Robert B. Parker: The Spencer Novels 1?6

by Robert B. Parker

  “Sensitive,” Hawk said.

  “Absolutely,” I said. “Everybody knows words have the power to hurt.”

  “They do that.”

  Hawk grinned.

  “But not like a kick in the balls,” he said.

  “No.” I said. “Not like that.”

  We were quiet. Actors and stage technicians, dressed very informally, came and went through the lobby.

  “So I’ll follow Jocelyn a couple of days,” I said. “Make her think I’m protecting her. And while she’s rehearsing or whatever I’ll ask around about her romantic interests, and you and Vinnie hang around in case the Chinks strike again.”

  “Good plan,” Hawk said.

  •21•

  I stayed close to Jocelyn Colby for the rest of the week. Every morning when she came out of her apartment I was lurking somewhere out of sight: parked in my car up the street; strolling aimlessly by in the other direction; at a pay phone on the corner, talking animatedly to my answering machine. And all the time I did this, Hawk and Vinnie sat at a distance in Hawk’s car and kept me in sight. I knew it was pointless. If there had been a shadow, Hawk would have spotted him. And the shadow would not have spotted Hawk. Hawk could track a salmon to its spawning bed without getting wet. But to make it work I had to pretend there was a shadow. So there I was in the rain, with the collar of my leather jacket turned up, and my hands in my pockets, and my black Chicago White Sox baseball cap pulled down over my forehead, staying alert for assassins, and pretending to shadow a shadow who didn’t exist. My career did not seem to be taking off.

  Friday, when Jocelyn came home from the theater, I didn’t tail her. I walked with her. If Port City downtown was ever going to look good, which it wasn’t, it was now. Mid-October, late afternoon when the light was nostalgic, and the endless drizzle made everything shiny. As we walked, Jocelyn put her hand lightly on my arm.

  “How nice,” she said. “I haven’t been walked home in a long time.”

  “Hard to imagine,” I said.

  “Oh, it’s brutal out there,” she said. “Most men are such babies. The good-looking men you meet, the ones with manners and a little style, are gay. The straight ones are cheating on their wives. Or if they’re single, they want to whine to you about their mother. Or their ex-wife.”

  “Where are all the good ones?” I said.

  “God knows. Probably aren’t any.”

  “I protest.”

  She laughed.

  “I got a friend,” she said, “insists that men are only good for moving pianos.”

  “They make good fathers, sometimes.”

  “And, the truth is,” Jocelyn said, “I wouldn’t mind if one galloped up and rescued me.”

  “From what?”

  “From being a divorced woman without a guy,” she said. “From being alone.”

  “Alone is not always such a bad thing,” I said.

  “You’re not alone.”

  “No.”

  “You have Susan.”

  “Yes.”

  “So what the hell do you know,” she said.

  “I haven’t always had Susan,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, I bet you didn’t like that as much as you think you did.”

  “I prefer having her,” I said.

  We turned up Jocelyn’s street. The cement sidewalk was buckled with frost heaves. The three-deckers crowded right up against the sidewalk, with no front yards. The blinds were drawn in their front windows. Their living rooms were a foot away from us as we walked along. She rummaged in her shoulder bag as we approached the house where she lived. It took her half a block of rummaging, but by the time we got to her door she had found her key.

  “Thank you,” she said. “You don’t need to be here until ten tomorrow morning. I sleep late on Saturdays and Sundays.”

  “You don’t need me here at all,” I said. “There’s no one following you.”

  She stopped with her key half into the lock. Her eyes were very wide.

  “You have to come,” she said.

  “No,” I said. “There’s no one. If there were, Hawk or I would have caught him.”

  “He’s not around because you are,” she said. “If you leave, he’ll be here.”

  “He didn’t spot us,” I said. “We’re good at this.”

  “So what have you got going?” She sounded like an angry child. “You going away with Susan?”

  “We’re working on a house,” I said.

