Five Classic Spenser Mysteries (62 page)

“Good morning,” I said.

“Hi.” She offered the bag of Fritos to me. I took one and ate it. It wasn’t as bad as some things I’d eaten. The Nutter Butter cookies, for instance.

“Had breakfast?” I really know how to talk to kids. After that I could ask her how she was doing in school, or maybe her age. Really get her on my side.

She shook her head and nodded at the Fritos.

“You’d be better off eating the bag,” I said.

She giggled. “I bet I wouldn’t,” she said.

“Maybe not,” I said. “Bags aren’t nourishing anymore Now when I was a boy …”

She made a face and stuck out her tongue. “Oh,” I said, “you heard that line before?”

She nodded. I was competing with the top forty sounds in Boston playing loud in her earphone, and she was only half-listening to me. That was okay because I was only half-saying anything.

“You want to see Kevin’s hideout?” she said, one ear still fastened to the radio.

“Yes,” I said.

“Come on.” She got up carrying the radio and headed up the stairs. Punkin and I scrambled for second position. I won. Still got the old reflexes.

The second floor of the barn was unfinished. Exposed beams, subflooring. At one end a small room had been studded off and Sheetrock nailed up. Some carpenter tools lay on the floor near it, and a box of blue lathing nails had spilled on the floor It looked like a project Roger Bartlett was going to do in his spare time, and he didn’t have any spare time. There was scrap lumber and Sheetrock trimmings in a pile as if someone had swept them up and gone for a trash barrel and been waylaid. A number of four-by-eight plywood panels in a simulated wood-plank texture were leaning against a wall.

“In here,” Dolly said. And disappeared into the studded-off room. I followed. It was probably going to be a bathroom from the size and the rough openings that looked to be for plumbing. A makeshift partition had been constructed out of some paneling and two sawhorses. Behind it was a steamer trunk and a low canvas lawn chair. The steamer trunk was locked with a padlock. The floor was covered with a rug that appeared to be a remnant of wall-to-wall carpeting. The window looked out over the pool and
the back of the house. The wiring was in, and a bare light bulb was screwed into a porcelain receptacle. A string hung from it.

“What’s in the trunk?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Kevin always kept it locked up. He never let me in here.”

“Do your mother and father know about this place?”

“I doubt it. My father hasn’t worked up here since last summer, and my mother’s never been up here. She says it should be fixed up so she can have it for a studio. But she hasn’t ever come up. Just me and Kevin, and Kevin always kicked me out when he came up here. He didn’t want anyone to know about his place.”

“How come you’re telling me?”

She shrugged. “You’re a detective.”

I nodded. I was glad she said that because I was beginning to have my doubts.

“You get along with Kevin?” I asked.

“He’s creepy,” she said, “but he’s okay sometimes.” She shrugged again. “He’s my brother. I’ve known him all my life.”

“Okay, Dolly, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to break into that trunk. Maybe it won’t have anything that will help, but maybe it will, and the only way to know is to look. I know it’s not mine, but maybe it will help us find Kevin, all right?”

“Kevin will be mad.”

“I won’t tell him about your being here.”

“Okay.”

I found a pinch bar among the tools on the floor and pried the hasp off the trunk. Inside the cover of the trunk an eight-by-ten glossy was attached with adhesive tape, a publicity still of Vic Harroway in a body-building pose. In the trunk itself was a collection of body-building magazines, a
scrapbook, a pair of handsprings that you squeezed to build up your grip, and two thirty-pound dumbbells.

Dolly did an exaggerated shudder. “Gross,” she said.

“What?” I said.

“The guy in the picture. Ugh!”

“Do you know him?” I asked.

“No.”

I sat down in the lawn chair and picked up the first magazine in the pile. Dolly said, “Are you going to read that?”

I said, “I’m going to read them all.”

“Sick,” she said.

“They’re clues. That’s what I’m supposed to do—study clues and after studying enough of them I’m supposed to solve a mystery and …”

“Are you going to tell?” she said.

I knew what she meant. Kevin had hidden this stuff from his parents, for whatever reason.

“No,” I said. “Are you?”

“No.”

