Spare Change

by Robert B. Parker

  “Yes. We recently upped our surveillance. Four officers, three shifts, twenty-four-seven.”

  “Is he aware of the surveillance?” Margie said.

  “I’m sure he is,” Quirk said. “We had him under some surveillance before and he knew it, and shook us regularly. He seemed to like it.”

  “And there’s been no murders since this level of surveillance went into place?”

  “No.”

  “That could be suggestive,” Margie said. “Though hardly definitive.”

  Margie looked at me.

  “You are a pretty tough cookie, Ms. Randall,” she said.

  “I know,” I said. “I know.”

  50

  My father and mother and I had dinner with Elizabeth and Charles in the beautiful high dining room at the Langham Hotel on Post Office Square. When the waiter arrived, my mother ordered bourbon.

  “Do you have a preference, ma’am,” the waiter said. “We have Wild Turkey, Jack Daniel’s, Maker’s Mark…”

  My mother got a small, frightened look in her eyes. I had seen the look all my life. She smiled vaguely at the waiter and glanced sideways at my father.

  “She likes Maker’s Mark,” my father said, “rocks.”

  My mother’s smile became calmer and the little fear thing went from her eyes. The rest of us ordered and the waiter went to get it.

  She hadn’t known what kind of bourbon she liked. If anyone had asked me I would have guessed that, but I never thought about it. And when she was asked a question she couldn’t answer, she got scared; and when she got scared, she looked at my father. Who, in effect, rescued her.

  The drinks came. Charles raised his glass.

  “Family,” he said, and we all drank.

  I’d watched that same scene play out a million times. If she saw a mouse, if a pot boiled over, if one of us girls fell and skinned a knee, if the toilet wouldn’t flush, or the stove wouldn’t light, or someone asked her a question she couldn’t answer, or gave her a direction she couldn’t understand, the reaction was always the same—the sort of panicky screech that I had heard since I could hear: Philll! The screech was private, but the covert look she had just shifted onto my father was the public equivalent.

  My father smiled as he raised his glass.

  “Even this one,” he said.

  My mother frowned.

  “There’s nothing wrong with this family, Phil Randall, and don’t you forget it.”

  He smiled at her. We drank.

  I had seen all this before. Why did it so register now? I knew the answer to that. Most of my life, until now, I hadn’t been sitting with Dr. Silverman twice a week, trying to figure out who the hell I was.

  The waiter brought the menus and offered some explanations. Charles was impatient. My mother paid avid attention.

  It must have been part of her charm. The helplessness. Nasty and demanding and bossy as she was, she was exotically dependent on my father. He could rescue her every day. Even her drunkenness made her dependent.

  “I thought I’d buy us a bottle of wine,” Charles said. “What kind of wine do you like?”

  Again, the blank look, the enigmatic little smile of fear, the glance. Again, Phil to the rescue. All my life, I watched this all my life and never understood.

  “I kind of like the Oregon pinot noirs,” my father said. “But of course we’d defer to you, Charles.”

  Charles looked faintly startled. He hadn’t expected my father to know anything more than white or red. It was such a Daddy moment. He always knew more than you thought he would. Talk about sailing and you’d discover he knew what a Marconi rig was. Talk about books and you’d find that he knew who Eudora Welty was. Talk about architecture and you’d find he had an opinion on Bauhaus. It was never clear how much he knew, or whether he was making a little go a long way. But he always knew something of which you were speaking. All the while looking like someone hired to keep order in a downscale nightclub.

  “I was thinking about a French wine tonight,” Charles said.

  Which meant he probably didn’t know much about Oregon pinot noirs.

  “We can always drink an American wine,” Elizabeth said. “Pick us some lovely French vintage.”

  “It is a night for a French vintage,” Charles said.

  My mother nodded vigorously.

  “It is exactly a night for a French vintage,” she said just as if she knew what that meant.

  “You bet,” my father said.

