Five Classic Spenser Mysteries (82 page)

Phil stood up. I followed him out through the door we’d entered. Broz never moved or said a word. In the
anteroom a thin-faced Italian man with a goatee was cleaning his fingernails with the blade of a large pocket knife, his feet up on the desk, a Borsalino hat tipped forward over the bridge of his nose. He paid us no mind as we went through.

I took a cab back from Broz’s office to mine. When I got there, I sat in my chair in the dark and looked out the window. The snow was steady now and starting to screw up the traffic. Plows were out, and their noise added to the normal traffic sounds that drifted up through the closed window. “Sleigh bells ring,” I thought, “are ya listening.” The falling snow fuzzed out all the lights in the Combat Zone, giving them halos of neon red and streetlight yellow. I was tired. My eye hurt. The knuckles of my left hand were sore and puffy from hitting Sonny in the face. I hadn’t eaten for a long time and I was hungry, but I didn’t seem to want to eat. I pulled a bottle of bourbon out of the desk drawer and opened it and drank some. It felt hot in my stomach.

Where was I? Somewhere along the line I had touched a nerve, and somebody had called Broz. Who? Could be anybody. Broz got around. But it was probably someone today. Broz would have no reason to wait once he knew I was trampling around on his lawn. I couldn’t see Broz being tied into the Godwulf Manuscript. It wasn’t worth any money. It was impossible to fence. But he’d implied he’d put it back if I dropped out. He knew a lot of people; maybe he could push the right button without being necessarily involved. Maybe he’d been lying. But something
had stirred him up. Not only did he want me out of things, but he wanted to know what I knew. Maybe it was simply collateral interest. Maybe it was Powell’s murder. Maybe he didn’t want me digging into that. I liked that better. Terry’s description of the two men included one like Sonny. The other one wasn’t Phil. But Phil wouldn’t do that kind of trench duty anyway. I was amazed he had done errand duty for me. But why would Broz care one way or the other about a loudmouth kid like Dennis Powell, care enough to send two employees to kill him and frame his girl? Yet somebody’s employees did it. It wasn’t an amateur job, by Terry’s account. Came in, held them up, had her gun, the rubber gloves, the drug they’d brought, the whole thing. It didn’t sound like it had been ad-libbed. Did they have inside help? How did they get hold of her gun? And what possible interest would Broz have in the university? He had a lot of interests—numbers, women, dope—but higher education didn’t seem to be one of them. Of his line, dope would seem the best connection. It seemed the only place where college and Broz overlapped. Dennis Powell was reputed to be a channel for hard stuff: heroin, specifically. That meant, if it were true, that he had mob connections, direct or indirect. Now he was dead, in what looked like some kind of mob killing. And Joe Broz wanted me to keep my nose out of his business.

But what did that have to do with the manuscript? I didn’t know. The best connection I had was the dope and the question of the gun. How did they know she’d have a gun there? She’d lived with another girl before she’d lived with Powell. I took another belt of the bourbon. Uncut by bitters or ice and cheap anyway, it grated down into my stomach. Catherine Connelly, Tower had told me. Let’s try her. More bourbon. It wasn’t really so bad, didn’t taste bad at all, made you feel pretty nice in your stomach.

Made you feel tough, too, and on top of it—whatever it was. The phone rang.

I picked it up and said, “Spenser industries, security division. We never sleep.”

There was a pause, and then a woman spoke.

“Mr. Spenser?”

“Yeah.”

“This is Marion Orchard, Terry’s mother.”

“Howya doing, sweets,” I said, and took another pull on the bourbon.

“Mr. Spenser, she’s gone.”

“Me, too, sweets.”

“No, really, she’s gone, and I’m terribly worried.”

I put the bottle down and said, “Oh, Christ!”

“Our lawyer called and said the police wished to speak with her again, and I went to her room and she wasn’t there and she hasn’t been home all day. There’s two hundred thousand dollars bail money, and … I want her back. Can you find her, Mr. Spenser?”

“You got any ideas where I should look?”

“I … Mr. Spenser, we have hired you. You sound positively hostile, and I resent it.”

“Yeah, you probably do,” I said. “I been up a long time and have eaten little, and had a fight with a tough guinea and drank too much bourbon and was thinking about going and getting a sub sandwich and going to bed. I’ll come out in a little while and we’ll talk about it.”