I opened a copy of
Strength and Health
. On the inside cover and spilling over onto page 1, there was an ad for high-protein health food and pictures of hugely muscled people who apparently ate it. There were badly laid-out ads for strength-training booklets, weight-lifting equipment, and choker bathing suits; and pictures of weight lifters and Mr. America contestants. On page 39 was a sepia-tone picture of Vic Harroway. He had on a white bikini and was posed on a beach in front of a low shelf of rock that kicked spray up as the sea hit it. His right arm was flexed to show the biceps. His left hand was clamped behind his neck, and he was flexed forward with his right knee bent and the toes of his left leg barely touching the ground. The sun glistened on his features, and his narrowed eyes were fixed on
something high and distant and doubtless grand behind the camera. Beauty is its own excuse for being. The caption said, “Vic Harroway, Mr. Northeastern America, Combines Weight Lifting and Yoga.” I read the story. It said the same thing in supermasculine prose that made me want to run out and uproot a tree.

While I read, Dolly Bartlett sat down against the wall with her knees drawn up to her chest and listened to her radio.

I went through all the strength magazines. They dated back five years, and each of them had a story on Vic Harroway. I learned how Vic trained down for “that polished look.” I learned Vic’s diet-supplement secrets for gaining “ten to fifteen pounds of solid muscles.” I learned Vic’s technique for developing “sinewy and shapely underpinnings.” I didn’t learn much about Vic’s theories on kidnapping and harassment or if he might know where Kevin Bartlett was.

I looked at the scrapbook. It was what I thought it would be. Clippings of Vic Harroway’s triumphs in body-building contests. Ads announcing the opening of a new health spa where Vic Harroway would be the supervisor of physical conditioning. Fifteen-year-old newspaper clippings of Vic Harroway as a high school football hero in Everett. Snapshots of Vic and one of Vic and Kevin with Vic’s arm around Kevin’s shoulder. Harroway was smiling. Kevin looked very serious.

“Did Kevin lift weights?” I asked Dolly.

“No. I remember he wanted to buy a set once, but my mother wouldn’t let him.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. She said it would make him big and beefy and stuff, you know?”

I nodded.

“They had a big fight about it.”

I nodded again.

“Would it?”

“Would it what?”

“Would it make him big and beefy?”

“Not if he did it right,” I said. I took the publicity shot of Harroway, put the magazines and the scrapbook back in the trunk, and closed it. Dolly and the dog and I went downstairs. The dog edged me out on the way down, and I was last. In the driveway Marge Bartlett was standing looking impatiently into the open barn. She had on a pale violet pants suit with huge cuffed bell-bottoms and blunt-nosed black shoes poking out underneath. A big burlap purse with a crocheted design hung from her shoulder. She wore white lipstick, and her nails were polished in a pale lavender.

“Come on, Dolly, time to go to Aunt Betty’s. Hop in the car.”

“Aw, Ma, I don’t want to go over there again.”

“Come on now, no arguing. Hop in the car I’ve got a lot of shopping to do. The party is tonight, and I don’t want you in the way. You know how nervous I get when I’m having a big party. And while I’m at the shopping center I don’t want you here alone. It’s too dangerous.”

I went to my car and put the photo in the glove compartment.

“Well, lemme stay with Mr. Spenser.”

Marge Bartlett shook her head firmly. “Not on your life. Mr. Spenser is my bodyguard, and he’ll have to go with me to the shopping center.” She clapped her hands once, sharply. “In the car.”

Dolly climbed into the backseat of the red Mustang. Marge Bartlett got in behind the wheel, and I sat beside her.
The dog stood in front of the car with his ears back and stared at us.

“Can I bring Punkin?” Dolly asked.

“Absolutely not. I don’t want him getting the car all muddy, and Aunt Betty can’t stand dogs anyway.”

“He’s not muddy,” Dolly said.

The cop in the Smithfield cruiser poked his head out the side window and said, “Where you going?”

“It’s all right. Mr. Spenser is with me. We’ll be gone most of the day, shopping.”

“Whoopee,” I said. “All day.”

The cop nodded. “Okay, Mrs. Bartlett. I’m going to take off then. You let us know when you’re back, and Chief’ll send someone up.”

He started the cruiser and headed down the drive. We followed. He turned left. We turned right.

