Paper Doll

chapter four

LOUISBURG SQUARE IS in the heart of Beacon Hill, connecting Mt. Vernon and Pinckney Streets. In the center of the square is a little plot of grass with a black iron fence around it and a statue of Christopher Columbus. Around the square and facing it were a series of threestory, brick-front town houses.

The Tripp-Nelson home was one of them. It had a wide raised panel door, which was painted royal blue. In the middle of the door was a big polished brass knocker in the form of a lion holding a big polished brass ring his mouth.

I had walked up the hill from Charles Street the way Olivia Nelson had on the night she was killed. I stopped at the lower corner of the square where it connected to Mt. Vernon. There was nothing remarkable about it. There were no bloodstains, now. The police chalkings and the yellow crime-scene tape were gone. Nobody even came and stood and had their picture taken on the spot where the sixteenounce framing hammer had exploded against the back of Olivia Nelson’s skull. According to the coroner’s report she probably never knew it. She probably felt that one explosion-and the rest was silence.

I had her case file with me. There wasn’t anywhere to start on this thing, so I thought it might help to be in her house when I read the file of her murder investigation. It wasn’t much of an idea, but it was the only one I had. Tripp knew I was coming. I had told him I needed to look around the house. A round-faced brunette maid with pouty lips and a British accent answered my ring. She had on an actual maid suit, black dress, little white apron, little white cap. You don’t see many of those anymore.

“My name’s Spenser,” I said. “Mr. Tripp said you’d be expecting me.”

She looked at me blankly, as if I were an inoffensive but unfamiliar insect that had settled on her salad.

“Yes, sir,” she said. “You’re to have the freedom of the house, sir. May I take your hat, sir?”

I was wearing a replica Brooklyn Dodgers baseball cap, royal blue with a white B and a white button on top. Susan had ordered it for me at the same time she’d gotten me the replica Braves hat, which I wore with my other outfit.

“I’ll keep it,” I said. “Makes me look like Gene Hermanski.”

“Certainly, sir. If you need me you should ring one of these bells.”

She showed me a small brass bell with a rosewood handle sitting on the front hall table. “How charming,” I said.

“Yes, sir.”

She backed gracefully away from me and turned and disappeared under the staircase, presumably to the servants’ area below stairs. She had pretty good legs. Although in Louisburg Square it was probably incorrect to look at the maid’s legs at all.

There was a central stairway in the front hall, with mahogany railing curving down to an ornate newel post, white risers, oak treads. To the right was the living room, to the left a study, straight down the hall was a dining room. The kitchen was past the stairs, to the right of the dining room. With the file under my arm, I walked slowly through the house. The living room was in something a shade darker than ivory, with pastel peach drapes spilling onto the floor. The furniture was white satin, with a low coffee table in the same shade of marble. There were rather formal-looking photographs of Tripp, a woman whom I assumed to be his late wife, and two young people who were doubtless their children. There was a fine painting of an English setter on the wall over a beige marble fireplace, and, over the sofa, on the longest wall, a large painting of a dapple gray horse that looked like it might have been done by George Stubbs and selected because the tones worked with the decor.

The house was very silent, and thickly carpeted. The only noise was the gentle rush of the central air-conditioning. I had on the usual open shirt, jeans and sneakers, plus a navy blue windbreaker. It was too warm for the windbreaker, but I needed something to hide my gun; and the Dodger cap didn’t go with any of my sport coats.

The study was forest green with books and dark furniture and a green leather couch and chairs. There was a big desk with an Apple word processor on one corner. It was more out of place than I was. It looked sort of unseemly there. No one had thought of a way to disguise it as a Victorian artifact.

The books were impersonal. Mostly college texts, from thirty years ago, a picture book about Frederic Remington, an American Heritage Dictionary, a World Atlas, Ayn Rand, James Michener, Tom Clancy, Barbara Taylor Bradford, Louis L’Amour, Jean Auel, Rod McKuen, three books on how to be your own shrink, and A History of the Tripps of New England in leather, with gilt lettering on the spine. I put my murder file on the desk and took the book down and sat on the green leather couch and thumbed through it. It was obviously a commissioned work, privately printed. The Tripps had arrived in the new world in 1703 in the person of Carroll S. Tripp, a ship’s carpenter from Surrey, who settled in what later became Belfast, Maine. His grandson moved to Boston and founded the Tripp Mercantile Company in 1758, and they had remained here since. The organizing principle of the book appeared to be that all the Tripps were nicer than Little Bo Peep, including those from the eighteenth century who had founded the family fortune by making a bundle in the rum, molasses, and slave trade business. It told me nothing about the murder of Olivia Nelson, who had kept her birth name.