“I beg your pardon.”
“That’s how we writers would describe you. Voluptuous with a saucy hint of deviltry lurking in the sparkling of the eyes and the impertinent cast of the mouth.”
“Spenser, I want a hot dog and some beer and peanuts and a ball game. Could you please, please, please, pretty please, please with sugar on it knock off the writer bullshit and escort me through the gate?”
I shook my head. “Writers aren’t understood much,” I said, and we went in.
I was showing off for Brenda and took her up to the broadcast booth to watch the game. My presence didn’t seem to be a spur to the Red Sox. They lost to Kansas City 5-2, with Freddie Patek driving in three runs on a bases-loaded fly ball that Alex Montoya played into a triple. Maynard ignored us, Wilson studied Brenda closely between innings, and Lester boned up on the National Enquirer through the whole afternoon. Thoughtful.
It was four ten when we got out onto Jersey Street again. Brenda said, “Who was the cute thing in the cowboy suit?”
“Never mind about him,” I said. “I suppose you’re not going to settle for the two hot dogs I bought you.”
“For dinner? I’ll wait right here for the cowboy.”
“Where would you like to go? It’s early, but we could stop for a drink.”
We decided on a drink at the outdoor café by City Hall. I had draft beer, and Brenda a stinger on the rocks, under the colorful umbrellas across from the open brick piazza. The area was new, reclaimed from the miasma of Scollay Square where Winnie Garrett the Flaming Redhead used to take it all off on the first show Monday before the city censor decreed the G-string. Pinball parlors, and tattoo shops, the Old Howard and the Casino, winos, whores, sailors, barrooms, and novelty shops: an adolescent vision of Sodom and Gomorrah, all gone now, giving way to fountains and arcades and a sweep of open plaza.
“You know, it never really was Sodom and Gomorrah anyway,” I said.
“What wasn’t?”
“Scollay Square. It was pre-Vietnam sin. Burlesque dancers and barrooms where bleached blondes danced in G-strings and net stockings. Places that sold plastic dog turds and whoopee cushions.”
“I never came here,” she said. “My mother had me convinced that to step into Scollay Square was to be molested instantly.”
“Naw. There were ten college kids here for every dirty old man. Compared to the Combat Zone, Scollay Square was the Goosie Gander Nursery School.”
I ordered two more drinks. The tables were glass-topped and the café was carpeted in Astroturf. The waitress was attentive. Brenda Loring’s nails were done in a bright red. Dark was still a long way off.
Brenda went to the ladies’ room, and I called my answering service. There was a message to call Healy. He’d be in his office till six. I looked at my watch: 5:40. I called.
“This is Spenser, what have you got?”
“Prints belong to Donna Burlington” He spelled it. “Busted in Redford, Illinois, three-eighteen-sixty-six, for possession of a prohibited substance. That’s when the prints got logged into the bureau files. No other arrests recorded.”
“Thanks, Lieutenant.”
“You owe me,” Healy said and hung up. Mr. Warmth.
I was back at the table before Brenda.
At seven fifteen we strolled up Tremont Street to a French restaurant in the old City Hall and had rack of lamb for two and a chilled bottle of Traminer and strawberry tarts for dessert. It was nearly nine thirty when we finished and walked back up School Street to Tremont. It was dark now but still warm, a soft night, midsummer, and the Common seemed very gentle as we strolled across it. Brenda Loring held my hand as we walked. No one attempted to mug us all the way to Marlborough Street.
In my apartment I said to Brenda, “Want some brandy or would you like to get right to the necking?”
“Actually, cookie, I would like first to take a shower.”
“A shower?”
“Uh-huh. You pour us two big snifters of brandy and hop into bed, and I’ll come along in a few minutes.”
“A shower?”
“Go on,” she said. “I won’t take long.”
