“Sure. Ain’t so easy for some people.”
“You got a whacko file?” I said.
“Sure.”
“Anybody fill the bill?”
“Not till we get desperate,” DeSpain said.
“Then you make do,” I said.
“I’ve squeezed a lot of square pegs into a lot of round holes,” DeSpain said. “Just need to shove sort of hard.”
DeSpain had picked up the handgun and was now twirling it by the trigger guard around his forefinger, like a movie cowboy.
“You been a cop,” he said.
“Can I see the file?” I said.
Still playing with the handgun DeSpain reached over to the computer on the side table behind his desk and turned it on with his left hand. When the screen brightened, he tapped the keys for a minute. A list of names formed on the screen.
“Want a printout?” he said. “Or you want to read it off the screen?”
“Printout,” I said.
DeSpain turned on the printer, hit a couple of keys, and the list began to print.
“Couple years,” DeSpain said, “these things’ll violate a suspect’s civil rights for you. Won’t have to lift a finger.”
The paper eased out of the printer and DeSpain picked it up and handed it to me. He pointed at the list with the muzzle of the gun.
“Ding dongs are hard to keep track of,” he said. “List may need an update.”
I nodded.
“You learn anything, you’ll dash right on in here and tell me about it,” DeSpain said.
“Sure. Who’s working the case?”
“Me,” DeSpain said.
“Keeping your hand in?” I said.
“Sure.”
“I find something, I’ll let you know,” I said.
“’Preciate it,” DeSpain said. He scratched a spot behind his ear with the muzzle of the gun. “We’re fighting crime up here day and night,” he said. “Day and fucking night.”
“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” I said.
DeSpain’s wolfish grin flashed again. It was almost a reflex. There was no humor in the grin, or in the eyes that were as hard and flat as two stones.
“Yeah,” he said. “It is, isn’t it.”
•8•
We were in front of a three-hundred-year-old farmhouse set on twelve acres about three miles from the center of Concord, waiting for the real-estate lady. The house didn’t look its age, but it didn’t look my age either. The foundation plantings were overgrown, the paint was peeling, some of the windowsills had shriveled and warped. The land rolled gently down toward a stream and merged with thickly forested wetlands, where the deciduous trees were already beginning to turn. From most places on the property you could see no other human sign.
Pearl the Wonder Dog raced around in steadily widening circles, her nose to the ground, her short tail erect. After every full circle she would come to stand in front of Susan with her mouth open, and stare up at her for a moment. Susan would pat her, and Pearl would dash off in another circle.
A single blue jay curved in past some pine trees and settled on the lawn and cocked his head and listened for worms. He heard none and went up again, circling closer to us before he settled on the limb of a red maple. Like most birds he seemed never completely at rest, moving his head, fluttering his wings, making brief, abrupt hops on his tree limb for no reason that I could see. On the other hand, he may have thought me sluggish, leaning against the car in the last glimmer of sunlight beside this striking woman. Probably at least thirteen ways of looking at a blue jay.
“This is the house,” Susan said.
“Perfect,” I said. “Having established that we cannot live together, we should buy a house in the country together.”
“We have also established that we can spend weekends together,” Susan said.
“That’s because you always distract me with endless sexual invention,” I said.
“Doesn’t seem endless to me,” Susan said. “Ever since I sold the Maine place I’ve thought we should buy a weekend place out of the city, with some land we could fence, so the baby could run around and point birds.”
“Pearl’s instincts run more to pointing Oreo cookies, I think.”
Susan ignored me.
“And this is the place. It’s run down so we can buy it cheap. Then you’ll fix it up, and we’ll come here with Pearl on autumn weekends and roast chestnuts and have a nice time.”
When she was really intense about something she paid very little attention to anything else. Except, usually, me.
“We always have a nice time,” I said.
“Yes. We do,” Susan said. “Are you making any progress in Port City?”
“Sure. Hawk’s watching Christopholous and no one’s following him,” I said. “I had a nice talk with DeSpain.”
“Does he know anything?”
“No. He gave me the psycho list, but there’s nothing on it that helps.”
“Is he any good?” Susan said.
“DeSpain. Yeah. He’s a good cop. Very tough cop.”
“Too tough?”
“Some people thought so,” I said.
“Tougher than you?”
“Never a horse that couldn’t be rode, little lady. Never a rider that couldn’t be throwed.”
“Good heavens,” Susan said. “Does that mean he might be?”
“Means maybe we’ll find out some day,” I said. “What do you know about Rikki Wu?”
“Rikki?”
“Yeah. It’s not much, but so far she’s the only one who’s objected to my looking into the murder.”
“Oh, well, yes, I suppose so. It’s hard to take Rikki seriously.”
“Somebody does,” I said. “If she pawned the jewelry she was wearing the other night, she could buy this house.”
