As if taking that as a cue, Valentine got up quickly and busied himself with getting coffee and a plate for Niobe.
“I worked a double again yesterday so that this one”—she cocked a thumb in Valentine’s direction—“could go out on a hot date.”
“Was it busy last night?” Niobe asked sympathetically.
“It was a nightmare,” Clarisse said huskily. “I jammed the tape machine and ruined Sean’s new tape. Seven cases of empty beer bottles fell on top of me. A pair of lovers barricaded themselves in the ladies’ room and had a violent breakup— for an hour and a half—at the top of their lungs, until Sean finally got the door off the hinges and threw them out. At a quarter to two, when I was dragging the trash out to the side of the building, a bum in the playground spilled Sterno all over himself and caught on fire. He was wearing sixteen layers of clothing, so the fire department got there before the fire got down to his skin. Sean, of course, invited the firemen inside for coffee, which I ended up making, because Sean was too busy trying to pick up one of the firemen who was going off duty. He succeeded, so I had to clean up all by myself. I didn’t get to bed till after four o’clock.”
“Little annoyances come with the territory,” Valentine said loftily.
Niobe delicately wiped away crumbs from her mouth. “Wait’ll you work a full moon,” she said.
Clarisse made a little hissing noise. “I should know better than to expect sympathy from either of you.”
“How do you like my outfit?” Niobe broke in. “Newt designed it, and I sewed what I couldn’t buy.”
“It’s very…eye-catching,” Clarisse said diplomatically.
Niobe narrowed her slanted eyes. “You hate it! I can tell by your tone!”
“I don’t hate it, Niobe. It’s…well—”
“What? What?”
“Snug,” Clarisse finished. “I mean, with all the jumping up and down you’ll be doing, it doesn’t look as if it’s going to be comfortable.”
“I like my clothes to fit,” said Niobe defensively. “The worst feeling in the world is having material slipping and sliding all over my body. Gives me the willies. I like to know that something’s not going to fall off while I’m walking down the street.”
During this, Valentine sat down again and peered speculatively at the gray-and-red box Niobe had brought in with her. It was the size of a small shoe box, with ornate brass wirework covering three inch-square openings on either side. A miniature brass padlock dangled from an ornate latch. “This is a very peculiar purse, Niobe.”
“It’s not a purse,” Niobe said. “It’s a mascot.”
Wiping the crumbs from her hands, Niobe smartly slapped the top of the box. From inside erupted a shrieking blast of angry chirps, accompanied by a furious scratching against the wire. Two sharp yellow claws and a bit of puffy yellow feather shot out through one of the wire grates. The whole box rocked on the tabletop. “It’s a canary,” she told them.
Valentine and Clarisse glanced at one another. Valentine leaned down cautiously to peer inside.
Without asking permission, Niobe got up and opened the refrigerator. She looked about inside and took out a small plastic container of leftover meat loaf and returned to the table.
“Valentine!” she yelled, yanking the cage over to her place. “Stop making faces at him! You’ll make him sick!”
“Did you give it a name yet?” Valentine asked.
“Rodan.”
“As in Japanese monster movies?” Clarisse asked.
Niobe took a bit of the cold meat loaf with her fingers and pushed it through the grating. “Here’s breakfast, baby,” she cooed.
“It’s carnivorous?” Valentine asked incredulously. “It’s a carnivorous canary?”
Niobe nodded and pushed more meat inside the cage. “The man at the pet shop told me it goes wild over fresh kielbasa, but I think that’s too greasy, don’t you?”
The cheerleader then sat up and looked at both their empty plates. “You two done eating?” Without waiting for a reply, she flipped open the Herald she’d brought with her.
Niobe folded the paper carefully into quarters and then held it up for them to see. “Do you recognize this person?” she asked, waving the paper first toward Valentine and then toward Clarisse. She held up a photograph of a clean-shaven young man in a business suit. The caption was concealed by her hand.
“Are we supposed to know him?” Valentine inquired.
“Wait, wait.” Niobe turned the paper away from them. “Do you have a pen?”