I went to the kitchen and got a bottle of Rémy Martin out of the kitchen cabinet. Did David Niven keep cognac in the kitchen? Not likely. I got two brandy snifters out and filled them half full and headed back toward the bedroom. I could hear the shower running. I put the two glasses down on the bureau and got undressed. The shower was still running. I went to the bathroom door. My bare feet made no noise at all on the wall-to-wall carpeting. I turned the handle and it opened. The room was steamy. Brenda’s clothes were in a small pile on the floor under the sink. I noticed her lingerie matched her dress. Class. The steam was billowing up over the drawn shower curtain. I looked in. Brenda had her eyes closed, her head arched back, the water running down over her shiny brown body. Her buttocks were in white contrast to the rest of her. She was humming an old Billy Eckstine song. I got in behind her and put my arms around her.
“Jesus Christ, Spenser,” she said. “What are you doing?”
“Cleanliness is next to godliness,” I said. “Want me to wash your back?”
She handed me the soap and I lathered her back. When I was finished, she turned to rinse it off, and her breasts, as she faced me, were the same startling white that her buttocks had been.
“Want me to wash your front?” I said.
She laughed and put her arms around me. Her body was slick and wet. I kissed her. There is excitement in a new kiss, but there is a quality of memory and intimacy in kissing someone you’ve kissed often before. I liked the quality. Maybe continuity is better than change. With the shower still running we went towelless to bed.
10
Ten hours later I was in the coach section, window seat, aft of the wing, in an American Airlines 747, sipping coffee and chewing with little pleasure a preheated bun that tasted vaguely of adhesive tape. We were passing over Buffalo, which was a good idea, and heading for Chicago.
Beside me was a kid, maybe fifteen, and his brother, maybe eleven. They were discussing somebody named Ben, who might have been a dog, laughing like hell about it. Their mother and father across the aisle took turns giving them occasional warning glances when the laughter got raucous. Their mother looked like she might be a fashion designer or a lady lawyer; the old man looked like a stevedore, uncomfortable in a shirt and tie. Beauty and the beast.
We got into Chicago at eleven. I rented a car, got a road map from the girl at the rental agency counter, and drove southwest from Chicago toward Redford, Illinois. It took six and a half hours, and the great heartland of America was hot as hell. My green rental Dodge had air conditioning and I kept it at full blast all the way. About two thirty I stopped at a diner and had two cheeseburgers and a black coffee. There was a blackberry pie which the counterman claimed his wife made, and I ate two pieces. He had married well. About four thirty the highway bent south and I saw the river. I’d seen it before, but each time I felt the same tug. The Mississippi, Cartier and La Salle, Grant at Vicksburg and “it’s lovely to live on a raft.” A mile wide and “just keeps rolling.” I pulled up onto the shoulder of the highway and looked at it for maybe five minutes. It was brown and placid.
I got to Redford at twenty of seven and checked into a two-story Holiday Inn just north of town that offered a view of the river and a swimming pool. The dining room was open and more than half empty. I ordered a draft beer and looked at the menu. The beer came in an enormous schooner. I ordered Wiener schnitzel and fresh garden vegetables and was startled to find when it came that it was excellent. I had finished two of the enormous schooners by then and perhaps my palate was insensitive to nuance. My compliments to the chef. Three stars for the Holiday Inn in Red-ford, Illinois. I signed the check and went to bed.
The next morning I went into town. Outside the air-conditioned motel the air was hot with a strong river smell. Cicadas hummed. The Holiday Inn and the Mississippi River were obviously Redford’s
high spots. It was a very small town, barely more than a cluster of shabby frame houses along the river. The yards were mostly bare dirt with an occasional clump of coarse and ratty-looking grass. The town’s single main street contained a hardware and feed store, a Woolworth’s five-and-ten, Scooter’s Lunch, Bill and Betty’s Market with two Phillips 66 pumps out front, and, fronting on a small square of dandelion-spattered grass, the yellow clapboard two-story town hall. There were two Greek Revival columns holding up the overhanging second floor and a bell tower that extended up perhaps two more stories to a thin spire with a weathervane at the tip. In the small square were a nineteenth-century cannon and a pyramid of cannonballs. Two kids were sitting astride the cannon as I pulled up in front of the town hall. In the parking area to the right of the town hall was a black and white Chevy with a whip antenna and POLICE lettered on the side. I went around to that side and down along the building. In the back was a screen door with a small blue light over it. I went in.
