“Yeah, sure. I know Yates a little. One of the things he does best is respond to pressure from somewhere up the line.”
Quirk didn’t say anything.
“Look, Lieutenant,” I said, “does it seem odd to you that there are two guys looking into the Terry Orchard thing and both of us are told to butt out within the same day? Does that seem like any kind of coincidence to you?”
“Spenser, I am a cop. I have been a cop for twenty-two years, and I will keep on being one until they lock me out of the station house. One of the things that a cop has to have is discipline. He gets orders, he has to obey them—or the whole thing goes to hell. I don’t have to like what’s happening, but I do it. And I don’t run around crying about it.”
“Words to live by,” I said. “It was the widely acclaimed Adolf Eichmann who popularized that ‘I obey orders’ routine, wasn’t it?”
“That’s a cheap shot, Spenser. You know goddamn well the cops are right more than they’re wrong. We’re not wiping out six million people. We’re trying to keep the germs from taking over the world. To do that you got to have order, and if someone gets burned now and then so someone gets burned. If every cop started deciding which order to obey and which one not, then the germs would win. If the germs win, all the goddamn bleeding hearts will get their ass shot.”
“Yeah, sure, the big picture. So some goddamn teen-aged kid gets fed to the fishes for something she didn’t do. So you know she didn’t do it and Joe Broz puts the squeeze on some politician who puts the squeeze on Captain Yates who takes you off the case. But you don’t cry. It’s good for society. Balls. Why don’t you take what you got to the States?”
“Because I haven’t got enough. The State cops would laugh and giggle if I came in with what I’ve got. And because, goddamn it, Spenser, because I can’t. I’m a cop. It’s what I do. I can’t.”
“I know,” I said. “But I can. And I’m going to. I’m going to have Broz and Yates, and you, too, if I have to, and whoever else has got his thumb in whatever pie this is.”
“Maybe you will,” Quirk said. “I hear you were a pretty good cop before you got fired. What’d you get fired for?”
“Insubordination. It’s one of my best things.”
“And maybe Broz will have you shot in the back of the head.”
I let that pass. We were silent.
“How much do I have to get for you before you go to the States?”
“I’m not asking you to get a damn thing for me,” Quirk said.
“Yeah, I know. If I got you proof. Not suspicion, proof. Then what happens?”
“Then the pressure will go away. Yates is impressed with proof.”
“I’ll bet,” I said.
More silence. Quirk didn’t seem to want to leave, but he didn’t have anything to say. Or at least he wasn’t saying it.
“What do you know about Cathy Connelly, Lieutenant?”
“We checked her out routinely. No record, no evidence of drugs. Roomed with Orchard before her boyfriend moved in. Now lives somewhere over on the Fenway.”
“Anybody interview her?”
“Couple of precinct boys in a radio car stopped by. She wasn’t home. We saw no reason to press it. Do you?”
“Those two hoods had Terry Orchard’s gun with them when they came to the apartment. How’d they get it?”
“If it’s true.”
“Of course, if it’s true. I think it’s true. Cathy Connelly seems like the best person to ask about how they got the gun. Terry doesn’t know, Powell is dead. Who’s left?”
“Why don’t you go ask her then?” Quirk said. “Thanks for the drink.”
He walked out leaving the door open behind him, and I listened to his footsteps going down the hall.
Chapter 14
I went over to the university to call on Carl Tower. I hoped the campus cops weren’t under orders to shoot on sight. Whether they were, the secretary with the ripe thighs was not. She was friendly. She had on a pants suit today, black, with a large red valentine heart over the left breast. Red platform heels, red enamel pendant earrings. Bright red lipstick. She obviously remembered me. I was probably haunting her dreams.
She said, “May I help you?”
“Don’t pull that sweet talk on me,” I said.
“I beg your pardon.”
“I know what you’re thinking, and I’m sorry, but I’m on duty.”
“Of all the outer offices in all the towns in all the world,” she said, “you had to walk into mine.” There was no change in her expression.
I started to say something about, “If you want anything, just whistle,” but at that moment Carl Tower appeared at his office door and saw me. I was obviously not haunting his dreams.
“Spenser,” he said, “get the hell in my office.”
I took off my wristwatch and gave it to the secretary. “If I don’t come out alive,” I said, “I want you to have this.”
