Back Story

by Robert B. Parker

  I drank a lot of bad coffee. The night watch came on. I was hungry. When I finally finished, it was dark outside. I closed the envelope and put it on the empty desk and leaned my head back against the chair and closed my eyes and took in some long, quiet breaths.

  Where was the FBI intelligence report?

  4

  Quirk was still in his office, his jacket hung on a hanger on the back of his door. His feet were on the desk, his tie was loosened, his shirt cuffs rolled. He was looking at a large bulletin board across the small room, where a number of crime scene photographs were posted.

  “You still here?” he said.

  “You ever read this case file?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  He kept staring at the photographs.

  “Anything bother you in there?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like the FBI intelligence report.”

  “Ah,” Quirk said, still scanning the pictures. “You spotted that, too.”

  “Any thoughts?” I said.

  “Nope.”

  “You ever chase it down?”

  “I never saw the case file until I got to be Homicide Commander. By then the case was cold. Command staff don’t much like it when the Homicide Commander, the new Homicide Commander, starts up with the Feds over a cold, cold case we never solved.”

  “Politics affects police work?” I said.

  “Shocking, isn’t it. How was it when you were a cop?”

  “Politics affected police work,” I said.

  “How disappointing,” Quirk said.

  “Lead investigator was a guy named Bennati,” I said. “He still around?”

  “Retired,” Quirk said. “Lives up on the North Shore now.”

  I looked at Quirk. He was scanning the crime scene photos again.

  “That’s why you offered me the case files,” I said.

  “Spirit of cooperation,” Quirk said.

  “That FBI reference bothered you, too, but it didn’t seem like a good idea to pursue it. But you don’t forget anything. So when I finally came along . . .”

  Quirk continued to study the photos.

  “I’m supposed to be an executive now,” Quirk said. “Manage the division. Let the detectives do most of the hands-on stuff. But I like to stay late, couple nights a week, and look at the crime scene coverage while it’s quiet, and see what I can see.”

  I nodded.

  “Woman and two children killed in this one,” Quirk said, nodding at the pictures. “Woman was raped first.”

  “I’ll call you tomorrow,” I said. “Get Bennati’s address.”

  “Call Belson,” Quirk said. “He’ll get it for you.”

  5

  Mario Bennati lived in Gloucester in a small, gray-shingled house with a deck where you could sit and drink beer and look at the Annisquam River. He and I were sitting there, doing that, in the late afternoon. With us was a large friendly German shepherd named Grover.

  “Wife died four years ago,” Bennati said. “Daughter comes up from Stoughton usually once or twice a week, vacuums, dusts. . . .” He shrugged. “Mostly it’s me and Grover. I can cook okay and do my laundry.”

  We were drinking Miller High Life from the clear glass bottles.

  “I don’t smoke no more,” he said, looking at the boats moving toward the harbor across the wide water below us. “Ain’t got laid since she died.” He drank some of the Miller High Life with an economy of motion that suggested long practice. “We done fine, ’fore she got sick.” Grover put his head on Bennati’s thigh and looked at him. “Watch this,” Bennati said. He tilted the bottle of beer carefully and Grover drank a little. “Right from the bottle,” Bennati said. “Huh?”

  “Cool,” I said.

  “Don’t let him drink much,” Bennati said. “Gets drunk real easy.”

  I patted Grover on the backside. His tail wagged, but he kept his head on Bennati’s lap. “I’m looking into an old murder,” I said. “One of yours. September 1974. Woman was killed in a bank holdup in Audubon Circle.”

  Bennati drank the rest of his beer and reached down and got another one out of the cooler under the table. He twisted off the cap and drank probably four ounces of the beer in one long pull. He looked at the bottle for a moment and nodded.

  “Yeah, sure, bunch of fucking hippies,” he said. “Stealing money to save America. Killed her for no good reason.”

  “I read the case file yesterday,” I said.

  “So you know we didn’t clear it.” He drank some more beer. “They’re always a bitch, the fucking cases where shit happens for no good reason.”

  I nodded. “Anything you remember, might help me?” I said.

  “You read the case file, you know what I know,” he said.

  “I used to be a cop,” I said. “Everything didn’t always get included in the case file.”

  “Did in mine,” Bennati said.

  “What happened to the FBI intelligence report?” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “In your notes you say the FBI was sending over an intelligence report. It’s not in the file and you never mentioned it again.”

  “FBI?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “For crissake, we’re talking like thirty fucking years ago.”

  “Twenty-eight,” I said. “You remember anything about the FBI intelligence report?”

  “Too long,” he said. “I’m seventy-six years old and live alone except for the dog, and drink too much beer. I can barely remember where my dick is.”

  “So you don’t remember the FBI report?”

  “No,” he said and looked at me steadily. “I don’t remember.”

  I took a card out of my shirt pocket and gave it to him.

  “Anything occurs to you,” I said, “give me a buzz.”

  “Sure thing.”

  As I walked toward my car, he took another High Life out of the cooler and twisted off the cap.

