Five Classic Spenser Mysteries (86 page)

He said, “Yes, sir.” Pushing an old wino around always enlivens your spirits. I picked up the phone and called Quirk. Then I went back upstairs and waited for him to arrive with his troops. It wasn’t as long a wait as it seemed. When they arrived Captain Yates was along.

He and Quirk went in to look at the remains. I sat on the day bed and didn’t look at anything. Sergeant Belson sat on the edge of the table smoking a short cigar butt that looked like he’d stepped on it.

“Do you buy those things secondhand?” I asked.

Belson took the cigar butt out of his mouth and looked at it. “If I smoked the big fifty cent jobs in the cedar wrappers, you’d figure I was on the take.”

“Not the way you dress,” I said.

“You ever think of another line of work, Spenser? So far all you’ve detected is two stiffs. Maybe a crossing guard, say, or …”

Quirk and Yates came out of the bathroom with a man from the coroner’s. The lines in Quirk’s face looked very deep, and the medic was finishing a shrug. Yates came over to me. He was a tall man with narrow shoulders and a hard-looking pot belly. He wore glasses with translucent plastic rims like they used to hand out in the army. His mouth was wide and loose.

He looked at me very hard and said, “Someone’s going to have to pay for that door.”

Belson gave him a startled look; Quirk was expressionless.
I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I didn’t say anything. It was a technique I ought to work on.

Yates said, “What’s your story, Jack? What the hell are you doing here?”

“Spenser,” I said, “with an
s
like the English poet. I was selling Girl Scout cookies door to door and they told us to be persistent.…”

“Don’t get smart with me, Jack; we got you for breaking and entering. If the lieutenant here hadn’t said he knew you, I’da run you in already. The janitor says you threatened him, too.”

I looked at Belson. He was concentrating mightily on getting his cigar butt relit, turning it carefully over the flame of a kitchen match to make sure it fired evenly. He didn’t look at me.

“What’s the coroner’s man say about the kid?” I asked Quirk.

Yates answered, “Accidental death. She slipped getting in the tub, hit her head, and drowned.” Belson made a noise that sounded like a cough. Yates spun toward him. “You got something to say, Sergeant?”

Belson looked up. “Not me, Captain, no, sir, just inhaled some smoke wrong. Fell right on her head, all right, yes, sir.”

Yates stared at Belson for about fifteen seconds. Belson puffed on his cigar. His face showed nothing. Quirk was looking carefully at the light fixture on the ceiling.

“Captain,” I said, “does it bother you that her bed is turned back, her clothes are on the chair, and her pajamas are on the bathroom floor? Does it seem funny to you that someone would take off her clothes, put on her pajamas, and get in the bathtub?”

“She brought them in to put on when she got through,” Yates said very quickly. His mouth moved erratically as he
talked. It was like watching a movie with the soundtrack out of sync. Peculiar.

“And dropped them carefully in a pile on the floor where the tub would splash them and she’d drip on them when she got out because she loved putting on wet pajamas,” I said.

“Accidental death by drowning. Open and shut.” Yates said it hard and loud with a lot of lip motion. Fascinating to watch. “Quirk, let’s go. Belson, get this guy’s statement. And you, Jack”—he gave me the hard look again—“be where I can reach you. And when I call, you better come running.”

“How about I come over and sleep on your back step,” I said, but Yates was already on his way out.

Quirk looked at Belson. Belson said, “Right on her head she fell, Marty.”

Quirk said, “Yeah,” and went out after Yates.

Belson whistled “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” between his teeth as he got out his notebook and looked at me. “Shoot,” he said.

“For crissake, Frank, this is really raw.”

“Captain don’t want an editorial,” Belson said, “just what happened.”

“Even if you aren’t bothered by the pajamas and all, isn’t it worth more than routine when the ex-roommate of a murder suspect dies violently?”

Belson said, “I spent six years rattling doorknobs under the MTA tracks in Charlestown. Now ride in a car and wear a tie. Captain just wants what happened.”

I told him.

