Five Classic Spenser Mysteries

by Robert B. Parker

I said, “What are you reading?”

  She said, “Erikson’s biography of Gandhi.”

  I said, “I’ve always liked Leif’s work.”

  She looked at the bourbon bottle, four ounces gone, and opened the door. I went in.

  “You don’t look good,” she said.

  “You guidance types don’t miss a trick, do you?”

  “Would it help if I kissed you?”

  “Yeah, but not yet. I been throwing up. I need a shower. Then maybe we could sit down and talk and I’ll drink the Wild Turkey.”

  “You know where,” she said. I put the bourbon down on the coffee table in the living room and headed down the little hall to the bathroom. In the linen closet beside the bathroom was a shaving kit of mine with a toothbrush and other necessaries. I got it out and went into the bathroom. I brushed and showered and rinsed my mouth tinder the shower and soaped and scrubbed and shampooed and lathered and rinsed and washed for about a half an hour. Out, out, damned spot.

  When I got through, I toweled off and put on some tennis shorts I’d left there and went looking for Susan. The stereo was off, and she was on the back porch with my Wild Turkey, a bucket of ice, a glass, a sliced lemon, and a bottle of bitters.

  I sat in a blue wicker armchair and took a long pull from the neck of the bottle.

  “Were you bitten by a snake?” Susan said.

  I shook my head. Beyond the screen porch the land sloped down in rough terraces to a stream. On the terraces were shade plants. Coleus, patient Lucy, ajuga, and a lot of vincas. Beyond the stream were trees that thickened into woods.

  “Would you like something to eat?”

  I shook my head again. “No,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “Drinking bourbon instead of beer, and declining a snack. It’s bad, isn’t it?”

  I nodded. “I think so,” I said.

  “Would you like to talk about it?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but I don’t quite know what to say.”

  I put some ice in the glass, added bitters and a squeeze of lemon, and filled the glass with bourbon. “You better drink a little,” I said. “I’ll be easier to take if you’re a little drunk too.”

  She nodded her head. “Yes, I was thinking that,” she said. “I’ll get another glass.” She did, and I made her a drink. In front of the house some kids were playing street hockey and their voices drifted back faintly. Birds still sang here and there in the woods, but it was beginning to get dark and the songs were fewer.

  “How long ago did you get divorced?” I asked.

  “Five years.”

  “Was it bad?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it bad now?”

  “No. I don’t think about it too much now. I don’t feel bad about myself anymore. And I don’t miss him at all anymore. You have some part in all of that.”

  “Mr. Fixit,” I said. My drink was gone and I made another.

  “How does someone who ingests as much as you do get those muscle ridges in his stomach?” Susan said.

  “God chose to make me beautiful instead of good,” I said.

  “How many sit-ups do you do a week?”

  “Around a zillion,” I said. I stretched my legs out in front of me and slid lower in the chair. It had gotten dark outside and some fireflies showed in the evening. The kids out front had gone in, and all I could hear was the sound of the stream and very faintly the sound of traffic on 128.

  “There is a knife blade in the grass,” I said. “And a tiger lies just outside the fire.”

  “My God, Spenser, that’s bathetic. Either tell me about what hurts or don’t. But for crissake, don’t sit here and quote bad verse at me.”

  “Oh damn,” I said. “I was just going to swing into Hamlet.”

  “You do and I’ll call the cops.”

  “Okay,” I said. “You’re right. But bathetic? That’s hard, Suze.”

  She made herself another drink. We drank. There was no light on the porch, just that which spilled out from the kitchen.

  “I killed two guys earlier this evening,” I said.

  “Have you ever done that before?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But I set these guys up.”

  “You mean you murdered them?”

  “No, not exactly. Or … I don’t know. Maybe.”

  She was quiet. Her face a pale blur in the semidarkness. She was sitting on the edge of a chaise opposite me. Her knees crossed, her chin on her fist, her elbow on her knee. I drank more bourbon.

