Crimson Joy

by Robert B. Parker

  Susan had half a glass of champagne and Midori left. She raised it toward the light and gazed through it for a moment and then she drank half of it and lowered the glass and looked at me thoughtfully. Her eyes were so large and dark that they seemed all pupil, as if the iris had disappeared.

  "What's for supper?" she said.

  "Grilled lemon and rosemary chicken, brown rice with pignolias, assorted fresh vegetables lightly steamed and dressed with Spenser's famous honey-mustard splash, blue corn bread, and a bottle of Iron Horse Chardonnay."

  Susan drank the rest of her champagne and leaned forward and put the glass on the coffee table and stood up. She stepped out of the cowboy boots, and unsnapped the leather pants and wiggled out of them and folded them neatly across the back of the wing chair. Then she turned and looked full at me and smiled with all of her energy and said, "I believe it would be best if you jumped on my bones now."

  "I knew you'd say that," I said.

  "When did you first suspect?" she said. a "When you took your pants off," I said.

  "Yes," Susan murmured, her face against mine, "that would be suggestive."

  I put my arms around her. "You know what I miss?" I said. "I miss the old days, before pantyhose, when there were garter belts and the flash of thigh above a stocking top."

  "Ah, sweet bird of youth," Susan said with her mouth against mine.

  "But I'll manage," I said.

  And I did.

  Later we ate dinner, Susan in one of my blue oxford shirts and me in a pair of stretch-fabric workout pants, the kind with the drawstring at the top. We looked dashing.

  "How about therapy?" I said. "Should I start checking shrinks?"

  She shook her head. There was a drop of vegetable dressing on her chin and I leaned over and daubed with my napkin. "He probably wouldn't seek therapy," Susan said. "He wouldn't need to, his needs are being fulfilled by the crime. People seek help when they are frustrated, when the pressure is too great to bear."

  "Just like me," I said. "Whenever the pressure of tumescence becomes intolerable, I seek you out."

  "How lovely to think of it that way," Susan said.

  "Well, I'm also motivated by the fact that I love you more than it is possible to say."

  "I know," Susan said. "I feel the same about you."

  For a moment we were silent, and the connection between us was shimmering and palpable and more changeless than the universe. I raised my wineglass slightly. "Forever," I said.

  Her eyes glistened as she looked at me.

  "Probably," she said.

  CHAPTER 3

  Red Rose did it again on a wet April day, with the snow finally gone and the slim gold of nature's first green beginning to edge out on some of the shrubs. Dolores Taylor had been an exotic dancer. This one was a singer. Her name was Chantelle, and she played piano and sang in the cocktail lounge of a hotel out near the airport. She'd been killed in one of the hotel rooms and found in the morning by a maid, who was still incoherent from shock.

  When Quirk and I got there, there was press of every species jammed into the corridor outside what I heard one television reporter call "the death room." Television lights glared. A big-bellied, red-nosed, thick-necked cop in uniform was guarding the door as we went through. He nodded at Quirk's badge and we went past him into the death room. Behind us I heard the cop say to someone, "Put the goddamned piece up her snatch and pulled the trigger."

  Quirk heard him too. He stopped, turned, stepped to the door, and gestured the red-nosed cop inside.

  A reporter yelled at him, "Lieutenant, Lieutenant."

  Quirk ignored him and closed the door.

  Speaking softly, he said to the red-nosed cop, "The victim was a young woman who died terrified and alone. If I ever hear you talk about her like she was a piece of meat, I will personally take that fucking badge off your fucking chest and make you fucking eat it."

  The veins in the cop's thick neck swelled and he opened his mouth. Quirk stared at him steadily, standing very close, his raincoat open, his hands stuck in his back pockets.

  The rest of the room went about its business. No one even heard Quirk except me and the red-nosed cop. If you didn't see Quirk's eyes, you'd have thought they were talking about lunch.

  The red-nosed cop closed his mouth and straightened slightly. "Yes, sir," he said.

