Five Classic Spenser Mysteries (100 page)

“She lied to me about her name, where she lived, how she got married. I want to know why.”

“You think she’s committed a crime?”

“Not that I know of. I don’t want her for anything. I just ran across a lie and I want to run it down. You know how it goes, people lie to you, you want to know why.”

Donaldson nodded. He took a swig from his Dr Pepper, swallowed it, and began to suck on his upper lip.

“I don’t want to stir up old troubles,” I said. “She was eighteen when you busted her. Everyone is entitled to screw up when they’re eighteen. I just want to know about her.”

Donaldson kept sucking on his upper lip and looking at me.

“It’ll be worse if I start asking around and get people wondering why some dick from the East is asking about Donna Burlington. I’ll find out anyway. This isn’t that big a place.”

“I might not let you ask around,” Donaldson said.

“Aw come on, Hondo,” I said. “If you give me trouble, I’ll go get the state cops and a court order and come on back and ask around and more people will notice and a bigger puff of smoke will go up and you’ll be worse off than you are now. I’m making what you call your legitimate inquiry.”

“Persistent sonovabitch, aren’t you? Okay, I’ll go along. I just don’t like telling people’s business to others without a pretty good reason.”

“Me either,” I said.

“Okay.” He opened the folder and looked at it. “I arrested Donna Burlington for possession of three marijuana cigarettes. She was smoking with two boys from Buckston in a pickup truck back of Scooter’s Lunch. It was a first offense, but we were a little jumpier about reefers around here in ’sixty-six than we are now. I booked her; she went to court and got a
suspended sentence and a year’s probation. Six weeks later she broke probation and went off to New York City with a local hellion. She never came back.”

“What was the hellion’s name?”

“Tony Reece. He was about seven or eight years older than Donna.”

“What kind of kid was she?”

“It was a while ago,” Donaldson said. “But kind of restless, not really happy, you know—nothing bad, but she had a reputation, hung out with the older hotshots. The first girl in class to smoke, the first to drink, the first one to try pot, the one the boys took out as soon as they dared while the other girls were still going to dancing school at the grange hall and blushing if someone talked dirty.”

“Family still live in town?”

“Yeah, but they don’t know where she is. After she took off, they were after me to locate her. But there’s only me and two deputies, and one of them’s part-time. When nothing came of that, they wrote her off. In a way they were probably glad she took off. They didn’t know what to do with her. She was a late baby, you know? The Burlingtons never had any kids, and then, when Mrs. Burlington was going through the change, there came Donna. That’s
what my wife says anyway. Embarrassed hell out of both of them.”

“How about Reece? He ever show up again?”

Donaldson shook his head. “Nope. I heard he got in some kind of jam in New York and he might be doing time. But he hasn’t shown up around here anyway.”

“Okay, any last known address?”

“Just the house here.”

“Can you give me that? I’d like to talk to the parents.”

“I’ll drive you over. They’ll be a little easier if I’m there. They’re old and they get nervous.”

“I’m not going to give them the third degree, Donaldson, I’m just going to talk to them and ask them if they know anything more than you do about Donna Burlington.”

“I’ll go along. They’re sorta shiftless and crummy, but they’re my people, you know? I like to look out for them.”

I nodded. “Okay, let’s go.”

We got into Donaldson’s black and white and drove back up the main street past the row of storefronts and the sparse yards. At the end of the street we turned left, down toward the river, and pulled up in front of a big shanty. Originally it had probably been a four-room
bungalow backing onto the river. Over the years lean-tos and sagging additions had been scabbed onto it so that it was difficult to say how many rooms there were now. The area in front of the house was mud, and several dirty white chickens pecked in it. A brown and white pig had rooted itself out a hollow against the foundation and was sleeping in it. To the right of the front door, two big gas bottles of dull gray-green metal stood upright, and to the left the remnants of a vine were so bedraggled I couldn’t recognize what kind it was. The land to the side and rear of the house sloped in a kind of eroded gully down to the river. There was a stack of old tires at the corner of one of the lean-tos, and beyond that the rusted frame of a forty-year-old pickup truck, a stack of empty vegetable crates, and on the flat mud margin where the river lapped at the land a bedspring, mossy and slick with river scum.

