THREE

By the time he stalked out of Menlo’s stuffy hole of an office at one thirty in the morning, Spraggue’s earlier romantic mood was shot—nothing but a distant memory, as far away as Kathleen Farrell. He glared at the other occupant of the rumbling elevator all the way down to the lobby, causing the rookie cop to blush and pat his holster for reassurance. Ignoring the sergeant manning the check-out desk, Spraggue hurried down the stone steps of police headquarters, crossed a deserted Berkeley Street, and found, as he’d hoped, a lone taxi waiting in front of the Greyhound terminal.

“Harvard Square,” he snapped as he opened the door.

“In a hurry?” The cabbie sounded hopeful: a bad sign. The cab had an accordion-pleated right front fender.

“No,” Spraggue said sharply. A race down Storrow Drive hanging on to a filthy armrest in a taxi whose interior smelled like someone had recently bled to death in it didn’t sound like any remedy for a foul mood.

The cabdriver shrugged and slammed his foot down on the accelerator like a flamenco dancer warming up for the finale. Spraggue clutched the armrest, wondered what the aging juvenile delinquent would have pulled had he been unwise enough to urge haste.

After the cabbie shot the red light at Beacon Street and surged onto Storrow Drive from a tricky left-lane merge without benefit of side or rearview mirror, Spraggue settled back and closed his eyes.

“Goddam Menlo,” he muttered under his breath. He replayed the scene in his dressing room and got angry all over again.

“Imagine those two rookies just taking your name and address and letting you walk,” Menlo had said while Spraggue had inwardly cursed the assistant stage manager responsible for keeping invaders away from the stage door. Menlo had folded his wallet and shoved it back into the pocket of his disreputable khaki pants; he must have used his badge to bully the woman into submission. Some admission ticket, that badge.

Spraggue could hear Kathleen, in her nearby dressing room, humming a tune from the show, a piping rustic melody. He resolved not to irritate Menlo in any way, not to give him the slightest excuse to ruin such a promising evening. He fastened a polite smile on his face; the evening’s performance wasn’t over yet.

“Long time, et cetera,” he said mildly. “I convinced them I wasn’t likely to skip town. And even if I did, they’ve got plenty of other witnesses, people who saw a lot more than I did.”

“If they’d known who they were dealing with—”

“I’m not exactly on the F.B.I.’s most wanted list, Captain.” God, it hurt to call Menlo “Captain.” How the asshole had ever managed lieutenant was a puzzle.

“What the hell were you doing at the reservoir?”

“Ready, Michael?” Kathleen had chosen that moment to peer in over the cop’s shoulder. Her two words were sufficient to inform Menlo that he had the unparalleled opportunity to interrupt something that might turn out to be fun. His eyes glowed.

“He’ll be busy for a while,” Menlo grunted, eyeing Kathleen as offensively as possible.

She gave it back to him with interest, and Menlo’s face burned briefly red.

Much as he would have enjoyed seeing Farrell tangle with the cop, Spraggue nodded her back outside. “Five minutes. If it’s longer than that, go on home and I’ll phone.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

Menlo could have taken out a patent on obscene leers.

“I asked you a question,” he said triumphantly, as soon as Farrell’s perfume wafted out of the immediate area.

“I’m sure it must have been important.”

“What were you doing at the reservoir?”

“What are you doing here? Last time I looked, this was Cambridge, not Boston.”

“If you got any complaints; I’ll be glad to take you down to the Cambridge Police Station and you can—”

“No, thanks.”

“So what were you doing at the reservoir?”

“Running.”

The conversation had lurched downhill from there. The calmer Spraggue’s manner, the more he seemed to rile Menlo. And Menlo had always had the effect of a persistent buzzing mosquito on Spraggue.

The first time they’d met, with shattering results, Spraggue had been a licensed P.I. working a case. Like the majority of their encounters, it had ended with Spraggue getting hauled off to a cell in the Charles Street Jail, only to be rescued prior to incarceration by a fleet of the best lawyers ever to whip up a writ of habeas corpus. By a conservative estimate, Spraggue figured he’d held up Menlo’s appointment to lieutenant by two years. Two years well spent. Maybe he should have stayed a private investigator just for the satisfaction of keeping Menlo off the captain’s roll.

Now it seemed that any hint of a trace of a possibility that Spraggue might be back in the private investigation game was enough to bring Menlo roaring over from Boston, enough to make him stretch his authority in order to cart Spraggue in for questioning, enough to make him threaten a material witness jailing. Spraggue failed to feel flattered by the attention.

“What were you doing at the reservoir?”

By the time the question got asked for the fourth time, they were in Menlo’s dingy downtown office and the fantasy-fulfilling night with Kathleen had gone up in smoke.

“I suppose this is now an official inquiry?”

“You might say so.”

“Get the stenographer in here, then. Make it nice and legal.”

“That ain’t necessary.”

“Oh, but it is. Without one, I do my famous impersonation of a clam.”

“Oh, yeah?” Menlo’s right hand clenched instinctively into a fist.

“And my lawyer will find it lamentably easy to demonstrate that you did not bring me here with any official purpose in mind, but were just having a slow night and decided to harass an innocent citizen to pass the time.”

That brought the steno in. It also got Menlo’s feet tapping in the same drunken rhythm they habitually beat when Spraggue’s needling pierced the skin. Not for the first time, Spraggue thought that he really ought to measure the interval it took to get the captain’s legs shaking. He never clocked it; he continually assumed that each present encounter was the final one—that he’d never have to see Menlo’s big, dumb boxer’s mug again. But there always seemed to be an encore, one more session with Menlo barking harebrained questions and Spraggue managing not to get hit in the mouth.

“Okay,” Menlo had said once the stenographer was situated, “what were you doing at the reservoir on the afternoon of April 16, 1982?”

“Running.”

Menlo’s questions droned on, augmented by dire warnings concerning the fate of private citizens who persisted in screwing up police investigations. Spraggue quit listening and started imagining horrible tortures for Pete Collatos, who’d gotten him into this mess in the first place. But his mind kept picturing Kathleen … Kathleen in Celia’s long flowered dress … Kathleen shrugging out of her clothes in his dressing room … Damn. A night that should have been an occasion to remember, to savor, shot to hell.

“Where ya want me to drop ya?” the cabbie asked.

Unwillingly, Spraggue opened his eyes. His fingers closed on a card in his pocket. After all that waste of time, Menlo had actually had the nerve to dole out his card along with the admonition to call with any newly remembered details of the shooting. Spraggue read the embossed face of the card once, ripped it across. “Turn onto Brattle,” he said. “Stop in front of Reading International.”

Usually he walked to the theater from his house, but today, pressed for time, he’d driven straight in from the reservoir. Found a damn good parking place. A tow zone, true, but he couldn’t recall ever seeing a car towed in the Square. Particularly a car with a Cambridge resident sticker on the windshield. If the cops really needed the parking fee, they victimized a car with New York plates. Vengeance for what the Yankees routinely did to the Red Sox.

When he’d located the empty space, smack on Brattle, he’d considered it a good omen. Based on the disaster his evening had turned into, his car had probably been stolen.

He paid off the cabbie and glanced at his watch. No point in calling Kathleen. She’d be deep in dreamless sleep by now—unless she’d invited one of the other actors home as his understudy.

The Porsche was still there.

He drove up Brattle, sped by Fayerweather Street, and only realized after he had passed it that he’d never had any intention of going home.