Pale Kings and Princes

11

I drove Susan back to Boston Sunday night and kept her car.

“I’ll rent one,” she said. “You can pay for it.”

“The Argus can pay for it,” I said.

Then it was Monday morning and Susan was gone and I was back to hanging around Wheaton looking for a clue. I felt like an ugly guy at a dating bar. I went into the Friendly restaurant and sat at the counter and had an English muffin and a cup of coffee.

“I heard there was some kind of excitement out on the Quabbin Road the other night,” I said. The young woman behind the counter looked at me blankly.

“Really?” she said. “What kind of excitement?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. I turned to the guy next to me, who was wearing a gray satin sweatsuit and black loafers. “You hear about it?” I said.

He was dipping a corner of his toast into the yellow of a fried egg. He finished doing that and looked up and shrugged.

“Nope,” he said. He had a two-day growth of beard and while his hair was brown, the beard was mostly gray.

“What’d you hear, mister?” The girl behind the counter was maybe nineteen and already was starting to look haggard.

“Oh, some kind of accident, out there, guy got shot or something.”

“Shot? Honest to God?”

“What I heard,” I said.

Gray stubble next to me said, “Know his name?”

“No,” I said. “Heard a car got burned too.”

“Honest to God,” the counter girl said.

Two cops came into the restaurant. They sat down at the counter three stools past gray stubble.

“Hey, Lenny,” the counter girl said to one of them, “what happened out on Quabbin Road the other night? This guy says somebody got shot.”

She poured coffee for both of them without being asked.

Lenny was maybe twenty-five with a thick blond moustache and his police cap crushed like a bomber pilot on his fifty-third mission. He looked down the counter at me.

“What’s this?” he said.

“I heard there was a shooting out on Quabbin Road,” I said. “Heard a car got burned too.”

“Where’d you hear that,” Lenny said.

“Got it from an eyewitness,” I said.

Lenny looked at his partner. “You know anything about a shooting, Chuck?”

Chuck was blond too, but taller than Lenny and clean-shaven. Chuck drank from his coffee cup holding it in both hands, his wrists limp, his shoulders hunched, the way Jack Palance did it in Shane. He sipped another sip and then put the cup down slowly and looked at me, turning only his head.

“Don’t know anything about it,” he said. “I would be real careful about the rumors I was spreading in this town, pal.”

“Oh, sure,” I said. “I’m probably wrong, just talk you hear around.”

“You know something,” Lenny said, “you report it to us, otherwise you do yourself a favor and keep your trap shut, you understand?”

Chuck kept gazing at me with his best baleful gaze. Baleful gazes are more effective if you aren’t twenty-five and blond and can’t grow a moustache.

“Gotcha,” I said. “Thanks for clearing that up, officers.” I left three one-dollar bills on the counter and got up and strolled out onto the street.

Susan had a new car, a bullet-shaped red Japanese sports car with a turbo-charged engine that would go from 0 to 5 million in 2.5 seconds. She blazed around in it like Chuck Yeager, but it scared me half to death and whenever I could I drove it with the cruise control set to fifty-five so it wouldn’t creep up to the speed of light on me when I glanced at the road. I nursed it away from the curb and went out Main Street toward the Wheaton Union Hospital. I picked up the Wheaton cruiser in my rearview mirror almost at once. They had their open tail on me again. I was supposed to pick them up in the rearview mirror.

About a quarter of a mile farther I picked up another tail, behind the cops, a silver Ford Escort. I love a parade.

Wheaton Union was a square two-story yellow-brick building with some glass brickwork around the entrance. A sign pointed around back to the emergency room and outpatient clinic. I parked and went in.

There was a waiting room with three people in it, and beyond a glassed-in reception area with two white-coated women, and beyond that the corridor and examining rooms.

I went to the reception room and spoke with one of the women.

“I understand a man was brought in Friday night around six o’clock with a gunshot wound in the left thigh,” I said.

Behind me a Wheaton cop, no one I’d seen before, strolled into the reception area and sat down in one of the spring-back wheeled chairs behind the desk next to the one I stood before. He was eating an apple.

“I beg your pardon, sir?” the woman at the desk said.

The other woman said, “Hello, Dave,” to the cop with the apple.

I said, “The guy that got shot Friday night, I wondered how he was.”

The cop swallowed his apple and said to my receptionist, “Hey, Jenny, you and Kevin coming to the softball banquet?”

She nodded at the cop and looked at me and said, “I’m sorry, sir, I have no record of anybody with a gunshot wound.”

“Without even checking?” I said.

“A gunshot wound would be news, sir. There’s been no one brought in here shot.”

The cop took another bite of his apple.

