Five Classic Spenser Mysteries (56 page)

I gave the paper back to Healy and raised my eyebrows.

“Yeah,” Healy said. “I know.”

“Know what? What do you mean by that?” Marge Bartlett said.

“It’s an odd note and an odd set of instructions,” I said. “Can you get the fifty?”

Bartlett nodded. “Murray Raymond, down the bank, will gimme the dough. I can put the business up as collateral. I already talked to him, and he’s getting me the money from Boston.”

“What’s funny about the instructions?” Marge Bartlett said. “Why do I have to be there?”

Healy answered her “I don’t know why you have to be there except what they said, maybe to keep some kid from finding the bag and taking it home. The instructions are complicated in the wrong ways. For instance, they obviously want the bag to be where they can grab it on the move, but why there? And why no instructions about the kinds of money and the denominations of the bills? Why give us two days lead time like that to set up a stake?”

“But they needed to give Rog time to get the money,” Trask said.

“Yeah, but they didn’t need to tell us where they were going to pick it up,” I said.

“Right,” Healy said. “A call five minutes beforehand would have done that, and left us nothing to do but sit around and wonder.”

“And why the mail?” I said.

“What’s wrong with the mail?” Roger Bartlett said.

“That’s one reason they had to give you lead time,” Healy said. “They can’t be sure when you’ll get the letter, so they have to give themselves away several days ahead.”

“What do you mean a stake?” Marge Bartlett asked.

“That’s the stakeout,” Trask answered. “We conceal ourselves in the adjacent area so’s to be in a position to apprehend the kidnappers when they come for the ransom.”

“Apprehend,” Healy said, and whistled admiringly.

I said, “Adjacent isn’t bad either, Lieutenant.”

“What’s wrong with you guys?” Trask said.

“You talk terrific,” I said, “but I’m not sure you want to apprehend the culprits in the adjacent area. Maybe you might want to place them under close surveillance until they lead you to the victim. You know?”

“I don’t want anything like that,” Margery Bartlett said. And she shook her head. “I want nothing like that at all. They might get mad if they saw you. And they said—about his head—I couldn’t stand that.”

“I don’t want that either,” Roger Bartlett said. “I mean, it’s only money, you know. I want to do what they say, and when it’s over then you can catch them. I mean, it’s only money, you know?”

Trask put his hand on Margery Bartlett’s again. “We’ll do just as you ask, Marge, just as you ask.”

Healy shook his head. “A mistake,” he said. “Your odds are better on getting the kid back if you let us in on it.”

Margery Bartlett looked at me. “What does he mean?”

I took a deep breath. “He means that your best chance to get Kevin back okay is to have us find him. He means they might take the ransom and kill him anyway, or they might not. There’s no way to tell. The statistics are slightly in favor of the cops. More kidnap victims survive the kidnapping when rescued by the police than when turned loose by the kidnappers. Not many more; I’d say it’s about fifty-five percent to forty-five percent.”

Healy said, “Maybe a little closer. But what else have you got?”

Roger Bartlett said, “I don’t want him hurt.”

Margery Bartlett put her face down in her hands and began to wail.

Her husband put one arm around her shoulder She
shrugged it away and cried louder. “Marge,” he said. “Jesus, Marge, we gotta do something. Spenser. what should we do?” Tears formed in his eyes and began to slide down his face.

I said, “We’ll stake it out.”

“But …”

“We’ll stake it out,” I said again. “We’ll be cool about it. We got two days to set it up.”

Trask said, “Now just hold on, Spenser. This is my town, and I decide whether or not we do any surveillance.”

Healy let the front legs of his chair down slowly to the floor, put his folded hands on the tabletop, leaned forward slightly, and with no inflection in his voice said, “George, please keep your trap shut until we are finished talking.” Trask flushed. He opened his mouth and closed it. He looked hard at Healy for a minute, and then his eyes shifted away.

“Now,” Healy continued. “George, here’s what I want you to do. I want you to go down to the town hall and get some maps of that area from the surveyor’s office and bring them back. And together we will go over them.” He turned toward the Smithfield patrolman named Paul. “Marsh, I want you to take these two items into Ten-ten Commonwealth and have the crime lab go over them. You know people in there?”

Paul said, “Yessir, I been in there before.”