  6

  The Boston FBI office was in 1 Center Plaza. The agent in charge was a thin guy with receding hair and round eyeglasses with black rims named Nathan Epstein. It was like finding an Arab running a shul. We shook hands when I came in, and he gestured me to a chair.

  “You’re the SAC,” I said.

  “I am.”

  “At least tell me you went to BC,” I said.

  “Nope.” He had a strong New York accent.

  “Fordham?”

  “NYU,” Epstein said.

  “This is very disconcerting,” I said.

  “I know,” he said. “People usually assume I’m from Accountemps.”

  He was wearing a dark blue suit, a white shirt, and a powder-blue silk tie.

  “I am looking into a murder during a bank holdup in 1974,” I said.

  “Tell me about it,” Epstein said.

  I told him about it.

  “Why did she come to you,” Epstein said when I finished.

  “Mutual friend.”

  “And why did you take it on?”

  “Favor to the friend,” I said.

  “Favor to a friend?” Epstein said. “The case is twenty-eight years cold. You have some reason to think you can solve it?”

  “Self-regard,” I said.

  Epstein smiled. “So they tell me,” he said.

  “You checked me out?”

  “I called the Commissioner’s Office, they bucked me over to the Homicide Commander.”

  “Martin Quirk,” I said.

  Epstein nodded.

  “You check out everyone you have an appointment with?” I said.

  “I remembered the name,” Epstein said. There was something very penetrating about him.

  “You recall the case?”

  Epstein smiled and shook his head. “Wasn’t with the Bureau then,” he said.

  “Would it be possible for me to get a copy of the case file?”

  He sat and thought about it. He was a guy that was probably never entirely still. As he thought, he turned a
ballpoint pen slowly in his hands, periodically tapping a little paradiddle with it on the thumbnail of his left hand. Then he leaned forward and pushed a big khaki envelope toward me, the kind that you close by wrapping a little string around a little button.

  “Here’s the file,” he said.

  “Quirk?” I said.

  “He mentioned you might be looking into the Gordon killing.”

  “Have you read it?”

  “The file?” Epstein said. “Yes. I read it this morning. I assume you’ve read the BPD case file.”

  “I have.”

  “You’ll find this pretty much a recycle of that.”

  “Someplace I can sit and read this?”

  “Outside office,” Epstein said. “One of my administrative assistants is on vacation. My chief administrator will show you her desk.”

  “Was there a time when we would have called your chief administrator a secretary?”

  Epstein smiled his thin smile and said, “Long ago.” I took the folder and stood.

  “I think I know what you’re looking for,” Epstein said.

  I raised my eyebrows and didn’t say anything.

  “I don’t know where the Bureau intelligence report is either,” he said.

  “The one that was supposed to be delivered to Bennati?”

  “Yes.”

  I sat back down, holding the file envelope. “You noticed,” I said.

  “I did.”

  I sat back in my chair. “You guys gathered intelligence on dissident groups,” I said.

  “Some,” Epstein said.

  “Some? For chrissakes, the Bureau probably had a file on the Beach Boys.”

  Epstein smiled again . . . I think.

  “Things have changed in the Bureau since those days.”

  “Sure,” I said. “So do you have a file on the Dread Scott Brigade?”

  “None that I know of.”

  “Could there be one you might not know of?”

  “Of course.”

  “If there was one, how would I access it?”

  “You’d get me to request it through channels,” Epstein said.

  “Will you?”

  “I did.”

  “And?”

  Epstein drummed on his thumbnail with his pen. His face was completely without expression.

  “There appears to be no such file,” he said.

  “So how come Bennati thought one was on its way?”

  “That is bothersome,” Epstein said. “Isn’t it.”

  7

  I drove up to Toronto on a Monday morning, with the sun shining the way it was supposed to in May, and got an all-chocolate, fifteen-month-old female German shorthaired pointer, whose kennel name was Robin Hood’s Purple Sandpiper. She was crated when I got her, which was a sound idea given that it was a ten-hour drive home. You wouldn’t want her jumping around in a strange car and causing an accident. As I pulled onto 404 north of Toronto, she whimpered. At the first rest area we came to on 401, I discarded the crate next to the Dumpster behind the food court, and Robin Hood’s Purple Sandpiper spent the rest of the trip jumping around in the car. Susan had said that ten hours was too long for her to have to ride on her first day, so Robin Hood’s Purple Sandpiper and I spent Monday night at a motel in Schenectady. Unless you are a lifelong GE fan, there’s not a lot to be said for Schenectady.

  Robin Hood’s Purple Sandpiper slept very little and was full awake at 5:10 Tuesday morning. We pulled out of Schenectady before dawn and got to Cambridge around noon. When we pulled into the driveway off Linnaean Street, Susan was sitting on the front steps of the big, five-colored painted-lady Victorian house where she lived and worked. As I got out of the car I said “Oh boy” to myself, which was what I always said, or some variation of that, whenever I saw her. Thick black hair, very big blue eyes, wide mouth, slim, in shape, great thighs, plus an indefinable hint of sensuality. She radiated a kind of excitement, the possibility of infinite promise. It wasn’t just me. Most people seemed to feel that spending time with Susan would be an adventure.

