Dead Heat

by Linda Barnes

  “What happened?” Spraggue cut across the murmur of the crowd with the question.

  “I’m not sure,” Donagher said hurriedly. “Reflex action, I guess. A noise. I saw something moving in the graveyard—”

  “Everyone hid, so I did, too,” piped up a woman in an orange tank top. “Maybe it was just a car backfiring.”

  “No way!” This from a burly bare-chested man with an abundance of curly dark hair. “Shots. Rifle shots. I heard enough of ’em in ’Nam to last a lifetime. Man, I thought I was hallucinating, having a nightmare or something.”

  “Shouldn’t somebody call the police?”

  “Is everyone okay? Did anybody get hit?”

  “That man running away, his face was all mashed-in looking, not like a normal face.”

  The last offering, rising over the hubbub of the suddenly talkative crowd, came from a blond teenager Spraggue recognized as one of the young females who’d passed him earlier in the day.

  Stocking mask, Spraggue thought.

  Donagher’s pleasant baritone took charge. Spraggue didn’t hear all the words because he was peering off for a returning Pete Collatos. But Donagher’s tone smoothed and apologized. Spraggue caught a sentence here and there, something about “avoiding panic” and “unfortunate publicity” and “a black eye for a gracious city right before one of her most prestigious events.”

  Good luck, Spraggue thought. Try to keep these twenty people from spilling their guts to all their friends and relations. Just try. Wait until the newsmongers get ahold of it. Shots fired at senator from Boston College graveyard. He wondered how lurid the headlines in the Herald would be. GHOST SNIPES SENATOR in three-inch-high black boldface.

  Collatos, still running, hove back into view.

  He halted near Spraggue, panting like an overweight dog, and tried to speak.

  “A car …” He got that much out, doubled over at the waist, bent his knees, and huddled into a ball.

  Spraggue knelt beside him. “You all right?”

  “Out … of breath …”

  “You call the cops?”

  Collatos nodded. So much for Donagher’s eloquent plea to keep the incident under wraps.

  Spraggue waited until Collatos had drawn a couple of shuddery breaths. “What kind of car?” he asked.

  “On Comm Ave … dark … gunned the motor just as I got there.”

  “You see the guy get in it?”

  Collatos shrugged.

  “License plate?”

  “Covered … with mud.”

  “Make?”

  “Olds … maybe Buick … late model …” Collatos smeared the back of his hand across his forehead and drops of sweat spattered the ground. He grabbed Spraggue’s shoulder and hauled himself up to a standing position. He tottered, caught himself, walked the ten paces over to where Donagher stood, and placed a tentative hand on the senator’s arm.

  “Sorry …” he said, still fighting for breath. “Sorry. Stupid to leave you …”

  “Forget it,” Donagher said, but his voice was hard and tight.

  A siren closed in, different in tone and pitch from the one Collatos had identified earlier as a fire engine. A few stragglers in the crowd ran off, not eager to get involved. Most pressed in closer.

  A patrol car, its blue lights spinning and flashing, shrieked around the corner and blocked the road. Two uniformed men jumped out.

  TWO

  He tore off his beard with the quick deft yank that experience dictated as the least excruciating way to perform a painful task. Then he cold-creamed and tissued the paint off his face, removing the heavy makeup that disguised one of Duke Senior’s courtiers from the man the audience had earlier encountered as the wicked brother, Oliver. Spraggue glanced at the table in front of him to ensure that all was laid out in preparation for his five-minute transformation back to Oliver; fake mustache, dark red lining pencils, brown shadow, white liner, two fine-tipped camel’s-hair brushes, medium powder, one grease stick in standard tan. He wouldn’t have time to blend a particular shade for Oliver.

  He smoothed on a light layer of grease and rubbed it in with face-washing motions, then selected the sharpest of his lining pencils by testing each of their points against his thumb. He raised both eyebrows to wrinkle his forehead and automatically traced the most prominent of the resulting lines with red pencil, highlighting each furrow with white. Pretty soon he could forget about the wrinkling ceremony, he thought. The lines were getting damn easy to spot without it.

