Five Classic Spenser Mysteries (28 page)

Hair spray?

I smelled hair spray. My time in the labyrinth had sharpened my senses. I smelled the chemical banana smell of hair spray and then I realized that the darkness was no longer absolute. That I couldn’t quite see anything but looking was less
hopeless. Then there was light. I saw a thin pinstripe of light at floor level. I inched to it. No hurry. Don’t gain anything by being sudden at the end. There was no moat. No monsters, not at least on my side of the door. I reached it and touched it. The line from beneath it seemed all one would ever need, after my time in the tunnel. I ran my hand slowly over the surface. It was smooth and metallic. Like a fire door. With a knob. I pressed my ear against the door and listened. I could hear a quiet hum, the kind a refrigerator makes, or a dishwasher on dry cycle. Maybe also a sound of voice or music, too faint, but there was something besides the quiet hum. I touched the .357 in its shoulder holster and changed my mind and left it there, under my arm, inside my jacket. No one expected an intruder. If I went in quietly they might not notice. Or they might. In which case I could then take out the gun. I took hold of the knob and turned it. The door opened and I stepped through the looking glass.

I was in a clothes closet. The door when I stepped through it was a full-length mirror on the other side. I felt along the edge and found the latch and felt along the jamb where the door fitted and found the release. I closed the door and it fit smoothly against the wall and looked simply like a full-length mirror. The smell of hair spray was stronger. I tried the catch and the door released smoothly. I shut it again. If I had to go out that way hurriedly I needed to know how the door opened. I tried it again. It worked. I closed it again and moved toward the front of the closet. It was a big one, a deep walk-in with women’s clothes hanging along both sides. It was the clothes that gave off the scent of hair spray. The front of the closet was a louvered door. I listened through it. The hum was still there. The sound I’d heard below the hum was a television set. I listened for movement, breathing, sound. The television was tuned to a game show. But the sounds of a game show are not human sounds.

There was no movement outside the closet. I opened the door. I was in a bedroom. A woman’s bedroom, obviously. There were two twin beds in
there. One was neatly made, in fact immaculately made. Hospital corners, bounce a quarter on the taut gray blanket. The other was unmade, a huge aqua-colored puff was turned back in a sloppy triangle, aqua flowered sheets were rumpled and a pillow with an aqua slip was rumpled and stained with mascara and lipstick. A stiffly ribbed girdle complete with garters was draped over the foot of the bed and a pair of stockings, not panty hose, but stockings that went with garters, was bunched on the floor. The floor was carpeted in lavender.
Nice
, I thought.
Nice with the aqua
. There was a heavy mahogany bureau with curving drawers. The top was covered with makeup and perfume bottles and big rollers and several prescription drug containers, the amber kind with the childproof caps that only strong men can open. There was a television set on a stand next to the bureau, but it was silent. The game show came from the next room. Above the bureau was a mahogany-framed mirror and on walls to either side of the beds were portraits of big-eyed children. On the left wall a door opened into a bathroom. There was no one in the bathroom. I stepped to the bathroom door. It was ajar. Two nightgowns, one pink, one yellow, hung from a hook on the back of the door.

It had to be Jerry and Grace Costigan’s bedroom. But except for the scrupulously made bed there was no sign of Jerry. Unless I read it wrong
and Jerry was sleeping on the aqua sheets in the unmade bed. And wearing a corset and stockings.

I edged my head around the door and looked into the next room. It was empty. The television was tuned loudly to a soap opera. If a soap opera plays in an empty room, does it make a sound? I moved across the room full of wing chairs and overstuffed couches and out through the far door and left the slow-phrased agony of the soap behind me. The room I entered was the living room, leather furniture, Oriental rugs, brass, walnut, and, like all the subterranean rooms, low-domed. To the right an archway into the dining room, to the left a solid metal door. I went for the metal door and was out in a domed, bright corridor. It probably looked just like the dark one I’d felt my way through to get here, except it was lit. Ahead the tunnel widened enough for a desk to be set up. On the desk was a telephone and a looseleaf notebook in a blue leather binder. Behind the desk, facing away from me, was a big dark-haired guy in a white short-sleeved shirt with a shoulder holster on. The family receptionist. As I walked toward him he turned and stared at me.

