Five Classic Spenser Mysteries (84 page)

I gave her a third drink and freshened up my own. She sat on a stool in the kitchen and sipped it while I put some baking powder biscuits in the oven.

She had not spoken since I’d found her. Now she said, “Do you have any cigarettes?”

I found some thin filter tips in a fancy feminine package that a friend had left in one of the kitchen drawers. I held a match for her as she lit one and inhaled deeply. She let the smoke slip slowly out of her nose as she sipped her drink, holding the glass in both hands. The smoke spread out on the surface of the bourbon and eddied gently back up around her face. I felt my stomach tighten; I had known someone a long time ago who used to do just that, in just that way.

I got out the corkscrew and opened one of the bottles of wine. I poured some into each glass, and then took the biscuits out and served the supper. She sat opposite me at the small table and ate. Her manners were terrific. One hand in the lap, small bites, delicate sips of wine. But she ate everything. So did I. Still no talk. I had the radio on in the kitchen. When I offered her more, she nodded yes. When I got up to get the second bottle of wine, I plugged in the coffee. Its steady perk made a pleasant counterpoint to the radio. When we’d finished eating, I poured the coffee and brought out some applejack and two pony glasses. I put them on the cobbler’s bench coffee table in front of the sofa. She sat at one end and I sat at the other, and we drank our coffee and sipped our brandy and she smoked another cigarette, holding her hand primly over the gap in the front of the bathrobe as she leaned over to accept my light. I got out a cigar and we listened some
more to the radio. She leaned back against the arm of the couch and closed her eyes.

I stood up and said, “You can sleep in my bed. I’ll sleep out here.” I walked to the bedroom door and opened it. She went in.

I said, “I’m sorry I don’t have any pajamas. You could sleep in one of my dress shirts, I guess.”

“No, thank you,” she said. “I don’t wear anything to bed anyway.”

“Okay,” I said. “Good night. We’ll talk in the morning.”

She went in and shut the door, then opened it a crack. I heard her get into the bed. I picked up the dishes and put them in the dishwasher. Then I went in and took a shower and shaved. I felt odd, like my father probably had when we were small and all home and in bed and he was the only one up in the house. I got a blanket out of the closet, shut out the lights, and lay on my back on the couch smoking the rest of my cigar, blowing the smoke across the glowing tip.

I heard the light click on in the bedroom. She called, “Spenser?”

“Yeah?”

“Would you come in here, please?”

I got up, put on a pair of pants, and went in, still smoking the cigar. She was lying on her back in bed with covers pulled up under her chin.

“Sit on the bed,” she said.

I did.

“Did you ever work on a farm?” she asked me.

“Nope.”

“My grandfather, my mother’s father, had a farm in Illinois. He used to milk fifty cows a day, and he had forearms like yours. He wasn’t as big as you, but he had muscles in his forearms like you do.”

I nodded.

“You’re not fat at all, are you?” she said. I shook my head.

“With your clothes on you look as if you might be a little fat, but with your shirt off you’re not. It’s all muscle, isn’t it?”

I nodded.

“You look like … like a boxer, or like somebody in a Tarzan movie.”

“Cheetah,” I said.

“Do you know,” she said, “do you know that I’ve only met you four times in my life, and you are the only person in the entire world I can trust?” As she got to the end of the sentence her eyes filled. I patted her leg and said, “Shhh.” But she went on, her voice not quite steady but apparently under control.

“Dennis is dead. My mother and father use me to get even with each other. I thought I could join the Moloch people. They’d dropped out, they weren’t hung up on all the crap my father is. I thought they just took you as you were. They don’t.” Her voice got shakier. “They initiate you.”

I patted her thigh again. I had nothing to say. The stub of the cigar was too short. I put it in an ashtray on the night table.

“Do you know what the initiation is?”

“I figured out the first part,” I said.

She sat up in bed and let the covers fall away.

“You are the only one in the world, in the whole goddamned sonova bitch world …” The tears started to come. I leaned toward her and put my arm around her and she caught hold of me and squeezed.

