Robert B. Parker: The Spencer Novels 1?6

by Robert B. Parker

  It was one of those things you know for a long time before you know it. The dead woman in Boston was Cheryl Anne Rankin.

  forty

  * * *

  THE WEATHER IN Alton was still warm and it didn’t seem like fall. But at quarter to seven in the evening it was dark on the Batesburg Road. And empty, as if no one wanted to go to Batesburg, even to have their hair done. On the other hand, maybe no one wanted to leave Batesburg and go to Alton. I would have preferred neither.

  I passed the gravel pit and turned right onto the dirt road and bumped slowly down to the end of it. My headlights hit on a cinder-block shack with a corrugated metal roof that looked like it might once have been used to house tractors. Someone had filled in the big garage-type doors with odd pieces of unpainted plywood, and cut a person-sized door in the middle of one of them. The door hung on badly nailed galvanized strap hinges, and opened with a rope pull. There was the rusted hulk of what might have once been a 1959 Plymouth in the yard, and several old tires. A dirty white sow lying behind one of the tires raised her head and stared into my headlights. I got out and knocked on the front door and the woman from the track kitchen opened it. She peered at me, trying to see into the darkness.

  “My name is Spenser,” I said. “We met once at the track kitchen.”

  She flinched back as if I had pushed her and glanced over her shoulder.

  “I don’t know you,” she said.

  “Yeah, you do. And I know you. You’re Bertha Rankin, formerly Bertha Voss. You have a daughter Cheryl. Where’s your husband?”

  “He’s asleep,” she said, and glanced back into the room again.

  I could smell bacon grease and kerosene and a strong reek of whiskey.

  “We need to talk about Jack Nelson,” I said. “If you’d like to step outside.”

  She hesitated, and then stepped out of the house and pulled the makeshift door closed behind her. She was wearing some sort of shapeless dress, over some sort of shapeless body. Her gray hair was down and lank, and her face was red. There was sweat on her forehead and I could smell whiskey on her too.

  “What you want?”

  “I know that Jack Nelson is the father of your daughter, Cheryl Anne Rankin. I have no need to tell other people about that, right now. But I need to talk with you about it.”

  “How you know that?” she said.

  “Doesn’t matter. Tell me when Cheryl Anne was born.”

  “1948.”

  “Same year as Olivia Nelson,” I said.

  Bertha Rankin didn’t speak.

  “Did she look like Olivia Nelson?”

  Bertha Rankin nodded.

  “Where did she go to school?” I said.

  “Batesburg.”

  “Her father know about her?”

  “Yes.”

  “He give you money?”

  We were standing in my headlights. As if on stage. She looked at me and then back at the house and then at the ground.

  “Just you and me,” I said. “Did Jack Nelson give you money?”

  “He give me a hundred dollars every month.”

  “And told you to shut up,” I said.

  “Didn’t have to. Hilly knew, it’d kill him. Hilly drinks some, but he loves me. I been faithful to him forty-three years. I wouldn’t never want him to know.”

  There were tears now in her squinty eyes. Her face was puffy with booze and fat and age and tiredness.

  “Did Cheryl Anne know who her father was?” I said.

  The tears blossomed, and ran down her face. Her heavy shoulders sagged, and her breath began to come hard. She lowered her face suddenly and stared at the ground.

  “She did, didn’t she?” I said.

  Bertha nodded.

  “Be hard not to tell her,” I said.

  “I told her when she a seventeen-year-old girl,” Bertha said. “I wanted her to be proud of where she come from. To know that she wasn’t just like us.”

  “And a little after that,” I said, “she left town.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you didn’t hear from her anymore.”

  Bertha was crying full out now, her head down, her arms at her sides. She shook her head. I didn’t have it in me to tell her that her daughter was dead. She’d have to know sometime. But it didn’t have to be me who told her.

  I put my hand out and patted her shoulder. She pulled away.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. And turned and got back in my car and drove away.