I sat in my car on the dark Fenway. The super had, grumbling, installed a padlock on the splintered door to the Connelly apartment while a prowl car cop watched. Belson had departed with my statement, and everything was neat and orderly again. The corpse gone. The mob, the cops, the university had all told me to mind my own business. Not a bad trio; I was waiting for a threat from organized religion. In a few weeks Terry Orchard would be gone, to the women’s reformatory in Framingham; twenty years probably, a crime of passion by a young woman. She’d be out when she was forty, ready to start anew. You meet such interesting people in jail.

I got a flashlight and some tape out of the glove compartment and a pinch bar out of my trunk and went back over to the apartment house. The super hadn’t fixed the screen on the back door, but he had shut and locked the inside door. I went to a cellar window. It was locked. On my hands and knees I looked through the frost patterns of grime. Inside was darkness. I flashed the light through. Inside was what looked like a coal bin, no longer used for coal. There were barrels and boxes and a couple of bicycles. I taped a tic-tac-toe pattern on one of the window-panes and tapped the glass out with the pinch bar. The tape kept the noise down. When the opening was big enough I
reached my hand through and unlatched the window. It was not a very big window, but I managed to slide through it and drop to the cellar floor. I scraped both shins in the process.

The cellar was a maze of plastic trash bags, old wooden barrels, steamer trunks, cardboard boxes, clumsily tied piles of newspaper. A rat scuttled out of the beam from my flashlight as I worked my way through the junk. At the far end a door, slightly ajar, opened onto the furnace room, and to the left were the stairway and the super’s cage. I could hear canned laughter from the television. I went very quietly along the wall toward the stairs. I was in luck; when I peered around the corner of the super’s office he was in his swivel chair, asleep in the rich fumes of port wine and furnace heat, the TV blaring before him. I went up the same stairs to the third floor. No hesitation on the second floor—I learn quickly. The padlock on Cathy Connelly’s door was cheap and badly installed. I got the pinch bar under the hasp and pulled it loose with very little noise. Once inside I put a chair against the door to keep it closed and turned on the lights. The place hadn’t changed much in the past two hours. The bloated corpse was gone, but otherwise there was nothing different. It wasn’t a very big apartment. I could search it in a couple of hours probably. I didn’t know what I was looking for, of course, which would slow me down, because I couldn’t eliminate things on an “is-it-bigger-than-a-bread-box” basis.

I started in the bathroom, because it was on the left. If you are going to get something searched you have to do it orderly. Start at a point and go section by section through the place, not where things are most likely, or least likely, or anything else, just section by section until you’ve looked at everything. The bathroom didn’t take long. There was in the medicine cabinet some toothpaste, some aspirin,
some nose drops prescribed by a doctor in New Rochelle, New York, a bottle of Cope, some lipstick, some liquid make-up, a safety razor, an eyebrow pencil. I emptied out the make-up bottle; there was nothing in it but make-up. The aspirin tasted like aspirin, the Cope appeared to be Cope, the nose drops smelled like nose drops. There was nothing in the lipstick tube but lipstick. There was nothing in the toilet tank, nothing taped underneath the sink, no sign that anything had been slipped under the buckling linoleum. I stood on the toilet seat and unscrewed the ceiling fixture with a jackknife blade—nothing inside but dusty wiring that looked like it wouldn’t pass the city’s electrical code. I screwed the fixture back in place.

I went over the kitchen next. I emptied the flour, sugar, dry cereal, salt, and pepper into the sink one by one and sifted through them. Other than some little black insects I found nothing. The stove was an old gas stove. I took up the grillwork over the burners, looked carefully at the oven. The stove couldn’t be moved without disconnecting the gas pipe. I was willing to bet Cathy Connelly never had. I took all the pans out of the under sink cabinet and wormed under the sink on my back, using my flashlight to examine it all. A cockroach. There was little food in the old gas refrigerator. I emptied it. A couple of TV dinners. I melted them under the hot water in the sink and found nothing. I took the panel off of the bottom and looked carefully in. The motor was thick with dust kitties, and the drip pan was gummy with God knows what.

