Dead Heat (18 page)

The sharp thud from the study was no creaky floorboard. Spraggue froze, dropped the pillow back on the bed. He picked up a cracked glass ashtray, hefted it for throwing weight. The outraged ghost of Pete Collatos wouldn't make so much noise.

He tiptoed to the door of the study. Empty.

There was a closet next to an old-fashioned rocking chair. The chair teetered slowly, back and forth. A rickety aluminum table sat next to the chair. It held an ashtray, a box of tissues, a Rolling Rock can and the telephone. The receiver dangled the floor.

“Come on out,” Spraggue said.

Silence.

“Come on.”

“Get away,” the woman's voice said weakly. “Get away. I have a gun in here. I mean it. I'll shoot.”

“Sure you do,” Spraggue said, recognizing the voice. “A howitzer or an M-16?”

He yanked open the closet door. Sharon Collatos would have fallen to the ground if he hadn't caught her. He dropped the ashtray and it shattered on the floor.

TWENTY-TWO

“How long have you been here?” he asked.

She huddled on the faded couch, smoothing a black skirt that might have been the same one she'd worn to the funeral. She stared down at her hands to make sure they'd stopped shaking, steeled her voice and whispered, “I have every right to be here.” Her voice cracked when she tried to make it louder. “What are you doing here?”

“What you asked me to do. At the funeral.”

“I'm sorry about that. I was … I had no business … Pete's death isn't your responsibility.”

“Is it yours?”

Black eyeliner had run down her cheeks in inky stripes. She put her hands to her eyes and smudged them into gray circles, puffy with lack of sleep. Her right stocking had a run up the side. Her wrinkled gray sweater … Hadn't she worn that under her black suit jacket at the funeral?

“Have you been here since Pete's funeral?” Hadn't the woman any friends, any family, one good neighbor?

“I guess … I don't know …”

“Christ! That was Sunday. This is Wednesday. Where did you sleep? The bed wasn't touched. Have you eaten since Sunday?”

No answer, just that blank paralyzed stare. When she'd fallen out of the closet, mouth open in a soundless scream, her face had registered terror. He thought he'd seen recognition, even relief when he'd cradled her shaken body, half lifted, half dragged her into the living room. Now, nothing.

“Come on.” He walked her into the kitchen, sat her down on a plastic-covered dinette chair. He started to open the refrigerator, remembered the contents and stopped. He filled the kettle with water. Blue flame sputtered into a ring on the stove's front burner. There had been soup cans in the wooden cupboard over the stove. He rejected Campbell's Clam Chowder: no milk. Cream of Mushroom might be tolerable with water.

“Don't bother.” she said weakly.

Pete kept booze in a cabinet under the laminated blue countertop. Spraggue tilted a dollop of vermouth into the soup. Sherry would have been better. Pete didn't have any coffee, but there were tea bags stuffed into a tin canister.

Sharon Collatos used her left hand to prop up her forehead. With her right hand, she traced circles on the tabletop. Dark, tangled hair fell forward and hid her face. She didn't look up when he put a spoon down next to her. He poured bubbling soup into a chipped bowl.

“Eat it,” he said.

“When I heard the door open, I hid. I thought you were Pete's killer. I hoped you were just a thief.”

“A soup thief. I leave the cans. Eat.” He busied himself with teabags, didn't turn back to her until he heard the clink of silverware on crockery.

“There's another bowlful after you finish that,” he said.

“Please, you eat it.”

“I've been eating regularly, thank you.”

“Thank you,” she said in a small voice.

“Where did you sleep?” he asked. “I can see you didn't eat, so I can't be blamed for not noticing the fresh potato peelings in the garbage. But if you slept here, I should have been able to—”

“I dozed off in one of the chairs.…”

One he'd thought the cops had messed up.

He peeled off his plastic gloves. “I guess I don't have to keep my presence here a secret anymore.”

She shook her head and spooned soup. When the bowl was empty, Spraggue refilled it over her protests.

“When I take the trouble to open a can, I expect it to get eaten,” he said severely. “Did you come to clear up Pete's things?”

Tears welled in her eyes.

