“How come you’re messing it up, then? If it’s so good. How come you don’t believe it?”
“I talked to her right after it happened. She’s not that good a liar.”
“Why ain’t it a trip? Maybe she really thinks she’s telling you true. You ever been on a trip?”
“No. You?”
“Baby, I’m fat, black, widowed, pushing thirty, and got four kids. I don’t need no additional problems. But she could think it happened. Got any better reason for thinking she’s not guilty?”
“I like her.”
“All right,” she said. “That’s cool.”
“So, what do you know?”
“Not a hell of a lot. The kid Powell was a jerk, sulky, foolish. On an ego trip. Terry, I don’t know. I’ve been in classes with her. She’s bright, but she’s screwed up. Jesus, they’re so miserable, those kids, always so goddamn unhappy about racism and sexism and imperialism and militarism and capitalism. Man, I grew up in a tarpaper house in Fayette, Mississippi, with ten other kids. We were trying to stay alive; we didn’t have time to be that goddamn unhappy.”
“How about a professor?”
“In SCACE, you got me. I do know that there’s a lot of talk about drug dealing connected with SCACE.”
“For instance?”
“For instance, that Powell was dealing, and had big connections. He could get you smack, anything you wanted. But especially smack. A kid that can get unlimited smack is heavy in some circles.”
“Mob connection?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even know whether he really could get a big supply of smack. I just tell you what I hear. Kids like to talk big—especially to me, because I live in Roxbury, and they figure all us darkies are into drugs and crime, ’cause we been oppressed by you honky slumlords.”
“I want a professor,” I said. “Try this. Name me the most radical faculty members in the university.”
“Oh, man, how the hell do I know? There’s about thirty-five thousand people in this place.”
“Name me anyone, any that you know. I’m not the Feds. I’m not going to harass them. They can advocate cannibalism for all I care. I only want to get one kid out of trouble. Make me a list of any you can think of. They don’t have to be active. Who is there that might be involved in stealing a manuscript and holding it for ransom?”
“I’ll think on it,” she said.
“Think on it a lot. Get any of your friends who will think on it too. Students know things that deans and chairmen don’t know.”
“Ain’t that the truth.”
“How about an English professor? Wouldn’t that be the best bet? It was a medieval manuscript. It was important because it referred to some medieval writer. Wouldn’t an English professor be most likely to think of holding it for ransom?”
“Who’s the writer it mentions?” she asked.
“Richard Rolle.”
“How much they want for him?”
“A hundred thousand dollars.”
“I’d give them some dough if they’d promise not to return it. You ever read his stuff?”
I shook my head.
“Don’t,” she said.
“Can you think of any English professors who might fit my bill?”
“There’s a lot of flakes in that department. There’s a lot of flakes in most departments, if you really want to know. But English …” She whistled, raised her eyebrows, and looked at the ceiling.
“Okay, but who is the flakiest? Who would you bet on if you had to bet?”
“Hayden,” she said. “Lowell Hayden. He’s one of those little pale guys with long, limp blond hair that looks like he hasn’t started to shave yet, but he’s like thirty-nine. You know? Serious as a bastard. Taught a freshman English course two years ago called The Rhetoric of Revolution. You dig? Yeah, he’d be the one, old Dr. Hayden.”
“What’s he teach besides freshman English?”
“I don’t know for sure. I know he teaches Chaucer, ’cause I took Chaucer with him.” I felt a little click in the back of my head. Something nudged at me. A Chaucer class had been mentioned before. I tucked the inkling away. I knew I could dredge it up later when I had time. I always could.
“Mrs. Milford, thank you. If you come up with anything, my number’s on the card. I have an answering service. If I’m not there, leave a message.”
“Okay.”
I got up and looked around the basement room. “Freedom of the press is a flaming sword,” I said. “Use it wisely, hold it high, guard it well.”
Iris Milford looked at me strangely. I left.
The corridor in the basement of the library was almost empty. I looked at my watch. 5:05. Too late to find anyone in the English Department. I went home.
In my kitchen I sat at the counter and opened a can of beer. It was very quiet. I turned on the radio. Maybe I should buy a dog, I thought. He’d be glad to see me when I came home. The beer was good. I finished the can. And opened another. Where was I? I ran over the last couple of days in my mind. One: Terry Orchard didn’t kill Dennis Powell. That was a working hypothesis. Two: the missing manuscript and the murder were two parts of the same thing, and if I found out anything about one, I’d know something about the other. That was another working hypothesis. What did I have in support of these hypotheses? About half a can of beer. There was that click I had when I talked with Iris Milford. Chaucer. She’s had a Chaucer course with Lowell Hayden. I drank the rest of the beer and opened another can. It came back. Terry was up early for her Chaucer course the day Dennis had been telling some professor on the phone to cut his class. I looked at my face, reflected in the window over the sink. “You’ve still got all the moves, kid,” I said. But what did it give me? Nothing much, just a little coincidence. But it was something. It suggested some kind of connection. Coincidences are suspect. Old Lowell Hayden looked better to me all the time. I got another beer. After three or four beers everything began looking better to me.
