Five Classic Spenser Mysteries (77 page)

“Uh huh.”

“What do you do, Mr. Spenser? You look to be in excellent condition. Do you work out?”

“Not at the club,” I said.

“No,” she said. “Of course not.”

I took off my coat. “May I sit down?” I said.

“Oh, I’m sorry, of course, sit down. Will you have some coffee, or tea? I had some sandwiches made up. Would you like one?”

“No, thank you, I ate before I came. I’ll take coffee though, black.”

“You must pardon me, Mr. Spenser, my manners are really much better. It’s just that I’ve never been involved with policemen and all. And I have never really spoken to a private detective before. Are you carrying a gun?”

“I thought I’d risk West Newton without one,” I said.

“Yes, of course. You’re sure you won’t have a sandwich?”

“Look, Mrs. Orchard, I spent most of last night with your daughter and a corpse. I spent the rest of last night
with your daughter and the cops. The last I knew she was in jail for murder. Your husband says she’s home. Now he and you didn’t get me out here to make sure I was eating properly. What do you want?”

“My husband will be along soon, Mr. Spenser; he’ll explain. Rolly handles these things. I do not.” She looked straight at me as she talked and leaned forward a little. She had large blue eyes, and she wore eye shadow, I noticed. I bet the eyes got her a lot that she wanted. Especially when she looked right at you and leaned forward a little as she talked. She turned slightly on the couch and tucked one leg under the other, and I got the long line of her thigh and the jut of her sharp breasts. Her body looked lean and tight. A little sinewy for my taste. She kept the pose. I wondered if I was supposed to bark.

She picked up the book. “Do you read much, Mr. Spenser?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Do you enjoy Miss Oates?”

“No.”

“Oh, really? Why on earth not?”

“I’m probably insensitive,” I said.

“Oh, I don’t think so, Mr. Spenser. What little I’ve heard Terry say of you suggests quite the contrary.”

“Where is Terry?”

“In her room. Her father has asked that she talk with no one except in his presence.”

“How’s she feel about that?”

“After what she’s gotten herself into and what she’s putting us through, she’s learning to do what she’s told.”

There was a triumphant undertone in Mrs. Orchard’s voice. I said nothing.

“Would you put another log on the fire, Mr. Spenser? It
seems to be going low, and Rolly always likes a blazing fire when he comes in.”

It was a way of establishing relationships, I thought, as I got a log from the basket and set it on top of the fire—get me to do her bidding. I’d known other women like that. If they couldn’t get you to do them little services, they felt insecure. Or maybe she just wanted another log in the fireplace. Sometimes I’m deep as hell.

The door to the study opened and a man came in. He wore a dark double-breasted blazer with a crest on the pocket, a thick white turtleneck sweater, gray flared slacks, and black ankle boots with a lot of strap and buckle showing. His hair was blond and no doubt naturally curly; it contrasted nicely with his tan. He was a slender man, shorter than I by maybe an inch and maybe ten years older. Under the tan his face had a reddish flush which might be health or booze.

“Spenser,” he said, and put out his hand, “kind of you to come.” I shook hands with him. He wasn’t being the top-exec-used-to-instant-obedience. He was being the gracious-man-of-affluence-putting-an-employee-at-ease.

He said to his wife, “I’ll have coffee, Marion.”

She rose and poured him coffee. She put several small triangular sandwiches on a plate, put the coffee cup in the little depression on the plate that was made to hold it, and placed it next to a red leather wing chair.

Orchard sat down, carefully hiking his trouser legs up at the knee so they wouldn’t bag. I noticed he had a thick silver ring on his little finger.

“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, Spenser, but I don’t like to stay out of work if I can help it. Married to the job, I guess. Just wanted to make sure everything was running smoothly.”

He took a delicate sip of coffee and a small bite of one of the sandwiches.

“I wish to hire you, Mr. Spenser, to see that my daughter is exonerated of the charges leveled against her. I was able to have her released on bail in my custody, but it took a good deal of doing and I had to collect a number of favors to do it. Now I want this mess cleared up and the suspicion eliminated from my name and my home. The police are working to convict. I want someone working to acquit.”

“Why not have Terry join us?” I said.

“Perhaps later,” Orchard said, “but first I want to speak with you for a time.”