The north shore shopping center was on high ground north off Route 128 in Peabody. Red brick, symmetrical evergreens, and parking for eight thousand cars. I discovered that Marge Bartlett was a member of the shopping center the way some people belong to a country club. Between ten fifteen and one twenty she charged $375 worth of clothes. I spent that time watching her, nodding approval when she asked my opinion, keeping a weather eye out for assailants, and trying not to look like a pervert as I stood around outside a series of ladies’ dressing rooms. I was glad I hadn’t worn my white raincoat. There were a lot of very well-shaped suburban ladies shopping in the same stores. Suburban ladies tended to wear their clothes quite snug, I noticed. I was alert for concealed weapons.

We got back to Smithfield at about a quarter of two. The house was still. Roger Bartlett worked Saturdays, and Dolly was going to spend the night with Aunt Betty. Punkin lay placidly in a hollow under some bushes to the right of the back door. Marge Bartlett held the door for me as I carried in the shopping bags. The dog came in behind us.

“Put them on the couch in the living room,” she said. “I want to call the caterer.”

There was a corpse in the living room. On the floor, face
down, with its head at a funny angle. I dropped the shopping bags and went back to the kitchen with my gun out.

Marge Bartlett was still on the phone with her back to me. No one was in sight. The back door was closed. The dog had settled under the kitchen table. I turned back to the living room and stood in the center, beside the corpse, and held my breath and listened. Except for Marge Bartlett talking with animation about a jellied salad, there was no sound.

I put the gun back in the hip holster and squatted down beside the corpse and looked at its face. It had been Earl Maguire. That’s it for the law practice, Earl. I picked up one hand and bent the forefinger back and forth. He was cold and getting stiff. I put the hand down. All the college and all the law school and all the cramming for the bar, and someone snaps your neck for you when you’re not much more than thirty. I looked around the room. A glass-topped rug was bunched toward Maguire’s body. A fireplace poker lay maybe two feet beyond Maguire’s outflung hand. An abstract oil painting was on the floor beneath a picture hook on the wall as if it had fallen.

I duck-walked over to the poker and looked at it without touching it. There was no sign of blood on it. I stood up and went to the front door. The lock button in the middle of the knob was in. The door was locked. I’d seen Marge Bartlett unlock the back door. I opened the front door. No sign of it being jimmied. There’d been no sign of jimmying on the back door. I’d have noticed when we came in. There weren’t any other doors. I walked across the front hall to the dining room. It was undisturbed except that the door to the liquor cabinet was open. There was a lot of booze inside. It didn’t look as if any was missing.

I heard Marge Bartlett hang up. I headed for the kitchen and cut her off before she got to the door.

“Stay here,” I said.

“Why?”

“Earl Maguire is dead in your living room.”

“My God, the party’s in six hours.”

“Inconsiderate bastard, wasn’t he,” I said.

She opened her mouth and then put both hands over it and pressed and didn’t say anything. “Sit there,” I said and steered her to a kitchen chair. She kept her hands over her mouth and watched me minutely while I called the cops. When she heard me say Maguire’s neck was broken, she made a muffled squeak.

Five minutes later Trask arrived with a bald, fat old geezer who carried a black bag like the ones doctors used to carry when they made house calls. He eased himself down on his knees beside the body and looked at it. He was too fat to squat.

“When’d he die, Doc?” Trask had a notebook out and held a yellow Bic Banana pen poised over it to record the answer.

The doctor was strained for breath, kneeling down like that; it didn’t help his temperament. “Before we got here,” he said.

Trask got a little redder “I know that, goddamn it. What I want to know is how long before we got here?”

“How the hell do I know, George? I don’t even know what killed him, yet. His neck looks broken.” The doctor picked up Maguire’s head and turned it back and forth. A dark bruise ran along his cheek from the earlobe to the corner of his mouth. “Yep, neck’s broken.”

“What time you find him, Spenser?” Trask decided to question me. It wasn’t going well with the doctor.

“Quarter of two.”

“Exactly?”

“Approximately.”

“Well, goddamn it, can’t you be more exact? You’re supposed to be some kind of hot stuff. I want to know the exact time of the discovery of the deceased. It could be vital.”

“Only in the movies, Trask.”

Trask looked past me and said, “Hello, Lieutenant.” I turned and it was Healy. He had on the same straw hat with the big headband that I’d seen him in before. His jacket was gray tweed with a muted red line forming squares in it. Gray slacks, white shirt with a button-down collar, and a narrow black knit tie. Tan suede desert boots. He had his hands in his hip pockets, and his face was without expression as he looked down at the body.