Five Classic Spenser Mysteries (87 page)

I said, “Many campus romances start here?”

She laughed and shook her head. “Not hardly,” she said. “You want to scuff hand and hand through fallen leaves, you don’t go here.”

We stood in line for our coffee. The service was cardboard, by Dixie. I paid, and we found a table. It was cluttered with paper plates, plastic forks, and cardboard beverage trays and napkins. I crumpled them together and deposited them in a trash can.

“How long you had this neatness fetish?” Iris asked.

I grinned, took a sip of coffee.

“You find Cathy Connelly?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said, “but she was dead.”

Iris’s mouth pulled back in a grimace and she said, “Shit.”

“She’d been drowned in her bathtub, by someone who tried to make it look accidental.”

Iris sipped her coffee and said nothing.

I took the letter from my inside pocket and gave it to her. “I found this in her room,” I said.

Iris read it slowly.

“Well, she didn’t die a virgin,” Iris said.

“There’s that,” I said.

“She was sleeping with some professor,” Iris said.

“Yep.”

“If you can find out what eight o’clock classes she had, you’ll know who.”

“Yep.”

“But you can’t get that information because you’ve been banished from the campus.”

“Yep.”

“Which leaves old Iris to do it, right?”

“Right.”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Because I don’t know. It’s a clue. There’s a professor in here someplace. The missing manuscript would suggest a professor. Terry says she heard Powell talking to a professor before he was killed, now Cathy Connelly appears to have been sleeping with a professor, and she’s dead. I want to know who he is. He could be the same professor. Can you get her class schedule?”

“This year?”

“All years, there’s no date on the note.”

“Okay, I got a friend in the registrar’s office. She’ll check it for me.”

“How soon?”

“As soon as she can. Probably know tomorrow.”

“I’m betting on Hayden,” I said.

“As a secret lover?”

“Yep. The manuscript is medieval. He’s a medieval specialist. He teaches Chaucer, which is an early class. Terry Orchard was up early for her Chaucer course the day that Powell threatened some professor on the phone. The conversation implied that the professor on the phone had an early class. Hayden pretended not to know Terry Orchard when in fact he did know her. He’s a raging radical according to a very reliable witness. There’s enough coincidence for me to wager on. Why don’t you get in touch with your friend and find out if I’m right?”

She said, “Soon as I finish my coffee. I’ll call you when I know.”

I left her and headed back for my car.

I was right. Iris called me at eleven thirty the next morning to report that Cathy Connelly had taken Chaucer this year with Lowell Hayden at eight o’clock Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. The only other eight o’clock class she’d had in her three years at the university had been a course in Western civilization taught by a woman.

“Unless she was gay,” Iris said, “it looks like Dr. Hayden.”

“You took the same course, right?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Got any term papers or exams, or something with a sample of his writing?”

“I think so. Come on over to the newspaper office. I’ll dig some up.”

“Don’t you ever go to class?”

“Not while I’m tracking down a criminal, I don’t.”

“I’ll be over,” I said.

When I got there Iris had a typewritten paper bound in red plastic lying on her desk. It was twenty-two pages long and titled “The Radix Trait: A Study of Chaucer’s Technique of Characterization in
The Canterbury Tales
.” Underneath it said “Iris Milford,” and in the upper right-hand corner it said “En 308, Dr. Hayden, 10/28.” Above the title in red pencil with a circle around it was the grade A minus.

“Inside back page,” she said. “That’s where he comments.”

I opened the manuscript. In the same red pencil Hayden had written, “Good study, perhaps a bit too dependent on secondary sources, but well stated and judicious. I wish you had not eschewed the political and class implications of the
Tales,
however.”

I took the note out of my coat pocket and put it down beside the paper. It was the same fancy hand.

“Can I have this paper?” I asked Iris.

“Sure—why, want to read it in bed?”

“No, I’m housebreaking a puppy.”

She laughed. “Take it away,” she said.

Near my office there was a Xerox copy center. I went in and made a copy of the note and the comment page in Iris’s paper. I took the original up to my office and locked it in the top drawer of my desk. I put the copies in my pocket and drove over to see Lowell Hayden.

