I was living that year on Marlborough Street, two blocks up from the Public Garden. I made myself hash and eggs for supper and read the morning’s New York Times while I ate. I took my coffee with me into the living room and tried looking at television. It was awful, so I shut it off and got out my carving. I’d been working on a block of hard pine for about six months now, trying to reproduce in wood the bronze statue of an Indian on horseback that stands in front of the Museum of Fine Arts. The wood was so hard that I had to sharpen the knives every time I worked. And I spent about half an hour this night with whetstone and file before I began on the pine. At eleven I turned on the news, watched it as I undressed, shut it off, and went to bed.
At some much later time, in the dark, the phone rang. I spiraled slowly upward from sleep and answered it after it had rung for what seemed a long time. The girl’s voice at the other end was thick and very slow, almost like a 45 record played at 33.
“Spenser?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s Terry … help me.”
“Where are you?”
“Eighty Hemenway Street, apartment three.”
“Ten minutes,” I said, and rolled out of bed.
It was 3:05 in the morning when I got into my car and headed for Hemenway Street. It wasn’t till 3:15 when I got there. Three A.M. traffic in Boston is rarely a serious problem.
Hemenway Street, on the other hand, often is. It is a short street of shabby apartment buildings, near the university, and for no better reason than Haight-Ashbury had, or the East Village, it had become the place for street people. On the walls of the building Maoist slogans were scrawled in red paint. On a pillar at the entrance to the street was a proclamation of Gay Liberation. There were various recommendations about pigs being offed scrawled on the sidewalk. I left my car double-parked outside 80 Hemenway and tried the front door. It was locked. There were no doorbells to push. I took my gun out, reversed it, and broke the glass with the handle. Then I reached around and turned the dead lock and opened the door from the inside.
Number three was down the hall, right rear. There were bicycles with tire locks lining both walls, and some indeterminate litter behind them. Terry’s door was locked. I knocked; no answer. I knocked again and heard something faint, like the noise of a kitten. The corridor was narrow. I braced my back against the wall opposite the door and drove my heel, with 195 pounds behind it, against the door next to the knob. The inside jamb splintered, and the door tore open and banged violently against the wall as it opened.
Inside all the lights were on. The first thing I saw was Dennis Goldilocks lying on his back with his mouth open, his arms outspread, and a thick patch of tacky and blackening blood covering much of his chest. Near him on her hands and knees was Terry Orchard. Her hair was loose and falling forward as though she were trying to dry it in the sun. But it wasn’t sunny in there. She wore only a pajama top with designs of Snoopy and the Red Baron on it, and it was from her that the faint kitten sounds were coming. She swayed almost rhythmically back and forth making no progress, moving in no direction, just swaying and mewing. Between her and Dennis on the floor was a small white-handled gun. It or something had been fired in the room; I could smell it.
I knelt beside the blond boy and felt for the big pulse in his neck. The minute I touched his skin I knew I’d never feel the pulse. He was cool already and getting colder. I turned to Terry. She still swayed, head down and sick. I could smell something vaguely medicinal on her breath. Her breath was heaving and her eyes were slits. I pulled her to her feet, and held her, one arm around her back. She was almost all the way under. I couldn’t tell from what, but whatever it was, it was an o.d.
I walked her into the bathroom, got her pajama shirt off, and got her under the shower. I turned the water on warm and then slowly to full cold and held her under. She quivered and struggled faintly. The sleeves of my jacket were wet up past the elbows and my shirtfront was soaked through. She pushed one hand weakly at my face and began to cry instead of mew. I held her there some more. As I held her I kept listening for footsteps behind me. The door had made a hell of a lot of noise when I kicked it open, and the gunshot must have been a loud one long before that. But the neighborhood was not, apparently, that kind of neighborhood. Not the kind to look into gunshots and doors splintering and such. The kind to pull the covers up over the head and burrow the face in the pillow and say screw it. Better him than me.
I got a hand up to her neck and felt her pulse. It was quicker—I guessed about sixty. I got her out of the shower and across to the bedroom. I didn’t see a robe, so I pulled the blanket off the bed and wrapped it around her. Then we waltzed to the kitchen. I got water boiling and found some instant coffee and a cup. She was babbling now, nothing coherent, but the words were intelligible. I made coffee with her balanced half over one hip, my arm around her and the blanket caught in my fist to keep her warm. Then back to the living room to the day bed—there were no chairs in the kitchen—and sat her down.
She pushed aside the coffee and spilled some on herself and cried out at the pain, but I got her to drink some. And again some. And one more time. Her eyes were open now and her breath was much less shallow. I could see her rib cage swell and settle regularly beneath the blanket. She finished the coffee.
I stood her up and we began to walk back and forth across the apartment, which wasn’t much of a walk. There was the living room, a small bedroom, a bath, and a kitchenette, barely big enough to stand in. The living room, in which the quick and dead were joined, held only a card table, a steamer trunk with a lamp on it, and the studio couch on whose bare mattress Terry Orchard had drunk her coffee. The blanket I had pulled off the bed had been its only adornment, and as I looked into the bedroom I could see a cheap deal bureau beside the bed. On it was a candle stuck in a Chianti bottle beneath a bare light bulb hanging from a ceiling.
I looked down at Terry Orchard. There were tears running down her cheeks, and less of her weight leaned on me.
“Sonova bitch,” she said. “Sonova bitch, sonova bitch, sonova bitch.”
“When you can talk to me, talk to me. Till then keep walking,” I said.
