Perish Twice

by Robert B. Parker

  “You know a guy named Lawrence B. Reeves?” I said.

  “What you think. The johns give me a calling card?”

  “He came to you through Jermaine.”

  “Lotta johns do that,” Jewell said.

  “Middle-aged guy, maybe fifty. Pudgy, no style.

  He’s bald in front and what’s left he wears long and pulled back in a ponytail. Wears little round gold-rimmed glasses,” I said. “Would normally be in action on Thursday nights.”

  “Larry,” she said.

  “Larry?”

  “That’s him. Jermaine bring him ’round every Thursday. One of us always takes him to the Bradley Hotel for an hour, haul his ashes.”

  “Anything you can tell me about him?”

  “Got a really big dick,” Jewell said.

  “Really?” I said.

  “Yeah. He don’t look like he would,” Jewell said. “But he do. All the girls want to do him so they get a look.”

  “Anything else about him?”

  “Naw. They all weird.”

  “How is he weird?” I said.

  “He like to pretend stuff, lot of them pretend stuff.”

  “What’s he pretend?”

  “He pretend I making him do this.”

  “What’s he like afterwards?” I said.

  “Just get up and leave. Don’t say nothing,” Jewell said. “This stuff turning you on?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t know why.”

  “Well he ain’t much,” Jewell said, “but he got a thing on him.”

  “Be still my heart.”

  CHAPTER

  37

  I WAS AT my kitchen counter with a yellow legal pad and a Bic pen trying to make a list. I loved lists. They made me feel organized. Unfortunately I barely knew enough about the death of Gretchen Crane to list anything. There were three black women employed by Great Strides. None of them was tall. None had a short haircut. And none wore eyeglasses with green frames. There had been no one, black or otherwise, hired or fired in the previous year. So “Honey” didn’t come from the job. I looked up Natalie Goddard, who had taken Mary Lou’s last name, in the phone book and found no listing. I called information and found it was nonpub.

  Lawrence B. Reeves apparently used the services of Jermaine Lister, who had at least talked with Gretchen and her friend Honey. He had also stalked Mary Lou, and claimed posthumous credit for murdering Gretchen. Since everybody seemed connected to everybody else, a pattern should have been forming. It wasn’t. The result of careful analysis produced the conclusion so what? While I was trying to figure out if so what? meant anything but so what? and finding that it appeared only to mean so what? my sister rang the bell and I buzzed her up. As soon as she came in the door, I knew that something had hit a fan some where. She was red-eyed and her face was haggard and she looked about twenty years older than I knew her to be. Rosie made a feeble attempt to wag and then forgot about it.

  “So,” I said, “how’s your day?”

  “I…I’ve broken up with Mort.”

  Although the reasons were nearly infinite, I felt it best not to say so.

  “How come?” I said.

  “He’s a…a pig.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “Yes. Don’t pretend you didn’t think so.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “You could have warned me.”

  “No, I don’t think at that point I could have. What particularly piggish thing did he do?”

  She was staring at the floor between us. She shook her head.

  “Okay,” I said. “Would you care for coffee?”

  Elizabeth scooched up onto a stool at my counter.

  She shook her head again. We were quiet. Down the loft where my easel stood the morning light was flooding it. The best time to paint. Or even to make a list. Not a very good time to be sitting silently with your unpleasant sister, while she stared at the floor and breathed deeply. To be doing something I made a notation on my list: Mary Lou’s girlfriend? She was the only person I could think of connected to my murder case that I hadn’t talked to.

  “He wanted me and another woman,” Elizabeth said so softly that I bent toward her to listen, “to have sex with him.”

  “Yuck,” I said.

  “You’ve never done that?” Elizabeth murmured.

  “God no,” I said.

  “He said there was nothing wrong with it.”

  “There isn’t, I guess, if it takes place among consenting, or maybe more accurately, willing, adults. I wouldn’t be willing.”

  “Mort says I’m frigid.”

  “Mort’s a reptile,” I said. “It doesn’t matter what he said.”

  “I did everything he wanted. I did sex things I’d never done before.”

  “Did you enjoy it?”

  Elizabeth stopped looking at the floor and looked at me as if I had asked her to interpret the Bhagavad Gita. She didn’t say anything as she thought about the question.

  Finally she said, “I don’t know. I was getting even with Hal.”

  I nodded and didn’t say anything.

  “He’s furious at me for breaking up with him.”

  “Un huh.”

  “He has pictures of me.”

  “Of course he does,” I said.

  “He says if I don’t come back to him, he’ll put them on the Internet.”

  “A lot of adolescent boys will be pleased,” I said.

  “That’s an awful thing to say.”

  “I meant it as a compliment,” I said. Which was only partly true and I think we both knew it.

  “What am I going to do?” Elizabeth said.

  I knew there was that rivalrous ungenerous part of me that was enjoying the hell out of this. There’s stuff you don’t learn at Mount Holyoke. Stuff you have to ask your younger sister who didn’t go to Mount Holyoke, and didn’t marry an Ivy Leaguer. These were maybe the first two of the seven vices for Elizabeth. Though I was pleased to know that group sex was in the ranking.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Elizabeth said. “What if Daddy sees the pictures?”

