Mortal Stakes (11 page)

There’s a restaurant in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which makes whipped cream biscuits, and I got the recipe once while I was up there having dinner with Brenda Loring.

I made some while the coffee perked, and while they baked I squeezed a pint of orange juice and drank it. I had the biscuits with fresh strawberries and sour cream and three cups of coffee.

It was nearly ten o’clock when I got out onto the street.

There was a bright smell of summer outside my apartment house. Across Arlington Street the Public Garden was a sunny pleasure. I strolled on past the enormous Thomas Ball statue of Washington on horseback. The flower beds were rich with petunias and redolent of pansies against a flourish of scarlet snapdragons. The swan boats had begun to cruise the pond, pedaled by college kids in yachting caps and trailed by an orderly assemblage of hungry ducks that broke formation to dart at the peanuts the tourists threw. I crossed the bridge over the swan boat lake and headed toward the Common on the other side of Charles Street. At the crossing there was a guy selling popcorn from a pushcart and another selling ice cream and another selling balloons and little monkeys dangling from thin sticks and blue pennants that said BOSTON, MASS., in yellow script. I turned right, walked up Charles toward Boylston. At the corner was the old guy that takes candids with a big tripod camera; faded tan samples were displayed in a case on the tripod. I turned up Boylston toward Tremont and down Tremont toward Stuart. My office was on Stuart Street. It wasn’t much of an office, but it suited the location. It would have been an ideal spot for a VD clinic or a public exterminator.

I opened the window as soon as I got in. I’d have to remember not to do push-ups on the days I had to open that window. I hung up my blue blazer, sat down at my desk, got my yellow pad out, and pulled the phone over. By one thirty I had pretty well confirmed Marty Rabb’s biography as stated.

The town clerk’s office in Lafayette, Indiana, established that Marty Rabb had in fact lived there and that his parents still did. The office of the registrar at Marquette confirmed his attendance and graduation in 1965. I called a cop I knew in Providence and asked him if they had anything on Rabb when he was at Pawtucket. He called me back in forty minutes to say no. He promised me he’d keep his mouth shut about my question, and I half thought he would. He was as trustworthy as I was likely to find.

Linda Rabb was more of a problem. There was no record of her marriage to Rabb at the Chicago Hall of Records.

As far as they knew, Marty Rabb hadn’t married Linda Hawkins or anyone else in Chicago in 1970 or any other time.

Maybe they got married by some JP in a suburb. I called Arlington Heights and talked with the city clerk himself. No record. How about any record of Linda Hawkins or Linda Rabb? None, no birth certificate, no marriage license. If I’d wait a minute, he’d check motor vehicles. I waited. It was more like ten minutes. The air blowing in from Stuart Street was hot and gritty. The sweat had soaked through my polo shirt and made it stick to my back. I looked at my watch: 3:15.

I hadn’t had lunch yet. I sniffed at the hot breeze. If the wind was right, I could catch the scent of sauerbraten wafting across the street from Jake Wirth’s. It wasn’t right. All I could smell was the uncontrolled emission of the traffic.

The Arlington Heights city clerk came back on the phone.

“Still there?”

“Yep.”

“Got no record of a driver’s license. No auto registration. There’s four Hawkinses in the city directory but no Linda. Want the phone numbers?”

“Yes, and can you give me the number of the school administration department?”

“Yeah, one minute, I’ll check it here.”

He did and gave it to me. I called them. They had no record of Linda Rabb or Linda Hawkins. There had been eight children named Hawkins in the school system since 1960. Six were boys. The other two were named Doris and Olive.

I hung up. Very cooperative.

I called the first Hawkins number in Arlington Heights. No soap. Nor was there any soap at the next two.

The fourth number didn’t answer. But unless they were the ones when I finally got them, I was going to have to wonder about old Linda. I looked at my watch: 4:30. Three thirty in Illinois. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. I went over to Jake Wirth’s, had some sauerbraten and dark beer, came back to the office at five forty-five, and called the fourth Hawkins again. A woman answered who had never heard of Linda Hawkins.

I swung my chair around and propped my feet on the windowsill and looked out at the top floor of the garment loft across the street. It was empty. Everyone had gone home.

There are a lot of reasons why someone doesn’t check out right off quick when you begin to look into her background.

