Dead Heat (11 page)

Spraggue stared at Bartolo, memorizing the jowly face, five o'clock shadow already visible at noon, the sleek-fitting black suit that almost disguised a paunch. Governor's man. Safe vote for the conservative status quo. Or was he? Once elected to the Senate's lofty heights, would Bartolo develop unexpected beliefs of his own to shock his benefactor? Did the governor have the goods on Bartolo, something related to those shady Mafia connections the
Boston Globe
seemed so certain of, something that would keep Bartolo in line, blackmail him into coming across with the key vote in the tight situation?

Spraggue stood to one side, removed from the main body of mourners, not eager to be identified with one political faction or another, missing Pete Collatos. Not the brightest of men, not the best of friends. Hell, until this Donagher business started, he'd seen Collatos what? Twice in two years? But the knowledge of never again, the finality of sodden earth clunking against the iron casket, brought a lump to his throat and made him look away.

By conservative estimate, Spraggue thought, he must have died some fifty times on stage, more if one counted the multiple comic deaths of Mortimer in
The Fantastiks
. On stage, he'd watched so many friends die, played Horatio to so many doomed Hamlets.… But Collatos wouldn't be resurrected for tomorrow's matinee.

Aunt Mary, beside him, lightly touched his fingers. Sympathy seemed to flow from her hand to his, leaving him curiously comforted. She'd held his hand throughout that eternally long funeral after his parents had died in that fiery car crash, while he'd still thought it the “tragic senseless accident” the newspapers gloated in retelling: a fable for our time, illustrating that ever popular theme that money cannot, after all, buy happiness—or eternal life. It was summer then, but the sky had been just as leaden. Aunt Mary's hand seemed so frail, so cold, that he pulled her closer under his umbrella, put his arm around her shoulders. His other hand, clutching the wavering umbrella, felt as if it were welded to the handle.

No one held, comforted, or warmed the funeral's chief mourner, Pete's sister, Sharon. Donagher had tried, been rebuffed. Sharon Collatos … No, the last name was no longer Collatos. She had married; Spraggue remembered that, but he couldn't recall her married name. Nor could he see a likely husband in the crowd. Did the man work Saturdays? Was he out of town? Wasn't there a friend, a neighbor, a cousin, an aunt, to take the black-clad woman's arm?

He watched her while the somber priest hastily read the final words, knowing that the chill rain disposed no one to linger. Her black suit was either borrowed or purchased in haste. Or else she, like Donagher, had lost too much weight too rapidly. Borrowed, more likely; she hadn't the coloring to wear black. Her skin and hair were too dark to set it off. Her shapeless raincoat could have been a man's. Her hair was scraped back off her forehead and forced into a bun at the nape of her neck, blurred with a black lace veil. Her face was a mask that one tear would have cracked and shattered.

She reminded him of Medea, not the Medea of the final curtain, but the just betrayed Medea, pondering that most horrible act of vengeance.

What had each of these people meant to Collatos; what had he meant to them? Spraggue scanned the crowd for some young attractive woman; had Collatos dated a special girl? When had his parents died? Who was here to say farewell to a friend? Who was present to record his political loyalties on camera, to have his face splayed across the evening news?

Shutting his eyes, Spraggue methodically relaxed, unclenching the jaw that was always the first to tense, shrugging the shoulders that were the next to go. Usually, the relaxation ceremony was reserved for preperformance jitters.

The whole damned ritual reminded him of a performance, an empty piece of theater that had nothing to do with Pete Collatos, alive or dead.

The priest finished droning and Medea took center stage. She hurled a bouquet of blood red roses at the coffin, an angry heave, not a gentle toss. Some cry, some involuntary grunt escaped her lips, and she looked away, blinking hard. Still no tears, no crack in the mask. Donagher took her arm, but she wouldn't move away from the yawning hole. It took Donagher's wife to lead her off. The pastel woman seemed so frail, but her tiny tug prevailed.

The mourners should have melted gratefully back into their cars, escaped the gray storm and the gloomy landscape, the gaping hole filled with new death, the final sound of earth shoveled down on the coffin. But the TV cameras stayed. So, instead of bolting, the cops and politicians that made up the bulk of the herd lingered, gathered in hopeful photogenic groupings, crowded to press Donagher's hand, express their horror at his narrow escape. And that, that last play for the attention of the cameras, turned Spraggue's sorrow into anger.

