“He’s dirty,” I said.
“Yeah, he’s dirty; but almost always it’s secondhand, under the table, behind the back. We usually bust somebody else and Rojack goes home to Dover.”
“Why would he shoot Babe Loftus?” I said.
Quirk shrugged.
“What’s the autopsy say?”
“Shot once, at close range, in the back, with a three fifty-seven magnum, bullet entered her back below the left shoulder blade at an angle, penetrated her heart and lodged under her right rib cage. She was dead probably before she felt anything.”
“Think the killer’s left-handed?” I said.
“If he stood directly behind her,” Quirk said, “which he may or may not have done. Even if he is, it narrows the suspects down to maybe, what, five hundred thousand in the Commonwealth?”
“Or maybe he was right-handed and shot her that way so you’d think he was left-handed.”
“Or maybe he was ambidextrous, and a midget, and he stood on a box,” Quirk said. “You been reading Philo Vance again?”
“So young,” I said, “yet so cynical.”
“What else you got?” Quirk said.
“That’s it,” I said.
“You think it’s mistaken identity?”
“I don’t know.”
“You think Rojack did it, or had Randall do it?”
“No.”
“Why not?” Quirk said.
“Doesn’t seem his style,” I said.
Outside the light was gone. The early winter evening had settled and the artificial light in storefronts and on street corners had taken hold. Nothing like colored light to spruce up a city.
“Why do I think you know more than you’re telling?” Quirk said.
“Because you’ve been a copper too long. It’s made you suspicious and skeptical.”
“I’ve known you too long,” Quirk said.
I was about to make a devastating response when my door opened and Susan came in, bringing with her a light scent of lilac. Quirk rose and Susan came and kissed him on the cheek.
“If you are going to arrest him, Martin, could you wait until he’s taken me to dinner?”
“If being a pain in the ass were illegal,” Quirk said, “he’d be doing life in Walpole.”
“He’s kind of cute, though, don’t you think?”
“Cuter than lace pants,” Quirk said.
20
IT was one of my favorite times in winter, the part of the day when it is dark, but the offices haven’t let out yet. All the windows are still lighted, and people are at their desks and walking about in the offices— bright vignettes of ordinary life.
Susan and I held hands as we strolled down Boylston Street toward Arlington. The store windows were full of red bows, and Santa cutouts, and tinsel rope, and fake snow. Real snow had begun again, lightly, in big flakes that meandered down. Not the kind of snow that would pile up. Just the kind of snow the Chamber of Commerce would have ordered pre-Christmas. After the recent chill it was mild by comparison, maybe thirty degrees. Susan was wearing a black hip-length leather coat with fake black fur on the collar. Her head was bare and she wore her thick black hair up today. A few of the snowflakes settled on it.
“No fur coat?”
“Last time I wore it someone in Harvard Square called me a murderer.”
“That’s because they haven’t met a real murderer,” I said.
“Still, I don’t feel right wearing it,” Susan said. “The animals do suffer.”
“You didn’t know that?” I said.
“No. I had this lovely little vision of them romping about in green pastures until they died a quiet death of natural causes.”
“Of course,” I said. “Who would think otherwise?”
“I know, it’s a ludicrous idea; but when they said ranch raised that’s what I thought.”
“Complicity’s hard to avoid,” I said.
“Probably impossible,” Susan said. “But it doesn’t hurt to try a little.”
“Especially when it’s easy,” I said.
“Like giving up fur,” Susan said. She banged her head gently against my shoulder. “Next I may have to reexamine my stand on whales.”
The snow was falling fast enough now to give the illusion of snowfall, without any real threat of a blizzard. The stoplights fuzzed a little in the falling snow, radiating red or green in a kind of impressionist splash in the night. We turned left on Arlington and walked past the Ritz. Across the street, in the Public Garden, Washington sat astride his enormous horse, in oblivious dignity as the snow drifted down past him. To our left, the mall ran down Commonwealth Avenue. There was a man walking his dog on the mall. The dog was a pointer of some kind and kept shying against the man’s knee as the snow fluttered about her. Every few steps she would look up at the man as if questioning the sense of a walk in these conditions.
The next block was mine, and we turned down Marlborough Street and into my apartment. Susan looked around as she took off her coat and draped it over the back of one of my counter stools.
“Well,” she said, “fire laid already, table set for two. Wineglasses?”
She shook her hair a little to get rid of the snowflakes, her hand making those automatic female gestures which women make around their hair.
“What did you have in mind?” she said.
“I’d like to emulate the fire,” I said. “Shall we start with a cocktail?”
“We’d be fools not to,” Susan said.
“Okay,” I said. “You light the fire while I mix them up.”
“Jewish women don’t make fires,” Susan said.
“It’s all made,” I said. “Just light the paper in three or four places.”
“All right,” she said, “I’ll try. But I don’t want to get any icky soot on me.”
She crouched in front of the fire, smoothing her skirt under her thighs as she did so, and struck a match. I went around the counter into my kitchen and made vodka martinis. I stirred them in the pitcher with a long spoon. I used to stir them with the blade of a kitchen knife until Susan saw me do it one day and went immediately out to buy me a long-handled silver spoon. I put Susan’s in a stemmed martini glass with four olives and no ice. I put mine in a thick lowball glass over ice with a twist. I put both drinks on a little lacquer tray and brought them around and put them on the coffee table.
