Five Classic Spenser Mysteries (78 page)

“How do you know he wasn’t talking about cutting a piece of rope, or a salami?”

“Because he mentioned class or school a little before. And what could they be talking about angrily that had to do with salami?”

“Okay. Good. What else?”

There wasn’t anything else. I worked on her for maybe half an hour more and nothing else surfaced. All I got was the name of a SCACE official close to Powell, someone named Mark Tabor, whose title was political counselor.

“If you think of anything else, anything at all, call me. You still have my card?”

“Yes. I … my father will pay you for what you did last night.”

“No, he won’t. He’ll pay me for what I may do. But last night was a free introductory offer.”

“It was a very nice thing to do,” she said.

“Aw, hell,” I said.

“What you should try to do is this,” I said. “You should try to keep from starting up with your old man for a while. And you should try to stay around the house, go to class if you think you should, but for the
moment let SCACE stave off the apocalypse without you. Okay?”

“Okay. But don’t laugh at us. We’re perfectly serious and perfectly right.”

“Yeah, so is everyone I know.”

I left her then. Said good-bye to her parents, took a retainer from Roland Orchard, and drove back to town.

Driving back to Boston, I thought about my two retainers in the same week. Maybe I’d buy a yacht. On the other hand maybe it would be better to get the tear in my convertible roof fixed. The tape leaked. I got off the Mass Pike at Storrow Drive and headed for the university. On my left the Charles River was thick and gray between Boston and Cambridge. A single oarsman was sculling upstream. He had on a hooded orange sweat shirt and dark blue sweat pants and his breath steamed as he rocked back and forth at the oars. Rowing downstream would have been easier.

I turned off Storrow at Charlesgate, went up over Commonwealth, onto Park Drive, past a batch of ducks swimming in the muddy river, through the Fenway to Westland Ave. Number 177 was on the left, halfway to Mass Ave. I parked at a hydrant and went up the stone steps to the glass door at the entry. I tried it. It was open. Inside an ancient panel of doorbells and call boxes covered the left wall. I didn’t have to try one to know they didn’t work. They didn’t need to. The inner door didn’t close all the way because the floor was warped in front of the sill and the door jammed against it. Mark Tabor was on the fourth floor. No elevator. I walked up. The apartment house smelled bad and the stair landing had beer bottles and
candy wrappers accumulating in the corners. Somewhere in the building electronic music was playing at top volume. The fourth flight began to tell on me a little, but I forced myself to breathe normally as I knocked on Tabor’s door. No answer. I knocked again. And a third time. Loud. I didn’t want to waste the four-flight climb. A voice inside called out, “Wait a minute.” There was a pause, and then the door opened.

I said, “Mark Tabor?”

And he said, “Yeah.”

He looked like a zinnia. Tall and thin with an enormous corona of rust red hair flaring out around his pale, clean-shaven face. He wore a lavender undershirt and a pair of faded, flare-bottomed denim dungarees that were too long and dragged on the floor over his bare feet.

I said, “I’m a friend of Terry Orchard’s; she asked me to come and talk with you.”

“About what?”

“About inviting people in to sit down.”

“Why do you think I know what’s her name?”

“Aw, come off it, Tabor,” I said. “How the hell do you think I got your name and address? How do you know Terry Orchard is not a what’s his name? What do you lose by talking with me for fifteen minutes? If I was going to mug you I would have already. Besides, a mugger would starve to death in this neighborhood.”

“Well, what do you want to talk about?” he asked, still standing in the door. I walked past him into the room. He said, “Hey,” but didn’t try to stop me. I moved a pile of mimeographed pamphlets off a steamer trunk and sat down on it. Tabor took a limp pack of Kools out of his pants pocket, extracted a ragged cigarette, and lit it. The menthol smell did nothing for the atmosphere. He took a big
drag and exhaled through his nose. He leaned against the door jamb. “Okay,” he said. “What do you want?”

“I want to keep Terry Orchard out of the slam, for one thing. And I want to find the Godwulf Manuscript, for another.”

“Why are the cops hassling Terry?”

“Because they think she killed Dennis Powell.”

“Dennis is dead?”

I nodded.