  When I thought about it, on the dark road back to Alton, I figured that she probably sort of knew that her daughter was dead. Which didn’t make me feel any better.

  forty-one

  * * *

  IT WAS EIGHT-THIRTY at night and starting to rain when Jefferson let me into the big white house on the rise where Jack Nelson lived. As I stepped into the dim front hall, there was the quiet movement of dogs about me, and the old alpha dog put his nose against the back of my hand.

  “Evening, Mr. Spenser,” Jefferson said.

  “I need to talk to Mr. Nelson,” I said. “He in?”

  I could hear the smile in Jefferson’s voice although the hallway was too dim to see it.

  “Mr. Jack always in, sir. What is it you need to see him about?”

  “Cheryl Anne Rankin,” I said.

  We stood silent in the dim, dog-smelling hallway. Jefferson still had a hand on the open door. The old alpha dog sat next to me waiting for me to pat him. I patted him. The silence dragged on. Then Jefferson closed the door softly behind me.

  “This way, Mr. Spenser,” he said and we went back through the house the same way we had gone last time into the vast glass room where Jack Nelson kept his whiskey.

  The last time I’d come, the room had been flooded with light. Now it was dark except for the eccentric glow of the television set. The raindrops flattened against the glass roof, and ran together, and ran off in convoluted streaks. The sound of the rain hitting was a kind of steady rattle in the dark.

  Nelson was propped in his chair by the television. The water and the bourbon were at hand. The silent dogs were there. The air-conditioning was still turned up and the chilled room felt like a meat locker.

  Nelson looked at me without reaction as I walked toward him. Jefferson held back a little, among the dogs, silent at the periphery.

  I said, “Mr. Nelson, remember me?”

  Nelson stared at me and shook his head. He seemed to have become more inert since I’d seen him last. Three hundred nearly motionless pounds of booze and suet. The sound was low on the television, where two guys were pretending to wrestle. Nelson’s breath wheezed in the quiet room.

  “My name is Spenser. I’m a detective from Boston, Mass. I came a while back and talked with you about your daughter.”

  “No daughter,” he rasped.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Nelson, but that’s not true. In fact, there’s two daughters.”

  At the dark rim of the glass room Jefferson made a sound like a sigh.

  “Nigger lover,” Nelson said. He drank some bourbon. His eyes went back to rest on the television set.

  “Your daughter Olivia married an African,” I said. “Your daughter Cheryl Anne married a rich guy from Boston.”

  Nelson’s eyes never moved from the television. He seemed to settle more deeply into his own mass. The rain streamed off the black glass of the conservatory roof.

  “She was murdered a little while ago,” I said. “In Boston. I’m trying to find out why.”

  Nelson drank some more bourbon, and fumbled for the bottle and poured another drink and muddled water into it from the pitcher. While he did this he never took his eyes from the television tube. He spilled some of the bourbon and some of the water. He didn’t bother with
ice. I stepped in front of the television set.

  “You have an illegitimate daughter named Cheryl Anne Rankin,” I said.

  Nelson bent his head to the side trying to see past me to the screen. I seemed to have no meaning to him. He seemed to know only that I was an object between him and the picture.

  “He ain’t going to talk, Mr. Spenser,” Jefferson said. “He don’t talk much anymore.”

  “Then you’ll have to talk, Jefferson,” I said. “One way or another, I’m going to find out about Cheryl Anne Rankin. And if that includes getting an extradition warrant on Jumper Jack, then I’ll do it.”

  Jefferson turned a switch somewhere and indirect lighting brightened the room somewhat. Nelson seemed oblivious of it. Jefferson nodded at a couch against the inner wall of the conservatory. We went and sat on it, he at one end, me at the other. Across the room Nelson sat and watched the wrestling match and drank whiskey among his dogs.

  “Been with Mr. Jack more than sixty years,” Jefferson said. “Fourteen years old, graduate eighth grade, going to be a carpenter.”

