Five Classic Spenser Mysteries (48 page)

I held the phone out to Paul. “For you,” I said. “Susan.”

Paul took the phone and said, “Hello.”

Then he was quiet.

Then he said, “Okay.”

Then he was quiet.

Then he said, “Okay,” and hung up.

“She says there’s a prep school out in Grafton that specializes in drama, music, and dance,” he said. “She says she’ll take me out to look at it this afternoon if I want to go.”

“You want to go?”

“I guess so.”

“Good. You should. Is it a boarding school?”

“You mean live there?”

“Yes.”

“She didn’t say. Would I have to live there?”

“Maybe.”

“You don’t want me to live with you?”

“Eventually you’ll have to move on. Autonomy means self-reliance, not changing your reliance from your mother and father to me. I’m what they call in politics a transition coordinator.”

“I don’t think I want to go away to school.”

“Wait, see, take a look at the place. We’ll talk. I won’t make you do what you genuinely can’t stand to do. But keep open. Keep in mind that sometimes I go to unpleasant places and people shoot at me. There are drawbacks to living with me.”

“I don’t mind.”

“Some of the drawbacks might be mine,” I said.

“Oh.”

“Don’t make more of that than it is. If one of us starts fearing that honesty will hurt the other’s feelings, we’ve slid back some. I’m trying to work this out so it’s best for all of us, me as well as you. Susan too.”

He nodded.

“I’ve taken you this far. I won’t push you out of the nest until we both know you can fly. You understand that?”

“Yes.”

“You can trust me to do what I say. Do you know that?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Willing to make another trip out in the rain?”

“Yes.”

“I’m in a Dunkin’ Donut frenzy,” I said. “If you went up Boylston Street and bought some, and coffee to go, and hurried back before the coffee got cold, I might be able to make it until afternoon.”

He grinned. “Since I’ve known you you’ve been a health food freak.”

I gave him five dollars. He put on the yellow slicker jacket I’d bought him and left.

I called a guy in Chicago named Flaherty at Colton Insurance Company of Illinois. He told me that they had insured property in the name of Elaine Brooks, that six months later the building burned, and that while everyone guessed it was arson, no one could prove it and they paid and privately agreed not to insure Elaine again.

“Thing is,” he said, “if it was arson, it was also murder. Two winos were apparently cooping up in there and never got out. What they found was mostly charred bones and a muscatel bottle that had half melted.”

I said, “Thanks, Jack,” and noted the information on my master list.

He said, “You got anything I should know about on this thing, Spenser?”

“No, I’m into something else, this is just collateral, you know.”

“Well, don’t hold out on us. I throw a lot of investigative work your way.”

“Yeah, and it’s real exciting too,” I said.

“Don’t knock it, money’s good.”

“Money’s not everything, Jack,” I said.

“Maybe not, but you ever try spending sex?”

“There’s something wrong with that argument,” I said, “but I can’t think what right now. I may call you later with my comeback.”

“Keep in touch,” Flaherty said.

We hung up. Murder, two counts. Better and better. Or worse and worse, depending on where you stood. From where I stood it looked like enough to keep Mel Giacomin in line.

Paul came back with coffee and doughnuts. Plain for me. Two Boston creams for him—disgusting. I made some more of my calls. Everything was clicking in. Giacomin was involved with some kind of arson ring, and there was no doubt, though at the moment, no proof, that Harry Cotton was in it with him.

Susan showed up in the MG at two thirty. She had on a soft felt hat with a big floppy brim and a brass ring on the hatband. She also wore a light leather trench coat and high-heeled boots of the same color. I wished I were going to look at ballet schools with her. “This will be the real test,” I said to Susan. “If the instructional staff doesn’t attempt to seduce you
en masse
it will prove they’re gay.”

She wrinkled her nose at me. “I’ll tell them how big and tough you are,” she said. “Maybe they’ll hesitate long enough for us to escape.”

Paul said, “What if they attempt to
seduce me?
”

I grinned. “That would be further proof, I think.”

They left and I finished up my phone calls. There were no surprises.

I made the final notes on my master sheet and then got out some fresh bond paper and typed it all out neatly and went out to a copy shop and had two copies made and came back and filed the original in my office. I mailed the second one to myself at my apartment and stuck the third copy in my pocket for
handy reference. Also maybe for showing to Mel Giacomin along with threats. I looked at my watch. Four twenty. I had to get away from the desk.

I locked up the office, got into the Bronco, and cruised down to the waterfront. Henry Cimoli was sitting behind the office desk in the Harbour Health Club in white pants, sneakers, and a white T-shirt. He looked like the world’s toughest jockey. He had in fact been one of the best lightweight fighters around and gone fifteen rounds once and lost a split decision to Willie Pep. His arms bulged against the T-shirt and his short body moved like a compressed spring, a great deal of contained energy.

“Come to try and rescue what’s left, kid?” he said.

“Yeah. You think it’s too late?”

“Almost.”

I went to my locker and changed. In the exercise room there were weight machines, barbells, dumbbells, a heavy bag, two speed bags. The walls were mirrored. I started working on bench presses.

I was almost through my workout when Hawk came in at about seven. He wore silky-looking warm-up pants with the bottoms unzipped, and high white boxer’s shoes and no shirt. He had a pair of speed gloves in the hip pocket of the warmup pants and he carried a jump rope. Most of the people in the room eyed him covertly. He nodded at me, did a few stretching exercises, and began to jump rope. He jumped rope for a half hour, varying the step and speed, crisscrossing the rope.

As he finished I started on the speed bag. He hung the rope up and came over beside me and started on the other bag. As I began to get a rhythm down on the bag he began to punch in counterpoint. I grinned and started to whistle “Sweet Georgia Brown.”

