Spare Change

by Robert B. Parker

  I looked at my father. He nodded.

  “Chico Zarilla?” I said.

  “Seems a reasonable guess,” he said.

  There were photos as well of every victim, snipped from the newspapers. Both the victims of Spare Change 1 and the victims of Spare Change 2. And of course the picture of me. It had been a picture of me and Daddy, but Daddy had been excised. My picture as well occupied its own page.

  54

  It was late afternoon when all of us had read everything. The oddness of it was thick in the room. This was a group of very tough people, with long experience. But none had seen anything quite like this before.

  “We got enough, Margie?” Quirk said.

  “Oh, hell, yes,” she said. “Christ, we could successfully prosecute him for being weird.”

  “Frank, we know where he is?” Quirk said.

  “Haven’t heard that we don’t.”

  “Be sure,” Quirk said.

  Belson left the room.

  “I’m scheduled to meet him for drinks tomorrow,” I said. “Late afternoon. Place called Spike’s, down near the Market.”

  “I know Spike’s,” Quirk said. “What are you suggesting?”

  “We could let him meet me. I could wear a wire. I could confront him with what we know, see what happened?”

  “Why do we need to do that?” Quirk said. “We got him now.”

  “Because it may be our only chance to get any real information on how this worked. Father and son serial killers? Not together but sequentially?”

  “We arrest him,” Quirk said, “we’ll ask him.”

  I shook my head.

  “No,” I said. “This is a game with him. He’ll love the attention, just like when we first brought him in. He’ll tell you what he thinks sounds good. You won’t know if he’s telling you the truth or not. He thinks we have some sort of relationship. When he hears it from me, and realizes I’ve been playing him, and knows that he’s cooked, he might have the only genuine public reaction he’ll ever have. I want to hear it.”

  “Because?”

  “Because I haven’t heard it. None of us has. And if we don’t get it quick, we never will.”

  No one in the room said anything.

  “We’re all in the protect-and-serve business in one way or another, and we all care about that in one way or another. There’s a bunch of Spare Change victims that we neither protected nor served too well. If we understand this guy, what made him tick, maybe we can protect some other people down the line.”

  “You want me to let him lose another day,” Quirk said, “so he can talk to you over drinks?”

  “You have him under close surveillance. Even if you didn’t. This is too exciting for him. He’s not going anywhere. You can fill every table and chair in Spike’s with cops when I talk with him. It’s our only chance to know.”

  Quirk looked around the room. Epstein shook his head. So did Margie, so did Healy. Quirk looked at my father.

  “I can’t make that judgment,” my father aid. “I’m recusing myself.”

  Quirk nodded.

  Belson came back into the room.

  “Johnson’s having lunch at Lock’s with two suits,” Belson said.

  “Sunny wants us to hold off arresting Johnson until she’s talked with him tomorrow wearing a wire,” Quirk said.

  Belson looked at me and back at Quirk.

  “That’s crazy,” he said.

  Quirk nodded.

  “It’s our only chance to know,” I said.

  Quirk looked around the room. Then he looked at me for a time.

  “This,” he said, “is pretty much your collar, Sunny. You spotted him early. You got us interested. It was you did the burglary that we don’t know about. It was you that started poking around at Taft, and it was you got your old man poking around Taft. We wouldn’t be in the room with this evidence if it weren’t for you.”

  Nobody said anything for a time, including me.

  Then Margie Collins said, “Martin. If you let her do this and it goes sour, it is your ass…big-time!”

  Quirk didn’t say anything. He kept looking at me. Everyone waited. Finally, Quirk nodded his head slowly.

  “You’re right,” he said. “It’s our only chance. You wear a wire. We’ll bust him at Spike’s.”

  55

  Aside from Bob Johnson, Spike was the only non-cop in his restaurant. The two waitresses were cops. The business types having drinks at the next table were cops. And the drinks were tea and ginger ale. The happy couple having a sandwich just inside the door were cops. The guys sitting at the bar drinking what looked like beer were cops. Spike was behind the bar. My father was in the kitchen with Quirk and Belson. There were cops strolling by outside, and cops in cars down the street, and cops in the alley behind Spike’s building. All of them looking like tourists, and people in from Framingham.

  I was in the middle of the room, looking sophisticated and sympathetic in jeans, a loose-fitting beige jacket, a black T-shirt, and some soft, low-heeled boots that would permit me to jump around if I needed to. There was a microphone in my bra and a transmitter pack in the small of my back. I had my gun holstered on the left side, butt forward, under the jacket. Despite the massive police presence, I was uneasy, and it made me feel a little less so to have the gun on my belt, instead of in my handbag.

  There was scotch on the rocks in front of me. I didn’t want to drink. But I didn’t want him to catch me drinking tea disguised as scotch.

  Bob came in wearing a double-breasted navy blazer and a pink Lacoste shirt. There was a spring in his step. He was tanned and cheery.

  “Sunny,” he said. “This is great.”

  He sat down beside me, in the chair to my right. That was different. Usually he sat across.