  “Spenser,” she said, “I have known you for only a year or so. But I have known you very intensely. You are a good man. You are perhaps the best man I’ve ever known. If you killed two men, you did it because it had to be done. I know you. I believe that.”

  I put my drink on the floor and got up from the chair and stood over her. She raised her face toward me and I put one hand on each side of it and bent over and looked at her close. She had a very strong face, dark and intelligent, full of kinetic suggestion, with faint laugh lines at the corners of her mouth. She was still wearing her glasses, and her big dark eyes looked bigger through the lenses.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said.

  She put her hands over mine and we stayed that way for a long time.

  Finally she said, “Sit.”

  I sat and she leaned back on the chaise and pulled me down beside her and put my head against her breast. “Would you like to make love?” she said.

  I was breathing in big low inhales. “No,” I said. “Not now, let’s just lie here and be still.”

  Her right arm was around me and she reached up and patted my cheek with her left hand. The stream murmured and after a while I fell asleep.

  27

  It was a hot, windy Tuesday when I finished breakfast with Susan and drove back into Boston. I stopped on the way to look at the papers. The Herald American had it, page one, below the fold: GANGLAND FIGURE GUNNED DOWN. Doerr and Wally Hogg had been found after midnight by two kids who’d slipped in there to neck. State and MDC police had no comment as yet.

  Under the expressway, street grit was blowing about in the postcommuter lull as I pulled up and parked in front of Harbor Towers. I went through the routine with the houseman again and went up in the elevator. Bucky Maynard let me in. He was informal in a Boston Red Sox T-shirt stretched over his belly.

  “What do you want, Spenser?” Informal didn’t mean friendly. Lester leaned against the wall by the patio doors with his arms folded across his bare chest. He was wearing dark blue sweat pants and light blue track shoes with dark blue stripes. He blew a huge pink bubble and glared at me around it.

  “It’s hard to look tough blowing bubbles, Lester,” I said. “You ever think about a pacifier?”

  “Ah asked what you want, Spenser.” Maynard still had his hand on the door.

  I handed him the paper. “Below the fold,” I said, “right side.”

  He looked at it, read the lead paragraph, and handed it to Lester.

  “So?”

  “So, maybe your troubles are over.”

  “Maybe they are,” Maynard said.

  “So are Marty Rabb’s troubles over too?”

  “Troubles?”

  “Yeah, maybe you’ll stop sucking on him now that Frank Doerr’s not going to suck on you anymore.”

  “Spenser, y’all aren’t making any sense. Ah’m not doing anything to Marty Rabb. Ah don’t know, for a fact, what you are talking of.”

  “You’re going to recoup your losses,” I said. “You mean, stupid sonovabitch.”

  “No reason to stand there shaking your head, Spenser. Ah’m the one should be offended.”

  “Doerr bled Rabb through you, and you never got any blood. Now he’s dead, you want yours.”

  “Ah think you ought to leave now, Spenser. You’re becoming abusive.”

  Lester popped his bubble gum and tittered. There were newspapers on the coffee table, the Globe and the Herald American. They’d known before I got here, and Mayna
rd had already figured out that he had the money machine now.

  “Don’t you want to know why I think you’re stupid?” I said.

  “No, ah don’t.”

  “Because you were off the hook, clean. And you won’t take the break.”

  “Move out,” Lester said. “And just keep in mind, Spenser, if anybody was blackmailing Rabb, they could get him for throwing games just as much as for marrying a whore.”

  “Never mind, Lester,” Maynard said sharply. “We don’t know anything about it and Spenser is on his way out.”

  “I’d be glad to make him go faster, Buck.”

  “He’s on his way, Lester. Aren’t you, Spenser?”

  “Yeah, I am, but as they say in all the movies, Bucky, I’ll be back.”

  “Ah wouldn’t if ah were you. Ah can’t restrain Lester too much more.”

  “Well, do what you can,” I said. “I don’t want to kill him.” Maynard opened the door. He’d never taken his hand off the knob.

