the door jammed against it. Mark Tabor was on the fourth floor. No elevator. I walked up. The apartment house smelled bad and the stair landing had beer bottles and candy wrappers accumulating in the corners. Somewhere in the building electronic music was playing at top volume. The fourth flight began to tell on me a little, but I forced myself to breathe normally as I knocked on Tabor's door. No answer. I knocked again. And a third time. Loud. I didn't want to waste the four-flight climb. A voice inside called out, 'Wait a minute.' There was a pause, and then the door opened.
I said, 'Mark Tabor?'
And he said, 'Yeah.'
He looked like a zinnia. Tall and thin with an enormous corona of rust red hair flaring out around his pale, cleanshaven face. He wore a lavender undershirt and a pair of faded, flare-bottomed denim dungarees that were too long and dragged on the floor over his bare feet.
I said, 'I'm a friend of Terry Orchard's; she asked me to come and talk with you.'
'About what?'
'About inviting people in to sit down.'
'Why do you think I know what's her name?'
'Aw, come off it, Tabor,' I said. 'How the hell do you think I got your name and address? How do you know Terry Orchard is not a what's his name? What do you lose by talking with me for fifteen minutes? If I was going to mug you I would have already. Besides, a mugger would starve to death in this neighborhood.'
'Well, what do you want to talk about?' he asked, still standing in the door. I walked past him into the room. He said, 'Hey,' but didn't try to stop me. I moved a pile of mimeographed pamphlets off a steamer trunk and sat down on it. Tabor took a limp pack of Kools out of his pants pocket, extracted a ragged cigarette, and lit it. The menthol smell did nothing for the atmosphere. He took a big drag and exhaled through his nose. He leaned against the door jamb. 'Okay,' he said. 'What do you want?'
'I want to keep Terry Orchard out of the slam, for one thing. And I want to find the Godwulf Manuscript, for another.'
'Why are the cops hassling Terry?'
'Because they think she killed Dennis Powell.'
'Dennis is dead?'
I nodded.
'Ain't that a bitch, now,' he said, much as if I'd said the rain would spoil the picnic. He went over and sat on the edge of a kitchen table covered with books, lined yellow paper, manila folders, and the crusts of a pizza still in the take box. Behind him, taped to the gray painted wall with raggedly torn masking tape, was a huge picture of Che Guevara. Opposite was a day bed covered by an unzipped sleeping bag. There were clothes littered on the floor. On top of a bureau was a hot plate. There were no curtains or window shades.
I clucked approvingly. 'You've really got some style, Tabor,' I said.
'You from
'Nope, I'm a private detective.' I showed him the photostat of my license. 'I'm trying to clear Terry Orchard of the murder charge. I'm also looking for the Godwulf Manuscript, and I think they're connected. Can you help me?'
'I don't know nothing about no murder, man, and nothing about no jive ass manuscript.' Why did all the radical white kids from places like Scarsdale and Bel-Air try to talk as if they'd been brought up in Brownsville and Watts? He stubbed out his Kool and lit another.
'Look,' I said. 'You and Dennis Powell roomed together for two years. You and Terry Orchard are members of the same organization. You share the same goals. I'm not the cops. I'm free-lance, for crissake, I'm labor. I work for Terry. I don't want you. I want Terry out of trouble and the manuscript back in its case. Do you know where the manuscript is?'
'Naw, man. I don't know anything about it.'
He didn't look up from the contemplation of his Kool. His voice never varied. Like Terry, he showed no affect. No response to stimulus. It was as though he'd shut down.
'Tell me this,' I said. 'Does SCACE have a faculty adviser?'
'Oh, man, be cool. SCACE ain't no frat house, baby. Faculty adviser… Man, that's heavy.'
'Do any faculty members belong to SCACE?'
'Maybe. Lot of people belong to SCACE. That's for me to know and you to guess.'
'What's the big secret?'
'Lots of dudes can get in trouble for joining organizations like SCACE. The imperialists don't like opposition. The fat cats don't like organizations that are for the worker. The super-oppressors are scared of the revolution.'
'You forgot to mention the capitalist running-dog lackeys,' I said.
'Like you, you mean? See what happened to Terry Orchard? The pigs have framed her already. They'll do anything they can to stamp us out.'
'Look, kid, I don't want to sit up here and argue Herbert Marcuse with you. The cops are professionals. You can sit here in your hippie suit and drink wine and smoke grass and read Marx and play revolution like Tom Sawyer ambushing the A-rabs all you want. That bothers the cops like a tick fly on an elephant. If they wanted to stamp you out, they'd come in here and stamp and you'd know what a stamping was. They don't have to get frilly and frame some twenty-year-old broad to get at you. They've got guys in the station house in Charlestown that they keep in a cage when they're not on duty.'
He gave me a tough look. Which isn't easy when you weigh 150 pounds.
'How about a faculty member that might be associated with SCACE?'
He let the smoke from his cigarette out of his nose and mouth slowly. It drifted up around his head. Long years of practice, I thought. He looked straight at me with his eyes almost closed for a long time. Then he said, 'Where would the movement be now if someone had saved Sacco and Vanzetti?'
'Sonova bitch,' I said. 'You're almost perfect, you are, a flawless moron. I don't think I've ever seen anyone stay so implacably on the level of absolute abstraction.'
'Screw you, man,' he said.
'That's better,' I said. 'Now we're getting down where I live. I've got no hope for you, punk. But I promise you that if that kid gets burned because you don't tell me what you could tell me, I will come for you. You martyr that kid and I'll give the movement another martyr.'
'Screw you, man,' he said.
I walked out.
I went back down the four flights of stairs, as empty as when I went up. Some sleuth, Spenser, a real Hawkshaw. All you've found out is you get winded after four flights of stairs. I wondered if I should go back up and have a go at shaking some information out of him. Maybe later. Maybe he'd stew a little and I could call on him again. I didn't even know he knew anything. But talking to him, I could feel him holding back. I could even feel that he liked knowing something and not telling. It added color to the romance of his conspiracy. Out in the street the air was cold and it tasted clean after the mentholated smoke and the stale air of Tabor's room. A truck backfired and up on Mass Avenue a bus ground under way in low gear.
My next try was the campus. The student newspaper was located in the basement of the library. On the blond oak door cut into the cinder block of the basement corridor an inventive person had lettered NEWS in black ink.
Inside, the room was long and narrow. L-shaped black metal desks with white Formica tops were sloppily lined up along the long wall on the left. A hand-lettered sign made from half a manila folder instructed the staff to label all photographs with name, date, and location. The room was empty except for a black woman in a red paisley dashiki and matching turban. She was fat but not flabby, hard fat we used to call it when I was a kid, and the dashiki billowed around her body like a drop cloth on the sofa when the living room's going to be painted. A plastic name plate on her desk said FEATURE EDITOR.
She said, 'Can I help you?' Her voice was not cordial. No one seemed to be mistaking me for a member of the academic community.
I said. 'I hope so.'
I gave her a card. 'I'm working on a case, and I'm looking for information. Can I ask you for some?'