My receptionist looked at him and then the other receptionist.

“You don’t know anything about a gunshot victim, do you, Marge?”

Marge pushed her lower lip out and shook her head slowly. To my right a small black-haired woman came into the waiting room and sat down.

The cop was short and round-faced and wore his cap on the back of his head. He took a last bite out of the apple and looked around for the wastebasket. Didn’t see it and put the core in an ashtray.

My receptionist picked it up with a wrinkled nose and dropped it in the basket under her desk.

“Really, Dave,” she said. “Did you grow up in a barnyard?”

He grinned at her and then looked at me for the first time. He had been elaborately not looking at me up until now.

“Guess there’s no gunshot wound here, mister,” he said.

“Silly me,” I said and turned and went back out into the waiting room. The small black-haired woman was careful not to look at me. I went on out into the parking lot and got in my car and pulled out of my parking slot. The cop ambled out and got in his cruiser and turned around the curve of the emergency room drive and fell in behind me again. As I reached the top of the drive the small black-haired woman came out of the emergency room door and headed for her car. Two hundred yards down the road I checked the rear-view mirror again and the little Ford Escort was back in line behind the cops. Maybe she wasn’t following me, maybe she was following Dave. I didn’t want to be egocentric. I drove straight back through town and on out Quabbin Road to my motel. I parked in the lot and walked toward the lobby. The Wheaton cruiser moseyed on by me and turned back toward town. The Ford Escort drove on past me and parked at the end of the lot. I went on into the lobby and turned and watched through the glass doors as the small black-haired woman got out of the Escort and walked slowly toward the motel. As she walked she kept looking off in the direction the cruiser had taken. When she got to the hotel lobby, I was standing by the entry to the bar.

“Care for a cocktail?” I said.

She looked at me for a moment and said, “Yes,” and walked past me into the bar and sat at a small table against the far wall. I followed her and sat down across. The lunch crowd was starting to drift into the restaurant. Virgie was behind the bar.

“What would you like,” I said.

“Perrier,” she said. “Wedge of lime.”

I stood and went to the bar. “Perrier, Virgie,” I said. “And a bottle of Sam Adams.”

“Lime?” Virgie said.

“In the Perrier,” I said.

“I’ll bring them over,” Virgie said.

I went back and sat down. The dark-haired woman had lit a cigarette and as I sat down she exhaled some smoke.

“You mind,” she said.

I shook my head.

Virgie came around the bar with a tray and set the drinks down and went back to the bar.

The woman across the table was not very old, twenty-six maybe, twenty-seven. She was Hispanic with prominent cheekbones and dark oval eyes. Her black eyebrows were thick and she wore no makeup. Her long black hair was pulled back and clubbed behind with a tortoiseshell clasp. She wore a white shirt with a button-down collar and mannish-looking khaki slacks and brown leather gum-soled shoes. Around her throat where the shirt gapped open she wore some kind of Indian-looking choker of blue and white beads. She had a silver ring with a big turquoise oblong set in it on the forefinger of her right hand.

She picked up the Perrier glass with the same hand that held her cigarette and gestured at me.

“Salud,” she said.

I nodded and poured some beer into my glass and made a slight gesture with it and we each took a sip. Someday I’d have to find out how all this glass-touching stuff began. People were obsessive about it. She hadn’t drunk till I’d poured the beer and responded.

We put our glasses down and looked at each other. I laced my fingers together and rested my chin on them and waited.

“My name is Juanita Olmo,” she said.

“You know mine?” I said.

“Spenser,” she said.

I nodded.

“Why did you ask if I wanted a drink?” she said.

“Saw you following me. Saw you at the hospital. Watched you park here after the cops left.”

She nodded.

“I suppose you are wondering why I’ve been following you.”

“I assumed it was my virile kisser and manly carriage,” I said.

She didn’t smile. “I am not interested in you as a person,” she said.

“There is no other way to be interested,” I said.

She tipped her head to the side and forward in a cranial gesture of apology.

“I didn’t mean it that way,” she said. “I’m a social worker. I share your respect for the value of the individual.”

“Dynamite,” I said. “I knew we’d get along. You want my room key?”

“Please, Mr. Spenser. I’m a serious person and I am concerned about serious things. I don’t want to joke.”

“Sure,” I said.

“You are here looking into the death of Eric Valdez,” Juanita said.

I nodded, seriously.

“I knew Eric,” she said.

“Un huh.”

“I thought I could help.”

“So how come you’ve been following me around.”

“I wanted to get you when the police weren’t there,” she said. “And I... I wanted to get an idea of you. I wanted to look at you and see what you were like.”

“From two cars back?”

“I was going to get closer, but then you stopped me here in the lobby and I knew you had seen me.”

