small rim of snow I could see a black nose with slight pink outlinings. It snuffed at me. I shifted my head slightly and said, “
Lifting my head was too hard. I put it back in the snow. The dog moved closer and snuffed at me again. I heard someone yell, “Digger!” The dog shuffled his feet uncertainly.
Someone yelled, “Digger!” again, and the dog moved away. I took a deep breath. It hurt my ribcage. I exhaled, inhaled again, inched my arms under me, and pushed myself up onto my hands and knees. My head swam. I felt my stomach tighten, and I threw up, which hurt the ribs some more. I stayed that way for a bit, on my hands and knees with my head hanging, like a winded horse. My eyes focused a little better. I could see the snow and the dog’s footprints, beyond them the legs of a park bench. I crawled over, got hold of it, and slowly got myself upright. Everything blurred for a minute, then came back into focus again. I inhaled some more and felt a little steadier. I looked around. The mall was empty. The Dalmatian was a long way down the mall now, walking with a man and woman. The snow where I stood was trampled and churned. There was a lot of blood spattered on the snow. Across the street in front of Manfred’s apartment the Pontiac was gone. I felt my mouth with my left hand. It was swollen, but no teeth were loose. My nose seemed okay, too.
I let go of the bench and took a step. My ribs were stiff and sore. My head ached. I had to wait for a moment while dizziness came and went. I touched the back of my head. It was swollen and wet with blood. I took a handful of snow from the bench seat and held it against the swollen part. Then I took another step, and another. I was under way. My apartment was three blocks away—one block to Marlborough Street, two blocks down toward the Public Garden. I figured I’d make it by sundown.
Actually I made it before sundown. It wasn’t quite noon when I let myself in and locked the door behind me. I took two aspirin with a glass of milk, made some black coffee, added a large shot of Irish whiskey and a teaspoon of sugar, and sipped it while I got undressed. I examined myself in the bathroom mirror. One eye was swollen and my lower lip was puffy. There was a seeping lump on the back of my head and a developing bruise that was going to be a lulu on my right side. But the ribs didn’t appear to be broken, and in fact there seemed to be nothing but surface damage. I took a long hot shower and put on clean clothes and had some more coffee and whiskey, and cooked myself two lambchops for lunch. I ate the lambchops with black bread, drank some more coffee with whiskey, and cleaned up the kitchen. I felt lousy but alive, and my fourth cup of whiskeyed coffee made me feel less lousy.
I looked into the bedroom at my bed and thought about lying down for a minute and decided not to. I took out my gun and spun the cylinder, made sure everything worked smoothly, put the gun back in my hip holster again, and went back out of my apartment.
I walked the three blocks back to Manfred’s place a lot faster than I had walked from Manfred’s two hours earlier. I was not sprightly, but I was moving steadily along.
When I rang the bell Manfred’s mom came to the door. She was thin and small, wearing a straight striped dress and white sneakers with a hole cut in one of them to relieve pressure on a bunion. Her hair was short and looked as if it had been trimmed with a jackknife. Her face was small, and all the features were clustered in the middle of it. She wore no make-up.
I said, “Good afternoon, ma’am. Is Manfred Roy here, please?”
She looked at my face uneasily. “He’s having his lunch,” she said. Her voice was very deep.
I stepped partway into the apartment and said, “I’ll be glad to wait, ma’am. Tell him I have some good news about Spenser.”
She stood uncertainly in the doorway. I edged a little further into the apartment. She edged back a little.
Manfred called from another room, “Who is it, Ma?”
“Man says he has good news about Spenser,” she said. I smiled at her benignly. Old Mr. Friendly.
Manfred appeared in the archway to my right. He had a napkin tucked in his belt and a small milk mustache on his upper lip. When he saw me, he stopped dead.
“The good news is that I’m not badly hurt, good buddy,” I said. “Ain’t that swell?”
Manfred backed up a step. “I don’t know nothing about that, Spenser.”
“About what?” his mother said. I edged all the way past her.
“About what, Manfred?” I said. His mom still stood with one hand on the doorknob.
“I didn’t have nothing to do with you getting beat up.”
“I’ll not be able to say the same about you, Manfred.”
Mrs. Roy said, “What do you want here? You said you had good news. You lied to get in here.”
“True,” I said. “I did lie. But if I hadn’t lied, sort of, then you wouldn’t have let me in, and I’d have had to kick in your door. I figured the lie was cheaper.”
“Don’t you threaten my mother,” Manfred said.
“No, I won’t. It’s you I came to threaten, Manfred.”
Mrs. Roy said, “Manfred, I’m going for the police,” and started out into the hall.
“No, Ma. Don’t do that,” Manfred said. Mrs. Roy stopped in the hall and looked back in at him. Her eyes were sick.
“Why shouldn’t I go to the police, Manfred?”
“They wouldn’t understand,” Manfred said. “He’d lie to them. They’d believe him. I’d get in trouble.”
“Are you from the niggers?” she said to me.
