Paper Doll (2 page)

The Tripp-Nelson home was one of them. It had a wide raised panel door, which was painted royal blue. In the middle of the door was a big polished brass knocker in the form of a lion holding a big polished brass ring his mouth.

I had walked up the hill from Charles Street the way Olivia Nelson had on the night she was killed. I stopped at the lower corner of the square where it connected to Mt. Vernon. There was nothing remarkable about it. There were no bloodstains, now. The police chalkings and the yellow crime-scene tape were gone. Nobody even came and stood and had their picture taken on the spot where the sixteenounce framing hammer had exploded against the back of Olivia Nelson’s skull. According to the coroner’s report she probably never knew it. She probably felt that one explosion-and the rest was silence.

I had her case file with me. There wasn’t anywhere to start on this thing, so I thought it might help to be in her house when I read the file of her murder investigation. It wasn’t much of an idea, but it was the only one I had. Tripp knew I was coming. I had told him I needed to look around the house. A round-faced brunette maid with pouty lips and a British accent answered my ring. She had on an actual maid suit, black dress, little white apron, little white cap. You don’t see many of those anymore.

“My name’s Spenser,” I said. “Mr. Tripp said you’d be expecting me.”

She looked at me blankly, as if I were an inoffensive but unfamiliar insect that had settled on her salad.

“Yes, sir,” she said. “You’re to have the freedom of the house, sir. May I take your hat, sir?”

I was wearing a replica Brooklyn Dodgers baseball cap, royal blue with a white B and a white button on top. Susan had ordered it for me at the same time she’d gotten me the replica Braves hat, which I wore with my other outfit.

“I’ll keep it,” I said. “Makes me look like Gene Hermanski.”

“Certainly, sir. If you need me you should ring one of these bells.”

She showed me a small brass bell with a rosewood handle sitting on the front hall table. “How charming,” I said.

“Yes, sir.”

She backed gracefully away from me and turned and disappeared under the staircase, presumably to the servants’ area below stairs. She had pretty good legs. Although in Louisburg Square it was probably incorrect to look at the maid’s legs at all.

There was a central stairway in the front hall, with mahogany railing curving down to an ornate newel post, white risers, oak treads. To the right was the living room, to the left a study, straight down the hall was a dining room. The kitchen was past the stairs, to the right of the dining room. With the file under my arm, I walked slowly through the house. The living room was in something a shade darker than ivory, with pastel peach drapes spilling onto the floor. The furniture was white satin, with a low coffee table in the same shade of marble. There were rather formal-looking photographs of Tripp, a woman whom I assumed to be his late wife, and two young people who were doubtless their children. There was a fine painting of an English setter on the wall over a beige marble fireplace, and, over the sofa, on the longest wall, a large painting of a dapple gray horse that looked like it might have been done by George Stubbs and selected because the tones worked with the decor.

The house was very silent, and thickly carpeted. The only noise was the gentle rush of the central air-conditioning. I had on the usual open shirt, jeans and sneakers, plus a navy blue windbreaker. It was too warm for the windbreaker, but I needed something to hide my gun; and the Dodger cap didn’t go with any of my sport coats.

The study was forest green with books and dark furniture and a green leather couch and chairs. There was a big desk with an Apple word processor on one corner. It was more out of place than I was. It looked sort of unseemly there. No one had thought of a way to disguise it as a Victorian artifact.

The books were impersonal. Mostly college texts, from thirty years ago, a picture book about Frederic Remington, an American Heritage Dictionary, a World Atlas, Ayn Rand, James Michener, Tom Clancy, Barbara Taylor Bradford, Louis L’Amour, Jean Auel, Rod McKuen, three books on how to be your own shrink, and A History of the Tripps of New England in leather, with gilt lettering on the spine. I put my murder file on the desk and took the book down and sat on the green leather couch and thumbed through it. It was obviously a commissioned work, privately printed. The Tripps had arrived in the new world in 1703 in the person of Carroll S. Tripp, a ship’s carpenter from Surrey, who settled in what later became Belfast, Maine. His grandson moved to Boston and founded the Tripp Mercantile Company in 1758, and they had remained here since. The organizing principle of the book appeared to be that all the Tripps were nicer than Little Bo Peep, including those from the eighteenth century who had founded the family fortune by making a bundle in the rum, molasses, and slave trade business. It told me nothing about the murder of Olivia Nelson, who had kept her birth name.

