It was quiet then for a while. I sipped a little. And listened to the street sounds a little and then I heard someone snoring and it was me.
CHAPTER TWENTY
THE NEXT DAY it took me five miles of jogging and an hour and a half in the weight room to get the swelling out of my tongue and my vital signs functioning. I had breakfast in a diner, nothing could be finer, took two aspirin, and set out after Frank Doerr. A funeral parlor in Charlestown, Quirk had said. I brought all my sleuthing wiles to bear on the problem of how to locate it and looked in the Yellow Pages. Elementary, my dear Holmes. There it was, under “Funeral Directors”: Francis X. Doerr, 228 Main Street, Charlestown.
There’s no escape Doerr.
With the top down I drove my eight-year-old Chevy across the bridge into City Square. Charlestown is a section of Boston. Bunker Hill is there, and Old Ironsides, but the dominant quality of Charlestown is the convergence of elevated transportation. The Mystic River Bridge, Route 93, and the Fitzgerald Expressway all interchange in Charlestown.
Through the maze run the tracks of the elevated MBTA. Steel and concrete stanchions have flourished in the City Square area as nowhere else. If the British wanted to attack Bunker Hill now, they wouldn’t be able to find it.
From City Square I drove out Main Street under the elevated tracks. Doerr was maybe a half mile out from City Square toward Everett. Parking in that area of Charlestown was no problem. Most of the stores along that stretch of Main Street are boarded up. And urban renewal had not yet brought economic renewal. My car looked just right in the neighborhood.
Doerr’s Funeral Parlor was a two-story brick house with a slate roof. It was wedged in between an unoccupied grocery store with plywood nailed over the windows and a discount shoe store called Ronny’s Rejects. Across the street a vacant lot, not yet renewed, supported a flourishing crop of chicory and Queen Anne’s lace. Nature never betrayed the heart that loved her.
I brushed my hand over the gun on my hip for security and rang the bell at the front door. Inside, it made a very gentle chime. Full of solicitude. The door was opened almost at once by a plump man with a perfectly bald head. Striped pants, white shirt, dark coat, black tie. The undertaker’s undertaker.
“May I help you,” he said. Soft. Solicitous. May I take your wallet, may I have all your money? Leave everything to us.
“Yes,” I said. “I’d like to speak with Mr. Doerr.” Mr.
Doerr? He had me talking like him. I felt the scared feeling in my stomach.
“Concerning what, sir?”
I gave Baldy my card, the one with just my name on it, and said, “Tell Doerr I’d like to continue the discussion we began the other night.” Dropping the “Mr.” made me feel more aggressive.
“Certainly, sir, won’t you sit down for a moment?”
I sat in a straight-back chair with a velvet seat, and the bald man left the room. I thought he might genuflect before he left but he didn’t, just left with a dignified and reverent nod. It didn’t help my stomach. Getting the hell out would have helped my stomach but would have done little for my self-image. Doerr probably wasn’t that tough anyway. And Big Wally looked out of shape. Course you don’t have to be in really great shape to squeeze off, say, two rounds from a ninemillimeter Walther.
The building was absolutely silent and had a churchy smell. The entry hall where I sat was papered in a dim beige with palm fronds on it. Very understated and elderly. The rug on the floor was Oriental, with dull maroon the dominant color, and the ceiling fixture was wreathed in molded plaster fruit.
The bald man came back. “This way, please, sir,” he said, and stood aside to let me precede him through the door.
Well, Spenser, I said, it’s your funeral. Sometimes I’m uncontrollably droll.
Doerr’s office was on the second floor front and looked out at the elevated tracks. Just right if you wanted to make eye contact with commuters. Apparently Doerr didn’t because he sat behind a mahogany desk with his back to the window.
His desk was cluttered with manila file folders. There were two phones, and a big vase of snapdragons flourished on a small stand beside the window.
“What do you want?” Doerr said.
I sat in one of the two straight chairs in front of the desk. Doerr didn’t waste a lot of bread on decor.
“Why don’t you get right to the point, Frank?” I said.
“Don’t hide behind evasive pleasantries.”
“What do you want?”
“I want to answer some of the questions you asked me the other day.”
“Why?”
“Openness and candor,” I said. “The very hallmark of my profession.”
Doerr was sitting straight, hands resting on the arms of his swivel chair. He looked at me without expression. Without comment. A train clattered by outside the window, headed for Sullivan Square. Doerr ignored it.
“Okay,” I said. “You asked me what I was doing out at the ball park besides playing pepper.”
Doerr continued to look at me.
“I was hired to see if someone was going into the tank out there.”
