“Would you put another log on the fire, Mr. Spenser? It seems to be going low, and Rolly always likes a blazing fire when he comes in.”
It was a way of establishing relationships, I thought, as I got a log from the basket and set it on top of the fire—get me to do her bidding. I’d known other women like that. If they couldn’t get you to do them little services, they felt insecure. Or maybe she just wanted another log in the fireplace. Sometimes I’m deep as hell.
The door to the study opened and a man came in. He wore a dark double-breasted blazer with a crest on the pocket, a thick white turtleneck sweater, gray flared slacks, and black ankle boots with a lot of strap and buckle showing. His hair was blond and no doubt naturally curly; it contrasted nicely with his tan. He was a slender man, shorter than I by maybe an inch and maybe ten years older. Under the tan his face had a reddish flush which might be health or booze.
“Spenser,” he said, and put out his hand, “kind of you to come.” I shook hands with him. He wasn’t being the top-exec-used-to-instant-obedience. He was being the gracious-man-of-affluence-putting-an-employee-at-ease.
He said to his wife, “I’ll have coffee, Marion.”
She rose and poured him coffee. She put several small triangular sandwiches on a plate, put the coffee cup in the little depression on the plate that was made to hold it, and placed it next to a red leather wing chair.
Orchard sat down, carefully hiking his trouser legs up at the knee so they wouldn’t bag. I noticed he had a thick silver ring on his little finger.
“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, Spenser, but I don’t like to stay out of work if I can help it. Married to the job, I guess. Just wanted to make sure everything was running smoothly.”
He took a delicate sip of coffee and a small bite of one of the sandwiches.
“I wish to hire you, Mr. Spenser, to see that my daughter is exonerated of the charges leveled against her. I was able to have her released on bail in my custody, but it took a good deal of doing and I had to collect a number of favors to do it. Now I want this mess cleared up and the suspicion eliminated from my name and my home. The police are working to convict. I want someone working to acquit.”
“Why not have Terry join us?” I said.
“Perhaps later,” Orchard said, “but first I want to speak with you for a time.”
I nodded. He went on. “I would like you to give me a complete rundown of the circumstances by which you became involved with Terry up to and including last night.”
“Hasn’t Terry told you?”
“I want your version.”
I didn’t want to tell him. I didn’t like him. I did like his daughter. I didn’t like his assumption that our versions would differ. I said, “Nope.”
“Mr. Spenser. I am employing you to investigate a murder. I want a report of what you’ve discovered so far.”
“First, you may or may not be hiring me. You’ve offered. I haven’t accepted. So at the moment I owe you nothing. That includes how I met your daughter, and what we did.”
“Goddammit, Spenser, I don’t have to take that kind of insolence from you.”
“Right,” I said, “you can hire another Hawkshaw. The ones with phones are in the yellow pages under SLEUTH.”
I thought for a moment that Orchard was going to get up and take a swing at me. I felt no cold surge of terror. Then he thought better of it, and leaned back in his chair.
“Marion,” he said, “I’ll have some brandy. Would you join me, Mr. Spenser?” I looked at my watch; it was two thirty. He really handled stress well. I decided what the flush under the tan was.
“Yeah. I’ll have some. Thank you.”
Marion Orchard’s face looked a little more tightly stretched over her good bones as she went to the sideboard and poured two shots of brandy from a decanter into crystal snifters. She brought them back to us, handed one to me and one to her husband.
Orchard swirled it in his glass and took a large swallow. I tried mine. It was the real stuff okay, barely liquid at all as it drifted down my throat. A guy who served brandy like that couldn’t be all bad.
“Now look, Spenser. Terry is our only child. We’ve lavished every affection and concern on her. We have brought her up in wealth and comfort. Clothes, the best schooling, Europe. She had her own horse and rode beautifully. She made us proud. She was an achiever. That’s important. We do things in this family. Marion rides and hunts as well as any man.”
I looked at Marion Orchard and said. “Hi ho, Silver.”
Orchard went on. I was not sure he’d heard me.
