Five Classic Spenser Mysteries

by Robert B. Parker

  “No,” I said, “you couldn’t. You couldn’t use your private knowledge of him to get his father killed. Even though Russell might like it.”

  “You understand that?”

  “Yes.”

  “You understand that I can tell you about Jerry and about Grace and that sort of thing. But I can’t give you his number that he trusted me with.”

  I nodded.

  “You see the difference,” Susan said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  She took my right hand in both of hers and leaned forward and kissed me on the lips. Lightly.

  Rachel Wallace tapped on the door. “Room service is here,” she said. I took my hand from Susan’s and patted her on the cheek. Then I went into the other room, and took my gun out and stood half into the bathroom door with the gun out of sight and said to Rachel Wallace, “Okay.”

  When the waiter left there were glasses and soda and a large bowl of Smokehouse almonds. “Ice down the corridor,” Rachel Wallace said.

  I was gazing at the almonds. “I’ll get some when Hawk comes back.”

  Rachel Wallace grinned. “The almonds were with you in mind,” she said.

  “If you weren’t a pervert,” I said, “I think I’d marry you.”

  There was a tap on the door and Hawk’s voice said, “Booze patrol.”

  I opened the door and Hawk came in with two bottles of Glenfiddich and a bottle of Domaine Chandon Blanc de Noirs champagne.

  “Let the good times roll,” he said.

  I looked at the champagne. “Domestic?” I said.

  “French house, California grapes,” he said. “Top shelf.”

  I went down the hall for ice. When I came back into the room Rachel Wallace was talking to Hawk.

  “And he knew that you were alone at the door. How could he know someone wasn’t forcing you to lie at gunpoint.”

  Hawk looked at me sadly.

  “If I understand your question,” I said, “Hawk wouldn’t do it.”

  “Even under threat of death he wouldn’t betray you?”

  “I doubt that either of us has thought of it that elegantly, but no, he wouldn’t.”

  “And you know that?”

  “Yes.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “ ’Cause he know he wouldn’t,” Hawk said.

  Rachel Wallace shook her head impatiently. “That’s what I’m trying to get at. How do you know he wouldn’t? How do you know he knows he wouldn’t? Do you discuss these things?”

  “One doesn’t,” I said.

  “Oh, God, spare me the Hemingway posturing,” she said.

  I grinned. “We don’t,” I said.

  “But damn it, why don’t you?”

  “One doesn’t,” Hawk said.

  “Oh shit,” she said and began putting ice cubes in a glass.

  Susan opened the door of the adjoining room. “We need to talk,” she said.

  I went in and closed the door again. The phone lay on the bed, the receiver off the hook.

  “He wants to talk with you,” Susan said. Her face was pale and tight.

  I picked up the phone. “Yeah?”

  “With Susan,” Russell said, “it looks like I lost and you might win. She wants it, she should have it. I wish her well.”

  Costigan’s voice was hoarse, but steady. I knew how he might be feeling. I was quiet. My knuckles on the receiver were white.

  “You and I aren’t friends,” he said, “but we got a special connection. We know things most people don’t know.”

  I said, “Un huh?”

  “You’re trying to kill my old man,” Russell said.

  “Un huh.”

  “He’s trying to kill you.”

  “Un huh.”

  “He’s in Boise,” Russell said. “Him and the old lady. They’ve been there since you broke into The Keep.”

  “Boise, Idaho?” I said.

  “Yeah. There’s an old silver mine that he’s recycled.”

  “Recycled?”

  “Yeah, he’s turned it into a fortress. You get him in there and you’re the best that ever lived.”

  “He know you’re telling me this?” I said.

  “No.”

  “You there too?” I said.

  “I will be.”

  “See you there,” I said.

  He hung up. I stood for a moment listening to the empty sound of the incompleted circuit. Then I hung up too. Susan was sitting on the bed with her back against the headboard and her knees hugged up to her chest. She stared at her kneecaps. I reached over with my right hand and softly massaged the back of her neck.