  Just as he’d established a ritual for the makeup table and an order, from hairline to chin, in which to line his face, so there was a structure to his mental preparation for each role. Now was the allotted time to slip back into the character of the evil elder brother: to replay Oliver’s grim encounter with Duke Frederick at the new court; to reconstruct Oliver’s plans to do away with his brother, Orlando; to relive Oliver’s long journey to the Forest of Arden, culminating in his miraculous, plot-saving conversion to sudden goodness. Instead, Spraggue pondered the shooting at the reservoir.

  The cops now had the names of some twenty runners who’d witnessed the brouhaha, complete with addresses, phone numbers, and a few addled, unmatching descriptions of the supposed perpetrator. The young woman who had brought up the stocking-mask possibility seemed the most reliable of a bad lot. The old man with the twisted ankle had offered twenty-two different conspiracy theories, the mildest being a plot by the sponsors of the New York Marathon to scuttle the Boston race. He also thought the sniping might be a diabolically clever ploy by the mob to get the cops out of the way while crooks reprised the Brink’s heist.

  Spraggue thumbed brown shadow across his eyelids. What bothered him was the reporters. Channel 4’s news team had been on the scene like flies on honey even before the cops had finished flashing their badges. Asked better questions, too. Could they have been tipped off slightly in advance? Was the whole episode some cockeyed publicity stunt? Donagher was up for reelection in November and many were the pundits who claimed his return to marathon running was a cheap way of garnering momentum for his campaign start-up. Instead of shelling out hard won campaign contributions for newspaper ads, would some flunky in Donagher’s organization point proudly to tomorrow’s front page coverage in the Globe and the Herald and chalk up the cash savings for his committee? Spraggue decided that he’d investigate that angle long before he checked out any anonymous crank letters. He wondered what Pete Collatos would do. If Collatos kept his job. Spraggue hoped his friend hadn’t gotten fired for his dereliction of duty.

  Deftly, he hollowed out the area under his right cheekbone with dark shadow, edged it with white.

  Any flunky responsible for the prank would have wept at Donagher’s low-key reaction. The candidate had resisted every attempt by the cops to single him out as the target. A “random sniping incident” at the reservoir, that’s what Donagher had called it. When pressed for motive, he’d discoursed on random violence in today’s society. Hadn’t mentioned any threatening letters. Out of twenty-five observers of Donagher’s chat with the cops, Spraggue supposed the senator hadn’t won more than twenty-five votes. Getting shot at all across the city seemed an uncertain way to win an election.

  He peered up at the ceiling, cheated down into the mirror to line under his eyes. His Oliver makeup was a straight job in contrast to the character makeup he did for the rustic lord. No fancy tricks on this one, no putty noses or bushy eyebrows. Spraggue just reinforced the features he already had, evening out the faint asymmetricality that made his mobile face perfect for double casting.

  Right now, Spraggue thought, he could play any age, from twenty to death, but his days as youthful Romeo were fast drawing to a close. On the street, his face never drew a second look. Makeup made a difference. The Globe’s reviewer had called his Oliver a handsome rogue, two words no one would have used to describe Spraggue. Normal was a more oft used term. Average, except for those amber cat’s eyes.

  Hurriedly buttoning up
his deep red tunic, Spraggue reread the note he’d found tacked to his dressing-room door. “Michael,” it said, “must see you. Finances. Real estate. Tonight. No excuses.” The assistant stage manager had written down his aunt’s peremptory message in appropriate red. He doubted his aunt had been quite so succinct; Mary had a reputation for volubility.

  Tonight … Whether or not he made the appointment would depend on the mood of one Kathleen Farrell, the actress who played his beloved Celia. An after-theater snack might be in order: He’d missed dinner due to the cops’ insistence on his testimony at the sniping scene, and his stomach rumbled like distant cannonfire. He’d almost been tempted by the gruesome fare the props crew dispensed for the Act Two rustic banquet scene. And after dinner … well, Aunt Mary might have to wait a bit. Maybe she’d have to forge his signature on whatever moneymaking scheme she was presently contemplating.