Valentine leaned back and retrieved a felt-tip pen from a counter drawer. With it Niobe made rapid short strokes on the photograph. When she clicked the pen shut, she flipped the paper back around again. “Now do you recognize him?” she demanded.
Niobe had added a thin mustache and a large hat.
“That shrimp in the cowboy hat!” Clarisse exclaimed without hesitation. “The one who gave me such a hard time last Thursday night.”
“Valentine?” Niobe said.
“His name’s Mike,” said Valentine, troubled. “Why is his picture in the paper?”
Niobe lifted two fingers, and the bottom of the page dropped down into view. Clarisse’s expression darkened. “Oh, no,” she said.
Beneath the photograph the headline read: “Police Link Fourth Gay Killing to Necktie Murderer.”
Niobe relinquished the paper to Clarisse. She crumbled more meat loaf through the wire mesh of Rodan’s cage as Clarisse read the article aloud. Valentine’s mouth creased into a tight frown as he listened. He’d put on his baseball glove and was prodding the supple leather with his closed fingertips.
“Almost exactly like the last murder,” Clarisse said when she finished. “Bound with his own neckties. No sign of robbery. No indication of sexual activity. Dead at least twenty-four hours and discovered by a friend.”
Valentine slammed his glove angrily onto the table. Rodan squawked in protest. “At least twenty-four hours,” he repeated bitterly. “Do you know what that means?”
Niobe looked up. “That in this weather he was a pretty ripe corpse?”
Valentine shook his head. “Body found late Saturday morning, dead twenty-four hours. Since Friday morning, which probably means he got killed by whoever took him home on Thursday night. And where did Clarisse say he was on Thursday night? At Slate.”
“I can’t believe this is happening,” Clarisse said, peering at the photograph. “I served him drinks. I listened to his trials and tribulations. And now he’s dead?”
Niobe grimaced. “If you two are going to break out the black crepe over that dwarf, I’m getting out of here.”
“You knew him, too?” Valentine asked her.
“I bounced his little buns out of the bar one afternoon a couple of months ago.”
“Why?” asked Clarisse.
“He was giving me a hard time,” said Niobe simply.
“Whoever is killing all these people is as good as invisible,” Valentine said.
“I’ll bet the killer is clean shaven,” Niobe speculated. “Nice looking, average.” She screwed her face into a sour expression. “Who’s going to remember a man like that? People remember beards and mustaches. I’ll bet he’s well built too, because he subdues his victims.”
“Niobe,” Clarisse said, “the shrimp couldn’t have been more than four foot two, and he was thin. He couldn’t have fought his way out of a Roach Motel.”
“Oh, yeah,” Niobe conceded, then after a moment of thought, said, “but All-American Boy wasn’t. He lifted weights and belonged to the gym, but he ended up tied to his bed.”
Clarisse looked at Valentine. “You were on the door Thursday night. Did you see him leave with anybody?”
Valentine thought for a moment. “No. For a while he was talking to those two leatherettes who were with that peculiar woman, but nothing came of it. He left by himself, so far as I can remember. About one-thirty.”
“This is depressing,” Clarisse said. “I don
’t need this with the way I feel already today.”
“I know just what you mean,” Niobe said with no emotional backup in her tone. “I’m all broken up inside.” She glanced at the clock. “Daniel, we have to get a move on. Warm-up is eleven sharp.”
Clarisse pushed her chair back from the table. “I think I’ll go for a walk. It’ll make me feel better. Mind if I tag along with you two as far as Copley Square?”
“I know what that means,” Valentine said, standing. “You’re going to make a beeline to Copley Place. Whenever you get depressed, you go shopping.”
“Through some major clerical error,” said Clarisse, “Neiman-Marcus sent me a charge card. I intend to run it up to my limit before they check my credit rating and realize what a mistake they’ve made.”
Niobe snatched up the bird cage and held it to her face. “We’re gonna lead our boys to victory with cheers and chirps, aren’t we, Rodan?” She shook the bird cage and was satisfied only when the bird squawked and fluttered madly against the walls of its cage.
