Spare Change

by Robert B. Parker

  “And Larsen didn’t want to know that reason,” my father said.

  Hall nodded.

  “Family know?” I said.

  “Not from me,” Hall said.

  “Undertaker?” I said. “You have to do something with the body.”

  “Not my department,” Hall said. “I cleaned it up at my end, and Larsen took care of the rest.”

  “This is pretty much a company town,” Spivey said.

  “Where is Larsen now,” I said.

  “Dead,” Hall said. “’Bout five years ago.” He smiled faintly. “Heart attack.”

  “You’re sure,” I said.

  “I think so,” Hall said.

  “Bullet exit the skull?” my father said.

  “Yeah. I dug it out of the ceiling.”

  “Anybody run ballistics on it?”

  “No.”

  “You know where the bullet is now?” my father said.

  Hall nodded.

  “I got it,” he said.

  “How about the gun?” my father said.

  “I got that, too. I was supposed to get rid of them, but a cop is a cop.”

  “Twenty years?” Spivey said.

  “I couldn’t throw it away.”

  “Anyone run ballistics on that?” my father said.

  “No.”

  “Get them for me,” my father said.

  “There’s something else,” Hall said.

  “What?”

  “You’ll see,” Hall said.

  He got up and left the porch. The spaniel watched him but didn’t move. He was back in about a minute. The gun and the slug were in a big plastic Baggie. There was also an envelope in the Baggie. He’d known right where it all was.

  “Can you do anything for me on this?” he said.

  My father looked at the gun, and the slug, a little battered by its journey through Professor Johnson’s head. But not so bad that they couldn’t get a match off of it, if they had something to match it to.

  “I got no problem with you, Hall,” my father said. “I don’t have to mention your name, I won’t. I do have to, I’ll mention only in the context of how helpful you’ve been. On the other hand, you conspired to cover up a homicide in Spivey’s town. I can’t speak for Spivey.”

  “Old news,” Spivey said. “Larsen’s dead. Who knows where any of the others are? I don’t plan to reopen the case.”

  “Don’t misunderstand me,” my father said. “Sunny and I are going to crack this Spare Change thing, and if I have to throw you off the back of the sled, I will.”

  “But only if you have to.”

  “Only then,” my father said.

  “That’s a better break than I deserve,” Hall said.

  “You got kids?” my father said.

  “Yeah, four, all grown.”

  “Think of it as a break they deserve,” my father said.

  Hall nodded.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  My father took the envelope out of the Baggie. He opened it.

  There was a piece of white typing paper, the whiteness yellowish over time. My father unfolded it and read it and showed it to me.

  “It was in his typewriter,” Hall said.

  The paper had three words typed on it in capital letters: ADIOS, CHICO ZARILLA.

  I looked at my father.

  “Is that name familiar?”

  “I think so,” he said.

  “Bob Johnson’s address book,” I said. “The last entry.”

  “Yes,” my father said.

  “Has anyone talked with him?”

  “We haven’t found him,” my father said. “He’s never at his address. He has no answering machine. He doesn’t respond to mail or notes on his door.”

  “Does he still live there?” I said.

  “As far as we know.”

  My father looked at Hall.

  “Anything else?” he said.

  “No.”

  “You don’t know anything about Chico Zarilla?” my father said.

  “No.”

  “We’ll do what we can for you,” my father said. “You did what you needed to do at the time you needed to do it.”

  “I did what I was scared not to do,” Hall said.

  “Same thing,” my father said.

  47

  The bullet came from the same gun as the last bullet used in the original Spare Change killings,” I said to Dr. Silverman. “Which is the gun that was found with the body.”

  “Do you think that Professor Johnson was the original Spare Change Killer?” Dr. Silverman said.

  “The killings stopped after he died,” I said.

  “And now you suspect his son of picking up the torch, so to speak?”

  “The second round of killings started when Bob Johnson Junior became the same age his father was when the father died,” I said.

  Dr. Silverman nodded.

  “And you’re still seeing him socially?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that wise?”

  “I don’t know, I wanted to talk with you about him,” I said.

  “I am not a forensic psychologist,” Dr. Silverman said.

  “No, but I hold your opinion in high regard.”

  Dr. Silverman dipped her head slightly.

  “He’s very skittish about it, but he is clearly hoping to enlarge our relationship. Except the only real way he can be, for lack of a better word, flirtatious is to allude to the killings and our suspicion of him.”

  “And he’s right, of course,” Dr. Silverman said. “It’s what makes him important to you.”

  “Does he actually think that because he’s a serial killer, I’ll go to bed with him?”

  “He might think that you would go to bed with him because he’s just like his father,” Dr. Silverman said.

  I sat back.