  Quirk opened the room door again and nodded toward it. The red-nosed cop stepped back to his post. Smartly. Quirk turned and began to speak with the ME. I went to look at the body. There was no reason to, really. There wouldn't be a clue. But you sort of had to look at the body if you were investigating the murder. It was part of how you did it, part maybe of the way you understood what murder was, and what this one had been. I hated it, and like always, I forced myself not to squint or look obliquely. If she could suffer it, I could look at it. I did.

  Belson was there, by the window, looking at the room. I'd seen him work before. It was how he did it. He stood and took in the room and absorbed it, and after a while he could tell you everything in the room and explain why it was as it was. His thin face was placid, almost dreamy. The thin wisp of blue smoke from his cigar drifted up past his eyes and curled toward the window.

  I walked over and stood beside him, watching the ID people dusting and measuring and photographing.

  "Anything different?" I said.

  He shook his head, still looking at the room.

  "How about lab reports from the other cases?"

  "What do you think?" Belson said.

  "I think the semen analysis shows he's blood type A, and secretes PGM

  I," I said.

  "Blood type C," Belson said.

  "Which means he could be any one of two million males in greater Boston."

  Belson still gazed at the room.

  "Forty-five percent of all white males are blood type C. Eighty percent of all males secrete PGM when they ejaculate. Fifty-eight percent of them are white. That shit is good for eliminating suspects, but it's useless when you don't have any. He didn't have a vasectomy either."

  "Whose room is it?" I said.

  "Hers. No booze. No sign the bed had been slept in. No sign the door had been forced."

  "I suppose no one heard the shot," I said.

  "He probably muffled it with a pillow," Belson said. He inhaled some cigar smoke and let it out slowly. "Her body would have muffled it some."

  I nodded.

  "We got people checking all the guests. Figure he might have stayed here. Figure it's hard to walk around carrying twenty feet of rope, a roll of duct tape, and a gun without being noticed."

  "Could wrap the rope around your waist," I said, "under your shirt, put a small roll of duct tape in your pocket."

  "Yep," Belson said. "Or carry it in a briefcase. But we're checking anyway. You never know."

  "She tied the same way?"

  "I haven't compared the photos and the write-ups," Belson said, "but it looks the same."

  "We should check that," I said. Belson nodded. Quirk came to stand with us.

  "Hotel staff," Quirk said. "Guests, people drinking in the bar?"

  "Dino's collecting all the credit card receipts," Belson said. "Richie's got the staff, O'Donnell and Rourke got the guests."

  "Parking?" Quirk said.

  "Unattended," Belson said. "We got the registration of everything that's in the lot, but we got no way to know who was there and left."

  "Okay. I'll talk with the press," Quirk said. "We got someplace set aside?"

  "The ballroom, second floor."

  Quirk nodded and moved toward the door. I went with him. "They've heard about you," Quirk said as we went down in the elevator. "You may as well be around while they ask me about you."

  There were folding chairs in the ballroom and maybe two dozen reporters.

  Most of those in the hallway upstairs had moved down here. Television lights had been set up and aimed at a speaker's lectern at the front of the room. I leaned against the wall nea
r the door with my arms folded across my chest while Quirk walked to the lectern. He still had his raincoat on. The TV sound men moved closer to the lectern, crouching under camera shot, holding forward long, soft microphones with black foam covering. The press photographers began to snap pictures.

  "I'm Lieutenant Martin Quirk and I'm in charge of the investigation."

  Quirk said. "So far we have no suspects in the killings, which we believe to be related. The commissioner has asked me to assure you that every resource of the department will be placed at my disposal until the killer is apprehended." Quirk said the stuff about the commissioner the way a child recites the pledge to the flag.

  "Any questions?" Quirk said. It was like asking a shark if it was hungry.

  "Do you expect the killings to continue, Lieutenant?"

  "Probably."

  "What steps are you taking to apprehend the killer, Lieutenant?"

  "All."

  "Lieutenant, is the modus operandi the same for this killing as the others?"

  "Yes."

