Shortest Day (20 page)

They dodged around the obstruction while people shouted at the truck from the stalled cars on Garden Street. Stuck in the teeming traffic on Massachusetts Avenue, frustrated drivers blew their horns.

The truck was heaped high, packed tight—puffy arm to puffy arm, sagging seat to flabby pillowed back—with seventeen of Palmer Nifto's drab upholstered requisitioned sofas.

CHAPTER 25

From the East the donkey came
,

Stout and strong as twenty men;

Ears like wings and eyes like flame
,

Striding into Bethlehem
.

Heh! Sir Ass, oh heh!

“Orientis Partibus”

I
t was 4:00 a.m. in Harvard Square. The traffic jam had calmed down. The three-quarter moon shone bald and bright in the sky above the truck that was double-parked on Garden Street, as Palmer Nifto and the truck driver and Bob Chumley tried to manhandle the first sofa down on the pavement.

Half the citizens of Harvard Towers waited on the sidewalk. Bob's dogs frisked and barked and tangled one another in their leashes. Vergil Taylor skimmed in and out, executing phenomenal leaps on and off the curb, while his boom box thundered and crashed. A guy from the
Cambridge Chronicle
, summoned by Palmer Nifto, leaned against a light pole, yawning.

“Okay,” said Palmer, “here we go. Put the first one down right here.”

The driver of the truck was mystified. “But this is a major intersection. It's Harvard Square. You can't dump sofas on the street in Harvard Square.”

“Why not? Come on, Bob, you take the other end.” Palmer jumped down and grasped the stumpy legs of the sofa, and it came down with a thump.

“But, Jesus, Palmer,” said the driver, “this is a parking place, for Christ's sake.”

“Why, so it is,” said Palmer. He plucked a quarter out of his pocket and popped it in the meter. “There we are. Perfectly legal. All we're doing is parking.”

The guy from the
Cambridge Chronicle
guffawed and took a picture, Bob Chumley snickered, and his dogs leaped into the truck and hopped up on another sofa.

“Here, Guthrie,” said Palmer, beckoning to the old man, “this one's for you. Just lie down and make yourself comfortable, okay?”

Guthrie shuffled forward and stared uneasily at the humpy shape of the sofa, which looked very strange on the edge of a broad city avenue in the middle of Harvard Square, somebody's derelict
three-cushioned high-backed buttery-soft vinyl sofa with lumbar support
, bought years ago at a sleazy furniture store in Central Square. “You mean here? This sofa right here? Listen, I want to tell you something, I ain't going to lie down on a piece of crap like that there sofa.”

“Now, come on, Guthrie. It's a nice comfy sofa, and it's all yours. And, hey, looky here, I've got a blanket.” Palmer nipped into the cab of the truck, hauled out an army blanket, and tucked Guthrie in like a loving mother with an infant child. “Cozy as a bug in a rug, Guthrie. Now, just make yourself comfortable and lie down and go to sleep.”

Guthrie lay down cautiously, then reared up again. “Listen, I want to tell you something. The police, they ain't gonna like it.”

“What's not to like?” Palmer beamed with righteousness. “I put in a quarter. We're parking here, that's all we're doing. Go to sleep now, Guthrie, there's a good boy.”

Guthrie lay down again, but he kept lifting his head to watch Palmer Nifto and Bob Chumley and the bemused driver of the truck dump sofa after sofa down on the parking spaces along Garden Street.

“My God, Nifto, what's all this?” Arlo Field was on his way to the Science Center to begin dawn observations of the rising sun with the spectrohelioscope. He stopped to gaze at the row of battered sofas.

Palmer explained, while his crew of homeless men and women plopped themselves on the sofas and hauled up Palmer's blankets and settled down. Bob Chumley took charge of the meters, moving up and down the line, popping in quarters, and the truck driver backed his truck a little farther up the street to dump the last couple of sofas.

“Hey, like my meter's gonna run out,” hollered Guthrie, at the other end of the row, in sofa number one.

“Right you are.” Bob raced back, accompanied by his dogs, and dropped in a quarter.

Arlo started to laugh. He couldn't stop. He was still laughing when a police cruiser pulled up beside Palmer and a couple of uniformed women got out and said, “What the
hell
is going on?”

“Just a sec.” Palmer guided the last sofa down from the truck into a parking place next to the old cemetery. The sofa was a baroque affair with a busted leg. It came down with a bang, and another leg broke off. The sofa tipped crazily on its remaining legs, but Palmer beckoned to Gretchen Milligan to lie down on its gritty velvet surface.

