I got out of the car arthritically. When I straightened up she was outside the building, on the top step. Squinting against the light, she was wearing a dapple gray suede coat with white fur trim at collar, cuffs, hem, and down the front where it buttoned. Her hands were thrust deep in her pockets and a shoulder purse hung against her left side. She was wearing black boots with three-inch heels, and looking up at her from street level, she looked a lot taller than I knew she was. Her hair was loose and dark against the high white fur collar.
Neither of us moved for a minute. We stood in silence in the bright afternoon and looked at each other. Then she came down the steps.
I said, “Hi.”
She said, “Hi.”
I went around and opened the door to my car on her side. She got in, tucking the skirt of her long coat modestly under as she slid in. I went around and got in my side.
She said, “Do you have a cigarette?”
I said, “No. But I can stop and pick some up. There’s a Liggett’s on the corner.”
She said, “If you would. I’d like to buy some make-up too.”
I pulled over and parked in the alley between the parking garage and the drugstore at the corner of Berkeley and Boylston streets. As we got out she said, “I don’t have any money, can you lend me some?”
I nodded. We went into the drugstore. It was a big one—a soda fountain down one side, bottles of almost everything on the other three walls, three wide aisles with shelves selling heating pads and baby strollers, paperback books and candy and Christmas lights. Terry bought a package of Eve cigarettes, opened it, took one out, lit it, and inhaled half of it. She let the smoke out slowly through her nose. I paid. Then we went to the make-up counter. She bought eye liner, eye shadow, make-up base, rouge, lipstick, and face powder. I paid.
I said, “Would you like an ice cream cone?”
She nodded and I bought us two ice cream cones. Vanilla for me, butter pecan for her. Two scoops. We went back out to my car and got in.
“Could we drive around for a little while?” she asked.
“Sure.”
I drove on down Berkeley Street and onto Storrow Drive. At Leverett Circle I went over the dam to the Cambridge side and drove back up along the river on Memorial Drive. When we got to Magazine Beach we parked. She used the rearview mirror to put on some of the make-up. I looked across the gray river at the railroad yards. Behind them, half-hidden by the elevated extension of the Mass Turnpike, was Boston University Field, with high-rise dorms built up around the stadium. When I was a kid it had been Braves Field until the Braves moved to Milwaukee and B.U. bought the field. I remembered going there with my father, the excitement building as we went past the ticket taker and up from the dark under stands into the bright green presence of the diamond. The Dodgers and the Giants used to come here then. Dixie Walker, Clint Hartung, Sibbi Sisti, and Tommy Holmes. I wondered if they were still alive.
Terry Orchard finished her make-up and stowed it all away in her shoulder purse.
“Spenser?”
“Yeah?”
“What can I say? Thank you seems pretty silly.”
“Don’t say anything, kid. You know and I know. Let it be.”
She leaned forward and held my face in her hands and kissed me hard on the mouth and held it for a long time. The fresh make-up was sweet smelling. When she finished, her lipstick was badly smeared.
“Gotcha,” I said. “Let’s go home.”
We drove on out Soldier’s Field Road toward Newton. She slid over in the seat beside me and put her head against my shoulder while I drove, and smoked another cigarette. There was a maroon car in the driveway of her house when we got there.
“My father,” she said. “The police must have reached him.” As I pulled up to the curb the front door opened and Terry’s mother and father appeared on the porch.
“Shit,” she said.
“I’ll let you out here and keep going, love,” I said. “This is family business.”
“Spenser, when am I going to see you again?”
“I don’t know. We don’t live in the same neighborhood, love. But I’m around. Maybe I’ll come by sometime and take you to lunch.”
“Or buy me an ice cream,” she said.
“Yeah, that too.”
She stared at me and her eyes filled up.
She said, “Thank you,” and got out of the car and walked up toward her house. I drove back to town, got my side stitched at Boston City by the same doctor, and went home.
It was dark when I got there, and I sat down in my living room and drank bourbon from the bottle without turning on the lights. They’d given me two pills at the hospital and combined with the bourbon they seemed to kill the pain pretty well.
I looked at the luminous dial of my wristwatch. 6:45.
I felt as if I’d wrung out, and was drip-drying. I also felt that spending the night alone would have me screaming incoherently by 3 A.M.
I looked at my watch again. 6:55.
I turned the light on and took off the watch. Inside, it still said Brenda Loring, 555-3676.
I dialed the number. She answered.
I said, “Hello, my name is Spenser; do you remember me?”
She laughed, a terrific laugh, a high-class laugh. “With the shoulders, and the nice eyes, yeah, I remember.” And she laughed again. A good laugh, full of promise. A hell of a laugh when you thought about it.
This, like everything else, is for Joan, David, and Daniel.
Published by
Dell Publishing
a division of
Random House, Inc.
