Five Classic Spenser Mysteries

by Robert B. Parker

  Phil said, “Gimme your gun.”

  I hesitated. I didn’t like his manner, I didn’t like his assumption that I’d do what I was told because he’d told me to, and I didn’t like his assumption that if he had to he could make me. On the other hand, I’d come this far because I was curious. Something bothered Broz enough to have him send his top hand to bring me in. And Sonny looked a lot like one of the two hoods that Terry had described. Also, Phil didn’t seem much to care whether I liked his assumptions or not.

  I noticed that there was a gun in Phil’s hand, and it was pointing at an area somewhere between my eyes. I’d never seen him move. I took my gun out of my hip holster and handed it to him, butt first. People were taking it away from me a lot lately. I didn’t like that too much either. Phil stowed my gun away in an overcoat pocket, put away his own gun in the other, and stepped to one of the inner doors of the reception room. It was solid, no glass panel. I heard a buzz, and the door clicked open. I looked around and spotted the closed-circuit camera up high in one corner of the reception room. Phil pushed the door open and nodded me through it.

  The room was bone white. The first thing I saw was my own reflection in the wide black picture window that stretched the width of the opposite wall. My reflection didn’t look too aggressive. In front of the window was a broad black desk, neat, with a bank of phones on it. The room was carpeted with something thick and expensive, in a dark blue. There were several black leather chairs about. Along the side wall was an ebony bar with blue leather padding. Leaning against it was Joe Broz.

  There was something theatrical about Broz, as if there was always a press photographer downstage left, kneeling to shoot a picture with his big Speed Graphic camera. He was a middle-size man who stood very straight with his chin up, as if squeezing every inch of height out of what God had given him. He had many teeth—a few too many for his mouth—and they were very prominent and white. His hair was slick black, combed straight back from a high forehead and gray at the temples. The sideburns were long and neatly trimmed. His nose was flat and thick with a slight ski-jump quality to the end that hinted at a break somewhere in the past. He wore a white suit, a white vest, a dark blue shirt, and a white tie. There was a gold chain across the vest, and presumably a gold watch tucked in the vest pocket. I would have bet against a Phi Beta key, but little is sure in life. He had one foot hooked on the brass rail of the bar, and a large diamond ring flashed from his little finger as he turned a thick highball glass in his hands.

  “Do you always dress in blue and white?” I asked. “Or do you have the office redone to match your clothes every day?”

  Broz sipped a little of his drink, put it down on the bar, and swung fully around toward me, both elbows resting on the bar.

  “I have been told,” he said in a deep voice that had the phony quality you hear in an announcer’s voice when he’s not on the air, “that you are a wise-ass punk. Apparently my information was correct. So let’s get some ground rules. You are here because I sent for you. You will leave when I tell you to. You are of no consequence. You have no class. If you annoy me, I will have someone sprinkle roach powder on you. Do you understand that?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I think so, but you better give me a drink. I feel faint.”

  Phil, who had drifted to a couch in the far corner and sprawled awkwardly on it, let out a soft sound that sounded almost like a sigh.

  Broz moved to his desk, sat, and nodded at one of the leather chairs. “Sit down. I got things to say. Phil, make him a drink.”

  “Bourbon,” I said, “with water, and some bitters.”

  Phil made the drink. He moved stiffly, and his hands seemed like distorted work gloves. But they performed the task with a bare economy of motion that was incongruous. I’d have to be sure not to make any mistakes about Phil.

  I leaned back in the black chair and took a sip of the bourbon. It was a little more expensive than the private label stuff I bought. There was too much bitters, but I decided not to call Phil on it. We’d probably have other issues. There was a knock on the door. Phil glanced at the monitor set in the wall by the door, opened the door, and let Sonny in. He had his trench coat folded over his arm, and his tie was neatly up. His neck spilled over slightly around his collar. He walked quietly over to a chair near the couch and sat down, holding the trench coat in his lap. Broz paid no attention to him. He stared at me with his yellowish eyes.

  “You’re working on a case.” It wasn’t really a question. I wasn’t sure Broz ever asked questions.

  I nodded.

  “I want to hear about it,” Broz said.

