Spare Change

by Robert B. Parker

  I sat for a while. If I went home now, there’d be time to take a power-yoga class at my health club. Then home, a glass of wine, cook a small supper, some chicken, whole-wheat pasta, broccoli. I considered broccoli to be, for me, what spinach was for Popeye…. Or maybe she hadn’t gotten to Taft until Bob was a junior, or a sophomore, or a senior. Maybe she would show up several yearbooks hence, if I stayed the course. Or maybe she had been here when he arrived and dropped out. I took a slow breath and got up and went for more yearbooks.

  An undergraduate library assistant came by my table.

  “Are you through with these, ma’am?” she said.

  Ma’am?

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “Wow,” the kid said. “That’s a lot of yearbooks. Did you used to go here?”

  So much for Sunny Coed. I shook my head and the girl moved on. I got yearbooks on either side of Bob Johnson and looked not only at the graduation photos but at every picture I could make out. Clubs, snapshots, girls’ field hockey. It was quarter to four in the afternoon when I found her. Maybe.

  33

  Her name is Victoria Russo,” I said to my father. “She was two years behind Johnson at Taft.”

  We were having lunch at the No Name on the Fish Pier.

  “Hometown is listed in the yearbook as Ardmore, Pennsylvania. But there’s no one listed there now by that name.”

  “Alumni office got an address?” my father said.

  “Wouldn’t give it to me,” I said.

  “I’ll get it,” my father said.

  “Get copies of the yearbooks while you’re at it,” I said.

  “Maybe we can find somebody who knew him.”

  My father nodded. He was eating fish chowder carefully, not spilling any. It made me smile. He was a squat bull of a man but very fastidious.

  “You get Victoria’s address, I’ll go talk with her,” I said.

  “Woman to woman,” my father said.

  “Girl talk,” I said.

  “You think the alumni office would be current on her?” my father said.

  “They’re more likely than the CIA,” I said. “My alumni office knows every move I make.”

  “People can do wonders when they’re chasing money,” my father said.

  “I’ve noticed that,” I said.

  “What do you think you’ll get once we chase this woman down?” my father said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But here’s a guy that, as far as we know, never married. Does not, as far as we know, sustain a long-term relationship with anyone. Yet he’s got a picture of a woman on the bureau in his bedroom.”

  “You think they had a relationship?” my father said.

  “I have no way to know,” I said. “Maybe they did. Maybe they still do. Maybe they never did but he wished they had?”

  “Maybe,” my father said.

  “What about his father, anything on him?”

  “Just that he died young,” my father said.

  “Date?”

  “I don’t know off the top of my head. But we have it.”

  “Cause of death?”

  “Heart failure, if I remember right.”

  “Aren’t all deaths because of heart failure, in some sense or other?”

  “I think they were probably referring to congestive heart failure,” my father said. “Why do you want to know?”

  “Because I don’t know,” I said. “Any information is better than none.”

  He grinned.

  “Right answer,” he said. “I’ll get you what we’ve got.”

  “Anything surfacing from that list of addresses?” I said.

  “Not yet,” my father said. “If he had any doubt that we suspect him, this should put it to rest.”

  “Because someone’s bound to tell him.”

  “Yes.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said. “He has no doubt already.”

  “Won’t do his business any good,” my father said, “if these folks are clients and find that the cops are checking on their financial adviser.”

  “If he’s the killer, it won’t matter,” I said.

  “But if he’s not…” my father said.

  I looked out through the second-floor windows at the harbor and didn’t answer. He was, I knew he was.

  34

  It was another woman, this time. Near the Hatch Shell on the Esplanade. Wearing a tank top and shorts, and running shoes with pink laces. She lay on her stomach. There were three coins resting in the small of her back.

  “Around five feet, seven inches,” the crime-scene tech read off his notes. “They’ll measure her exactly when we get her into the lab. Looks like about a hundred twenty-five pounds. Maybe, what? Thirty, thirty-five.”

  “Blue eyes,” my father said. “Blond hair.”

  “Hard to tell about hair color, Captain,” the tech said, “until we get a look in the lab.”

  “She may enhance it,” my father said. “But she’s fair-skinned. She’ll be blond.”

  “Probably right,” the tech said.

  “Sunny,” my father said, “let’s talk.”

  I nodded. We walked to his car, parked among the other police cars, and got in. He started it up, turned on the a/c, and turned toward me.

  “Notice anything about the vic?” he said.

  “Third woman in a row,” I said.

  “Anything else?”

  “She’s my age, weight, and coloration,” I said.

  My father nodded.

  “Have you drawn any conclusions from that?”