There was a head-high standing floor fan at the long end of a narrow room, and it blew a steady stream of hot air at me. To my right was a low mahogany dividing rail, and behind it a gray steel desk and matching swivel chair, a radio receiver-transmitter and a table mike on a maple table with claw and ball feet, a white round-edged refrigerator with gold trim, and some wanted posters fixed to the door with magnets. And a gray steel file cabinet.
A gray-haired man with rimless glasses and a screaming eagle emblem tattooed on his right forearm was sitting at the desk with his arms folded across his chest and his feet up. He had on a khaki uniform, obviously starched, and his black engineer boots gleamed with polish. A buff-colored campaign hat lay on the desk beside an open can of Dr Pepper. On a wheel-around stand next to the radio equipment a portable black-and-white television was showing Hollywood Squares. A nameplate on the desk said T. P. DONALDSON. A big silver star on his shirt said SHERIFF. A brown cardboard bakery box on the desk contained what looked like some lemon-filled doughnuts.
“My name’s Spenser,” I said, and showed the photostat of my license in its clear plastic coating. Germ-free. “I’m trying to backtrack a woman named Donna Burlington. According to the FBI records she was arrested here in nineteen sixty-six.”
“Sheriff Donaldson,” the gray-haired man said, and stood up to shake hands. He was tall and in shape with healthy color to his tan face, and oversize hands with prominent knuckles. His shirt was ironed in a military press and had been tailored down so that it was skintight.
“Hundred and First?” I said.
“The tattoo? Yeah. I was a kid then, you know. Fulla piss and vinegar, drunk in London, and three of us got it done. My wife’s always telling me to get rid of it but …” He shrugged. “You airborne?”
“Nope, infantry and a different war. But I remember the Hundred and First. Were you at Bastogne?”
“Yep. Had a bad case of boils on my back. The medics said I ought to eat better food and wash more often.” His face was solemn. “Krauts took care of it, though. I got a back full of shrapnel and the boils were gone.”
“Medical science,” I said.
He shook his head. “Christ, that was thirty years ago.”
“It’s one of the things you don’t forget,” I said.
“You don’t for sure,” he said. “Who was that you were after?”
“Burlington, Donna Burlington. A.k.a. Linda Hawkins, about twenty-six years old, five feet four, black hair, FBI records show she was fingerprinted here in nineteen sixty-six, at which time she would have been about eighteen. You here then?”
He nodded. “Yep, I been here since nineteen forty-six.” He turned toward the file cabinet. A pair of handcuffs draped over his belt in the small of his back, and he wore an army .45 in a government-issue flap holster on his right hip. He rustled through the third file drawer down and came up with a manila folder. He opened it, his back still to me, and read through the contents, closed it, turned around, put the folder facedown on the desk, and sat down. “You want a Dr Pepper?” he said.
“No, thanks. You have Donna Burlington?”
“Could I see your license again, and maybe some other ID?”
I gave him the license and my driver’s license. He looked at them carefully and turned them back to me. “Why do you want to know about Donna Burlington?”
“I don’t want to tell you. I’m looking into something that might hurt a lot of people, who could turn out to be innocent, if the word got out.”
“What’s Donna Burlington got to do with it?”
“She lied to me about her name, where she lived, how she got married. I want to know why.”
“You think she’s committed a crime?”
“Not that I know of. I don’t want her for anything. I just ran across a lie and I want to run it down. You know how it goes, people lie to you, you want to know why.”
Donaldson nodded. He took a swig from his Dr Pepper, swallowed it, and began to suck on his upper lip.
“I don’t want to stir up old troubles,” I said. “She was eighteen when you busted her. Everyone is entitled to screw up when they’re eighteen. I just want to know about her.”
Donaldson kept sucking on his upper lip and looking at me.
