Dead Heat (6 page)

He stared at the cracked white ceiling for five minutes, crawled over to the bed, reached for the phone, and brought it down to his level.

The way things were going, he didn't want to ask Pete Collatos for any favors, even one as minor as the name of the appropriate officer to handle Mary's potential arsonist. And mentioning the arsonist to Hurley as a casual aside was no longer an option if there was no reason to call Hurley about the Buick.

He dialed 911, police emergency. The high intermittent beep let him know he was being recorded from the moment the gruff-voiced cop answered on the second ring. He asked to be transferred from the Cambridge Police to the Boston Police, then made it quick.

He used the voice he'd adopted for the jailkeeper in a long ago run of
Inherit the Wind
at the Berkshire Theater Festival. It came to mind for the obvious reason: Jailkeepers reminded one of jail and jail was where he was headed if Menlo uncovered evidence of his late-night prowl around the reservoir. It also seemed a safe bet for nonrecognition. Less than two hundred people had seen the play, and not even the nastiest critic would recall the slightly Southern, high, breathy tones he'd taken such pains to perfect.

“That fire at 312 Commonwealth Avenue was set,” he said.

“Who is this? State your full name and address.”

“Do yourself a favor. Check out the insurance on that place.” Spraggue hung up, ignoring a second plea for his name. TV cops would already have had the call traced, a prowl car on the way to his front door. With the real-life Boston Police, the question was whether they'd even bother to check out the tip.

Hauling himself to his feet, leaving the phone on the floor, he tried to stretch the ache out of his muscles. No soap. He went downstairs, padding barefoot into the living room.

Spraggue's apartment, the top two floors of a Fayerweather Street triple-decker, wasn't exactly furnished. Its barren quality was a direct response to the finished perfection of the Chestnut Hill mansion. He'd bought the place on his return from England, for its proximity to Harvard, determined never to live in old Davison Spraggue's museum again. That had been the easy part. Convincing Mary that she ought to remain in the family mausoleum had been the tricky half of the deal. She'd finally acquiesced when he'd threatened to donate his patrimony to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for use as a museum. All he'd taken from the house he'd grown up in was one chair, a brown suede monster comfortable enough to sleep in at a pinch, one Oriental rug, and two paintings.

At the time, he'd thought he would enjoy furnishing and decorating his own place. He still thought so. He never got around to it.

He'd bought a bed and stuck it at one end of the big sky-lit room that was intended as the third floor living room. He'd ordered plain white shades for the multitude of windows, but never gotten as far as curtains. The built-in chests of drawers in the closets seemed sufficient for storage. One of the appropriated artworks, a signed Picasso sketch, hung on a wall visible from the bed.

The remainder of the decor consisted mainly of plants, showered on him by Mary, watered sporadically. Their health, their glorious green profusion, made him suspect that Mrs. Wales, the lady who cleaned his apartment in exchange for a steep reduction in her first floor rent, augmented his haphazard care.

The old brown chair was the only item of furniture in the living room, unless you counted cushions. He'd bought a few pieces for the dining room at an auction: an old trestle table, eight ladderback chairs in need of recaning. The second painting hung in the dining room: a Van Gogh still life swirled in glorious golds and reds that made up for the room's lack of window or fireplace.

He went into the kitchen to scramble eggs. No barren quality there. Two walls were entirely covered by pegboard, and the pegboard bristled with every conceivable cooking gadget invented, from garlic presses and egg slicers to meat mallets, pastry brushes, and wine pulls, from the very helpful to the ludicrous. Most were gifts. He owned six egg timers, ranging from serviceable to mildly cute to positively obscene. He never used egg timers.

He washed the eggs down with black coffee, the beans ground in one of three gift coffee grinders. He ground by handcrank this morning; shuddering at the thought of the noisy sleek electric grinder.

He dialed Kathleen from the kitchen wall phone, scraping up bits of egg on the last crust of toast, chewing hastily as the phone rang. She snatched up the receiver as if she'd been waiting for the call. Once he identified himself, all the eagerness faded. She thought she might be coming down with a cold. She was absolutely exhausted. She would definitely be busy after tonight's show. Possibly busy for the rest of her life.

