Spare Change

by Robert B. Parker

  “He trained in that?”

  “Degree in finance from Taft. Some sort of financial-planner certificate.”

  “Married? Single?”

  “Single,” Bellino said.

  “Ever married?” Belson said.

  “I don’t have it,” Bellino said.

  “Take a break,” Belson said to Bellino. “We’ll take him from here.”

  “I’ll grab some lunch,” Bellino said. “I been talking all day.”

  “Enjoy,” Belson said.

  Bellino went.

  “He’s having too good a time,” my father said.

  “I think I should talk with him,” I said.

  “Why you?” Belson said.

  “He’s a showoff,” I said. “He’ll show off more for me.”

  “Because you’re a woman?” Belson said.

  “Yes. Men show off for women.”

  Belson looked at my father.

  “He strike any note with you, Phil?”

  “Maybe,” my father said. “He sounds a little like the letters.”

  “That ain’t much, Phil.”

  “Didn’t say it was.”

  “The killings are a kind of showing off,” I said. “You know? Look at me. See me. Look at this. Let me see if I can get him to show off a little more.”

  In the interview room, Johnson was still leaning back, hands behind his head, casual. He seemed to be whistling softly to himself.

  “Give her a shot at him, Frank,” my father said. “She’s awful smart.”

  “I’ve heard that,” Belson said.

  He walked to the door of the interview room, made a courtly sweep of his hand, and opened the door.

  16

  The room was fluorescent-lit and painted gray-green. There was a white plastic-topped table and four matching straight chairs. Everything was pretty new and still sort of clean. There were no windows except the one-way observation window. When I came in, Bob Johnson swung his feet off the desk and stood. I could feel his stare. I was glad I hadn’t worn a skirt. I glanced at my reflection in the one-way viewing glass. Yellow blazer, celadon tee. I looked good.

  “Hi,” he said, “Bob Johnson.”

  He put out his hand. I didn’t take it.

  “Sunny Randall,” I said.

  “The other cop wouldn’t shake hands, either,” Johnson said. “What’s up with that, Sunny?”

  “Cops get sort of used to not letting people get hold of them,” I said. “Let’s sit.”

  We did. Johnson looked at me carefully.

  “Wow,” he said. “Lady Blue.”

  I smiled. He smiled back.

  “Or Lady Yellow, I suppose,” he said. “Is that jacket real leather?”

  “Let’s talk about you,” I said.

  “You want to pat me down?” he said.

  “That won’t be necessary,” I said.

  “Damn,” he said, and grinned at me.

  “Could we run through it again,” I said. “What brought you to the Public Garden at the time of the shooting?”

  “I live in the Back Bay,” he said, “Vendome Building, and three, four times a week I run down Commonwealth and around the Public Garden and back up. Keep that boyish figure.”

  “And you were jogging around the Public Garden at the time of the murder?” I said.

  “Just after,” he said. “I was cruising down Charles Street when I saw a bunch of cops rushing into the garden and so I banged a left and went in after them.”

  “Because?”

  He grinned again.

  “Curiosity killed the cat,” he said. “I minded my business and kept jogging, I wouldn’t be in here getting questioned.”

  I smiled back at him.

  “I deserve it,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “On the other hand, if I had just kept going, I’d never have met you.”

  “Did you see anything that might be useful to us?”

  Johnson tilted his head back and stretched his neck and sat with his eyes closed. I waited. After a time he dropped his head back to its normal position and opened his eyes, smiled, and shook his head.

  “Sorry, Sunny.” He grinned. “Or Sunny, sorry. It works either way, doesn’t it?”

  “You saw nothing,” I said.

  Bob rubbed his chest absently, as if he were feeling his pectoral muscles and was happy with them.

  “Not a thing,” he said.

  “You hung around to watch,” I said.

  I had nowhere to go particularly, but I wanted to keep him talking.

  “Sure did,” Johnson said. “Police stuff is fascinating.”

  “Why?” I said.

  “Oh, you know. Movies, TV shows. Men”—he grinned—“and women, with guns.”

  “You like guns?” I said.

  “For me? Personally? No. But I’m like everybody else. You know, cops and robbers? From the sidelines—fascinating.”

  I nodded.

  “Sunny Randall,” he said. “Great name.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You spell Sunny with an o or a u?”

  “Have you been following the case, then?” I said.

  He grinned again. He was certainly a grinner.

  “‘Yesterday my life was filled with pain’…remember the song?”

  “Yes.”

  “Randall,” he said. “Are you related to Phil Randall, the cop that worked on the first Spare Change killings? You know, twenty years ago?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Just curious, you know. I’m a curious guy.” He laughed. “If I was a cat, I’d probably be dead.”

  “How would you know his name from twenty years ago?” I said.

