THIRTY-THREE
The Porsche sported a glowing red-orange parking violation ticket stuck under the windshield wiper. Spraggue stuffed it in the glove compartment. Sharon gaped at the number of relatives it joined.
“Dear God,” she said. “Is that your hobby?”
Spraggue shrugged.
“Don’t you fear the Denver Boot?”
“It’s a game I play with the city of Boston. See, sooner or later, this car is going to disappear; every other decent car I’ve owned has been stolen while legally parked in Boston. Whoever rips off this one is going to get a bonus: a lifetime supply of parking violations. Can’t you just see some joyriding son-of-a-bitch coming out of the package store half-drunk to find his newly stolen chariot wearing the boot? I look on it as an experiment; I want to see who gets the car first: the crooks or the cops. I’m betting on the thieves.”
He could have taken Commonwealth Avenue all the way to the reservoir, but a line of sullen drivers crawled along, honking at left-turners and parking place scouts, so he turned right and got onto Storrow Drive, traced that all the way to Parsons Street, then zigzagged through Brighton back to Commonwealth. He parked in a tow zone and Sharon shook her head reproachfully.
The afternoon had turned gray and chilly. A low-hanging layer of clouds blotted out the sun and a sharp breeze belied the season. The reservoir trail was almost deserted. Spraggue hoped the absence of runners was due to the promised rain, not the fear of a random sniper. He stopped a few panting college students to ask if they’d been out the day before the marathon. Faint hope. No takers. He and Sharon circled the reservoir once. She shivered.
“Want to wait in the car?”
Her temper flared. “I don’t know why you’re doing this, but if you’re doing it, I’ll go along.”
“Did my aunt hire you to be my bodyguard?”
“Nobody hired me to do anything. Nobody hired you either, so I’m told.”
“I’m working for myself.”
“I could pay you—”
“Forget it.”
. “I can’t forget it. Michael, look at me. Are you doing this because of what I said at the funeral? Are you doing it for me?”
“Why?”
“Because I’m not a reward.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve kissed you; you’ve kissed me. Once I think it was desperation and once relief. I like you. I do. But I don’t want to have that hanging over me. The idea that you would do something like this, something dangerous, so that I would—Well, just don’t play knight in shining armor on my account.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it. Too uncomfortable.”
“I’m serious.”
“Me, too. I learned a long time ago never to confuse women with trophies.”
“Well, I’m no prize, believe me. I’m an over-the-hill, dumpy, divorced schoolteacher—”
“Go sit in the car. It’s not locked. You’re a beautiful woman in a foul mood. Either that or your feet are killing you—”
“And I haven’t noticed any typewriters in the goddam bushes,” she said, ignoring his protest, making no move to leave.
“Neither have I.”
“Then what are we doing here? Your poor aunt thinks we’re at Channel 4. She said she might pack everything up and go over there. Heineman’s got some files he’s anxious to look at, and they’d be able to check out all the typewriters while they keep on with their research.”
“She’ll wait for us.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“Your brother went here; we go here.”
“And what do we do?”
“What investigators generally do. Wait. Listen. Absorb. Waste time. Hope for divine guidance.”
“How long do they generally wait? On a cold day?”
“Want my jacket?”
“No.” The response was automatic, a reflex of independent stubbornness that made Spraggue smile. He stopped and stripped off his windbreaker.
“All right,” she said, reluctantly. “Yes. I do.”
He helped her drape the jacket over her shoulders. The contact, the isolation, the windy chill made him draw her into the circle of his arms. She stepped back, turned away.
“It wasn’t just desperation and just relief, you know,” he said. “I think there might be some basic chemistry involved, a little bit of attraction …”
She kept her head down, stared at the brown, dead grass, slipped the arms of his windbreaker over those of her own borrowed jacket.
“You’re freezing,” he said, when she failed to respond. “Goose bumps and all. Want to race me over to the Rodgers Running Center? Warm you up.”
“Run in these shoes? I can barely walk. Mine—”
He remembered. Abandoned on the second floor of the Cambridge house. Burned or drowned. Ruined. Delicate leather straps charred to black dust. Along with—He blocked the thoughts, but the rage must have translated itself into speed. Sharon tugged at his arm.
“Could we go a little slower?”
“Sorry.”
They succeeded in crossing the complex intersection at Beacon Street and Chestnut Hill Avenue only by ignoring the traffic lights completely. Bill Rodgers Running Center boasted a blue and gold sign. They descended a few steps to the basement level doorway.
One lanky, bearded man slouched behind the cash register to the left of the door. Another, this one with a blond beard in contrast to the cash register man’s dark beard, knelt on the wooden floor, busily lacing a shoe on a woman customer’s foot. Everyone in the place was uniformly thin. The WeightWatchers next door would go out of business if they had to depend on the clientele of the Running Center.
“Can I help you?” the dark-bearded man asked. He had a voice as soft as his silky beard.
Spraggue made sure his words were loud enough for all the runners in the store to hear. “I’m looking for anyone who was racing around here the Sunday before the marathon.”
After thirty seconds of dead air, a blond teenager standing by a magazine rack muttered, “Jeez, there must have been millions of people out running.”
“It’s important,” Spraggue said. “Did anyone here run around the reservoir the day before the marathon?”
With a clatter of feet, a few other customers, intrigued by the loud voices, came down three steps from the small ground-level room that held, besides merchandise, many of Rodgers’ own trophies, as well as a glass case containing the running shoes he’d worn to win his first Boston championship in ’75.
A woman with thick blonde hair stopped pushing hangers around a circular rack of colorful racing tops and said, “I did.”
Spraggue asked the follow-up question quietly, so certain was he of the negative response.
“Did you happen to see Senator Donagher? Running with a dark, curly haired man.”
The blond-bearded sales clerk who’d been fitting shoes stood up. “Pete Collatos?” he asked.
Spraggue nodded.
“If you’re a reporter, nobody here wants to say anything for the papers. They’ve made a big enough hash of it as it is. You read them?” he said indignantly to the woman who’d agreed to buy a pair of blue Adidas. “You’d think running was a hazard to your health. Probably written by some guy with so much belly flab he can’t even see his feet.”
“I’m not a reporter,” Spraggue said. “A friend of Pete’s. I was wondering if he came in here that day. That Sunday. Were you open?”
“Not actually open. Not to the general public. But we weren’t actually closed either, if you know what I mean.”
“Did Pete come to the party?”
“He might have. I know he was in that week. Senator Donagher, no, I don’t think so.”
Spraggue sighed. If Donagher hadn’t come in, then Pete hadn’t either. Me and my shadow travel together.
“Do you have a typewriter here? In the office?”
“Michael!” It was Sharon’s voice, quiet but electric. It sliced through the room like a surgeon’s scalpel and everyone turned to look at her.
She was standing by the bulletin board to the right of the door, her left hand uplifted, pointing at a fragment of paper pinned to the upper right-hand corner of the crowded board.
“Pete wrote that,” she said in a faraway voice. “I think.”
In the midst of much folded newspaper articles, ads for running clinics, chiropractors, and practitioners of sports medicine, folders extolling races, some upcoming, some held months ago, was a scrap of paper, folded over and tacked shut. B.D. it said on the outside fold. Brian Donagher.
Spraggue removed a blue pushpin, took the note down, unfolded it. The room was so still he could hear Sharon breathing.
Sorry, was all it said. Back soon. If you need me, call 555-8945.
Spraggue read the number twice.
It was one he knew well.