I thought of Linda Rabb in her Church Park apartment with the fresh jeans and her black hair gleaming.

“Come to where the flavor is,” I said.

“Yeah, it’s not much, is it? Don’t much wonder that Donna took off as soon as she could.” We got up and walked to the front door. There were the brown remains of a wreath hanging
from a galvanized nail. The ghost of Christmas past. Maybe of a Christmas future for the Burlingtons.

An old woman answered Donaldson’s knock. She was fat and lumpy in a yellow housedress. Her legs were bare and mottled, her feet thrust into scuffed men’s loafers. Her gray hair was short and straight around her head, the ends uneven, cut at home probably, with dull scissors. Her face was nearly without features, fat puffing around her eyes, making them seem small and squinty.

“Morning, Mrs. Burlington,” Donaldson said. “Got a man here from Boston wants to talk with you about Donna.”

She looked at me. “You seen Donna?” she said.

“May we come in?” I said.

She stood aside. “I guess so,” she said. Her voice wasn’t very old, but it was without variation, a tired monotone, as if there were nothing worth saying.

Donaldson took off his hat and went in. I followed. The room smelled of kerosene and dogs and things I didn’t recognize. The clutter was dense. Donaldson and I found room on an old daybed and sat. Mrs. Burlington shuffled off down a corridor and returned in a moment
with her husband. He was pallid and bald, a tall old man in a sleeveless undershirt and black worsted trousers with the fly open. His face had gray stubble on it, and some egg was dried in the corner of his mouth. The skin was loose on his thin white arms and wrinkled in the fold at the armpit. He poured a handful of Bond Street pipe tobacco from a can into the palm of his hand and slurped it into his mouth.

He nodded at Donaldson, who said, “Morning, Mr. Burlington.” Mrs. Burlington stood, and they both looked at Donaldson and me without moving or speaking. American Gothic.

I said, “I’m a detective. I can’t tell you where your daughter is, except that she’s well and happy. But I need to learn a little about her background. I mean her no harm, and I’m trying to help her, but the whole situation is very confidential.”

“What do you want to know?” Mrs. Burlington said.

“When is the last time you heard from her?”

Mrs. Burlington said, “We ain’t. Not since she run off.”

“No letter, no call, nothing. Not a word?”

Mrs. Burlington shook her head. The old man made no move, changed his expression not at all.

“Do you know where she went when she left here?”

“Left us a note saying she was going to New York with a fellow we never met, never heard nothing more.”

“Didn’t you look for her?”

Mrs. Burlington nodded at Donaldson, “Told T.P. here. He looked. Couldn’t find her.” A bony mongrel dog with short yellow fur and mismatched ears appeared behind Mr. Burlington. He growled at us, and Burlington turned and kicked him hard in the ribs. The dog yelped and disappeared.

“You ever hear from Tony Reece?” It was like talking to a postoperative lobotomy case. And compared to the old man, she was animated.

She shook her head. “Never seen him,” she said. The old man squirted a long stream of tobacco juice at a cardboard box of sand behind the door. He missed.

And that was it. They didn’t know anything about anything, and they didn’t care. The old man never spoke while I was there and just nodded when Donaldson said good-bye.

In the car Donaldson said, “Where to now?”

“Let’s just sit here a minute until I catch my breath.”

“They been poor all their life,” Donaldson said. “It tends to wear you out.” I nodded.

“Okay, how about Tony Reece? He got any family here?”

“Nope. Folks are both dead.” Donaldson started the engine and turned the car back toward the town hall. When we got there, he offered me his hand. “If I was you, Spenser, I’d try New York next.”

“Fun City,” I said.

It was sunset when the plane swung in over the water and landed at La Guardia Airport. I took the bus into the East Side terminal at Thirty-eighth Street and a cab from there to the Holiday Inn at West Fifty-seventh Street. The Wiener schnitzel had been so good in Red-ford, I thought I might as well stay with a winner.

The West Side hadn’t gotten any more fashionable since I had been there last and the hotel looked as if it belonged where it was. The lobby was so discouraging that I didn’t bother to check the dining room for Wiener schnitzel. Instead, I walked over to a Scandinavian restaurant on Fifty-eighth Street and ravaged its smorgasbord.

