"Of course, if it"s true. I think it"s true. Cathy Connelly seems like the best person to ask about how they got the gun. Terry doesn"t know, Powell is dead. Who"s left?"
"Why don"t you go ask her then?" Quirk said. "Thanks for the drink."
He walked out leaving the door open behind him, and I listened to his footsteps going down the hall.
Chapter 14.
I went over to the university to call on Carl Tower. I hoped the campus cops weren"t under orders to shoot on sight. Whether they were, the secretary with the ripe thighs was not. She was friendly. She had on a pants suit today, black, with a large red valentine heart over the left breast. Red platform heels, red enamel pendant earrings. Bright red lipstick. She obviously remembered me. I was probably haunting her dreams.
She said, "May I help you?"
"Don"t pull that sweet talk on me," I said.
"I beg your pardon."
"I know what you"re thinking, and I"m sorry, but I"m on duty."
"Of all the outer offices in all the towns in all the world," she said, "you had to walk into mine." There was no change in her expression.
I started to say something about, "If you want anything, just whistle." but at that moment Carl Tower appeared at his office door and saw me. I was obviously not haunting his dreams.
"Spenser," he said, "get the h.e.l.l in my office."
I took off my wrist.w.a.tch and gave it to the secretary. "If I don"t come out alive," I said, "I want you to have this."
She giggled. I went into Tower"s office.
Tower picked up a tabloid-size newspaper from his desk and tossed it across at me. It was the university newspaper. Across the top was the headline ADMINISTRATION AGENT SPIES ON STUDENT, and in a smaller drop head, PRIVATE EYE HIRED BY ADMINISTRATION QUESTIONS ENGLISH PROFESSOR. I didn"t bother to read the story, though I noticed they spelled my name wrong in the lead paragraph.
"It"s with an"s, not a c," I said. "Like the English poet. S-p-e-n-s-e-r."
Tower was biting down so hard on his back teeth that the muscles of his jaw bulged at the hinge.
"We won"t ask for a return on the retainer, Spenser," he said. "But if you are on this campus again, ever, we"ll arrest you for trespa.s.sing and use every influence we have to have your license lifted."
"I hear you got the ma.n.u.script back," I said.
"That"s right. No thanks to you. Now beat it."
"Who returned it?"
"It just showed up yesterday in a cardboard box, on the library steps."
"Ever wonder why it came back?"
Tower stood up. "You"re through, Spenser. As of this minute. You are no longer in the employ of this university. You have no business here. You"re trespa.s.sing. Either you leave or I call some people to take you out of here."
"How many you going to call?"
Tower"s face got quite red. He said, "You sonova b.i.t.c.h," and put his hand on the phone.
I said, "Never mind. If I whipped your entire force it would embarra.s.s both of us."
On the way out I stopped by the secretary"s desk. She handed me back my watch.
"I"m glad you made it," she said.
On the inside of the watch strap in red ink she had written "Brenda Loring, 555-3676."
I looked up at her. "I am, too," I said, and strapped the watch back on.
She went back to typing and I went back to leaving the university in disgrace. Administration agent, I thought as I went furtively down the corridor. Zowie!
Chapter 15.
Back to the Fenway to Cathy Connelly"s apartment. I rang the bell; no answer. I didn"t feel like swapping compliments with Charlie Charm the super, so I strolled around the building looking for an alternate solution. Behind the apartment was an asphalt courtyard with lines for parking s.p.a.ces and a line of trash barrels, dented and bent, against the wall, behind low trapezoidal concrete barriers to keep the cars from denting and bending them more. Despite the ill-fitting covers on them, some of the trash had spilled out and littered the ground along the foundation. The cellar entrance door was open, but the screen door was closed and fastened with a hook and eye arrangement. It was plastic screening. I took out my jackknife and cut through the screen at the hook. I put my hand through and unhooked it. Tight security. I thought. Straight ahead and two steps down stretched the cellar. To my left rose the stairs. I went up them. Cathy Connelly was apartment 13. I guessed second floor, given the size of the building. I was wrong. It was third floor. Close observation is my business.
Down the corridor ran a frayed, faded rose runner. The doors were dark-veneer wood with the numbers in shiny silver decals asymmetrically pasted on. The k.n.o.b on each door was fluted gla.s.s. The corridor was weakly lit by a bare bulb in a wall sconce at the end. In front of number 13 a faint ap.r.o.n of light spread out under the door. I looked at my watch; I knocked again. Same result. I put my ear against the door panel. The television was on, or the radio. I heard no other sound. That didn"t prove anything. Lots of people left the TV running when they went out. Some to discourage burglars. Some because they forgot to turn them off. Some so it wouldn"t seem so empty when they came home. I tried the k.n.o.b. No soap. The door was locked. That was a problem about as serious as the screen door in the cellar. I kicked it open-which would probably irritate the super, since when I did, the jamb splintered. I stepped in and felt the muscles begin to tighten behind my shoulders. The apartment was hot and stuffy, and there was a smell I"d smelled before.