  “He won’t,” I said. “He has no idea how the Internet works.”

  “But someone will tell him.”

  “It won’t happen,” I said. “I’ll talk to Mort.”

  “By yourself?”

  “No,” I said, and smiled happily at the thought. “I’ll bring Spike.”

  CHAPTER

  38

  SPIKE AND I found Mort Kraken’s office in Waltham, in a warehouse filled with mismatched andirons, and frayed Chinese screens, and cracked toilets, and ceramic statuettes of shepherd girls, and paintings on velvet, and wrought-iron things, and a lot of knicks and a really large number of knacks. There were a couple of feral-looking helpers scuttling around the premises but no one paid us any attention.

  “I wonder if he’s in there battening on huge sea worms,” Spike said.

  “Doing what?” I said.

  “It’s a poem,” Spike said.

  “And a lovely one no doubt,” I said and knocked on the office door, which had a pebbled-glass window with the word MANAGER in black paint across the middle of it.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ll take that to mean ‘come in,’” I said to Spike and opened the door.

  Mort was sitting at his desk without his rug, wearing a white shirt that looked as if it had been washed but not ironed. Over the shirt he had on a blue cable stitched cardigan sweater. He didn’t look any better than he did the last time I saw him, but he was more suitable to his surroundings.

  “Yeah?”

  “We’ve met,” I said. My name is Sunny Randall. I’m Elizabeth Randall’s sister.”<
br />
  “Big deal,” Mort said.

  I looked at Spike and I could see the beginnings of a smile starting at the corners of his mouth. I closed the door behind us.

  “You come to talk to me about dumping her, it’s no use. She had her run, ya know. Now I’m moving on.”

  “Are you taking the nude pictures of her with you?”

  Mort stared at me for a moment.

  “I got no pictures,” he said after a time.

  “And therefore you won’t be able to put them on the Internet,” I said.

  Then Mort made a bad mistake.

  “Even if I did,” he said, “they’re mine. She wanted me to take them. You got no call telling me what to do with them.”

  Spike is not one of those chiseled gym rats. He is built like a bear. And like a bear he is both strong and very quick. He went around the desk, took hold of the back of Mort’s shirt, yanked him out of the chair, and slammed him up against the wall, almost before Mort had stopped talking. Mort’s feet were off the floor. He hit Spike, but Spike paid no attention.

  “Why don’t you step out, Sunny,” Spike said, “and keep an eye out for the two desperadoes we saw on the way in.”

  “Help,” Mort shouted.

  Spike leaned close to Mort and whispered something in his ear.

  Mort stopped struggling as if he’d been tranquilized. I stepped out into the warehouse and closed the office door behind me. The two scraggly employees were nowhere in sight. In about two minutes Spike opened the door and came out of Mort’s office carrying a manila envelope. I looked past him. Mort was sitting quietly at his desk looking at nothing. Spike smiled and handed me the envelope.

  “Nudies of Sis,” he said.

  CHAPTER

  39

  I BROUGHT ROSIE back from her morning walk and sat at the kitchen counter to have some coffee. Rosie did a variety of cute sits and looks in hopes of conning me into a second breakfast, but my trained detective’s eye saw right through her ploy. I gave her a dog biscuit.

  My list was still on the counter and was slightly longer than it had been. I needed to find out from Lee Farrell when Gretchen had died. I called him.

  “Do we have a time of death on Gretchen Crane?” I said.

  “The victim in the homicide we solved?”

  “Yes,” I said, “that Gretchen Crane. When did she die?”

  “Oddly enough I still remember,” Farrell said. “She was shot about eight hours before she was discovered.”

  “That would make it about midnight,” I said.

  “It’s a pleasure to witness a trained investigative mind,” Farrell said.

  “In your job you probably don’t get much chance to do that,” I said. “Do you have an address for Natalie Goddard?”

  “Who the hell is Natalie Goddard?”

  “Mary Lou Goddard’s significant other.”

  “I didn’t know she had a significant other.”

  “She lives on Revere Street, her number is nonpub.”

  “Hang on,” Farrell said and I sat and listened to the faint hubbub of the squad room for a while, until Farrell came back on the phone and gave me the street number.

  “Wow,” I said. “It’s a pleasure to witness a trained investigative mind.”

  Farrell hung up. I put the address on my list, and carefully noted the time of death too. It was not, for the moment anyway, illuminating. I didn’t even know where I was on the midnight Gretchen died. Probably in bed, probably with Rosie. Still it is always better to have information than not to. I am more comfortable making a list when there’s stuff written down. I had nothing else to do and nowhere else to go, so I gave Rosie another dog biscuit and a big kiss, and went to see Natalie. Revere Street is on Beacon Hill. One has more chance of bumping into Leonardo DiCaprio at the 7-Eleven than one has of finding a place to park in the Revere Street neighborhood. So I left my car at home and walked down and caught the subway and stared at my reflection in the glass and changed trains and got out at the Charles Street Station.