I put the family history away and opened the case file Quirk had given me. Sitting on the green leather couch in the silent room of her nearly empty home, I read the coroner’s description of Olivia Nelson’s death. I read the crime-scene report, the pages of interview summaries, the document checks, I plowed through all of it. I learned nothing useful. I didn’t expect to. I was simply being methodical, because I didn’t know what else to be. Quirk had turned everything he had loose on this one and come up with nothing.

I put the file down and got up and walked through her house. It was richly decorated in appropriate period. Nothing didn’t match. At the top of the stairs I turned right toward the master suite. The cops had already noted that the Tripps had separate bedrooms and baths. The bedrooms were connected by a common sitting room. It had a red-striped Victorian fainting couch, and two straight chairs and a leather-topped table with fat legs in front of the window. There was a copy of Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen, on the table. It seemed brand-new. It was bound in red leather and matched the tabletop. Against the wall opposite the window was a big mahogany armoire with ornate brass hinges. I opened it. It was empty. The room was as cozy as a dental lab. I went through the sitting room to her room. It was clearly hers: canopied queen-size four-poster, antique lace bedspread, heavy gathered drapes with a gold tone, thick ivory rug, on the wall at the foot of the bed a big nineteenth-century still life of some green pears in a blue and white bowl. Her bureau drawers were full of sweaters and blouses and more exotic lingerie than I’d have expected. There was a walk-in closet full of clothes appropriate to an affluent Beacon Hill pillar of the community. She had maybe thirty pairs of shoes. Her jewelry box was full. She had a lot of makeup.

I sat on her bed. It had about seven pillows on it, carefully arranged as she had left them the last time she was here, or maybe the maid had arranged them this morning. I listened to the quiet. It was a cool day outside, in the low seventies, and the air conditioner had cycled off. I was out of earshot of the clock. I heard only the quiet, and the more I listened the more I heard it. Nothing moved. No one whispered the butler did it.

I stood up and walked across the room and through the sitting room and into Loudon Tripp’s bedroom. It had been created by the same sensibility as the rest of the house. Hers, I assumed, or her decorator’s. Except that it had no canopy, the big four-poster bed was identical to hers, the fluted mahogany bedposts shaped like tall Indian clubs. On the bedside table was a thick paperback copy of Scott Turow’s new novel. A television remote lay next to it. There was a still life on the wall, and an identical armoire stood in the same position that it stood in Olivia’s room. I opened it. There was a big-screen television set on an upper shelf, connected through a hole in the back to electrical and cable outlets behind the piece. On the lower shelves were magazines: Sports Illustrated, Forbes, Time, two back copies of The New York Times Magazine, and a current TV Guide. The rest of the rooms were unrevealing. The children’s rooms were gender appropriate, impersonal and perfectly coordinated. There were guest rooms on the third floor.

I went back down to the living room and picked up the picture of Olivia Tripp and sat on the satin-covered couch and looked at it. She was blonde and wore her short hair in the sort of loose blonde way that wealthy WASP women affect. Her skin looked healthy, as if she exercised out-of-doors. Her eyes were wide apart. Her nose was straight, and quite narrow with nostrils that flared sort of dramatically. Her mouth was a little thin, though she’d made it look more generous than it was with the judicious use of lip pencil. There was a strand of pearls just above the point where her neck disappeared into airbrushed gossamer. She looked to be in her early forties.

She was forty-three when she died. Not planning to, no time to get ready for if, walking along in her good clothes, maybe a small aftertaste of Oreo cookie in her mouth, maybe thinking about her children, or her husband, or sex, or sleep, or good works, maybe trying to remember the lyrics to a song by Harry Belafonte. And somebody appearing in the shadows, faceless and silent in the quiet summer night, with a long-handled hammer. Like an old stone-age savage, armed.

