Five Classic Spenser Mysteries (47 page)

I parked in the alley in back of my office and Paul and I carried the files up. It had been a while since I’d been in my office. There was a batch of mail on the floor below the mail slot. A spider had made a web in one corner of my window. Since it didn’t interfere with my view of the ad agency across the street, I left it alone.

I put the big file down next to my desk. Paul put the card file on top of it. I opened the window and picked up my mail and sat at my desk to read it. Most of it went right to the wastebasket unopened. What was left was a copy of a book autographed by the woman who’d written it, a woman I’d done some
work for awhile ago, and an invitation to attend the wedding of Brenda Loring to someone named Maurice Kerkorian. Reception following the ceremony at the Copley Plaza Hotel. I looked at the invitation for a long time.

“What are we going to do with these files?” Paul said.

I put the mail down. “After we get them open we’ll look and see what’s there.”

“What are we looking for?”

“Don’t know. We’ll see what’s there.”

“What did you mean it would be good if my father knew you’d taken the files?” Paul said.

I got a pinch bar out of the coat closet in the corner of the office and began to pry the file drawers open.

“Gets him moving. The worst thing that can happen if you’re trying to find out about people is to have them hunker down and stay put. If they simply sit on whatever it is and do nothing, then nothing happens. They don’t commit themselves, don’t give you a chance to counterpunch, don’t make mistakes, don’t open themselves up, if you follow.”

“What do you think my father might do?”

“He might try to get the files back.”

“And what if he does?”

“We’ll see.”

“But you don’t know?”

The last file drawer snapped open under the pressure of the bar. “No, I don’t know. But if you’ll excuse the phrase, it’s the way life is. You don’t know what’s going to happen. People whose lives work best are the ones who recognize that and, having done what they can, are ready for what comes. Like the man said, ‘Readiness is all.’ ”

“What man?”

“Hamlet.”

“That’s what you did with Harry.”

“Yeah, partly. You go from handle to handle. I tried Buddy, and then Harry, and now your father. It’s like walking down a long corridor with a bunch of doors. You keep trying them to see which one opens. You don’t know what’s behind the doors, but if you don’t open any, you don’t get out of the corridor.”

“All that’s in this card file are a bunch of names,” Paul said.

I took a card and looked at it. It said
Richard Tilson. 43 Concord Avenue. Waltham. Whole Life. 9/16/73. Prudential #3750916
. “Client file, I guess,” I said. I looked at some other cards. Same setup. “Run through them,” I said. “Make a note of any names you know. Make sure it’s all client information.”

“Why do you want me to list people I know?”

“Why not? Might matter. It’s a thing to do with the file. Maybe a pattern will crop up. You won’t know till you’ve done it.”

I gave Paul a pad and pencil from my desk and he sat in my client’s chair with the file on his side of my desk and began to go through it. I turned on the portable radio to a contemporary sound station for Paul and began to go through the contents of the big file on my side of the desk. It was slow. There was correspondence to be read, all of it couched in the clotted, illiterate jargon of economic enterprise. After ten minutes I was getting cerebral gas pains. The music wasn’t helping. “If Andy Warhol were a musician, he’d sound like this,” I said.

Paul said, “Who’s Andy Warhol?”

“It’s better you should not know,” I said.

At one thirty I tuned to the ball game. Relief. At two I said to Paul, “You hungry?”

“Yeah.”

“Why don’t you walk over to that sandwich shop on Newbury and get us some food.”

“Where is it?”

“Just a block down and around the corner. Right across from Brooks Brothers.”

“Okay.”

I gave him some money. “Get whatever looks good,” I said.

“What do you want?”

“Use your own judgment,” I said.

“Okay.”

He went out and I kept at the files. Paul came back with turkey sandwiches on oatmeal and roast beef sandwiches on rye and two lemon turnovers and a carton of milk. I had coffee from the coffee pot. By three Paul had finished with his file. He said, “I’m going to walk around.”

I said, “You need any money?”

He said, “No. I still got change from what you gave me before.”

At five Paul came back. He’d bought a book on ballet at the Booksmith up Boylston.

He read his book while I worked on the files. It got dark. I turned on the lights in the office. At eight fifteen I said, “Enough. Come on, I’ll buy you dinner.”

We went up to Café L’Ananas and ate. I got a bottle of wine and Paul had some. Then we walked back to my apartment. “What about your car?” Paul said.

“We’ll leave it there. It’s only a four-block walk to my office.”

“We going back tomorrow?”

“Yeah, I’m not through.”

“I only found three people on the list.”

“More than I’ve found so far.”

We went upstairs and went to bed.

It was nearly noon the next day before I found anything. It wasn’t a bloody dagger or even an Egyptian dung beetle sculptured from gold. It was a list of addresses. It wasn’t much, but it was all there was. It was on a single sheet of paper by itself in an unlabeled file folder in the back of the bottom file drawer.

“What’s important about that?” Paul said.

“I don’t know, but it’s the only thing that doesn’t have a simple explanation.”

I got a city directory out of the bottom drawer of my desk and thumbed through it, looking up the names of the people at the addresses. The fourth one I looked up was Elaine Brooks.

“Isn’t Elaine Brooks your father’s girl friend?”

“Yes.”

“This isn’t where she lives.”