He nodded and picked up the beat. We began to alternate, picking up the pace. Like a battle of two drummers from the forties. Hawk picked up the tempo, I picked it up a little more. Hawk used his elbows and fists. I alternated one hand then the other. People began to group around us and the rhythm of the bag and the sense of competition began to carry me. I concentrated as the bag was a wine-colored blur in time with Hawk’s. We did paradiddles and rolls, and some of the men in the exercise room cheered at one or another of us. Then they began to clap in rhythm to the bags and Hawk and I carried them with us until the place was in an uproar and Henry came in from the front desk and yelled at Hawk, “Telephone.”

Hawk did shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits on his bag and I responded and we stopped, and Hawk, grinning widely, went to the phone. The rest of the room cheered and clapped. I yelled after him.

“Hey, gee whiz, my dad’s got a barn, maybe we can put on a show.”

Hawk disappeared around the corner and I went to the heavy bag. When he came back his grin wasn’t as wide, but his face had a look of real pleasure.

He leaned on the other side of the bag while I pounded it.

“You going to like this, babe,” he said.

“You been drafted,” I said.

“You been messing with Harry Cotton, haven’t you?”

I dug a hook into the bag. “I spoke with him.”

“You got that slick way, you know, how you talk so sweet to people. Harry putting out a hit on you.”

“He’s too sensitive,” I said. “Call a guy a weasel
and tell him he smells bad and he goes right into a goddamned swivet,” I said.

“He do smell bad, that’s a fact,” Hawk said.

“You know Harry?”

“Oh, yes. Harry’s an important person in this town.”

“That him on the phone?”

“Yeah. He want me to whack you.” Hawk’s smile got wider. “He ask me if I know who you are. I say, yeah, I think so.”

I did a left jab and an overhand right.

“How much he offering?” I said.

“Five G’s.”

“That’s insulting,” I said.

“You’d have been proud of me,” Hawk said. “I told him that. I said I wouldn’t do it for less than ten. He say lot of people be happy to do it for five. I said that wasn’t the point. I said lot of people be happy to do it for nothing, but they can’t, ’cause they ain’t good enough. I said it’s a ten-thousand-dollar job at least. He say no.”

“Harry was always cheap,” I said.

“So I said no. Guess you safe again.”

“From you at least.” I did some low body punches into the bag. Hawk held it steady.

“Harry will hire cheap,” Hawk said. “He’ll hire some bum, don’t know no better. You’ll bury him and.…” Hawk spread his hands. “I got nothing going for a while. Maybe I hang around with you some.”

“What would the rate for hitting us both be?” I said.

“ ’Bout one hundred and thirty-two trillion,” Hawk said.

“Harry’s too cheap for that,” I said.

At nine o’clock I was at the Giacomin house in Lexington. I forced the back door and went in and turned on the lights. In Patty Giacomin’s bedroom was a small secretary with slender curving legs and gold stenciling. Her picture in a leather frame was on it. I opened the leaf and sat down on the small rush-bottomed stool in front of it and began to go through the contents. When I’d been here I’d seen Patty do her bills here, and there wasn’t much else but bill-payment receipts and canceled checks. The only handle I had besides her sweet Stephen was her periodic trips to New York.

In a half hour I found what I wanted: American Express receipts from the New York Hilton dated roughly a month apart going back several years. They were all room charges, she’d paid them all with her American Express card, and she’d kept the receipts. She kept all receipts apparently without discrimination. So there was nothing terribly significant about her keeping these. She probably didn’t know what was important, so she kept them all.

I went through everything else in the house and there was nothing else worth looking at. I took all the American Express receipts and Patty’s picture, turned off the lights, and closed the door.

The spring night was quiet in Lexington. The rain had stopped. Lights shone in people’s houses and there were open windows. Voices drifted out occasionally, and the sounds of television. It was late, but there were still cooking smells in the air. As I went toward my car, a cat slid past me and into the shrubs in the next yard. I thought about Harry Cotton’s contract. I touched the gun on my hip. The street, when I got to the car, was empty. In the circle of the streetlights moths flew without apparent purpose. The cat appeared from the shrubs and sat on its haunches under the streetlight and looked up at the moths. It was a yellow-striped cat with white chest and face and paws.

I got into the Bronco and started up and drove away from Emerson Road. The ball game was coming in from Milwaukee and it made the sound it always made, soft crowd murmur in the background, the voices of the announcers in familiar pattern, the occasional sound of the bat hitting the ball, the metallic stilted voice of the P.A. announcer, repeating the hitter’s last name. The sound seemed almost eternal.

It was nearly midnight when I got back to my apartment. Susan and Paul were still up watching a movie on television. Susan said, “There’s a sub out there if you haven’t eaten.”

I got the sandwich and a beer and came back into the living room. The movie was
An American in Paris
. “How was the Laurel School?” I said.

“The admissions guy was a feeb,” Paul said.

I looked at Susan. She nodded. “Regrettable but true,” she said. “Everything you hoped he wouldn’t be.”

“Effeminate?”

“Effeminate, affected, supercilious,” Susan said.

“Susan yelled at him,” Paul said. His eyes were bright.

I looked at Susan. “He was a pompous little twerp,” she said.

“Is he now aware of that?” I said.

“That’s what she told him,” Paul said.

“Did he get scared?” I said.

Susan said, “I think so.”

“Well,” I said. “It can’t be the only school in the world.”

There was an extended dance scene on the television screen. Paul watched it closely. We were quiet while I finished the sub and the beer. I went to the kitchen and put the can in the wastebasket and the plate in the dishwasher. I washed my hands and face at the kitchen sink and came back into the livingroom. There was a commercial on the tube.

I said to Paul, “You ever been to New York?”

He said, “No.”

“Want to go tomorrow?”

“Okay.”

“How about you, sugarplum?” I said to Susan.