Five Classic Spenser Mysteries

by Robert B. Parker

  I started in the bathroom, because it was on the left. If you are going to get something searched you have to do it orderly. Start at a point and go section by section through the place, not where things are most likely, or least likely, or anything else, just section by section until you’ve looked at everything. The bathroom didn’t take long. There was in the medicine cabinet some toothpaste, some aspirin, some nose drops prescribed by a doctor in New Rochelle, New York, a bottle of Cope, some lipstick, some liquid make-up, a safety razor, an eyebrow pencil. I emptied out the make-up bottle; there was nothing in it but make-up. The aspirin tasted like aspirin, the Cope appeared to be Cope, the nose drops smelled like nose drops. There was nothing in the lipstick tube but lipstick. There was nothing in the toilet tank, nothing taped underneath the sink, no sign that anything had been slipped under the buckling linoleum. I stood on the toilet seat and unscrewed the ceiling fixture with a jackknife blade—nothing inside but dusty wiring that looked like it wouldn’t pass the city’s electrical code. I screwed the fixture back in place.

  I went over the kitchen next. I emptied the flour, sugar, dry cereal, salt, and pepper into the sink one by one and sifted through them. Other than some little black insects I found nothing. The stove was an old gas stove. I took up the grillwork over the burners, looked carefully at the oven. The stove couldn’t be moved without disconnecting the gas pipe. I was willing to bet Cathy Connelly never had. I took all the pans out of the under sink cabinet and wormed under the sink on my back, using my flashlight to examine it all. A cockroach. There was little food in the old gas refrigerator. I emptied it. A couple of TV dinners. I melted them under the hot water in the sink and found nothing. I took the panel off of the bottom and looked carefully in. The motor was thick with dust kitties, and the drip pan was gummy with God knows what.

  The living room was of course the one that took time. It was about two in the morning when I found something. In the bottom bureau drawer was a cigar box containing letters, bills, canceled checks. I took it over to the daybed, sat down, and began to read through them. There were two letters from her mother full of aimless amenities that made my throat tighten. The dog got on the school bus and her father had gotten a call from the school and had to leave the store and go get it, younger brother was in a junior high school pageant, momma had lost three pounds, she hoped Cathy was watching what she ate, daddy sent his love.

  The third letter was different. It was on the stationery of a Peabody motel. It said:

  Darling,

  You are beautiful when you are asleep. As I write this I am looking at you and the covers are half off you so I can see your breasts. They are beautiful. I want to climb back into bed with you, but I must leave. You can cut my eight o’clock class, but I can’t. I won’t mark you absent though and I’ll be thinking about last night all the time. The room is paid for and you have to leave by noon, they said. I love you.

  There was no date, no signature. It was written in a distinctive cursive script.

  For crissake! A clue. A goddamned clue. I folded the note up and put it in my inside coat pocket. So far I was guilty of breaking and entering, possession of burglar’s tools, and destruction of property. I figured tampering with evidence would round things out nicely. I wanted to run right out and track down my clue, but I didn’t. I searched the rest of the room. There were no other clues.

  I turned off the lights, moved the chair, and went out. The door wouldn’t stay shut because of the broken padlock. I went out the front way this time, as if I belonged. When I reached my car I put the pinch bar back in the trunk, got in the car, and sat for a bit. Now that I had a clue, what exactly was I supposed to do with it? I looked at my watch. 3 A.M. Searching apartments is slow business. I turned on the interior light in my car, took out my clue, and read it again. It said the same thing it said the first time. I folded it up again and tapped my front teeth with it for about fifteen seconds. Then I put it back in my pocket, turned off the interior light, started up the car, and went home. When I decide something I don’t hesitate.

  I went to bed and dreamed I was a miner and the tunnel was collapsing and everyone else had left. I woke up with the dream unfinished and my clock said ten minutes of seven. I looked at the bureau. My clue was up there where I’d left it, partly unfolded, along with my loose change and my jackknife and my wallet. Maybe I’d catch somebody today. Maybe I’d detect something. Maybe I’d solve a crime. There are such days. I’d even had some. I climbed out of bed and plodded to the shower. I hadn’t worked out in four days and felt it. If I solved something this morning, maybe I could take the afternoon off and go over to the Y.

  I took a shower and shaved and dressed and went out. It was only 7:45 and cold. The snow was hard-crusted and the sun glistened off it very brightly. I put on my sunglasses. Even through their dark lenses it was a bright and lovely day. I stopped at a diner and had two cups of coffee and three plain doughnuts. I looked at my watch. 8:15. The trouble with being up and at ’em bright and early was once you were up most of the ’em that you wanted to be at weren’t out yet.

  I bought a paper and cruised over to the university. There was room to park in a tow zone near the gymnasium. I parked there and read the paper for half an hour. Nowhere was there mention of the fact that I’d found a clue. In fact, nowhere was anyone even predicting that I would. At nine o’clock I got out and went looking for Iris Milford.