“I came in last night,” I said. “With Russell.”

The gun in the shoulder holster was a Browning 45 automatic.

“Nobody told me,” the guard said.

I shrugged. “You know Russell,” I said.

The guard made a small half laugh and nodded. “Everybody does,” he said.

I grinned. “Jerry wants to see me,” I said. “Which way?”

“Probably in the office,” the guard said. “Second door, down the tunnel, speak to the guard.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Place is a real maze, isn’t it.”

“First visit?”

“Yeah.”

“Takes a while,” the guard said. “You’ll get used to it.”

I made a friendly salute, put my hands in my hip pockets so he wouldn’t see the blackjack sticking out, and sauntered on down the tunnel. Periodically there were the blank steel doors cut into the steel tube. I opened the second one, into another tunnel, and headed on down. Out of sight of the guard I tucked the blackjack into my belt, under the T-shirt, and zipped the jacket halfway up so the bulge wouldn’t show.

The corridor was long and straight with a dwindling perspective. There were doors punctuating it too. As I walked along, looking like a friendly visitor, I figured that the layout must be a series of chambers connected by tunnels. Always the low hum of the life-support machinery made a quiet white sound, which probably no one heard once they’d been in here a day or so. Ahead was a cross-way where two tunnels intersected. In the widened
area was another guard. He had on a work shirt and cords. His gun was a big Colt magnum in a western-style holster.

“I’m staying with Russell,” I said. “And Jerry wants me to come to the office.”

“Yes, sir,” the guard said. “You know the way?”

“No, Russell and I just came in last night. I haven’t got a clue.”

The guard smiled. “It’s confusing at first,” he said. “Jerry’s down this tunnel. Third door on the right.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“No problem,” the guard said.

Three doors down, about a hundred yards, walking casually maybe a minute. I wasn’t getting enough oxygen. I was having trouble swallowing. Probably because there was no saliva to swallow. My mouth tasted like an old penny. Do or die. Do and die. Don’t and die. Swell options. I flexed my hands. Above ground Susan.

I clamped my jaw a little tighter. The muscles ached. I came to the third door and opened it and walked in. There was a woman. A middle-aged secretary at a desk. Christ, she was my age. Blue framed harlequin-shaped glasses hung on a gold chain around her neck. She looked friendly and firm, like someone in a coffee commercial.

She said, “May I help you?”

I said, “Yes, is Jerry in?”

“His family is with him,” she said warmly. “Perhaps you can wait.”

“Sure,” I said. “Actually he wanted me to show you something.”

I walked to the desk and held my clenched left fist out in front of me, low near the desk top. “Watch,” I said, “when I open my hand.”

She smiled and looked down. I took the sap out from under my shirt with my right hand and hit her low on the back of her head. She sprawled forward onto the desk and was still. I put the sap in my back pocket and took out my gun and went past her to the inner office door and opened it and stepped in. Jerry was there at his desk with his feet up smoking a thin good-looking cigar. Grace sat in a leather chair near the wall and Russell leaned on the same wall next to her, his arms folded.

“Ah, Kurtz,” I said.

Jerry swiveled slowly and stared at me. He saw the gun before he saw who held it and he recognized the gun before he recognized me. But he did recognize me. The stages of surprise and slow recognition played on his face.

Grace said, “Oh my God, Jerry …”

Russell had an odd tight grin. His face looked shiny. He didn’t move or speak. Jerry stared at me.

“Jerry,” Grace said, “Jerry, for heaven’s sake do something. What’s he want, Jerry?”

Jerry stared at me for a moment then turned his head and looked at Russell.

“You let him in,” Jerry said.

Russell grinned at him. “Not me, Pop,” he said.

“You Jew-loving little bastard,” Jerry said.

“Jerry,” Grace said.

Jerry kept looking at Russell.

“You sick Jew-loving little bastard,” he said. His voice quivered slightly.

Grace said, “Jerry,” again, louder.

Costigan looked back at me. “Fuck it,” he said, “get it done.”

I shot him. A hole appeared in his forehead and the impact spun his swivel chair half around. He fell sideways and lolled out of the chair draped over one of the black leather arms. Neither Russell nor Grace moved. I stepped around the desk and shot Jerry again, behind the ear, to be sure. Then I turned toward his widow and orphan.

