner had given up and moved out in mid-mortar. From the carport came the steady whine of a gasoline engine. Not a car, maybe a generator. I saw no utility wires running in from the road.

  A narrow mongrel bitch, about knee-high, with pendulous dugs, burrowed in an overturned trash barrel near the front door. A plump brown-haired girl of maybe fourteen sat on the front steps. She had big dark eyes that looked even bigger and darker in contrast with her white, doughy face. She had on a white T-shirt, blue dungarees with a huge flare at the bottom, and no shoes. She was eating a Twinkie and in her right hand held an open can of Coke and a burning filter tip cigarette. She looked at us without expression as we got out of the car and started up the walk.

  “I don’t like it here,” Susan Silverman said.

  “That’s the trouble with you urban intellectuals,” I said. “You have no sense of nature’s subtle rhythms.”