Healy handed him the two envelopes. Paul started to leave, looked uncertainly at Trask, then at Healy. Healy nodded. Paul left, holding the two envelopes under his raincoat. Trask sat looking at his knuckles. The muscles at his jaw hinge were clenched. There was a tic in his left eyelid.

“The maps, George,” Healy said. Their eyes locked again, briefly. Then Trask got up, put on a yellow slicker,
and went out. He slammed the door. In the kitchen it was quiet except for Margery Bartlett’s sobbing. Her husband stood about three feet from her, his arms hanging straight down as if he didn’t know what to do with them.

Earl Maguire said, “We’d better get a doctor over here. He can give her something. Who’s your doctor, Rog? I’ll call him for you.”

“It’s there by the phone,” Bartlett said. “Croft, Doctor Croft. Have him come over. Tell him what happened. Tell him she needs something. That’s a good idea. Tell him to come over and give her something.”

Healy stood up, took off his coat, hung it over the back of his chair, loosened his tie, and sat back down. He nodded toward the chair Trask had left. “Sit down, Spenser,” he said. “We got some work to do.”

Margery Bartlett had gone upstairs to lie down, Dr. Croft had come over and given her a shot. Roger Bartlett had gone to a neighbor’s house to pick up his daughter. Trask had brought back the maps, and he and Healy and I were looking at them spread out on the kitchen table. A small slick-haired state cop in plainclothes and rimless glasses had hooked a tape recorder to the phone in the den off the kitchen and sat next to it with earphones, reading a copy of
Playboy
he’d found in the magazine rack. He turned it sideways to look at the centerfold.

“Sonova bitch,” he said, “hair and all. You see this, Lieutenant?”

Healy didn’t look up. “If you gotta read that garbage, read it, but don’t narrate it.”

The little cop held the magazine out at arm’s length. “Sonova bitch,” he said.

Healy said, “What’s up here, back of the riding stable?”

“Nothing,” Trask said, “just woods. It’s the west end of the Lynn Woods. Runs for miles back on into Lynn.”

“Hills?”

“Yeah, low ones; it slopes up back of the stable riding ring.

“Can we put someone up there with glasses?”

“Sure, the woods are thick. He could climb a tree if he wanted.”

“You know the people at the stable?”

“Sure.”

“Can we put somebody in there?”

“In the stable?”

Healy said, “I don’t mean inside the stable. Can we have someone posing as an employee?”

“Oh yeah, sure. I’ll set it up.”

Healy made some notes on a small notepad he’d taken from inside his coat. He used a big red fountain pen that looked like one my father had used when I was small.

“If they pick up the money here,” I said, “that’s northbound. Where’s the first place they can get onto Route 1 north?”

“Saugus,” Healy said. “Here, by the shopping center.”

“And the first place they can get off?”

“Here, about two hundred yards up, at this intersection. Otherwise they could dip down through the underpass here and head up Route 1 or turn off here at 128. We can put a couple of people at each place.”

“And a walkie-talkie up on the hill with the glasses?”

Healy nodded. “We’ll put an unmarked car here.” He put a cross on the map at the intersection of Route 1 and Salem Street. “Here, here, he could U-turn at the lights. So here, southbound.” Healy marked out eleven positions on the map.

“That’s a lot of cars,” Trask said.

“I know. We’ll have your people use their own cars and supply them with walkie-talkies. How many people can you give me?”

“Everybody; twelve men. But who’s going to pay them per diem?”

Healy looked at him. “Per diem?”

“For the cars. They’re supposed to get a per diem
mileage allowance for the use of their own cars on official business. This could mount up if all of them do it. And I have to answer to a town meeting every year.”

I said, “Do you accept Master Charge?”

Trask said, “It’s not funny. You’ve never had to answer to a town meeting. They’re a bunch of unreasonable bastards at those things.”

Healy said, “The state will rent the cars. I’ll sign a voucher. But if you screw this up, you’ll learn what an unreasonable bastard really is.”

“There won’t be any screw-up. I’ll be right on top of every move my people make.”

“Yeah,” Healy said.

“Who you going to put into the stable?” I asked Healy.

“You want to do it? You’re the least likely to be recognized.”

“Yeah.”

“You know anything about horses?”

“Only what I read in the green sheet.”

“It doesn’t matter. We’ll go up and look around.”