The next morning I made some phone calls to the New York Department of Social Services while I drank coffee in my room. When I finished I walked along Fifty-seventh Street to
Fifth Avenue and headed downtown. I always walk in New York. In the window of F.A.O. Schwarz was an enormous stuffed giraffe, and Brentano’s had a display of ethnic cookbooks in the window. I thought about going in and asking them if they were a branch of the Boston store but decided not to. They probably lacked my zesty sense of humor.

It was about nine forty-five when I reached Thirty-fourth Street and turned left. Four blocks east, between Third and Second avenues, was a three-story beige brick building that looked like a modified fire station. The brown metal entrance doors, up four stairs, were flanked with flagpoles at right angles to the building. A plaque under the right-hand flagpole said
CITY OF NEW YORK, DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL SERVICES, YORKVILLE INCOME MAINTENANCE CENTER
. I went in.

It was a big open room, the color a predictable green; molded plastic chairs in red, green, and blue stood three rows deep to the right of the entrance. To the left a low counter. Behind the counter a big black woman with blue-framed glasses on a chain around her neck was telling an old woman in an ankle-length dress that her check would come next week and would not come sooner. The woman protested
in broken English, and the woman behind the desk said it again, louder. At the end of the counter, sitting in a folding chair, was a New York City cop, a slim black woman with badge, gun, short hair, and enormous high platform shoes. Beyond the counter the room L’d to the left, and I could see office space partitioned off. There was no one else on the floor.

Behind me, to the right of the entry, a stair led up. A handprinted sign said
FACE TO FACE UPSTAIRS
with an arrow. I went up. The second floor had been warrened off into cubicles where face to face could go on in privacy. The first cubicle was busy; the second was not. I knocked on the frame of the open door and went in. It was little bigger than a confessional, just a desk, a file cabinet, and a chair for the face to face. The woman at the desk was lean and young, not long out of Vassar or Bennington. She had a tanned outdoor face, with small lines around the eyes that she wasn’t supposed to get yet. She had on a white sleeveless blouse open at the neck. Her brown hair was cut short and she wore no makeup. Her face presented an expression of no-nonsense compassion that I suspected she was still working on. The sign on her desk said
MS. HARRIS
.

“Come in,” she said, her hands resting on
the neat desk in front of her. A pencil in the right one. I was dressed for New York in my wheat-colored summer suit, dark blue shirt, and a white tie with blue and gold stripes. Would she invite me to her apartment? Maybe she thought I was another welfare case. If so, I’d have to speak with my tailor. I gave her a card; she frowned down at it for about thirty seconds and then looked up and said, “Yes?”

“Do you think I ought to have a motto on it?” I said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“A motto,” I said. “On the card. You know, like ‘We never sleep’ or maybe ‘Trouble is my business.’ Something like that.”

“Mr.”—she checked the card—“Spenser, I assume you’re joking and there’s nothing wrong with that, but I have a good deal to do and I wonder if you might tell me what you want directly?”

“Yes, ma’am. May I sit?”

“Please do.”

“Okay, I’m looking for a young woman who might have showed up here and gone on welfare about eight years ago.”

“Why do you want to find her?”

I shook my head. “It’s a reasonable question, but I can’t tell you.”

She frowned at me the way she had frowned at my card. “Why do you think we’d have information about something that far back?”

“Because you are a government agency. Government agencies never throw anything away because someone someday might need something to cover himself in case a question of responsibility was raised. You got welfare records for Peter Stuyvesant.”

The frown got more severe, making a groove between her eyebrows. “Why do you think this young woman was on welfare?”

“You shouldn’t frown like that,” I said. “You’ll get little premature wrinkles in the corners of your eyes.”

“I would prefer it, Mr. Spenser, if you did not attempt to personalize this contact. The condition of my eyes is not relevant to this discussion.”

“Ah, but how they sparkle when you’re angry,” I said.

She almost smiled, caught herself, and got the frown back in place. “Answer my question, please.”

“She was about eighteen; she ran away from a small midwestern town with the local bad kid, who probably ditched her after they got here. She’s a good bet to have ended up on
welfare or prostitution or both. I figured that you’d have better records than Diamond Nell’s Parlor of Delight.”