  I shook my head.

  Broz got a big curved-stem meerschaum pipe out of a rack on his desk and carefully began to pack it from a thick silver humidor.

  “Spenser, this can be easy or hard. I’d just as soon it was easy, but the choice is yours.”

  “Look,” I said, “one reason people employ me is because they want their business private. If I spill what I know every time anybody asks me, I am not likely to flourish.”

  “Your chances of flourishing are not very big right now, Spenser.” Broz had the pipe packed to his satisfaction and spoke through a blue cloud of aromatic smoke. “I know you are looking for the Godwulf Manuscript. I know that you are working for Roland Orchard. What I want to know is what you’ve got. There’s no breach of confidence in that.”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Let’s say I’m an interested party.”

  “Let’s say more than that. Why be one way? You tell me what your interest is; I’ll think about telling you what I know.”

  “Spenser, I’m hanging on to my patience. But it’s slipping. I don’t have to make swaps with you. I get what I ask for.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  From his place Sonny said, “Let me have him, Mr. Broz.”

  “What are you going to do, Sonny,” I said, “sweat all over me till I beg for mercy?”

  Phil made his little sighing sounds again. Sonny put his trench coat carefully on the arm of the couch and started toward me. I saw Phil look at Broz and saw Broz nod.

  “You been crying for this, you sonova bitch,” Sonny said.

  I stood up. Sonny was probably thirty pounds heavier than I was, and a lot of it was muscle. But some of it was fat, and quickness didn’t look to be Sonny’s strong suit. He swung a big right hand at me. I rolled away from it and hit him in the middle of the face twice with left hooks, getting my shoulder nicely behind both of them, feeling the shock all the way up into my back. Sonny was tough. It rocked him, but he didn’t go down. He grabbed at my shirtfront with his left hand and clubbed at me with his right. The punch glanced off my shoulder and caught me under the left eye. I broke his grip by bringing my clenched fists up under his forearm, and then drove my right forearm against the side of his jaw. He stumbled back two steps and sat down. But he got up. He was wary now. His hands up, he began to circle me. I turned as he did. He put his head down and lunged at me. I moved aside and tripped him and he sprawled against Broz’s desk, knocking over the pipe rack. Broz never blinked. Sonny pushed himself up from the desk like a man doing his last pushup. He turned and came at me again. His nose was bleeding freely and his shirtfront was bloody. I feinted with my left hand at his stomach and then brought it up over his hands and jabbed him three times on that bloody nose, then crossed over with a right hand that caught him in the neck below the ear. He went down face first. This time he stayed. He got as far as his hands and knees and stayed, his head hanging, swaying slightly, with the blood dripping on the azure rug.

  Broz spoke to Phil. “Get him out of here, he’s messing on the rug.” Phil got up, walked over, pulled Sonny to his feet by the back of his collar, and walked him, weaving and swaying, out through a side door.

  Broz said, “Sonny seems to have exaggerated his ability.”

  “Maybe he just underestimated mine,” I said.

  “Either way,” Broz said.

 
; Phil came back in, wiping his hands on a handkerchief. “Ask him again, Joe,” he rasped, “now that Sonny’s got him softened.” His face twisted in what was, I think, a momentary smile.

  Broz looked disgusted. “I want you out of this business, Spenser.”

  “Which business?”

  “The Godwulf Manuscript. I don’t want you muddying up the water.”

  “What’s in it for me if I pull out?”

  “Health.”

  “You gonna unleash Sonny on me again?”

  “I can put ten Sonnys on your back whenever I want to. Or Phil. Phil’s not Sonny.”

  “I never thought he was,” I said. “But I hired on to find the manuscript.”

  “Maybe the manuscript will turn up.” Broz leaned back in the big leather executive swivel with the high back, and blew a lungful of pipe smoke at the ceiling. His eyes were squeezed down as he squinted through the smoke.

  “If it does, I won’t have to look for it anymore.”

  “Don’t look for it anymore.” Dramatically, Broz came forward in the swivel chair, his hands flat on the desk. “Stay out of it, or you’ll end up looking at the trunk of your car from the inside. You’ve been warned. Now get the hell out of here.” He swiveled the chair around to face the window, putting the high leather back between me and him. What a trouper, I thought.