“Two Tramps in Mud Time” from THE POETRY OF ROBERT FROST edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright 1936 by Robert Frost. Copyright © 1964 by Lesley Frost Ballantine. Copyright © 1969 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc.
Copyright © 1975 by Robert B. Parker
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, New York, New York.
The trademark Dell® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
eISBN: 978-0-307-56981-3
v3.1
Contents
Master - Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Dedication
Other Books by This Author
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.
ROBERT FROST
1
It was summertime, and the living was easy for the Red Sox because Marty Rabb was throwing the ball past the New York Yankees in a style to which he’d become accustomed. I was there. In the skyview seats, drinking Miller High Life from a big paper cup, eating peanuts and having a very nice time. I wasn’t supposed to be having a nice time. I was supposed to be working. But
now and then you can do both.
For serious looking at baseball there are few places better than Fenway Park. The stands are close to the playing field, the fences are a hopeful green, and the young men in their white uniforms are working on real grass, the authentic natural article; under the actual sky in the temperature as it really is. No Tartan Turf. No Astrodome. No air conditioning. Not too many pennants over the years, but no Texans either. Life is adjustment. And I loved the beer.
The best pitcher I ever saw was Sandy Koufax, and the next best was Marty Rabb. Rabb was left-handed like Koufax, but bigger, and he had a hard slider that waited for you to commit yourself before it broke. While I shelled the last peanut in the bag he laid the slider vigorously on Thurman Munson and the Yankees were out in the eighth. While the sides changed I went for another bag of peanuts and another beer.
The skyviews were originally built in 1946, when the Red Sox had won their next-to-last pennant and had to have additional press facilities for the World Series. They were built on the roof of the grandstand between first and third. Since the World Series was not an annual ritual in Boston the press facilities were converted to box seats. You reached them over boardwalks laid on the tar and gravel roof of the grandstand, and there was a booth up there for peanuts, beer, hot dogs, and programs and another for toilet facilities. All connected with boardwalks. Leisurely, no crowds. I got back to my seat just as the Sox were coming to bat and settled back with my feet up on the railing. Late June, sun, warmth, baseball, beer, and peanuts. Ah, wilderness. The only flaw was that the gun on my right hip kept digging into my back. I adjusted.
Looking at a ball game is like looking through a stereopticon. Everything seems heightened. The grass is greener. The uniform whites are brighter than they should be. Maybe it’s the containment. The narrowing of focus. On the other hand, maybe it’s the tendency to drink six or eight beers in the early innings. Whatever—Alex Montoya, the Red Sox center fielder, hit a home run in the last of the eighth. Rabb fell upon the Yankee hitters in the ninth like a cleaver upon a lamb chop, and the game was over.
It was a Wednesday, and the crowd was moderate. No pushing and trampling. I strolled on down past them under the stands to the lower level. Down there it was dark and littered. A hundred programs rolled and dropped on the floor. The guys in the concession booths were already rolling down the steel curtains that closed them off like a bunch of rolltop desks. There were a lot of fathers and kids going out. And a lot of old guys with short cigars and plowed Irish faces that seemed in no hurry to leave. Peanut shells crunched underfoot.
Out on Jersey Street I turned right. Next door to the park is an office building with an advance sale ticket office behind plate glass and a small door that says BOSTON AMERICAN LEAGUE BASEBALL CLUB. I went in. There was a flight of stairs, dark wood, the walls a pale green latex. At the top another door. Inside a foyer in the same green latex with a dark green carpet and a receptionist with stiff blue hair. I said to the receptionist, “My name is Spenser. To see Harold Erskine.” I tried to look like a short-relief prospect just in from Pawtucket. I don’t think I fooled her.
She said, “Do you have an appointment?”
I said, “Yes.”
She spoke into the intercom, listened to the answer, and said, “Go in.”
Harold Erskine’s office was small and plain. There were two green file cabinets side by side in a corner, a yellow deal desk opposite the door, a small conference table, two straight chairs, and a window that looked out on Brookline Ave. Erskine was as unpretentious as his office. He was a small plump man, bald on top. The gray that remained was cut close to his head. His face was round and red-cheeked, his hands pudgy. I’d read somewhere that he’d been a minor-league shortstop and hit .327 one year at Pueblo. That had been a while ago; now he looked like a defrocked Santa.
“Come in, Mr. Spenser, enjoy the game?”
“Yeah, thanks for the pass.” I sat in one of the straight chairs.
“My pleasure, Marty’s something else, isn’t he?”
I nodded. Erskine leaned back in his chair and cleaned the corners of his mouth with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, drawing them together along his lower lip. “My attorney says I can trust you.”
I nodded again. I didn’t know his attorney.
Erskine rubbed his lip again. “Can I?”
“Depends on what you want to trust me to do.”
“Can you guarantee that what we say will be confidential, no matter what you decide?”