The real estate broker had probably described it as a studio apartment-which meant one room with kitchenette and bath. The bath was to my left, door slightly ajar. The kitchenette was directly before me, separated from the rest of the room by a plastic curtain. To my right were a day bed, the covers folded back as if someone were about to get in, an armchair with a faded pink and beige shawl draped over it as a slipcover, a bureau, a steamer trunk apparently used as a coffee table, and a wooden kitchen table, painted blue, which seemed to double as a desk. On it the television maundered in black and white. In front of the kitchen table was a straight chair. A woman"s white blouse and faded denim skirt were folded over the back of it, underwear and socks tangled on the seat. A saddle shoe lay on its side beneath the chair and another stood flatfooted under the table. There was no one in the room. There was no one behind the plastic curtain. I turned into the bathroom and found her.
She was in the tub, face down, her head under water, her body beginning to bloat. The smell was stronger in here. I forced myself to look. There was a clotted tangle of blood in the hair at the back of one ear. I touched the water; it was room temperature. Her body was the same. I wanted to turn her over, but I couldn"t make myself do it. On the floor by the tub, looking as if she"d just stepped out of them, were a pair of flowered baby doll pajamas. She"d been there awhile. Couple of days, anyway. While I"d been ringing her bell and asking the super if he"d seen her, she"d been right here floating motionless in the tepid water. How do you do, Miss Connelly, my name is Spenser, very sorry I didn"t get to meet you sooner. h.e.l.l of a way to meet now. I looked at her for two, maybe three minutes, feeling the nausea bubble inside me. Nothing happened, so I began to look at the bathroom. It was crummy. Plastic tiles, warn linoleum buckling up from the floor. The sink was dirty and the faucet dripped steadily. There was no shower. Big patches of paint had peeled off the ceiling. I thought of a line from a poem: "Even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course/Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot." I forget who wrote it.
There were no telltale cigar b.u.t.ts, no torn halves of claim checks, no traces of lint from an imported cashmere cloth sold only by I. Press. No footprints, no thumb prints, no clues. Just a drowned kid swelling with death in a shabby bathroom in a crummy apartment in a lousy building run by a grumpy janitor. And me.
I went back out into the living room. No phone. G.o.d is my copilot. I went out to the hall and down the stairs to the cellar. The super had an office part.i.tioned off with chicken wire from the rest of the cellar. In it were a rolltop desk, an antique television set, and a swivel chair, in which sat the super. The smell of bad wine oozed out of the place. He looked at me with no sign of recognition or welcome.
I said, "I want to use your phone."
He said, "There"s a pay phone at the drugstore across the street. I ain"t running no charity here."
I said, "There is a dead person in room thirteen, and I am going to call the police and tell them. If you say anything to me but yes, sir, I will hit you at least six times in the face. "
He said, "Yes, sir." Pushing an old wino around always enlivens your spirits. I picked up the phone and called Quirk. Then I went back upstairs and waited for him to arrive with his troops. It wasn"t as long a wait as it seemed. When they arrived Captain Yates was along.
He and Quirk went in to look bt the remains. I sat on the day bed and didn"t look at anything. Sergeant Belson sat on the edge of the table smoking a short cigar b.u.t.t that looked like he"d stepped on it.
"Do you buy those things secondhand?" I asked.
Belson took the cigar b.u.t.t out of his mouth and looked at it. "If I srnoked the big fifty cent jobs in the cedar wrappers, you"d figure I was on the take."
"Not the way you dress," I said.
"You ever think of another line of work, Spenser? So far all you"ve detected is two stiffs. Maybe a crossing guard, say, or..."
Quirk and Yates came out of the bathroom with a man from the coroner"s. The lines in Quirk"s face looked very deep, and the medic was finishing a shrug. Yates came over to me. He was a tall man with narrow shoulders and a hard-looking pot belly. He wore gla.s.ses with translucent plastic rims like they used to hand out in the army. His mouth was wide and loose.
He looked at me very hard and said, "Someone"s going to have to pay for that door."
Belson gave him a startled look; Quirk was expressionless. I couldn"t think of anything to say, so I didn"t say anything. It was a technique I ought to work on.
Yates said, "What"s your story, Jack? What the h.e.l.l are you doing here?"
"Spenser," I said, "with an"s like the English poet. I was selling Girl Scout cookies door to door and they told us to be persistent..."
"Don"t get smart with me, Jack; we got you for breaking and entering. If the lieutenant here hadn"t said he knew you, I"da run you in already. The janitor says you threatened him, too."