But most of them have to do with deceit, and most deceit is based on having something to hide. Two pigeons settled down onto the window ledge of the loft and looked at me looking at them. I looked at my watch: 6:10. After supper on a summer evening. Twilight softball leagues were getting under way at this hour. Kids were going out to hang out on the corner till dark. Men were watering their lawns, their wives sitting nearby in lawn chairs. I was looking at two pigeons.

Linda Rabb was not what she was supposed to be, and that bothered me, like it bothered me that she met Rabb at a ball game even though she wasn’t interested in baseball till she married him. Little things, but they weren’t right. The pigeons flew off. The traffic sounds were dwindling. I’d have to find out about Linda Rabb. The Sox had a night game tonight, which meant Rabb wouldn’t be home. But Linda Rabb probably would be because of the kid. I called. She was.

“I wonder if I could drop by just for a minute,” I said.

“Just want to get the wife’s angle on things. You know, what it’s like to be home while the game’s on, that sort of thing.”

What a writer I’d make, get the wife’s angle. Slick. Probably should have said “little woman’s angle.”

“That’s okay, Mr. Spenser, I’m just giving the baby his bath. If you drop around in an hour or so, I’ll be watching the game on television, but we can talk.”

I thanked her and hung up. I looked at the window ledge on the garment loft some more. My office door opened behind me. I swiveled the chair around. A short fat man in a Hawaiian shirt and a panama hat came in and left the door open behind him. The shirt hung outside his maroon double knit pants. He wore wraparound black-rimmed sunglasses and smoked a cigar. He looked around my office without saying anything. I put my feet up on my desk and looked at him.

He stepped aside, and another man came in and sat down in front of my desk. He was wearing a tan suit, dark brown shirt, and a wide red-striped tie in browns, whites, and yellows. His tan loafers were gleaming; his hands were manicured; his face was tanned. His hair was bright gray and expensively barbered, curling over his collar in the back, falling in a single ringlet over his forehead. Despite the gray hair, his face was young and unlined. I knew him. His name was Frank Doerr.

“I’d like to talk with you, Spenser.”

“Oh golly,” I said, “you heard about my whipped cream biscuits and you were hoping I’d give you the recipe.”

The fat guy in the panama hat had closed the door behind Doerr and was leaning against it with his arms folded.

Akim Tamiroff.

Doerr said, “You know who I am, Spenser?”

“Aren’t you Julia Child?” I said.

“My name’s Doerr. I want to know what business you’re doing with the Red Sox.”

A master of disguise, the man of 1,000 faces. “Red Sox?” I said.

“Red Sox,” he said.

“Jesus, I didn’t think the word would get out that quickly. How’d you find out?”

“Never mind how I found out, I want answers.”

“Sure, sure thing, Mr. Doerr. You any relation to Bobby?”

“Don’t irritate me, Spenser. I am used to getting answers.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t know you had anything against Bobby Doerr, I thought he was a hell of a second baseman.”

Doerr said, “Wally,” without looking around, and the fat man at the door brought a gun out from under his flowered shirt. “Now knock off the bullshit, Spenser. I haven’t got a lot of time to spend in this roach hole.”

I thought “roach hole” was a little unkind, but I thought the gun in Wally’s hand was a little unkind too.

“Okay,” I said, “no need to get sore. I was a regional winner in the Leon Culberson look-alike contest, and the Sox wanted to talk to me about being a designated hitter.”

Doerr and Wally looked at me. The silence got to be quite long. “You don’t think I look like Leon Culberson?” I said.

Doerr leaned forward. “I asked around a little about you, Spenser. I heard you think you’re a riot. I think you’re a roach in a roach hole. I think you’re a thirty-five-cent piece of hamburg, and I think you need to learn some manners.”

The building was quiet; the traffic sounds were less frequent through the open window. Wally’s gun pointed at me without moving. Wally sucked on one of his canine teeth. My stomach hurt a little.

Doerr went on. “You are hanging around Fenway Park, hanging around the broadcast booth, talking with people, pretending you’re a writer, and not telling anyone at all that you’re only a goddamned egg-sucking snoop, a nickeland-dime cheapie. I want to know why, and I want to know right now or Wally will make you wish you’d never been born.”