“Her husband, Lonnie Wu, is very wealthy, and Rikki is totally indulged. A Chinese American Princess. It has left her with a feeling of near total entitlement.”
“Perhaps we should introduce her to Pearl,” I said.
“A Canine American Princess,” Susan said. “Rikki gives large sums of money to the theater.”
“And now she’s on the board,” I said. “Can you arrange for me to have lunch with her?”
“I’m not sure she’d be willing to see you.”
“Mention to her about me being hunk city.”
“I’ll ask her to lunch with both of us, and then I’ll have a crisis with a patient and you can convey my apologies.”
“Okay,” I said. “But I think hunk city would have worked just as well.”
“Rikki’s too self-centered to be flirtatious,” Susan said.
“Shows what you know,” I said.
“You seriously think . . .” Susan started, but Pearl started barking and jumping around, and the real-estate lady pulled up in her maroon Volvo station wagon. When the real-estate lady got out, Pearl dashed up to her and rammed her head between the real-estate lady’s thighs.
“How embarrassing,” Susan said.
The real-estate lady smiled and patted Pearl. She didn’t mind at all. She knew Pearl’s owner was a live one.
“House needs a lot of work,” I said.
“We prefer the term ‘great potential,’” the real-estate lady said.
“I bet you do,” I said.
“In this price range. In a lower price range we would prefer the term ‘handyman’s special,’” she said.
“You like this kind of work,” Susan said to me.
“At my own pace,” I said.
“Of course,” Susan said and smiled at me.
I smiled back. I didn’t believe her for a moment, but her smile was worth any s
ervitude. Which is how I found myself, an hour later, the co-owner of a very large house, with a jumbo mortgage, on a street where other home owners raised cows and rode horses and drove Volvo station wagons.
If I weren’t so heroic, I would have been nervous.
•9•
I felt like a college recruiter. All day I had been sitting in the back row of the empty theater interviewing people about Craig Sampson. I had begun at eight in the morning with Leonard O, himself, in to audition for Craig Sampson’s replacement. The first thing I noticed was that Leonard had no beard. It wasn’t that he was clean-shaven; he appeared never to have needed a shave. His blond hair was shoulder-length and lank. He had a small voice like the bleat of a goat, and he chewed gum very rapidly. I trow he were a gelding or a mare.
We shook hands. His eyes seemed not to register me, and his handshake was a limp squeeze with the tips of his fingers.
“I don’t have much time,” he said. “I have a full day of listening to actors botch my lines.”
He didn’t look at me when he spoke. His gaze flitted without apparent purpose.
“I’m looking into Sampson’s murder,” I said.
“Murder is the bloodiest of the creative arts,” he said.
“I kind of figured it was a destructive art,” I said.
“The death of the individual may be destructive,” O said. “But the act itself, its conception and performance, may be quite artful.”
“Encores are hard.”
O was scornful.
“Like so many people you conceive of art in the narrowest possible terms,” he said. “Museum art.”
“I love that Norman Rockwell, don’t you?” I said.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” O said.
“Any reasons you can think of why someone would kill Craig Sampson?” I said.
O’s gaze flickered past me. His eyes were never still, and he never looked at me except in passing.
“Of course, dozens of reasons: unrequited love, passion, jealousy, vengeance, lust expressed through violence, political zeal, money, greed . . .”
O shrugged as if to indicate that he had but scratched the surface.
“Pride, lust, envy, anger, covetousness, gluttony, and sloth,” I said. “I thought of those too. Anything less general?”
“I knew him only as an actor in my play. He was inadequate. But all the other candidates were even more so.”
“What was his greatest failing?” I said.
“Passion. He mouthed the words like a player piano. He did not feel the emotive rhythms that stirred beneath the language.”
“I noticed that too,” I said.
O’s eyes moved rapidly. He chewed his gum.
“It is the greatest frustration of any playwright, that his art emerges only through the instrumentation of actors. Almost by definition the soul that wishes to act is far too narrow to carry the burden of an artist’s vision.”
“Bummer,” I said.
O’s glance jittered past me as it moved from one blank wall to another. His eyes were pale blue, and as flat as the bottom of a pie plate.
“Is there anything in the play that I might have missed, that would cause a murder?” I said.
“Almost certainly,” O said. “My play speaks to the deepest impulses of humanity, and challenges its most profoundly held beliefs. To the small part of humanity capable of full response, the challenge is very threatening, and a cleansing rage is one possible response.”
“In addition to pity and terror,” I said.
It almost made O look at me for a minute. But he caught himself and slid his look onto a wall and chewed his gum very swiftly.
“Have you ever been threatened?” I said.
“To be human is to be threatened,” O said.
His neck was thin and would wring easily if someone were of a mind.
“Could you tell me about it?” I said.