I looked at Belson. He was concentrating mightily on getting his cigar b.u.t.t relit, turning it carefully over the tlarne of a kitchen match to make sure it fired evenly. He didn"t look at me.
"What"s the coroner"s man say about the kid?" I asked Quirk.
Yates answered. "Accidental death. She slipped getting in the tub, hit her head, and drowned."
Belson made a noise that sounded like a cough. Yates spun toward him. "You got something to say, Sergeant?"
BElson looked up. "Not me, Captain, no, sir, just inhaled some smoke wrong. Fell right on her head, all right, yes, sir."
Yates stared at Belson for about fifteen seconds. Belson puffed on his cigar. His face showed nothing. Quirk was looking carefully at the light fixture on the ceiling.
"Captain," I said, "does it bother you that her bed is turned back, her clothes are on the chair, and her pajamas are on the bathroom floor? Does it seem funny to you that someone would take off her clothes, put on her pajamas, and get in the bathtub?"
"She brought them in to put on when she got through," Yutes said very quickly. His mouth moved erratically as he talked. It was like watching a movie with the soundtrack out of sync. Peculiar.
"And dropped them carefully in a pile on the floor where the tub would splash them and she"d drip on them when she got out because she loved putting on wet pajamas." I said.
"Accidental death by drowning. Open and shut." Yates said it hard and loud with a lot of lip motion. Fascinating to watch. "Quirk, let"s go. Belson, get this guy"s statement. And you, Jack"-he gave me the hard look again-"be where I can reach you. And when I call, you better come running."
"How about I come over and sleep on your back step," I said, but Yates was already on his way out.
Quirk looked at Belson. Belson said, "Right on her head she fell, Marty."
Quirk said, "Yeah," and went out after Yates.
Belson whistled "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" between his teeth as he got out his notebook and looked at me. "Shoot," he said.
"For crissake, Frank, this is really raw."
"Captain don"t want an editorial," Belson said, "just what happened."
"Even if you aren"t bothered by the pajamas and all, isn"t it worth more than routine when the ex-roommate of a murder suspect dies violently?"
Belson said, "I spent six years rattling doork.n.o.bs under the MTA tracks in Charlestown. Now ride in a car and wear a tie. Captain just wants what happened."
I told him.
Chapter 16.
I sat in my car on the dark Fenway. The super had, grumbling, installed a padlock on the splintered door to the Connelly apartment while a prowl car cop watched. Belson had departed with my statement, and everything was neat and orderly again. The corpse gone. The mob, the cops, the university had all told me to mind my own business. Not a bad trio; I was waiting for a threat from organized religion. In a few weeks Terry Orchard would be gone, to the women"s reformatory in Framinghapt; twenty years probably, a crime of pa.s.sion by a young woman. She"d be out when she was forty, ready to start anew. You meet such interesting people in jail.
I got a flashlight and some tape out of the glove compartment and a pinch bar out of my trunk and went back over to the apartment house. The super hadn"t fixed the screen on the back door, but he had shut and locked the inside door. I went to a cellar window. It was locked. On my hands and knees I looked through the frost patterns of grime. Inside was darkness. I flashed the light through. Inside was what looked like a coal bin, no longer used for real. There were barrels and boxes and a couple of bicyelcs. I taped a tic-tac-toe pattern on one of the windowpanes and tapped the gla.s.s out with the pinch bar. The tape kept the noise down. When the opening was big enough I reached my hand through and unlatched the window. It was not a very big window, but I managed to slide through it and drop to the cellar floor. I sc.r.a.ped both shins in the process.
The cellar was a maze of plastic trash bags, old wooden barrels, steamer trunks, cardboard boxes, clumsily tied piles of newspaper. A rat scuttled out of the beam from my flashlight as I worked my way through the junk. At the far end a door, slightly ajar, opened onto the furnace room, and to the left were the stairway and the super"s cage. I could hear canned laughter from the television. I went very quietly along the wall toward the stairs. I was in luck; when I peered around the corner of the super"s office he was in his swivel chair, asleep in the rich fumes of port wine and furnace heat, the TV blaring before him. I went up the same stairs to the third floor. No hesitation on the second floor-I learn quickly. The padlock on Cathy Connelly"s door was cheap and badly installed. I got the pinch bar under the hasp and pulled it loose with very little noise. Once inside I put a chair against the door to keep it closed and turned on the lights. The place hadn"t changed much in the past two hours. The bloated corpse was gone, but otherwise there was nothing different. It wasn"t a very big apartment. I could search it in a couple of hours probably. I didn"t know what I was looking for, of course, which would slow me down, because I couldn"t eliminate things on an "is-it-bigger-than-a-bread-box" basis.
