building I found it. Second floor. I rang. Nothing happened. I rang again and leaned on it. No soap. I rang some other buzzers at random. No one opened the door. A cagey lot. I rang all the buttons. No response. Then a mean, paunchy man in green twill shirt and pants came to the front door. He opened it about a foot and said, 'Whaddya want?'
'You the super?' I said.
'Who do you think I am?' He was smoking a cigarette that looked as if he'd found it, and it waggled wetly in the corner of his mouth as he spoke.
'I thought you were one of Santa's helpers coming around to see if everything was set for Christmas.'
'Huh?' he said.
'I'm looking for a young woman named Catherine Connelly. She doesn't answer her bell,' I said.
'Then she ain't home.'
'Mind if I check?'
'You better stop ringing them other buzzers too,' he said, and shut the door. I resisted the temptation to ring all the buzzers again and run. 'Childish,' I thought. 'Adolescent.' I went back to my car, got in, and drove to the university. Maybe I'd be able to locate her there. I parked in a spot that was reserved for Dean Mersfelder and headed for the library basement.
Iris Milford was there in her NEWS office, behind her metal desk. There were several other members of the staff, obviously younger, doing journalistic things at their metal desks.
She recognized me when I came in.
'Nice eye you got,' she said.
I'd forgotten the punch Sonny had landed. It looked worse than it felt, though it was still sore to touch.
'I bruise easily,' I said.
'I'll bet,' she said.
'Want to have lunch with me?' I asked.
'Absolutely,' she said. She closed the folder she was looking at, picked up her purse, and came around the desk.
'Too bad about how you can't make up your mind,' I said.
We walked out through the corridor. It was class-change time and the halls were crowded and hot and loud. A miasma of profanity and smoke and sweatiness under heavy winter coats. Ah, where are the white bucks of yesteryear? We wormed our way up to the first floor and finally out past the security apparatus that set off an alarm if someone smuggled out a book, past the scrutiny of a hard-faced librarian alert beside it, into the milling snow-crusted quadrangle. I got a cab and we rode to a restaurant I liked on top of an insurance building, where the city looked clean and patrician below, and the endless rows of red-brick town houses that had crumbled into slums looked geometric and orderly and a little European, stretching off to the south.
We had a drink and ordered lunch. Iris looked out at the orderly little brick houses.
'Get far enough away and it looks kinda pretty, don't it?' she said. 'You only get order from a distance. Close up is always messy.'
'Yeah,' I said, 'but your own life is always close up. You only see other people's lives at long range.'
'You better believe it,' she said. 'I'll take another pop.'
I ordered us two more drinks.
'Okay, Spenser, what is it? You not the type to feed drinks to a poor colored lady and take advantage of her body. Even one as irresistible as mine. What you want?' I liked her. She'd been there and seen it done. A tough, wised-up, honest broad.
'Well, if you're not going to come across, I'll take second best. Tell me about Cathy Connelly.'
'What you want to know?'
'I don't know, everything, anything. All I know is she was once Terry Orchard's roommate, that she moved out when the Powell kid moved in, that she now lives on the Fenway, and that she wasn't home when I called on her this morning.'
'That's about as much as I know. She was in my Chaucer class, and I copied her notes a couple times. I don't know her much better than that.'
'She belong to SCACE?'
'Not that I know. She seemed kind of a loner. Didn't belong to anything I know of. You never see her around campus, but that don't mean much because the goddamn campus is so big and crowded that you might not see a woolly rhinoceros around campus.'
'Boyfriends?' I asked.
'None that I know. But I'm telling you, I don't hardly know her. What I'm saying could be wrong as hell.'
'Where can I get a picture of her?'
'Student Personnel Office, I would guess. That's where we get ones we use in the paper for fast-breaking news stories, like who was elected captain of the girls' field hockey team. Campus security can probably get them for you.'
'I don't think so, Iris. Last dealing I had with campus security was when they ejected me from the premises. I think they don't like me.'
She widened her eyes. 'I thought they hired you.'
'They did, but I think they are in the process of making an agonizing reappraisal of that decision.'
'You having a good week, Spenser. Someone plunks you in the eye, you get thrown off the campus, you gonna get fired, you can't find Cathy Connelly. I hope you don't depress easy.'
'Like you were saying, it's always messy close up.'
'What you want Connelly for, anyway?'
'She was Terry Orchard's roommate. She might know how Terry's gun got from her bedside table into a hood's pocket.'
'Jesus, she don't look the type.'
'There isn't any type, my love.'
She nodded, 'Ain't that the truth.'
'Want dessert?' I said.
She nodded. 'Do I look like someone who turns down dessert?'
I asked for a dessert menu.
Iris said, 'I can get the picture for you. I'll go over to student personnel and tell them we need it for a feature we're doing. We do it all the time.'
'Would you like two desserts?' I said.
After I paid the bill with some of Roland Orchard's retainer and drove her back to the university, she did what she said. I sat in the car with the heater on, and she strolled into the student center and returned twenty minutes later with a two-by-two ID photo of Cathy Connelly. I thanked her.
She said, 'Two drinks and a lobster salad will get you almost anything, baby,' and went to class.
I drove over to Mass Ave and had a technician I know at a photo lab blow the picture up to eight by ten. Service while I waited cost me twenty-five dollars more of Roland Orchard's retainer, and I still hadn't got the tear fixed in my car top.
I took the picture back to my office and sat behind my desk looking at it. She looked like a pallid little girl. Small features, light hair, prominent teeth, serious eyes. While I was looking at her picture my door opened and in came Lieutenant Quirk. Hatless, wearing a glen plaid overcoat, shoes glossy, pocked face clean-shaven, ruddy from the cold, and glowing with health. He closed the door behind him, and stood looking at me with his hands in his overcoat pockets. He did not radiate cheer.
'Come in, Lieutenant,' I said. 'No need to knock, my door is always open to a public servant. You've come, no doubt, to ask my assistance in solving a particularly knotty puzzle… '
'Knock it off, Spenser. If I want to listen to bullshit, I'll go over to a City Council meeting.'
'Okay, have a seat. Want a drink?'
Quirk ignored the chair I'd nodded at and stood in front of my desk.
'Yeah, I'll have a drink.'
I poured two shots of bourbon into two paper cups. Quirk drank his off without expression and put the empty cup down. I sipped at mine a little and thought fondly of the stuff that Roland Orchard served.