“Yes.” Erskine kept working on his lower lip. It looked clean enough to me.
“What did my lawyer tell you when he called?”
“He said you’d like to see me after today’s game and there’d be a pass waiting for me at the press entrance on Jersey Street if I wanted to watch the game first.”
“What do you charge?”
“A hundred a day and expenses. But I’m running a special this week; at no extra charge I teach you how to wave a blackjack.”
Erskine said, “I heard you were a wit.” I wasn’t sure he believed it.
“Your lawyer tell you that too?” I asked.
“Yes. He discussed you with a state police detective named Healy. I think Healy’s sister married my lawyer’s wife’s brother.”
“Well, hell, Erskine. You know all you really can know about me. The only way you can find out if you can trust me is to try it. I’m a licensed private detective. I’ve never been to jail. And I have an open, honest face. I’m willing to sit here and let you look at me for a while, I owe you for the free ball game, but eventually you’ll have to tell me what you want or ask me to leave.”
Erskine stared at me some more. His cheeks seemed a little redder, and he was beginning to develop callus tissue on his lower lip. He brought his left hand down flat on the top of the desk. “Okay,” he said. “You’re right. I got no choice.”
“It’s nice to be wanted,” I said.
“I want you to see if Marty Rabb’s got gambling connections.”
“Rabb,” I said. Snappy comebacks are one of my specialties.
“That’s right, Rabb. There’s a rumor, no, not even that, a whisper, a faint, pale hint, that Rabb might be shading a game now and then.”
“Marty Rabb?” I said. When I’ve got a good line, I like to stick with it.
“I know. It’s hard to believe. I don’t believe it, in fact. But it’s possible and it’s got to be checked. You know what even the rumor of a fix means to baseball.”
I nodded. “If you did have Rabb in your teacup, you could make a buck, couldn’t you?”
Just hearing me say it made Erskine swallow hard. He leaned forward over the desk. “That’s right,” he said. “You can get good odds against the Sox anytime Marty pitches. If you could get that extra percentage by having Rabb on your end of the bet, you could make a lot of money.”
“He doesn’t lose much,” I said. “What was he last year, twenty-five and six?”
“Yeah, but when he does lose, you could make a bundle. And even if he doesn’t lose, what if you’ve got money bet on the biggest inning? Marty could ease up a little at the right time. We don’t score much. We’re all pitching and defense and speed. Marty wouldn’t have to give up many runs to lose, or many runs to make a big inning. If you bet right he wouldn’t have to do it very often.”
“Okay, I agree, it would be a wise investment for someone to get Rabb’s cooperation. But what makes you think someone has?”
“I don’t quite know. You hear things that don’t mean anything by themselves. You see stuff that doesn’t mean anything by itself. You know, Marty grooving one to Reggie Jackson at the wrong time. Could happen to anyone. Cy Young probably did it too. But after a while you get that funny feeling. And I’ve got it. I’m probably wrong. I got nothing hard. But I have to know. It’s not just the club, it’s Marty. He’s a terrific kid. If other people started to get the funny feeling it would destroy him. He’d be gone and no one would even have to
prove it. He wouldn’t be able to pitch for the Yokohama Giants.”
“Hiring a private cop to investigate him isn’t the best way to keep it quiet,” I said.
“I know, you’ve got to work undercover. Even if you proved him innocent the damage would be done.”
“There’s another question there too. What if he’s guilty?”
“If he’s guilty I’ll hound him out of baseball. The minute people don’t trust the integrity of the final score, the whole system goes right down the tube. But I’ve got to know first, and I’m betting there’s nothing to it. I’ve got to have absolute proof. And it’s got to be confidential.”
“I’ve got to talk to people. I’ve got to be around the club. I can’t find out the truth without asking questions and watching.”
“I know. We’ll have to come up with a story to cover that. I don’t suppose you play ball?”
“I was the second leading hitter on the Vine Street Hawks in nineteen forty-six.”
“Yeah, you ever stood up at the plate and had someone throw you a major-league curve ball?”
I shook my head.
“I have. Nineteen fifty-two I went to spring training with the Dodgers and Clem Labine threw about ten of them at me the first inter-squad game. It helped get me into the front office. Besides you’re too old.”
“I didn’t think it showed,” I said.
“Well, I mean, for a ballplayer, starting out.”
“How about a writer?” I said.
“The guys know all the writers.”
“Not a sports reporter, a writer. A guy doing a book on baseball—you know, The Boys of Summer, The Summer Game, that stuff.”
Erskine thought about it. “Not bad,” he said. “Not bad. You don’t look much like a writer, but hell, what’s a writer look like? Right? Why not? I’ll take you down, tell them you’re doing a book and you’re going to be hanging around the club and asking questions. It’s perfect. You know anything about writing?”
Five Classic Spenser Mysteries Page 73