He left Mary standing by the car, entered the crowd near Captain Hurley, intending to ask a few, just a few of the questions he'd been longing to ask, at least to set up a later appointment, to find out what the hell the Boston Police were doing to ensure that whoever had killed Collatos wouldn't go undiscovered, unpunished.

Two things got in his way.

The first was a smiling old man who stumbled, trod on Spraggue's toe, and forgot to mumble an apology. A retired cop in faded dress blues, with a crinkled red face, the old fellow seemed to be treating the funeral like a grand occasion, a chance to get out of the house and socialize, to feel useful and young again, instead of simply enduring the tedious hours until night, when he could legitimately try for the sleep that wouldn't come anymore.

The old man neatly buttonholed Donagher's campaign manager, backed him up against a budding maple. Spraggue would have passed them by, with perhaps a sympathetic smile at the obviously trapped Eichenhorn, if the red-faced cop hadn't spoken with such drunken loudness.

“So, Marty,” the old man sang out, and his melodic brogue pinned down his native origin as easily as his face, “It's a treat for these old eyes to see you after so long, doing so fine, too.”

Donagher's campaign manager stared at the man in blank incomprehension for ten or fifteen seconds. Then he turned paper white and grabbed the old cop by the sleeve of his aged uniform.

A tight, fake smile stretched across Eichenhorn's mouth, but his eyes darted left and right, as if he were checking out the people in immediate earshot. He muttered something in the old man's ear.

The old cop hooted a laugh that wound up in a coughing fit. “Surely, there's no harm—” he began, but the rest of his words were cut off as Eichenhorn quickly draped an arm across his shoulder and led him off under a stand of oak trees.

Intrigued, Spraggue started to follow, wondering why a man named Murray would react so oddly to being called Marty. A cold voice stopped him, spun him around.

“You,” the Greek Medea said. “You. I want to talk to you.”

THIRTEEN

Her voice was low, husky with unshed tears, but its intensity burned across ten feet of muddy ground like a laser beam. A glance at her frozen eyes told him that this was not a request to be fobbed off with the excuse of a waiting aunt, a matinee still to be performed.

The Medea woman motioned him toward an isolated stand of rhododendrons, using the merest nod of her head. He tried to shield her with his umbrella. She stalked off without noticing. Weary of keeping the umbrella upright in the gale, he folded it and followed her, rain pelting his face.

Everything about the woman was so terribly controlled, Spraggue thought as he trailed behind her … her carefully balanced walk, like a drunkard's in a police lineup, her marionette gestures, her unanimated voice, her painted face.… She was smaller than her drawn-up posture made her seem. She had a short, sturdy body, more accustomed to jeans and T-shirts than black suits, stockings, and high heels. She stumbled as she turned to check on his progress and he sped up. One chink in that awesome armor would collapse the entire facade. He'd never be able to reassemble the pieces on his own.

She turned and faced him, swallowed with effort. Spraggue tried to find in her granite visage some trace of a laughing windswept girl in a photograph that had been a fixture on Pete's desk. Not a gorgeous girl, not a knockout—but a woman with such a genuine smile, such deep secret eyes, that Pete had finally hidden the photo in a drawer. Too many cops asked for his sister's phone number, he had complained. He'd wanted better than that for baby sister.

This woman was older than the teenager in the photo, older in ways that had nothing to do with passing years. Her eyes were sunken in dark shadows. Spraggue regretted that he hadn't asked for the phone number of the laughing girl; then, she'd seemed too young, too innocent, too burdened with the baggage of being a friend's treasured sister. Now she seemed too old. He wondered if the sparkle would ever reappear in her empty eyes.

“So,” she said. “You're Spraggue.” Her voice lowered the temperature five degrees.

“Your brother must have described me.”

“Pete … didn't … We rarely spoke.… I asked someone.”

Spraggue wanted to ask why, but said nothing. She would explain; she wouldn't have made the painful effort to talk to him unless she had a reason. He was prepared for something, but not for what came.

Sharon Collatos' lower lip trembled momentarily, then stiffened. Her breathing was so shallow and quick, he was afraid she might faint.

