Five Classic Spenser Mysteries

by Robert B. Parker

  Orchard had finished his brandy. He nodded at the empty glass. His wife got up, refilled it, and brought it to him. He drank, then put the glass down. He said, “While you’re up, Marion, would you ask Terry to come down.”

  Marion left the room. Orchard took another belt of brandy. He wasn’t bothering to savor the bouquet. I nibbled at the edge of mine. Marion Orchard came back into the room with Terry.

  I stood and said, “Hello, Terry.”

  She said, “Hi.”

  Her hair was loose and long. She wore a short-sleeved blouse, a skirt, no socks, and a pair of loafers. I looked at her arms—no tracks. One point for our side; she wasn’t shooting. At least not regularly. She was fresh-scrubbed and pale, and remarkably without affect. She went to a round leather hassock by the fire and sat down, her knees tight together, her hands folded in her lap. Dolly Demure, with a completely blank face. The loose hair softened her, and the traditional dress made her look like somebody’s cheerleader, right down to loafers without socks. Had there been any animation she’d have been pretty as hell.

  Orchard spoke. “Terry, I’m employing Mr. Spenser to clear you of the murder charge.”

  She said, “Okay.”

  “I hope you’ll cooperate with him in every way.”

  “Okay.”

  “And, Terry, if Mr. Spenser succeeds in getting you out of this mess, if he does, perhaps you will begin to rethink your whole approach to life.”

  “Why don’t you get laid,” she said flatly, without inflection, and without looking at him.

  Marion Orchard said “Terry!” in a horrified voice.

  Orchard’s glass was empty. He flicked an eye at it, and away.

  “Now, you listen to me, young lady,” he said. “I have put up with your nonsense for as long as I’m going to. If you …”

  I interrupted. “If I want to listen to this kind of crap I can go home and watch daytime television. I want to talk with Terry, and maybe later I’ll want to talk with each of you. Separately. Obviously I was wrong; we can’t do it in a group. You people want to encounter one another, do it on your own time.”

  “By God, Spenser,” Orchard said.

  I cut him off again. “I want to talk with Terry. Do I or don’t I?”

  I did. He and his wife left, and Terry and I were alone in the library.

  “If I told my father to get laid he would have knocked out six of my teeth,” I said.

  “Mine won’t,” she said. “He’ll drink some more brandy, and tomorrow he’ll stay late at the office.”

  “You don’t like him much,” I said.

  “I bet if I said that to you, you’d knock out six of my teeth,” she said.

  “Only if you didn’t smile,” I answered.

  “He’s a jerk.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But he’s your jerk, and from his point of view you’re no prize package either.”

  “I know,” she said.”

  “However,” I said, “let’s think about what I’m supposed to do here. Tell me more about the manuscript and the professor and anything else you can remember beyond what you told Quirk last night.”

  “That’s all there is,” she said. “I told the police everything I know.”

  “Let’s run through it again anyway,” I said. “Have you talked with Quirk again since last night?”

  “Yes, I saw him this morning before Daddy’s people got me out.”

  “Okay, tell me what he asked you and what you said.”

  “He started by asking me why I thought two big white men in hats would come to our apartment and kill Dennis and frame me.”

  That was Quirk, starting right where he left off, no rephrasing, no new approach, less sleep than I had and there in the morning when the big cheeses passed the word along to let her out, getting all his questions answered before he released her.

  “And what did you answer?” I said.

  “I said the only thing I could think of was the manuscript. That Dennis was involved somehow in that theft, and he was upset about it.”

  “Can you give me more than that? How was he involved? Why was he involved? What makes you think he was involved? Why do you think he was upset? What did he do to show you he was upset? Answer any or all, one at a time.”

  “It was a phone call he made from the apartment. The way he was talking I could tell he was upset, and I could tell he wasn’t talking to another kid. I mean, you can tell that from the way people talk. The way his voice sounded.”

  “What did he say?” I said.

  “I couldn’t hear most of it. He talked low, and I knew he didn’t want me to hear, you know, cupping his hand and everything. So I tried not to hear. But he did say something about hiding it … like ‘Don’t worry, no one will find it. I was careful.’ ”

  “When was this?” I asked.