  Elizabeth put her head against Charles’s insubstantial shoulder.

  I almost smiled. Screw off, Daddy. I got somebody else now. I understood Elizabeth. I should understand myself the way I understood Elizabeth. If we got our warrant tomorrow and searched Chico Zarilla’s apartment and broke the Spare Change case and I went back to trying to put my life together, Elizabeth’s relationship to Charles would last maybe another month. And then, when she wasn’t fighting me for my father’s attention, his professorial shallowness would become thunderous and she’d dump him, though probably not before she found somebody else to be with.

  The sommelier appeared, and conferred with Charles in French.

  I wondered as I sipped my martini if anyone had ever called Charles Charlie or Chuck. Several people in my father’s circle called him Philz, and at least one guy called him Philzie. They had lived in different worlds, Philzie and Charles. Charles lived in a world of liberal-arts mumbo jumbo, where the idea was an end in itself. The accomplishment was having it. Considerations of execution were often dismissed with scorn. In many cases there was no execution. In its extremes, it was a world where being in love could be more important than making love. My father’s world was full of things that mattered, often mortally, to people. What he did mattered. His decisions mattered. His successes were real. His failures were real, sometimes horrifically so. It made him understand that he mattered. And because he mattered, we mattered, mother and daughters, because we were his. It allowed him to feel deeply. He loved us because we were his. That was why he could love my unpleasant mother and my annoying sister just as much as he loved me, even though I was much more fun than they were. It wasn’t about me, or Elizabeth, or even the dependent Emily. It was about him. We were his.

  The evening pressed its way slowly to conclusion. My mother prattled. As she got drunk, the prattle got louder. Charles showed off for her. My mother flirted with Charles. Elizabeth and I competed. She blatantly, me subtly. My father showed every evidence of enjoying the evening. He was with us. It didn’t matter what we did, or who we were. Or what we were. We were his. And in this part of his world, that was the only fact that mattered.

  Maybe he was more like Charles than I thought.

  51

  We showed up in the South End at Chico Zarilla’s condo a half hour before noon on the Wednesday before Labor Day. There had been a hurricane on the Gulf Coast, and we were feeling a modest spill out. The air was heavy. The skies were dark. There was enough wind to notice. And it was raining. My father was there, and Sergeant Belson with the warrant, a detective named Lee Farrell, a black guy named Trent something, and eight uniforms. The uniforms stayed on the street. The rest of us followed the warrant into the building. Zarilla’s condo was on the ground level in a redbrick row house. We had already looked at building plans. The only exit was into a minuscule backyard that led to an alley. Four of the uniforms covered the alley.

  Belson rang the bell. No answer. He rang again. No answer. He said loudly, “Boston police.”

  No response. Belson turned and walked to the front door and gestured at two of the uniforms. They came in with a portable ram and busted open the door. Everyone stood aside for a moment with guns drawn. The place was dark. Belson nodded and Farrell and Trent went in first. Belson followed. My father and I followed him. The uniforms held the hallw
ay.

  Somebody found a light switch.

  I heard Belson say, “Jesus Christ.”

  The room was painted black: walls, floor, ceiling. On the wall, opposite the front door, was a five-foot-high black-and-white photograph of a man and a boy. The man looked just like Bob Johnson, and the boy would, too, in forty years. The man was wearing a dark three-button suit. The boy wore a child’s version of the same suit. The picture had about it the clear sense that it was not recent. It was bland enough, except there was something chilling in the posed identity of the man and the boy.

  “Bob Senior and Junior,” I said.

  Belson grunted. No one else said anything.

  The condo was a studio, and not a big one: a bed, a bath, and a little kitchen. The shades were all drawn. Everything was neat. The bed was made with a white sheet and a plaid blanket. Besides the bed there was a low bureau, a desk, and a desk chair. One of the two detectives, when they came in, had opened the closet door and left it open. On hangers, still in the film packaging from the cleaner, were a suit, shirt, and tie like the one in the photo. There was nothing else.