  “Hey, Spenser,” Lester said, “I got something you haven’t seen before.” He put his hands behind his back and brought them back out front. In his right hand was a nickel-plated automatic pistol. It looked like a Beretta. “How’s that look to you, Mr. Pro?”

  I said, “Lester, if you point that thing at me again, I’ll take it away from you and shoot you with it.” Then I stomped out. The door closed behind me and I headed for the street.

  Outside, the wind was hotter and stronger. I drove home in such a funk that I didn’t even check the skirts on the girls, something I did normally as a matter of course, even on still days. Across the street from my apartment was a city car, and in it were Belson and the cop named Billy.

  I walked over to the car. “You guys want something or are you hiding from the watch commander?”

  “Lieutenant wants you,” Billy said.

  “Maybe I don’t want him.”

  Belson was slumped down in the passenger seat with his hand over his eyes. He said, “Aw knock off the bullshit, Spenser. Get in the car. Quirk wants you and we both know you’re going to come.”

  He was right, of course. The way I felt if someone said up I’d say down. I got in the back seat. In the two minutes it took us to drive to police headquarters no one said anything.

  Quirk’s office had moved since last time. He was third-floor front now, facing out onto Berkeley Street. With a view of the secretaries from the insurance companies when they broke for lunch. On his door it said COMMANDER, HOMICIDE.

  Belson knocked and opened the door. “Here he is, Marty.”

  Quirk sat at a desk that had nothing on it but a phone and a clear plastic cube containing pictures of his family. He was immaculate and impervious, as he had been every other time I ever saw him. I wondered if his bedroom slippers had a spit shine. Probably didn’t own bedroom slippers. Probably didn’t sleep. He said, “Thanks, Frank. I’ll see him alone.”

  Belson nodded and closed the door behind me. There was a straight chair in front of the desk. I sat in it. Quirk looked at me without saying anything. I looked back. There was a traffic cop outside at the Stuart Street intersection and I could hear his whistle as he moved cars around the construction.

  Quirk said, “I think you burned those two studs up in Saugus.”

  I said, “Uh-huh.”

  “I think you set them up and burned them.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I went up and took a look early this morning. One of the MDC people asked me to. Informal. Doerr never fired his piece. Wally Hogg did, the magazine’s nearly empty, there’s a lot of brass up above the death scene in the woods, and there’s ricochet marks on one side of the big rock. There’s also six spent twelve-gauge shells on the ground on the other side of the rock. The shrubs are torn up around where the M-sixteen brass was. Like somebody fired off about five rounds of shotgun into the area.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You knew that Doerr was gunning for you. You let him know you’d be there and you figured they’d try to back-shoot you and you figured you could beat them. And you were right.”

  “That’s really swell, Quirk, you got some swell imagination.”

  “It’s more than imagination, Spenser. You’re around buying me a drink, asking about Frank Doerr. Next day I get a tip that Doerr is going to blow you up, and this morning I was looking at Doerr and his gunsel dead up the woods. You got an alibi for yesterday afternoon and evening?”

  “Do I need one?”

  Quirk picked up the clear plastic cube on his desk and looked at the pictures of his family. In the outer office a phone rang. A typewriter clacked uncertainly. Quirk put the cube down again on the desk and looked at me.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t think you do.”

  “You mean you didn’t share your theories with the Saugus cops?”

  “It’s not my territory.”

  “Then why the hell am I sitting here nodding my head while you talk?”

  “Because this is my territory.” The hesitant typist in the outer office was still hunting and pecking. “Look, Spenser, I am not in sorrow’s clutch because Frank Doerr and his animal went down. And I’m not even all that unhappy that you put them down. There’s a lot of guys couldn’t do it, and a lot of guys wouldn’t try. I don’t know why you did it, but I guess probably it wasn’t for dough and maybe it wasn’t even for protection. If I had to guess, I’d guess it might have been to take the squeeze off of someone else. The squeezee, you might say.”

  “You might,” I said. “I wouldn’t.”