  “Fine. You’re working on a house with Susan.” She made the name sound like it had many syllables. “And you don’t give a goddamn what happens to me.”

  “You’ll be swell,” I said. “There’s no one shadowing you.”

  “So.” She stood with her hands on her hips now, the key dangling untended in the lock. “You think I made it up.”

  “You tell me.”

  She was like a fourteen-year-old who’d been grounded. She talked with her teeth clenched.

  “Prick master,” she said.

  “Wow,” I said. “Prick master. I don’t think anyone has ever called me that before.”

  “Well, you are a prick master,” she said and turned the key in her door and wrenched it open and went in and slammed it shut.

  Up the street Hawk pulled the Jaguar away from the curb and cruised up to the house and stopped. I got in the back. Vinnie was sitting up front beside Hawk with a shotgun between his knees. Hawk pulled the car away from the curb. The wipers moved at intervals back and forth across the windshield of the Jaguar. Hawk had the radio on softly playing.

  “Still got that magic touch with the broads,” Vinnie said to me. “Don’t you.”

  “Just a spat,” I said.

  “She don’t like it that you not coming tomorrow?” Hawk said.

  “She called me a prick master,” I said.

  Vinnie half turned in the front seat and looked at me.

  “Prick master?” he said. “I never heard that. Broad’s pretty colorful.”

  At Hill Street, Hawk turned and headed up Cabot Hill. Vinnie was faced around front again and was looking out the car window at the near-empty street as we climbed away from the waterfront in the rain. He was chuckling to himself.

  “Prick master,” he said. “I like it.”

  •22•

  Hawk waited until I went in the front door of my place on Marlboro Street before he pulled away. It was an old brownstone and brick townhouse, a block from the Public Garden, which had been turned into condominiums in the early eighties, when condos were high, and the living was easy. The lobby was done in beige marble. The oak stairway turned, in a series of angular landings, up around the open mesh elevator shaft.

  Spry as ever, I skipped the elevator and took the stairs. I was wearing my New Balance running shoes with the aquamarine highlights and went up the stairs with very little noise, for a man carrying as much armament as I was. Since my visit from Lonnie and the Dreamers I felt I needed more fire power. I was wearing the Browning .9 mm on my hip with a round in the chamber and 13 in the clip. I also had the .357 butt forward on the left side of my belt with six rounds in the cylinder. I had decided against a blunderbuss.

  My place was on the second floor, and as I turned toward my door down the hall past the elevator shaft, I smelled cigarette smoke. I stopped. I sniffed. I checked the elevator shaft. The car was at the top, resting quietly on the sixth floor. My place occupied the whole second floor. The smell of cigarette smoke was from my place. It was a fresh smell, not the stale remnant of a cigarette long since smoked, but the fresh smell of one just lit, drawn in deeply and exhaled. I looked at my door. There was no change in the way light shone through the peep hole. I took the Browning off my hip, and cocked it and walked quietly back down the shor
t hall to the stairwell behind the elevator shaft.

  Susan was the only one with a key and she didn’t smoke. If someone had Murphied the lock they were good at it, because there was no sign of it on the door jamb. There was a fire escape near my kitchen window, which could have been used for access. The way they got in was less significant for the moment than the fact that they were in there.

  It could, of course, be the tooth fairy copping a quick lungful before slipping a quarter under my pillow, but it was more likely to be a couple of gunnies sent by Lonnie Wu, and if it was, in addition to myself, I wanted one alive.

  The stairwell was silent. The elevator remained motionless on the top floor. I was the only one, normally, who used the stairs. People on the first floor obviously had no need, people from the third floor up always took the elevator. However they had gotten in, there were two ways out. There was the fire escape, which came down into the public alley between Marlboro and Beacon Street. And there was the front door. I could cover the alley from Arlington Street. I could cover the front door from the stairwell. Backup would have helped.