She just kept saying sonova bitch, in a dead singsong voice, and I found that as we walked we were keeping time to the curse, left, right, sonova bitch. I realized that the broken door was still wide open and as we sonova-bitched by on the next swing I kicked it shut with my heel. A few more turns and she fell silent, then she said, half question—
“Spenser?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh my God, Spenser.”
“Yeah.”
We stopped walking and she turned against me with her face hard against my chest. She clenched onto my shirt with both fists and seemed to be trying to blend into me. We stood motionless like that for a long time. Me with my arms around her. Both wet and dripping and the dead boy with his wide sightless eyes not looking at us.
“Sit down,” I said after a while. “Drink some more coffee. We have to talk.”
She didn’t want to let go of me, but I pried her off and sat her on the day bed. She huddled inside the blanket, her wet hair plastered down around her small head, while I made some more coffee.
We sat together on the day bed, sipping coffee. I had the impulse to say, “What’s new?” but squelched it. Instead I said, “Tell me about it now.”
“Oh, God, I can’t.”
“You have to.”
“I want to get out of here. I want to run.”
“Nope. You have to sit here and tell me what happened. From the very first thing that happened to the very last thing that happened. And you have to do it now, because you are in very big trouble and I have to know exactly how big.”
“Trouble? Jesus, you think I shot him, don’t you?”
“The thought occurred to me.”
“I didn’t shoot him. They shot him. The ones that made me take the dope. The ones that made me shoot the gun.”
“Okay, but start with the first thing. Whose apartment is this?”
“Ours, Dennis’s and mine.” She nodded at the floor and then started and looked away quickly.
“Dennis is Dennis Powell, right?”
“Yes.”
“And you live together and are not married, right?”
“Yes.”
“When did the people come who did this?”
“I don’t know exactly—it was late, about two thirty maybe.”
“Who were they?”
“I don’t know. Two men. Dennis seemed to know them.”
“What did they do?”
“They knocked on the door. Dennis got up—we weren’t asleep, we never go to sleep till very late—and asked, ‘Who is it?’ I couldn’t hear what they said. But he let them in. That’s why I think he knew them. When he opened the door they came in very fast. One of them pushed him against the wall and the other one came into the bedroom and dragged me out of bed. Neither one said anything. Dennis said something like, ‘Hey, what’s the idea?’ Or ‘Hey, what’s going on?’ One of them had a gun and he held it on both of us. He never said anything. Neither one. It was spooky. The other guy reached in his coat pocket and came out with my gun.”
“Is that your gun on the floor?” I asked.
She wouldn’t look but nodded.
“He handed my gun to the first man, the man with the gun, and then he grabbed me and turned me around and put his hand over my mouth and bent my arm up behind me and the other man shot Dennis twice.”
“With your gun?”
“Yes.”
“Then what?”
“Then—” She paused and closed her eyes and shook her head.
“Go on,” I said.
“Then the man that shot Dennis made me hold the gun in my hand and shoot it into Dennis. He held my wrist and squeezed my finger on the trigger.” She said it in a rush and the words nearly ran together.
“Did he have on gloves?”
She thought a minute. “Yes, yellow ones. I think they might have been rubber or plastic.”
“Then what?”
“Then the one who was holding me made me lie down on the bed. I didn’t have anything on but my top. And the other one poured some kind of dope in my mouth and forced it shut and held my nose till I swallowed it. Then they just held me there with a hand over my mouth for a little while. Then they left.”
I didn’t say anything. If she’d invented that story coming out of a narcotic coma, she was some kind of special species and nothing I could handle. She might have hallucinated the whole thing, depending on what she had taken. Or the story might be true.
“Why did they make me shoot him after he was dead?” she asked.
I discovered as I answered that I believed her. “To hook you on a paraffin test. When you fire a handgun cordite particles impregnate your skin. A lab man puts paraffin over it, lets it dry, peels it off, and tests it. The particles show up in the wax.”
It took a minute to register. “A lab man, you mean the police?”
“Yes, honey, the police.”
“No, can’t we get out of here? I’ll go home. You won’t say anything. My father will pay you. He has money. I know he can give you some …”
“Your boyfriend, dead in your apartment, killed with your gun, you gone? They’d come and get you and bring you back. Do you know a lawyer?”
“A lawyer, how the hell would I know a freaking lawyer?” She looked desperately toward the door. “I’m splitting, screw this scene.” Her voice had gotten harsh and tough with fright, and I noticed her lapse into the jargon of her peer group as her fright increased. When she’d been clinging to me she talked like a young girl in college. When she wanted to get away from me her voice and language changed. I held her against me with my arm around her shoulder.
“Listen,” I said. “You are in trouble enough to pull up over your head and tie a knot in. But you’re not in it alone. I’ll help you. It’s my line of work. I’ll get you a lawyer in a bit. Then I’ll call the cops. Before I do, though—” She started to speak and I squeezed her. “Listen,” I said, “When the cops come don’t say anything, don’t talk to them, don’t argue with them, don’t be hostile, don’t be smart. Do not say anything to anybody till you talk to the lawyer. His name is Vincent Haller. He’ll see you soon after you go downtown. Talk only with him present and say only what he says you should. Have you ever been busted?”
“No.”
“Okay. It’s not anywhere near as bad as you think it is. No one will hurt you. No one will grab you under a bright light and hit you with a hose. You’ll be okay, and you won’t be in long. Haller will take care of you.”
She nodded. I went on.
“Before I make my call—do you have any idea why the men did this?”
“No.”
“Do you use drugs?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know what they gave you?”
“No. It tasted like paregoric and smelled like ether. It wasn’t anything I’d tried. Whatever it was, was a downer though.”
“Okay. Get dressed. I’m going to call.”