Dead Heat (20 page)

He halted behind a shelf full of ponderous gray-spined history books, read their titles for five minutes. A teenaged boy, wearing a black watchcap and bopping along to the rhythm of his silent Sony Walkman, entered through the courtyard door. No one else.

Spraggue exited the library through the revolving doors on Boylston Street. He crossed Exeter and entered the lobby of the Lenox Hotel, took a flight of stairs down to the telephone.

No answer at Gravier's. He looked up Senator Donagher's Boston number, dialed, and got a recording: “This is. Donagher Campaign Headquarters. All our lines are busy now. Please hang on and the next available worker will answer your call.” They started to play Muzak in his ear so he hung up. He fumbled through his pockets for his black Harvard Coop book, found the number Senator Donagher had given him the way you'd give someone a gift: My own private number; whether I'm in Washington or Boston, this'll get you through.

This time, Spraggue was almost sure the man who slurred an offhand hello in the receiver was the man who called himself Murray Eichenhorn.

“Michael Spraggue to speak to Senator Donagher.”

“Senator Donagher is not available.” If it was Eichenhorn, he wasn't breezing into any easy informalities. “Then I'll speak to Mrs. Donagher,” Spraggue said.

He could almost hear Eichenhorn swallow over the phone.

“Uh … hang on a minute, please.”

There was a hurried, whispered, inaudible conference and then the unavailable Brian Donagher came on the line.

“What can I do for you?”

“When you were given that squeeze bottle, what did the woman say to you?”

Donagher hesitated, then spoke as if he'd made up his mind about something. “I've been through this so many times that I'm not sure I really remember. Maybe I'm not remembering what happened anymore; maybe I'm just recalling what I told the cops. It was so fuzzy when they first asked me. I was still in the hospital and …”

“Try. Word for word.”

“Well, I remember the woman called to me, said my name. Hey Brian, or something like that.”

“Did she seem at all familiar?”

“A lot of people call me Brian right off. They've seen my picture in the paper, seen me on TV. I'm one of the family. So, she said, Brian, have some water, or something like that. I was thirsty as hell—”

“And your wife wasn't where she was supposed to be.”

“My wife … Look, Spraggue, Lila is not getting involved in this mess. I absolutely deny—” What started out a bombastic speech turned into a plea. “There's no reason to harass my wife. I'm telling you the truth, just the way it happened. I was thirsty and I took the water and Pete looked at me, like to say, maybe the water's bad. I held it out to him, kind of like a joke.”

“The woman say anything?”

“She said, go ahead and share it, or give your buddy some, or something like that.”

“Is that all?”

“All I can remember. Then she promised to vote for me.” Donagher sighed. “Are you making head or tail out of this? I'd sure as hell like to get rid of the cops at my door. My wife's afraid to send the kids to school. It's like living in prison, a state of siege—”

“The cops can do without another killing.”

“It looks so bad. Especially with the election heating up—”

“I'd think it would give you a big publicity boost.”

“Yeah,” Donagher's voice was so bitter Spraggue regretted the gibe. “It's great. Senator hides behind cops. Won't meet people. You think I want that kind of coverage? You think I care about publicity when my wife can't go out and buy a loaf of bread, my kids can't pedal their bikes around the block? You think I enjoy finding out what Teddy Kennedy must live with every day of his life?”

“Sorry.”

“You're working on it, aren't you, Spraggue?”

“A little.”

“Let me hire you. Then you can be on it full time.”

“No, thanks,” Spraggue said, craning his neck around and looking for the man in the tan raincoat. “By the way, you haven't hired anybody else, have you?”

“No.”

“Good-bye.”

“Wait, hang on a minute, Spraggue. Do you think I should?”

The receiver was still squawking sound when Spraggue pressed it down into the cradle. Hire someone? Nope. Fire someone? A definite maybe.