  Phil stood up. I followed him out through the door we’d entered. Broz never moved or said a word. In the anteroom a thin-faced Italian man with a goatee was cleaning his fingernails with the blade of a large pocket knife, his feet up on the desk, a Borsalino hat tipped forward over the bridge of his nose. He paid us no mind as we went through.

  Chapter 11

  I took a cab back from Broz’s office to mine. When I got there, I sat in my chair in the dark and looked out the window. The snow was steady now and starting to screw up the traffic. Plows were out, and their noise added to the normal traffic sounds that drifted up through the closed window. “Sleigh bells ring,” I thought, “are ya listening.” The falling snow fuzzed out all the lights in the Combat Zone, giving them halos of neon red and streetlight yellow. I was tired. My eye hurt. The knuckles of my left hand were sore and puffy from hitting Sonny in the face. I hadn’t eaten for a long time and I was hungry, but I didn’t seem to want to eat. I pulled a bottle of bourbon out of the desk drawer and opened it and drank some. It felt hot in my stomach.

  Where was I? Somewhere along the line I had touched a nerve, and somebody had called Broz. Who? Could be anybody. Broz got around. But it was probably someone today. Broz would have no reason to wait once he knew I was trampling around on his lawn. I couldn’t see Broz being tied into the Godwulf Manuscript. It wasn’t worth any money. It was impossible to fence. But he’d implied he’d put it back if I dropped out. He knew a lot of people; maybe he could push the right button without being necessarily involved. Maybe he’d been lying. But something had stirred him up. Not only did he want me out of things, but he wanted to know what I knew. Maybe it was simply collateral interest. Maybe it was Powell’s murder. Maybe he didn’t want me digging into that. I liked that better. Terry’s description of the two men included one like Sonny. The other one wasn’t Phil. But Phil wouldn’t do that kind of trench duty anyway. I was amazed he had done errand duty for me. But why would Broz care one way or the other about a loudmouth kid like Dennis Powell, care enough to send two employees to kill him and frame his girl? Yet somebody’s employees did it. It wasn’t an amateur job, by Terry’s account. Came in, held them up, had her gun, the rubber gloves, the drug they’d brought, the whole thing. It didn’t sound like it had been ad-libbed. Did they have inside help? How did they get hold of her gun? And what possible interest would Broz have in the university? He had a lot of interests—numbers, women, dope—but higher education didn’t seem to be one of them. Of his line, dope would seem the best connection. It seemed the only place where college and Broz overlapped. Dennis Powell was reputed to be a channel for hard stuff: heroin, specifically. That meant, if it were true, that he had mob connections, direct or indirect. Now he was dead, in what looked like some kind of mob killing. And Joe Broz wanted me to keep my nose out of his business.

  But what did that have to do with the manuscript? I didn’t know. The best connection I had was the dope and the question of the gun. How did they know she’d have a gun there? She’d lived with another girl before she’d lived with Powell. I took another belt of the bourbon. Uncut by bitters or ice and cheap anyway, it grated down into my stomach. Catherine Connelly, Tower had told me. Let’s try her. More bourbon. It wasn’t really so bad, didn’t taste bad at all, made you feel pretty nice in your stomach.

  Made you feel tough, too, and on top of it—whatever it was. The phone rang.

  I picked it up and said, “Spenser industries, security division. We never sleep.”

  There was a pause, and then a woman spoke.

  “Mr. Spenser?”

  “Yeah.”

  “This is Marion Orchard, Terry’s mother.”

  “Howya doing, sweets,” I said, and took another pull on the bourbon.

  “Mr. Spenser, she’s gone.”

  “Me, too, sweets.”

  “No, really, she’s gone, and I’m terribly worried.”

  I put the bottle down and said, “Oh, Christ!”

  “Our lawyer called and said the police wished to speak with her again, and I went to her room and she wasn’t there and she hasn’t been home all day. There’s two hundred thousand dollars bail money, and … I want her back. Can you find her, Mr. Spenser?”

  “You got any ideas where I should look?”