  “Anything in the bathroom?” Belson said.

  “Hand soap and a towel, and two rolls of toilet paper,” Trent said.

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Nothing in the medicine cabinet?”

  “No.”

  Farrell, wearing latex gloves, opened a bureau drawer.

  “Vadda voom,” he said.

  We all looked. In the otherwise empty drawer were three .38-caliber Smith and Wesson revolvers. And seven boxes of .38 ammunition. Belson put his weapon away and put on some latex gloves. All of us did.

  “Get some crime-scene people down here,” Belson said.

  Trent took out a cell phone and dialed. Farrell opened the lower drawer in the bureau.

  “Scrapbooks of some kind,” he said.

  “There’s one on the desk, too,” I said.

  Belson went to the desk.

  “Along with a large jar of change,” he said.

  We all looked at the jar. The process was becoming eerie. The shaded room. The neat, barren quality of it. The overwhelming old photograph staring out at us, of the eerily similar man and child. The slowly growing knowledge of what we had found. We moved from revelation to revelation like tourists in the Louvre, staring.

  “When you get through with the crime-scene call,” Belson said to Trent, “get Quirk down here.”

  Cell phone to his mouth, Trent nodded yes to Belson. Belson looked down at the scrapbook on the desk.

  “We’ll back out of this,” Belson said. “Stay put. Don’t touch anything. Secure the place. Until Quirk gets here and the crime-scene people.”

  “Frank,” I said. “We have to look in that scrapbook.”

  Nobody else said anything. Trent had gone to the hallway with his cell phone, as if he needed some routine gesture of politeness to offset the penetrating strangeness of the room.

  Belson pursed his lips and breathed deeply and opened the cover of the scrapbook. I heard my father grunt. On the first page was pasted a large picture, taken at the Fenway crime scene and carefully cut from the newspaper, of me.

  52

  Quirk ran the gathering in a big corner room, down the hall from his office in police headquarters. Belson sat with Quirk. There was a big cardboard box on the floor between Quirk and Belson. The rest of us spread out around the big conference table. Epstein was there again, from the FBI, and State Police Captain Healy, the senior prosecutor Margie Collins, and Phil Randall, and his daughter.

  “I want to nail this thing down, shut, airtight, leakproof, and done,” Quirk said. “Before we open the gates and everybody comes in and tramples on it.”

  Everyone nodded.

  “The scientists have been all over the room and its contents,” Quirk said. “Here’s what we know. The big photo on the wall is in fact of Robert Johnson Senior and Robert Johnson Junior. The scientists can date it. The room is full of the fingerprints of Robert Johnson Junior. As best we can tell, no one else has been in there.”

  Nobody said anything. We all wanted to hear about what was in the scrapbooks, and who the hell Chico Zarilla was. But we were patient. Quirk was never long-winded.

  “There are ancient smudges that we probably couldn’t match if we had to. There is also no evidence that the room was lived in. The stove shows no signs of use. There’s water in the plumbing traps.”

  I looked at my father.

  “Later,” he murmured.

  “The clothes in the closet have been laundered recently, and apparently regularly,” Quirk said. “Place in the South End with walk-in service. Bed linens, too. Last record they have of him is twelve days ago. He picked up some cleaning and dropped some off. What he picked up is the suit, shirt, and black knit tie that you saw in the closet. He dropped off the same thing. Identical. Suit, shirt, black knit tie. Like the one in the picture. Forty-two regular. No labels. Don’t know when or where they were bought. Only thing the scientists could tell us is that they aren’t new.”

  “Could they be twenty years old?” Healy said.

  His slim hands rested motionless before him on the table. The backs of his hands were freckled.

  “Yes,” Quirk said.

  “Coins in the jar tell us anything?” Healy said.

  “No,” Quirk said. “Some could have been in circulation during the first killings. Some couldn’t.”

  Quirk paused. No one said anything.

