Five Classic Spenser Mysteries (76 page)

“Has she been advised of her rights?”

Belson snorted. “Are you kidding. If she were shooting at me with a flame thrower I’d have to advise her of her rights before I shot back. Yes, she’s been advised.”

“Have you, Miss Orchard?”

“Yes, sir.” She was numb and scared, and entirely submissive.

“Okay, come over here and we’ll talk.” She did and Belson and I stood silently watching them. I suddenly realized how tired I was. I’d slept about three hours. As we stood there, Quirk came in with two other dicks. He looked over at Haller and Terry Orchard, said nothing, and walked into his cubicle. Belson went in after him.

“Stick around,” he said. And closed the door. The two dicks sat down at desks, and looked at nothing.

At the other end of the office a black cop with thick hands and a broken nose was talking into a telephone receiver cradled on one shoulder. An old guy in green coveralls came through dragging a cardboard carton with a rope handle and emptying the ashtrays and wastebaskets into it. Haller was still talking to Terry. And I thought about all the times I’d spent in shabby squad rooms like this. Sometimes it felt like all the rooms I was ever in looked out onto alleys. And I thought about how it must feel to be twenty and alone and be in one at 5:30
A.M.
and
not sure you’d get out. The steam pipes hissed. I wanted to hiss back.

More than that I wanted to run. The room was hot and stuffy. The air was bad. I wanted to get out, to get in my car and drive north. In my mind I could see the route, over the Mystic Bridge up Route One, north, maybe to Ipswich or Newburyport where the houses were stately and old and the air was clean and cold and full of the sea. Where there’s a kind of mellowness and a memory of another time and another America. Probably never was another America though. And if I headed out that way I’d probably be sitting around the police station in Ipswich, smelling the steam pipes and the disinfectant and wondering if some poor slob deserved what he was getting.

Quirk came out of his office. And looked at Haller. Then turned to me.

“Come in and talk.”

I did. I told the same story to Quirk that I had to Belson. Exactly the same way. Quirk listened without a word. Looking straight at me all the time I talked. When I was through he said, “Okay, wait outside.”

I did. He called Terry Orchard in. Haller went with her. The door closed. I sat some more. The dick at the end of the room still talked into the phone. The two that had come in with Quirk continued to sit and look elaborately at nothing. The sun had come up and shone into one corner of the room. Dust motes drifted in languidly.

“I can’t stand it anymore,” I said. “I’ll confess, just don’t give me the silent treatment anymore.”

The two detectives looked at me blankly. “Confess what?” one of them said. He had long curly sideburns.

“Anything you want, just no more of the cold shoulder.”

Sideburns said to his partner, “Hey, Al, ain’t he a
funny guy? Right before you go off duty after working all night it’s really great to have a funny guy like him around so you can go home happy. Don’t you feel that way, Al?”

Al said, “Aw, screw him.”

More silence. I got up and walked to the window. There was a heavy wire mesh across it so suspects wouldn’t jump out, drop three stories to the ground, and run off. The windows were grimy, with a kind of ancient grime that seemed to have sunk into the glass. Three floors below a thin Puerto Rican kid with pointed shoes came out of the back of the coffee shop with a bucket and poured hot dirty water into the street. It steamed in the cold briefly. I looked at my watch. 6:40. The kid had got up awful early to come in and mop the floor. I wondered how late tonight he’d be there.

Belson came out of Quirk’s office with Terry, through the squad room, and out. Haller came out too, and walked over to me.

“They’ve gone down to the lab. I think they’ll book her,” he said. I didn’t say anything.

He said, “Quickly, I wanted to check her story with you. She was asleep with her boyfriend in their apartment. Two men apparently known to Powell entered. Shot Powell, forced her to shoot Powell’s body, drugged her, and left. She called you. You came. Sobered her up, got her story. Called the cops.”

“That’s it,” I said.

“She knows you because the university employed you to find a missing rare book.”

“Manuscript,” I said.

“Okay, manuscript.… You got in touch with her because the campus security man suggested that an organization she was part of might have taken it. She had your card. In trouble, she called you.”

“Right again,” I said.

“As stories go it’s not a winner,” Haller said.

“I know,” I said.

“She’s convincing when she tells it, though,” said Haller.