  She wasn’t in the newspaper office. The kid cropping photos at the next desk told me she never came in until the afternoon, and showed me her class schedule pasted on the corner of her desk. With his help I figured out that from nine to ten she had a sociology course in room 218 of the chemistry building. He told me how to get there. I had a half-hour wait in the corridor, where I entertained myself examining the girl students who went by. During class time they were sparse and I had nothing else to do but marvel at the consistency with which the university architects had designed their buildings. Cinder block and vinyl tile seem to suffice for all seasons. At ten minutes to ten the bell rang and the kids poured into the corridor. Iris saw me as she came out of the classroom. She said, “Hell, Spenser. How’d you know where to find me?”

  I said, “I’m a trained detective. Want some coffee?”

  We went to the cafeteria in the student union. Above the cafeteria entrance someone had scrawled in purple magic marker, “Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here.”

  I said, “Isn’t that from Dante?”

  She said, “Very good. It’s written over the entrance to hell in book three of ‘The Inferno.’ ”

  I said, “Aw, I bet you looked that up.”

  The cafeteria was modernistic as far as cinder block and vinyl tile will permit. The service area along one side was low-ceilinged and close. The dining area was three stories high, with one wall of windows that reached the ceiling and opened on a parking lot. The cluttered tables were a spectrum of bright pastels, and the floor was red quarry tile in squares. It was somewhere between an aviary and Penn Station. It was noisy and hot. The smoke of thousands of cigarettes drifted through the shafts of winter sunlight that fused in through the windows. Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here.

  I said, “Many campus romances start here?”

  She laughed and shook her head. “Not hardly,” she said. “You want to scuff hand and hand through fallen leaves, you don’t go here.”

  We stood in line for our coffee. The service was cardboard, by Dixie. I paid, and we found a table. It was cluttered with paper plates, plastic forks, and cardboard beverage trays and napkins. I crumpled them together and deposited them in a trash can.

  “How long you had this neatness fetish?” Iris asked.

  I grinned, took a sip of coffee.

  “You find Cathy Connelly?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I said, “but she was dead.”

  Iris’s mouth pulled back in a grimace and she said, “Shit.”

  “She’d been drowned in her bathtub, by someone who tried to make i
t look accidental.”

  Iris sipped her coffee and said nothing.

  I took the letter from my inside pocket and gave it to her. “I found this in her room,” I said.

  Iris read it slowly.

  “Well, she didn’t die a virgin,” Iris said.

  “There’s that,” I said.

  “She was sleeping with some professor,” Iris said.

  “Yep.”

  “If you can find out what eight o’clock classes she had, you’ll know who.”

  “Yep.”

  “But you can’t get that information because you’ve been banished from the campus.”

  “Yep.”

  “Which leaves old Iris to do it, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Because I don’t know. It’s a clue. There’s a professor in here someplace. The missing manuscript would suggest a professor. Terry says she heard Powell talking to a professor before he was killed, now Cathy Connelly appears to have been sleeping with a professor, and she’s dead. I want to know who he is. He could be the same professor. Can you get her class schedule?”

  “This year?”

  “All years, there’s no date on the note.”

  “Okay, I got a friend in the registrar’s office. She’ll check it for me.”

  “How soon?”

  “As soon as she can. Probably know tomorrow.”

  “I’m betting on Hayden,” I said.

  “As a secret lover?”

  “Yep. The manuscript is medieval. He’s a medieval specialist. He teaches Chaucer, which is an early class. Terry Orchard was up early for her Chaucer course the day that Powell threatened some professor on the phone. The conversation implied that the professor on the phone had an early class. Hayden pretended not to know Terry Orchard when in fact he did know her. He’s a raging radical according to a very reliable witness. There’s enough coincidence for me to wager on. Why don’t you get in touch with your friend and find out if I’m right?”

  She said, “Soon as I finish my coffee. I’ll call you when I know.”

  I left her and headed back for my car.

  Chapter 17

  I was right. Iris called me at eleven thirty the next morning to report that Cathy Connelly had taken Chaucer this year with Lowell Hayden at eight o’clock Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. The only other eight o’clock class she’d had in her three years at the university had been a course in Western civilization taught by a woman.

  “Unless she was gay,” Iris said, “it looks like Dr. Hayden.”

  “You took the same course, right?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Got any term papers or exams, or something with a sample of his writing?”

  “I think so. Come on over to the newspaper office. I’ll dig some up.”

  “Don’t you ever go to class?”

  “Not while I’m tracking down a criminal, I don’t.”

  “I’ll be over,” I said.

  When I got there Iris had a typewritten paper bound in red plastic lying on her desk. It was twenty-two pages long and titled “The Radix Trait: A Study of Chaucer’s Technique of Characterization in The Canterbury Tales.” Underneath it said “Iris Milford,” and in the upper right-hand corner it said “En 308, Dr. Hayden, 10/28.” Above the title in red pencil with a circle around it was the grade A minus.

  “Inside back page,” she said. “That’s where he comments.”