  "When do you expect to make an arrest, Lieutenant?"

  "As soon as we have a suspect with enough evidence to warrant it."

  "Lieutenant, do you have any suspects now?"

  "No."

  "Is it true, Lieutenant, that the killer may be a policeman?"

  "I have an unsigned letter which makes that claim."

  "Is it authentic, Lieutenant?"

  "I don't know."

  "I am told that there was spermatozoa at the scene of each crime, Lieutenant. Is that true? And if so, how did it get there?"

  Quirk looked without expression at the questioner for a moment before he answered.

  "It is true. We are assuming the killer ejaculated."

  "Are you treating this as a racially motivated sequence of crimes, Lieutenant?"

  "We don't know the killer. We don't know why he kills. We thought it prudent to hold judgment until we did."

  "But, Lieutenant, isn't it odd that all the victims are black?"

  "Yes."

  "And yet, Lieutenant, you are not prepared to say it's racial?"

  "No."

  "Isn't that denying the obvious, Lieutenant?"

  "No."

  "Is it true, Lieutenant, that a Boston private detective is assisting you on this case?"

  "Yes."

  "Is he being paid with city funds, Lieutenant?"

  "No."

  "Who is paying him, sir?"

  "No one. It's a charitable action on his part."

  "Is it because you don't trust your colleagues, Lieutenant?"

  "No."

  "What is his name, Lieutenant?"

  "Spenser. He's back there by the door," Quirk said. "I'm sure he'll enjoy talking with you."

  Then Quirk stepped down from the lectern and walked through the reporters and past me, out the door. As he passed me, he said, "Enjoy."

  CHAPTER 4

  On Wednesday morning there was a profile of me in the Globe. PRIVATE

  EYE ON RED ROSE CASE, it said. It mentioned that I'd been involved in a number of cases, that I'd had a longtime relationship with Susan Silverman, a Cambridge psychologist, and that I had once been a boxer.

  It neglected to mention that when I smiled, my cheeks dimpled sweetly.

  The press never gets it right.

  Wayne Cosgrove called to see if there was anything I knew that I hadn't told the beat man at the news conference. I said no. He said would I lie to him. I said yes. And we hung up. I turned to the sports page and read "Tank Macnamara," and was checking the "Transactions" listing when Quirk came in. He was carrying an easel and a chalkboard, and a large paper bag. I said, "Are you going to brief me?"

  Quirk set up the easel, put the chalkboard on it, and took a new package of yellow chalk out of his coat pocket and set it on my desk. He took two napkins out of the bag and put them on my desk. Then he got two paper cups of coffee out, and two corn muffins. He put one muffin carefully on each napkin, and sat down in my client chair.

  "How's Susan?" he said.

  "The usual," I said, "glamorous, smart, hot for me."

  Quirk bent the plastic lid of his coffee cup carefully up on one side and twisted out a neat triangle, leaving the rest of the lid in place.

  "Hard to understand how someone could be all three," Quirk said.

  "You're just sulky because they ran my picture in the Globe today and not yours," I said.

  Quirk drank a little coffee. "Yeah," he said. "Let's go over this Red Rose thing."

  "Sure," I said.

  Quirk stood and walked to the chalkboard.

  "If you don't mind, I'm going to want to leave this set up here," he said.

  "Fine," I said.

  Quirk began to write on the board.

  Killer 1. Probably white

  2. Blood type C 3. No vasectomy

  4. Secretes PGM I 5. Ejaculates at scene

  6. Victims black a. Hooker b. Waitress c. Exotic dancer d. Singer

  "What else do we know about him?" Quirk said.

  "Victims are black," I said. "Scene of crime is white, or mostly white."

  "See 1 above," Quirk said.

  "What about the victims?" I said. "Pattern?"

  "Like from hooker to singer?" Quirk said.

  "Might be a kind of progression up the social scale," I said.

  "If he thinks like that," Quirk said.

  "You got a profile of him from the forensic shrinks yet?" I said.