TWENTY-FIVE

He tried Gravier's phone number often enough to memorize it, plunking his dimes into the pay phone at the theater during intermission, calling from his apartment after the show, dialing between yawns into the early hours of the morning. Hostile-voiced Information confirmed that the number belonged to A. Gravier. At 9
A.M.
, Bell Telephone's business office declared the line in working order and suggested, with surpassing brilliance, that perhaps Mr. Gravier was out of town. Spraggue finessed the full name on the March bill out of the sweet young thing who handled the call. Arnold Gravier. Bingo.

He frittered away some time making breakfast, clearing the dishes. He had a script to study, a possibility for the next off-Broadway season, something his agent had described as “serio-comic Brechtian with a hint of Neil Simon.” He read the first two pages, flipped it shut, and tossed it on the floor.

He stifled the impulse to call Sharon Collatos; he couldn't justify the intrusion with no news to impart. And the woman he wanted to talk to was the one in the photo on Pete's desk, the smiling, colorful, windswept girl, not the black Medea of the funeral or the desperate waif of the previous day.

He kicked the script across the room and decided to visit Arnold Gravier. Even if the man wasn't home, he'd have neighbors, neighbors who wouldn't mind spending a few minutes chatting with an old friend of Arnie's. Gossips who might talk too much or too little.

He felt foolish checking the shrubbery out front as he passed the high fence that sealed off his property from the street, but he had been followed from the police station yesterday. And if Hurley wanted to pick up the trail again, he certainly knew where to do it. No secret where to find one Michael Spraggue most evenings between eight and eleven o'clock.

He left the Porsche in the garage. Gravier's address was in the North End, on Hanover Street. The North End was one of the oldest sections of Boston, cut off from the rest of the city by a combination of the Central Artery and Italian clannishness. The streets were cobblestone, one-way, narrow enough to give the driver of the slimmest compact car pause. Parking was an adventure to be avoided; even if he were to beat the fifty-to-one odds and find a remotely legal parking place, Porsches were apt to disappear in the North End. And then Mary would go out and buy him another flashy car, another engraved invitation to car thieves and reckless drivers. What he really needed was a battered, rusting-out jalopy, with a mammoth dent in the side, the kind of car that sent a message to aggressive drivers on the Southeast Expressway.

He was shoved out of the crowded subway at Park Street, walked down Tremont past the Granary Burying Ground, past the columns of King's Chapel, half hidden behind repairmen's scaffolding. He hurried across the cheerless bricks of barren City Hall Plaza, skirted Quincy Market to avoid the crush.

The smell of pancetta slowly frying in olive oil, of pungent Romano cheese, and fresh-baked bread made him regret having already eaten breakfast. Miniature multicolored lights twinkled from streetlamps overhead, left from the feast of St. Anthony, or any one of the myriad feasts, honoring the saints with parades and festivals, that periodically brightened the twisting streets of the neighborhood.

Arnold Gravier's building was three stories high, painted the same fading brown as its neighbors, a little further along in its state of disrepair. No yard to speak of, front or back. A clothesline waved three checked shirts out the second floor window like forlorn banners.

He kept walking, found a phone, and dialed the number with the usual result. He strolled back and mounted the warped wooden steps. The cramped vestibule disclosed the pertinent facts. The house was divided into three rented flats. First floor: two unrelated individuals, both designated by sexless first initials. Mrs. Eugenia Romero, the second floor tenant with the checkered shirts, wasn't afraid to list her entire name. ‘Gravier' said the third floor entry, even less forthcoming than the phone book.

He backed out and circled the block. There were lights burning in the third floor windows. A blare from a radio on the second or third floor, hard to tell. Maybe Arnold Gravier took care to make his place look lived in when he was out. Maybe he wasn't out. Maybe he hated telephones. Maybe he was deaf.

Spraggue bought coffee and a copy of the
Globe
at a corner variety store, settled himself in the schoolyard across from the Gravier place, and played the innocent, catching the rays of the friendly sun.