  Jefferson stood suddenly and walked over to the table by Nelson’s chair and made himself a drink and one for me and brought them back. He handed me mine and remained standing, holding his in both of his still-strong hands, looking out at the dark rain beyond the conservatory glass.

  “Always like tools,” he said. “Like to make a miter fit snug. Like things square.”

  He looked around the conservatory slowly.

  “Started working for Mr. Jack’s father on this room. Apprentice. But I was good at it, even then, and Mr. Jack’s father, he say, ‘Boy, you a hard worker. Need a boy to work ’round here.’ He say, ‘You want to work for me?’ and I say, ‘Sure enough, Mr. Nelson.’ And I worked here ever since.”

  He was looking at the darkness again, and through it probably, back down the corridor of his past.

  “Cheryl Anne,” I said softly.

  “Sure, you right. She Mr. Jack’s daughter. Mr. Jack, he a hand with the ladies. And maybe Miss Abby knew it, and maybe she didn’t, but nothing come of it, ’cause Mr. Jack, he don’t never embarrass her, you understand? He maybe have a fling with a lady, but it always a lady of breeding and position, nobody gonna embarrass Miss Abby.”

  “Miss Abby was Jack’s wife?”

  “Yessir.”

  Jefferson shook his head. Across the room Nelson fumbled together another drink for himself.

  “Bertha come here to work in the kitchen. Not a cook, just to peel vegetables, and wash up, that sort of thing. She from Batesburg. She come over on the bus every morning, go home on it every night.”

  One of the dogs wandered across the room as we talked and jumped up on the couch and turned around three times and lay down between us. Jefferson patted her head absently.

  “She don’t look like much no more, but she look like something then all right. And she had that thing, you know, Mr. Spenser. She . . . she had a wiggle. She . . . hot, you know?”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “And Mr. Jack, he can’t keep his hands off her.”

  “It wasn’t his hands got him in trouble,” I said.

  “Yessir. And when she have the baby, Mr. Jack was ashamed. He felt real bad about it and he didn’t want Miss Abby to know, and he don’t want anyone else to know either. So he give her some money, and he say it is a secret, and long as it stayed a secret, he’d keep giving her the money.”

  “Hundred bucks a month,” I said.

  Jefferson shrugged.

  “Those times that a lot of money to somebody like Bertha Voss,” he said. “And she gets married to Hilly Rankin and she lets him think it’s his kid. So it worked out that it stayed secret.”

  “Except she told her daughter,” I said. “And she told her to be proud of who her father was and she told her how rich her father was and the daughter always remembered that, and always hated that he wouldn’t acknowledge her, and for reasons that probably have to do with her being crazy, she took the legitimate daughter’s name and history.”

  “Yessir.”

  “And when she was forty-three years old and broke, she remembered about how rich he was, and she came to him for money.”

  “Yessir.”

  The hokum noise of the wrestling match on the television made the silence in the rest of the vast atrium seem somehow more intense. Jefferson went and got two more drinks and brought them back and gave me one. Jumper Jack never stirred. His gaze remained fixed on the television screen.

  “Did he pay her?” I said.

  “Don’t even know who she is,” Jefferson said. “Or he says he don’t. Hard to say what Mr. Jack know and don’t know anymore.”

  “You pay her?” I said.

  “Did for a while. Then no more.”

  “Why’d you stop?”

  Jefferson shook his head softly.

  “Ain’t no money,” he said.

  “Jack too?” I said.

  “Mr. Jack never had as much as everybody think,” Jefferson said. “And he spend what he got.”

  Jefferson smiled thoughtfully, thinking back over the spending.

  “Bought cars and horses, and whiskey and food and presents for Miss Abby and Miss Livvie, and he spent a lot on women. Mr. Jack always say he didn’t waste none. He say he didn’t get cheated. Horse players die broke, he say.”

  “So he’s broke?”