  “Did you tell me that he had an encounter with his past just before the killings started?” Dr. Silverman said.

  “Victoria Russo,” I said. “What would be the connection.”

  “I don’t know,” Dr. Silverman said. “All we know is sequence, we don’t know causality. But surely these killings mean something quite different to him than they do to you.”

  “Well, I suppose they do, don’t they,” I said. “It’s funny, with something like this, you sort of accept the fact the killer is crazy, and forget that there’s still a thought process going on, that he experiences the killings, and thinks of them in some way. I mean, he’s probably not walking around thinking, I’m a deranged murderer.”

  “It is impossible at this moment to know what he’s thinking,” Dr. Silverman said. “But these killings do seem to mean something to him, and from your experience, what they mean seems enhancing to him.”

  “I have taken him about as far as I can go,” I said. “I don’t know what to do with him. Do you have any thoughts?”

  “I would like to know more about his relationship to his father and to Victoria Russo,” Dr. Silverman said.

  “Like what?”

  “It might be useful if you could establish a correlation between their breakup and his father’s death in any way.”

  “Or their unsuccessful sex.”

  “Unsuccessful sex?”

  I told her about the hasty effort that Bob Johnson had made on Victoria Russo.

  “He did penetrate,” Dr. Silverman said.

  “Yes, and ejaculated almost immediately thereafter.”

  “So he would have felt perhaps as if he’d failed?”

  “She thought he felt that way.”

  Dr. Silverman nodded.

  “What if I stopped seeing h
im?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” Dr. Silverman said. “You are playing with very explosive material. It would surely be in your best interest to get away from it.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “I’m going to catch him. He needs to be caught.”

  “And you need him as an anodyne,” Dr. Silverman said.

  “Anodyne?” I said.

  “As long as you have him to talk about, you don’t have to face the hard things that need to be talked about in terms of Richie and your family.”

  “Or why I can’t live with anybody,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you going to tell me I have to live with somebody?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t think I ever want to get married again, either,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “Do you think I should?”

  “I think you should do what’s in your best interest,” Dr. Silverman said.

  “Right now this is in my best interest,” I said.

  “Perhaps.”

  “You think I’m doing this just to dodge the issue?”

  “You are a good person, Sunny. And a good detective, and you are doing what good detectives do. But things have more than one meaning.”

  “And as long as I’m caught up in being a detective, I don’t have to talk about other things,” I said. “To you, or to myself.”

  Dr. Silverman nodded.

  “Richie, my family, that stuff.”

  “And you,” Dr. Silverman said.

  “We will get to that,” I said. “But I need to do this first.”

  “And that need is one of the things I hope we can talk about,” she said. “In the meanwhile, you need to be very careful. You mustn’t let him kill you.”

  I smiled at her.

  “That would not be in my best interest,” I said.

  48

  On the website of somebody called Jimjam was a picture of Julie lounging in full frontal nudity on a couch, which I recognized from her condo.

  “Oh, Jesus Christ, Julie,” I said.

  “It’s Jimmy,” she said. “George’s friend. I know it is.”

  “He took the picture?”

  “No, George did. But I know he gave it to Jimmy.”

  “How would I look this up on the Web?” I said.

  “It says ‘My Counselor: Nude.’”

  I shook my head.

  “You and Dr. Laura,” I said.

  “Like you’ve never posed nude,” she said.

  “In fact, I haven’t,” I said. “At least Dr. Laura can say she was young and foolish. This is a recent photo.”

  “How can you tell?” Julie said. “Do I look fat?”

  “You just look like you,” I said.

  “You’ve got to make him stop,” she said.

  “There’s more?”

  “Yes. We took a lot of pictures.” Julie looked out her window at the harbor. “Some of them quite graphic.”

  “I don’t want to hear about it,” I said. “And I don’t want to see them.”

  Her gaze shifted back to me.

  “Can you go out to Milwaukee?” she said.

  “Milwaukee?”

  “You, or send Spike, or both of you. I’d pay. He has to be stopped…. If someone recognizes me…if they find out it’s a patient’s husband…they could take away my license.”

  “You should have thought more about that when there was something to be done about it, like when you were flashing the camera.”

  “You and Spike could speak to him. It worked with George.”

  “George presented a possible physical danger to you.”

  “You know people, Richie knows people. We could have him killed.”

  “You mind if I click you off the screen?” I said.

  She shook her head. I got rid of her image and looked up Jimjam on the Web.

  “There are twenty-four thousand hits for Jimjam,” I said. “How can we decide which one it is.”

  “We know.”

  “You know,” I said. “You think I’d actually have someone killed on your say-so.”

  “My God, Sunny, you’re my best friend.”