Chapter Five
VALENTINE WIPED THE BACK of his left hand across his forehead, erasing an irritating trickle of sweat. He looked up through squinted eyes. The early-afternoon sky was darkened by thick charcoal-gray clouds, and the scent of impending rain was strong in the humid air. The storm had been predicted for the night before, but Boston weathermen were famed for their habitual inaccuracy. Valentine firmly wrapped his palms around the bat he’d been weighing in his right hand. He turned his attention to the pitcher’s mound and prodded the earth with one cleated foot before taking his position and raising the bat to his shoulder.
He was standing at home plate on the municipal diamond on the Charles Street side of the Boston Common. From where he stood, Valentine had a clear view of the lush Public Garden across the street and the traffic streaming toward Beacon Hill.
The game was going into the sixth inning. Slate was pitted against the team from the Eagle this Memorial Day weekend, and the Eagle had been winning until Sean Alexander slammed a home run on a two-ball, no-strike pitch to even the score. Valentine hoped to break that tie and keep Slate ahead until the game was over. He glanced to his left. The tiny crowd in the bleachers—not to mention his own team—evidently found his turn at bat to be of less interest than the heated argument being pursued by Newt and Niobe, at the top of their voices. Niobe was swinging Rodan’s tiny cage back and forth with more than a vague sense of threat. Tiny tufts of yellow feather spat out of the cage’s air vents.
“Heads up,” the catcher hunkering behind Valentine warned.
Valentine turned his concentration back to the pitcher—a tall, clean-shaven man with wavy hair who was one of the acting managers of the Eagle.
With a slight nod of his head, Valentine indicated that he was ready. The pitcher performed an elaborate windup, thrust forward, and sailed the ball toward home plate.
The ball thudded into Valentine’s stomach.
Valentine groaned and let go of the bat. He pitched violently forward, throwing out his right hand to break his fall. Three of his fingers bent far back as he hit the hard-packed earth.
Valentine rolled onto his side, coiling into a fetal position and yelping as he tried to figure out which hurt more—his stomach or his hand. Niobe and Newt collided with each other racing to get to home plate.
“Water!” screamed Niobe, going to her knees on the ground next to Valentine. “Get me water!”
Someone thrust a half-empty bottle of Perrier at her, and she immediately upended it over Valentine’s head. As the spring water splashed over his face, he expelled his breath in a single groaning blast. A wedge of squeezed lime popped out of the bottle and grazed off his cheek.
“It was an accident!” the pitcher pleaded. “I swear it was an accident!” He went to his knees at Valentine’s side next to Niobe.
“Shall I call an ambulance?” Newt asked.
Valentine struggled to sit up, but Niobe immediately pushed him back onto the ground. “Stay put until I can figure out if you’re going to live.” She took his injured hand into hers and turned it gently palm up. Valentine yelped. “There goes the ball game,” Niobe muttered with a doleful shake of her head. She looked up at the faces ranged in a circle around her. “Broken,” she said factually, then added less positively, “I think.”
“Oh, God, Val,” the pitcher moaned, “I didn’t mean to break your finger.”
“You’re a vicious beast!” Niobe snapped at the man. “You deliberately tossed a knuckleball, and you know it. I saw you.”
“You weren’t watching me,” the pitcher shot back heatedly. “You were fighting with Newt. As per usual,” he added with a sarcastic grimace.
“I see everything!” She snapped her fingers at the man’s face. “Knuckleballs can fly wild, and they’re dangerous unless you’re a professional, which you obviously are not!”
Valentine wrested himself out of Niobe’s grip and came to a sitting position. Through gritted teeth he said, “It was an accident, and while you two have been arguing this thing out, I have been sitting here suffering. Sean, Niobe, help me up.”
As they were hoisting Valentine to his feet, a raindrop splashed against his cheek, and thunder rumbled ominously in the near distance. Valentine looked at the distressed pitcher. “If you’ll drive me over to New England Medical, I won’t sue.” The hospital was only a few blocks from the Common.
“I’m just parked on Charles,” the pitcher said.
“We’ll all go,” Newt declared. The Slate team chimed in with firm agreement.
Valentine shook his head. “If all of you want to be a help,” he began just as rain began to fall in a light misty shower, “go over to Sailor’s. I’ll meet you there when I get done at the hospital and give you the damage report.”