Paul said, “I don’t know where she lives.”

“I do. I followed her to you, remember?”

“Maybe she used to live there.”

“Maybe.”

“She’s on my list,” he said.

“From the card file?”

“Yes.”

“Let me see this list.”

He gave it to me. There were two other names
besides Elaine Brooks. I consulted the city directory. Both the names were listed in the city directory as owning property at one or another address on the list. Elaine Brooks owned two addresses.

“The card file alphabetical?”

Paul said, “Yes.”

“Okay. I’m going to read you some names. You look them up and see if they are in your file. If they are, pull the card and give me the address.”

I went through the whole list of addresses, looking each up in the city directory and giving Paul the name I found. All of them were in the file. None of them were listed on the cards at the address in the city directory. “What kind of insurance is listed?” I said when we were through and all the cards were pulled.

“This one says casualty.”

“Yeah?”

“This one says homeowner’s.”

“Any of them say life?”

Paul ruffled through the cards. “No,” he said.

I took the cards and made a master list of names and both addresses and the kinds of insurance each had. All had casualty. Everyone was insured with a different company. When I was through, I said to Paul, “Let’s go take a look at this property.”

The first address was on Chandler Street in the south end. The south end was once rather elegant redbrick town houses. Then it fell into slum wino. Now it was coming back. A lot of upper-middle-class types were moving in and sandblasting the bricks and buying Dobermans and installing alarm systems and keeping the winos at bay. It was an interesting mix: black street kids; winos of many races; white women in tapered pants and spike heels; middle-aged men,
black and white, in Lacoste shirts. Our address was between a soul-food takeout and a package store. It was burned out.

“ ‘Bare ruined choirs,’ ” I said, “ ‘Where late the sweet birds sang.’ ”

“Frost?” Paul said.

“Shakespeare,” I said. “Why’d you think it was Frost?”

“ ’Cause you always quote Frost or Shakespeare.”

“Sometimes I quote Peter Gammons,” I said.

“Who’s he?”

“The
Globe
baseball writer.”

We drove to the next address on Symphony Road in the Back Bay. Symphony Road was students and what the school board called Hispanics. The address was a charred pile of rubble.

“Bare ruined church,” Paul said.

“Choirs,” I said. “Do we sense a pattern developing?”

“You think they’ll all be burned?”

“Sample’s a little small,” I said, “but the indices are strong.”

The third address was on Blue Hill Avenue in Mattapan. It was between a boarded-up store and a boarded-up store. It had burned.

“Where are we?” Paul said.

“Mattapan.”

“Is that part of Boston?”

“Yes.”

“God, it’s awful.”

“Like a slice of the South Bronx,” I said. “Life is hard here.”

“They’re all going to be burned,” Paul said.

“Yeah, but we gotta look.”

And we did. We looked in Roxbury and Dorchester
and Allston and Charlestown. In Hyde Park and Jamaica Plain and Brighton. The addresses were always obscure so that we sometimes crisscrossed the same neighborhoods several times, following our list. All the addresses were in unpretentious neighborhoods. All had been burned. It was dark when we got through, and a little rain was starting to streak my office windows.

I put my feet up on my desk and shrugged my shoulders, trying to loosen the back muscles that eight hours of city driving had cramped. “Your daddy,” I said, “appears to be an arsonist.”

“Why would he burn all those buildings down?”

“I don’t know that he burned them. He may have just insured them. But either way it would be for money. Buy it, burn it, collect the insurance. That’s his connection to Cotton. Your old man’s business was real estate and insurance. Cotton’s is money and being bad. Put them together and what have you got?”

“Bibbity-bobbity-boo,” Paul said.

“Oh, you know the song. How the hell could you?”

“I had it on a record when I was little.”

“Well, it fits. And then when your father needed a little cheap sinew to deal with his divorce situation, Cotton sent him Buddy Hartman and Hartman brought Harold and his musical blackjack.”

“What will you do now?” Paul said.

“Tomorrow I’m going to call up all these insurance companies and find out if your father was in fact the broker on these fire losses, and if they paid off.”

“The ones in the card file?”

“Yeah.”

“How will you know who to call?”

“I’ve done a lot of work for insurance companies. I know people in most of the claims departments.”

“Then what will you do?”

“Then I’ll file all of what I know for the moment and see what I can get on your mother.”

Paul was quiet.

“How do you feel?” I said.

“Okay,”

“This is awful hard.”

“It’s okay.”

“You’re helping me put the screws to your father and mother.”

“I know.”

“You know it’s for you?”

“Yes.”

“Can you do it?”

“Help you?”

“All of it. Be autonomous, be free of them, depend on yourself. Grow up at fifteen.”

“I’ll be sixteen in September.”

“You’ll be older than that,” I said. “Let’s get something to eat and go to bed.”

It was raining hard in the morning when Paul and I ran along the Charles River. It rained all day. I sat in my office and called insurance companies. Paul had finished his book on ballet. He went out and, at my suggestion, walked up to the Boston Public Library and used my card to take out a copy of
Catcher in the Rye
. Five minutes after he was back, Susan called.

“The line’s been busy for an hour,” she said.

“Broads,” I said. “Word’s out that I’m back in town and the broads have been calling since yesterday.”

“Paul with you?”

“Yes.”

“Let me speak to him, please.”