Robert B Parker - Spenser 21 - Walking Shadow

by Walking Shadow(lit)

  "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."

  CHAPTER 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."

  CHAPTER 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.

  I stood. She walked over to me.

  "Mrs. Wu," I said.

  "Where's Susan?"

  "She had an emergency with a patient," I said.

  I held Rikki Wu's chair for her. She seemed puzzled.

  "So it's just the two of us?" she said.

  "Yes, but I'll be twice as lively and amusing to make up," I said.

  Rikki Wu looked uneasy, but she sat.

  The restaurant had begun, in another time, before it was a pizzeria, as a store with glass windows facing the street. The windows were half curtained in some sort of accordion-pleated white paper. Above the curtains, the glass was fogged by the wet weather.

  A waiter brought us tea, and stood quietly beside us. He was as close to prostrating himself as he could
get while standing. Without looking at him, Rikki Wu spoke in rapid Chinese. He bowed and backed away and disappeared.

  "I hope you don't mind," Rikki Wu said in a voice that sounded like she didn't care if I minded or not.

  "I took the liberty of ordering for us."

  "I don't mind," I said.

  I watched her accept the fact that she was alone with me, and watched as her persona adjusted to the fact. She smiled at me.

  There was a touch of conspiratorial intimacy in the smile. Rikki Wu was sex. I was pretty sure she was spoiled and self-centered and shallow. Maybe cruel. Certainly careless about other people. But she was sex. She would like sex, she would need it, she would want more of it than most people were prepared to give her, and she would be totally self-absorbed during it. I'd spent too many years looking for it, and occasionally at it, not to know it when I saw it.

  And I was seeing it. She would be a hell of a good time once a month.

  "Well," she said, "here we are."

  "Sleepy-eyed and yawning," I said.

  "See how late it gets."

  "You're sleepy?"

  "It's a song lyric. I have these momentary flights now and then."

  "Oh, how interesting."

  The waiter arrived, placed a large platter of assorted dim sum before us, and bowed himself away. Rikki Wu put several items on my plate.

  "Thank you," I said.

  "Did you know Craig Sampson very well?"

  "Oh, no."

  "You seemed very protective of him the other night."

  "I admired him, his work," Rikki Wu said.

  "He was a fine actor. And I did not like the innuendo of your questions."

  Her English was perfect, and formal-sounding. Her Chinese had sounded fluent too, though I had no way to judge that, except that it had been rapid.

  "Yeah. I'm sorry I had to ask. Were you born here?"

  "In Port City?"

  "In the United States."

  "No. In Taipei

  "So your English is acquired."

  She smiled.

  "Yes. It's interesting that you should notice."

  "It sounds like your native language," I said.

  "Yes. It is. So is Cantonese, which I just spoke to the waiter.

  And Mandarin."

  "You speak the Chinese dialects as well as you speak English?"

  "Oh, certainly." + "What do you think in?" I said.

  "Excuse me?"

  "When you're alone, thinking about things, what language do you think in?"

  She hesitated, and drank some tea. Maybe she never thought about anything when she was alone.

  "I don't know... I guess it depends what I'm thinking about."

  She smiled.

  "Or who."

  "Do you think much about Craig Sampson?"

  "Yes, it's so tragic. Such a brilliant young man, his life cut short so suddenly."

  "Did you think about him much before he died."

  Her eyes widened. She sipped some more tea. Then her eyes narrowed a little and she looked sternly at me over the tea cup.

  "What are you trying to imply?" she said coldly.

  "Mrs. Wu, I'm just talking. I'm just looking for a handhold. I mean no innuendo."

  "There was nothing between Craig and me. I barely knew him offstage."

  "You live here in Port City?"

  "On the hill," she said.

  "Of course. Did he have any relationship with any of the women in town that you know of?"

  "Why did he have to have a relationship? I know of no relationships he had in town or anywhere else. Why do you keep asking that?"

  "Because most people have one, even if only of a fleeting sexual nature. And he seems to have had none. That's maybe a little unusual. If you don't know anything, you pay attention to the unusual."

  "Well, why do you keep asking me?"

  "I keep asking everyone. You're just the one that's here."

  "Well, I find it very boring," Rikki Wu said.

  "Okay. We'll turn our attention to more exciting stuff," I said.

  "Would you like to see me do a one-armed pushup?"

  "Can you really do that?" she said.

  "As many as you'd like."

  She relaxed. We were back in the realm of the physical. This was her turf.

  "You must be very strong," she said.

  "But pure," I said.

  "And kind-hearted."

  "Perhaps you will show me sometime, when we are not in so public a place."

  "I could meet you at the gym," I said.

  She frowned. Maybe I wasn't as funny as I thought I was. Or maybe she didn't have much sense of humor. Probably a Chinese thing. I ate some dim sum. She drank some tea. The dim sum wasn't very good. But there was plenty of it.

  "Do you work out?" she said.

  "Sure," I said.

  "I do too. Do you have a trainer?"

  "No, I muddle through on my own."

  "I have two," she said.

  "My CV specialist, and Ronny, my strength and conditioning coach."

  "CV?"

  "Cardiovascular," she said.

  "I train with them every day."

  "Well, it seems to be working," I said.

  "Yes. You should see my body," she said.

  "Yes, I should."

  She laughed. It wasn't an embarrassed laugh. But it was an uneasy one, as if she feared her own sexuality and where it might lead her. She stood. For lunch she had consumed two cups of green tea. I stood.

  "I have to go to my body-sculpting class," she said.

  "Sometime you must show me that pushup."

  "One arm," I said.

  "Ask Ronny if he can do that."

  She laughed. I gave her my card.

  "You think of anything useful, call me," I said.

  "Perhaps I will," she said.

  The waiter appeared with her coat and held it while she put it on.

  "Lunch is taken care of," she said.

  She turned and walked to the door. The waiter followed her, and when she got to the door, he opened it, and popped her umbrella open and held it over her head until she took the handle from him and walked out. I'm not sure she ever saw the waiter.

  CHAPTER 12

  It was a bright day in Concord. The sky above the old house was the kind of bright blue that you see in seventeenth-century Dutch paintings. The sun was strong and pleasant and the foliage was turning color.

  The grounds around the house seemed to have been landscaped by Tarzan of the apes. Bushes, vines, saplings, weeds, decorative plantings run amok, all looped and sagged around the house, clustered in front of it, clung to it, and concealed far too much of it.

  "This is ugly," Susan said. She had on jeans, and sneakers, and a lavender tee shirt with the sleeves cut off. Sweat had darkened the tee shirt. Sweat ran down her face under the long billed Postrio baseball cap. A sheen of sweat defined the small, hard muscles in her forearms.

  "They'd never recognize you at Bergdorf s," I said.

  She paid no attention, focusing as she always did on the question before her. She was wearing tan leather work gloves and carrying an axe.

  "We need a chain saw," Susan said.

  "Jesus," I said.

  "You don't think I can handle a chain saw?"

  "They're sort of dangerous," I said.

  "If I weren't totally fearless, I'd be a little afraid of chain saws."

  "Well, it would speed things up," she said.

  "What's the hurry? We have the rest of our life to do this."

  "You know perfectly well that I am always in a hurry."