The super, having called 911, stood in the doorway, as if he didn’t dare enter and he didn’t dare leave. It was maybe three minutes before two uniforms came into the room.
“He says he’s a cop,” he told one of the cops.
“That right?” the cop said to me.
He was a thick-necked guy with a red face, and he was showing signs of sitting down too much. His partner was a younger guy, black, with sort of economical movements. The black cop squatted on the floor beside me and felt the pulse in Gary’s neck. He nodded to himself and moved over to Beth.
“Right,” I said.
“Show me something,” the cop said.
“I’m private,” I said.
“Impersonating an officer?” the red-faced cop said.
“Exactly,” I said.
Squatting by Beth, the cop felt for her pulse and didn’t find it. He stood.
“Charlie,” he said. “We seem to have a murder here. Maybe you could postpone the impersonating-an-officer investigation till we solve this.”
The red-faced cop looked at him a moment, and at me.
“They dead?” he said.
“She is. The guy seems like he’ll make it,” the black cop said.
The red-faced cop walked past me and looked at Beth.
“Shame,” he said.
Two paramedics came in.
“Broad’s dead,” the white cop said. “Work on the other guy?”
One of the paramedics was a stocky blonde woman.
“Lemme check,” she said, and crouched beside Beth. The male paramedic started on Gary.
Charlie walked out into the foyer and began to talk on his radio. The black cop came to me.
“My name’s Harper,” he said. “What’s yours?”
I told him.
“ID?”
I took out my license and my carry permit. The black cop looked at it.
“You carrying a weapon now?” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
“I’ll hold on to it for a while,” he said.
I opened my coat so he could see the gun.
“You can take it out,” Harper said. “Just go easy.”
I took the gun off my hip and handed it to him. It was a short-barreled.38 revolver. Reliable. Easy to carry.
“You hit anything with this?” Harper said.
“Ten, fifteen feet,” I said.
“All you need,” Harper said, and put the gun in a pocket of his uniform jacket.
Belson came into the apartment with some crime-scene people and two homicide detectives.
“This guy,” Charlie said, and looked at his notebook,
“Spenser. He was impersonating a police officer.”
Belson glanced at him.
“We all thought that,” Belson said, “when he was a cop.”
“Was carrying,” Harper said. “With a permit. I got the piece.”
“Give it back to him,” Belson said.
Harper shrugged and handed me my gun.
Belson looked at the super.
“Who’s this?” he said.
“I’m the superintendent. He told me he was a cop.”
Belson nodded.
“Fucking crime wave in here,” he said.
He nodded at one of the detectives.
“Get a statement from the super,” he said.
Then he looked at the paramedics.
“Woman dead?”
“Yes, Sergeant,” the woman said. “Appears to be blunt-instrument trauma.”
“Guy?”
“He’s way out,” she said. “But vital signs are steady. He should come around.”
“When?”
The woman shrugged.
“When he does,” she said.
“You taking him to City?”
“We call that Boston Medical Center now,” she said.
“You taking him there?” Belson said.
“Yes.”
Belson turned to Harper and his partner.
“You two go with him. Make sure nobody tries to finish the job. When he wakes up, call me.”
“What about her?” the paramedic said.
“Coroner will take her away. Right now she’s evidence.”
The medics put Gary on a stretcher, stabilized him, and took him to the ambulance. Charlie and Harper went with them. Belson turned to me.
“Impersonating a police officer,” Belson said.
He was looking at the room as he talked to me. He always did that at a crime scene, and when he left, I knew he would have seen everything in the room, and he’d remember it.
“Mea culpa,” I said.
“How many times you done that now,” Belson said, “since I knew you?”
“Sixty-three times, I think.”
Belson nodded, still slowly absorbing the room.
“Tell me what you know,” he said.
Chapter 66
I DON’T KNOW QUITE why I left Boo out of it, but I did. When Gary woke up he’d tell them what happened, and they’d come for Boo. I wanted a little time to get there first. I didn’t quite know why I wanted to get there first. I left Vinnie out, too-professional courtesy. I said that I’d been watching her place and seen somebody suspicious-looking come out of the building. So I’d called on my cell and got no answer. The rest of it I told as it happened.
I don’t think Frank bought it all, he came at it from a few different directions, but my story didn’t change and Frank let it go. He knew I hadn’t done it. And he knew that sooner or later, he and I were working the same side of the street.
Mostly.
I got to JP a little before midnight. There was a light on in the window of the second-floor apartment that Boo shared with Zel. I rang the bell. After a minute Zel came to the door, and looked out and saw it was me, and opened the door.
“Trouble?” he said.
“Where’s Boo?” I said.
“He ain’t here, ain’t been home all day.”
“We need to talk,” I said.
Zel nodded and stepped aside. He closed the door behind me and preceded me up the dim stairway. He had a gun in his right hip pocket.
In the kitchen, we sat on opposite sides of the table, under a single naked bulb.
“What?” Zel said.
I looked around the apartment. It wasn’t much. Two bedrooms, a bath, and a kitchen. The doors to all the other rooms were open to the kitchen. There was no sign of Boo.
“Boo killed Beth Jackson tonight,” I said. “Beat her to death.”
Zel didn’t move. He didn’t change his expression.
“Cops know she’s dead, but they don’t know yet that it was Boo.”
Zel nodded slightly.
“But you do,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “But they’ll know soon enough. Boo left an eyewitness alive.”
Zel shook his head sadly.
“Poor dumb bastard,” Zel said.
“Gary Eisenhower,” I said. “He was unconscious when we found him, but when he wakes up, he’ll pretty sure be mentioning Boo’s name.”
Zel nodded.
“So why are you here,” Zel said.
I paused. The room wasn’t much, but it was neat. No dirty dishes, no crumbs on the table. The refrigerator was old and made a lot of noise. Otherwise, there was no sound anywhere, and no sense that there was anyone alive in the building but me and Zel under the one-hundred-watt bulb.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I just figured I oughta talk with you before the cops came to get him.”
“Boo won’t want to go,” Zel said.
“They’ll come in large numbers,” I said.
“Yeah,” Zel said. “They do that.”
He got up and got two bottles of beer from the refrigerator and gave me one and sat down again.
“You know why he killed her?” I said.
“I got an idea,” Zel said.
I nodded.
“Here’s my theory,” I said. “See what you think.”
Zel nodded.
“I figure she came on to him,” I said.
Zel turned the beer bottle on the tabletop and didn’t say anything.
“I figure she came on to him so she could get him to kill her husband,” I said.
“Why’d she want him dead?” Zel said, watching the bottle as he turned it slowly, as if turning it just right was as important as anything he was going to do this day.