“What are you going to do about it?” she said.

If volume had been substituted for intensity, her words would have deafened the remaining mourners. But her tone was just above a whisper and more powerful, more urgent for that.

“Your partner's dead, so what are you going to do about it? Almost a week and have I seen you at the police station? Have I seen you at Pete's apartment? What are you doing?

Spraggue considered options: Either melting into a puddle at her feet or turning into a pillar of salt seemed preferable to saying, “I was no partner of your brother's; where did you get that screwy idea?” Particularly since he had a pretty strong inkling that the screwy idea had come from a source that could no longer be impeached. Damn Pete Collatos.

Pete's sister took his silence for shame.

“You know what the police told me?” she said. “Nothing. That they have no single clue, that unless a miracle occurs, my brother's killer will never be found. That the case will stay open, so I shouldn't worry my little head. Maybe in ten years or so, they'll get a break. Then they sent me to see the medical examiner—”

Spraggue shuddered; he'd been there, too. He hoped the M.E. had been a trifle more politic with this grieving woman.

“A man in a white coat said to me, ‘isn't it an
interesting case
? Like with guinea pigs, with rats, with mice. He says maybe it isn't even a murder case, just an assault. I ask him how that can be when my brother, my only relative in this world, is lying cold in his coffin. And you know what he said?”

“Look, Mrs.…” Dammit, why couldn't he remember that name?

“Miss Collatos,” she said coldly.

Oh, Christ, yes. Pete had mentioned separation or divorce. “Miss Collatos, I have a car here. We could sit in it and talk. There's no need for you to get pneumonia.” Or me, he thought.

She stared up, noticing the rain as an external phenomenon for the first time, as bewildered as if she had thought that the rain was her own personal misery, unseen, unfelt by others.

While thus confused, she allowed Spraggue to take her arm and lead her to the warm interior of Mary's Mercedes. Pierce was in the driver's seat, Aunt Mary beside him. Spraggue made quick introductions, stopped the flow of Mary's sympathetic chatter with a glance, spoke to Sharon Collatos.

“The medical examiner probably told you that the amount of amphetamine in your brother was about twenty milligrams, that ten milligrams is the highest recommended therapeutic dose, that toxic effects begin at fifteen, but that it's highly unusual for twenty milligrams of speed to kill a man.”

“Pete's dead.”

“But the senator isn't. So then they told you that there might have been some precondition in your brother, an aneurism, say, or an idiosyncratic reaction to amphetamine …”

She nodded. “And that's what they told the police. And all those fancy words had one effect: The police aren't really looking for my brother's killer.”

Aunt Mary turned, knelt on the front seat and took the woman's hand in hers. “She's freezing, poor thing. Pierce, don't we have a blanket or something in the trunk?”

What they had seemed to be a fur lap robe more suited to a sleigh ride than a stationary auto on an April day. Sharon burrowed into it, gratefully, and for a minute, Spraggue was certain the mask would break, but she shuddered and went on.

“I can hear the defense attorney now. Just a prank that went wrong, Your Honor. How was I to know a little bit of speed would kill a man? I just thought it would make the senator run faster. All a mistake, Your Honor. Then the judge taps that devil woman on the back of the hand, says ‘naughty girl,' and that's the end of it. Except that Pete is dead. And from what he told me about the business you were working on together, about those anonymous notes, I know he didn't die because of some crazy prank. I know that someone intended to kill Senator Donagher … to—”

She ran down suddenly, like a clock, overwound and dying.

“Spraggue,” she said in a painful monotone, “Mr. Spraggue. My brother always called you just by the one name.… I was not a good sister to my brother; we weren't as close as we should have been. I said to myself, there's time for that. There are other things I have to do now, more important things. There'll always be time for Pete. And someone took that time away from me.”

Aunt Mary opened the car door, got out into the downpour, entered the back seat, and put her arm around Sharon's quivering shoulders. Sharon turned her head away, closed her eyes to blink back tears, but she let Mary's hand stay. What, Spraggue wondered, staring at Sharon Collatos' too white face, made him think of that other woman, the one on Heartbreak Hill, the one who'd handed Senator Donagher a supposedly harmless bottle of water …?