“Then when it came time for college, she insisted on going to that factory. Can you imagine the reaction of some of my associates when they ask me where my daughter goes to school and I tell them?” It was a rhetorical question. I could imagine, but I knew he wasn’t looking for an answer. “Against my best judgment I permitted her to go. And I permitted her to live there rather than at home.” He shook his head. “I should have known better. She got in with the worst element in a bad school and …” He stopped, drank another large slug from his snifter, and went on. “She never gave us any trouble till then. She was just what we wanted. And then in college, living on the very edge of the ghetto, sleeping around, drugs. You’ve seen her, you’ve seen how she dresses, who she keeps company with. I don’t even know where she lives anymore. She rarely comes home, and when she does it’s as if she were coming only to flaunt herself before us and our friends. Do you know she appeared here at a party we were giving wearing a miniskirt she’d made out of an old pair of Levi’s? Now she’s gotten herself involved in a murder. I’ve got a right to know about her. I’ve got a right to know what she’ll do to us next.”
“I don’t do family counseling, Mr. Orchard. There are people who do, and maybe you ought to look up one of them. If you’ll get Terry down here we’ll talk, all of us, and see if we can arrange to live in peace while I look into the murder.”
Orchard had finished his brandy. He nodded at the empty glass. His wife got up, refilled it, and brought it to him. He drank, then put the glass down. He said, “While you’re up, Marion, would you ask Terry to come down.”
Marion left the room. Orchard took another belt of brandy. He wasn’t bothering to savor the bouquet. I nibbled at the edge of mine. Marion Orchard came back into the room with Terry.
I stood and said, “Hello, Terry.”
She said, “Hi.”
Her hair was loose and long. She wore a short-sleeved blouse, a skirt, no socks, and a pair of loafers. I looked at her arms—no tracks. One point for our side; she wasn’t shooting. At least not regularly. She was fresh-scrubbed and pale, and remarkably without affect. She went to a round leather hassock by the fire and sat down, her knees tight together, her hands folded in her lap. Dolly Demure, with a completely blank face. The loose hair softened her, and the traditional dress made her look like somebody’s cheerleader, right down to loafers without socks. Had there been any animation she’d have been pretty as hell.
Orchard spoke. “Terry, I’m employing Mr. Spenser to clear you of the murder charge.”
She said, “Okay.”
“I hope you’ll cooperate with him in every way.”
“Okay.”
“And, Terry, if Mr. Spenser succeeds in getting you out of this mess, if he does, perhaps you will begin to rethink your whole approach to life.”
“Why don’t you get laid,” she said flatly, without inflection, and without looking at him.
Marion Orchard said “Terry!” in a horrified voice.
Orchard’s glass was empty. He flicked an eye at it, and away.
“Now, you listen to me, young lady,” he said. “I have put up with your nonsense for as long as I’m going to. If you …”
I interrupted. “If I want to listen to this kind of crap I can go home and watch daytime television. I want to talk with Terry, and maybe later I’ll want to talk with each of you. Separately. Obviously I was wrong; we can’t do
it in a group. You people want to encounter one another, do it on your own time.”
“By God, Spenser,” Orchard said.
I cut him off again. “I want to talk with Terry. Do I or don’t I?”
I did. He and his wife left, and Terry and I were alone in the library.
“If I told my father to get laid he would have knocked out six of my teeth,” I said.
“Mine won’t,” she said. “He’ll drink some more brandy, and tomorrow he’ll stay late at the office.”
“You don’t like him much,” I said.
“I bet if I said that to you, you’d knock out six of my teeth,” she said.
“Only if you didn’t smile,” I answered.
“He’s a jerk.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But he’s your jerk, and from his point of view you’re no prize package either.”
“I know,” she said.”
“However,” I said, “let’s think about what I’m supposed to do here. Tell me more about the manuscript and the professor and anything else you can remember beyond what you told Quirk last night.”
“That’s all there is,” she said. “I told the police everything I know.”
