Spare Change

by Robert B. Parker

  It was nearly three in the morning. Spike’s was closed. The doors were locked, and there was a car outside with two cops in it, just to keep an eye. My father and I were having a drink alone, with Spike still behind the bar. I was having a double-sized martini on the rocks. My father was drinking scotch. My microphone was gone, and my battery pack. The lab was already processing the tape, making dupes. I still felt shivery cold.

  “How could you have possibly decided to bring that target gun?” I said.

  “I try to be prepared,” my father said. “How come you had a gun under your coat instead of in your purse.”

  His breathing was calm now, but his voice was still hoarse.

  “I try to be prepared,” I said.

  We drank. My father’s face still looked tight. His skin was pale.

  “Pretty ballsy thing,” my father said. “Pulling your gun like that.”

  “I could see him in the mirror,” I said. “He was fixated on you.”

  My father nodded slowly and drank some more scotch. It was restorative, I thought, for both of us. The jolt of the alcohol enlivening us, bringing us back from the dreadful place we’d been. Somehow it reiterated our humanness.

  “What would you have done,” I said, “if I hadn’t pulled the gun?”

  “If he took you out of there,” my father said, “you were gone.”

  “What would you have done?”

  My father drank again. His color seemed a little better.

  “I’d have tried the shot,” he said.

  I nodded and drank again. I felt a little less chilled.

  “I guess it didn’t work out like I’d hoped,” I said.

  My father shrugged.

  “We got him,” my father said.

  Spike came over with two more drinks, put them down, and left.

  “I was hoping for more,” I said.

  My father nodded, turning his drink on the table in front of him.

  “There’s still the present in the mail,” my father said.

  “Think it’ll be about the Spare Change killings?” I said.

  “Everything was about that,” my father said.

  “I know. I think it was a good-bye present. I think he was running away.”

  “Yes,” my father said. “I think when we put the twenty-four-hour surveillance on him, he knew we were getting closer.”

  “And what he’ll send me will be some sort of farewell brag,” I said.

  “Be my guess,” my father said.

  He finished his first drink and turned to the second. So did I.

  “If it is some sort of farewell horn blowing,” I said, “I wonder how much we can trust it.”

  My father shrugged and shook his head.

  “There may be no explanation,” my father said. “What makes some of these guys so scary is that what they do often seems to them perfectly reasonable.”

  “I wonder how much he understood himself,” I said.

  “Not enough,” my father said.

  “Who does,” I said.

  My father looked into his scotch and didn’t answer.

  “Whatever he was, it was about his father,” I said.

  “And what in God’s name was he about?” my father said.

  I shook my head.

  “Were you on the earphones?” I said. “In the kitchen?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you hear him humming?” I said.

  My father nodded.

  “Do you know what he was humming?” I said.

  “‘Three Coins in the Fountain,’” my father said.

  “Oh, God,” I said.

  Spike came over to see if we needed more. We didn’t.

  “You got me covered, Phil?” Spike said. “They bust me for serving booze after closing time?”

  “I can probably fix it,” my father said.

  Spike kneaded my shoulders gently for a moment, then went back to the bar.

  “You all right?” my father said.

  “Yes.”

  “You want to come home with me tonight?” he said. “Sleep in your old room?”

  “And explain to Mother what I’m doing there?”

  My father made a face.

  “I could stay with you tonight,” he said. “Couch would be fine.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “No need to be tougher than you have to be,” my father said. “That was an ordeal to go through.”

  “We went through it together,” I said.

  My father nodded.

  I said, “You are a rock, Daddy. Because you were there, I was less scared than I should have been.”

  He nodded again.

  “You sure you’ll be all right alone?” he said.

  “I’m not only a big girl, Daddy. I have to be a big girl…otherwise…”

  “Otherwise what?”

  “Otherwise,” I heard myself say, “I’ll turn into Mother.”

  My father was quiet for a moment.

  Then he said, “No…you won’t.”

  58

  I woke up the next morning with a faint hangover, and a sense of loss. I’d worked with my father all summer on Spare Change, and now it was gone. I fed Rosie, and took her out and brought her back. I felt a sense of urgency and then remembered that there was none. I took a long, slow shower and washed my hair. I put on clean clothes. I ate breakfast. I drank coffee. I read the paper. The death of Bob Johnson hadn’t made the early edition. I should have felt the luxury of no obligations for the day. I didn’t. Instead, the day seemed ill-formed and long.

  The mail wasn’t due until early afternoon.

  I cleaned my gun. I should have cleaned it last night when I got home, but it was all I could do to feed Rosie, take her out, and then drag myself into bed. When I had the gun cleaned and reloaded, the light was right and I worked for a while on my painting. Brushwork often absorbs me. This time it didn’t.

  When the sun moved on and the light wasn’t quite right, I cleaned my brushes and went to my health club. I did everything. Weights, treadmill, bike, stretching. My mother used to tell me that horses sweat, men perspire, and ladies glow. Halfway through the workout, I was sweating like a horse. The sweat felt good, as if it was somehow cleansing.