  “Worse and worse,” she said.

  I was quiet. She reached behind her neck with her left hand and took my right and held it against her cheek.

  “You and me, babe,” I said.

  She nodded, holding my hand as hard as she could.

  CHAPTER 48

  An Asian man answered Hugh Dixon’s door. Without any hesitation he said, “Come in, Mr. Spenser,” and I stepped into Dixon’s baronial foyer. It was as I remembered. Polished stone floor, a grand piano in the center. There aren’t that many foyers big enough for a grand piano. The Trump Tower was the only other one I’d seen in recent memory.

  “I’ll tell Mr. Dixon you’re here,” the Asian man said, like I dropped in regularly and he’d seen me since 1976.

  “Thank you.”

  He was gone maybe ninety seconds and came back and said, “This way, please.” It wasn’t the terrace this time, it was the study, or library, or office, or whatever people in Dixon’s income bracket called it. Bookshelves, leather furniture, Oriental rugs, a huge and ornately carved mahogany table with a phone on it and a green banker’s lamp. Behind it Dixon sat in his wheelchair.

  “It’s good to see you again,” he said when I came in. The Asian man left silently.

  “I need help, sir.”

  Dixon nodded his head toward one of the leather chairs. “Sit,” he said.

  “I’m afraid I might not find my way out,” I said. “I’ve lived in places smaller than that chair.”

  “As you wish,” he said. “What do you need?”

  Dixon looked better than he had eight years back. His face was calmer, his eyes had less ferocity in them, and more life. But his massive upper body still loomed in profound stillness in the wheelchair as it had since the bomb blast took his legs and family in London.

  “I need money,” I said. “A lot.”

  Dixon nodded. His head was grayer than I remembered. “Easy,” he said. “I have more of that than almost anything else.”

  “It is better that you not know why,” I said.

  “Don’t care,” Dixon said. “When you have little else to care about, you care about yourself, or try to. You care about your word, things like that.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “I told you if you ever needed help I’d give it to you. You and the black man.”

  “Yes, sir, in Montreal.”

  “Is the black man still alive,” Dixon said.

  “Yes, sir, he’s in this too. The money is for both of us.”

  “How much?” Dixon said.

  “Ten thousand dollars,” I said.

  Dixon nodded. “Will you have a drink?” he said.

  The Asian man had come in. He went to a side-board and brought a tray from it to Dixon. On the tray was a cut-glass decanter, and two brandy snifters.

  “Sure,” I said.

  The Asian man poured two glasses of brandy and gave me one. He gave the other to Dixon and left the decanter on his desk.

  “Lin,” Dixon said, “I want ten thousand dollars in”—he looked at me—“small bills?”

  “Tens and twenties and hundreds,” I said.

  Dixon nodded and said, to Lin, “To go.”

  Lin left. Dixon and I drank some brandy.

  “I can’t pay you back, sir,” I said.

  “You may or may not be able to,” Dixon said. “I don’t
expect you to return the money.”

  I nodded. We drank some more brandy.

  “How have you been, sir?” I said.

  “I am better,” he said. “Time helps. And”—he took some more brandy, and nearly smiled—“I have remarried.”

  “Congratulations,” I said. “That’s very good to hear.”

  “Life goes on,” he said. “And you?”

  “Lately it’s been complicated, but …” I shrugged. “In a while it will uncomplicate, I think.”

  Dixon picked up the decanter and gestured toward me with it. I stepped over to his desk and he poured some more brandy into the snifter. He put more into his glass and put the stopper back in the decanter. We drank.

  “Will I have to wait to see you again until you need another ten thousand,” Dixon said, nearly smiling again.

  “Probably, sir,” I said. “I’m not too sociable a guy.”

  Dixon nodded.

  “A man who has as much money as I do is used to people who make it a point to keep in touch in case they do need ten thousand dollars. It is a great pleasure to see someone who doesn’t.”

  “I took you at your word, sir.”