“Love me,” she said in a choked voice. “Make love to
me, make me feel, make love to me, make me feel.” A fleeting part of my mind thought, “Jesus, first the mother, then the daughter,” but the enduring majority of my mind said, Yes, Yes, Yes, as I bore her back onto the bed and turned the covers back from her.

In the morning I drove Terry home. Riding out to Newton we mentioned neither the Ceremony of Moloch nor the previous night. We ran through the events of the murder again; nothing new. I described Sonny for her in detail. Yes, that sounded like one of the men. They had brought the drug with them that she’d swallowed. They had brought her gun with them. Yes, she had shared that apartment with Cathy Connelly before Dennis had moved in. They had parted friends and still were, as far as Terry knew. Cathy lived on the Fenway, she said. On the museum side, near the end closest to the river. She didn’t know the number. I stopped in front of her house and let her out. I didn’t go in. Having slept with mother and daughter within the same twenty-four hours, I felt fussy about sitting around with both of them in the library and making small talk. She leaned back in through the open door of my car.

“Call me,” she said.

“I will,” I said.

She closed the door and I pulled away, watching her in the rearview mirror. She went in very slowly, turning once to wave at me. I tooted the horn in reply.

Back to Boston again. I seemed to be making this drive a lot. Turning off Storrow at the Charlesgate exit, I went up the ramp over Commonwealth Ave and looked down at
the weeping willows underneath the arch—bare now, with slender branches crusted in snow and bending deep beneath winter weight. There was a Frost poem, but it was about birches, and then I was off the ramp and looking for a parking space. This was not a business for poets anyway.

I parked near the Westland Avenue entrance to the Fenway and walked across the street to a drugstore. There was no listing in the phone book for a Catherine Connelly on the Fenway. So I started at the north end and began looking at the mailboxes in apartment lobbies, working my way south toward the museum. In the third building I found it. Second floor. I rang. Nothing happened. I rang again and leaned on it. No soap. I rang some other buzzers at random. No one opened the door. A cagey lot. I rang all the buttons. No response. Then a mean, paunchy man in green twill shirt and pants came to the front door. He opened it about a foot and said, “Whaddya want?”

“You the super?” I said.

“Who do you think I am?” He was smoking a cigarette that looked as if he’d found it, and it waggled wetly in the corner of his mouth as he spoke.

“I thought you were one of Santa’s helpers coming around to see if everything was set for Christmas.”

“Huh?” he said.

“I’m looking for a young woman named Catherine Connelly. She doesn’t answer her bell,” I said.

“Then she ain’t home.”

“Mind if I check?”

“You better stop ringing them other buzzers too,” he said, and shut the door. I resisted the temptation to ring all the buzzers again and run. “Childish,” I thought. “Adolescent.” I went back to my car, got in, and drove to the university. Maybe I’d be able to locate her there. I parked
in a spot that was reserved for Dean Mersfelder and headed for the library basement.

Iris Milford was there in her
NEWS
office, behind her metal desk. There were several other members of the staff, obviously younger, doing journalistic things at their metal desks.

She recognized me when I came in.

“Nice eye you got,” she said.

I’d forgotten the punch Sonny had landed. It looked worse than it felt, though it was still sore to touch.

“I bruise easily,” I said.

“I’ll bet,” she said.

“Want to have lunch with me?” I asked.

“Absolutely,” she said. She closed the folder she was looking at, picked up her purse, and came around the desk.

“Too bad about how you can’t make up your mind,” I said.

We walked out through the corridor. It was class-change time and the halls were crowded and hot and loud. A miasma of profanity and smoke and sweatiness under heavy winter coats. Ah, where are the white bucks of yesteryear? We wormed our way up to the first floor and finally out past the security apparatus that set off an alarm if someone smuggled out a book, past the scrutiny of a hard-faced librarian alert beside it, into the milling snow-crusted quadrangle. I got a cab and we rode to a restaurant I liked on top of an insurance building, where the city looked clean and patrician below, and the endless rows of red-brick town houses that had crumbled into slums looked geometric and orderly and a little European, stretching off to the south.

We had a drink and ordered lunch. Iris looked out at the orderly little brick houses.

“Get far enough away and it looks kinda pretty, don’t it?” she said. “You only get order from a distance. Close up is always messy.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but your own life is always close up. You only see other people’s lives at long range.”