  “About a week ago. Lemme see, I was up early for my Chaucer course, so it would have been Monday, that’s five days ago. Last Monday.”

  The manuscript had been stolen Sunday night.

  “Okay, so he was upset. About what?”

  “I don’t know, but I can tell when he’s mad. At one point I think he threatened someone.”

  “Why do you think so? What did he say that makes you think so?”

  “He said, ‘If you don’t …’ No … No … he said, ‘I will, I really will.…’ Yeah. That’s what it was … ‘I really will.’ But very threateny, you know.”

  “Good. Now why do you think it was a professor? I know the voice tone told you it was someone older, but why a professor? What did he say? What were the words?”

  “Well, oh, I don’t know, it was just a feeling. I wasn’t all that interested; I was running the water for a bath, anyway.”

  “No, Terry, I want to know. The words, what were his words?”

  She was silent, her eyes squeezed almost shut, as if the sun were shining in them, her upper teeth exposed, her lower lip sucked in.

  “Dennis said, ‘I don’t care’ … ‘I don’t care, if you do.’ … He said, ‘I don’t care if you do. Cut the goddamn thing.’ That’s it. He was talking to an older person and he said cut the class if the other person had to. That’s why I figured it must be a professor.”

  “How do you know he wasn’t talking about cutting a piece of rope, or a salami?”

  “Because he mentioned class or school a little before. And what could they be talking about angrily that had to do with salami?”

  “Okay. Good. What else?”

  There wasn’t anything else. I worked on her for maybe half an hour more and nothing else surfaced. All I got was the name of a SCACE official close to Powell, someone named Mark Tabor, whose title was political counselor.

  “If you think of anything else, anything at all, call me. You still have my card?”

  “Yes. I … my father will pay you for what you did last night.”

  “No, he won’t. He’ll pay me for what I may do. But last night was a free introductory offer.”

  “It was a very nice thing to do,” she said.

  “Aw, hell,” I said.

  “What you should try to do is this,” I said. “You should try to keep from starting up with your old man for a while. And you should try to stay around the house, go to class if you think you should, but for the moment let SCACE stave off the apocalypse without you. Okay?”

  “Okay. But don’t laugh at us. We’re perfectly serious and perfectly right.”

  “Yeah, so is everyone I know.”

  I left her then. Said good-bye to her parents, took a retainer from Roland Orchard, and drove back to town.

  Chapter 7

  Driving back to Boston, I thought about my two retainers in the same week. Maybe I’d buy a yacht. On the other hand maybe it would be better to get the tear in my convertible roof fixed. The tape leaked. I got off the Mass Pike at Storrow Drive and headed for the university. On my left the Charles River was thick and gray between Boston and Cambridge. A single oarsman was sculling upstream.
He had on a hooded orange sweat shirt and dark blue sweat pants and his breath steamed as he rocked back and forth at the oars. Rowing downstream would have been easier.

  I turned off Storrow at Charlesgate, went up over Commonwealth, onto Park Drive, past a batch of ducks swimming in the muddy river, through the Fenway to Westland Ave. Number 177 was on the left, halfway to Mass Ave. I parked at a hydrant and went up the stone steps to the glass door at the entry. I tried it. It was open. Inside an ancient panel of doorbells and call boxes covered the left wall. I didn’t have to try one to know they didn’t work. They didn’t need to. The inner door didn’t close all the way because the floor was warped in front of the sill and the door jammed against it. Mark Tabor was on the fourth floor. No elevator. I walked up. The apartment house smelled bad and the stair landing had beer bottles and candy wrappers accumulating in the corners. Somewhere in the building electronic music was playing at top volume. The fourth flight began to tell on me a little, but I forced myself to breathe normally as I knocked on Tabor’s door. No answer. I knocked again. And a third time. Loud. I didn’t want to waste the four-flight climb. A voice inside called out, “Wait a minute.” There was a pause, and then the door opened.

  I said, “Mark Tabor?”

  And he said, “Yeah.”