  “I read the papers. I told you I love law-and-order stuff. Said in the paper that he was coming back out of retirement to work on the case again.”

  “Are you especially interested in the Spare Change killings?”

  “Are you?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Well, it’s certainly an interesting one,” Johnson said, “isn’t it, Sunny.”

  “What’s the most interesting part for you?” I said.

  “Talking with you,” he said. “You really are something to look at.”

  I thought of my father on the other side of the observation glass. I had a momentary fear that he’d come into the room and take Johnson by the neck. But he didn’t. I decided to try demure.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “You’re welcome,” he said. “You deserve it.”

  “Aside from me,” I said, “why do you find the Spare Change case fascinating.”

  “Well.” He leaned back and stretched his legs out in front of him and folded his arms. “He must be a fascinating guy. I mean, he goes about his business. He does what he does, on his own terms, without a word. There’s no clues. There’s no pattern. There’s no motive. Nobody knows who he is. But everybody’s thinking about him.”

  “Or her,” I said.

  He shook his head.

  “No,” he said.

  “No?”

  “No woman could do what this guy has done,” Johnson said. “For more than twenty years? Never a slipup. Just walk up to somebody and pop!”

  He pantomimed with his forefinger and thumb.

  “No woman’s going to do that,” he said.

  “You sound like you admire him,” I said.

  “Don’t get me wrong. I condemn what he does. It’s evil. But you gotta give the devil his due. He’s good at it. He must be a pretty interesting guy.”

  “I wonder where he was for the last twenty years,” I said.

 
“Between shootings?”

  “Yes.”

  Johnson smiled. “See what I mean. The man’s inexplicable.”

  “So far,” I said.

  “You think you’ll catch him?”

  “Yes.”

  Johnson grinned at me. “Attagirl,” he said.

  17

  It’s him,” I said.

  We were in Quirk’s office.

  Quirk looked at Belson.

  “He was pretty odd,” Belson said.

  “Phil?” Quirk said.

  “He was playing, Marty. You know how they get sometimes,” my father said. “He was very coy.”

  “It was more than coy,” I said. “It was masturbatory. He was exposing himself to me.”

  “You get people like that,” my father said, “who sort of flirt with the crime. Doesn’t mean they did it.”

  “He did it,” I said.

  “Maybe he wasn’t flirting with the crime,” Belson said. “Maybe he was flirting with you.”

  “He was flirting with me,” I said. “But he was flirting with me about something covert and nasty. Like a dirty little boy showing me his pee pee.”

  “We need more than intuition,” Quirk said.

  “Thanks for not saying woman’s intuition,” I said.

  “If I’d meant it, I’d have said it,” Quirk answered. “Your intuition may be good. But we don’t have enough evidence to disqualify him as police commissioner, let alone arrest him or search his place.”

  “We can pay special attention to him,” Belson said.

  “And we will,” Quirk said. “We’ll put a tail on him, twenty-four hours. And we’ll see what kind of history we can get.”

  “Maybe when we get some,” Belson said, “we’ll talk to him again.”

  “If he’s willing,” my father said. “Unless we get some evidence, any cooperation from him is voluntary.”

  “He’ll talk to me,” I said.

  “Voluntarily,” my father said.

  “Eagerly,” I said.

  “You’re really convinced,” Quirk said to me.

  “Yes,” I said. “Maybe in this case it is woman’s intuition. You get to be a grown woman and you’ve been hit on by a lot of men.”

  Quirk grinned.

  “You wanna leave the room, Phil?” he said.

  My father shook his head.

  “It’s better than having daughters that don’t get hit on,” he said.

  “Thank you, Daddy…. You get hit on enough, you develop a sense for when something icky is going on. This guy is icky. There’s something sexual involved in his interest in the crimes. He gets a sexual charge out of talking about it. I go back to what I said before. He was like exposing himself to me.”

  “I’ve listened to the tape,” Quirk said. “I think you did a nice job in there, Sunny, and I’m inclined to think you may be right.”

  “I am right,” I said.

  Quirk nodded.

  “But if he’s the guy,” Quirk said, “and he’s not gay, and there’s a sexual thing going on, why isn’t he just killing women?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But there is a sexual thing going on.”

  “Well,” Quirk said, “we’ll have to find out what it is.”

  18

  I was at my Tuesday session with Dr. Silverman.

  “I’ve got so much to talk about,” I said.

  Dr. Silverman smiled and nodded. I always felt sort of pale and insubstantial when I was with her. She was such a presence. Her black hair was so thick. Her eyes were so big.

  Her intelligence was so palpable.

  “Two categories,” I said. “Professional and personal.”

  Dr. Silverman nodded.

  “I’m not sure where to start,” I said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said.

  “Because we’ll end up at the same place eventually,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m helping my father,” I said. “On the Spare Change Killer.”