  When I was through, I took my second shower of the day and put on my second set of clean clothes for the day.

  When I got home, the mail had still not come.

  I put my laundry through and folded it and put it away still warm from the dryer. Then I went downstairs and checked my mailbox.

  No mail.

  I went back upstairs and got Rosie and took her on her leash for a walk. I had my shoulder bag with my gun in it. For the first time in a while, I had no pressing need for it, but I had a license, and there was no reason to leave it home. Since Bob Johnson, the world seemed a somewhat more hazardous place than it once had.

  We walked down across the Fort Point Channel and along Atlantic Avenue, through and around the moraine of the Big Dig. Rosie was, as always, adorable on her walk. Though she had some sort of genetic glitch that caused her periodically to stop stock-still and stare at nothing in particular. Sometimes she sat down. She’d always done it. I’d never understood it. Richie and I referred to the instances as “brain cramps.” I had tried various cures, but the only workable solution was to stand still with her until she decided to start up again. It meant that a mile walk with Rosie took longer than most mile walks. Still, it was excellent patience training.

  I knew I shouldn’t get too excited about Bob Johnson’s posthumous present. If it was something revelatory, it would be self-serving, particularly since Bob hadn’t intended it to be posthumous. This wasn’t going to be a deathbed confe
ssion. In fact, of course, it could be a lovely framed photo of Bob himself, or a year’s subscription to Vogue. And the Postal Service being what it was, it might not arrive today. Rosie paused in front of the Boston Harbor Hotel. I waited.

  By the time we got home it had clouded up and started to rain. I checked my mail. The package was there.

  59

  It was a videotape.

  When I sat on the couch to watch it, Rosie got up beside me. The first thing on the screen was an empty chair against a blank wall.

  “Hi, ho, Sunny,” Bob Johnson’s voice said off-camera.

  Bob walked into the shot wearing a dark blue suit with a white shirt and a pale blue tie. He was carrying a spiral-bound notebook. He paused and smiled into the camera, then he sat in the chair and crossed his legs. He held the notebook up.

  “I have a lot of things to say, Sunny. So I wrote it down.” He smiled into the camera and waved the notebook a little. “Be sure not to leave anything out.”

  Beside me, Rosie stood up suddenly on the couch, turned around three or four times, and resettled against my thigh, in the same position, as far as I could tell, that she’d been in before.

  On the television screen, Bob began to read from his notebook.

  “By the time you see this and hear what I have to tell you,” he said, “I’ll be long gone and hard to find. Your father and the other cops are beginning to squeeze me. They follow me everywhere. Not that I can’t get away from them if I need to. But it’s becoming more laborious to do so, and it is hindering to my freedom.”

  Bob didn’t read well. His gloss of charm fell away when he read. He looked up and into the camera every once in a while, as if he’d learned in some elocution school somewhere: Read three sentences, pause, look up, smile. It was graceless.

  “So I’m moving on,” Bob said. “But before I go, I’m going to tell you a story.”

  It was mid-afternoon, and raining pleasantly. The overcast outside had spread into my apartment. I would have turned on a light, but getting up to do so would have disrupted Rosie’s nap. It felt a little cold for early September.

  “I was an only child,” Bob said, “and my mother was sort of nervous, and my dad was the one who had to do most of the parenting. He was able to do that because he was a professor and could be home a lot. My dad and I were very close. My mother didn’t like that. Now that I’m older, I realize that she was probably jealous. But back then I just knew she didn’t like it.”

  The room was very still. Everything seemed artificial. I was looking at Bob Johnson and listening to him, and I had seen him die last night. It blurred everything. Reality, illusion; life, death; self, other; all seemed suddenly doubtful. I was aware of my breathing. I put my hand on Rosie, steadying myself as if I were dizzy. Her solid little self was comforting. Rosie was real.

  “So one day, I was about fourteen, and my mother wasn’t home. I went into my dad’s study and he was dressed up like some sort of Mexican. Big hat, ammunition belts, like a bandito. I asked him why he was dressed up like that. He looked at me sort of funny. Then he went and closed the door, and sat down at his desk. And he said to me, could I keep a secret. And I said sure. And he said no matter what he told me, I had to promise it was a secret. Something only he and I knew. I couldn’t tell anyone, including my mother. Just him and me. I said of course. So he took out his key ring and unlocked the bottom drawer of his desk and brought out a scrapbook and showed it to me. It was about the Spare Change Killer.”

  Jesus Christ, fourteen years old, high puberty.

  “So I look at it, and while I’m looking at it, he tells me that he is really two people. He’s him, Dad, most of the time. But sometimes he’s also a guy named Chico Zarilla. And Chico Zarilla is the Spare Change Killer. I said what’s the money for. He said the spare change stuff was just something to let everybody know it was him. It didn’t mean anything.”

  I felt Rosie’s muscular little certainty, solid against my thigh. She was snoring faintly. I kept my hand resting on her flank. Behind me, outside my window, the rain was persistent.