  He looked like a zinnia. Tall and thin with an enormous corona of rust red hair flaring out around his pale, clean-shaven face. He wore a lavender undershirt and a pair of faded, flare-bottomed denim dungarees that were too long and dragged on the floor over his bare feet.

  I said, “I’m a friend of Terry Orchard’s; she asked me to come and talk with you.”

  “About what?”

  “About inviting people in to sit down.”

  “Why do you think I know what’s her name?”

  “Aw, come off it, Tabor,” I said. “How the hell do you think I got your name and address? How do you know Terry Orchard is not a what’s his name? What do you lose by talking with me for fifteen minutes? If I was going to mug you I would have already. Besides, a mugger would starve to death in this neighborhood.”

  “Well, what do you want to talk about?” he asked, still standing in the door. I walked past him into the room. He said, “Hey,” but didn’t try to stop me. I moved a pile of mimeographed pamphlets off a steamer trunk and sat down on it. Tabor took a limp pack of Kools out of his pants pocket, extracted a ragged cigarette, and lit it. The menthol smell did nothing for the atmosphere. He took a big drag and exhaled through his nose. He leaned against the door jamb. “Okay,” he said. “What do you want?”

  “I want to keep Terry Orchard out of the slam, for one thing. And I want to find the Godwulf Manuscript, for another.”

  “Why are the cops hassling Terry?”

  “Because they think she killed Dennis Powell.”

  “Dennis is dead?”

  I nodded.

  “Ain’t that a bitch, now,” he said, much as if I’d said the rain would spoil the picnic. He went over and sat on the edge of a kitchen table covered with books, lined yellow paper, manila folders, and the crusts of a pizza still in the take box. Behind him, taped to the gray painted wall with raggedly torn masking tape, was a huge picture of Che Guevara. Opposite was a day bed covered by an unzipped sleeping bag. There were clothes littered on the floor. On top of a bureau was a hot plate. There were no curtains or window shades.

  I clucked approvingly. “You’ve really got some style, Tabor,” I said.

  “You from House Beautiful or something?” he said.

  “Nope, I’m a private detective.” I showed him the photostat of my license. “I’m trying to clear Terry Orchard of the murder charge. I’m also looking for the Godwulf Manuscript, and I think they’re connected. Can you help me?”

  “I don’t know nothing about no murder, man, and nothing about no jive ass manuscript.” Why did all the radical white kids from places like Scarsdale and Bel-Air try to talk as if they’d been brought up in Brownsville and Watts? He stubbed out his Kool and lit another.

  “Look,” I said. “You and Dennis Powell roomed together for two years. You and Terry Orchard are members of the same organization. You share the same goals. I’m not the cops. I’m free-lance, for crissake, I’m labor. I work for Terry. I don’t want you. I want Terry out of trouble and the manuscript back in its case. Do you know where the manuscript is?”

  “Naw, man. I don’t know anything about it.”

  He didn’t look up from the contemplation of his Kool. His voice never varied. Like Terry, he showed no affect. No response to stimulus. It was as though he’d shut down.

  “Tell me this,” I said. “Does SCACE have a faculty adviser?”

  “Oh, man, be cool. SCACE ain’t no frat house, baby. Faculty adviser … Man, that’s heavy.”

  “Do any faculty members belong to SCACE?”

  “Maybe. Lot of people belong to SCACE. That’s for me to know and you to guess.”

  “What’s the big secret?”

  “Lots of dudes can get in trouble for joining organizations like SCACE. The imperialists don’t like opposition. The fat cats don’t like organizations that are for the worker. The superoppressors are scared of the revolution.”

  “You forgot to mention the capitalist running-dog lackeys,” I said.

  “Like you, you mean? See what happened to Terry Orchard? The pigs have framed her already. They’ll do anything they can to stamp us out.”

  “Look, kid, I don’t want to sit up here and argue Herbert Marcuse with you. The cops are professionals. You can sit here in your hippie suit and drink wine and smoke grass and read Marx and play revolution like Tom Sawyer ambushing the A-rabs all you want. That bothers the cops like a tick fly on an elephant. If they wanted to stamp you out, they’d come in here and stamp and you’d know what a stamping was. They don’t have to get frilly and frame some twenty-year-old broad to get at you. They’ve got guys in the station house in Charlestown that they keep in a cage when they’re not on duty.”