He wasn’t in his office, and the schedule card posted on his door indicated that he had no more classes until Monday. Across the street at a drugstore I looked for his name in the directory. He wasn’t listed in the Boston books. I looked up the English Department and called them.

“Hi,” I said, “this is Dr. Porter. I’m lecturing over here at Tufts this evening and I’m trying to locate Lowell Hayden. We were grad students together. Do you have his home address?”

They did, and they gave it to me. He lived in Marblehead. I looked at my watch. 11:10. I could get there for lunch.

Marblehead is north, through the Callahan Tunnel and along Route 1A. An ocean town, yachting center, summer home, and old downtown district that reeked of tar and salt and quaint. Hayden had an apartment in a converted warehouse that fronted on the harbor. First floor, front.

A big hatchet-faced woman in her midthirties answered my ring. She was taller than I was and her blond hair was pulled back in a tight bun. She wore no make-up, and the only thing that ornamented her face were huge Gloria Steinem glasses with gold rims and pink lenses. Her lips were thin, her face very pale. She wore a man’s green pullover sweater, Levi’s, and penny loafers without socks. Big as she was, there was no extra weight. She was as lean and hard as a canoe paddle, and nearly as sexy.

“Mrs. Hayden?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Is Dr. Hayden in?”

“He’s in his study. What do you want?”

“I’d like to speak with him, please.”

“He always spends two hours a day in his study. I don’t permit him to be bothered during that time. Tell me what you want.”

“You’re beautiful when you’re angry,” I said.

“What do you want?”

I offered her my card. “If you’ll give that to Dr. Hayden, perhaps he’ll break his rules just once.”

“I will do nothing of the kind,” she said without taking the card.

“Okay, but if you’ll give him this card when he is through his meditations I’ll be waiting out in my car, looking at the ocean, thinking long thoughts.” I wrote on the back of the card, “Cathy Connelly?” and put the card down on the edge of the umbrella stand by the door. She didn’t slam it, but she closed it firmly. I had the feeling she did everything firmly.

I went back to my car and watched the sun glint on the water. There weren’t many boats in the harbor in winter, mostly sea gulls bobbing on the cold water and swooping in the bright sky. A lobster boat came slowly into the
harbor mouth past the lighthouse on the point of Marblehead Neck. Behind me, the seafood restaurant on the wharf was filling with lunchtime customers, and ahead of me two tourists were taking pictures of the wharf building. I watched the Hayden apartment. Hatchet face never so much as peeked out a window at me. Her husband as far as I could tell continued to meditate. The waves hit the wharf regularly; the interval between waves was about three seconds. After two hours and twenty minutes Lowell Hayden appeared at the front door and looked hard at me. I waved. He shut the door and I sat some more. Another half hour and Hayden appeared again, this time wearing a tan poplin jacket with a fur-lined hood. Other than that he seemed to be dressed just as he had been the last time I saw him. His wife loomed behind him, much taller. She stood in the open door while he came to the car. Making sure I wouldn’t mug him, I guess. He opened the door and got in. I smiled pleasingly.

He said, “Spenser, you’d better leave me alone.” His little pale face was clenched and there was a flush on each cheekbone. He looked a bit like Raggedy Andy.

“Why is that?” I said.

“Because you’ll get hurt.”

“No,” I said. “You’re not saying it right. Keep the lips almost motionless, and squinch your eyes up.”

“I’m warning you now, Spenser. You stay away from me. I have friends who know how to deal with people like you.”

“You gonna call in some hard cases from the Modern Language Association?”

“I mean people who will kill you if I say so.”

“Oh, Mrs. Hayden, you mean.”

“You leave her out of this. You’ve upset her enough.”
He looked nervously at the motionless and implacable figure in the doorway.

“She asking you funny questions about Cathy Connelly?”

“I don’t know anything about Cathy Connelly.”

“Yeah, you do,” I said. “You know about spending the night with her in a motel in romantic Peabody. You know that she’s dead, and you know how she died.”

“I do not.” His resonant voice was up about three octaves; for the first time it matched his appearance. He glanced back at the woman in the doorway. “I’ll have you killed, you bastard. I don’t know anything about this. You leave me alone or you’ll be so sorry—you can’t imagine.”

“You don’t really think Joe Broz will kill me on your say-so, do you?”