The Editorial and Op-Ed pages had three columns dedicated to the upcoming election. The
Globe
editorial was pro-Donagher as expected, the
Globe
being the more liberal rag in a two-newspaper town. The
Herald
would assuredly be pro-Bartolo. The second column was a rehash of campaign promises by both candidates, a compare-and-contrast job pointing out that both candidates had said the politically expedient at the appropriate time. The third, under the byline H. Marsh, discussed the media coverage of the campaign. Spraggue sighed and folded the paper in half, scrunching over to shield the page from the glare of the sun. Damn, but he was getting tired of the media turning its own people into minor league celebrities, interviewing each other instead of the newsmakers. He had started to turn the page when the name “Heineman” caught his eye. H. Marsh excoriated Channel 4's new “glamour boy” for tearing apart Senator Donagher in stories that were supposed to be news, not commentary. How much more would Marsh have written had he known of Lila Donagher's friendship with Edward Heineman?

The street noises grew louder, the sun warmer. Spraggue was glad of the length of the Wednesday
Globe
. It gave him plenty of reason to prolong his stay on the bench, enough anyway to avoid arousing suspicion—

The sudden quiet made him wary, that was what he diagnosed later. The radio inside A. Gravier's apartment had been turned off. Spraggue waited, staring at the same paragraph for five minutes without really seeing it.

Jaunty steps descended the front stoop of the brown house on Hanover Street. Spraggue peeked over the top of the newspaper just in time to see the man in the tan raincoat head down the street.

The same man who'd followed him from police headquarters yesterday.

TWENTY-SIX

The man in the tan raincoat couldn't have negotiated his disappearance more neatly if he'd known he was being followed. He pushed through the double doors leading to the central market building, the most crowded of Quincy Market's jammed lunchtime locales. Spraggue abandoned caution, ran up the steps in an effort to keep the raincoat in sight. The long, narrow hall was wall-to-wall people, lined with fast-food stands. The clamor of cohorts greeting colleagues from nearby Government Center over pizza or knockwurst or seafood salad crushed his ears. He shouldered his way through the tide, muttering haphazard “excuse me's” to outraged patrons, made it as far as the central rotunda.

Tan raincoats. Three were in sight, none of them on the back of the man with the gray-flecked hair who might be A. Gravier. Already Spraggue had passed six possible exits, cut-offs to the right or left galleries of the building. From the rotunda, the tan raincoat could have exited any one of a dozen ways, including the stairs to the vaulted dome. Spraggue hesitated on the first landing, revolving like a slow-spinning top, climbed further, seeking the better view.

From the second floor, the marketplace spread out beneath him like an intricate moving tapestry. People turned into blobs of color: a dark head surrounded by purple, a blond head in blue. Too much tan. Too much gray. Directly below, the wooden benches and tables melded into the wooden floor, the cacaphony of laughter and words deafened. A constant hunt for the rare empty table took place. As soon as one was vacated, figures sprang upon the seats like famished vultures.

Outside, with the pale sunshine for a backdrop, the scene turned into a Breughel frolic. Constant movement, vivid color—almost a dance. Spraggue circled the rotunda. Gave up the chase. Sat on the corner of a precarious bench.

Was Tan Raincoat Arnold Gravier? Or was Tan Raincoat a cop? Had he been sent to spy on both Spraggue and Gravier? Had Spraggue just witnessed the ransacking of Gravier's apartment?

The man had played the radio, turned on the lights. He'd bounced merrily down the front steps, ignoring a perfectly good back alleyway that would have served far better as an unobserved escape route … He'd acted like the apartment's rightful tenant, which made him Arnold Gravier. But he didn't answer his phone.

Why not? And why did he spend his time darting through the streets of the Back Bay? What did Tan Raincoat know about the arson that had claimed the life of JoJo Stearns? What did he know about the murder, if indeed it was murder, of Pete Collatos?

Spraggue wondered what Pete's killers would be charged with, just in case he should happen to stumble across them. What was the charge for spiking drinking water? Not first-degree murder. It would be harder than hell to get the district attorney to call it first-degree murder. Even though premeditation was evident, intent was not. What if the target were actually Donagher? What if—

Shit. Spraggue consoled himself with the fact that he'd discovered something about his shadow, that he'd probably be able to pick him up again. He headed over to the Government Center MBTA stop. Maybe they'd meet while waiting for the train. If it arrived with its customary dispatch, most of the world would have time to parade by.