  “Many people say that. You seem actually to do it. I don’t assume you take everyone at his word.”

  “Or hers,” I said. “No, sir. Just people who can be taken at their word.”

  “And how do you distinguish which are those people,” Dixon said.

  I tapped my forehead. “A piercing intellect,” I said.

  “Or luck,” Dixon said.

  “That helps too,” I said.

  The sun was coming in from my right as it set, and where it hit the rug it made the colors seem almost translucent. We drank our brandy quietly. The house was still. It was so big it would seem still if someone were building a nuclear submarine in the other wing.

  Lin returned with a square package the size of a shoebox, wrapped in brown paper and tied neatly with brown cord. He handed it to me and left.

  “I have other resources,” Dixon said. “In addition to cash in small bills.” He took a small engraved card out of a drawer in his table. It had a telephone number on it and nothing else. Dixon held it toward me and I took it and put it in my shirt pocket.

  “Thank you,” I said. I drank the rest of my brandy.

  Dixon said, “Good luck.”

  I said thank you again and left.

  CHAPTER 49

  The Transpan mine was north out of Boise on Route 55 toward Placerville. We parked our lease car on the shoulder of a barren stretch of road and looked down into a valley in the rolling foothill terrain.

  “Map say here,” Hawk said. He held a U.S. Topographical Survey map with detailed directions written in Rachel Wallace’s neat circular hand. The valley ran north and south and the road curved along the rim of the eastern slope. A stream ran along the valley floor and along its west bank a narrow road curved with it toward a stand of western pine that obscured the north end of the valley.

  “That end,” Hawk said. “Behind the trees.” He sat in front with me. Susan sat in the back wearing enormous sunglasses with lavender rims. I put the car in drive and we moved along the rim until we could see around the trees as the valley turned slightly east and the road followed.

  I stopped the car and we sat looking down maybe half a mile at the mine entrance. It was square and dark, and even from here looked newly timbered and shipshape. To the right was a helicopter pad, and to the left a wide parking lot. A hundred yards down the road toward us from the entrance was a high chain link fence that encircled the entry area and was manned by a guardhouse. There were concrete vehicle barriers set up in front of the gate in a kind of labyrinth, so that a vehicle could get through, but only very slowly, to the gate. Around the mine entrance the face of the hill had been sheared so that it rose straight up for maybe a thousand feet and some kind of steel wire mesh had been stretched over it to retard erosion. There was a large sign outside the guard-house but it was too far away to read.

  “Bet it doesn’t say ‘Welcome,’ ” I said.

  “Might say ‘Step into my parlor,’ ” Hawk said.

  We sat quietly looking at the mine entrance.

  “We could go down the cliff face,” I said.

  “If they don’t have people on top,” Hawk said.

  “Or if they do and we can take them out,” I said.

  “Without they let anybody know down below,” Hawk said.

  “Or we could land in a helicopter inside there,” I said.

  “If we find a guy willing to fly one in there and get shot dead,” Hawk said.

  “Pilots charge an arm and a leg for that,” I said. “And even then we’re only inside the fence.”

  We looked at the mine some more. On the crest of the hill above the mine, across the valley, a man appeared with a dog and a rifle. He stood looking across at our car.

  “They got people on top,” Hawk said.

  “Time to go,” I said and put the car in drive.

  “What I wonder,” I said as we headed back toward Boise, “is if Jerry Costigan knows we know where he is.” I looked back briefly over my shoulder at Susan.

  “I don’t know,” Susan said. “I can’t figure out what he’s doing.” He always meant Russell. I didn’t question it. “He’s ambivalent about his father.”

  “How so,” I said.

  “He loves him and hates him, wants to be him, fears he isn’t man enough,” Susan said. “The other side of Oedipus.”

  “You shrinks ever look for motive?” I said.

  “Yes, but not always in the same place you do,” she said.

  “What’s he get out of this? Out of telling me where his father is holed up?”

  “Maybe he lying,” Hawk said.