The living room was of course the one that took time. It was about two in the morning when I found something. In the bottom bureau drawer was a cigar box containing letters, bills, canceled checks. I took it over to the daybed, sat down, and began to read through them. There were two letters from her mother full of aimless amenities that made
my throat tighten. The dog got on the school bus and her father had gotten a call from the school and had to leave the store and go get it, younger brother was in a junior high school pageant, momma had lost three pounds, she hoped Cathy was watching what she ate, daddy sent his love.

The third letter was different. It was on the stationery of a Peabody motel. It said:

There was no date, no signature. It was written in a distinctive cursive script.

For crissake! A clue. A goddamned clue. I folded the note up and put it in my inside coat pocket. So far I was guilty of breaking and entering, possession of burglar’s tools, and destruction of property. I figured tampering with evidence would round things out nicely. I wanted to run right out and track down my clue, but I didn’t. I searched the rest of the room. There were no other clues.

I turned off the lights, moved the chair, and went out. The door wouldn’t stay shut because of the broken padlock. I went out the front way this time, as if I belonged. When I reached my car I put the pinch bar back in the trunk, got in the car, and sat for a bit. Now that I had a clue, what exactly was I supposed to do with it? I looked
at my watch. 3
A.M.
Searching apartments is slow business. I turned on the interior light in my car, took out my clue, and read it again. It said the same thing it said the first time. I folded it up again and tapped my front teeth with it for about fifteen seconds. Then I put it back in my pocket, turned off the interior light, started up the car, and went home. When I decide something I don’t hesitate.

I went to bed and dreamed I was a miner and the tunnel was collapsing and everyone else had left. I woke up with the dream unfinished and my clock said ten minutes of seven. I looked at the bureau. My clue was up there where I’d left it, partly unfolded, along with my loose change and my jackknife and my wallet. Maybe I’d catch somebody today. Maybe I’d detect something. Maybe I’d solve a crime. There are such days. I’d even had some. I climbed out of bed and plodded to the shower. I hadn’t worked out in four days and felt it. If I solved something this morning, maybe I could take the afternoon off and go over to the Y.

I took a shower and shaved and dressed and went out. It was only 7:45 and cold. The snow was hard-crusted and the sun glistened off it very brightly. I put on my sunglasses. Even through their dark lenses it was a bright and lovely day. I stopped at a diner and had two cups of coffee and three plain doughnuts. I looked at my watch. 8:15. The trouble with being up and at ’em bright and early was once you were up most of the ’em that you wanted to be at weren’t out yet.

I bought a paper and cruised over to the university. There was room to park in a tow zone near the gymnasium. I parked there and read the paper for half an hour. Nowhere was there mention of the fact that I’d found a clue. In fact, nowhere was anyone even predicting that I would. At nine o’clock I got out and went looking for Iris Milford.

She wasn’t in the newspaper office. The kid cropping photos at the next desk told me she never came in until the afternoon, and showed me her class schedule pasted on the corner of her desk. With his help I figured out that from nine to ten she had a sociology course in room 218 of the chemistry building. He told me how to get there. I had a half-hour wait in the corridor, where I entertained myself examining the girl students who went by. During class time they were sparse and I had nothing else to do but marvel at the consistency with which the university architects had designed their buildings. Cinder block and vinyl tile seem to suffice for all seasons. At ten minutes to ten the bell rang and the kids poured into the corridor. Iris saw me as she came out of the classroom. She said, “Hell, Spenser. How’d you know where to find me?”

I said, “I’m a trained detective. Want some coffee?”

We went to the cafeteria in the student union. Above the cafeteria entrance someone had scrawled in purple magic marker, “Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here.”

I said, “Isn’t that from Dante?”

She said, “Very good. It’s written over the entrance to hell in book three of ‘The Inferno.’ ”

I said, “Aw, I bet you looked that up.”

The cafeteria was modernistic as far as cinder block and vinyl tile will permit. The service area along one side was low-ceilinged and close. The dining area was three stories high, with one wall of windows that reached the ceiling and opened on a parking lot. The cluttered tables were a spectrum of bright pastels, and the floor was red quarry tile in squares. It was somewhere between an aviary and Penn Station. It was noisy and hot. The smoke of thousands of cigarettes drifted through the shafts of winter sunlight that fused in through the windows. Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here.