“So you want to sit and look at me for a while before you say anything?”

“No,” she said. “And I do not want you to patronize me either. I’m not a fool.”

“We’ll see,” I said.

She smiled faintly. “I appreciate honesty,” she said.

I waited.

She drank some Perrier. “Do you have any suspects in Eric’s death,” she said.

“No,” I said. “Eric was down here looking into the cocaine trade in Wheaton and a logical assumption is that he was killed because of that.”

“By the savage Colombians.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“It’s not a logical assumption,” Juanita said. “It’s a racist assumption.”

“One doesn’t exclude the other,” I said.

“Racism is not logical,” she said.

“And logic isn’t racist,” I said. “I’m not pointing at the coke trade because it’s Colombian. I’m pointing because that’s what Eric was involved in and it is a hugely profitable illegal money machine.”

“And you’re so sure that cocaine means Colombia.”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure of that.”

“I’m Colombian,” she said. She straightened as she said it and leveled her black eyes at me.

“Got any on you?” I said.

Her face colored. She said, “That’s precisely my point.”

“I know,” I said. “Mine too. I tend to tease more than I ought to, and sometimes I’m funny at the wrong time.”

“I don’t think you’re funny,” she said.

“Why should you be different,” I said. “Do you have a theory on Eric’s death?”

“I think the police killed him,” she said.

“Why would they do that?” I said.

“The chief is a bully and a bigot,” she said. “Eric was Hispanic.”

“That’s it?” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“You think the chief just up and shot him one day because he was Hispanic?”

“I do not know. Eric uncovered things the chief wanted secret.”

“You think the chief has secrets?” I said.

“He is an evil man,” she said. “He is a cruel man. That I know.”

“Tell me about the coke trade around here,” I said.

“There is some, and Colombians are involved. That is true. For us coca is simply part of life. It was part of life before Columbus.”

“Coca’s not cocaine,” I said.

“It is where cocaine begins,” she said. “Cocaine is a Colombian heritage. Like corn for many native American tribes.”

“Corn’s better for you,” I said.

“Not when it is made into whiskey.”

“Probably not,” I said. “Who runs the cocaine business here?”

She shook her head.

“You don’t know or you won’t say?”

She shook her head again.

“Cops know about it?”

“Of course,” she said.

“And take money to let it alone.”

“Of course,” she said again.

“All of them?”

She shrugged.

“So just what kind of help do you want to give me?” I said.

“I do not want all of us, each of us who is Colombian or of Colombian descent, tarred with this brush,” she said, leaning forward toward me with self-conscious intensity. “And I want to catch the people who killed Eric.”

“Were you and Eric intimate?” I said.

“Not in the way that you imply,” she said. “We were friends.”

I nodded. “Did he have other female friends?”

“Yes. Eric was very social with women.”

I nodded. “Chief Rogers says he was killed by a jealous husband.”

“That would be a convenient cover-up, for the chief,” Juanita said.

“Was Eric dating any married women?”

She didn’t look at me.

“Married Colombian women?” I said.

She stared past me at the empty tables beyond my right shoulder. She shook her head slightly.

“You don’t have much hope of getting the truth,” I said, “if you think you know in advance what the truth ought to be.”

She shifted her eyes back at me. “Look at you,” she said. “Drinking beer and preaching against drugs.”

“I’m not preaching against drugs,” I said. “I’m just trying to earn the money they paid me to find out who killed Eric Valdez.”

“Haven’t you ever wondered why some drugs are legal and some not?”

“I’ve never wondered that,” I said.

“The ruling class does not make alcohol illegal, or nicotine. It makes cocaine illegal. It makes marijuana illegal. It makes illegal the drugs of the powerless. The drugs it doesn’t use, or is not addicted to.”

“That’s why I never wondered,” I said. “It has also made killing Eric Valdez illegal and it has hired me, so to speak, to see who did that. You say you want to help. And you want to protect the Hispanic populace of Wheaton. Maybe you can’t do both. Maybe he was killed by a Colombian coke dealer. Maybe not. Maybe the truth is the best we can do.”

She stared at me.

“Better than speeches about the class struggle,” I said.

She stared at me some more.

“Why do you think you can do something,” she said.

“I’m pure of heart,” I said.

“One man, alone, in this town?”

“But devious,” I said.

I drank the rest of my Sam Adams. Juanita ignored her Perrier.

“Want to feel my muscle?” I said.

“Emmy Esteva,” she said.

“Thank you,” I said.

Tears began to form in Juanita’s eyes. She stood up suddenly and walked out of the bar and through the lobby and into the parking lot and got in her car and drove away.

Emmy Esteva.