“It’ll be worse if I start asking around and get people wondering why some dick from the East is asking about Donna Burlington. I’ll find out anyway. This isn’t that big a place.”
“I might not let you ask around,” Donaldson said.
“Aw come on, Hondo,” I said. “If you give me trouble, I’ll go get the state cops and a court order and come on back and ask around and more people will notice and a bigger puff of smoke will go up and you’ll be worse off than you are now. I’m making what you call your legitimate inquiry.”
“Persistent sonovabitch, aren’t you? Okay, I’ll go along. I just don’t like telling people’s business to others without a pretty good reason.”
“Me either,” I said.
“Okay.” He opened the folder and looked at it. “I arrested Donna Burlington for possession of three marijuana cigarettes. She was smoking with two boys from Buckston in a pickup truck back of Scooter’s Lunch. It was a first offense, but we were a little jumpier about reefers around here in ’sixty-six than we are now. I booked her; she went to court and got a suspended sentence and a year’s probation. Six weeks later she broke probation and went off to New York City with a local hellion. She never came back.”
“What was the hellion’s name?”
“Tony Reece. He was about seven or eight years older than Donna.”
“What kind of kid was she?”
“It was a while ago,” Donaldson said. “But kind of restless, not really happy, you know—nothing bad, but she had a reputation, hung out with the older hotshots. The first girl in class to smoke, the first to drink, the first one to try pot, the one the boys took out as soon as they dared while the other girls were still going to dancing school at the grange hall and blushing if someone talked dirty.”
“Family still live in town?”
“Yeah, but they don’t know where she is. After she took off, they were after me to locate her. But there’s only me and two deputies, and one of them’s part-time. When nothing came of that, they wrote her off. In a way they were probably glad she took off. They didn’t know what to do with her. She was a late baby, you know? The Burlingtons never had any kids, and then, when Mrs. Burlington was going through the change, there came Donna. That’s what my wife says anyway. Embarrassed hell out of both of them.”
“How about Reece? He ever show up again?”
Donaldson shook his head. “Nope. I heard he got in some kind of jam in New York and he might be doing time. But he hasn’t shown up around here anyway.”
“Okay, any last known address?”
“Just the house here.”
“Can you give me that? I’d like to talk to the parents.”
“I’ll drive you over. They’ll be a little easier if I’m there. They’re
old and they get nervous.”
“I’m not going to give them the third degree, Donaldson, I’m just going to talk to them and ask them if they know anything more than you do about Donna Burlington.”
“I’ll go along. They’re sorta shiftless and crummy, but they’re my people, you know? I like to look out for them.”
I nodded. “Okay, let’s go.”
We got into Donaldson’s black and white and drove back up the main street past the row of storefronts and the sparse yards. At the end of the street we turned left, down toward the river, and pulled up in front of a big shanty. Originally it had probably been a four-room bungalow backing onto the river. Over the years lean-tos and sagging additions had been scabbed onto it so that it was difficult to say how many rooms there were now. The area in front of the house was mud, and several dirty white chickens pecked in it. A brown and white pig had rooted itself out a hollow against the foundation and was sleeping in it. To the right of the front door, two big gas bottles of dull gray-green metal stood upright, and to the left the remnants of a vine were so bedraggled I couldn’t recognize what kind it was. The land to the side and rear of the house sloped in a kind of eroded gully down to the river. There was a stack of old tires at the corner of one of the lean-tos, and beyond that the rusted frame of a forty-year-old pickup truck, a stack of empty vegetable crates, and on the flat mud margin where the river lapped at the land a bedspring, mossy and slick with river scum.
I thought of Linda Rabb in her Church Park apartment with the fresh jeans and her black hair gleaming.
“Come to where the flavor is,” I said.
“Yeah, it’s not much, is it? Don’t much wonder that Donna took off as soon as she could.” We got up and walked to the front door. There were the brown remains of a wreath hanging from a galvanized nail. The ghost of Christmas past. Maybe of a Christmas future for the Burlingtons.
Five Classic Spenser Mysteries Page 78