He fetched the box of tissues from the study. By the time he returned to the table, the tears were gone and the stony look was back. He didn't know which he preferred.

“Drink your tea,” he said.

Her blind obedience showed her exhaustion.

“I tried to call you,” he said. “I wouldn't have broken in if I'd been able to reach you.…”

She made a gesture as if to say it was all right, a feeble wave of a hand that would never have satisfied the Medea of the funeral.

“Did your brother talk to you about his work?”

She opened her mouth as if to say something, changed her mind and rested her head on her hand again. Her eyes closed. Her eyelashes were unexpectedly long, so lush and soft-looking that Spraggue felt an urge to touch them, to smooth his thumbs gently over her eyes, down her still damp cheeks.

“Did your brother have a safe? Someplace he kept things that were important to him?”

Still no answer.

“Lie down on the couch and try to sleep while I finish looking around.”

“I can't … I can't sleep here.… I keep hearing things.”

“Just sit there. Wait for me. Then I'll take you home.”

He had to walk her back to the couch. He made another cup of tea and set it near her on a scratched oak end table. He wondered if her wobbly walk was due entirely to exhaustion, grief, and starvation—whether she'd taken any drugs.

“Call me if you want anything. I'll be in the study.”

He started at the left wall, with the books lined up across the back of Collatos' desk, held each one by the spine, and shook it over the threadbare beige rug. Each file drawer came out of the desk. Bottoms and sides were checked for taped hideaways, contents dumped and searched. Five years of telephone bills. Tax returns. Warranties for the vacuum cleaner Pete had rarely used, the cheap stereo.

Footsteps. She stood in the doorway, one hand clutching each side of the doorframe, smudged eyes dominating her pale face. He held out his arms only to steady her, drew her close to keep her from falling, smoothed her dark hair. She pressed against him like a moth drawn to flame, and he found himself kissing a soft mouth that hardened, kissed back with hungry, shocking urgency, parted.

She stiffened as suddenly as she had melted, pulled back, rubbing one hand across her mouth as if she could scrub the kisses away.

“What am I doing?” she said. “Oh my God, what am I doing?” She turned away, her face reddening with embarrassment.

They were panting like two exhausted runners. She was so small without her shoes; her head came barely past his shoulder.

“I'm sorry,” he said, because it was the only thing he could think of to break the taut silence. He tried to put a hand on her shaking shoulder, but she flinched.

She backed toward the door, eyes averted. “I meant to … I came in to tell you.… There are papers in the closet. Way back under a pile of coats.”

“Thank you,” he said, after a pause, with a formality that reassured her. He waved his arm at the section of the room still to be examined. “This is going to take me a while. So relax. Lie down. Wash your face. Take a shower if you want to. You've got time.”

“I'd like that.” She ducked her head and one corner of her mouth tilted. He caught a brief, tentative flash of the gentle, laughing girl in Pete's desktop photo. He wanted her more than he'd ever wanted Kathleen Farrell.

“Just don't come in here wrapped in any skimpy towel,” he muttered under his breath. “Please.”

She left without speaking and Spraggue sat in the rocking chair to let the heat dissipate. He didn't break the pattern of his search to check the closet. One thing at a time, left to right, top to bottom. He stood on the chair to feel around the central lighting fixture. In the bathroom, the shower pulsated. He rubbed his dusty hands down the side of his jeans and remembered the sound of the bolt clicking home after she'd closed the bathroom door, wondered if she regretted turning the lock as much as he regretted her doing it. There was an MBTA map thumbtacked on the wall. He took it down, turned it over. The beige wall was yellow where it had been.

He kept to pattern in the closet, started with the shelf behind the clothes rod. Folded up holey undershirts, a battered blue police hat, a pair of black shoes with a puncture wound in the right sole. Not many clothes in this closet, a few mothball-smelling suits, semi-retired. A pile of games: aged Monopoly, newer Parcheesi, Avalon Hill war games. The closet was deeper than it seemed, slanting outward at the back. He coughed and had to come back out into the study to catch his breath.

The pile of old clothes was in the right-hand corner, behind two cardboard boxes. He tossed the clothes out into the room, raising dust clouds. There was no dust on the two armloads of Manila files.