  “Omigod,” Susan said when Robin Hood’s Purple Sandpiper and I got out of the car.

  Susan’s yard was fenced. I opened the front gate and closed it behind us and unhooked the dog from her leash. She was uneasy.

  Susan said, “Pearl.”

  The dog pricked her long ears a little. Then she ran around Susan’s smallish front yard in a random way as if she were trying to find a point of stable reference. Finally she decided that I was her oldest friend outside Canada and came over to me and leaned in against my leg for emotional support.

  Susan watched her with the full-focus concentration that made her such a good therapist. If she concentrated on something long enough, it would begin to smolder.

  “Pearl?” Susan said.

  The dog looked at her carefully and wagged her tail tentatively. Susan nodded slowly.

  “She’s back,” Susan said.

  “Yes,” I said. “She just doesn’t know it yet.”

  Susan crouched at the foot of her stairs and opened her arms.

  “Pearl,” she said again.

  The dog walked to Susan and sniffed her. Susan put her cheek against the dog’s muzzle and patted the dog’s head.

  “She’ll know it soon,” Susan said.

  8

  I was in the lobby of the New Federal Courthouse on Fan Pier.

  “International Consulting Bureau,” I said.

  I gave my card to the guard and he looked at it, then checked his computer screen.

  “Whom do you wish to speak with there?”

  “Whom?”

  The guard looked up at me and grinned. “It’s the training program they give us,” he said.

  “I wish to speak with Mr. Ives,” I said.

  He nodded, punched up a number, and spoke into the phone.

  “Mr. Spenser to see Mr. Ives.” He nodded and hung up.

  “Over there,” he said, “through the metal detector, take the elevator to the fifteenth floor.”

  “There a room number?” I said.

  “Someone will meet you at the elevator, sir.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  At the security barrier there were four guards from the Federal Protection Service.

  “I have a gun on my right hip,” I said to them. “I’m going to unclip it and hand it to you, holster and all.”

  The guards spread out slightly and two of them rested hands on their holstered guns. The head guard was a black man who looked like retired military.

  “And do you have a permit, sir?”

  “I do.”

  “First the gun, then the permit,” he said.

  I handed him the holstered gun, then I took my permit from my shirt pocket where I had put it in anticipation of this moment. The head guard read it carefully.

  “We’ll hang on to the gun and the permit,” he said. “You can pick them up on the way out.”

  “You’re asking me to risk the federal courthouse unarmed?” I said.

  The guard’s face stayed serious.

  “Yes, sir,” he said. “We are.”

  He swept his arm toward the metal detector, and I went through without incident.

  “Elevators are there, sir.”

  “Stay alert,” I said. “If I run into trouble, I’ll scream.”

  “We’ll be here, sir.”

  At the fifteenth floor there was a woman with long, silver hair and a severe young face. She was dressed in a black pantsuit and a mannish white shirt with a narrow black tie. Her black shoes had very high heels. We stepped into a long hallway. There were office doors along both sides of it. The hallway floor was carpeted in dark red. There was no identification on any of the office doors, all of which were closed.

  “Spenser,” I said.

  “Follow me, please,” she said.

  There were discreet security cameras at either end of the hall. I smiled at the one I was facing. It’s good to be cheery. The severe woman
knocked on the last door on the right.

  From inside, a voice said, “Come.”

  The woman opened the door and stepped aside, and I went in. Ives was sitting at an empty desk in a blank room with a view of the harbor. He looked at me without expression until the door closed and we were alone.

  Then he smiled, sort of, and said, “Well, well, young Lochinvar.”

  “How about maturing Lochinvar,” I said.

  “You’re as old as you feel,” Ives said, and gestured at the straight chair in front of his desk. “Sit.”

  Ives was sort of tall and leathery with sandy hair. He wore a tan poplin suit with a pink oxford button-down shirt and a pink bow tie with black polka dots. The room was entirely without ornamentation except for Ives’s Yale diploma framed on the wall behind his desk.

  “You ever hear of an antiestablishment organization in 1974 that called itself the Dread Scott Brigade?”

  Ives smiled his dim smile. “It is my business to hear of things,” he said. “Why do you ask?”

  “They killed a woman in a bank holdup in Boston in September of 1974.”

  “And were never caught,” Ives said.

  I nodded.

  “Which is why you’re here,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re going to catch them.”

  “I am.”

  “Except you don’t know who they are.”

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “Or if they even exist,” Ives said.

  “Somebody killed her,” I said.

  “Why do you think it was this group?”

  “Cops got a letter from them afterwards, claiming responsibility.”

  “Anyone can write a letter,” Ives said.

  “It’s a place to start,” I said.

  “I suppose it is.”

  Ives folded his hands over his flat stomach and leaned back in his chair and rested one foot on the edge of his desk. He made a slight gesture with his lips, which I had decided to treat as a smile.