I got a pound of fresh scallops out of the refrigerator and began to make something called Scallops Jacques for supper. It was a recipe in a French cookbook that I’d gotten for a birthday present from a woman I know. I like to cook and drink while I’m doing it. Scallops Jacques is a complicated affair with cream and wine and lemon juice and shallots, and by the time it was done I was feeling quite pleasant. I made some hot biscuits for myself, too, and ate the scallops and biscuits with a bottle of Pouilly Fuissé, sitting at the counter. Afterward I went to bed. I slept heavy and for a long time.
Chapter 8
I slept late and woke up feeling very good, though my mouth tasted funny. I went over to the Boston Y.M.C.A. and worked out in the weight room. I hit the light bag and the heavy bag, ran three miles around their indoor track, took a shower, and went down to my office. I was glistening with health and vigor till I got there. You never felt really glistening in my office. It was on Stuart Street, second floor front, half a block down from Tremont. One room with a desk, a file cabinet, and two chairs in case Mrs. Onassis came with her husband. The old iron radiator had no real control and the room, closed for three days, reeked with heat. I stepped over the three-day pile of mail on the floor under the mail slot and went to open the window. It took some effort. I took off my coat, picked up the mail, and sat at my desk to read it. I’d come down mainly to check my mail, and the trip had been hardly worth it. There was a phone bill, a light bill, an overdue notice from the Boston Public Library, a correspondence course offering to teach me karate at home in my spare time, a letter from a former client insisting that while I had found his wife she had left again and hence he would not pay my bill, an invitation to join a vacation club, an invitation to buy a set of socket wrenches, an invitation to join an automobile club, an invitation to subscribe to five magazines of my choice at once-in-a-lifetime savings, an invitation to shop the specials on pork at my local supermarket, and a number of less important letters. Nothing from Germaine Greer or Lenny Bernstein, no dinner invitatio
ns, no post cards from the Costa del Sol, no mash notes from Helen Gurley Brown. Last week had been much the same.
I stood up and looked out my window. It was a bright day, but cold, and the whores had emerged, working the Combat Zone, looking cold and bizarre in their miniskirts, boots, and blond wigs. Being seductive at twenty degrees was heavy going, I thought. Being horny at twenty degrees wasn’t all that easy either. Things were slow for the whores. It was lunchtime, and the businessmen were beginning to drift down from Boylston and Tremont and Back Bay offices to have lunch at Jake Wirth’s or upstairs in the Athens Olympia. The whores eyed them speculatively, occasionally approached one, and were brushed off. The businessmen didn’t like to look at them and hurried off in embarrassment when approached, visions of the day’s first Bloody Mary dancing in their heads.
I closed the window, threw most of the mail away, locked the office, and headed for my car. The drive to the university was easy from my office, and I was there in ten minutes. I parked in a slot that said RESERVED FOR UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT and found my way to Tower’s office. The secretary was wearing a pink jumpsuit this day. I revised my opinion about her thighs. They weren’t too heavy; they were exactly the right size for the jumpsuit. I said, “My name’s Spenser. To see Mr. Tower.” She said, “Yes, Mr. Spenser, he’ll be through in a minute,” and went back to her typing. Twice I caught her looking at me while she pretended to check the clock. You haven’t lost a thing, kid, I thought. Two campus cops, in uniform, looking unhappy, came out of Tower’s office. Tower came to the door with them.
“This is not Dodge City,” he said, “you are not goddamn towntamers—” and shut the outer office door behind them as they left. “Dumb bastards,” he said. “Come on in, Spenser.”
“I’ll see you again on the way out,” I said to the secretary. She didn’t smile.
“What have you got, Spenser?” Tower asked when we were in and sitting.
“A bad murder, some funny feelings, damn little information, some questions, and no manuscript. I think your secretary is hot for me.”
Tower’s face squeezed down. “Murder?”
“Yeah, the Powell killing. You know about it at well as I do.”
“Yeah, bad. I know, sorry you had to get dragged into it. But we’re after a manuscript. We’re not worried about the murder. That’s Lieutenant Quirk’s department. He’s good at it.”
“Wrong. It’s my department too. I think the manuscript and the murder are connected.”
“Why?”
“Terry Orchard told me.”
“What?” Tower wasn’t liking the way the talk was going.
“Terry remembers a conversation on the phone between Dennis Powell and a professor in which Dennis reassured the professor that he’d hidden ‘it’ well.”
“Oh, for crissake, Spenser. The kid’s a goddam junkie. She remembers anything she feels like remembering. You don’t buy that barrel of crap she fed you about mysterious strangers and being forced to shoot Dennis, and being drugged and being innocent. Of course she thinks the university’s involved. She thinks the university causes famine.”
“She didn’t say the university. She said a professor.”
“She’ll say anything. They all will. She knows you’re investigating the manuscript, and she wants you to get her out of what she’s gotten herself into. So she plays little-girl-lost with you, and you go panting after her like a Saint Bernard dog. Spenser to the rescue. Balls.”
“Tell me about Lowell Hayden,” I said.
Tower liked the conversation even less. “Why? Who the hell is employing who? I want to know your results, and you start asking me questions about professors.”