But that was to come. The face in the expensive portrait showed no hint of that. It looked out at me tranquil and personless, and devoid of meaning.

“What the hell are you looking at?” a voice said, and I looked up, and there were the children.

“My name’s Spenser,” I said. “I’m a detective.”

She was wearing a white tank top and pink short-shorts and thick white socks and white training shoes with pink laces. She had an immaculate tan.

Her brother looked just like her, except he wasn’t cute. And he wasn’t self-effacing. He wasn’t short either, probably 5’ll“, but he had the thick wrestler’s neck and upper body, and it made him look shorter than he was. He had the pouty lips too. His nose was too small for his face. His eyes were set in deep sockets. His blond hair was cut short, except in front where it was longish and combed back. He looked petulant and angry. It might have been me, but I suspected that it was his permanent expression. He wore a rust tank top and white shorts and gray socks and white highcut basketball shoes. Rust-rimmed sunglasses with dark green lenses hung on a rust-and-white braided cord from around his neck. His tan was immaculate too.

The two of them stood very close together as they looked at me. Ken and Barbie. Except Barbie wouldn’t look at me.

“Put the picture down,” he said. “Who the hell let you in here?”

“Your father,” I said. “He hired me to find who killed your mother.”

“Swell,” the brother said, “we don’t have enough half-arsed cretin cops slopping around. Dad has to hire an extra one.”

“You’re Meredith,” I said to the sister. She nodded.

“And you’re Loudon, Junior,” I said. He didn’t say anything.

“Sorry about your mother,” I said.

“Great,” he said. “Now why don’t you just get lost?”

“Why so hostile?” I said.

“Hostile? Me? If I get hostile, brother, you’ll goddamn well know about it.”

“Chi-ip,” Meredith said. Her voice was very soft.

“Your father probably needs to do this,” I said.

“Yeah,” Chip said. “Well, I don’t like you looking at my mother’s picture.”

His stare was full of arrogance. It came with wealth and position. And it came with being a wrestler. He thought he could toss me on my kiester.

If I kept talking to them he was going to try it, and find he had misjudged. It would probably be a good thing for him to learn. But now was probably not the best time for him to learn it.

I put the picture down carefully on the table and stood.

“I’m afraid I’ll have to keep looking into this. I’ll try not to be more annoying than I have to be.”

Meredith said, in a voice I could barely hear, “You might make everything worse.”

“You better keep your hands off my mom’s stuff,” Chip said.

I smiled graciously, and went past them and out the front door. It wasn’t much of a move, but it was better than wrestling with Chip.

I slid onto the bar stool and looked at the shot glass.

“Old Thompson?” I said.

“Four Roses,” he said. “You got a problem with that?”

“Nostalgia,” I said. “When I was a kid it was a Croft Ale and a shot of Old Thompson.”

“Well, now it’s not,” Farrell said.

“Jesus,” I said, “how old were you when you dropped out of charm school?”

The bartender came down and poured another shot into Farrell’s glass. He looked at me. “Draft,” I said. He drew one and put it on a napkin in front of me.

Farrell took in about half his whiskey, washed it down with some draft beer. Then he shifted on the bar stool and leaned back a little and stared at me.

“You got a reputation,” he said. “Tough guy.”

“Richly deserved,” I said.

“Smart too,” Farrell said.

“But modest,” I said.

It was a little past five-thirty in the evening and the bar was lined with people. Made you wonder about the work people did if they had to get drunk when they finished.

“Quirk says you get full cooperation,” Farrell said. His speech wasn’t slurred, but there was a thickness to his voice. “Says you’re pretty good, says you might come up with something, if there’s anything to come up with.”

I nodded and sipped a little beer.

“Sort of implies that I won’t,” Farrell said. “Doesn’t it? Sort of implies that maybe I’m not so good.”

“You got other things to do. I don’t.”

Farrell emptied his shot glass, and drank the remainder of his beer. He nodded toward the bartender, who refilled him. There was a flush on Farrell’s cheeks, and his eyes seemed bright.

“How many people in this room you figure are gay?” he said.

I glanced around the room. It was full of men. I swallowed a little more beer. I looked at Farrell and shrugged.

