Spare Change

by Robert B. Parker

  “We’ll have to save Richie for next time,” she said.

  “And the time after that and the time after that,” I said.

  She stood. I stood. She walked to the door with me.

  “And maybe the Spare Change Killer, too,” I said.

  “We have lots of time,” Dr. Silverman said.

  19

  There is not really a way to force someone to give you an alibi, if the someone enjoys being a suspect. If we could establish an alibi for Bob Johnson for one or more of the Spare Change killings, then Bob’s fun was over. If there was no alibi, then he’d remain a suspect. But we couldn’t arrest him for not having an alibi, and the game would continue.

  The police didn’t have any evidence to get a search warrant. But I was not the police. I was a private investigator. I could do whatever the hell I wanted…sort of. Which was why, on a lovely late-summer Tuesday, I was about to break into Bob Johnson’s condo with a professional burglar named Ghost Garrity.

  Bob gave every evidence of going to an appointment. He had left five minutes ago, wearing a seersucker suit, carrying a briefcase, with a police tail behind him. Ghost and I stopped at the concierge desk. I gave the woman a card I had printed up the night before on my computer. The card said ZENITH SECURITY CONSULTANTS, with a downtown Boston address that didn’t exist.

  “Sonja Burke,” I said. “My assistant, Mr. Garrity. The insurance company has asked us to look at security here. Nothing fancy. We just need to walk your corridors, look at exit flow.”

  The woman at the desk was a redhead wearing a nice green suit that set off her hair. She studied my card. Then she put it in the drawer of her desk.

  “Sure, Ms. Burke,” she said. “Help yourself.”

  “We’ll start at the top and work down,” I said. “We won’t bother anyone.”

  The redhead gestured toward the elevators to her right, and Ghost and I got in.

  “The apartment on the top floor?” he said.

  “Next to the top, but if she’s looking, I want her to see the elevator go to the top.”

  “Sure,” Ghost said.

  Ghost was carrying a big old briefcase. He had on a Palm Beach suit that was big for him, and wore one of the worst hairpieces I had seen in a while. It was a full shade of brunette darker than the graying hair that showed below it.

  We got off on the top floor and walked the length of the open corridor, which surrounded a central atrium, and down the back stairs to the floor below.

  “How long to get us in there?” I said to Ghost.

  He looked at the lock with scorn. He laughed as he opened his briefcase.

  “I could open this thing with a Popsicle stick,” he said. “But I don’t need to.”

  He took a big ring of keys out of his briefcase and began to sort through them. I scanned the corridor so we wouldn’t get caught.

  “Open,” Ghost said. “You need me anymore?”

  “No,” I said. “What are you going to tell the concierge?”

  “I’m going out the cellar door,” Ghost said.

  “You cased the place?” I said.

  Ghost grinned at me.

  “I’ve robbed it before,” he said.

  I put my hand up, Ghost gave it a gentle high five, and he headed for the stairs. I didn’t really like him leaving. I was a little uneasy about Johnson. But Ghost was a burglar, not a fighter. I had no right to ask him for protection. I went into Johnson’s apartment.

  It was a long apartment, but narrow, that looked out onto Commonwealth Ave. The blue walls were covered with art prints. The furniture was heavy masculine, with leather armchairs and thick-legged coffee tables. There was a kitchen, a den, a bedroom, and a bath. Everything was neat. The bed was made. All the surfaces were dust-free. The bath and kitchen were quite clean. To search the apartment thoroughly would take hours. I opted for the den. There was a couch and a desk. The desk was in front of the window. It was a dark wood, maybe stained cherry, with ornately carved legs and a green leather inlaid writing surface. There was a stand-up cordless phone on it, a planning calendar open to the current month, and an address book. I quickly looked up the dates of the current Spare Change killings in the planning calendar. There was nothing on any of those dates. The rest of the calendar was full of dates and notations, not all of them readable, but there was nothing on any of the killing dates.

  The address book was a break. If he’d been a Rolodex man, it would have taken me forever. As it was, it took me only about five minutes to photograph the pages in the whole book with my macro closeup digital camera. I was an up-to-the-minute girl. The apartment reeked of silence. I could hear every appliance sound, the sound of the elevator, the sound of doors opening or closing, footsteps in the corridor. When I was done with my photography, I put the camera back in my purse. While my hand was in there, I rested it briefly on my gun. It was comforting.

  I walked through the apartment, opened some closets, opened some drawers, found no guns, no clip file on the Spare Change Killer, no collection of incriminating letters, nothing to indicate that he wasn’t clean, straight, orderly, and normal. Though maybe a little neat. In the bedroom, on the ornate bureau, was the picture of a young woman. It looked like a graduation picture. No inscription. No way to know who she was. I took a picture of the picture. Then I put the camera back and left the apartment. I heard the lock click behind me. I walked to the stairs. The concierge was supposed to think I’d been going floor to floor. I came out in the lobby, waved at the redhead, and went out. I was tense as I went out the front door. If Bob Johnson came back at that moment, I was busted. He didn’t. I went out onto Commonwealth, turned right onto Dartmouth, and walked up toward Copley Place to get my car.