“Please, I’m very worried.”

“Yeah, I’ll be along.” I hung up, put the cork in the bottle, put the bottle in the drawer. My head was light and my eyes focused badly and my mouth felt thick. I got my coat on, locked the office, and went down to my car. I parked in a taxi zone and got a submarine sandwich and a large black coffee to go. I ate the sandwich and drank the
coffee as I headed out to Newton again. Eating a sub sandwich with one hand is sloppy work, and I got some tomato juice and oil on my shirtfront and some coffee stains on my pant leg. I stopped at a Dunkin’ Donuts shop in West Newton Square, bought another black coffee, and sat in my car and drank it.

I felt terrible. The bourbon was wearing off, and I felt dull and sleepy and round-shouldered. I looked at my watch. It was a quarter to ten. The snow continued as I sat and forced the coffee down. I had read somewhere that black coffee won’t sober you up, but I never believed it. After bourbon it tasted so awful it had to be doing some good.

The plows hadn’t gotten to the Orchards’ street; my wheels spun and my car skidded getting up their hill. I had my jacket unbuttoned, but the defrosters were going full blast. And, wrestling the car through the snow, I could feel the sweat in the hollow of my back, and my shirt collar was wet and limp. Sometimes I wondered if I was getting too old for this work. And sometimes I thought I had gotten too old last year. I jammed the car through a snowdrift into the Orchards’ driveway and climbed out. There was no pathway, so I waded through the snow across the lawn and up to the front door. The same black maid answered the door. She remembered me, took my hat and coat, and led me to the same library we’d talked in before. A fire was still burning, but no one was in the room. I got a look at myself in the dark window: unshaven, sub sandwich stains on my shirt, collar open. There was a puffy mouse under one eye, courtesy of old Sonny. I looked like the leg man for a slumlord.

Marion Orchard came in. She was wearing an ankle-length blue housecoat that zipped up the front, a matching headband, and bare feet. I noticed her toenails were painted
silver. She seemed as well groomed and together as before, but her face was flushed and I realized she had been drinking. Me, too. Who hadn’t? The ride and the coffee had sobered me up and depressed me. My head ached, and my stomach felt like I’d been swallowing sand. Without a word Marion Orchard went to the sideboard, put ice in a glass from a silver bucket, added Scotch, and squirted soda in from a silver-laced dispenser. She drank half of it and turned toward me.

“You want some?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Scotch or bourbon?”

“Bourbon, with bitters, if you’ve got it.”

She turned and mixed me bourbon and soda with bitters in a big square-angled glass. I drank some and felt it begin to combat the coffee and the fatigue. I’d need more, though. From the looks of Marion Orchard, she would, too, and planned on getting it.

“Where’s Mr. Orchard?” I asked.

“At the office. Sitting behind his big masculine desk, trying to feel like a man.”

“Does he know Terry’s gone?”

“Yes. That’s why he went to the office. It makes him feel better about himself. All he can cope with is stocks and bonds. People, and daughters and wives, scare hell out of him.” She finished the drink, took mine, which was still half-full, and made two fresh ones.

“Something scares hell out of everybody,” I said. “Have you any thoughts on where I should look for Terry?”

“What scares hell out of you?” she asked.

The bourbon was making a lot of headway against the coffee. I felt a lot better than I had when I came in. The line of Marion Orchard’s thigh was tight against the blue
robe as she sat with her legs tucked up under her on the couch.

“The things people do to one another,” I answered. “That scares hell out of me.”

She drank some more. “Wrong,” she said. “That engages your sympathy. It doesn’t scare you. I’m an expert on what scares men. I’ve lived with a scared man for twenty-two years. I left college in my sophomore year to marry him, and I never finished. I was an English major. I wrote poetry. I don’t anymore.” I waited. She didn’t really seem to be talking to me anymore.

“About Terry?” I prodded softly.

“Screw Terry,” she said, and finished her drink. “When I was her age I was marrying her father and nobody with wide shoulders came around and got me out of that mess.” She was busy making us two more drinks as she talked. Her voice was showing the liquor. She was talking with extra-careful enunciation—the way I was. She handed me the drink and then put her hand on my upper arm and squeezed it.

“How much do you weigh?” she asked.