  “It could be about me,” I said. “Or it could be nothing at all.”

  “Fifty-fifty,” my father said.

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t like those odds,” my father said.

  “I’m not crazy about them, either.”

  “I suppose you wouldn’t back off of this thing,” he said.

  “Even if I would, Daddy, he knows my name. He knows where I live.”

  “You could come home for a while,” my father said. “Lay low until we catch him.”

  “I’m the only thing you have to catch him with,” I said.

  “Then I’d rather we didn’t catch him at all,” my father said.

  “And I live at home with you and Mother for the rest of my life?”

  Behind us, on Storrow Drive, the traffic was backed up out of sight in both directions. Westbound, all the police vehicles had narrowed the roadway to a single lane. Eastbound, everybody was staring at all the police vehicles on the westbound side and trying to figure out why they were there. I could hear a traffic helicopter thumping dimly overhead.

  “No,” my father said, “you can’t do that, can you.”

  “No,” I said.

  Around us the police were rounding up anyone they could find along the river. It was slim pickings. The Public Garden had been contained. But the parkland ran most of the length of the river.

  “When you were a little kid,” my father said, “your mother and I used to argue about whether you were old enough to go out alone, or cross the street alone, or ride your bike to school. I used to say, ‘It’s a risk you got to take sooner or later. She has to be on her own sometime.’ And your mother would say, ‘Not yet, not yet.’ But finally it had to be, and off you went.”

  “And I survived,” I said.

  “Hell,” my father said. “You flourished.”

  “Thank you.”

  My father was shaking his head slowly.

  “I got you into this,” he said.

  “I was thrilled that you did,” I said.

  “And the only way to get you out of it is to let you do what you’re doing and hope y
ou survive.”

  “You think it’s Johnson, too,” I said. “Don’t you.”

  “Yes,” my father said. “So do Quirk and Belson. But we have nothing. We haven’t got enough to get a wiretap, a search warrant, enough men to really cover him twenty-four-seven. No fucking thing, nothing.”

  “He isn’t dangerous to me yet,” I said. “I said the same thing to Spike. I excite him too much. He’s having too much pleasure out of me to get rid of me.”

  “So he’s killing someone like you?” my father said.

  “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe a coincidence. You said yourself he’s killed several men in a row.”

  “Maybe they looked like someone,” my father said.

  “I’ve read the files,” I said. “They didn’t even look like each other.”

  “I know,” my father said. “I’m unhappy. I’m bitching. You think he’ll call you again.”

  “Guaranteed,” I said.

  “You think he’ll want to have sex with you?”

  “I think he may be having sex with me now,” I said.

  “You think he’ll press for the real thing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “One promise,” my father said.

  “I won’t be alone with him.”

  “Which will preclude sex,” my father said.

  “I hope,” I said.

  “Which might get him in gear.”

  “Yes. Does Mother know anything about this?” I said.

  “No. Just that you’re helping me.”

  “Let’s keep it that way,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “We will.”

  My father turned away from me and stared out through his windshield at the river. It was alleged to be swimmable again in some parts. I was adopting a wait-and-see attitude on that.

  “Maybe I should stick around with you,” my father said. “I could sleep on your couch.”

  “No more than you could walk me to school,” I said.

  “Yeah,” my father said, “I know. I knew it when I said it.”

  35

  Richie and I had a table by the window in the bar at the old Ritz-Carlton on Arlington Street. There was a new one up on Avery Street, which confused me, but I was adjusting.

  I had a glass of white wine; Richie had beer. I smiled. We were both being careful. Richie caught the smile and got it.

  “Don’t want to be getting drunk amidst delicate negotiations,” he said.

  “Well, it’s nice that we’re careful,” I said.

  “Maybe someday we won’t have to be careful,” he said.

  “Or maybe we always will.”

  “Or maybe we always will,” Richie said. “Doesn’t matter.”

  “I don’t want to be someone you have to be careful around,” I said.

  “You are who you are,” Richie said. “Me too. We’re smart. We can figure out a way to be with each other. What’s Dr. Silverman say.”

  “She makes me wonder,” I said, “whether I was the one mostly at fault in our breakup.”

  “She say that?”

  “No,” I said. “But talking to her, I’m beginning to think it.”

  “Probably don’t have to decide that,” Richie said.

  “We need to understand more than we did,” I said.

  “We already do,” he said.

  “And more to come,” I said.

  We both smiled. I sipped wine. Richie drank beer.

  “Phil called me this morning,” Richie said.

  “My father called you?”

  “Yep. Said he understood we might get back together.”

  “He knew that,” I said. “I already talked to him about it.”

  “He said if we were going to, now might be a good time.”