  20

  My father and I sat at the kitchen counter in my loft, looking at my computer. On the screen before us were the pictures of Bob Johnson’s address book.

  “So you just take the little whosis out of the camera,” he said, “and stick it in the computer and it shows your pictures.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Can you print it out?” he said.

  “Sure,” I said.

  I clicked on print.

  “How do you know about all this stuff,” my father said.

  “I am a woman of the new millennium,” I said.

  The pages began to emerge from the printer.

  “Of course,” my father said.

  He picked up the first page and began to look at the names.

  “Any evidence we accumulate from using this list of names is inadmissible in court,” my father said.

  “If they know that the list of names led you to the evidence,” I said.

  My father nodded.

  “Let’s see what we find out, and then we’ll let the DA worry about how we found it out,” he said.

  “We don’t want to lose him,” I said.

  “If we can establish that it’s him, not intuit but establish,” my father said, “we won’t lose him.”

  My father looked at the names on each sheet as the printouts emerged from the printer. At the end he shook his head.

  “Nobody that I recognize,” he said.

  I brought up the photograph of the woman whose picture had been on Bob Johnson’s bureau.

  “How about her?” I said.

  My father looked at the picture for a full minute. Then shook his head.

  “Nope,” he said. “I don’t know her.”

  “That’s a picture of her picture,” I said. “The original is on the bureau in Johnson’s bedroom.”

  “Any clues who it is?”

  “No. I’d say she was twenty-one, twenty-two. The hairstyle is a little dated. It looks like a graduation picture to me,” I said.

  “There’s no record of him bein
g married,” my father said.

  “Lots of people have other kinds of connections,” I said, “for which there would be no record.”

  “Ah, yes,” my father said, “the new millennium.”

  “Anyone explored his years at Taft?” I said.

  “Sure, and high school,” my father said. “When his name first surfaced. Cohasset cops did the high school for us. Good academic record. No record of trouble. Not particularly active in whaddya call it, extra stuff.”

  “Extracurricular?” I said.

  “Of course,” my father said. “Didn’t play sports, either, high school or college. He wasn’t in a fraternity in college.”

  “Taft doesn’t have fraternities anymore,” I said.

  “That would account for him not being in one,” my father said. “The initial check was records mostly, nobody particularly remembered him.”

  “It’s more than twenty years,” I said.

  “You have any sense of him from his apartment?”

  “Mostly it was the absence of any sense of him,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “Yes. The place was clean and orderly. There was food in the refrigerator, and shaving soap in the bathroom, that sort of thing. But no real sense of the man. Except for this photo, everything was art prints; trite, expensive furniture; matching drapes and bedspread.”

  “Like no one lived there?”

  “No,” I said. “Someone lives there, but it’s like someone with very little personal self lives there. You know, no personality.”

  My father looked around the loft. Rosie was asleep on my bed. My easel stood under the skylight.

  “Some people don’t think much about where they live, some people do,” he said. “We’ll run down this list.”

  “It’ll take a while,” I said.

  “Maybe we’ll get lucky,” my father said.

  We were quiet, looking at the woman’s picture on my computer screen.

  “What bothers me most of all,” my father said, “is that not one of the murder dates on his calendar is filled in.”

  “Nothing,” I said. “All blank.”

  “But he had a lot of calendar notations,” my father said.

  “Yes.”

  “Big coincidence,” my father said.

  “Big.”

  Again we were quiet.

  “How’d you get into Johnson’s condo?” my father said after a while.

  “A friend of Richie’s,” I said. “He had a key.”

  “How did he get a key?”

  “Off a very large key ring,” I said. “Which he carried in his briefcase.”

  “He have a name?”

  “Gentleman named Ghost,” I said.

  My father stared at me for a moment.

  “Ghost Garrity?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Worse, and worse,” my father said.

  21

  The cops spread out over the metropolitan area with the list of names I’d stolen. Boston cops, State cops, FBI, cops in Cambridge and Brookline, cops in Milton and Cohasset, cops in any locale where there was an address in Bob Johnson’s book. There were junior ADAs trying to match the names with any names they had collected in the background check of the victims. Did any of the victims know any of the people in Johnson’s address book? Did any of the people who knew the victims know anyone in Johnson’s address book? There were FBI researchers working computers to cross-check against the first round of Spare Change victims from twenty years ago. Serial-killer files were being read. Modi operandi were being compared. Ballistics technicians were trying to find a match between the Spare Change bullets and anything they had in the files. FBI profilers were studying data. Despite the massive effort, there wasn’t much new data. So the profilers went over the old data again. Forensic shrinks were talking to everyone involved. They talked to me about my intuition.

  “Do you know how many people confess falsely to high-profile crimes?” one of the shrinks said to me.

  He was a thin, eager man with shaggy hair and a beard. His name was Tillman.

  “I have some idea,” I said.