“Everybody but me,” I said.

“Pretty sure you can tell by just looking?”

“It’s a gay bar,” I said. “I know you’re gay. Quirk told me.”

“I’m not so sure I like that,” Farrell said.

“Why, is it a secret?”

“No, but why is he talking about it?”

“As an explanation of why you might be stuck on a dead-end case.”

“I never thought Quirk cared.”

“I don’t think he does.”

“Lotta people do,” Farrell said.

“True,” I said.

We sat for a while.

“You figure fags got no iron?” Farrell said.

“I assume some do and some don’t,” I said. “I don’t know enough about it to be sure.”

We sat some more.

“I’m as good as any cop,” Farrell said.

I nodded encouragingly.

“Good as you too,” Farrell said.

“Sure,” I said.

Farrell drank more whiskey. His speech was still fully formed, but his voice was very thick.

“You believe that?” he said.

“I don’t care,” I said. “I don’t care if you are as good as I am or not. I don’t care if you’re tough or not, or smart or not. I don’t care if you are gay or straight or both or neither. I care about finding out who killed that broad with a framing hammer, and so far you’re not helping me worth shit.”

Farrell sat for a while staring at me, with the dead-eyed cop that all of them perfect, then he nodded as if to himself. He picked up the whiskey and sipped a little and put the glass down.

“You know,” he said, “sometimes if I’m alone, and there’s no one around…”

He glanced up and down the bar and lowered his voice.

“… I order a sloe gin fizz,” he said.

“A dead giveaway,” I said. “Now that we’ve established that you’re queer and you’re here, can we talk about the Nelson case?” I said.

“You got the case file,” Farrell said.

“Yeah, and I’ve seen the house, and I’ve talked to the children.”

“Always a good time,” Farrell said.

The bartender came down and looked at Farrell’s drink. Farrell shook his head.

“They’re under stress,” I said.

“Sure,” Farrell said.

“Tripp and his wife had separate rooms,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Which doesn’t mean they didn’t get along,” I said.

“True.”

“Un huh.”

“What do you think?”

“Hers doesn’t look like she spent much time there,” Farrell said.

“What’s he do?” I said.

“For work?”

“Yeah.”

Farrell shrugged. “Runs the family money, I guess. Got an office and a secretary in the DePaul Building downtown. Goes there every day. Reads the paper, makes some calls, goes over to Locke’s for lunch.”

“Nice orderly life,” I said.

“Maybe it was just a random crazy,” Farrell said.

“Maybe. But if we assume that, we got no place to go,” I said.

“So you assume it’s not random. Where does that leave you?”

“Looking for a motive,” I said.

“We been over that,” Farrell said. “Me, Belson, Quirk, everybody. You going to go over it again?”

“Probably,” I said. “And then, probably, I’ll try it from the other end.”

“Her past?”

“If it’s not a random killing, there’s something in her life that caused it. You people have been all over the recent events. I’ll go over them again because I’m a methodical guy. But I don’t expect to find something you missed. On the other hand, you haven’t turned out all the pockets of her history. You don’t have the budget.”

“But you do?”

“Tripp does,” I said.

“Until he decides you’re just churning his account,” Farrell said.

“Until then,” I said.

We sat for a while in the crowded bar. It was full of men. Most of them were in suits and ties. Some were holding hands. A tallish guy with a thin face had his arm around a gray-haired man in a blue blazer. No one paid me any mind.

“You married?” Farrell said.

“Not quite,” I said.

Farrell looked past me at the bar scene.

“How about you?” I said.

“I’m with somebody,” Farrell said.

We were quiet again. People circulated among the tables. I watched them, and nursed my beer.

“You notice nobody comes over,” Farrell said.

“They know you’re a cop,” I said. “They figure I’m from the outside. They don’t want to out you in case you’re en closet.”

“On the money,” Farrell said.

I waited. Farrell stared at the crowd.

“I come on too strong about things,” Farrell said.

“True,” I said.

“You understand why.”

“Yeah.”

Farrell shifted his eyes toward me and nodded several times.

“I’m sorry,” he said finally.

“Okay,” I said. “But I don’t think I want to go steady.”