  “Right,” I said. “Maybe he is. Maybe it’s a way to steer us away from Jerry and out here in the great West where we’re easy to find and make a good target. But the only way we find that out is to test it, and we have to test it by assuming Jerry’s here.”

  Hawk said, “Un huh.”

  “So back to the question. What’s Russell get out of helping us?”

  “The good feeling that comes from being a nice person,” Hawk said.

  “Besides that,” I said.

  Hawk looked back at Susan. I glanced back at her. She nodded at Hawk.

  “If you get killed,” she said, “he has no competition for me.”

  Hawk nodded.

  “And if we kill Jerry?” I said.

  “He has no competition for Grace,” Susan said.

  Hawk and I were silent as we came into Boise. Susan didn’t add to her comment. In downtown Boise I pulled the car in and parked on the street outside the Idanha Hotel. I looked at Susan.

  “Is there any chance,” I said, “that Russell might have been found on a hillside with his ankles pierced?”

  Susan smiled painfully and shook her head. “I can’t joke about it, even a little,” she said. “I know you’re trying to make it easier.”

  “Okay,” I said. “You’re saying that whether I get killed or Jerry gets killed, or we both get killed, Russell wins.”

  The afternoon was beginning to darken. It was autumn in Boise. Actually it was autumn in most of the hemisphere, but I only noticed it in Boise. The sun still shone full on the upper stories of the low downtown buildings, but the streets were shadowed. There wasn’t much traffic. I had a sense that maybe there never was much traffic in Boise.

  “This is the first time my ass may depend on whether Freud was right.”

  “And Sophocles,” Susan said.

  “Him too.”

  CHAPTER 50

  “If the mine depends on outside for power or water we could cut it off and force them out,” Hawk said. We were eating dinner in the Idanha dining room.

  “If we could find a way to do it,” I said. “But when they came out they’d have such security around Costigan that we’d be no better off.”

  “And they’d know
we here,” Hawk said.

  Susan was quiet, eating some cutthroat trout amandine. Hawk had ordered a Sokol Blosser Pinot Noir and I sipped some. I made a pleased motion with my head.

  “Oregon,” Hawk said. “Best Pinot Noir comes from Oregon.”

  “Who knew?” I said. I poured a little into Susan’s glass. She smiled at me.

  “Also,” she said, “the Costigans aren’t officially doing anything illegal. They can, and probably will, call the cops as needed. You would end up in trouble with the law again and you already have too much of that.”

  “Also reasonable to assume that Costigan has some influence with the law wherever he is,” I said.

  “Okay,” Hawk said, “so we don’t force him out. Mean we gotta go in.”

  I nodded. “At least he won’t expect us in there,” I said.

  “Hell,” Hawk said, “I don’t expect us in there.”

  “We can’t force it,” I said.

  “True,” Hawk said. “Eighty-second Airborne couldn’t force it.”

  “Guile,” I said. “We’ve got to think our way in.”

  “We may be in trouble,” Hawk said.

  “Best we can do,” I said, “is poke around and see what develops and keep thinking.”

  Susan looked up from her trout. “That’s your master strategy?” she said. “Poke around and see what happens?”

  “It’s all anyone can do,” I said. “The thing about us is when we start poking around we are hard as hell to discourage.”

  She put her hand briefly on my forearm. “You are that,” she said.

  We had some dessert, and some coffee, and some pear brandy, and after dinner Susan and I took a walk around downtown Boise. We stopped to look in the window of a bookstore on Main Street. Across the street a western-wear store showed a collection of high-heeled boots, and big-brimmed hats, and long-skirted canvas dusters. Just down from the hotel a storefront restaurant advertised steak, eggs, and fresh biscuits. There was a pawnshop where everyone seemed to have pawned a shotgun or a hunting knife. Everything was closed and there was around the small city a dark starlit sense of space running off in all directions under a high disinterested sky.

  “Not like Boston,” Susan said.

  “No,” I said.

  “I’ve never been in the West before,” she said. “Have you?”