"Get far enough away and it looks kinda pretty, don"t it?" she said. "You only get order from a distance. Close up is always messy."
"Yeah," I said, "but your own life is always close up. You only see other people"s lives at long range."
"You better believe it," she said. "I"ll take another pop."
I ordered us two more drinks.
"Okay, Spenser, what is it? You not the type to feed drinks to a poor colored lady and take advantage of her body. Even one as irresistible as mine. What you want?"
I liked her. She"d been there and seen it done. A tough, wised-up, honest broad.
"Well, if you"re not going to come across, I"ll take second best. Tell me about Cathy Connelly."
"What you want to know?"
"I don"t know, everything, anything. All I know is she was once Terry Orchard"s roommate, that she moved out when the Powell kid moved in, that she now lives on the Fenway, and that she wasn"t home when I called on her this morning."
"That"s about as much as I know. She was in my Chaucer cla.s.s, and I copied her notes a couple times. I don"t know her much better than that."
"She belong to SCACE?"
"Not that I know. She seemed kind of a loner. Didn"t belong to anything I know of. You never see her around campus, but that don"t mean much because the G.o.dd.a.m.n campus is so big and crowded that you might not see a woolly rhinoceros around campus."
"Boyfriends?" I asked.
"None that I know. But I"m telling you, I don"t hardly know her. What I"m saying could be wrong as h.e.l.l."
"Where can I get a picture of her?"
"Student Personnel Office, I would guess. That"s where we get ones we use in the paper for fast-breaking news stories, like who was elected captain of the girls" field hockey team. Campus security can probably get them for you."
"I don"t think so, Iris. Last dealing I had with campus security was when they ejected me from the premises. I think they don"t like me."
She widened her eyes. "I thought they hired you."
"They did, but I think they are in the process of making an agonizing reappraisal of that decision."
"You having a good week, Spenser. Someone plunks you in the eye, you get thrown off the campus, you gonna get fired, you can"t find Cathy Connelly. I hope you don"t depress easy."
"Like you were saying, it"s always messy close up."
"What you want Connelly for, anyway?"
"She was Terry Orchard"s roommate. She might know how Terry"s gun got from her bedside table into a hood"s pocket."
"Jesus, she don"t look the type."
"There isn"t any type, my love."
She nodded, "Ain"t that the truth."
"Want dessert?" I said.
She nodded. "Do I look like someone who turns down dessert?"
I asked for a dessert menu.
Iris said, "I can get the picture for you. I"ll go over to student personnel and tell them we need it for a feature we"re doing. We do it all the time."
"Would you like two desserts?" I said.
After I paid the bill with some of Roland Orchard"s retainer and drove her back to the university, she did what she said. I sat in the car with the heater on, and she strolled into the student center and returned twenty minutes later with a two-by-two ID photo of Cathy Connelly. I thanked her.
She said, "Two drinks and a lobster salad will get you almost anything, baby," and went to cla.s.s.
I drove over to Ma.s.s Ave and had a technician I know at a photo lab blow the picture up to eight by ten. Service while I waited cost me twenty-five dollars more of Roland Orchard"s retainer, and I still hadn"t got the tear fixed in my car top.
I took the picture back to my office and sat behind my desk looking at it. She looked like a pallid little girl. Small features, light hair, prominent teeth, serious eyes. While I was looking at her picture my door opened and in came Lieutenant Quirk. Hatless, wearing a glen plaid overcoat, shoes glossy, pocked face clean-shaven, ruddy from the cold, and glowing with health. He closed the door behind him, and stood looking at me with his hands in his overcoat pockets. He did not radiate cheer.
"Come in, Lieutenant," I said. "No need to knock, my door is always open to a public servant. You"ve come, no doubt, to ask my a.s.sistance in solving a particularly knotty puzzle... "
"Knock it off, Spenser. If I want to listen to bulls.h.i.t, I"ll go over to a City Council meeting."
"Okay, have a seat. Want a drink?"
Quirk ignored the chair I"d nodded at and stood in front of my desk.
"Yeah, I"ll have a drink."
I poured two shots of bourbon into two paper cups. Quirk drank his off without expression and put the empty cup down. I sipped at mine a little and thought fondly of the stuff that Roland Orchard served.
"Terry Orchard is it, Spenser," he said.
"The h.e.l.l she is."
"She"s it. Captain Yates is taking personal charge of the case, and she"s the one."
"Yates. That means you"re off it?"
"That"s right."
"What else does it mean?"
"It doesn"t mean anything else."
I poured two more shots of bourbon. Quirk"s hard face looked like he was concealing a toothache.
"Like h.e.l.l it doesn"t mean anything else, Quirk. You didn"t make a special trip down here just to keep me informed on personnel shifts in the BPD. You don"t like her for it, and you know it. Why is Yates on it?"