  “Yeah. Anyway. I’m saying to you you didn’t burn them in my city. And I’m kind of glad they’re burnt. But …” Quirk paused and looked at me. His stare was as heavy and solid as his fist. “Don’t do it ever in my city.”

  I said nothing.

  “And,” he said, “don’t start thinking you’re some kind of goddamned vigilante. If you get away with this, don’t get tempted to do it again. Here or anywhere. You understand what I’m saying to you?”

  “Yeah. I do.”

  “We’ve known each other awhile, Spenser, and maybe we got a certain amount of respect. But we’re not friends. And I’m not a guy you know. I’m a cop.

  “Nothing else?”

  “Yeah,” Quirk said, “something else. I’m a husband and a father and a cop. But the last one’s the only thing that makes any difference to you.”

  “No, not quite. The husband and father makes a difference too. Nobody should be just a job.”

  “Okay, we agree. But believe what I tell you. I won’t bite this bullet again.”

  “Got it,” I said.

  “Good.”

  I stood up, started for the door and stopped, and turned around and said, “Marty?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Shake,” I said.

  He put his hand out across his desk, and we did.

  28

  No one drove me home. It’s a short walk from Berkeley Street to my place, and I liked the walk. It gave me time to think, and I needed time. A lot had happened in a short while, and not all of it was going my way. I hadn’t thought it would, but there’s always hope.

  It was afternoon when I got home. I made two lettuce and tomato sandwiches on homemade wheat bread, poured a glass of milk, sat at the counter, and ate and drank the milk and thought about where I was at and where the Rabbs were at and where Bucky Maynard was at. I knew where Doerr and his gunner were at. I had a piece of rhubarb pie for dessert. Put the dishes in the dishwasher, wiped the counter off with a sponge, washed my hands and face, and headed for Church Park.

  It was in walking distance and I walked. The wind was still strong, but there was less grit in the air along Marlborough Street, and what little there was rattled harmlessly on my sunglasses. Linda Rabb let me in.

  “I heard on the radio that what’s’isname Doerr and another man were killed,” she said. She wore a loose sleeveless dress, striped black and white like mattress ticking, and white sandals. Her hair was in t
wo braids, each tied with a small white ribbon, and her face was without makeup.

  “Yeah, me too,” I said. “Your husband home?”

  “No, he’s gone to the park.”

  “Your boy?”

  “He’s in nursery school.”

  “We need to talk,” I said.

  She nodded. “Would you like coffee or anything?”

  “Yeah, coffee would be good.”

  “Instant okay?”

  “Sure, black.”

  I sat in the living room while she made coffee. From the kitchen came the faintly hysterical sounds of daytime television. The set clicked off and Linda Rabb returned, carrying a round black tray with two cups of coffee on it. I took one.

  “I’ve talked with Bucky Maynard,” I said, and sipped the coffee. “He won’t let go.”

  “Even though Doerr is dead?” Linda Rabb was sitting on an ottoman, her coffee on the floor beside her.

  I nodded. “Now he wants his piece.”

  We were quiet. Linda Rabb sipped at her coffee, holding the cup in both hands, letting the steam warm her face. I drank some more of mine. It was too hot still, but I drank it anyway. The sound of my swallow seemed loud to me.

  “We both know, don’t we?” Linda Rabb said.

  “I think so,” I said.

  “If I make a public statement about the way I used to be, we’ll be free of Maynard, won’t we?”

  “I think so,” I said. “He can still allege that Marty threw some games, but that implicates him too and he goes down the tube with you. I don’t think he will. He gets nothing out of it. No money, nothing. And his career is shot as bad as Marty’s.”

  She kept her face buried in the coffee cup.

  “I can’t think of another way,” I said.

  She lifted her face and looked at me and said, “Could you kill him?”

  I said, “No.”

  She nodded, without expression. “What would be the best way to confess?”

  “I will find you a reporter and you tell the story any way you wish, but leave out the blackmail. That way there’s no press conferences, photographers, whatever. After he publishes the story, you refer all inquiry to me. You got any money in the house?”

  “Of course.”