“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.
CHAPTER TEN
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.