“Ain’t that a bitch, now,” he said, much as if I’d said the rain would spoil the picnic. He went over and sat on the edge of a kitchen table covered with books, lined yellow paper, manila folders, and the crusts of a pizza still in the take box. Behind him, taped to the gray painted wall with raggedly torn masking tape, was a huge picture of Che Guevara. Opposite was a day bed covered by an unzipped sleeping bag. There were clothes littered on the floor. On top of a bureau was a hot plate. There were no curtains or window shades.

I clucked approvingly. “You’ve really got some style, Tabor,” I said.

“You from
House Beautiful
or something?” he said.

“Nope, I’m a private detective.” I showed him the photostat of my license. “I’m trying to clear Terry Orchard of the murder charge. I’m also looking for the Godwulf Manuscript, and I think they’re connected. Can you help me?”

“I don’t know nothing about no murder, man, and nothing about no jive ass manuscript.” Why did all the radical white kids from places like Scarsdale and Bel-Air try to talk as if they’d been brought up in Brownsville and Watts? He stubbed out his Kool and lit another.

“Look,” I said. “You and Dennis Powell roomed together for two years. You and Terry Orchard are members
of the same organization. You share the same goals. I’m not the cops. I’m free-lance, for crissake, I’m labor. I work for Terry. I don’t want you. I want Terry out of trouble and the manuscript back in its case. Do you know where the manuscript is?”

“Naw, man. I don’t know anything about it.”

He didn’t look up from the contemplation of his Kool. His voice never varied. Like Terry, he showed no affect. No response to stimulus. It was as though he’d shut down.

“Tell me this,” I said. “Does SCACE have a faculty adviser?”

“Oh, man, be cool. SCACE ain’t no frat house, baby. Faculty adviser … Man, that’s heavy.”

“Do any faculty members belong to SCACE?”

“Maybe. Lot of people belong to SCACE. That’s for me to know and you to guess.”

“What’s the big secret?”

“Lots of dudes can get in trouble for joining organizations like SCACE. The imperialists don’t like opposition. The fat cats don’t like organizations that are for the worker. The superoppressors are scared of the revolution.”

“You forgot to mention the capitalist running-dog lackeys,” I said.

“Like you, you mean? See what happened to Terry Orchard? The pigs have framed her already. They’ll do anything they can to stamp us out.”

“Look, kid, I don’t want to sit up here and argue Herbert Marcuse with you. The cops are professionals. You can sit here in your hippie suit and drink wine and smoke grass and read Marx and play revolution like Tom Sawyer ambushing the A-rabs all you want. That bothers the cops like a tick fly on an elephant. If they wanted to stamp you out, they’d come in here and stamp and you’d know what a stamping was. They don’t have to get frilly
and frame some twenty-year-old broad to get at you. They’ve got guys in the station house in Charlestown that they keep in a cage when they’re not on duty.”

He gave me a tough look. Which isn’t easy when you weigh 150 pounds.

“How about a faculty member that might be associated with SCACE?”

He let the smoke from his cigarette out of his nose and mouth slowly. It drifted up around his head. Long years of practice, I thought. He looked straight at me with his eyes almost closed for a long time. Then he said, “Where would the movement be now if someone had saved Sacco and Vanzetti?”

“Sonova bitch,” I said. “You’re almost perfect, you are, a flawless moron. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone stay so implacably on the level of absolute abstraction.”

“Screw you, man,” he said.

“That’s better,” I said. “Now we’re getting down where I live. I’ve got no hope for you, punk. But I promise you that if that kid gets burned because you don’t tell me what you could tell me, I will come for you. You martyr that kid and I’ll give the movement another martyr.”

“Screw you, man,” he said.

I walked out.

I went back down the four flights of stairs, as empty as when I went up. Some sleuth, Spenser, a real Hawkshaw. All you’ve found out is you get winded after four flights of stairs. I wondered if I should go back up and have a go at shaking some information out of him. Maybe later. Maybe he’d stew a little and I could call on him again. I didn’t even know he knew anything. But talking to him, I could feel him holding back. I could even feel that he liked knowing something and not telling. It added color to the romance of his conspiracy. Out in the street the air was
cold and it tasted clean after the mentholated smoke and the stale air of Tabor’s room. A truck backfired and up on Mass Avenue a bus ground under way in low gear.