His pale face went chalk white. The flush left his cheeks and his left eyelid began to flutter. My right hand was resting on the steering wheel and he suddenly dug his fingernails into it. I yanked my hand away and Hayden jumped out of the car and walked very fast to the house.

“You’ll see,” he shouted back to me. “You’ll see, you bastard. You’ll see.”

He went in past his wife, who closed the door. Firmly.

There were four red scratches on the back of my hand. Lucky it wasn’t the wife; they would have been on my throat. I leaned back in the car and took a big lungful of air and let it out slowly. I knew something. I knew that Hayden was it, or at least part of it. He’d overreacted. And he’d made a big mistake threatening me with tough-guy connections. It had to be Broz, and his reaction to the name made it certain. English professors don’t know hired muscle unless there’s something funny. Here there was something very funny. But exactly what? What was Lowell Hayden’s connection with Joe Broz? What did either one have that the other would want? Hayden didn’t have money,
which was all Broz would want. The connection had to be dope somewhere. Powell was reputed to be a contact for heroin. Powell might be connected with Hayden. Hayden was connected to Cathy Connelly, who was connected to Terry Orchard, who was connected to Powell.

My head began to feel like a mare’s nest. I could connect Hayden to Cathy Connelly for sure. The rest was just speculation, and what I knew in my gut wasn’t going to get Terry Orchard out of jail. My best hope was Hayden’s hysteria. He panicked pretty easily, and if I kept pushing at him, who knows what else might boil to the surface? But first I needed another point of view, a third party, you might say. It was time to go call on old Mark Tabor again. And this time maybe I’d stay longer and lean a little heavier.

Mark Tabor was not home when I got to Westland Avenue. I had to walk up four flights of stairs to find that out. I walked back down and sat outside in my car. I spent a lot of time doing that. It was getting dark and colder; I kept the motor running and the heater going. My stomach was making great cavernous noises at six thirty when Tabor showed up. He came down from Mass Ave with his hands deep in the pockets of a pea jacket, the collar up, and his red corona of hair blossoming about the dark coat like an eruption. He turned in at his building and I came up behind him, reaching his door as he was closing it. I hit it hard with my shoulder and it flew open, propelling Tabor across the room. He tripped over the bed as he staggered backward and fell on it. I shut the door hard behind me, for effect. I wanted him scared.

“Hey, man, what the hell,” he said.

“The hell is this, stupid,” I said. “If you don’t answer what I ask I’m going to pound you into an omelet.”

“Who the Christ are you, man?”

“My name’s Spenser. I was here before, and you proved too tough for me to break. I’m back for another try, boy, only this time I’ll try harder.”

“I don’t know nothing you care about, man.”

“Oh, yeah, you do. You know about Lowell Hayden.
Tell me. Tell me everything you know about Lowell Hayden.”

“Hey, man, all I know is he’s a professor, you know. That’s all I know.”

“No, you know more than that. You know he’s in SCACE with you, don’t you?” I moved toward him and he scrambled off the bed and backed toward the wall.

“No, man, honest.…”

“Yeah, you know that. And you’ll tell me. But there’s something else.”

I was on his side of the bed now and close to him. He tried to jump onto the bed and away from me. I grabbed him by the shirtfront and slammed him back up against the wall.

“Before you tell me about Hayden, I want to speak to you about the manner in which you address me.”

I had my face very close to his and was holding him very tight up against the wall. “I want you to address me as Mr. Spenser. I do not want you to address me as ‘man.’ Do you understand that?”

“Aw, man …” he began, and I slapped him in the face.

“Mr. Spenser, boy,” I said.

“Lemme go, Mr. Spenser. You got no right to come in here and hassle me.”

I jerked him away from the wall and slammed him back up against it.

“We’re not here to discuss my rights, stupid, we’re here to talk about Lowell Hayden. Is he in SCACE?”

“No, man … Mr. Spenser.”

I slapped him across the face again, a little harder, twice.

“I’ll kill you if I have to, stupid,” I said.

“Okay, okay, yeah, he was in SCACE, but he was like
a secret member, you know? Dennis Powell brought him in; he said this dude would be like a faculty contact only under cover, you dig? And me and Dennis would be like the only ones to know.” He was beginning to sniffle a little as he talked.