“You better believe it,” she said. “I’ll take another pop.”

I ordered us two more drinks.

“Okay, Spenser, what is it? You not the type to feed drinks to a poor colored lady and take advantage of her body. Even one as irresistible as mine. What you want?”

I liked her. She’d been there and seen it done. A tough, wised-up, honest broad.

“Well, if you’re not going to come across, I’ll take second best. Tell me about Cathy Connelly.”

“What you want to know?”

“I don’t know, everything, anything. All I know is she was once Terry Orchard’s roommate, that she moved out when the Powell kid moved in, that she now lives on the Fenway, and that she wasn’t home when I called on her this morning.”

“That’s about as much as I know. She was in my Chaucer class, and I copied her notes a couple times. I don’t know her much better than that.”

“She belong to SCACE?”

“Not that I know. She seemed kind of a loner. Didn’t belong to anything I know of. You never see her around campus, but that don’t mean much because the goddamn campus is so big and crowded that you might not see a woolly rhinoceros around campus.”

“Boyfriends?” I asked.

“None that I know. But I’m telling you, I don’t hardly know her. What I’m saying could be wrong as hell.”

“Where can I get a picture of her?”

“Student Personnel Office, I would guess. That’s where we get ones we use in the paper for fast-breaking news stories, like who was elected captain of the girls’ field hockey team. Campus security can probably get them for you.”

“I don’t think so, Iris. Last dealing I had with campus security was when they ejected me from the premises. I think they don’t like me.”

She widened her eyes. “I thought they hired you.”

“They did, but I think they are in the process of making an agonizing reappraisal of that decision.”

“You having a good week, Spenser. Someone plunks you in the eye, you get thrown off the campus, you gonna get fired, you can’t find Cathy Connelly. I hope you don’t depress easy.”

“Like you were saying, it’s always messy close up.”

“What you want Connelly for, anyway?”

“She was Terry Orchard’s roommate. She might know how Terry’s gun got from her bedside table into a hood’s pocket.”

“Jesus, she don’t look the type.”

“There isn’t any type, my love.”

She nodded, “Ain’t that the truth.”

“Want dessert?” I said.

She nodded. “Do I look like someone who turns down dessert?”

I asked for a dessert menu.

Iris said, “I can get the picture for you. I’ll go over to student personnel and tell them we need it for a feature we’re doing. We do it all the time.”

“Would you like two desserts?” I said.

After I paid the bill with some of Roland Orchard’s retainer and drove her back to the university, she did what she said. I sat in the car with the heater on, and she
strolled into the student center and returned twenty minutes later with a two-by-two ID photo of Cathy Connelly. I thanked her.

She said, “Two drinks and a lobster salad will get you almost anything, baby,” and went to class.

I drove over to Mass Ave and had a technician I know at a photo lab blow the picture up to eight by ten. Service while I waited cost me twenty-five dollars more of Roland Orchard’s retainer, and I still hadn’t got the tear fixed in my car top.

I took the picture back to my office and sat behind my desk looking at it. She looked like a pallid little girl. Small features, light hair, prominent teeth, serious eyes. While I was looking at her picture my door opened and in came Lieutenant Quirk. Hatless, wearing a glen plaid overcoat, shoes glossy, pocked face clean-shaven, ruddy from the cold, and glowing with health. He closed the door behind him, and stood looking at me with his hands in his overcoat pockets. He did not radiate cheer.

“Come in, Lieutenant,” I said. “No need to knock, my door is always open to a public servant. You’ve come, no doubt, to ask my assistance in solving a particularly knotty puzzle …”

“Knock it off, Spenser. If I want to listen to bullshit, I’ll go over to a City Council meeting.”

“Okay, have a seat. Want a drink?”

Quirk ignored the chair I’d nodded at and stood in front of my desk.

“Yeah, I’ll have a drink.”

I poured two shots of bourbon into two paper cups. Quirk drank his off without expression and put the empty cup down. I sipped at mine a little and thought fondly of the stuff that Roland Orchard served.

“Terry Orchard is it, Spenser,” he said.

“The hell she is.”