  “You’d think I would have been shocked, wouldn’t you,” Bob said. “But in fact I was thrilled. My dad was famous. My dad was famous and mysterious, and dangerous. My dad killed people. And no one knew it but me. I didn’t know what to say, so I asked him if he dressed up like Chico when he was being the Spare Change Killer. And he said no. He said Chico was the Spare Change Killer, not him, and Chico didn’t want to call any attention to himself when he was doing it. So I’m really excited, and I want to keep talking about it, but I don’t know what to say and I say, ‘Is it fun?’ How about that for a question, huh?”

  Bob looked up into the camera in a stagy way, as if it said in his notes, “Look up at camera.”

  “And my dad says that’s why Chico does it. It’s fun. He likes it. And I so got it. I knew exactly what he meant. I knew it would be fun. And I say can I see your gun, and he says Chico keeps them here, in this closet, and he unlocks the closet door, and he takes out like a footlocker, and he unlocks that, and there’s like a half a dozen guns, all the same, and a bunch of bullets, and I say are they loaded, and he says no. And he says would you like to shoot one? And I say yes, and he says okay, I’ll teach you.”

  I picked up the remote and clicked stop and Bob’s voice stopped and his image froze on the screen. Rosie opened a black, almond-shaped eye and looked at me. I patted her. With the tape shut off, I could hear the hushed sound of the rain coming down. I could hear it making a gentle noise on the big skylight over my easel. My head felt as if it were too full. The distant, ironic part of myself looked down at me, sitting alone with a small dog in a dim room watching this bland, bumptious monster talk about his father’s serial ferocity, as if it were some sort of hobby, like fly fishing. I got up. Rosie looked at me with annoyance. I went to my closet and got out a pale green sweatshirt with a zipper front and put it on. Rosie thumped her tail in case I might be going to give her a cookie. Which I was. She took it promptly and chewed it briskly. I walked the length of my loft and back and went to the small bay where I had my breakfast table, and stood, and looked out at the red-brick neighborhood, gleaming wet in the early autumn rain. I looked back at Rosie. She was still lying down, but her head was up and she was watching me.

  “They’re dead,” I said to Rosie. “Both of them. They can’t do these things anymore…. They’re dead.”

  Rosie wagged her tail. I went back to the couch and sat down and picked up the clicker. Rosie readjusted herself against me, and put her head down and went back to sleep. I ran the tape.

  “He taught me to shoot. In the woods, off the railroad tracks, in Walford. He never took me with him when he did the Spare Change thing, or Chico Zarilla did it. But he used to tell me about it after. We’d go in his study and close the door and he’d give me the details. On my sixteenth birthday, when we were alone, he gave me a picture of himself as Chico Zarilla. It was this thing we had…our thing.”

  Bob paused and looked down. I’m sure he had it in his notes: “Pause and look down.” He probably had written “Pause dramatically.”

  Bob looked back up into the camera. “The year he died was a bad year,” he said. “The woman I loved chose another man. Two very big holes in my life. But…” He shrugged. “Gotta keep going, right, Sunny? So I kept going, but last year my mom got sick, and before she died she told me my dad had confessed to her about Chico Zarilla, and then went to school that day and killed himself. The school covered it up and she let them. She didn’t want people to know about him. She was worried his evil gene would get passed on to me. My mom thought like that, evil genes.” He laughed and shook his head. “After she died, I went through the house and his office was like he left it. The guns were still locked up in there, and the bullets. I took them…. They made me feel close to my dad…. Then that same year I ran into Vicki again, the woman
who left me for another man?…And I went home that night feeling really alone. My mother and father were dead. The only woman I ever loved was with another man….” He leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling. He brought his eyes back down and looked directly into the camera. “But I still had Chico Zarilla,” he said. He sat looking into the camera for a long moment, as if he wasn’t sure what to say next. Then he smiled. “I’ll miss you, Sunny,” he said. “I really will.”

  He stood abruptly and walked out of the shot. The camera stared for a moment at the empty chair and then the screen went blank.

  Keep reading for an exciting excerpt from the next Sunny Randall novel, ROBERT B. PARKER’S BLOOD FEUD.

  One

  I said to Spike, “Do I look as if I’m getting older?”

  “This is some kind of trap,” he said.

  “I’m being serious,” I said. “The UPS kid ma’amed me the other day.”

  “I assume you shot him,” Spike said.

  “No,” I said. “But I thought about it.”

  We were seated at one of the middle tables in the front room at his restaurant, Spike’s, formerly known as Spike’s Place, on Marshall Street near Quincy Market. It had started out as a sawdust-on-the-floor saloon, before there even was a Quincy Market. It was still a comedy club when Spike and two partners took it over. Then Spike bought out the two partners, reimagined the place as an upscale dining establishment—“Complete with flora and fauna,” as he liked to say—and now he was making more money than he ever had in his life.

  It was an hour or so before he would open the door for what was usually a robust Sunday brunch crowd. We were both working on Bloody Marys even though it was only ten-thirty in the morning, being free, well past twenty-one, and willing to throw caution to the wind.

  Spike took a bite of the celery stalk from his drink. I knew he was doing that only to buy time.

  “Would you mind repeating the question?” he said.

  “You heard me.”