“What’s its effect on Quirk?” I asked.

“Hard to say. He doesn’t show much, but I don’t think he’s easy about it. I think he’ll book her, but I don’t think he’s sure she’s guilty.”

“What do you think?” I asked.

“All my clients are innocent.”

“Yeah,” I said, “of something, anyway.”

While we waited, the shift changed. Al and Sideburns left. The black cop with the phone departed. The day people came in. Faces shaved, wind-reddened. Smelling of cologne. Some of them had coffee in paper cups they’d bought on the way in. It smelled good. No one offered me any. Belson came back into the office with Terry. They went back into Quirk’s office. Haller with them. Quirk yelled from inside.

“Spenser, come in. You might as well hear the rest.”

I went in. It was crowded in there. Quirk was behind his desk. Terry in a straight chair beside it. Belson, Haller, and I standing against the wall. Quirk’s desk was absolutely bare except for a tape recorder and a transparent plastic cube that on all sides contained pictures of a woman, children, and an English setter.

Quirk turned the recorder on. “All right, Miss Orchard, your story and Spenser’s match. But that proves nothing much. You had plenty of time to arrange it before we were called. Can you think of any reason why two men would wish to come and kill Dennis Powell?”

“No, I don’t know—maybe.” Terry spoke barely above
a whisper, and she seemed to sway slightly in the chair as she spoke.

“Which is it, Miss Orchard?” Quirk’s voice was almost entirely without inflection and his thick, pockmarked face was entirely impassive. Terry shook her head.

Haller said, “Really, Lieutenant, Miss Orchard is about to fall from the chair.” When Haller talked, the orange level light on the recorder flared brightly.

“Which is it, Miss Orchard?” Quirk said again, as if Haller hadn’t spoken.

“Well, I think he was involved in the manuscript.”

“Which manuscript?”

“The one that Mr. Spenser is looking for, the whatchamacallit manuscript.”

I said, “Godwulf,” and Quirk said, “Is it the Godwulf Manuscript, Miss Orchard?”

She nodded.

Quirk said, “Say yes or no, Miss Orchard; the recorder can’t pick up signs.”

“Yes,” she said.

“How was he involved?”

“I don’t know, just that he was, and some faculty member was. I heard him talking on the phone one day.”

“What did they say?”

“I can’t remember.”

“Then why do you think it involved the theft of a manuscript?”

“I just know. You know how you remember having an idea from a conversation but don’t remember the conversation itself, you know?”

“Why do you think a faculty member is involved, Miss Orchard?”

She shook her head again. “Same reason,” she said.

“Do you think one of the men who you say killed Powell was a professor?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. They didn’t look like professors.”

“What did they look like?”

“It’s hard to remember. It was so fast. They were both big and had on dark topcoats and hats, regular felt hats, like businessmen wear. The one who shot Dennis had big sideburns, like Prince Albert, you know, along his jaw. He was sort of fat.”

“Black or white?”

She looked startled. “White,” she said.

“Why would the theft of a manuscript cause two big white men in hats and topcoats to come to your apartment at two thirty
A.M.
and kill Powell and frame you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why—” Quirk stopped. Tears were running down Terry Orchard’s face. She made no sound. She sat still with her eyes closed and the tears coming down her face.

I said, “Quirk, for crissake …”

He nodded, turned to Belson.

“Frank, get a matron and book her.”

Belson took her arm. She stood up.

There was no sign that she heard him, or that she heard anything.

Belson took her out. Haller went with her.

Quirk said, “So far you’re out of it, Spenser. I got nothing to hold you for. But if something does come up I want you to be where I don’t have to look for you.”

I got up. “There are whole days at a time, Lieutenant, that go by without me ever giving a real goddamn about what you want.”

Quirk took my gun out of his desk and handed it to me, butt first. “Beat it,” he said.

I put the gun away, went down the stairs three flights and out the front door. There were no cameramen, no TV trucks. It was cold and the wet snow-rain had frozen into gray lumpy ice. I went around the corner, got in my car, drove home, drank two glasses of milk, and went to bed.

The phone woke me again. I squinted against the brutal bright sunlight and answered.

“Spenser?”

“Yeah.”

“Spenser, this is Roland Orchard.” He paused as if waiting for applause.