“Whom,” I said.
“What?”
“It’s whom, who is employing whom? Or is it? Maybe it’s a predicate nominative, in which case …”
“Will you come off it, Spenser. I got things to do.”
“Me, too,” I said. “One of them is to find out about Lowell Hayden. His name has come up a couple of times. He’s a known radical. I have it on some authority that he’s the most radical on campus. I have it on authority that Powell was pushing heavy drugs and had heavy drug connections. I know Hayden had an early Chaucer class on the morning that Powell was talking to a professor about cutting his early morning class.”
“That adds up to zero. Do you know how many professors in this university have eight o’clock classes every day? Who the hell is your authority? I know what’s going on on my campus and no one’s pushing heroin. I don’t say no one’s using it, but it’s isolated. There’s no big supplier. If there were, I’d know.”
“Sure you would,” I said. “Sure, what I’ve got about professors and Lowell Hayden adds up to zero, or little more. But he is all I’ve got for either the murder or the theft. Why not let me think about him? Why not have a look at him? If he’s clean, I won’t bother him. He probably is clean. But if he isn’t …”
“No. Do you have any idea what happens if it gets out that a P.I. in the employ of the university is investigating a member of the university faculty? No, you don’t. You couldn’t.” He closed his eyes in holy dread. “You stick to looking for the manuscript. Stay away from the faculty.”
“I don’t do piecework, Tower. I take hold of one end of the thread and I keep pulling it in till it’s all unraveled. You hired me to find out where the manuscript went. You didn’t hire me to run errands. The retainer does not include your telling me how to do my job.”
“You’ll stay the hell away from Hayden, or you’ll be off this campus to stay. I got you hired for this job. I can get you canned just as easy.”
“Do that,” I said, and walked out. When you have two retainers you get smug and feisty. In the quadrangle I asked a boy in a fringed buckskin jacket where the English Department was. He didn’t know. I tried a girl in an ankle-length o.d. military overcoat. She didn’t know either. On the third try I got it; first floor, Felton Hall, other end of the campus.
Felton Hall was a converted apartment building, warrened with faculty offices. The main office of the English Department was at the end of the first floor foyer. An outer office with a receptionist/typist and a file cabinet. An inner office with another desk and woman and typewriter, secretary in chief or administrative assistant, or some such, and beyond that, at right angles, the office of the chairman. The receptionist looked like a student. I asked to see the chairman, gave her my card, the one with my name and profession but without the crossed daggers, and sat down in the one straight-backed chair to wait. She gave the card to the woman in the inner office, who did not look like a student and didn’t even look one hell of a lot like a woman, and came back studiously uninterested in me.
Somewhere nearby I could hear the rhythm of a mimeograph cranking out somebody’s midterm or a reading list for someone’s course in Byzantine nature poetry of the third century. I got the same old feeling in my stomach. The one I got as a little kid sitting outside the principal’s office.
The office was done in early dorm. There was a travel poster with a picture of the Yugoslav coast stuck with Scotch tape to the wall above the receptionist’s desk, the announcement of a new magazine that would pay contributors in free copies of the magazine, the big campy poster of Buster Keaton in The General, and a number of Van Gogh and Gauguin prints apparently cut off a calendar and taped up. It didn’t hold a candle to my collection of Ann Sheridan pinups.
The mannish-looking inner-office secretary came to her door.
“Mr. Spenser,” she said, “Dr. Vogel will see you now.”
I walked through her big office, through two glass doors, and into the chairman’s office, which was still bigger. It had apparently once been the dining room of an apartment, which had been divided by a partition so that it seemed almost a round room because of the large bow window that looked out over a recently built slum. In the arch of the bow was a large dark desk. On one wall was a fireplace, the bricks painted a dark red, the hearth clean and cold. Th
ere were books all around the office and pen and ink drawings of historical-looking people I didn’t recognize. There was a rug on the floor and a chair with arms—Tower had neither.
Dr. Vogel sat behind the desk, slim, medium height, thick curly hair trimmed round, black and gray intermixed, clean-shaven, wearing a black pin-striped double-breasted suit with six buttons, all buttoned, pink shirt with a wide roll collar, a white tie with black and pink stripes, and a diamond ring on the left little finger. Whatever happened to shabby gentility?
“Sit down, Mr. Spenser,” he said. I sat. He was looking at my card, holding it neatly by the corners before his stomach with both hands, the way a man looks at a poker hand.
“I don’t believe I’ve ever met a private detective before,” he said without looking up. “What do you want?”
“I’m investigating the theft of the Godwulf Manuscript,” I said, “and I have only the slightest of suggestions that a member of your department might be involved.”
“My department? I doubt that.”
“Everyone always doubts things like that.”
“I’m not sure the generalization is valid, Mr. Spenser. There must be circles where theft surprises no one, and they must be circles with which you’re more familiar than I. Why don’t you move in those circles, and not these?”
“Because the circles you’re thinking of don’t steal illuminated manuscripts, nor do they ransom them for charity, nor do they murder undergraduates in the process.”
“Murder?” He liked that about half as well as Tower had.
Five Classic Spenser Mysteries Page 62