I started in the bathroom, because it was on the left. If you are going to get something searched you have to do it orderly. Start at a point and go section by section through the place, not where things are most likely, or least likely, or anything else, just section by section until you"ve looked at everything. The bathroom didn"t take long. There was in the medicine cabinet some toothpaste, some aspirin, some nose drops prescribed by a doctor in New Roch.e.l.le, New York, a bottle of Cope, some lipstick, some liquid make-up, a safety razor, an eyebrow pencil. I emptied out the make-up bottle; there was nothing in it but make-up. The aspirin tasted like aspirin, the Cope appeared to be Cope, the nose drops smelled like nose drops. There was nothing in the lipstick tube but lipstick. There was nothing in the toilet tank, nothing taped underneath the sink, no sign that anything had been slipped under the buckling linoleum. I stood on the toilet seat and unscrewed the ceiling fixture with a jackknife blade-nothing inside but dusty wiring that looked like it wouldn"t pa.s.s the city"s electrical code. I screwed the fixture back in place.
I went over the kitchen next. I emptied the flour, sugar, dry cereal, salt, and pepper into the sink one by one and sifted through them. Other than some little black insects I found nothing. The stove was an old gas stove. I took up the grillwork over the burners, looked carefully at the oven. The stove couldn"t be moved without disconnecting the gas pipe. I was willing to bet Cathy Connelly never had. I took all the pans out of the under sink cabinet and wormed under the sink on my back, using my flashlight to examine it all. A c.o.c.kroach. There was little food in the old gas refrigerator. I emptied it. A couple of TV dinners. I melted them under the hot water in the sink, and found nothing. I took the panel off of the bottom and looked carefully in. The motor was thick with dust kitties, and the drip pan was gummy with G.o.d knows what.
The living room was of course the one that took time. It was about two in the morning when I found something. In the bottom bureau drawer was a cigar box containing letters, bills, canceled checks. I took it over to the daybed, sat down, and began to read through them. There were two letters from her mother full of aimless amenities that made my throat tighten. The dog got on the school bus and her father had gotten a call from the school and had to leave the store and go get it, younger brother was in a junior high school pageant, momma had lost three pounds, she hoped Cathy was watching what she ate, daddy sent his love.
The third letter was different. It was on the stationery of a Peabody motel. It said: Darling, You are beautiful when you are asleep. As I write this I am looking at you and the covers are half off you so I can see your b.r.e.a.s.t.s. They are beautiful. I want to climb back into bed with you, but I must leave. You can cut my eight o"clock cla.s.s, but I can"t. I won"t mark you absent though and I"ll be thinking about last night all the time. The room is paid for and you have to leave by noon, they said.
I love you.
There was no date, no signature. It was written in a distinctive cursive script.
For crissake! A clue. A G.o.dd.a.m.ned clue. I folded the note up and put it in my inside coat pocket. So far I was guilty of breaking and entering, possession of burglar"s tools, and destruction of property. I figured tampering with evidence would round things out nicely. I wanted to run right out and track down my clue, but I didn"t. I searched the rest of the room. There were no other clues.
I turned off the lights, moved the chair, and went out. The door wouldn"t stay shut because of the broken padlock. I went out the front way this time, as if I belonged. When I reached my car I put the pinch bar back in the trunk, got in the car, and sat for a bit. Now that I had a clue, what exactly was I supposed to do with it? I looked at my watch. 3 A.M. Searching apartments is slow business. I turned on the interior light in my car, took out my clue, and read it again. It said the same thing it said the first time. I folded it up again and tapped my front teeth with it for about fifteen seconds. Then I put it back in my pocket, turned off the interior light, started up the car, and went home. When I decide something I don"t hesitate.
I went to bed and dreamed I was a miner and the tunnel wits collapsing and everyone else had left. I woke up with the dream unfinished and my clock said ten minutes of seven. I looked at the bureau. My clue was up there where I"d left it, partly unfolded, along with my loose change and my jackknife and my wallet. Maybe I"d catch somehonly today. Maybe I"d detect something. Maybe I"d solve a crime. There are such days. I"d even had some. I climbed out of bed and plodded to the shower. I hadn"t worked out in four days and felt it. If I solved something this morning, maybe I could take the afternoon off and go over to the Y.
I took a shower and shaved and dressed and went out. It was only 7:45 and cold. The snow was hard-crusted and the sun glistened off it very brightly. I put on my sungla.s.ses. Even through their dark lenses it was a bright and lovely day. I stopped at a diner and had two cups of coffee and three plain doughnuts. I looked at my watch. 8:15. The trouble with being up and at "em bright and early was once you were up most of the "em that you wanted to be at weren"t out yet.
I bought a paper and cruised over to the university. There was room to park in a tow zone near the gymnasium. I parked there and read the paper for half an hour. Nowhere was there mention of the fact that I"d found a clue. In fact, nowhere was anyone even predicting that I would. At nine o"clock I got out and went looking for Iris Milford.