“Let’s run through it again anyway,” I said. “Have you talked with Quirk again since last night?”
“Yes, I saw him this morning before Daddy’s people got me out.”
“Okay, tell me what he asked you and what you said.”
“He started by asking me why I thought two big white men in hats would come to our apartment and kill Dennis and frame me.”
That was Quirk, starting right where he left off, no rephrasing, no new approach, less sleep than I had and there in the morning when the big cheeses passed the word along to let her out, getting all his questions answered before he released her.
“And what did you answer?” I said.
“I said the only thing I could think of was the manuscript. That Dennis was involved somehow in that theft, and he was upset about it.”
“Can you give me more than that? How was he involved? Why was he involved? What makes you think he was involved? Why do you think he was upset? What did he do to show you he was upset? Answer any or all, one at a time.”
“It was a phone call he made from the apartment. The way he was talking I could tell he was upset, and I could tell he wasn’t talking to another kid. I mean, you can tell that from the way people talk. The way his voice sounded.”
“What did he say?” I said.
“I couldn’t hear most of it. He talked low, and I knew he didn’t want me to hear, you know, cupping his hand and everything. So I tried not to hear. But he did say something about hiding it … like ‘Don’t worry, no one will find it. I was careful.’ ”
“When was this?” I asked.
“About a week ago. Lemme see, I was up early for my Chaucer course, so it would have been Monday, that’s five days ago. Last Monday.”
The manuscript had been stolen Sunday night.
“Okay, so he was upset. About what?”
“I don’t know, but I can tell when he’s mad. At one point I think he threatened someone.”
“Why do you think so? What did he say that makes you think so?”
“He said, ‘If you don’t …’ No … No … he said, ‘I will, I really will.…’ Yeah. That’s what it was … ‘I really will.’ But very threateny, you know.”
“Good. Now why do you think it was a professor? I know the voice tone told you it was someone older, but why a professor? What did he say? What were the words?”
“Well, oh, I don’t know, it was just a feeling. I wasn’t all that interested; I was running the water for a bath, anyway.”
“No, Terry, I want to know. The words, what were his words?”
She was silent, her eyes squeezed almost shut, as if the sun were shining in them, her upper teeth exposed, her lower lip sucked in.
“Dennis said, ‘I don’t care’ … ‘I don’t care, if you do.’ … He said, ‘I don’t care if you do. Cut the goddamn thing.’ That’s it. He was talking to an older person and he said cut the class if the other person had to. That’s why I figured it must be a professor.”
“How do you know he wasn’t talking about cutting a piece of rope, or a salami?”
“Because he mentioned class or school a little before. And what could they be talking about angrily that had to do with salami?”
“Okay. Good. What else?”
There wasn’t anything else. I worked on her for maybe half an hour more and nothing else surfaced. All I got was the name of a SCACE official close to Powell, someone named Mark Tabor, whose title was political counselor.
“If you think of anything else, anything at all, call me. You still have my card?”
“Yes. I … my father will pay you for what you did last night.”
“No, he won’t. He’ll pay me for what I may do. But last night was a free introductory offer.”
“It was a very nice thing to do,” she said.
“Aw, hell,” I said.
“What you should try to do is this,” I said. “You should try to keep from starting up with your old man for a while. And you should try to stay around the house, go to class if you think you should, but for the moment let SCACE stave off the apocalypse without you. Okay?”
“Okay. But don’t laugh at us. We’re perfectly serious and perfectly right.”
“Yeah, so is everyone I know.”
I left her then. Said good-bye to her parents, took a retainer from Roland Orchard, and drove back to town.
Chapter 7
Driving back to Boston, I thought about my two retainers in the same week. Maybe I’d buy a yacht. On the other hand maybe it would be better to get the tear in my convertible roof fixed. The tape leaked. I got off the Mass Pike at Storrow Drive and headed for the university. On my left the Charles River was thick and gray between Boston and Cambridge. A single oarsman was sculling upstream. He had on a hooded orange sweat shirt and dark blue sweat pants and his breath steamed as he rocked back and forth at the oars. Rowing downstream would have been easier.