She giggled. I went into Tower’s office.
Tower picked up a tabloid-size newspaper from his desk and tossed it across at me. It was the university newspaper. Across the top was the headline ADMINISTRATION AGENT SPIES ON STUDENT, and in a smaller drop head, PRIVATE EYE HIRED BY ADMINISTRATION QUESTIONS ENGLISH PROFESSOR. I didn’t bother to read the story, though I noticed they spelled my name wrong in the lead paragraph.
“It’s with an s, not a c,” I said. “Like the English poet. S-p-e-n-s-e-r.”
Tower was biting down so hard on his back teeth that the muscles of his jaw bulged at the hinge.
“We won’t ask for a return on the retainer, Spenser,” he said. “But if you are on this campus again, ever, we’ll arrest you for trespassing and use every influence we have to have your license lifted.”
“I hear you got the manuscript back,” I said.
“That’s right. No thanks to you. Now beat it.”
“Who returned it?”
“It just showed up yesterday in a cardboard box, on the library steps.”
“Ever wonder why it came back?”
Tower stood up. “You’re through, Spenser. As of this minute. You are no longer in the employ of this university. You have no business here. You’re trespassing. Either you leave or I call some people to take you out of here.”
“How many you going to call?”
Tower’s face got quite red. He said, “You sonova bitch,” and put his hand on the phone.
I said, “Never mind. If I whipped your entire force it would embarrass both of us.”
On the way out I stopped by the secretary’s desk. She handed me back my watch.
“I’m glad you made it,” she said.
On the inside of the watch strap in red ink she had written “Brenda Loring, 555-3676.”
I looked up at her. “I am, too,” I said, and strapped the watch back on.
She went back to typing and I went back to leaving the university in disgrace. Administration agent, I thought as I went furtively down the corridor. Zowie!
Chapter 15
Back to the Fenway to Cathy Connelly’s apartment. I rang the bell; no answer. I didn’t feel like swapping compliments with Charlie Charm the super, so I strolled around the building looking for an alternate solution. Behind the apartment was an asphalt courtyard with lines for parking spaces and a line of trash barrels, dented and bent, against the wall, behind low trapezoidal concrete barriers to keep the cars from denting and bending them more. Despite the ill-fitting covers on them, some of the trash had spilled out and littered the ground along the foundation. The cellar entrance door was open, but the screen door was closed and fastened with a hook and eye arrangement. It was plastic screening. I took out my jackknife and cut through the screen at the hook. I put my hand through and unhooked it. Tight security, I thought. Straight ahead and two steps down stretched the cellar. To my left rose the stairs. I went up them. Cathy Connelly was apartment 13. I guessed second floor, given the size of the building. I was wrong. It was third floor. Close obs
ervation is my business.
Down the corridor ran a frayed, faded rose runner. The doors were dark-veneer wood with the numbers in shiny silver decals asymmetrically pasted on. The knob on each door was fluted glass. The corridor was weakly lit by a bare bulb in a wall sconce at the end. In front of number 13 a faint apron of light spread out under the door. I looked at my watch; I knocked again. Same result. I put my ear against the door panel. The television was on, or the radio. I heard no other sound. That didn’t prove anything. Lots of people left the TV running when they went out. Some to discourage burglars. Some because they forgot to turn them off. Some so it wouldn’t seem so empty when they came home. I tried the knob. No soap. The door was locked. That was a problem about as serious as the screen door in the cellar. I kicked it open—which would probably irritate the super, since when I did, the jamb splintered. I stepped in and felt the muscles begin to tighten behind my shoulders. The apartment was hot and stuffy, and there was a smell I’d smelled before.
The real estate broker had probably described it as a studio apartment—which meant one room with kitchenette and bath. The bath was to my left, door slightly ajar. The kitchenette was directly before me, separated from the rest of the room by a plastic curtain. To my right were a day bed, the covers folded back as if someone were about to get in, an armchair with a faded pink and beige shawl draped over it as a slipcover, a bureau, a steamer trunk apparently used as a coffee table, and a wooden kitchen table, painted blue, which seemed to double as a desk. On it the television maundered in black and white. In front of the kitchen table was a straight chair. A woman’s white blouse and faded denim skirt were folded over the back of it, underwear and socks tangled on the seat. A saddle shoe lay on its side beneath the chair and another stood flat-footed under the table. There was no one in the room. There was no one behind the plastic curtain. I turned into the bathroom and found her.