“One ninety-five.”

“You work out, don’t you? How much can you lift?”

“I can bench press two-fifty ten times,” I said.

“How’d you get the broken nose?” She bent over very carefully and examined my face from about two inches away. Her hair smelled like herbs.

“I fought a ranked heavyweight once.”

She stayed bent over, her face two inches away, her fragrant hair tumbling forward, one hand still squeezing my arm, the other holding the drink. I put my left hand behind her head and kissed her. She folded up into my lap and kissed back. It wasn’t eager. It was ferocious. She let the glass drop from her hand onto the floor, where I
assume it tipped and spilled. Under the blue robe she was wearing nothing at all, and she was nowhere near as sinewy as she had looked to me the first time I saw her. Making love in a chair is heavy work. The only other time I’d attempted, I’d gotten a charley horse that damn near ruined the event. With one arm around her back I managed to slip the other one under her knees and pick her up, which is not easy from a sitting position in a soft chair. Her mouth never left mine, nor did the fierceness abate as I carried her to the couch. She bit me and scratched me, and at climax she pounded me on the back with her clenched fist as hard as she could. At the time I barely noticed. But when it was over, I felt as if I’d been in a fight, and maybe in some sense I had.

She had shed the robe during our encounter and now she walked naked over to the bar to make another drink for each of us. She had a fine body, tanned all over except for the stark whiteness of her buttocks and the thin line her bra strap had made. She returned with a drink in each hand. Gave one to me and then stroked my cheek once, quite gently. She drank half her drink, still standing naked in front of me, and lit a cigarette, took in a long lungful of smoke, let it out, picked up her robe, and slipped into it. There we were, all together again, neat, orderly, employee and employer. Here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson.

“I think Terry is with a group in Cambridge that calls itself the Ceremony of Moloch. In the past, when she would get in trouble or be freaked out on drugs or have a fight with her father, she’d run off there, and they let her stay. One of her friends told me about it.”

She’d known that when she’d called me. But she’d gotten me out here to tell me. She really didn’t like her husband.

“Where in Cambridge is the Ceremony of Moloch?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know if she’s there, but it’s all I could think of.”

“Why did Terry take off?” I didn’t use her name. After copulation on the couch, Mrs. Orchard sounded a little silly. On the other hand, we were not on a “Marion” basis.

“A fight with her father.” She didn’t use my name either.

“About what?”

“What’s it ever about? He sees her as an extension of his career. She’s supposed to adorn his success by being what he fantasizes a daughter is. She does everything the opposite to punish him for not being what she fantasizes a father is … and probably for sleeping with me. Ever read
Mourning Becomes Electra,
Spenser?”

That’s how she solved her problem with names; she dropped the Mister. I wondered if I should call her Orchard. I decided not to. “Yeah, a long time ago. But is there anything you could tell me about Terry, or the Ceremony of Moloch, that might turn out useful? It is past midnight, and I’ve gotten a lot of exercise today.”

I think she colored very slightly. “You are like a terrier after a rat. Nothing distracts your attention.”

“Well,” I said, “there are things, occasionally, Marion.”

Her color got a little deeper and she smiled, but shook her head.

“I wonder,” she said. “I wonder whether you might not have been thinking of a way to run down my dear daughter Terry, even then.”

“Then,” I said, “I wasn’t thinking of anything.”

She said, “Maybe.”

I was silent. I was so tired it was an effort to move my mouth.

She shook her head again. “No, there’s nothing. I can’t think of anything else to tell you that will help. But can you look? Can you find her?”

“I’ll look,” I said. “Did your lawyer tell you what the cops wanted?”

“No. He just said Lieutenant Quirk wanted her to come down tomorrow and talk with him some more.”

I stood up. Partly to see if I could. Marion Orchard stood up with me.

“Thank you for coming. I know you’ll do your best in finding Terry. I’m sorry to have kept you up so late.” She put out her hand, and I took it. Christ, breeding. Here she was, upper crust, Boston society, yes’m. Thank you very much, ma’am, for the drink and the toss on the couch, ma’am, it’s a pleasure to be of service to you and the master, ma’am. I gave her hand a squeeze. I was goddamned if I was going to shake it.

“I’ll dig her up, Marion. When I do, I’ll bring her home. It’ll work out.”