  Quirk shrugged, "Yeah, but what? Rage against women, or rage against blacks, or both. Powerfully repressed sexuality, manifested through the gun; the semen traces may be masturbation, or they may be involuntary ejaculation. Like when he shoots her."

  "Jesus Christ," I said.

  "Um," Quirk said. "You talk with Susan about this?"

  "Yeah."

  "What's she got to say?"

  "Same sort of stuff. One thing she said is to remember that psychopaths have their own symbolic system and it may not be like other people's."

  "So it doesn't necessarily mean that because he kills black women he hates black women," Quirk said.

  "Yes, he only hates, or fears, or something, what the black women symbolize."

  "She have any thoughts about what it would be?" Quirk said.

  "I asked her that," I said. "She gave me the shrink look and said, "Zee muzzer, vee often look to zee muzzer."

  "

  "Her too," Quirk said.

  "So we should be looking for a cop had trouble with his mom," Quirk said.

  "Maybe," I said.

  "On a force that's eighty percent Irish," Quirk said.

  "Okay," I said, "let's take another approach. Is he really a cop?"

  "Why say so if he's not?" Quirk said.

  "Why say so if he is?"

  Quirk shook his head. "So we're right back to knowing nothing."

  "He did know your home address," I said.

  "Like I said, it's in the book."

  "But not the Boston book," I said. "He had to know to look in the South Suburban listing."

  "It's an easy guess," Quirk said. "An Irish name, not living in the city, you look for him on the Irish Riviera."

  "Sure, but it means he went to some trouble," I said. "If he wasn't a cop, and didn't know you, it means he had to find out who the officer in charge was, and then track you down through phone books or whatever, all to tell you he's a cop."

  "Give him a feeling of power," Quirk said. "Lotta psychos get to feel powerful by learning stuff about the cop that's chasing them."

  Quirk stood quietly by the board for a moment. Then he put the chalk down and walked to my desk and sat in my client's chair. My office window was open an inch and the sound of traffic filtered up from Berkeley and Boylston streets. I looked over my shoulder out the window and glanced automatically at the window where Linda Thomas used to be.

  There was a set of pastel Levolor blinds in there now.

  The rain still slid down the window as i
t had all week. There were flood warnings in western Mass. Clouds hung around the top of the Hancock building, and places where the storm drains had clogged, the water ran over the curbing onto the sidewalk.

  I looked back at Quirk. He was staring at his empty coffee cup as he turned it slowly in his thick fingers.

  "How about ballistics?" I said.

  "Bullets are from the same gun, but we don't know what gun," Quirk said.

  "How about taking a sample from every cop?" I said.

  "Commissioner says no. Says the union would raise hell. Says it unjustly casts suspicion on every officer, and would impair the function of the department, which is, as you know, to serve and protect our citizens."

  Quirk gave the coffee cup a sudden sharp spin with his fingers and scaled it into my wastebasket.

  "Probably wouldn't use his own piece anyway," Quirk said. . The tension in his groin was intense.

  "She used to compete with me," he said.

  "Your mother?" the shrink said.

  "Yes. She used to want to shoot baskets with us, stuff like that."

  "How old were you?"

  "Little kid, 8, 9 maybe."

  "And so it was hard to compete with her," the shrink said.

  "Well, when I was little."

  "Difficult for a child to compete with an adult," the shrink said.

  "Well, hell, yes, if you're a real little kid it's hard, even if it's a woman."

  The tension in his pelvis buzzed along the nerve paths. His breath was shallow.

  "But pretty soon, you know, pretty soon I got older and then she couldn't compete with me."

  "At least not in basketball," the shrink said.

  He'd caught them once, at night, when he went to the bathroom. He heard his mother's voice and stopped and listened. The door wasn't closed entirely.

  "For God's sake, George, you're too drunk to even do it."

  He heard the bed rustle and the springs jounce.

  "What am I supposed to do, rub it until you remember what it's for?" she said.

  His father's voice was a mumble. There was more movement. He edged closer to the door. And then it was suddenly wide open and his mother was there naked.