She was in the tub, face down, her head under water, her body beginning to bloat. The smell was stronger in here. I forced myself to look. There was a clotted tangle of blood in the hair at the back of one ear. I touched the water; it was room temperature. Her body was the same. I wanted to turn her over, but I couldn’t make myself do it. On the floor by the tub, looking as if she’d just stepped out of them, were a pair of flowered baby doll pajamas. She’d been there awhile. Couple of days, anyway. While I’d been ringing her bell and asking the super if he’d seen her, she’d been right here floating motionless in the tepid water. How do you do, Miss Connelly, my name is Spenser, very sorry I didn’t get to meet you sooner. Hell of a way to meet now. I looked at her for two, maybe three minutes, feeling the nausea bubble inside me. Nothing happened, so I began to look at the bathroom. It was crummy. Plastic tiles, worn linoleum buckling up from the floor. The sink was dirty and the faucet dripped steadily. There was no shower. Big patches of paint had peeled off the ceiling. I thought of a line from a poem: “Even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course/Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot.” I forget who wrote it.
There were no telltale cigar butts, no torn halves of claim checks, no traces of lint from an imported cashmere cloth sold only by J. Press. No footprints, no thumb prints, no clues. Just a drowned kid swelling with death in a shabby bathroom in a crummy apartment in a lousy building run by a grumpy janitor. And me.
I went back out into the living room. No phone. God is my copilot. I went out to the hall and down the stairs to the cellar. The super had an office partitioned off with chicken wire from the rest of the cellar. In it were a rolltop desk, an antique television set, and a swivel chair, in which sat the super. The smell of bad wine oozed out of the place. He looked at me with no sign of recognition or welcome.
I said, “I want to use your phone.”
He said, “There’s a pay phone at the drugstore across the street. I ain’t running no charity here.”
I said, “There is a dead person in room thirteen, and I am going to call the police and tell them. If you say anything to me but yes, sir, I will hit you at least six times in the face.”
He said, “Yes, sir.” Pushing an old wino around always enlivens your spirits. I picked up the phone and called Quirk. Then I went back upstairs and waited for him to arrive with his troops. It wasn’t as long a wait as it seemed. When they arrived Captain Yates was along.
He and Quirk went in to look at the remains. I sat on the day bed and didn’t look at anything. Sergeant Belson sat on the edge of the table smoking a short cigar butt that looked like he’d stepped on it.
“Do you buy those things secondhand?” I asked.
Belson took the cigar butt out of his mouth and looked at it. “If I smoked the big fifty cent jobs in the cedar wrappers, you’d figure I was on the take.”
“Not the way you dress,” I said.
“You ever think of another line of work, Spenser? So far all you’ve detected is two stiffs. Maybe a crossing guard, say, or …”
Quirk and Yates came out of the bathroom with a man from the coroner’s. The lines in Quirk’s face looked very deep, and the medic was finishing a shrug. Yates came over to me. He was a tall man with narrow shoulders and a hard-looking pot belly. He wore glasses with translucent plastic rims like they used to hand out in the army. His mouth was wide and loose.
He looked at me very hard and said, “Someone’s going to have to pay for that door.”
Belson gave him a startled look; Quirk was expressionless. I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I didn’t say anything. It was a technique I ought to work on.
Yates said, “What’s your story, Jack? What the hell are you doing here?”
“Spenser,” I said, “with an s like the English poet. I was selling Girl Scout cookies door to door and they told us to be persistent.…”
“Don’t get smart with me, Jack; we got you for breaking and entering. If the lieutenant here hadn’t said he knew you, I’da run you in already. The janitor says you threatened him, too.”
I looked at Belson. He was concentrating mightily on getting his cigar butt relit, turning it carefully over the flame of a kitchen match to make sure it fired evenly. He didn’t look at me.
“What’s the coroner’s man say about the kid?” I asked Quirk.
Yates answered, “Accidental death. She slipped getting in the tub, hit her head, and drowned.” Belson made a noise that sounded like a cough. Yates spun toward him. “You got something to say, Sergeant?”