  “Because?”

  “The Spare Change Killer,” Richie said.

  “Goddamn him,” I said.

  Richie smiled.

  “I told him no,” he said.

  “You did?”

  “I told him you wouldn’t let me. I told him even if we were together, we might never move in together,” Richie said. “And if we did, it wouldn’t be so I could protect you.”

  “You told him that?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did he say.”

  Richie smiled at me.

  “He said that he knew I was right. He said that you were pretty tough, and pretty smart, and there was no reason to think you wouldn’t win this one. If we kept you from winning it, you’d never know you could.”

  “He said that?”

  “Uh-huh. He said he thought maybe I could do something, without you knowing it, sort of, if we were getting together anyway. He said he was your father and he was scared for you.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Of course.”

  “I’m scared for you, too,” Richie said.

  “I’d hate it if you weren’t,” I said. “But you understand, don’t you, that I have to do this.”

  “Yes.”

  I leaned forward over the table and held both his hands in mine.

  “You understand that if I can’t be without you,” I said, “I can’t be with you.”

  “Yes.”

  “You really do?” I said.

  “Whether I understand it or not,” Richie said, “I know it.”

  “You didn’t always,” I said.

  “No.”

  “How do you know it now?”

  “I believe what you tell me,” Richie said.

  “God!” I said.

  “Are you talking to me?” Richie said.

  I smiled at him.

  “No,” I said. “That was an expostulation!”

  “Wow,” Richie said.

  “It just sort of struck me,” I said, “that of course you couldn’t know what I needed until I did.”

  “This is true,” Richie said.

  36

  Bob Johnson and I met for a drink on the patio at the Boston Harbor Hotel. It was late afternoon, not too hot, with a nice breeze off the harbor. I ordered a vodka and tonic.

  “Damn,” he said to the waitress. “That sounds good. I’ll have one of those, too.”

  She went to get them. The place was public enough.

  Around us, people were coming in after work for drinks.

  They were mostly young people in good clothes. The tables were nearly all occupied.

  “So, Sunny Randall,” Bob said. “It’s nice to see you again.”

  “And you, Bob.”

  “I see the Spare Change Killer has struck again,” he said.

  “Apparently,” I said.

  “Are you still working on that?” he said.

  The waitress returned with our drinks.

  “My father’s still consulting,” I said. “I’m still helping him.”

  “Ah, yes, Phil. How is Phil?”

  “You know my father’s name,” I said.

  “Sure,” he said.

  “How?”

  I knew he knew it. We’d talked about it before. I was circling over the same territory.

  “I read the papers,” he said. “I mean, I’m sort of involved in this case ever since I got picked up in the dragnet in the Public Garden, you know? And, ah, met you.”

  Not quite the same answer as previously, but nothing incriminating.

  “Phil is fine,” I said.

  “Good,” Bob said. “Good, good.”

  He sipped his vodka and tonic.

  “Boy,” he said. “I’d forgotten how good those taste.”

  “Yes,” I said. “They’re nice.”

  “I imagine old Phil must be pr
etty frustrated by now, with this Spare Change case.”

  “I’m not sure my father gets frustrated,” I said. “He was a cop for a long time. I think he just plows along until he gets what he’s after.”

  “And if he doesn’t?” Bob said.

  “Then, I guess, he doesn’t.”

  “Has he had many cases when he didn’t?” Bob said.

  A trio at one corner of the patio began to play “Green Dolphin Street.” Piano, guitar, drums.

  “Sure,” I said. “All cops do. Lots of crimes don’t get solved.”

  “Because the criminal is too smart for them?” Bob said.

  “Often it’s just that his luck is better than theirs,” I said.

  “But sometimes they get outsmarted,” Bob said.

  “Even then, it’s more a matter of being less dumb,” I said.

  “Less dumb than the cops?” Bob said.

  “There aren’t a lot of criminal geniuses out there,” I said. “Some criminals are just less dumb than others.”

  “But some of them must be smart,” Bob said.

  “Probably,” I said. “Maybe some are so smart we never even know who they are.”

  “Except by their crimes.”

  “The real smart ones probably don’t even let us know there’s been a crime.”

  “Unless maybe they want you to know,” Bob said.

  He gestured at the waitress for another drink. She looked at me. I shook my head.

  “The crazies are really hard,” I said. “There’s no logic to the crime.”

  “A person could want you to know about the crime without being a crazy,” Bob said.

  “Why?” I said. “Why would a person want that?”

  “Might be a personal statement,” Bob said.

  “Of what?”

  The waitress brought Bob another vodka and tonic. He drank some.

  “Might be a statement of who and what a person is,” he said.