by Linda Barnes
The senator displayed a flash of even white teeth as he extended his hand, crinkling up his face even more. “If you’re the Michael Spraggue who spells his last name with two g’s, I’ve met your aunt at a few fund raisers lately.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Spraggue said, returning the man’s smile. “Get anything out of her?” He wished someone would suggest going out for a drink.
“A few tips on playing the stock market.”
“You running the marathon?”
Donagher’s face seamed into another smile. “You bet. God, I’ve missed running the damn thing. Last year, when I was sitting on my butt on that reviewing stand at the Prudential Center, I vowed that I’d run it this year, if I had to get the Senate to pass a special bill letting me out for training time.”
“Planning to come in second again?”
“Give me a break. It’s been five years since I made the top ten. Warming a chair in Washington isn’t the best preparation for Heartbreak Hill. Look, why don’t I keep on moving while you guys chat about old times? I’ve got a few more miles to rack up and I don’t want my leg muscles stiffening.”
“You sure it’s okay?” Collatos spoke in an undertone, full of concern.
“No problem,” Donagher reassured him, using the same hushed tone. “This isn’t exactly midnight in a dark alley. I’ll pick you up next circuit. Nice meeting you, Spraggue.”
“Stay away from the press,” Collatos hollered after him, grinning.
As soon as Donagher was out of sight, Spraggue collapsed onto a large flat rock by the side of the trail and rubbed his legs. “You’re looking good,” he said after a two-minute pause. He wasn’t going to be the one to mention the note.
Collatos laughed. “It’s that goddamned diet. Preparation for the marathon. Man, the day after the race, I’m gonna down three six-packs and stuff five large Regina’s pizzas with sausage, onion, and anchovies down my throat.”
“Remind me to avoid you on April twentieth. Are you carbohydrate loading?”
“Nah, it’s some fancy diet some doctor concocted for Donagher. I run with him; I follow his diet.”
And why are you, a former detective, running with the junior senator from Massachusetts? Spraggue wanted to ask.
“Sorry you got canned,” he said instead. Was Collatos responsible for that note? He’d been so sure when he’d first seen him; it was the kind of gag Collatos would pull.…
“Hey, forget it.” Collatos’ irrepressible smile made Spraggue’s legs throb painfully. “Oh, I was depressed at first. All that training down the tubes. Family tradition shot to hell. It’s hard to kiss off the dream of twenty-five years and a good pension. But, hell, I wasn’t in love with the department.”
“Your ears still perk up when you hear a siren,” Spraggue said.
“Can’t help it.” Collatos listened for a moment. “That’s a fire engine, not a cop car.”
“Sure it’s not an ambulance?”
The ex-cop closed his eyes in concentration, frowned, shook his head emphatically.
“Too bad,” Spraggue said, massaging his taut calf muscles. “I could use one.”
“You gotta stay in shape,” Collatos scolded. “Build up the miles gradually. Anyway, after I got laid off, not even a week after I’m out in the cold, I’ve got a new gig all sewn up.”
“Doing what?”
“I’m telling you.” Spraggue remembered how hard it was to push Collatos forward in a straight line. He leaned back on his hands and carefully flexed his ankles.
“I never even had a chance to reflect on my future,” Collatos said. “My sister had a whole list of professions for me to try out; she even wanted me to go back to school. I was planning to take a two-week vacation, blow my severance pay in the sunshine, then maybe go into private practice, pirate a case or two from the cops. But the guys in the department, man, they really take care of you. Senator Donagher calls up, looking for a bodyguard. He’s a runner; the guys know I run. Perfect match, they figure. The brass gives me top grades and here I am, training for the marathon while I earn more bucks than the dear old taxpayers ever shelled out.”
“What’s Donagher need a bodyguard for?”
“He started getting death threats in the mail. Makes him nervous.”
“Doesn’t seem nervous.”
“I thought, maybe, besides just protecting him, I’d do a little snooping, find out who’s sending the notes.”
“To a politician? Where are you going to start? The voting register? Probably some crank sending bouquets to both sides.”
“Nope. I checked. Bartolo’s people say he’s not getting that kind of hate mail.”
“Either they’re waiting for the campaign to heat up or there’s no accounting for taste.”
“You said it. I mean, why hate Donagher and not Bartolo? Donagher’s an all right guy. For a pol, he’s a prince. I told him he ought to hire you, Spraggue.”
Spraggue’s smile was grim, a straight line between two parentheses. “So that’s what this little charade is all about,” he said.
“I knew that note would get you,” Pete said. “You’re a sucker for that kind of stuff.”
“Hold it right there. You’re not a cop anymore; I’m not a private investigator anymore.”
“You’re shittin’ me.”
“Nope.”
“You sure it’s not just that your politics and Donagher’s politics don’t mix and match? I mean, he is one of the original soak-the-rich boys.”