"He didn"t say."
I sipped some more of my bourbon. Quirk walked over and looked out my window.
"What a really swell view you"ve got, Spenser."
I didn"t say anything. Quirk came back to my desk, picked up the bottle, and poured himself another drink.
"Okay," he said. "I don"t like the kid for the murder."
I said, "Me either."
"I got nothing. Everything I"ve got says she"s guilty. Nice simple murder, nice simple solution. Why screw around with it?"
"That"s right," I said. "Why screw around with it?"
"I"ve been on the force twenty-two years. You meet a lot of liars in twenty-two years. I don"t think she was lying."
I said, "Me either."
Quirk was walking around the room as he talked, looking at it like he looked at everything, seeing it all, and if he ever had to, he"d remember it all.
"You went to see Joe Broz yesterday."
I nodded.
"Why?"
"So he could tell me to b.u.t.t out of the G.o.dwulf Ma.n.u.script-Terry Orchard affair."
"What did you say?"
"I said we"ll see."
"Did you know the ma.n.u.script is back?"
i raised one eyebrow, something I"d perfected after years of practice and a score of old Brian Donlevy movies. Quirk appeared not to notice.
"Broz suggested that was possible," I said.
Quirk nodded. "Any idea why Broz wanted you to b.u.t.t out?"
"No," I said. "Any idea why Yates wanted you to b.u.t.t out?"
"No, but there"s a lot of pressure from somewhere up the line."
"And Yates is responding."
Quirk"s face seemed to shut down. "I don"t know about what Yates is doing. I know he"s in charge of the case and I"m not. He"s the captain. He has the right to a.s.sign personnel."
"Yeah, sure. I know Yates a little. One of the things he does best is respond to pressure from somewhere up the line."
Quirk didn"t say anything.
"Look, Lieutenant," I said, "does it seem odd to you that there are two guys looking into the Terry Orchard thing and both of us are told to b.u.t.t out within the same day? Does that seem like any kind of coincidence to you?"
"Spenser, I am a cop. I have been a cop for twenty-two years, and I will keep on being one until they lock me out of the station house. One of the things that a cop has to have is discipline. He gets orders, he has to obey them-or the whole thing goes to h.e.l.l. I don"t have to like what"s happening, but I do it. And I don"t run around crying about it."
"Words to live by," I said. "It was the widely acclaimed Adolf Eichmann who popularized that "I obey orders" routine, wasn"t it?"
"That"s a cheap shot, Spenser. You know G.o.dd.a.m.n well the cops are right more than they"re wrong. We"re not wiping out six million people. We"re trying to keep the germs from taking over the world. To do that you got to have order, and if someone gets burned now and then so someone gets burned. If every cop started deciding which order to obey and which one not, then the germs would win. If the germs win, all the G.o.dd.a.m.n bleeding hearts will get their a.s.s shot."
"Yeah, sure, the big picture. So some G.o.dd.a.m.n teenaged kid gets fed to the fishes for something she didn"t do. So you know she didn"t do it and Joe Broz puts the squeeze on some politician who puts the squeeze on Captain Yates who takes you off the case. But you don"t cry. It"s good for society. b.a.l.l.s. Why don"t you take what you got to the States?"
"Because I haven"t got enough. The State cops would laugh and giggle if I came in with what I"ve got. And because, G.o.dd.a.m.n it, Spenser, because I can"t. I"m a cop. It"s what I do. I can"t."
"I know," I said. "But I can. And I"m going to. I"m going to have Broz and Yates, and you, too, if I have to, and whoever else has got his thumb in whatever pie this is."
"Maybe you will," Quirk said. "I hear you were a pretty good cop before you got fired. What"d you get fired for?"
"Insubordination. It"s one of my best things."
"And maybe Broz will have you shot in the back of the head. "
I let that pa.s.s. We were silent.
"How much do I have to get for you before you go to the States?"
"I"m not asking you to get a d.a.m.n thing for me," Quirk said.
"Yeah, I know. If I got you proof. Not suspicion, proof. Then what happens?"
"Then the pressure will go away. Yates is impressed with proof."
"I"ll bet," I said.
More silence. Quirk didn"t seem to want to leave, but he didn"t have anything to say. Or at least he wasn"t saying it.
"What do you know about Cathy Connelly, Lieutenant?"
"We checked her out routinely. No record, no evidence of drugs. Roomed with Orchard before her boyfriend moved in. Now lives somewhere over on the Fenway."
"Anybody interview her?"
"Couple of precinct boys in a radio car stopped by, She wasn"t home. We saw no reason to press it. Do you?"
"Those two hoods had Terry Orchard"s gun with them when they came to the apartment. How"d they get it?"
"If it"s true."