“The threat of humanity?” O shook his head sadly. “I have been telling you about it for my whole theatrical life.”
“Any specific threats from a specific human?”
O shrugged and shook his head as if the question were tedious.
“Have you ever been followed?”
O rocked back a little in mock amazement.
“Excuse me?” he said.
“Followed, stalked, shadowed?”
O almost smiled. “By the angel of death, perhaps.”
“Besides him,” I said. “Or her.”
“What an odd question, why do you ask?”
“I’m an odd guy, have you?”
“Of course not.”
We sat for a moment looking at each other. O was working on the gum as if he had only a few more minutes to subdue it.
“I have a question for you, Spenser,” he said. “Did you understand anything in my play when you saw it?”
“Actually I did, O—the Tiresias stuff you stole from Eliot.”
A startling flush of red blossomed suddenly on O’s smooth white face. He stood up.
“I do not steal,” he said. “That was homage.”
“Of course,” I said. “It always is.”
•10•
Deirdre’s chest was no less aggressive than it had been at the reception, and neither was she.
“Alone at last,” she said when she sat down.
She might have been twenty-five, with wide blue eyes, and a lot of auburn hair, worn big. Her dark green spandex health club gear was iridescent. An oversized gray sweatshirt reached nearly to her knees. It had a New York Giants logo on the front.
“Craig Sampson’s loss is our gain,” I said.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean to be frivolous about something so awful.”
“I doubt that it makes much difference to Sampson,” I said. “What can you tell me about him?”
“He was fun,” Deirdre said. “He’d been around, you know, and he knew the score.”
“Which was what?”
“Excuse me?”
“The score? What was it?”
“Oh, you know what I mean. He was older. He knew the whole downtown theater scene in New York. He’d done cruise ships and dinner theaters. He was good to talk to about the business.”
“He ever in any trouble you know of?”
“Craig? No. He was too smart. He kept his nose clean and his mouth shut and went about his business.”
“Love life?”
“He wasn’t gay. I’m pretty sure. In the theater it’s not that big a deal, you know? And besides, I could tell. He was straight.”
“Did he have a girlfriend?”
“Nobody in the company. I don’t know why. He had plenty of chances, but he didn’t seem interested.”
“Outside the company?”
Deirdre was sitting sideways on the chair with her legs tucked under her. It was hard to figure how she’d achieved that position, but it made her look good, so I assumed it wasn’t accidental.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “Most of us don’t have much life outside the company. You know? I mean Port City . . . really!”
“Did he go away much? Boston? New York?”
“Not that I can remember. Most of us are working most of the time. He’d go to New York a couple times when the theater was dark, make a commercial, he said.”
“What commercials?”
“I don’t know. I never watch television. And I don’t ever want to do commercials. Craig said it covered expenses.”
“He have an agent?”
“I don’t know.”
“Management of any kind?”
“I don’t know.”
“How’d he get the commercials?”
“I don’t know. It wasn’t a big deal. He’d go away occasionally and come back and say he’d made a commercial. It’s not cool to ask a lot of stuff about things like that.”
“Except when I do it,” I said.
“Oh, anything you do is cool,” Deirdre said.
“It’s a gift,” I said.
She grinned at me, full of herself, pleased with her body, enjoying her sexiness, glad about her vocation, optimistic about the future, younger than a new Beaujolais.
“So what do you think? You got any clues yet?”
“Not yet.”
“Do you get a lot of cases that are hard to figure out?”
“Well, the process sort of selects them out. People don’t usually call me if the local cops solve it promptly. Even then, though, most cases aren’t complicated to solve. A lot of them are more complicated to resolve.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean sometimes I know who did what, but I’m not sure what I should do about it.”
“What do you do?” Deirdre said.
“I normally have two courses of action. I follow my best instincts guided by experience, or I do what Susan says.”
Deirdre grinned again.
“I bet you don’t do what anyone says.”
Without moving, she appeared somehow wiggly.
“Do you ever get a case where there are no clues? You know, when you can, like, never figure out who did it.”
“I solve all my cases,” I said. “Some of them are just not solved yet.”
Deirdre clapped quietly.
“Great line,” she said.
“Thanks, I’m trying it out for my ad in the Yellow Pages.”
•11•
Wearing a spiffy white raincoat beaded with rain drops, and carrying a wet umbrella that looked like a Chinese parasol, Rikki Wu came into her husband’s restaurant as if she were walking onto a yacht. The guy at the register jumped up and took her coat and umbrella and disappeared with them. No one had paid any attention to my coat, which I had hung on the back of a chair. She scanned the room looking for Susan. The place was nearly empty for lunch. Maybe it was the rain. Or maybe most people in downtown Port City didn’t do lunch. Her eyes swept past me, and stopped, and came back and stayed.
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