I said, “How nice for you.”

He said, “What?”

I said, “What do you want, Mr. Orchard?”

“I want to see you. How soon can you get here?”

“As soon as I feel like it. Which may be a while.”

“Spenser, do you know who I am?”

“I guess you’re Terry Orchard’s father.”

He hadn’t meant that. “Yes,” he said. “I am. I am also senior partner of Orchard, Bonner and Blanch.”

“Swell,” I said. “I buy all your records.”

“Spenser, I don’t care for your manner.”

“I’m not selling it, Mr. Orchard. You called me. I didn’t call you. If you want to tell me what you want without showing me your scrapbook, I’ll listen. Otherwise, write me a letter.”

There was a long silence. Then Orchard said, “Do you have my address, Mr. Spenser?”

“Yeah.”

“My daughter is home, and I have not gone into the office, and we would very much like you to come to the house. I expect to pay you.”

“I will come out in about an hour, Mr. Orchard,” I said, and hung up.

It was a little after noon. I got up and stood a long time under the shower. I’d had about four and a half hours’ sleep and I needed more. Ten years ago I wouldn’t have. I put on my suit—I wasn’t sure you could get onto West Newton Hill without one—made and ate a fried egg sandwich, drank a cup of coffee, and went out. I should have made the bed. I knew I would hate finding it unmade when I came back.

It was cold and bright out. It took five minutes for the heater in the car to get warm enough to melt the ice on my windows, and another five minutes for it to melt. I had no ice scraper.

By the Mass Turnpike it is less than ten minutes from downtown Boston to West Newton. From West Newton Square to the top of West Newton Hill is a matter of fifty thousand dollars. Status ascends as the hill rises, and at the top live the rich. It is old rich on West Newton Hill. Doctor rich, professor rich, stockbroker rich, lawyer rich. The new rich, the engineer rich, and the technocratic rich live in developments named after English kings in towns like Lynnfield and Sudbury.

Roland Orchard looked to be a rich man’s rich man. His home was large and white and towering as one came up the hill toward it. It occupied most of the lot it was built on. New rich seem to want a lot of land for a gardener to manicure. Old rich don’t seem to give a damn. Across the front and around one side of the house was a wide porch, empty in the winter but bearing the wear marks of summer
furniture. Above the door was a fan-shaped stained glass window. I rang the bell. A maid opened the door. Her black skin, devoid of make-up, shone as though freshly burnished. Her almond-colored eyes held a knowledge of things that West Newton Hill didn’t want to hear about.

She said, “Yes, sir.”

I gave her one of my cards. The one with only my name on it.

“Yes, Mr. Spenser. Mrs. Orchard is expecting you in the study.”

She led me down a polished oak-floored hall, past a curving stairway. The hall—it was more like a corridor—ran front to back, the depth of the house. At the far end a floor to ceiling window opened out onto the backyard. The coils of a grapevine framed the window. The rest was dirty snow. The maid knocked on a door to the left of the window; a woman’s voice said, “Come in.” The maid opened the door, said “Mr. Spenser,” and left.

It was a big room, blond wood bookcases built in on three walls. A fieldstone fireplace covered the fourth wall. There was a fire going, and the room was warm and smelled of woodsmoke. Mrs. Orchard was standing when I came in. She was darkly tanned (not Miami, I thought, West Palm Beach, probably) and wearing a white pants suit and white boots. Her hair was shag cut and tipped with silver, and the skin on her face was very tight over her bones. She had silver nail polish and wore heavy Mexican-looking silver earrings. A silver service and a covered platter on a mahogany tea wagon stood near the fire. A chiffon stole was draped over the back of the couch, and a novel by Joyce Carol Oates lay open on the coffee table.

As I walked toward her she stood motionless, one hand
extended, limp at the wrist, toward me. I felt as if I were walking into a window display.

“Mr. Spenser,” she said. “It’s very nice of you to come.”

“That’s okay,” I said.

I didn’t know what to do with her hand, shake it or kiss it. I shook it, and the way she looked made me suspect I’d chosen wrong.

“My husband had to go into the office for a bit; he should be back soon.”

I said, “Uh huh.”

“He might have stopped off at the club for handball and a rubdown. Rolly works very hard to stay in shape.”