Healy put on his coat, tightened his tie, put the snap-brimmed straw hat squarely on his head, and we went out. The rain had started again. Healy ignored it. “We’ll go in your car,” he said. “No need to have them looking at the radio car parked up there. Stick here, Miles,” he said to the cop leaning against the cruiser. He had on a yellow rain slicker now. “I’ll be back.”

“Yes, sir,” Miles said.

I backed out, pulling the car up on the grass to get around the state cruiser.

“Your roof leaks,” Healy said.

“Maybe I can get the state to give me per diem payment for a new one,” I said.

Healy said nothing. The stable was about ten minutes
from the Bartletts’ home. We drove there in silence. I pulled into the parking lot in front of the stable, parked, and shut off the motor. The stable was maybe one hundred yards in from the road. The access to it was between a restaurant and a liquor store. The restaurant was roadside colonial: brick, dark wood and white plastic, flat-roofed. In front was an enormous incongruous red and yellow sign that advertised home cooking and family-style dining and cocktails. The store was glass-fronted; the rest was artificial fieldstone. It too had a flat roof rimmed in white plastic. In the window was an inflated panda with a sign around his neck advertising a summer cooler. Across the top of the store was a sign that said Package Store in pink neon. Two of the letters were out. The parking lot narrowed to a driveway near the stable.

The stable looked like someplace you’d go to rent a donkey. It was a one-story building with faded maroon siding, the kind that goes on in four-by-eight pregrooved panels. The trim was white, and the nails had bled through so that it was rust streaked. The roof was shingled partly in red and partly in black. Through it poked three tin chimneys. Next to it was a riding ring of unpainted boards and the trailer part of a tractor trailer rig, rusted and tireless on cinder blocks. In front of the stable parked among the weeds were five horse trailers, an old green dump truck with V-8 on the front, an aqua-colored ’65 Chevy hardtop, a new Cadillac convertible, and a tan ’62 Chevy wagon. A sign, Solid Fill Wanted, stood at the edge of the road, and a pile of old asphalt, bricks, paving stones, tree stumps, gravel, crushed stone, sewer pipe, a rusting hot water tank, three railroad ties, and a bicycle frame settled into the marshy ground behind it. Marlboro country.

Healy looked at it all without speaking. Carefully. A sea gull lit on the containerized garbage back of the restaurant
and began working on a chunk of something I couldn’t identify through the rain.

“Let’s get out,” Healy said. We did. The rain was steady and warm and vertical. No wind slanted it. Healy had on no raincoat but seemed not to notice. I turned the collar up on my raincoat. We walked down toward the stable. The bare earth around it had been softened into a swamp of mud, and it became hard to walk. On the other side of the riding ring a handmade sign said Bridle Path, and an arrow pointed to a narrow trail that led into the woods. We walked back out to the parking lot and stood at the edge of Route 1 at the spot where Mrs. Bartlett was to stand. Cars rushed past in a hiss of wet pavement. To the left the road curved out of sight beyond a hill. To the right it dipped into a tunnel with a service road branching off to the right and parallel. Two hundred yards down was a light on the service road and a cross street.

Healy turned and headed back toward the stable. I followed. Healy seemed to assume I would. I walked a little faster so I’d be beside him, not behind him. I was beginning to feel like a trainee.

At the far end of the stable was a door marked Office. The torn screen door was shut, but the wooden door inside was open and a television set was tuned to a talk show. “Were you first into transcendental meditation before or after you made this picture?” “During, actually. We were in location in Spain …” Healy rapped on the door, and a dark-haired man answered. He was wearing black Levi’s jeans and a white T-shirt that was too small for him. His stomach spilled over his belt and showed bare where the T-shirt gapped. His skin was dark and moist-looking, and his face sank into several layers of carelessly shaved chin. He went perfectly with the stable. He also smelled strongly of garlic and beer.

“Yeah?”

I said, “I’d like to rent a high-spirited palomino stallion with a hand-tooled Spanish leather saddle and silver-studded bridle, please.” The man looked at me with his eyes squinting, as if the light were too bright.

“A what?” he said.

“Shut up, Spenser,” Healy said and showed his badge to the fat man. “May we come in, please?”

The fat man stepped back from the door. “Sure, sure, come on in; I’m just having lunch.”