  I opened the manuscript. In the same red pencil Hayden had written, “Good study, perhaps a bit too dependent on secondary sources, but well stated and judicious. I wish you had not eschewed the political and class implications of the Tales, however.”

  I took the note out of my coat pocket and put it down beside the paper. It was the same fancy hand.

  “Can I have this paper?” I asked Iris.

  “Sure—why, want to read it in bed?”

  “No, I’m housebreaking a puppy.”

  She laughed. “Take it away,” she said.

  Near my office there was a Xerox copy center. I went in and made a copy of the note and the comment page in Iris’s paper. I took the original up to my office and locked it in the top drawer of my desk. I put the copies in my pocket and drove over to see Lowell Hayden.

  He wasn’t in his office, and the schedule card posted on his door indicated that he had no more classes until Monday. Across the street at a drugstore I looked for his name in the directory. He wasn’t listed in the Boston books. I looked up the English Department and called them.

  “Hi,” I said, “this is Dr. Porter. I’m lecturing over here at Tufts this evening and I’m trying to locate Lowell Hayden. We were grad students together. Do you have his home address?”

  They did, and they gave it to me. He lived in Marblehead. I looked at my watch. 11:10. I could get there for lunch.

  Marblehead is north, through the Callahan Tunnel and along Route 1A. An ocean town, yachting center, summer home, and old downtown district that reeked of tar and salt and quaint. Hayden had an apartment in a converted warehouse that fronted on the harbor. First floor, front.

  A big hatchet-faced woman in her midthirties answered my ring. She was taller than I was and her blond hair was pulled back in a tight bun. She wore no make-up, and the only thing that ornamented her face were huge Gloria Steinem glasses with gold rims and pink lenses. Her lips were thin, her face very pale. She wore a man’s green pullover sweater, Levi’s, and penny loafers without socks. Big as she was, there was no extra weight. She was as lean and hard as a canoe paddle, and nearly as sexy.

  “Mrs. Hayden?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Is Dr. Hayden in?”

  “He’s in his study. What do you want?”

  “I’d like to speak with him, please.”

  “He always spends two hours a day in his study. I don’t permit him to be bothered during that time. Tell me what you want.”

  “You’re beautiful when you’re angry,” I said.

  “What do you want?”

  I offered her my card. “If you’ll give that to Dr. Hayden, perhaps he’ll break his rules just once.”

  “I will do nothing of the kind,” she said without taking the card.

  “Okay, but if you’ll give him this card when he is through his meditations I’ll be waiting out in my car, looking at the ocean, thinking long thoughts.” I wrote on the back of the card, “Cathy Connelly?” and put the card down on the edge of the umbrella stand by the door. She didn’t slam it, but she closed it firmly. I had the feeling she did everything firmly.

  I went back to my car and watched the sun glint on the water. There weren’t many boats in the harbor in winter, mostly sea gulls bobbing on the cold water and swooping in the bright sky. A lobster boat came slowly into the harbor mouth past the lighthouse on the point of Marblehead Neck. Behind me, the seafood restaurant on the wharf was filling with lunchtime customers, and ahead of me two tourists were taking pictures of the wharf building. I watched the Hayden apartment. Hatchet face never so much as peeked out a window at me. Her husband as far as I could tell continued to meditate. The waves hit the wharf regularly; the interval between waves was about three seconds. After two hours and twenty minutes Lowell Hayden appeared at the front door and looked hard at me. I waved. He shut the door and I sat some more. Another half hour and Hayden appeared again, this time wearing a tan poplin jacket with a fur-lined hood. Other than that he seemed to be dressed just as he had been the last time I saw him. His wife loomed behind him, much taller. She stood in the open door while he came to the car. Making sure I wouldn’t mug him, I guess. He opened the door and got in. I smiled pleasingly.

  He said, “Spenser, you’d better leave me alone.” His little pale face was clenched and there was a flush on each cheekbone. He looked a bit like Raggedy Andy.

  “Why is that?” I said.

  “Because you’ll get hurt.”

  “No,” I said. “You’re not saying it right. K
eep the lips almost motionless, and squinch your eyes up.”

  “I’m warning you now, Spenser. You stay away from me. I have friends who know how to deal with people like you.”

  “You gonna call in some hard cases from the Modern Language Association?”

  “I mean people who will kill you if I say so.”

  “Oh, Mrs. Hayden, you mean.”

  “You leave her out of this. You’ve upset her enough.” He looked nervously at the motionless and implacable figure in the doorway.

  “She asking you funny questions about Cathy Connelly?”

  “I don’t know anything about Cathy Connelly.”

  “Yeah, you do,” I said. “You know about spending the night with her in a motel in romantic Peabody. You know that she’s dead, and you know how she died.”

  “I do not.” His resonant voice was up about three octaves; for the first time it matched his appearance. He glanced back at the woman in the doorway. “I’ll have you killed, you bastard. I don’t know anything about this. You leave me alone or you’ll be so sorry—you can’t imagine.”