  The sounds of a silent building are always surprising when you are standing quiet and listening hard. There is the tiny creak of the building’s constant struggle with gravity and stress, the cycling of heat and ventilation, the faint hint of refrigerators or personal computers, a murmur, almost imaginary, of television sound, and compact discs. From outside come sounds of traffic, and wind, and the audible, celestial hush of the world moving through space.

  I knew I could outwait them. I could outwait Enoch Arden if I had to. But it would be nice if, when they finally got sick of waiting, I knew which way they’d exit. I didn’t know how long they’d been there. If they were the two kids I’d seen with Lonnie Wu, they wouldn’t have much patience. Kids never do, and Lonnie’s two jitterbugs probably had a lot less than most. They might be ready to leave now. If I went for backup, I might lose them. And I didn’t want to.

  There was a skylight at the top of the stairwell, but the late October afternoon had blended with the late October evening and the stairwell was lit only by the dim bulbs near the elevator door on each floor. No light showed through the peep hole in my door. The evening stretches out against the sky, I thought. Like a patient etherized upon a table. I grinned to myself. Live fast, die young, and have a literate corpse.

  On the sixth floor I heard the elevator door slide open slowly. There was a moment when nothing happened, and then the elevator jerked into life and came slowly down past me. On the first floor the doors slid open. There were footsteps. The front door opened. And closed.

  I kept my eyes on the door to my apartment. After fifteen or twenty minutes it becomes harder than you’d think it would be. But I had spent half my life looking at things for too long a time, and had learned how. The door didn’t open. I continued to look at it. I no longer smelled the cigarette smoke. My nose had gotten used to it. If I hadn’t quit smoking twenty-five years ago, I’d probably have opened my front door without noticing anything and walked right into a bullet with others following hard upon. Further argument to confound the Tobacco Institute.

  I hadn’t figured out how to get them out of there, and I hadn’t figured out what to do if they went out the fire escape. So I stayed with Spenser’s crime-stopper tip number 7. When uncertain of what to do, hang around. I leaned on the corner of the elevator shaft and looked at my door. Nothing happened.

  I speculated on the sexual potential of an anchorwoman I liked on local television. I decided that it was considerable. As was my own. I considered whether sexual speculation about a prominent female newsperson was sexist and concluded that it was. I wondered if she looked good with her clothes off. I reminded myself that anyone who looked good with clothes on would, of course, look even better with clothes off.

  I shrugged my shoulders and bent my neck in an effort to loosen my traps. I did some calf raises. I opened and closed my left hand twenty times and then shifted the Browning into it and opened and closed my right hand twenty times. Then I shifted the Browning back.

  Somebody in the building was cooking onions. I was hungry. I had expected to come home, have a drink, and cook myself supper. I had not expected to find one or more nicotine slaves in my way. I was going to make myself some shredded pork barbecue out of a pork tenderloin I had in the refrigerator. I was going to serve it with red beans and rice, coleslaw on the side, and some corn bread, which I was going to make from Crutchfield self-rising white corn meal. Instead I was standing out here in the dark trying to keep my extremities from going to sleep and listening to my stomach growl.

  Being a hero was not an unencumbered pleasure.

  I tried compiling a list of things I liked best—dogs, jazz, beer, women, working out, ball games, books, Chinese food, paintings, carpentry. I would have included sex, but everyone included sex, and I didn’t want to be common. I thought about my comics hall of fame. Alley Oop, Li’l Abner, Doonesbury, Calvin and Hobbes, Tank McNamara, of course. . . . I was sick of waiting. . . . I shifted the Browning to my left hand and took the .357 from my belt with my right. I cocked it, and stepped out from behind the elevator shaft, and fired one round from the revolver through my front door. Then I fired three rounds from the Browning and another round from the .357. Then I hotfooted it down the front stairs and out the front door. I went down Marlboro Street on the dead run with a gun in each hand, turned the corner on Arlington Street, past one building and into the alley that ran behind my building.