  He shook himself from his reverie and addressed his reflection in the full-length mirror on the back of the door.

  Good morrow, fair ones: Pray you, if you know,

  Where in the purlieus of this forest stands

  A sheep-cote, fenced about with olive trees?

  He spoke those words in Act Four, scene three, every night As You Like It played, which was by no means a simple matter of every Tuesday through Sunday night with Wednesday and Sunday matinees. The Harvard Rep was just what its title proclaimed, a repertory company complete with its own bizarre calendar. This season they were running a three-show schedule: a Shakespeare, a Brecht, and an opera, the latter a new departure for the theater. Spraggue was cast in two out of the three, having neither the voice nor the inclination for opera. This week was more hectic than most: three Caucasian Chalk Circles and four As You Like Its. The opera ran only once. At first, Spraggue had checked the schedule constantly to find out whom he was to play that night; now he took things a day at a time without much anxiety.

  The Act Four speech he’d just recited was the opening of his big scene with Celia, a scene played not by the text, but according to Rosalind’s later verdict that the two had “no sooner met, but they looked; no sooner looked but they loved.” Each night Spraggue picked a different point in the scene to fall madly in love with Celia. He wondered how much of an effect that had on his feelings for Kathleen Farrell. Imitation spawning the real thing; art provoking life rather than imitating it. Hard to tell.

  Kathleen, a blue-eyed siren with honey-colored hair, was breathtaking in the scene that night. Her voice was tuned to the back of the auditorium, but Spraggue couldn’t rid himself of the notion that her eyes and thoughts were just for him.

  He married her in the last scene. Was her curtain-call kiss warmer, longer than usual?

  He recalled the first time he’d been shot at, years before, when he’d been a practicing private detective. He remembered thinking: If life is so capricious, if you can be wiped off the face of the earth by a stray bullet fired at a stranger by a stranger, enjoy each day, each moment. Confronting death made him think of pleasure, and pleasure made him think of sex. He wondered how Senator Donagher would pass the night.

  Kathleen entered his dressing room still in her Celia garb, although her face had been scrubbed clean and her wig discarded. She carried her street clothes over her arm. Kathleen changed clothes wherever she happened to be—a habit that alternately delighted and irritated him—as long as her bra and panties stayed on. If those articles were to be removed, she retreated demurely to her dressing room like some innocent ingenue. Now she left the door open and began unhooking her bodice. Spraggue hoped the entire cast would not filter in to see which style of underwear she had selected for the evening.

  “Hungry?” he asked, wondering if he were the first or the final male in the cast to try this less than novel approach. His was certainly not the only dressing room Kathleen had graced with her postperformance strip shows.

  “Starving.”

  “The Harvest is still open. Or,” he said, carefully not staring at any of the portions of Farrell’s anatomy that were well worth staring at, “I could fix you some dinner at my place.”

  She glanced at him speculatively and said, “That would be nice” in a way that let him know all possible ramifications of his invitation had been taken into consideration.

  “Fine” was all he said.

  “Stage door in five minutes then.” She vanished, leaving him to think delightful thoughts.

  They were abruptly canceled. The hulking figure of Captain Hank Menlo of the Boston Police filled the doorway, blocking the light.

  THREE

  By the time he stalked out of Menlo’s stuffy hole of an office at one thirty in the morning, Spraggue’s earlier romantic mood was shot—nothing but a distant memory, as far away as Kathleen Farrell. He glared at the other occupant of the rumbling elevator all the way down to the lobby, causing the rookie cop to blush and pat his holster for reassurance. Ignoring the sergeant manning the check-out desk, Spraggue hurried down the stone steps of police headquarters, crossed a deserted Berkeley Street, and found, as he’d hoped, a lone taxi waiting in front of the Greyhound terminal.

  “Harvard Square,” he snapped as he opened the door.

  “In a hurry?” The cabbie sounded hopeful: a bad sign. The cab had an accordion-pleated right front fender.