  He gave me a tough look. Which isn’t easy when you weigh 150 pounds.

  “How about a faculty member that might be associated with SCACE?”

  He let the smoke from his cigarette out of his nose and mouth slowly. It drifted up around his head. Long years of practice, I thought. He looked straight at me with his eyes almost closed for a long time. Then he said, “Where would the movement be now if someone had saved Sacco and Vanzetti?”

  “Sonova bitch,” I said. “You’re almost perfect, you are, a flawless moron. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone stay so implacably on the level of absolute abstraction.”

  “Screw you, man,” he said.

  “That’s better,” I said. “Now we’re getting down where I live. I’ve got no hope for you, punk. But I promise you that if that kid gets burned because you don’t tell me what you could tell me, I will come for you. You martyr that kid and I’ll give the movement another martyr.”

  “Screw you, man,” he said.

  I walked out.

  I went back down the four flights of stairs, as empty as when I went up. Some sleuth, Spenser, a real Hawkshaw. All you’ve found out is you get winded after four flights of stairs. I wondered if I should go back up and have a go at shaking some information out of him. Maybe later. Maybe he’d stew a little and I could call on him again. I didn’t even know he knew anything. But talking to him, I could feel him holding back. I could even feel that he liked knowing something and not telling. It added color to the romance of his conspiracy. Out in the street the air was cold and it tasted clean after the mentholated smoke and the stale air of Tabor’s room. A truck backfired and up on Mass Avenue a bus ground under way in low gear.

  My next try was the campus. The student newspaper was located in the basement of the library. On the blond oak door cut into the cinder block of the basement corridor an inventive person had lettered NEWS in black ink.

  Inside, the room was long and narrow. L-shaped black metal desks with white Formica tops were
sloppily lined up along the long wall on the left. A hand-lettered sign made from half a manila folder instructed the staff to label all photographs with name, date, and location. The room was empty except for a black woman in a red paisley dashiki and matching turban. She was fat but not flabby, hard fat we used to call it when I was a kid, and the dashiki billowed around her body like a drop cloth on the sofa when the living room’s going to be painted. A plastic name plate on her desk said FEATURE EDITOR.

  She said, “Can I help you?” Her voice was not cordial. No one seemed to be mistaking me for a member of the academic community.

  I said, “I hope so.”

  I gave her a card. “I’m working on a case, and I’m looking for information. Can I ask you for some?”

  “You surely can,” she said. “All the news that’s fit to print, that’s us.”

  “Okay, you know there’s a manuscript been stolen.”

  “Yep.”

  “I have some reason to believe that a radical student organization, SCACE, is involved in the theft.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “What I’m looking for are faculty connections with SCACE. What can you tell me?”

  “Why you want to know about faculty connections?”

  “I have reason to believe that a faculty member was involved in the theft.”

  “I have reason to believe that information is a two-way go, sweetie,” she said. “Ah is a member ob de press, baby. Information is mah business.”

  I liked her. She was old for a student, maybe twenty-eight. And she was tough.

  “Fair enough,” I said. “If you’ll drop the Stepin Fetchit act, I’ll tell you what I can. In trade?”

  “Right on, brother,” she said.

  “Two things. One, what’s your name?”

  “Iris Milford.”

  “Two, do you know Terry Orchard?”

  She nodded.

  “Then you know she’s a SCACE member. You also may know she’s been arrested for murder.” She nodded again.

  “I think the manuscript theft and the murder are connected.” I told her about Terry, and the murder, and Terry’s memory of the phone call.

  “Someone set her up,” I said. “If someone wanted her out of the way they’d just have killed her. They wanted to kill Powell. They wouldn’t go to the trouble and take the risk just to frame her. And they wanted to kill Powell in such a way as to keep people from digging into it. And it looked good—a couple of freaky kids living in what my aunt used to call sin. On drugs, long-haired, barefooted, radical, and on a bad trip, one shoots the other and tells some weird hallucinogenic story about guys in trench coats. The Hearst papers would have them part of an international sex club by the second day’s story.”