The fire was going and the paper had already ignited the kindling. Small ventures of flame danced around the edge of the yet unburning logs. Susan had retired to the couch, her feet tucked up under her. She had on a black skirt and a crimson blouse, open at the throat with a gold chain showing. Her earrings were gold teardrops. She had enormous dark eyes and a very wide mouth and her neck, where it showed at the open throat of the blouse, was strong.
Susan and I clinked glasses and drank.
“That’s a very good martini,” Susan said.
“Spenser,” I said, “the martini king.”
“What time do you leave tomorrow?” Susan said.
“Nine A.M.,” I said. “American flight 11. First class.”
“You deserve no less,” Susan said.
“Mindy,” I said, “the production coordinator. She looked at me and said clearly I don’t fit well in coach. She said everyone else travels first class at Zenith Meridien.”
“Nonstop?” Susan said.
“To L.A.,” I said. “I’ll drive down from there. Nothing nonstop from Boston to San Diego.”
“I’ll miss you,” Susan said.
“Yes,” I said. “I don’t like to leave you.”
The logs had begun to catch in the fireplace, and the fire got deeper and richer and both of us stared into it in silence.
“You e
ver wonder why people stare into fires?” I said.
“Yes,” Susan said. She had shifted on the couch and now sat with her head on my shoulder. She held her martini in both hands and drank it in very sparing sips.
“You ever figure out why?”
“No.”
“You’re a shrink,” I said. “You’re supposed to know stuff like that.”
“Oh,” Susan said. “That’s right. Well, it’s probably a somatic impulse rooted in neonatal adaptivity. People will gaze at clothes in a dryer, too.”
“I liked your previous answer better,” I said.
“Me too,” Susan said.
We looked at the fire some more. As the logs became fully involved in the fire they settled in upon each other and burned stronger. Susan finished her martini.
“What’s for chow?” she said.
“Duck breast sliced on the diagonal and served rare, onion marmalade, brown rice, broccoli tossed with a spoonful of sesame tahini.”
“Sounds toothsome,” Susan said.
“You have several options in relationship to dinner and other matters,” I said.
“Un huh?”
“You may make love with me before or after dinner,” I said. “That’s one option.”
“Un huh.”
“You may make love with me here on the couch, or you and I may retire to the bedroom.”
“Un huh.”
“You make take the time to disrobe, or you may enjoy me in whatever disarray we create with our spontaneity.”
Susan ticked off the various choices thoughtfully on the fingers of her left hand.
“Are there any other choices?” she said.
“You may shower if you wish,” I said.
Susan turned her face toward me with that look of adult play in her eyes that I’d never seen anyone emulate.
“I showered before I came to your office,” she said.
“Am I to take that to imply that you intended to, ah, boff me even before you arrived?”
“You’re the detective,” Susan said. “You figure it out. I opt for now, here, in disarray.”
And she put her arms around my neck and pressed her mouth against mine.
“Good choice,” I murmured.
21
THE drive down the San Diego Freeway from LAX takes about two and a half hours and seems like a week. Once you get below the reaches of L.A.’s industrial sprawl, the landscape is sere and unfriendly. The names of the beach towns come up and flash past and recede: Huntington Beach, Newport Beach, Laguna, San Clemente. But you can’t see them from the freeway. Just the signs and the roads curving off through the brownish hills.
Mindy had gotten me a hotel room at the Hyatt Islandia in Mission Bay, and I pulled in there around 3:30 in the afternoon with the temperature at eighty-six and the sky cloudless. They assigned me a room in one of the pseudo-rustic cabanas that ran along the bay, as a kind of meandering wing to the tall central hotel building. I stashed my bag, got my list of addresses and my city map, and headed back out to work.
San Diego, like San Francisco, and like Seattle, seems defined by its embrace of the sea. The presence of the Pacific Ocean is assertive even when the ocean itself is out of sight. There is a different ambient brightness where the steady sunshine hits the water and diffuses. The bay, the Navy, the bridge to Coronado seemed always there, even when you couldn’t see them.
Of my three Zabriskies, two lived downtown; the third was up the coast a little in Esmeralda. The first one was a Chief Petty Officer who was at sea on a carrier. His wife said he didn’t have any sisters, that his mother was in Aiken, South Carolina, and that she herself never watched television. The second was a Polish émigré who had arrived from Gdansk fourteen months ago. It took me into the evening to find that out. I had supper in a place near the hotel, on the bay, that advertised fresh salmon broiled over alder logs. I went in and ate some with a couple of bottles of Corona beer (hold the lime). It wasn’t as good as I had hoped it would be; it still tasted like fish. After supper I strolled back to the hotel along the bayfront, past the charter boat shanties and the seafood take-out stands that sold ice and soda. Across the expressway, gleaming with light in the murmuring subtropical evening, the tower of Sea World rose above the lowland where the bay had been created. It was maybe 9:30 on the coast, and half past midnight on my eastern time sensor. Susan would be asleep at home, the snow drifting harmlessly outside her window. She would sleep nearly motionless, waking in the same position as she’d gone to sleep. She rarely moved in the night. Jill Joyce would have gone to sleep drunk, by now; and she would wake up clear-eyed and innocent-looking in the morning to go in front of the camera and charm the hearts of America. Babe Loftus wouldn’t.