Farrell didn't take well to being stood up. It had probably never happened to her before. Getting semi-arrested didn't seem a good enough excuse to her. Her tone intimated that he should have shot the man dead who threatened last night's rendezvous. Spraggue wondered whether the judge at his murder trial would consider Menlo's interference in his tryst with Kathleen grounds for justifiable homicide. That would depend on the judge's age, he supposed. And his eyesight. And his memory.

He hung up, dressed, hobbled down to the car.

Sparhawk Street was a three-block section of faded elegance trapped between St. Elizabeth's Hospital and Market Street in the Brighton section of Boston. For a politician, it was an unusual address; the transient-liberal-student enclave rarely managed to elect one of its own to City Council, much less the U.S. Senate. But Donagher, with his marathon-earned fame, had a name-recognition advantage that had outweighed the clannishness of North End Italians and Southie Irish when he first ran for city-wide office, that even now ignored town boundaries and made him as popular in the rural Berkshires as he was inside the Route 128 industrial belt.

The huge old homes were in various states of disrepair, making it impossible to guess whether the area was on the way up toward respectable gentrification or down toward seedy poverty. One staid colonial had the faded air of a rooming house. A pillared porch boasted a Greek-lettered banner: a college fraternity house. Noisy neighbors.

They weren't very loud on a Saturday afternoon. Probably still asleep, hung over from the revels of Friday night. Spraggue sympathized; he felt a bit hung over himself, from the stale air of the police station, Mary's wine, and the shattered expectations of the night. He didn't feel like chatting with Collatos. He didn't feel like analyzing crazed death threats.

Parking was allowed on one side of Sparhawk Street, which left one-and-a-half lanes for two-way traffic, less if you counted the half lane devoted to the propagation of potholes. Spraggue was driving cautiously, scanning the houses for addresses, when he noticed the plain dark car parked halfway down the street. Two men dozed in the front seat, one with a newspaper spread partially over his face.

Spraggue kept his foot pressed firmly on the accelerator and breezed right past the house that must have been Donagher's, a neatly painted blue Victorian. About twenty feet before Sparhawk came to an end at Cambridge Street, a narrow road opened on the left: Murdock Street. Spraggue took the turn, then the next left: Mapleton. He checked for other unmarked cars, maybe a stationary utility van. The street seemed clear, so he pulled sharply to the right and parked.

He strolled back along Mapleton, hands shoved in his pockets, until he could plainly see, through the carefully tended back garden of a white colonial, the light blue paint he'd noted on 55 Sparhawk. A house the size of Donagher's would have more than one entrance, that was certain. How vigilant the police? How nosy the neighbors?

As if in response to his question, a woman walked swiftly down the narrow concrete-slab walkway that led into the yard of the white colonial. She matched the pale sunshine. Her long, fine golden hair was brushed tight to her skull. Her beige raincoat was cinched at her waist with a matching belt. She wore dark stockings and tiny high-heeled shoes. Stopping for a moment to shove a wide-brimmed khaki rainhat over her hair, she shot one careful glance to her right, one to her left. She seemed not to notice Spraggue. He caught only a glimpse of a delicate pastel face, like the face of a Dresden China shepherdess after the painter had set a final wash of gray over all his brighter tones.

The woman turned abruptly and sped off toward Market Street, leaving Spraggue to wonder how she could move so quickly on her tiny tap-tapping heels.

He waited until she was out of sight, then hurried up the walkway. It took a surprising turn behind a stand of budding trees and led, not to the presumed garage of number whatever Mapleton, but directly to the back porch of Donagher's blue Victorian. Spraggue stared speculatively after the pastel woman. Had she come from Donagher's house?

Collatos was at the back door before he could push the buzzer, a broad grin splitting his swarthy face. “Cops out front,” he said casually as they shook hands.

“You could have mentioned them when you called.”

“I knew you'd spot them. Even had a bet on it with Murray. You just won me five bucks.”

“Murray?”

“Come on in, Spraggue. I feel well-disposed toward you.”

“Nice place” was all Spraggue said as they moved down a hallway with a glistening wooden floor into a lace-curtained front room furnished in stolid New England unimaginativeness accented with a few not inexpensive antiques.