I nodded. He went on. “I would like you to give me a complete rundown of the circumstances by which you became involved with Terry up to and including last night.”

“Hasn’t Terry told you?”

“I want your version.”

I didn’t want to tell him. I didn’t like him. I did like his daughter. I didn’t like his assumption that our versions would differ. I said, “Nope.”

“Mr. Spenser. I am employing you to investigate a murder. I want a report of what you’ve discovered so far.”

“First, you may or may not be hiring me. You’ve offered. I haven’t accepted. So at the moment I owe you nothing. That includes how I met your daughter, and what we did.”

“Goddammit, Spenser, I don’t have to take that kind of insolence from you.”

“Right,” I said, “you can hire another Hawkshaw. The ones with phones are in the yellow pages under
SLEUTH
.”

I thought for a moment that Orchard was going to get up and take a swing at me. I felt no cold surge of terror. Then he thought better of it, and leaned back in his chair.

“Marion,” he said, “I’ll have some brandy. Would you join me, Mr. Spenser?” I looked at my watch; it was two thirty. He really handled stress well. I decided what the flush under the tan was.

“Yeah. I’ll have some. Thank you.”

Marion Orchard’s face looked a little more tightly stretched over her good bones as she went to the sideboard and poured two shots of brandy from a decanter into crystal snifters. She brought them back to us, handed one to me and one to her husband.

Orchard swirled it in his glass and took a large swallow. I tried mine. It was the real stuff okay, barely liquid at all as it drifted down my throat. A guy who served brandy like that couldn’t be all bad.

“Now look, Spenser. Terry is our only child. We’ve lavished every affection and concern on her. We have brought her up in wealth and comfort. Clothes, the best schooling, Europe. She had her own horse and rode beautifully. She made us proud. She was an achiever. That’s important. We do things in this family. Marion rides and hunts as well as any man.”

I looked at Marion Orchard and said. “Hi ho, Silver.”

Orchard went on. I was not sure he’d heard me.

“Then when it came time for college, she insisted on going to that factory. Can you imagine the reaction of some of my associates when they ask me where my daughter goes to school and I tell them?” It was a rhetorical question. I could imagine, but I knew he wasn’t looking for an answer. “Against my best judgment I permitted her to go. And I permitted her to live there rather than at home.” He shook his head. “I should have known better. She got in with the worst element in a bad school and …” He stopped, drank another large slug from his snifter, and
went on. “She never gave us any trouble till then. She was just what we wanted. And then in college, living on the very edge of the ghetto, sleeping around, drugs. You’ve seen her, you’ve seen how she dresses, who she keeps company with. I don’t even know where she lives anymore. She rarely comes home, and when she does it’s as if she were coming only to flaunt herself before us and our friends. Do you know she appeared here at a party we were giving wearing a miniskirt she’d made out of an old pair of Levi’s? Now she’s gotten herself involved in a murder. I’ve got a right to know about her. I’ve got a right to know what she’ll do to us next.”

“I don’t do family counseling, Mr. Orchard. There are people who do, and maybe you ought to look up one of them. If you’ll get Terry down here we’ll talk, all of us, and see if we can arrange to live in peace while I look into the murder.”

Orchard had finished his brandy. He nodded at the empty glass. His wife got up, refilled it, and brought it to him. He drank, then put the glass down. He said, “While you’re up, Marion, would you ask Terry to come down.”

Marion left the room. Orchard took another belt of brandy. He wasn’t bothering to savor the bouquet. I nibbled at the edge of mine. Marion Orchard came back into the room with Terry.

I stood and said, “Hello, Terry.”

She said, “Hi.”

Her hair was loose and long. She wore a short-sleeved blouse, a skirt, no socks, and a pair of loafers. I looked at her arms—no tracks. One point for our side; she wasn’t shooting. At least not regularly. She was fresh-scrubbed and pale, and remarkably without affect. She went to a round leather hassock by the fire and sat down, her knees
tight together, her hands folded in her lap. Dolly Demure, with a completely blank face. The loose hair softened her, and the traditional dress made her look like somebody’s cheerleader, right down to loafers without socks. Had there been any animation she’d have been pretty as hell.