  It was dark. I flattened against the wall behind a bulkhead that sheltered some trash barrels. I could hear my heart pumping hard, trying to catch up with my sudden sprint. In the cool October night I could feel the sweat drying on my face. The side of my building caught some moon glow. If it had worked, they should be on the fire escape. I forced myself to look wide-eyed and unfocused at the whole side of my building, rather than trying to concentrate. In the dark you saw better if you did it that way. Especially movement. Like the movement on the fire escape below my window. Two figures coming down. Ah, Spenser, I thought, you tricky devil, you’ve done it again! I would have been even more impressed with myself if it hadn’t taken me an hour to think of this ploy.

  The two figures dropped to the ground and started down the alley toward Arlington Street. One of them was putting his gun away inside his coat. They came quietly down the alley, not running, but moving quickly and staying in the shadows. They passed from the pale moon light into the shadows, and their eyes took a moment to adjust. They passed me in the shadows without any notice. They looked like the two kids who’d come with Lonnie Wu and scared me to death. I stepped out behind them, grabbed one of them by the hair, and jammed the Browning into his ear. I didn’t say anything. They probably didn’t speak English. And I didn’t know how to say “Stick ’em up” in Chinese. The kid grunted and his buddy turned with his gun out. I kept myself behind my teeny bopper, so his pal couldn’t get a shot at me. The pal began to back down the alley toward Arlington Street, in a crouch, gun forward, held in both hands, looking for a shot at me and not able to get one. I was afraid he’d shoot at me anyway and kill his buddy. These were not stable young men. I took my gun out of the kid’s ear and waved it at the other one, making a “beat it” gesture. For a moment, we faced off that way. The kid I had hold of tried to twist out of the way, but I was much too big and strong for him, and I kept him jammed against me, his head yanked back against my chest. In the distance was the sound of a siren. Somebody in my building had probably objected to gunshots in the stairwell, and called the cops. My neighbors were so traditional. The kid heard the siren, and for another moment held his crouch despite it. Then he broke, and turned, and ran. At the corner of Arlington Street, he turned toward Boylston Street, and disappeared. I didn’t care about him. I had one, which was all I needed.

  •23•

  I sat in an interrogation room at Police Headquarters with H
erman Leong and the Vietnamese shooter.

  “Name’s Yan,” Herman said.

  “He speak any English?” I said.

  The room was cinder block painted industrial beige. The floor was brown tile and the suspended ceiling was cellotex tile that had started out white. The door was oak with yellow shellac finish. There were no windows. Light came from a fluorescent fixture that hung from short lengths of chain in the center of the room.

  “Probably,” Herman said. “But he won’t let on.”

  Herman sat beside me on one side of an oak table shellacked the same yellow as the door. A lot of cigarettes had left their dark impressions on its edges. The kid sat across the table on a straight chair. He wore a white shirt buttoned to the neck, and dark, baggy trousers. His black hair was long, and it hung over his forehead and down to the corners of his eyes. He said something to Herman. Herman shook his head.

  “Wants a cigarette,” Herman said.

  “Tell him he’ll get one just before the blindfold.”

  Herman nodded and didn’t say anything. The kid stared at me. His eyes were black and empty.

  “How old is he?” I said.

  Herman spoke to him. Yan answered. His voice was uninflected. His face blank. He looked bored.

  “Says he thinks he’s seventeen. He doesn’t know for sure.”

  I nodded.

  “Why do you ask?” Herman said.

  “Just wondered,” I said.

  “He’s old enough to kill you,” Herman said. “You let him.”

  “I won’t let him,” I said. “What was he doing in my apartment?”

  I waited for the translation.

  “Says he wasn’t in your apartment.”

  “We’ll be able to make him there,” I said. “There’ll be prints.”

  Herman translated. Yan shrugged.

  “What was he doing on the fire escape?” I said to Herman. Herman spoke to Yan. Yan answered.