Sailor’s was a bar on Boylston Street just across from the Common. The drab, whitewashed exterior of the place could be seen from where they stood.
Thunder crashed overhead, and the mist of rain changed without warning into a sheeting downpour.
“Go on!” Valentine shouted. “I don’t want those new uniforms to shrink!”
The Eagle pitcher, again apologizing profusely, rushed with Valentine down the slope of ground. They darted through traffic to his car on the other side of the street. The Eagle team and the two dozen sodden spectators dispersed in various directions, while the Slate team, gathering bats, balls, and mitts, rushed en masse across Boylston Street and then clamored through the door into the dim, cool, red-lighted interior of Sailor’s.
Valentine joined the team an hour and a half later. Aside from the ballplayers who had gathered around the pool table, only a few customers were scattered throughout the bar at this early hour. Sailor’s was a hustler bar. Valentine noted that on this rainy Saturday afternoon the avarice and energy seemed at a low ebb, with the half-dozen hustlers basking about in the red light, waiting for the advances of the johns slumped in the shadows. Valentine walked up to the long bar in the back and ordered a beer from a middle-aged bartender with bright bleached hair and an artificial tan. He slid two bills across to the man and picked up the sweating can of Miller in his uninjured hand. The two middle fingers of Valentine’s right hand were bound together and held stiff by a splint. He made his way over to the pool table where Niobe was pitted against Newt. It was a long moment before anyone realized Valentine was there, but when Niobe looked up and saw him, she flung her pool cue in Newt’s general direction and rushed over.
The remaining team members—the shortstop and one of the outfielders had gone home—gathered around, asking Valentine a hundred questions at once. Valentine could tell by the number of empty cans spread about that the thirst created by the aborted game must have been thoroughly quenched by now.
“All right, you guys!” Niobe yelled. “Put a lid on it!”
Everyone went silent.
“It’s a bad sprain. Nothing’s broken,” said Valentine. “But this hand’ll be out of commission for a
while—and I’ll be off the team for the rest of the season.”
“What season?” said Sean, swallowing off the remainder of his beer. “With you and Jed out of the lineup, we’re not going to have a chance at the play-offs…”
“I’m going over to see Jed,” said Valentine. “When he sees this hand, maybe he won’t feel so bad.”
“It’s still raining out,” said Sean. “Stay and have a beer.”
“Yeah,” said Newt, “you got to catch up with us.”
“He couldn’t,” snapped Niobe. “You’ve had six in the past hour. It’s four o’clock in the afternoon, and you’re ossified.”
“I was just trying to keep up with you,” returned Newt. “I never could.”
“Rain makes me melancholy,” Niobe explained. “And if I weren’t afraid of denting this fake diamond engagement ring you foisted off on me, I’d knock your face off right here and now.”
“Okay, you two, don’t start,” Valentine warned. “I’m still going over to see Jed, rain or no rain. I talked to him yesterday, and he sounded pretty down.”
“We’ll all go,” said Niobe expansively, having already forgotten the quarrel with her husband. “We all need cheering up.”
The team began to herd out of the bar. Sean lingered behind a moment with Valentine.
“Are we sure that Jed is going to welcome a drunk softball team showing up unannounced on his doorstep?”
Valentine nodded. “It’s all right. He told me yesterday I should bring the team over after the game.”
Sean shrugged and smiled, tapping the brim of his cap. “You’re the captain.”
“Not anymore,” said Valentine. “Not with this hand.” He snatched Sean’s hat off his head and replaced it with his own. “You’re team captain now.”
Outside, the rain had stopped. Clouds had torn apart, revealing wide patches of blue sky. The humidity had abated, and the air was cooler. The Slate team strolled down Charles Street, with Valentine and Niobe in the lead. Niobe was swinging Rodan’s cage in a wide arc.
Jed lived in a spacious building on Mount Vernon Street between Charles and West Cedar. The team crowded the wide stoop, and Valentine depressed the buzzer for the fourth-floor apartment. A few seconds later a garbled voice rasped through the intercom speaker. Valentine announced himself, and the voice replied with another incomprehensible mutter before snapping off. Niobe peered through one of the side strips of glass at each side of the door.
Canary Page 4