Gretchen was game. “Whoops,” she said, laughing. “It's, like, rocking.” The sofa settled back with a bump against the curb, and she nestled herself into the cushions.

“You see?” said Palmer to the two policewomen, dropping a quarter in Gretchen's meter. “She's paying her way. It's all perfectly straightforward. If rich people's cars can have homes on the street, merely by paying a quarter, so can we. You want to speak to my attorney?”

The two women looked at Nifto, flabbergasted. Their mouths were open, but nothing came out. Then the shorter one had a flash of genius. “Wheeled vehicles,” she said firmly. “These parking spaces are exclusively for the use of wheeled vehicles. Get these sofas out of here. Come on, Palmer, get 'em out. Right now. You hear what I said? Move them out of here right now.”

“Okay, Palmer,” said the truck driver wearily, “we better load 'em up again. Oh, God, I'm tired.”

“Hey, Palmer,” said Arlo, “wait a minute. Come here, listen, I've got an idea.”

Palmer listened, and then he turned away from Arlo and grinned at the two women in uniform. “Okay, okay,” he said, “out they go again. Come on, Bob, let's load 'em up.”

“But, shit, Palmer,” said Bob, who was tired of humping sofas, “like we just—”

“I know.” Palmer helped Gretchen heave herself out of the broken sofa. “But we've got to be law-abiding, don't we, Bob?”

“Here,” said Arlo cheerfully. “I'll help.”

Bulging enormously, Gretchen stood on the sidewalk and watched as the driver of the truck and Bob Chumley and Palmer Nifto and Arlo Field helped the other occupants out of the sofas and hoisted all seventeen bulky pieces of furniture back onto the truck, piling them on top of one another, right side up and upside down.

The sofa caper was over, and the sleepy citizens of Harvard Towers began shuffling back to their tent city. But Gretchen Milligan looked back regretfully. “It was so comfortable,” she said. “I mean, that sofa was really comfortable.”

“God,” said one of the policewomen to her partner as they drove away, “what will they think of next?”

CHAPTER 26

…
gladly, good lord, would I game here and sleep
,

But I have a quest and a promise to keep
.

“Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”

I
t was true that Homer had washed his hands of the two Revels tragedies, the deaths of Henry Shady and Tom Cobb, leaving both matters up to the investigative branches of the Harvard and Cambridge Police Departments. But as time went on, Homer's fatal curiosity was getting the better of him.

There had been nothing in the papers about the real cause of Cobb's death, and nothing on the local television news, only the report that he had swallowed a toxic substance. But the rumor that he had been poisoned was everywhere, and Homer wanted to get to the bottom of it.

He had long since forgotten his wife's idiotic concern over the first Revels death, the accident that had killed Henry Shady—her wild story about some crazy goose and the problem of timing and some other dumb thing—what was it? No matter. It didn't make sense. His wife, Mary, was a superb human being, a wonderful companion, a warm and responsive lover, a magnificent teacher and a fine writer, but she didn't know beans about the investigation of criminal activity.

Was that why she'd been a little testy lately? Probably. Mary was just a little jealous of his long-standing expertise, all that know-how he had picked up so long ago as a lieutenant detective for Middlesex County. Jealousy, God! It was a pain in the neck.

Unfortunately, Homer's vast experience couldn't help him now. By rights he should have been able to go straight to the Cambridge Police Department to find out more about the toxic substance that had killed Tom Cobb, but he couldn't. His personal and official relation with the department was poor.
Excessive interference on the part of an unaccredited person
—that was the way they had put it.

Well, of course they were right. While poking into certain matters in the recent past, Homer had found it necessary to flash his long-outdated identification card as a Middlesex County lieutenant detective. The Cambridge investigating officer had seen through him, and he had barely escaped arrest. So in this matter he would have to be completely on his own.

Was the rumor true, that Cobb had been poisoned? How could he find out?

On the afternoon after Palmer Nifto's sofa caper in Harvard Square, Homer made his way to Cambridge Hospital. It was only a few blocks east of Memorial Hall, on Cambridge Street.

Approaching the front entrance, he felt like the heroic protagonist of one of Dr. Box's vision quests. In order to behold the vision or find the Grail or achieve whatever fabulous goal lay at the end of the quest, he would first have to overcome a set of impossible obstacles.

The hospital receptionist was the first enchanted obstacle. She was a mountain of glass.

Homer's magic talisman was his famous charm. Leaning over the counter, he showed all his teeth and complimented her on her navy-blue suit.