Belson looked up. “Not me, Captain, no, sir, just inhaled some smoke wrong. Fell right on her head, all right, yes, sir.”
Yates stared at Belson for about fifteen seconds. Belson puffed on his cigar. His face showed nothing. Quirk was looking carefully at the light fixture on the ceiling.
“Captain,” I said, “does it bother you that her bed is turned back, her clothes are on the chair, and her pajamas are on the bathroom floor? Does it seem funny to you that someone would take off her clothes, put on her pajamas, and get in the bathtub?”
“She brought them in to put on when she got through,” Yates said very quickly. His mouth moved erratically as he talked. It was like watching a movie with the soundtrack out of sync. Peculiar.
“And dropped them carefully in a pile on the floor where the tub would splash them and she’d drip on them when she got out because she loved putting on wet pajamas,” I said.
“Accidental death by drowning. Open and shut.” Yates said it hard and loud with a lot of lip motion. Fascinating to watch. “Quirk, let’s go. Belson, get this guy’s statement. And you, Jack”—he gave me the hard look again—“be where I can reach you. And when I call, you better come running.”
“How about I come over and sleep on your back step,” I said, but Yates was already on his way out.
Quirk looked at Belson. Belson said, “Right on her head she fell, Marty.”
Quirk said, “Yeah,” and went out after Yates.
Belson whistled “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” between his teeth as he got out his notebook and lo
oked at me. “Shoot,” he said.
“For crissake, Frank, this is really raw.”
“Captain don’t want an editorial,” Belson said, “just what happened.”
“Even if you aren’t bothered by the pajamas and all, isn’t it worth more than routine when the ex-roommate of a murder suspect dies violently?”
Belson said, “I spent six years rattling doorknobs under the MTA tracks in Charlestown. Now ride in a car and wear a tie. Captain just wants what happened.”
I told him.
Chapter 16
I sat in my car on the dark Fenway. The super had, grumbling, installed a padlock on the splintered door to the Connelly apartment while a prowl car cop watched. Belson had departed with my statement, and everything was neat and orderly again. The corpse gone. The mob, the cops, the university had all told me to mind my own business. Not a bad trio; I was waiting for a threat from organized religion. In a few weeks Terry Orchard would be gone, to the women’s reformatory in Framingham; twenty years probably, a crime of passion by a young woman. She’d be out when she was forty, ready to start anew. You meet such interesting people in jail.
I got a flashlight and some tape out of the glove compartment and a pinch bar out of my trunk and went back over to the apartment house. The super hadn’t fixed the screen on the back door, but he had shut and locked the inside door. I went to a cellar window. It was locked. On my hands and knees I looked through the frost patterns of grime. Inside was darkness. I flashed the light through. Inside was what looked like a coal bin, no longer used for coal. There were barrels and boxes and a couple of bicycles. I taped a tic-tac-toe pattern on one of the window-panes and tapped the glass out with the pinch bar. The tape kept the noise down. When the opening was big enough I reached my hand through and unlatched the window. It was not a very big window, but I managed to slide through it and drop to the cellar floor. I scraped both shins in the process.
The cellar was a maze of plastic trash bags, old wooden barrels, steamer trunks, cardboard boxes, clumsily tied piles of newspaper. A rat scuttled out of the beam from my flashlight as I worked my way through the junk. At the far end a door, slightly ajar, opened onto the furnace room, and to the left were the stairway and the super’s cage. I could hear canned laughter from the television. I went very quietly along the wall toward the stairs. I was in luck; when I peered around the corner of the super’s office he was in his swivel chair, asleep in the rich fumes of port wine and furnace heat, the TV blaring before him. I went up the same stairs to the third floor. No hesitation on the second floor—I learn quickly. The padlock on Cathy Connelly’s door was cheap and badly installed. I got the pinch bar under the hasp and pulled it loose with very little noise. Once inside I put a chair against the door to keep it closed and turned on the lights. The place hadn’t changed much in the past two hours. The bloated corpse was gone, but otherwise there was nothing different. It wasn’t a very big apartment. I could search it in a couple of hours probably. I didn’t know what I was looking for, of course, which would slow me down, because I couldn’t eliminate things on an “is-it-bigger-than-a-bread-box” basis.
Five Classic Spenser Mysteries Page 67