In my cabana I undressed and hung my clothes up carefully. There was nothing on the tube worth watching. I turned out the light and lay quietly, three thousand miles from home, and listened to the waters of the bay murmur across from my window, and smelled the water, a mild placid smell in the warm, faraway night.
22
ESMERALDA is in a canyon on the north edge of San Diego. It nestles against the Pacific Ocean with the hills rising behind it to cut off the rest of California as if it didn’t exist. Esmeralda was full of trees and gardens and flowers. The downtown lounged along the coastline, a highlight of stucco and Spanish tile and plate glass and polished brass clustered near Esmeralda cove. One would never starve in Esmeralda. Every third building along the main drag was a restaurant. The other ones sold jewelry and antiques and designer fashions. The pink stucco hotel in the middle of the main drag had a big canopied patio out front and a discreet sign that said CASA DEL PONIENTE. Three valet carhops stood alertly outside in black vests and white shirts waiting to do anything you told them to do. I nosed in and parked in front of a bookstore across the street from the hotel. According to my map, Polton’s Lane ran behind the stores that fronted Main Street. I left the car and walked back to the corner and turned left on Juniper Avenue. The street was lined with eucalyptus trees that sagged heavily, their branches nearly touching the ground in some places. There was a luggage shop, the window display a single suitcase with a fuchsia silk scarf draped over it. The suitcase and scarf sat on a black velvet background under a small spotlight. Beyond the luggage store was a discreet real estate office done in pale gray and plum, with color pictures, well mounted, of oceanfront property displayed in the window. Between the two buildings was Polton’s Lane. The name was too grand. It was an alley. Behind the stores, cartons and trash barrels were piled, overflowing in some cases. Two cats, a yellow tom with tattered ears, and something that had once been mostly white, scuttled out of sight, their tails pointed straight out as they hurried away.
The alley widened into a small vacant lot encircled by the back doors of affluence. In the lot were several small frame shacks, probably one room apiece, with low board porches across the front. To each had been attached a lean-to which probably was a bathroom. The yard in front of the one nearest to me was bare dirt. The rest of the lot was weeds. The rusting hulk of a car that might once have been a Volvo stood doorless and wheelless among the weeds, and beyond it someone had discarded a hot water heater. A line of utility poles preceded me down the alley, and wires swung lax between the poles and each house. I stood staring at this odd community of hovels, built perhaps before the town had acquired a main street; built maybe by the workers who built the main street. Here and there among the weeds were automobile tires and beer cans, and at least one mattress with the stuffing spilled out.
My address was number three. Once, a long time ago, someone had tried to make a front path of concrete squares set into the ground. Now they were barely visible among the weed overgrowth. From the house came the sound of a television set blaring a talk show. On the front porch a couple of green plastic bags had torn open, and the cont
ents spilled out onto the porch floor. It didn’t look as if it had happened recently. It was hot in the backside of Esmeralda, and in the heat the rank smell of the weeds mixed with whatever had rotted in the trash bags. I maneuvered around the trash and knocked on the screen door that hung loose in its hinges from a badly warped doorjamb. Nothing happened. I knocked again. Through the screen, which was, it seemed, the only door, I could see a steel-framed cot, with a mattress and a pink quilt and a pillow with no pillowcase. Next to it was a soapstone sink, and in front of both was a metal table that had once been coated with white enamel. To the right of the door I could see the back of what might have been a rocking chair. It moved a little and then a woman appeared in the doorway. The smell of booze came with her, overpowering the smell of the weeds and the hot barren earth.
“Yuh,” she said.
She was an angular woman with white hair through which faded streaks of blond still showed. The hair hung straight down around her face without any hint of a comb. She had on a T-shirt that advertised beer, and a pair of miracle fiber slacks that had probably started out yellow. Her feet were bare. In her right hand she was carrying a bottle of Southern Comfort, her skinny, blue-veined hand clamped around its neck.
“Spenser,” I said. “City Services. Open up.”
The door was hooked shut, although the screening in front of it was torn and I could have reached in and unhooked it myself.
She nodded slowly, staring at me through the door. Her face had not seen makeup, or sun, for a long time. It sagged along her jawline, and puckered at the corners of her mouth. Her eyes were darkly circled and pouchy. In the hand that didn’t hold the Southern Comfort was a cigarette, and she brought it up slowly, as if trying to remember the way, and took a big suck on it.
“Vera Zabriskie?” I said. I made it sound officious and impatient. Women like Vera Zabriskie were used to civil servants snapping at them. It was what they endured in return for the welfare check that kept them alive. She looked at me, still frowning, as she let the smoke drift out of her mouth. Then she took a slug of Southern Comfort from the bottle and swallowed.
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