  “Okay,” Quirk said. “The guns. All Smith and Wesson, .38-caliber, two-inch barrel. All of them manufactured in the 1970s. None have been fired. The ammo in six boxes hasn’t been used. Remington high-velocity, centerfires. Semi-jacketed, hollow-point. There are fifteen bullets missing from the seventh box.”

  “That gun holds five rounds,” Epstein said.

  “Yes.”

  “We have five victims,” Epstein said.

  Quirk nodded.

  “He got rid of five rounds at the Public Garden,” Epstein said. “One in the vic, four left in the piece he had to dump in the flowers.”

  “Means squat,” Healy said.

  “I know,” Epstein said. “Just means he’s got another gun maybe, and some ammo with him someplace else.”

  “It wasn’t a complete toss,” I said. “But I found neither in his other apartment.”

  Healy grinned at me. “That unexplained b-and-e that I know nothing about?” he said.

  “That one,” I said.

  “God bless inevitable disclosure,” Margie said.

  I smiled modestly.

  “He must have come by there regularly,” Quirk said. “I assume it was one of the endless times he’d shake the surveillance. There’s no mail collected. The room is clean.”

  “Maybe nobody wrote him a letter,” I said.

  “Light bills,” Belson said. “Phone bills. Water bills…”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “There was an upright vacuum in the closet,” Quirk said. “The contents of the bag didn’t tell us anything.”

  “Nice he was neat,” my father said.

  “There were twelve longneck bottles of Budweiser in the refrigerator,” Quirk said. “Nothing else.”

  “Party animal,” Epstein said.

  Quirk looked down at his notes for a moment.

  “And,” he said, “there were these five scrapbooks.”

  53

  They were numbered on the cover, in roman numerals, using what appeared to be black Magic Marker, number I being the earliest. The books themselves were standard scrapbooks, with pale gray covers. We passed them slowly among us, each of us taking as much time as we needed studying the one we had. Occasionally,
one of us got up to get coffee. And stood to drink it. Nobody drank coffee at the table. Nobody wanted to be the one who slopped on the evidence. We had the Spare Change Killer or Killers in the room, in a sense. We were concluding a twenty-year investigation. And we had won. It meant something to everyone in the room, and it meant the most to my father. So we were very scrupulous, and surprisingly respectful, and very careful to go slow.

  The notebooks were about two things: the life of Robert Johnson Senior, and the adventures of the Spare Change Killer. They were often the same thing. The clippings came mostly from the Boston papers, but occasionally there was one from The Walford Weekly or The Taft Daily Chronicle.

  Robert Johnson named Lippman Professor of Business Administration…Prof. Johnson youngest chair professor in University history…a homeless man, identified as Roderick Fernandez, was found murdered…Johnson wins Helman Prize…The body of a young woman found this morning…Johnson honored as teacher of year…Spare Change Killer strikes again…Boston Police Captain Phillip Randall was named today to head the task force…Professor Johnson chosen commencement speaker…Spare Change Killer claims another victim…At his regular news conference, Captain Phillip Randall said…Professor Robert Johnson to Chair Committee on Diversity…Woman found murdered…Man found murdered…Woman found murdered…Professor Robert Johnson Succumbs to Heart Attack…Young black man murdered in Back Bay…Captain Phillip Randall, pictured left, with his daughter Sunny…

  There were obits for Robert Johnson Senior, from the several newspapers that ran them. There were Christmas and birthday cards, and some photos. There were several pictures of Johnson Senior and Junior displaying fish they’d caught, paddling a canoe, playing catch, swimming together at an unidentifiable beach. The birthday and Christmas cards were from Senior to Junior and were affectionate. “…No man could have a better son…to the best son in the world…”

  There was an eight-by-ten color photo of Robert Senior costumed in the Hollywood version of a Mexican bandit outfit, which had a page to itself. It was one of those pictures you can have taken in tourist spots: sombrero, crossed cartridge belts, two guns, and drooping false mustache.