  “No,” Spraggue said sharply. A race down Storrow Drive hanging on to a filthy armrest in a taxi whose interior smelled like someone had recently bled to death in it didn’t sound like any remedy for a foul mood.

  The cabdriver shrugged and slammed his foot down on the accelerator like a flamenco dancer warming up for the finale. Spraggue clutched the armrest, wondered what the aging juvenile delinquent would have pulled had he been unwise enough to urge haste.

  After the cabbie shot the red light at Beacon Street and surged onto Storrow Drive from a tricky left-lane merge without benefit of side or rearview mirror, Spraggue settled back and closed his eyes.

  “Goddam Menlo,” he muttered under his breath. He replayed the scene in his dressing room and got angry all over again.

  “Imagine those two rookies just taking your name and address and letting you walk,” Menlo had said while Spraggue had inwardly cursed the assistant stage manager responsible for keeping invaders away from the stage door. Menlo had folded his wallet and shoved it back into the pocket of his disreputable khaki pants; he must have used his badge to bully the woman into submission. Some admission ticket, that badge.

  Spraggue could hear Kathleen, in her nearby dressing room, humming a tune from the show, a piping rustic melody. He resolved not to irritate Menlo in any way, not to give him the slightest excuse to ruin such a promising evening. He fastened a polite smile on his face; the evening’s performance wasn’t over yet.

  “Long time, et cetera,” he said mildly. “I convinced them I wasn’t likely to skip town. And even if I did, they’ve got plenty of other witnesses, people who saw a lot more than I did.”

  “If they’d known who they were dealing with—”

  “I’m not exactly on the F.B.I.’s most wanted list, Captain.” God, it hurt to call Menlo “Captain.” How the asshole had ever managed lieutenant was a puzzle.

  “What the hell were you doing at the reservoir?”

  “Ready, Michael?” Kathleen had chosen that moment to peer in over the cop’s shoulder. Her two words were sufficient to inform Menlo that he had the unparalleled opportunity to interrupt something that might turn out to be fun. His eyes glowed.

  “He’ll be busy for a while,” Menlo grunted, eyeing Kathleen as offensively as possible.

  She gave it back to him with interest, and Menlo’s face burned briefly red.

  Much as he would have enjoyed seeing Farrell tangle with the cop, Spraggue nodded her back outside. “Five minutes. If it’s longer than that, go on home and I’ll phone.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  Menlo could have taken out a patent on obscene leers.

  “I asked you
a question,” he said triumphantly, as soon as Farrell’s perfume wafted out of the immediate area.

  “I’m sure it must have been important.”

  “What were you doing at the reservoir?”

  “What are you doing here? Last time I looked, this was Cambridge, not Boston.”

  “If you got any complaints; I’ll be glad to take you down to the Cambridge Police Station and you can—”

  “No, thanks.”

  “So what were you doing at the reservoir?”

  “Running.”

  The conversation had lurched downhill from there. The calmer Spraggue’s manner, the more he seemed to rile Menlo. And Menlo had always had the effect of a persistent buzzing mosquito on Spraggue.

  The first time they’d met, with shattering results, Spraggue had been a licensed P.I. working a case. Like the majority of their encounters, it had ended with Spraggue getting hauled off to a cell in the Charles Street Jail, only to be rescued prior to incarceration by a fleet of the best lawyers ever to whip up a writ of habeas corpus. By a conservative estimate, Spraggue figured he’d held up Menlo’s appointment to lieutenant by two years. Two years well spent. Maybe he should have stayed a private investigator just for the satisfaction of keeping Menlo off the captain’s roll.

  Now it seemed that any hint of a trace of a possibility that Spraggue might be back in the private investigation game was enough to bring Menlo roaring over from Boston, enough to make him stretch his authority in order to cart Spraggue in for questioning, enough to make him threaten a material witness jailing. Spraggue failed to feel flattered by the attention.

  “What were you doing at the reservoir?”

  By the time the question got asked for the fourth time, they were in Menlo’s dingy downtown office and the fantasy-fulfilling night with Kathleen had gone up in smoke.