I took my feet off the desk, slowly, and put them on the floor. I put my hands, slowly, on the desk and stood up. When I was on my feet, I said, “Frank, baby, you’re a gambling man, and I’ll make a bet with you. In fact, I’ll make two. First one is that you won’t shoot because you want to know what’s happening and what I’m into and it’s lousy percentage to shoot a guy without being sure why. Second bet is that if your pet pork chop tries to hassle me, I can take away his piece and clean his teeth with it. Even money.”

As far as Wally showed anything, I might have been talking about Sam Yorty or the Aga Khan. He didn’t move.

Neither did the gun. Doerr’s sun-lamp face seemed to have gotten whiter. The lines from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth had gotten deeper, and his right eyelid tremored. My stomachache continued.

Another silence. If I weren’t so tough, I would have thought maybe I was scared. Wally’s gun was a Walther P.38.

Nine-millimeter. Seven shots in the clip. Nice gun, the grip on a Walther was very comfortable, and the balance was good.

Wally seemed happy with his. Below on Stuart Street somebody with a trick horn blew shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits.

And some brakes squealed.

Doerr got up suddenly, turned on his heels, and walked out. Wally put the gun away, followed him out, and closed the door. I breathed in most of the air in the office through my nose and let it out again very slowly. My fingertips tingled. I sat down again, opened the bottom desk drawer, took out a bottle of bourbon, and drank from the neck. I coughed. I’d have to stop buying the house brand at Vito’s Superette.

I looked around at the empty office. Green file cabinet, three Vermeer prints that Susan Silverman had given me for Christmas, the chair that Doerr had sat in. Didn’t look so goddamned roachie to me.

TEN HOURS LATER I was in the coach section, window seat, aft of the wing, in an American Airlines 747, sipping coffee and chewing with little pleasure a preheated bun that tasted vaguely of adhesive tape. We were passing over Buffalo, which was a good idea, and heading for Chicago.

Beside me was a kid, maybe fifteen, and his brother, maybe eleven. They were discussing somebody named Ben, who might have been a dog, laughing like hell about it. Their mother and father across the aisle took turns giving them occasional warning glances when the laughter got raucous.

Their mother looked like she might be a fashion designer or a lady lawyer; the old man looked like a stevedore, uncomfortable in a shirt and tie. Beauty and the beast.

We got into Chicago at eleven. I rented a car, got a road map from the girl at the rental agency counter, and drove southwest from Chicago toward Redford, Illinois. It took six and a half hours, and the great heartland of America was hot as hell. My green rental Dodge had air conditioning and I kept it at full blast all the way. About two thirty I stopped at a diner and had two cheeseburgers and a black coffee. There was a blackberry pie which the counterman claimed his wife made, and I ate two pieces. He had married well. About four thirty the highway bent south and I saw the river. I’d seen it before, but each time I felt the same tug. The Mississippi, Cartier and La Salle, Grant at Vicksburg and ”it’s lovely to live on a raft.“ A mile wide and ”just keeps rolling.“ I pulled up onto the shoulder of the highway and looked at it for maybe five minutes. It was brown and placid.

I got to Redford at twenty of seven and checked into a two-story Holiday Inn just north of town that offered a view of the river and a swimming pool. The dining room was open and more than half empty. I ordered a draft beer and looked at the menu. The beer came in an enormous schooner. I ordered Wiener schnitzel and fresh garden vegetables and was startled to find when it came that it was excellent. I had finished two of the enormous schooners by then and perhaps my palate was insensitive to nuance. My compliments to the chef.

Three stars for the Holiday Inn in Redford, Illinois. I signed the check and went to bed.

The next morning I went into town. Outside the airconditioned motel the air was hot with a strong river smell.

Cicadas hummed. The Holiday Inn and the Mississippi River were obviously Redford’s high spots. It was a very small town, barely more than a cluster of shabby frame houses along the river. The yards were mostly bare dirt with an occasional clump of coarse and ratty-looking grass. The town’s single main street contained a hardware and feed store, a Woolworth’s five-and-ten, Scooter’s Lunch, Bill and Betty’s Market with two Phillips 66 pumps out front, and, fronting on a small square of dandelion-spattered grass, the yellow clapboard two-story town hall. There were two Greek Revival columns holding up the overhanging second floor and a bell tower that extended up perhaps two more stories to a thin spire with a weathervane at the tip. In the small square were a nineteenth-century cannon and a pyramid of cannonballs.