  “You got yourself into this mess,” I said. “You’ll have to get yourself out of it. An expert can probably track down the source of the pictures. Then you can get a lawyer, and maybe you can get a restraining order to prevent him from putting them out. Maybe not.”

  “You won’t help.”

  “I am helping,” I said.

  “No,” she said, “you’re not. Lots of women allow themselves to be photographed nude.”

  “You’re not a lot of women,” I said. “You’re a counselor, being photographed nude by the husband of your patient.”

  “I know. I know it was wrong.”

  “But you did it anyway? What the hell kind of counselor is that?”

  “I’m not a trained psychiatrist, for God’s sake,” Julie said. “I have a degree in education. I took some courses in counseling and therapy.”

  “And didn’t believe a goddamned thing you learned,” I said. “And you presume to counsel people in trouble, based on a therapy you don’t even believe in.”

  “I believe in it.”

  “You ever had psychotherapy?” I said.

  “No,” Julie said. “Not really. I mean…it seems so high a hill to climb.”

  I shook my head.

  “People do what they believe,” I said. “The rest is bullshit.”

  “But I’ve learned. If you’ll just help me out with this…give me a chance to clean up my act.”

  “You’ve been spiraling down since you left Michael and the kids,” I said. “I’m not going to help you go lower.”

  “You won’t help me?”

  “No.”

  “What am I going to do?”

  “Probably get the lawyer first and he or she will find the computer guy.”

  “I could call Spike myself,” she said.

  I shrugged.

  “You’re a mess, Julie. You need serious psychiatric help.”

  “Don’t you talk to me that way,” she said.

  “If you need a referral,” I said, “I’ll get you one.”

  “A referral? Me? You think I can’t get my own referral?”

  “You haven’t yet,” I said.

  Julie screamed at me, “You holier-than-thou bitch, you have to help me.”

  “Can’t,” I said, and left the condo. She was still screaming at me when I closed the door.

  Driving home, I thought about her. I was right. There was nothing I could do that would get her back to being Julie. I smiled a little. I wasn’t proud of the thought, but in the nude she had looked a little chunky around the thighs.

  49

  Quirk and my father and I met in the Suffolk County DA’s office in Bowdoin Square, with a senior ADA named Margie Collins. She was an attractive woman in her fifties with very blond hair, wearing a nice suit that fit her like an Armani. She had a couple of assistants with her, both female, who were so recently out of law school that they still smelled of diploma ink.

  “Can we get a search warrant?” my father said.

  “You bet,” Margie said.

  “What about the fact that I first came across this name illegally?” I said.

  “When you burgled his apartment,” Margie said.

  “Fruit of the poisoned tree?” I said.

  “Doesn’t matter, the name was of enough significance that the police would have pursued it anyway and come to the conclusion that a search warrant was necessary.”

  “I
nevitable discovery,” Quirk said.

  “Exactly,” Margie said.

  “Since I never heard anything about your illegal burglary, I will see no reason to mention it to the judge. We get into court and he’s got a good defense lawyer, it may arise. If it does, we plead inevitable discovery. It’ll stand.”

  Both her assistants took notes.

  “How soon do we get a warrant,” Quirk said.

  Margie looked at her watch. It was three-thirty.

  “Big case,” she said. “High profile. Lot of pressure. I should have it by tomorrow.”

  “As soon as you can,” Quirk said.

  Margie looked at her assistants.

  “Okay, Laurel. You and Kate get the process started. When you’re ready, let me know and I’ll start calling the judges who like me.”

  The two assistants hustled out with their notebooks. Margie turned to Quirk.

  “You’ve given me the facts, Captain, or at least enough of them,” Margie Collins said, “so that I can get you the warrant, despite Ms. Randall’s banditry, but if you’d indulge me, do you have a theory of the case yet?”

  “I’ll let Phil answer,” Quirk said. “He and Sunny have done most of the spadework.”

  “We’re pretty confident that Robert Johnson Senior was the first Spare Change Killer,” my father said. “The evidence all points to it. The gun, the bullet, the cessation of killing at the time of his death. Probably even the suicide. Guilt maybe.”

  “And the son?” Margie said.

  “Sunny’s spent a lot of time with him. She’s convinced he is Spare Change number two.”

  “He keeps talking around it when I’m with him.”

  “You’re with him socially?” Margie said.

  “Always in a public place,” I said. “In fact, I’m scheduled for lunch with him Friday.”

  Margie raised her eyebrows but didn’t comment.

  “You think she’s right?” Margie said to my father.

  “Yes,” he said. “It’s got to do with his father and a former girlfriend and God knows what else. But yes, I think she’s right.”

  “Captain Quirk?” Margie said.

  “Yeah. I believe her,” Quirk said.

  “I know you haven’t enough yet to arrest him,” Margie said. “But have you taken steps?”