“It’s nothing political,” Spraggue said. “I voted for the guy. The old families in Massachusetts expect to get soaked. We just hate to flush our money down the nuclear warheads toilet. If Donagher had more power, I’d feel a hell of a lot better about my tax bill.”
“Jeez.” Collatos yanked off his sweatband, twisted it in his hands, and watched the drops of water seep into the ground. “Spraggue quits the snoop business. Nothing stays the same. You working? Or you just clipping coupons?”
“I went back to acting. I’m almost making a living at it.”
“No shit. You on TV?”
“I specialize in plays that close on opening night and movies that never get released. Right now I’m with the Harvard Repertory Theater.”
“And here I’ve been thinking I could hook up with you on this Donagher business. We worked together okay on that stolen car beef.”
Spraggue remembered the reckless enthusiasm that had characterized that long ago investigation and felt sorry for whoever had sent Donagher the anonymous notes. Their writer would be hounded by Collatos for the rest of his life.
“Why not work on one more case?” Collatos said. “Keep your hand in?”
“My P.I. license is expired.”
“Good,” Collatos said. “That’s probably the only thing that keeps Menlo from confiscating it.”
“Menlo! They haven’t fired that cretin yet?”
“You kidding? He was my boss on the arson liaison detail. When the rest of us got laid off, he got promoted!”
“God help the Boston Police!” Spraggue muttered under his breath.
Collatos twisted a grass stem between his thumb and index finger, kept his eyes glued on it while he said in a disappointed tone, “So that acting stuff keeps you busy?”
“Up to my ears.”
Instead of responding, Pete stared abruptly up at the path. Spraggue followed the ex-cop’s eyes and found himself confronting the woman of his fantasy, dark-eyed and exotic, moving at a languid pace around the pond. He jumped up as quickly as his stiffening legs would allow.
“You know her?” Collatos asked eagerly.
“Nope. But I’m planning to. Think it’ll be too obvious if I collapse at her feet?”
Collatos grinned. “You’re not up to your ears, you’re over your head.”
A shot cracked through the trees. Spraggue named it even before he stopped hoping it might be some backfiring truck. A sharp series of repeats, punctuated by screams, followed hard on the
first explosion.
Spraggue found he could still run.
His eyes met Collatos’ dark eyes for an instant and then both men took off, tracing the path Donagher had taken, the gravelly, narrow, uphill trail. Spraggue’s toes bit into the turf and he leaned slightly forward at the waist to counter the incline. He saw a flash of metal in Collatos’ hand, wondered where the ex-cop had managed to conceal a gun in his running clothes.
They topped the hill. “Brian!” Collatos hollered, and Spraggue wondered, too, where he got the breath for the full-throated bellow. The ex-cop stared wildly around and plunged full speed down the slope.
The Beacon Street traffic noises faded into insignificance in the background. The pain came back to Spraggue’s side; he ignored it. They passed the life-course exercise stations scattered along the side of the trail without stopping to perform any prescribed number of sit-ups or push-ups. The path changed from gravel to cement, broadened, leveled out. Spraggue’s breath rasped his throat, and he ran slightly bent now, not because of hilly terrain, but in an attempt to ease the stitch in his side. A burst of noise erupted just over the next rise. Someone shouted, “Stay down!”
“Brian!” Collatos hollered again. This time his voice shook and died.
“Pete!”
Collatos’ relief was so great Spraggue could see the spasm pass through his whole body. He sagged momentarily, straightened, sped up, and Spraggue fell in behind him on the narrowing path.
“Don’t come any closer!” The voice was Donagher’s. Collatos ducked behind an overhanging boulder. Spraggue dodged after him, staring at the scene spread out in front of them. Donagher had taken shelter from the sudden barrage of fire by vaulting the fence that surrounded the reservoir and flattening himself behind one of the elms. Every other runner in the vicinity seemed to have followed suit. Faces peered out from behind bushes. The potential targets stayed low, some prone, the more daring on their knees. Those not staring at Spraggue and Collatos kept their eyes fixed across Lake Street on the old Boston College graveyard.
Donagher picked that moment to leap to his feet. “Behind the column,” he yelled. “On the hill in the graveyard!”
Donagher pointed as he shouted and Collatos sprinted forward, crossing the road with a total disregard for traffic, climbing a formidable fence into the graveyard, and charging up the hill toward the tallest monument, gun drawn. In seconds, he was out of sight.
Spraggue considered pursuit, but his legs wouldn’t deliver.
The runners ventured out slowly, forming a gawking ring around Donagher, whispering his identity, examining scratches and bruises. One elderly man had twisted an ankle clambering over the fence. He knelt, cursed, and rubbed his leg. Several witnesses, not sure what to do, giggled awkwardly.
“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 per
petrator. 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.