“Donagher lived here long?” he asked, taking Collatos up on his invitation to sit on the chintz sofa.

“Maybe twelve, fifteen years. I think ever since he got married.”

“Big place.”

“It's more than just his house. It's staff headquarters, campaign headquarters. They've got rooms fixed up for people to stay over and they're always full. I moved in when I took the bodyguard job. Donagher's campaign manager lives here. One of his speech writers.”

“Is the senator here much?”

“Oh, yeah. Especially lately, with the marathon coming up and the election. Brian's a real home and family man so he's a regular commuter between Washington and Boston.”

“Odd that the whole family hasn't packed up and moved to Washington.”

“Coffee?” Collatos asked.

“Black.”

Spraggue left the uncomfortable couch as soon as Collatos went off in search of refreshment. He circled the room, pulled back one edge of a curtain cautiously. The unmarked car was in place. An envelope on the polished wooden mantel caught his eye, a packet full of amateur photographs. He shook them out in his hand: Donagher; two towheaded boys, maybe ten and fourteen years old; the pastel woman. The perfect political family. Except that the smile on the pastel woman looked tight, forced.

He heard Collatos' footsteps and shoved the prints back in their packet, placed the envelope back on the mantel. He wondered if Donagher's wife made a practice of leaving the house by the back door, scurrying down a neighbor's driveway, wearing a concealing hat. Maybe she was avoiding the patrol car out front. Spraggue kicked himself for not heeding his first impulse and following her. Then he kicked himself again for the thought. Follow Donagher's wife. What the hell for? He clenched his teeth and warned himself off.

When Collatos returned with the coffee, Spraggue was seated decorously on the couch, tapping his foot against a square of drab, but expensive rug.

“Want a doughnut?” Collatos asked. “Did you know that politicians live on doughnuts? We got glazed, plain, jelly, sugarcoated—”

“Who spotted me at the reservoir last night?” Spraggue asked, refusing the doughnut with a shake of his head.

Collatos took his time selecting a particularly gooey lump of dough that oozed red jam when bitten. “Want to meet him?” he asked.

“Why not?”

The man with the wire-rimmed glasses started talking as soon as Collatos ushered him into the room. He was last night's apparition all right, wearing a gray suit, instead of a dark one. His tall, skinny silhouette, his stick-out Adam's apple, left no doubt about it.

“Pleased to meet you,” he said, offering a gawky handshake. “You scared the hell out of me last night. I almost called the cops right then. If Pete hadn't been awake when I got home, if he hadn't realized who you were—”

“And how did you manage that?” Spraggue asked Collatos.

“Murray saw your car. A goddam silver Porsche, and I'm not supposed to know who it is?”

Spraggue turned to the man called Murray. “Just what game were you playing at the reservoir last night?”

“He sounds like a cop,” Murray said, and Spraggue remembered how many times Menlo had asked him similar questions during their unfriendly session downtown.

“Murray is Senator Donagher's campaign manager,” Collatos said hurriedly, as if his title explained the man's presence at the reservoir. “Murray Eichenhorn—Michael Spraggue. Sit down and drink some coffee, Murray, and don't antagonize the man, please.”

“Hey,” Eichenhorn sent Spraggue a disarming smile that would have worked better if it hadn't been practiced as much. “Look, I don't mean to be difficult. I didn't get much sleep last night. I was tied up all day in meetings. The Donagher campaign's really starting to rev up. And then I got word that some nutcase tried to shoot my man. I almost had a heart attack myself. But I was booked solid; I couldn't get over to the reservoir. Insomnia and curiosity sent me out on a wild-goose chase in the middle of the night, that's all.”

“What were you looking for?”

“Sure you're not a cop?” Eichenhorn's smile faded, reasserted itself. “Sorry. I just wanted to see the place. Brian had described it to me. I wanted to see how close I'd come to looking for a new job.”

“Campaign manager … You coordinate Donagher's publicity?”

“No crime in that. I handle all his media contacts, hire and fire his speech writers, make sure he wears a tie at the Ritz-Carlton and a hard hat on a construction site—”