  Dr. Silverman nodded.

  “Are you familiar with that case?”

  “I am,” Dr. Silverman said.

  It was always amazing how pulled together she was.

  “You know my father,” I said.

  Dr. Silverman made a little head movement that might have been a yes. Or might not have. I was free to go either way.

  “He won’t tell me how you know each other,” I said. “He says that’s up to you.”

  Again, the noncommittal nod. I took a breath.

  “How do you know each other?” I said.

  “We have a mutual acquaintance,” she said.

  I waited. She was quiet.

  “That’s all?” I said.

  “These sessions are not about me, Sunny,” she said.

  It was the first time she had called me Sunny. I was thrilled.

  “My father worked on the case twenty years ago, and in retirement is consulting on this one. I’m working with him.”

  “On the assumption that it’s the same case,” Dr. Silverman said.

  “Yes. May I tell you about it?”

  “Of course.”

  I told her about it, and about my long interview with Bob Johnson. She listened as she always did, with her full attention, leaning back a little in her chair. It didn’t take very long. I was always amazed that things of such complexity and import seemed so easily compressed and de-emotionalized in her office.

  “And you feel he is the Spare Change Killer?”

  “I know he is.”

  “But you can’t prove it.”

  “Yet,” I said.

  “We often know things in nondemonstrable ways,” she said.

  “But the courts require more,” I said.

  She smiled.

  “Captain Quirk raised a question,” I said. “Do you happen to know him, too?”

  “I do,” Dr. Silverman said.

  “Mutual acquaintance?”

  She nodded, I think.

  “What was Captain Quirk’s question?” she said.

  “If there is something sexual in all this, why is the killing apparently gender-indiscriminate, and why is there no sexual molestation?”

  “People are very good,” she said, “at taking anything and shaping it into the symbol that their condition requires.”

  “You think that’s going on here?”

  “I have no way to know,” she said.

  “Talk to me a little about serial killers,” I said.

  Dr. Silverman was silent for a moment. She was older than I, but it would be difficult to say just how one would know that. She was positively beautiful. Her body was graceful and strong. Even in her self-abnegating shrink mode, she reeked of womanhood. The force of her self filled the room.

  “There is a great deal of talk about serial killers,” she said after a time. “And very little said. As I’m sure you know, they are predominantly white males. We can, and I’m sure you have profilers who have done this, offer a suggested outline of what they might be like. But the real issue, why they do what they do, is rarely clear.”

  “It seems as if it is often directly, or indirectly, sexual,” I said.

  “That might well be true of all human activity,” Dr. Silverman said. “When we have a serial killer and can examine his life, we can find things that could explain him. But we could examine the lives of twenty similar people and find the same things, and they did not become serial killers.”

  “You’re saying we don’t know why serial killers are serial killers.”

  “To my knowledge,” she said, “and I am not a specialist in serial killers, none has been discovered to have
a unique emotional history.”

  “So Ted Bundy may have had a troubled youth,” I said, “but so did a thousand other people that didn’t turn out to be serial killers.”

  “Yes. It’s why psychological predictions are very imprecise. Individuals react differently to the same stimulus. Psychological retrospection works much better.”

  “So what makes the difference?” I said. “Why did Ted Bundy become Ted Bundy?”

  “Screw loose?” Dr. Silverman said.

  “Don’t get technical on me, Doctor,” I said.

  She smiled.

  “Chemical imbalance?” she said. “Synaptic dysfunction? I don’t know.”

  “You too,” I said.

  “And if you catch this Spare Change person, you still, quite likely, will not find out.”

  I nodded.

  “How much can I trust my intuition?” I said.

  She almost laughed. Good heavens. She had called me Sunny and now she’d nearly laughed.

  “This is a morning for imponderables,” she said. “Normally, intuition is the result of external stimuli interpreted by your own emotional condition. Neither, of course, is entirely reliable.”

  “Particularly the interior emotional condition,” I said.

  “True.”

  “If intuition is based entirely on emotion, it is probably useless.”

  She didn’t comment.

  “So is intuition just a fancy word for guess?” I said.

  “I think we can pay attention to intuition,” Dr. Silverman said. “As long as we are aware of its limits. A great deal in human behavior, after all, takes place below the level of rationality.”

  “Especially mine,” I said.

  She smiled and raised her eyebrows and cocked her head as if to invite more.

  “I haven’t even talked about Richie yet,” I said.

  She nodded.

  “Are you familiar with Yogi Berra?” I said.

  She smiled.

  “It’s never over till it’s over?” she said.

  “That’s the one,” I said.

  Dr. Silverman went into the small ritual with which she ended every session. She glanced at the clock behind me, straightened slightly in her chair, and placed her fingertips together.