My next try was the campus. The student newspaper was located in the basement of the library. On the blond oak door cut into the cinder block of the basement corridor an inventive person had lettered
NEWS
in black ink.

Inside, the room was long and narrow. L-shaped black metal desks with white Formica tops were sloppily lined up along the long wall on the left. A hand-lettered sign made from half a manila folder instructed the staff to label all photographs with name, date, and location. The room was empty except for a black woman in a red paisley dashiki and matching turban. She was fat but not flabby, hard fat we used to call it when I was a kid, and the dashiki billowed around her body like a drop cloth on the sofa when the living room’s going to be painted. A plastic name plate on her desk said
FEATURE EDITOR
.

She said, “Can I help you?” Her voice was not cordial. No one seemed to be mistaking me for a member of the academic community.

I said, “I hope so.”

I gave her a card. “I’m working on a case, and I’m looking for information. Can I ask you for some?”

“You surely can,” she said. “All the news that’s fit to print, that’s us.”

“Okay, you know there’s a manuscript been stolen.”

“Yep.”

“I have some reason to believe that a radical student organization, SCACE, is involved in the theft.”

“Uh huh.”

“What I’m looking for are faculty connections with SCACE. What can you tell me?”

“Why you want to know about faculty connections?”

“I have reason to believe that a faculty member was involved in the theft.”

“I have reason to believe that information is a two-way go, sweetie,” she said. “Ah is a member ob de press, baby. Information is mah business.”

I liked her. She was old for a student, maybe twenty-eight. And she was tough.

“Fair enough,” I said. “If you’ll drop the Stepin Fetchit act, I’ll tell you what I can. In trade?”

“Right on, brother,” she said.

“Two things. One, what’s your name?”

“Iris Milford.”

“Two, do you know Terry Orchard?”

She nodded.

“Then you know she’s a SCACE member. You also may know she’s been arrested for murder.” She nodded again.

“I think the manuscript theft and the murder are connected.” I told her about Terry, and the murder, and Terry’s memory of the phone call.

“Someone set her up,” I said. “If someone wanted her out of the way they’d just have killed her. They wanted to kill Powell. They wouldn’t go to the trouble and take the risk just to frame her. And they wanted to kill Powell in such a way as to keep people from digging into it. And it looked good—a couple of freaky kids living in what my aunt used to call sin. On drugs, long-haired, barefooted, radical, and on a bad trip, one shoots the other and tells some weird hallucinogenic story about guys in trench coats. The Hearst papers would have them part of an international sex club by the second day’s story.”

“How come you’re messing it up, then? If it’s so good. How come you don’t believe it?”

“I talked to her right after it happened. She’s not that good a liar.”

“Why ain’t it a trip? Maybe she really thinks she’s telling you true. You ever been on a trip?”

“No. You?”

“Baby, I’m fat, black, widowed, pushing thirty, and got four kids. I don’t need no additional problems. But she could think it happened. Got any better reason for thinking she’s not guilty?”

“I like her.”

“All right,” she said. “That’s cool.”

“So, what do you know?”

“Not a hell of a lot. The kid Powell was a jerk, sulky, foolish. On an ego trip. Terry, I don’t know. I’ve been in classes with her. She’s bright, but she’s screwed up. Jesus, they’re so miserable, those kids, always so goddamn unhappy about racism and sexism and imperialism and militarism and capitalism. Man, I grew up in a tarpaper house in Fayette, Mississippi, with ten other kids. We were trying to stay alive; we didn’t have time to be that goddamn unhappy.”

“How about a professor?”

“In SCACE, you got me. I do know that there’s a lot of talk about drug dealing connected with SCACE.”

“For instance?”

“For instance, that Powell was dealing, and had big connections. He could get you smack, anything you wanted. But especially smack. A kid that can get unlimited smack is heavy in some circles.”

“Mob connection?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know whether he really could get a big supply of smack. I just tell you what I hear. Kids like to talk big—especially to me, because I live in Roxbury, and they figure all us darkies are into
drugs and crime, ’cause we been oppressed by you honky slumlords.”

“I want a professor,” I said. “Try this. Name me the most radical faculty members in the university.”

“Oh, man, how the hell do I know? There’s about thirty-five thousand people in this place.”