Orchard spoke. “Terry, I’m employing Mr. Spenser to clear you of the murder charge.”

She said, “Okay.”

“I hope you’ll cooperate with him in every way.”

“Okay.”

“And, Terry, if Mr. Spenser succeeds in getting you out of this mess, if he does, perhaps you will begin to rethink your whole approach to life.”

“Why don’t you get laid,” she said flatly, without inflection, and without looking at him.

Marion Orchard said “Terry!” in a horrified voice.

Orchard’s glass was empty. He flicked an eye at it, and away.

“Now, you listen to me, young lady,” he said. “I have put up with your nonsense for as long as I’m going to. If you …”

I interrupted. “If I want to listen to this kind of crap I can go home and watch daytime television. I want to talk with Terry, and maybe later I’ll want to talk with each of you. Separately. Obviously I was wrong; we can’t do it in a group. You people want to encounter one another, do it on your own time.”

“By God, Spenser,” Orchard said.

I cut him off again. “I want to talk with Terry. Do I or don’t I?”

I did. He and his wife left, and Terry and I were alone in the library.

“If I told my father to get laid he would have knocked out six of my teeth,” I said.

“Mine won’t,” she said. “He’ll drink some more brandy, and tomorrow he’ll stay late at the office.”

“You don’t like him much,” I said.

“I bet if I said that to you, you’d knock out six of my teeth,” she said.

“Only if you didn’t smile,” I answered.

“He’s a jerk.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But he’s your jerk, and from his point of view you’re no prize package either.”

“I know,” she said.”

“However,” I said, “let’s think about what I’m supposed to do here. Tell me more about the manuscript and the professor and anything else you can remember beyond what you told Quirk last night.”

“That’s all there is,” she said. “I told the police everything I know.”

“Let’s run through it again anyway,” I said. “Have you talked with Quirk again since last night?”

“Yes, I saw him this morning before Daddy’s people got me out.”

“Okay, tell me what he asked you and what you said.”

“He started by asking me why I thought two big white men in hats would come to our apartment and kill Dennis and frame me.”

That was Quirk, starting right where he left off, no rephrasing, no new approach, less sleep than I had and there in the morning when the big cheeses passed the word along to let her out, getting all his questions answered before he released her.

“And what did you answer?” I said.

“I said the only thing I could think of was the manuscript. That Dennis was involved somehow in that theft, and he was upset about it.”

“Can you give me more than that? How was he involved? Why was he involved? What makes you think he was involved? Why do you think he was upset? What did he do to show you he was upset? Answer any or all, one at a time.”

“It was a phone call he made from the apartment. The way he was talking I could tell he was upset, and I could tell he wasn’t talking to another kid. I mean, you can tell that from the way people talk. The way his voice sounded.”

“What did he say?” I said.

“I couldn’t hear most of it. He talked low, and I knew he didn’t want me to hear, you know, cupping his hand and everything. So I tried not to hear. But he did say something about hiding it … like ‘Don’t worry, no one will find it. I was careful.’ ”

“When was this?” I asked.

“About a week ago. Lemme see, I was up early for my Chaucer course, so it would have been Monday, that’s five days ago. Last Monday.”

The manuscript had been stolen Sunday night.

“Okay, so he was upset. About what?”

“I don’t know, but I can tell when he’s mad. At one point I think he threatened someone.”

“Why do you think so? What did he say that makes you think so?”

“He said, ‘If you don’t …’ No … No … he said, ‘I will, I really will.…’ Yeah. That’s what it was … ‘I really will.’ But very threateny, you know.”

“Good. Now why do you think it was a professor? I know the voice tone told you it was someone older, but why a professor? What did he say? What were the words?”

“Well, oh, I don’t know, it was just a feeling. I wasn’t all that interested; I was running the water for a bath, anyway.”

“No, Terry, I want to know. The words, what were his words?”

She was silent, her eyes squeezed almost shut, as if the sun were shining in them, her upper teeth exposed, her lower lip sucked in.

“Dennis said, ‘I don’t care’ … ‘I don’t care, if you do.’ … He said, ‘I don’t care if you do. Cut the goddamn thing.’ That’s it. He was talking to an older person and he said cut the class if the other person had to. That’s why I figured it must be a professor.”