I turned off Storrow at Charlesgate, went up over Commonwealth, onto Park Drive, past a batch of ducks swimming in the muddy river, through the Fenway to Westland Ave. Number 177 was on the left, halfway to Mass Ave. I parked at a hydrant and went up the stone steps to the glass door at the entry. I tried it. It was open. Inside an ancient panel of doorbells and call boxes covered the left wall. I didn’t have to try one to know they didn’t work. They didn’t need to. The inner door didn’t close all the way because the floor was warped in front of the sill and the door jammed against it. Mark Tabor was on the fourth floor. No elevator. I walked up. The apartment house smelled bad and the stair landing had beer bottles and candy wrappers accumulating in the corners. Somewhere in the building electronic music was playing at top volume. The fourth flight began to tell on me a little, but I forced myself to breathe normally as I knocked on Tabor’s door. No answer. I knocked again. And a third time. Loud. I didn’t want to waste the four-flight climb. A voice inside called out, “Wait a minute.” There was a pause, and then the door opened.
I said, “Mark Tabor?”
And he said, “Yeah.”
He looked like a zinnia. Tall and thin with an enormous corona of rust red hair flaring out around his pale, clean-shaven face. He wore a lavender undershirt and a pair of faded, flare-bottomed denim dungarees that were too long and dragged on the floor over his bare feet.
I said, “I’m a friend of Terry Orchard’s; she asked me to come and talk with you.”
“About what?”
“About inviting people in to sit down.”
“Why do you think I know what’s her name?”
“Aw, come off it, Tabor,” I said. “How the hell do you think I got your name and address? How do you know Terry Orchard is not a what’s his name? What do you lose by talking with me for fifteen minutes? If I was going to mug you I would have already. Besides,
a mugger would starve to death in this neighborhood.”
“Well, what do you want to talk about?” he asked, still standing in the door. I walked past him into the room. He said, “Hey,” but didn’t try to stop me. I moved a pile of mimeographed pamphlets off a steamer trunk and sat down on it. Tabor took a limp pack of Kools out of his pants pocket, extracted a ragged cigarette, and lit it. The menthol smell did nothing for the atmosphere. He took a big drag and exhaled through his nose. He leaned against the door jamb. “Okay,” he said. “What do you want?”
“I want to keep Terry Orchard out of the slam, for one thing. And I want to find the Godwulf Manuscript, for another.”
“Why are the cops hassling Terry?”
“Because they think she killed Dennis Powell.”
“Dennis is dead?”
I nodded.
“Ain’t that a bitch, now,” he said, much as if I’d said the rain would spoil the picnic. He went over and sat on the edge of a kitchen table covered with books, lined yellow paper, manila folders, and the crusts of a pizza still in the take box. Behind him, taped to the gray painted wall with raggedly torn masking tape, was a huge picture of Che Guevara. Opposite was a day bed covered by an unzipped sleeping bag. There were clothes littered on the floor. On top of a bureau was a hot plate. There were no curtains or window shades.
I clucked approvingly. “You’ve really got some style, Tabor,” I said.
“You from House Beautiful or something?” he said.
“Nope, I’m a private detective.” I showed him the photostat of my license. “I’m trying to clear Terry Orchard of the murder charge. I’m also looking for the Godwulf Manuscript, and I think they’re connected. Can you help me?”
“I don’t know nothing about no murder, man, and nothing about no jive ass manuscript.” Why did all the radical white kids from places like Scarsdale and Bel-Air try to talk as if they’d been brought up in Brownsville and Watts? He stubbed out his Kool and lit another.
“Look,” I said. “You and Dennis Powell roomed together for two years. You and Terry Orchard are members of the same organization. You share the same goals. I’m not the cops. I’m free-lance, for crissake, I’m labor. I work for Terry. I don’t want you. I want Terry out of trouble and the manuscript back in its case. Do you know where the manuscript is?”
The Godwulf Manuscript Page 5