  “Yessir. This house free and clear, ’bout all.”

  “What’s he use for cash?” I said.

  “Don’t need much. Feed the dogs, buy whiskey. ’Bout all.”

  “You get a salary?”

  “I still do a little carpentry work, part-time, when Mr. Jack sleeping. My grandson come in, watch him for me. Put in some cabinets for people, do some finish work, that sort of thing. Can’t do too much heavy stuff anymore, but I still got the touch for finish.”

  “You support him,” I said.

  Jefferson took in some of his drink. I sipped mine. Bourbon wasn’t my favorite, but one made do.

  “Yessir,” Jefferson said.

  “And you told Cheryl Anne that there wasn’t money to give her.”

  Jefferson nodded. He was looking out again past the dark fields beyond the atrium. He raised his glass and drank slowly. From the look of the drink it was mostly bourbon, but he drank as if it were milk. The rain washed down along the glass walls of the room.

  “And she was unable to hide her disappointment,” I said.

  “Say she don’t believe me,” Jefferson said. “Call me a thieving nigger. And she scream at Mr. Jack. He ain’t right anymore. You can see that. Anybody see that. Say he her father and he owe her the money. Say he got one week to get her some money. It upset him, her screaming at him like that.”

  I sipped a little more bourbon. Jefferson finished his and looked at mine. I shook my head. Jefferson went for another and made one too for Jumper Jack. I scratched the hound’s ear that lay curled next to me on the couch. I looked at the rain that slid along the curving glass. I looked at Jefferson. He returned the look and we were silent. We both knew. It seemed as if I had known for a long time.

  Seeing me scratch the hound’s ear, another dog got up and came over and put his head on the edge of the couch. The rest of the dogs noticed this change of position and stood and moved silently around the room, as if ordered by an unseen trainer, and settled back down in realigned order.

  “And she left,” I said.

  Jefferson nodded.

  “And went back to Boston.”

  Nod.

  “And you took a framing hammer, with a long handle for leverage, because you’re not as strong as you used to be, and you went up there too.”

  “On the bus,” Jefferson said, looking straight at me with no exp
ression I could see. “Three days on the bus.”

  “And found her address and waited until it was dark and when she walked by you beat her to death.”

  “Yessir.”

  Across the room Jumper Jack sat staring at his television, with three dogs in various positions of sleep on the floor around him. He drank half a glass of whiskey as I watched him and dribbled some down his chin and wiped it away with the back of his hand. It was the most active I’d seen him. He never glanced at us. It was as if he were alone in the room with his dogs and his whiskey, except that as I watched, tears rolled slowly down his face.

  I put my drink down and rubbed my temples with both hands. The dog whose ear I’d been scratching looked up at me. I scratched his ear again, and he put his head back down on the couch.

  “Jefferson,” I said, “I’ll get back to you.”

  forty-two

  * * *

  I STOOD AT my stove pouring a thin stream of cornmeal into simmering milk. As it went in, I stirred with a whisk.

  “Cornmeal mush?” Susan said.

  “We gourmets prefer to call it polenta,” I said.

  I put the whisk down and picked up a wooden spoon and stirred the cornmeal more slowly as it thickened.

  “What are those crumby things on the platter?” Susan said.

  She was sitting at my counter going through a glass of Gewürztraminer at the speed of erosion. She was wearing a pair of fitted tan slacks, a lemon sweater, and a matching tan coat that was part of the outfit and reached to her knees. She looked like Hollywood’s vision of the successful female executive.

  “Those are chicken breasts pounded flat and coated with cornbread crumbs,” I said. “And flavored with rosemary.”

  “Will you fry them in lard?” Susan said.

  “I will coat a fry pan with corn oil and then pour it out, leaving a thin film in the pan, then I will gently sauté the breast cutlets until golden brown,” I said.

  “Exactly,” Susan said.

  “And for dessert,” I said, “there’s sour cherry pie.”