  “There’s a ton going on,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Our cop waitress took his order for Tanqueray and tonic.

  “They’re following me,” Bob said.

  “Who?”

  “The cops, who do you think? They are following me everywhere I go. They followed me here.”

  He looked around the room.

  “They stayed outside,” he said. “Afraid I’d spot them, I guess.”

  He laughed. While he was laughing, his drink arrived. He raised his glass to me. I touched it with mine. He gave me a big, confident grin.

  “To crime,” he said.

  He drank. I took a tiny sip.

  “I sent you a present,” Bob said.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, in the mail.” He laughed. “Which means maybe you’ll get it this week.”

  “What is it?” I said.

  “You’ll see.”

  Bob grinned at me.

  “It’s a pretty interesting present,” he said.

  “How exciting,” I said.

  “I’m going out of town for a few days,” he said, “and I wanted you to have something.”

  “What about the police,” I said. “The ones following you. Will they object to you going out of town?”

  It was as if both of us had entered into some sort of silent accord that I wasn’t with the police.

  “I can lose them,” he said, “any time I want.”

  I widened my eyes.

  “How?” I said.

  “I know a building I can go.” He was like a kid sharing a secret hideout with me. “It has a tunnel to the building next to it. I go in one building, out the side door of the next one, and poof, Bob has disappeared again.”

  “Wow,” I said with my eyes still wide. “Where is this building?”

  He grinned and shook his head.

  “Can’t tell you that, hon. It’s a secret.”


  “I’d love to see it,” I said.

  “Maybe someday I’ll show you.”

  I nodded brightly.

  “Where are you going?” I said.

  “When you get my present in the mail,” he said, “you’ll see.”

  His glass was empty. He gestured for another. Our waitress brought it. She was wearing a white shirt and black pants. Her gun was probably in an ankle holster.

  “Bob,” I said. “Will you be honest with me?”

  “I’d never lie to you, Sunny.”

  We had arranged seating at nearby tables so that there was no one next to me and Bob. Nothing to inhibit our conversation. The waitresses didn’t come by unless they were summoned.

  “Tell me what you can about Chico Zarilla,” I said.

  Nothing changed that I could see, but something had. It was as if a door had shut.

  “Chico Zarilla,” he said brightly.

  “He owns a condo in the South End,” I said.

  “South End.”

  “With a picture of your father in it.”

  Behind the bar, Spike was cutting up lemons and limes. The waitresses were hustling ginger ale and iced tea to a room full of undercover cops. My father was listening in the kitchen. But in the suddenly icy space around us, none of that seemed real. I had opened it. We were going to look at the gruesome thing inside.

  “You’ve been there,” Bob said.

  “Yes.”

  Bob’s gaze was entirely without meaning. It was like looking into the eyes of a frozen corpse.

  “You and the police?”

  “Bob,” I said. “I am the police.”

  The silence around my table seemed impenetrable. I met his look. We didn’t speak for a time. He looked slowly around the room.

  “Talk to me, Bob,” I said. “You can talk to me.”

  He kept surveying the room.

  “Talk to me about your father, Bob. About the Spare Change Killer. Bob, talk to me about yourself.”

  Bob kept looking. Under his breath, he had begun to hum a song. I didn’t recognize it.

  “We have you, Bob,” I said. “We know you did it. But I insisted on this chance to be with you. The chance for you and me to talk with each other. The chance for you to tell your side of the story.”

  He finished looking around the room, and looked back at me, and nodded slowly. There was a condescending expression on his face that might have included amusement. He continued to hum softly as he put his hand into his left-hand blazer pocket and took out two nickels and a dime and put them on the table between us.

  56

  The room seemed to organize around the coins. The cops stopped pretending they weren’t cops. Everyone turned toward us. Bob saw it. It made him smug. He took another sip of his drink and smiled at me. He put his left hand on my shoulder, then brushed it against my hair for a moment.

  “Sunny,” he said. “Sunny, Sunny.”

  Softly, I said, “Bob, talk to me.”

  He took a fistful of my hair and stood and pulled me up from my chair and pressed a gun against my temple.

  “I’ll kill her,” he said. “Anybody moves, I will kill her.”

  Time slowed way down, the way it does. Slowly, Bob and I backed away from the table so that we were against a wall. I could see us across the room in the mirror behind the bar.

  “Phil,” he said. “You’re in here someplace, aren’t you, Phil?”

  All the cops had their guns out. Nobody fired. Four of them, including our waitress, blocked the doorway.

  “Phil,” Bob shouted. “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

  My father came out of the kitchen and walked into the dining area and stopped in front of us. At his side he had a long-barreled .22 Colt target pistol. My father was a competition shooter. I recognized the gun. There was something shocking in the familiarity of the object. It was incongruously from home. My father didn’t say anything. With his grip on my hair, Bob had my head pulled back against his. His right arm was across the front of my shoulder, clamping me against him, while the gun was pressed to my temple. In the mirror I could see him staring hard at my father.