They were police files, xeroxed copies of material that should never have left the stationhouse. Old files, dating back twelve, fourteen years, in no seeming order.

The bolt on the bathroom door made a noise like a shot. She came out along with a cloud of fragrant steam, fully dressed, back in her gray sweater and black skirt. Her hair was twisted up in a navy towel. Her eyes were puffy, red, but the raccoon rings of darkness had been washed away. Her legs were bare and her clothes fitted with a slight difference. Spraggue speculated that she'd abandoned her undergarments, shrinking at the act of putting her newly clean body back into its three-day prison of mourning and dirt. He kept such speculation carefully off his face.

The only makeup she'd had with her must have been lipstick. She'd applied it too generously, as if to compensate for her pallor, rubbed some of it into her cheeks. He thought she looked terrific, smudges gone from her dark eyes, damp tendrils of dark hair escaping from the towel and framing her face.

She held up a tiny brown bottle.

“What's this?”

“Where did you find it?”

“The medicine cabinet's empty, except for this.”

He took it from her. Her hand drew back when he touched her as if an electric shock had passed between them. He turned the bottle carefully in his hand until he could read the yellowed label. It was torn across top and bottom, obscuring date, Rx number, and doctor's name.

40 Parnate 10 mg
, it said.
Take two to four tablets daily
.

TWENTY-THREE

They spent another hour filling cardboard boxes from the Beacon Supermarket with the odds and ends of Pete Collatos' short life—photographs, books, records, out-of-date calendars—and carting them down to Sharon Collatos' rusty brown Dodge Dart. She refused his offer of escort, drove off toward Park Drive and Route 2 on her way home to suburban Chelmsford—back stiff, head high, crumpling Spraggue's card between her hand and the steering wheel.

He took a dilapidated cab back to Cambridge, deposited two boxes of yellowing files in the middle of the kitchen floor. Then, mindful of Pete's early, unexpected demise, he burned three old letters, carefully stowed a few more—from Kate, faintly perfumed—at the back of a bottom desk drawer. He hoped that whoever got to read them would enjoy them as much as he had.

He patted his windbreaker pocket to make sure the brown bottle was still there.

It was late afternoon by the time he left the house and the lowering clouds were busy fulfilling their promise. The rain was steady and gentle, redolent of early spring. He walked bareheaded along Brattle to Harvard Square, boarded the Dudley bus, and rode as far as Auditorium station, then strolled up Boylston Street toward Berkeley, people-gazing, window-shopping. He stopped briefly at the Paperback Booksmith, winked at the solemn Lord and Taylor mannequins. A bewhiskered bum and a bag lady shared a brown-bagged bottle on the front steps of the Boston Public Library. A dumpy, elderly couple held hands across a table in Ciro and Sal's window and flashed smiles of blinding contentment.

Hurley spoiled his mood.

Hurley hadn't sniffed any budding daffodils. His weary, red-rimmed eyes hadn't taken in anything but the cracked dull green walls of his office.

“I'm busy,” he announced as soon as he saw Spraggue in the doorway. He smacked the file he'd been reading flat on his desk for emphasis, instinctively covered its open pages with his big knobby hands. “What do you want?”

“I'm fine,” Spraggue said. “And how are you?”

Hurley shoved his chair back from his desk with a sigh of pure disgust. “You see Menlo on your way up?”

“God forbid.”

“I'll bet he saw you. The last time you paid me a visit, he spent damn near an hour cross-examining me. I'm glad the bastard isn't on internal affairs. He'd have me up for treason or something, just for talking to you. And babbling to you about one of his cases … that would really burn him.”

“After I tell you what I came to tell you, maybe they'll toss him off the Collatos case. You'll get it.”

In spite of himself, Hurley was interested. He laughed, shrugged it off, but Spraggue could see it in the sudden sharpness of his glance at the closed door.

“Just what I need.” The captain gestured at his cluttered desktop. “Another case. The fifty-seven I've already got are sprouting paperwork like wings.”

Spraggue swung a metal folding chair away from a stack by the wall, snapped it open, and sat down. It teetered on three long legs and a short one. He knew Hurley would easily part with two teeth, if not his right arm, for any dirt on Menlo.