  “I … Mr. Spenser, we have hired you. You sound positively hostile, and I resent it.”

  “Yeah, you probably do,” I said. “I been up a long time and have eaten little, and had a fight with a tough guinea and drank too much bourbon and was thinking about going and getting a sub sandwich and going to bed. I’ll come out in a little while and we’ll talk about it.”

  “Please, I’m very worried.”

  “Yeah, I’ll be along.” I hung up, put the cork in the bottle, put the bottle in the drawer. My head was light and my eyes focused badly and my mouth felt thick. I got my coat on, locked the office, and went down to my car. I parked in a taxi zone and got a submarine sandwich and a large black coffee to go. I ate the sandwich and drank the coffee as I headed out to Newton again. Eating a sub sandwich with one hand is sloppy work, and I got some tomato juice and oil on my shirtfront and some coffee stains on my pant leg. I stopped at a Dunkin’ Donuts shop in West Newton Square, bought another black coffee, and sat in my car and drank it.

  I felt terrible. The bourbon was wearing off, and I felt dull and sleepy and round-shouldered. I looked at my watch. It was a quarter to ten. The snow continued as I sat and forced the coffee down. I had read somewhere that black coffee won’t sober you up, but I never believed it. After bourbon it tasted so awful it had to be doing some good.

  The plows hadn’t gotten to the Orchards’ street; my wheels spun and my car skidded getting up their hill. I had my jacket unbuttoned, but the defrosters were going full blast. And, wrestling the car through the snow, I could feel the sweat in the hollow of my back, and my shirt collar was wet and limp. Sometimes I wondered if I was getting too old for this work. And sometimes I thought I had gotten too old last year. I jammed the car through a snowdrift into the Orchards’ driveway and climbed out. There was no pathway, so I waded through the snow across the lawn and up to the front door. The same black maid answered the door. She remembered me, took my hat and coat, and led me to the same library we’d talked in before. A fire was still burning, but no one was in the room. I got a look at myself in the dark window: unshaven, sub sandwich stains on my shirt, collar open. There was a puffy mouse under one eye, courtesy of old Sonny. I looked like the leg man for a slumlord.

  Marion Orchard came in. She was wearing an ankle-length blue housecoat that zipped up the front, a matching headband, and bare feet. I
noticed her toenails were painted silver. She seemed as well groomed and together as before, but her face was flushed and I realized she had been drinking. Me, too. Who hadn’t? The ride and the coffee had sobered me up and depressed me. My head ached, and my stomach felt like I’d been swallowing sand. Without a word Marion Orchard went to the sideboard, put ice in a glass from a silver bucket, added Scotch, and squirted soda in from a silver-laced dispenser. She drank half of it and turned toward me.

  “You want some?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Scotch or bourbon?”

  “Bourbon, with bitters, if you’ve got it.”

  She turned and mixed me bourbon and soda with bitters in a big square-angled glass. I drank some and felt it begin to combat the coffee and the fatigue. I’d need more, though. From the looks of Marion Orchard, she would, too, and planned on getting it.

  “Where’s Mr. Orchard?” I asked.

  “At the office. Sitting behind his big masculine desk, trying to feel like a man.”

  “Does he know Terry’s gone?”

  “Yes. That’s why he went to the office. It makes him feel better about himself. All he can cope with is stocks and bonds. People, and daughters and wives, scare hell out of him.” She finished the drink, took mine, which was still half-full, and made two fresh ones.

  “Something scares hell out of everybody,” I said. “Have you any thoughts on where I should look for Terry?”

  “What scares hell out of you?” she asked.

  The bourbon was making a lot of headway against the coffee. I felt a lot better than I had when I came in. The line of Marion Orchard’s thigh was tight against the blue robe as she sat with her legs tucked up under her on the couch.

  “The things people do to one another,” I answered. “That scares hell out of me.”

  She drank some more. “Wrong,” she said. “That engages your sympathy. It doesn’t scare you. I’m an expert on what scares men. I’ve lived with a scared man for twenty-two years. I left college in my sophomore year to marry him, and I never finished. I was an English major. I wrote poetry. I don’t anymore.” I waited. She didn’t really seem to be talking to me anymore.