  There’s something Dickensian about Charles Street. It is old and red brick, and scattered with shops.

  During the winter months you expect to see someone in a long muffler carrying home a fat goose. But on this raw spring day, no one was carrying anything to roast, though I saw at least one person hurrying along who looked sort of like a fat goose.

  Natalie’s address was a four-story town house halfway up Revere Street on the right-hand side. The front door had a peephole. There was no nameplate under the bell. I rang. In a moment I heard some movement behind the door. Then silence. Then the door opened six inches on a security chain and a woman looked out at me. I could only see a portion of her face, but it was the face of a black woman, and she was wearing eyeglasses with green frames.

  Hot diggity!

  I smiled warmly.

  “My name is Sunny Randall,” I said. “I got your name from Mary Lou Goddard. I’m looking into the death of Gretchen Crane, who, as you may know, was employed by Mary Lou at Great Strides.”

  She stared at me for a moment through her green-framed glasses. Then the door closed. The chain rattled and the door opened.

  “Come in please.”

  I went into a small hallway with stairs rising along the left wall. To the right was an archway that opened into a living room. The town house appeared to be about one room wide, and since it was four stories high, if you lived here you’d have some pretty good quadriceps.

  We went into the living room and sat. The front wall was mostly a bay window secured with safety mesh that unlocked from the inside. The walls were painted with English hunting scenes. There was an oriental rug on the floor whose tones were extended by the ceiling, which was painted maroon. The furniture was weighty, quiet, and expensive. I sat on the couch with my back to the front window and a coffee table in front of me. There were two copies of the New Yorker and a copy of Entertainment Weekly. Eclectic. Natalie sat across from me on a hassock, with her knees crossed and her hands folded over them. She was black. Her hair was cut very close to her head. She was tall, wearing faded blue jeans that fit her perfectly and an oversized white T-shirt that she hadn’t tucked in and which hung to exactly the right length. Her running shoes were blue with yellow highlights and a lacing system that must have taken twenty minutes.

  “Do you know who I am?” I said.

  “You are the woman that was protecting Mary Lou from that dreadful stalker who killed poor Gretchen.”

  “Lawrence B. Reeves,” I said.

  “Yes. But I understood that case was solved.”

  She spoke like my sister Elizabeth, with a broad Seven Sisters accent.

  “I’m just trying to clean up some loose ends,” I said.

  “I understood that Mary Lou had discharged you.”

  “Mary Lou refers to you as her significant other,” I said. “Is that true?”

  “We are lovers. I have even taken her name. Has Mary Lou discharged you?”

  “What was your, ah, maiden name?”

  “Mary Lou has discharged you,” Natalie said. “I see no reason to speak with you further.”

  “Did you know Gretchen?” I said.

  Natalie rose and walked to the hall and held the front door open.

  “Good-bye, Ms. Randall.”

  I thought about asking her if she knew anyone named Jewell, or Jermaine. That might have gotten her attention, but I decided to keep what I knew to myself until I knew more. I got up and walked to the front door.

  I said, “Thank you, Ms. Goddard.” And left.

  I decided to walk on up Charles Street and across the Common to the Park Street Station to catch the subway. It would allow me to think about what I’d learned.

  Investigating is a funny business. After learn
ing nearly nothing since the day I met Mary Lou, in one ten-minute visit I had learned that Natalie was almost certainly the woman with Gretchen when she’d talked with Jewell. That she wasn’t eager to volunteer information. And that the magazines on her coffee table had little subscription labels that read Natalie Marcus.

  CHAPTER

  40

  IT WAS BRIGHT and not quite as warm as the brightness would lead you to believe. I told Julie about Mort and Elizabeth as we walked together along the Charles in Cambridge, where Julie was now in residence. The Weld boathouse was behind us. And to our left, across Memorial Drive, the red brick dorms, which Harvard of course called houses, fronted the river.

  “Do you think this Mort person will keep his word?” Julie said.

  “Yes,” I said. “I think Spike terrified him.”

  Julie smiled a little.

  “Spike’s unusual,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  We crossed the Weeks footbridge and turned upstream with the river on our right now, with more red brick, this time the Harvard Business School on our left. There are several places in Cambridge where, in all directions except up, you could see only Harvard.

  “Doesn’t it bother you at all that sometimes you have to ask a man for help?” Julie said.

  “No.”

  “But it makes you dependent.”

  “I think probably independence is a state of mind as much as a physical condition,” I said. “I could shoot Mort, but I can’t physically overpower him. Spike can.

  It’s kinder to Mort to, ah, manhandle him, than shoot him.”

  “You could be in a business where you didn’t need a man,” Julie said.

  “No,” I said. “I couldn’t. I need them to pick up things that are too heavy for me. I also need them for sex, for love, for both. Straight men need women in the same way. If I have children I’ll need someone to sire them. I’d also like someone to father them.”

  “Do you want children?”