  “Mr. Johnson, if you are correct, is, in his way, perhaps confessing to you,” Tillman said.

  “Halfway,” I said.

  “That in itself would not, of course, mean that he is guilty,” Tillman said. “Any more than the other, more outright confessions in this case.”

  “How many?”

  Dr. Tillman shook his head.

  “Several,” he said.

  “You’re sure they are all fakes?” I said.

  “One of them even brought the murder weapon.”

  “Really?”

  “It was a cigarette lighter,” Tillman said. “A replica Colt .45, like the cowboys used.”

  “Be a great red herring,” I said. “Come in and confess in so foolish a way that you’re dismissed as a whack job.”

  “Ms. Randall,” Tillman said seriously, “you may trust me. This man was a whack job. So were several others.”

  “So is the Spare Change Killer,” I said.

  “And,” Tillman said, as if I hadn’t spoken, “your intuition, as you call it, may simply be wrong. The very existence of such a thing as intuition is somewhat uncertain.”

  “Call it an informed guess,” I said, “if it makes you more comfortable.”

  “Informed by what?” Tillman said.

  “By the subject’s behavior and my experience.”

  “Both, of course, interpreted only by you,” Tillman said. “It is a closed circle, don’t you see. It has very little value in a forensic sense.”

  I wasn’t supposed to be poaching in his field of speculation, and he was letting me know it.

  “Neither do you,” I said, and got up and left.

  22

  We were sitting on a bench near the crime scene in the Public Garden.

  “Understand you were a little brusque with one Dr. Tillman,” my father said.

  “Pompous jerk,” I said.

  “Knows his stuff, though,” my father said.

  “So do I,” I said.

  “Good point,” my father said, and handed me a file folder.

  “Nothing much to report,” he said. “Here’s the bare facts we have on Johnson and the last victim.”

  All had returned to normal in the Public Garden. The swan boats cruised slowly. The ducks followed them. People gave peanuts to the ducks. Pastoral.

  I began to read the file. While I read, my father shelled and ate a bag of peanuts, paying no attention to the battalion of pigeons that swooped to our location when the first shell cracked.

  The victim in the swan boat pond was a twenty-nine-year-old woman named Geraldine Robiski. She was a jewelry department manager at Filene’s on Washington Street, and presumably was killed the night before she was found, while she was cutting through the Public Garden on her way home to an apartment on Newbury Street.

  My father offered me a peanut. I shook my head.

  The victim was single and lived alone. She’d worked at Filene’s since she was in college and gone on, after graduation, to make a career in retailing, which, according to the people at the store, was going to be a successful one. She was attractive, dated often, but had no steady boyfriend that anyone knew about. Her purse had been found undisturbed on the swan boat dock. She had three credit cards, a driver’s license, thirty-two dollars, some lip gloss, a couple of tissues, a comb, and some keys. The keys were for work, her apartment, and a 2001 Honda Civic parked in its space in the alley behind her building. According to the medical examiner, she was in good health, not a virgin, not pregnant, no sign that she’d ever been pregnant, no sign of sexually transmitted disease, nor any signs of phy
sical abuse. She did not need glasses. Her teeth were good and showed signs of regular care. There was no alcohol in her. When she died she hadn’t eaten supper yet. Her dress came from Filene’s, as did her undergarments. Her shoes were from a store on Newbury Street near where she lived. She had died of the gunshot, not from drowning. So she was dead, or nearly so, when she went into the water. Her parents had come on the train from Hamtramck, Michigan, to claim her body.

  There was nothing about her that helped us. She was not noticeably like, nor noticeably unlike, the other victims.

  Bob Johnson was forty years old, which made him old enough to have committed the earlier Spare Change murders. He had been born in Boston while his parents were still in school. His mother was nineteen, his father twenty. That had finished his mother’s educational career, but his father, who was apparently something of a whiz kid, had gone on to earn three degrees and become a business professor at Taft. His mother had a boutique in Cohasset, where the family had moved when they could afford to, and where young Bob had spent most of his growing-up years. His grades throughout his school career were mostly B’s. “Good student”—not a great one—was the report. Johnson went to Taft, where the tuition was probably right, and stayed in Boston. He’d worked several reasonably productive years at a big brokerage house before he’d gone out on his own at age thirty. He’d had no problems at the brokerage house that anyone could remember. According to the forensic accountants, his financial-planning business had flourished. His bank account was good. His investments were solid. He was single, had never married. There was nothing to suggest that he was gay. No one who knew him thought he was. He dated often but never the same woman for a long time. He owned his condo in the Vendome, on which he had a mortgage. He leased a 2003 Jaguar sedan. He was not otherwise in debt. His credit cards were paid off regularly. He had no problems with the IRS. He had not seen military service. A lot of people knew him, but none professed to be a close friend. On the other hand, no one had anything bad to say about him. He was not a member of any clubs. Not even a health club. As far as the cops could tell, he didn’t golf, or fish, or play tennis, or lift weights. There was nothing to tell us what he did in his free time. I’d had several pedicures more exciting than Johnson’s history.