  “What are you going to do, Phil?” Bob said. “You can’t shoot, you might hit her.”

  Standing silently in front of us, my father moved slightly to his right. Bob turned us slightly to compensate. My father shifted into a competition stance, turning sideways, gun aimed straight out from his shoulder, head turned so he was sighting down the extended arm and over the gun sights. Bob watched him.

  “You’ve never caught me, Phil, and now you had to try and trick me. You think I didn’t suspect a trick? You think I wasn’t ready for it?”

  We inched closer to the door. My father moved with us. In the mirror behind the bar it was like watching some sort of slow dance.

  “I been ready for you all the time, Phil.”

  Bob giggled.

  “Every day, Phil,” he said. “Every step, you’ve been a day late and a few coins short.”

  Bob’s eyes were fixed on my father. The gun pressed uncomfortably against my temple. His body, too. But he was watching my father, as if his spirit were lunging toward him. Despite the full-body contact and the restraining arm, it was as if I didn’t exist, as if I were merely a towel he’d grabbed to cover himself. His whole existence was focused on my father. Phil and Bob, one on one. I was like an accessory object between them.

  “Clear those people from the door, Phil,” Bob said.

  My father said nothing.

  “What choice you got, Phil?” Bob said.

  He inched us along the wall, holding me against him. As he moved, my father kept the target pistol up and leveled, aiming past me at what there was of Bob to aim at.

  “Don’t even think about it, Phil. Nobody’s that good.”

  Bob giggled again. It was an awful sound.

  “And you, at your age?” Bob said. “No chance.”

  It’s not about me, I thought. It never has been. For crissake, it’s about my father. Whatever sexuality had passed between us had been because I was Phil Randall’s daughter. With the forearm of his gun hand, Bob clamped me a little harder against him. He kept me tight against him. I felt his pressure behind me. As we inched toward the door, my father kept the target gun leveled.

  “We’re going out, Phil. Nobody’s going to follow. I’ll drop Sunny Bunny off someplace when I’m clear.”

  “No,” my father said in a voice like a razor blade. “You’re not going out.”

  “I die, she dies, maybe a few others, Phil. But Sunny dies first for sure.”

  My father’s gun tracked us like the pointer on a compass. The skin seemed to have stretched too tight over his face, and there were deep grooves around his mouth. In the mirror I could see Bob’s eyes follow him. He seemed nearly entranced. His grip on me stayed tight, and the gun stayed pressing against the side of my head. But his soul was with my father. Bob’s breathing was heavy in my ear. He pressed hard against me, watching my father, hardly aware that I was pressed against him, paying no attention to me, his accessory object.

  Except that the son of a bitch was erect.

  Phil Randall’s daughter.

  I had been fighting fear since he’d grabbed me. Holding myself still. Staying steady, watching developments, trying not to scream. Now I felt sick. This murderous pig was using me to protect himself, with no thought of me, and yet, rubbing against me, he was aroused. It was pornographic. It was an absolute denial of me as me.

  The issue for Bob was not how much pleasure he got out of holding me captive, rubbing against my body. The issue was my father, not me. The threat was from my father, not from me. Bob was so engaged in his nonverbal interchange with that threat, and so obscenely unconcerned in whatev
er was causing his sexual arousal, that I could probably make a phone call and he wouldn’t notice…or get my gun…. Quietly, I put my hand under my coat. I could see myself in the mirror. I could see Bob staring with smug intensity at my father. Quietly, I eased my gun out from under my coat. If Bob looked at the mirror, he would see me. If he saw me, he would probably shoot me. Didn’t matter. I could not stand to be handled this way. I was willing to die more than I was willing to let this obscene son of a bitch use me. Carefully, I raised the gun. My father, of course, could see what I was doing. He didn’t show it. His face stayed rigid. I put my gun close to my chest, pointing it upward toward Bob’s arm that wrapped around my shoulder and held his gun to my head. It was an awkward position.

  “Come on, Philly,” Bob said.

  His voice had an odd bubbly quality to it. As if there was too much saliva in his mouth.

  “You know you’re going to lose again,” he said. “Do it with style, Phil. Clear the doorway. Or I will kill her right in front of you and the hell with the rest.”

  I heard myself say something to myself like Here we go, and shot Bob through the wrist. Bob grunted and staggered slightly and my father put a bullet through Bob’s right eye.

  Bob sighed and let go of me, and I dove to the floor behind a table. All the cops in the room started shooting the minute I dove, and Bob was hit probably twenty times by the time he fell. The silence after the gunfire seemed almost louder than the gunfire. The smell of the shooting was strong in the room. Adios, Chico Zarilla.

  My father stepped over him and came to me sprawled behind the table. He put the target gun on the floor and sat on his haunches and began to pat my shoulder. He seemed short of breath.

  “He had a hard-on, Daddy. He had a hard-on.”

  My father kept patting me.

  His voice rasped when he spoke.

  “Now he doesn’t,” my father said.

  57