Dead Heat (3 page)

Spraggue thumbed brown shadow across his eyelids. What bothered him was the reporters. Channel 4's news team had been on the scene like flies on honey even before the cops had finished flashing their badges. Asked better questions, too. Could they have been tipped off slightly in advance? Was the whole episode some cockeyed publicity stunt? Donagher was up for reelection in November and many were the pundits who claimed his return to marathon running was a cheap way of garnering momentum for his campaign start-up. Instead of shelling out hard won campaign contributions for newspaper ads, would some flunky in Donagher's organization point proudly to tomorrow's front page coverage in the
Globe
and the
Herald
and chalk up the cash savings for his committee? Spraggue decided that he'd investigate that angle long before he checked out any anonymous crank letters. He wondered what Pete Collatos would do.
If
Collatos kept his job. Spraggue hoped his friend hadn't gotten fired for his dereliction of duty.

Deftly, he hollowed out the area under his right cheekbone with dark shadow, edged it with white.

Any flunky responsible for the prank would have wept at Donagher's low-key reaction. The candidate had resisted every attempt by the cops to single him out as the target. A “random sniping incident” at the reservoir, that's what Donagher had called it. When pressed for motive, he'd discoursed on random violence in today's society. Hadn't mentioned any threatening letters. Out of twenty-five observers of Donagher's chat with the cops, Spraggue supposed the senator hadn't won more than twenty-five votes. Getting shot at all across the city seemed an uncertain way to win an election.

He peered up at the ceiling, cheated down into the mirror to line under his eyes. His Oliver makeup was a straight job in contrast to the character makeup he did for the rustic lord. No fancy tricks on this one, no putty noses or bushy eyebrows. Spraggue just reinforced the features he already had, evening out the faint asymmetricality that made his mobile face perfect for double casting.

Right now, Spraggue thought, he could play any age, from twenty to death, but his days as youthful Romeo were fast drawing to a close. On the street, his face never drew a second look. Makeup made a difference. The
Globe
's reviewer had called his Oliver a
handsome rogue
, two words no one would have used to describe Spraggue.
Normal
was a more oft used term. Average, except for those amber cat's eyes.

Hurriedly buttoning up his deep red tunic, Spraggue reread the note he'd found tacked to his dressing-room door. “Michael,” it said, “must see you. Finances. Real estate. Tonight. No excuses.” The assistant stage manager had written down his aunt's peremptory message in appropriate red. He doubted his aunt had been quite so succinct; Mary had a reputation for volubility.

Tonight … Whether or not he made the appointment would depend on the mood of one Kathleen Farrell, the actress who played his beloved Celia. An after-theater snack might be in order: He'd missed dinner due to the cops' insistence on his testimony at the sniping scene, and his stomach rumbled like distant cannonfire. He'd almost been tempted by the gruesome fare the props crew dispensed for the Act Two rustic banquet scene. And after dinner … well, Aunt Mary might have to wait a bit. Maybe she'd have to forge his signature on whatever moneymaking scheme she was presently contemplating.

He shook himself from his reverie and addressed his reflection in the full-length mirror on the back of the door.

Good morrow, fair ones: Pray you, if you know,

Where in the purlieus of this forest stands

A sheep-cote, fenced about with olive trees?

He spoke those words in Act Four, scene three, every night
As You Like It
played, which was by no means a simple matter of every Tuesday through Sunday night with Wednesday and Sunday matinees. The Harvard Rep was just what its title proclaimed, a repertory company complete with its own bizarre calendar. This season they were running a three-show schedule: a Shakespeare, a Brecht, and an opera, the latter a new departure for the theater. Spraggue was cast in two out of the three, having neither the voice nor the inclination for opera. This week was more hectic than most: three
Caucasian Chalk Circles
and four
As You Like Its
. The opera ran only once. At first, Spraggue had checked the schedule constantly to find out whom he was to play that night; now he took things a day at a time without much anxiety.

The Act Four speech he'd just recited was the opening of his big scene with Celia, a scene played not by the text, but according to Rosalind's later verdict that the two had “no sooner met, but they looked; no sooner looked but they loved.” Each night Spraggue picked a different point in the scene to fall madly in love with Celia. He wondered how much of an effect that had on his feelings for Kathleen Farrell. Imitation spawning the real thing; art provoking life rather than imitating it. Hard to tell.

Kathleen, a blue-eyed siren with honey-colored hair, was breathtaking in the scene that night. Her voice was tuned to the back of the auditorium, but Spraggue couldn't rid himself of the notion that her eyes and thoughts were just for him.

He married her in the last scene. Was her curtain-call kiss warmer, longer than usual?

He recalled the first time he'd been shot at, years before, when he'd been a practicing private detective. He remembered thinking: If life is so capricious, if you can be wiped off the face of the earth by a stray bullet fired at a stranger by a stranger, enjoy each day, each moment. Confronting death made him think of pleasure, and pleasure made him think of sex. He wondered how Senator Donagher would pass the night.

Kathleen entered his dressing room still in her Celia garb, although her face had been scrubbed clean and her wig discarded. She carried her street clothes over her arm. Kathleen changed clothes wherever she happened to be—a habit that alternately delighted and irritated him—as long as her bra and panties stayed on. If those articles were to be removed, she retreated demurely to her dressing room like some innocent ingenue. Now she left the door open and began unhooking her bodice. Spraggue hoped the entire cast would not filter in to see which style of underwear she had selected for the evening.

“Hungry?” he asked, wondering if he were the first or the final male in the cast to try this less than novel approach. His was certainly not the only dressing room Kathleen had graced with her postperformance strip shows.

“Starving.”

“The Harvest is still open. Or,” he said, carefully not staring at any of the portions of Farrell's anatomy that were well worth staring at, “I could fix you some dinner at my place.”

She glanced at him speculatively and said, “That would be nice” in a way that let him know all possible ramifications of his invitation had been taken into consideration.

“Fine” was all he said.

“Stage door in five minutes then.” She vanished, leaving him to think delightful thoughts.

They were abruptly canceled. The hulking figure of Captain Hank Menlo of the Boston Police filled the doorway, blocking the light.

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.