Russell still had the fixed shiny grin. His arms were still folded across his chest, he still leaned against the wall. In the acrid silence I could hear his breathing, shallow and fast. There seemed to be spots of color on his cheekbones. Grace’s face was squinched up like a withered apple, a trace of saliva was at one corner of her mouth, and her entire posture seemed to have bunched up like a fist.

“Don’t you touch me,” she said. Her voice had a
raspy sound to it. “Don’t you dare touch me. Don’t you dare come near me,” she said.

“We’ll go out together,” I said. “We three. If I get out you get out. Otherwise you’re dead.”

“You better not touch me,” Grace said.

Russell said, “No. I’m not going.” His voice was tinny.

“I shot him,” I said, “I’ll shoot her. We’re going out together.”

Russell shook his head. “You’re on your own now, Superman.”

“Rusty,” Grace rasped. Her voice was electric. “You do what he says.”

“Like hell, Ma,” Russell said. “He won’t shoot me.”

“And your mother, do you care about your mother,” she said.

The spots of color on Russell’s cheeks deepened and enlarged as if a fever had begun to spread.

“Ma,” he said.

She clapped her hands together once, sharply. “Rusty Costigan, you listen to me. You still belong to me. And now that Dad’s dead, you’re all I have. You do what he says. Don’t you let him hurt me.”

The rasp in her voice came and went, replaced at odd moments by a lisping little girl sound full of lateral L’s and infancy. Russell’s breathing was even shallower. His face was fully flushed now.

“Move it,” I said.

Grace stood and took Russell’s arm, and turned him toward the door.

“I know you want to sit in that chair,” I said to Russell. “But unless we walk right out of this mine without any sweat,” I said, “I promise to kill you both.”

“You just don’t touch me,” Grace said. She had her hand firmly clamped on to her son’s upper arm. “You just behave,” she said.

The secretary was still sprawled on the desk in the outer office. I slid the .357 back in under my arm as we went into the corridor.

“So much as look funny at this guard,” I said, “and everybody’s dead.”

Grace squeezed her hand on her son’s arm and pushed her shoulder against him.

“We’ll go straight to my room,” she said. “There’s a way out that way.”

As we approached the guard I said to Russell, “You catch the Cubs on cable? How ’bout that Sandberg?”

Grace said to the guard, “How is your family, Ralph?”

He smiled and nodded, “Fine, Mrs. Costigan.”

“That’s nice,” Grace said.

I nodded as if Russell had spoken. “Still, I think it’s probably Bobby Dernier that makes them go, you know?”

Out of earshot, down the tunnel, Grace said,
“You saw what your father did, your father died for me, died to keep this man from hurting me. Now it’s up to you. You do exactly what this man says. You do it just like your father would. You do what I say.”

“Just like my father would,” Russell said. We both knew that wasn’t why his father died. When we came to the second guard we went through the same rigamarole. This time Russell said yes he had seen the Cubs on cable.

Then we were in her apartment. I took my gun out. “Back here,” Grace said. “In the back of my closet. Don’t look, I haven’t had a chance to pick up today.”

There was a way to light the tunnel from the inside, and Russell knew it. What had seemed like a Dante-esque descent in the darkness became a few hundred yards of banal corridor in the fluorescent brightness. Outside on the grassy hillside under the high stars the journey underground seemed an eternity that happened long ago.

Grace said, “There, we did just what you said.” She held Russell’s arm. “Rusty and I helped you escape.”

I nodded. I was looking at Russell. He looked back, the stiffness in his face clear in the bright harvest moon. He stared back at me. Our eyes held. He seemed to be waiting. I did too. Neither of us knew quite what we were waiting for.

“You have to let us go,” Grace said. “You said that if we helped you you wouldn’t hurt me. That’s what you said.”

Russell and I looked at each other some more. I could smell the grass as the minimal night wind moved over it.

“That’s what you said,” Grace said. “Rusty. He said that.”

“Go ahead, Ma,” Russell said without moving his eyes. “He won’t stop you.”

“Alone?” she said. “Out here? In the dark? I can’t go alone. You have to take me.”

The smell of the grass was released by the dew that had gathered on it while I was underground. It was the smell of spring mornings when I was small. I nodded slowly.