Silent Night: A Spenser Holiday Novel Read online

  THE SPENSER NOVELS

  Robert B. Parker’s Wonderland

  (by Ace Atkins)

  Robert B. Parker’s Lullaby

  (by Ace Atkins)

  Sixkill

  Painted Ladies

  The Professional

  Rough Weather

  Now & Then

  Hundred-Dollar Baby

  School Days

  Cold Service

  Bad Business

  Back Story

  Widow’s Walk

  Potshot

  Hugger Mugger

  Hush Money

  Sudden Mischief

  Small Vices

  Chance

  Thin Air

  Walking Shadow

  Paper Doll

  Double Deuce

  Pastime

  Stardust

  Playmates

  Crimson Joy

  Pale Kings and Princes

  Taming a Sea-Horse

  A Catskill Eagle

  Valediction

  The Widening Gyre

  Ceremony

  A Savage Place

  Early Autumn

  Looking for Rachel Wallace

  The Judas Goat

  Promised Land

  Mortal Stakes

  God Save the Child

  The Godwulf Manuscript

  THE JESSE STONE NOVELS

  Robert B. Parker’s Damned If You Do

  (by Michael Brandman)

  Robert B. Parker’s Fool Me Twice

  (by Michael Brandman)

  Robert B. Parker’s Killing the Blues

  (by Michael Brandman)

  Split Image

  Night and Day

  Stranger in Paradise

  High Profile

  Sea Change

  Stone Cold

  Death in Paradise

  Trouble in Paradise

  Night Passage

  THE SUNNY RANDALL NOVELS

  Spare Change

  Blue Screen

  Melancholy Baby

  Shrink Rap

  Perish Twice

  Family Honor

  COLE/HITCH WESTERNS

  Robert B. Parker’s Ironhorse

  (by Robert Knott)

  Blue-Eyed Devil

  Brimstone

  Resolution

  Appaloosa

  ALSO BY ROBERT B. PARKER

  Double Play

  Gunman’s Rhapsody

  All Our Yesterdays

  A Year at the Races

  (with Joan H. Parker)

  Perchance to Dream

  Poodle Springs

  (with Raymond Chandler)

  Love and Glory

  Wilderness

  Three Weeks in Spring

  (with Joan H. Parker)

  Training with Weights

  (with John R. Marsh)

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  Publishers Since 1838

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, NY 10014

  USA • Canada • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China

  penguin.com

  A Penguin Random House Company

  Copyright © 2013 by The Estate of Robert B. Parker

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Parker, Robert B., 1932–2010.

  Silent night : a Spenser Holiday novel / Robert B. Parker with Helen Brann.

  p. cm.—(A Spenser Holiday Novel)

  ISBN 978-0-698-15515-2

  1. Spenser (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Private investigators—Massachusetts—Boston—Fiction. 3. Boston (Mass.)—Fiction. I. Brann, Helen. II. Title.

  PS3566.A686S56 2013 2013028875

  813'.54—dc23

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Joan:

  Every Christmas gift I cherished came nicely wrapped as you.

  CONTENTS

  Also by Robert B. Parker

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Author’s Note

  SUSAN AND I WALKED from my place up to Newbury Street on a sunny Saturday morning. The snow from the night before had stopped falling. There wasn’t much traffic, mostly cabs and an occasional noisy snowplow. It was two weeks before Christmas. A Salvation Army worker in full uniform was ringing a bell beside a tripod bucket at the corner of Boylston and Berkeley.

  “I’m glad we don’t exchange presents anymore,” I said.

  “Me too,” Susan said. “Have you canceled your account at Victoria’s Secret?”

  “Reluctantly. But they still send me the catalog.”

  “You could probably have your name removed from the list,” Susan said.

  “Sure.”

  She smiled.

  We went into a women’s boutique, where the staff seemed to know Susan. I found a chair designed for a woman who weighed 108 pounds. I resumed my lifelong comparative study of the female form. Susan had opened a nearly insurmountable lead. That was no reason not to see who might be runner-up. Or in the top ten. After about forty minutes we left. Susan had bought what she referred to as a “lovely little top.” And several small packages in a shopping bag decorated with a large Santa Claus.

  “I didn’t think Jews did Christmas shopping,” I said.

  “More often we do Christmas selling. You do realize there’s a group of us at Harvard who gather every year and drink wine and exchange one gift each.”

  “Any men in this group?”

  “No.”

  “Sounds like a fun crowd. A gathering of Harvard women.”

  “It can get a little fustian at times,” Susan said. “But I like these women, and there’s something sort of nice about a girls’ night out.”

  “Sort of like Hawk and me at the fights?”

  “Sort of.”

  We turned the corner a
nd into the bar door of the Taj Boston, formerly the Ritz, for a libation at the table we liked overlooking the Garden.

  “I’ll have a glass of Edna Valley chardonnay,” Susan said to the waiter.

  “Johnnie Walker Blue, soda, highball,” I said.

  Susan smiled at me. “I like your Christmas spirit.”

  “And I like yours.”

  Susan sipped her wine. “Why do you suppose a grown woman, a doctor, a therapist at that, feels at Christmastime the same sense of excitement and anticipation she did when she was just a girl?”

  “Perhaps we’ll need to discuss this later,” I said, lifting my glass.

  “I do hope so,” Susan said, and raised her glass to me. “At length.”

  I STOOD AT MY OFFICE WINDOW and looked out at the snow falling quietly onto the Back Bay and muffling the gleam of the Christmas lighting in the store windows. The snow had come often this year.

  “Fa, la, la,” I said.

  Pearl raised her head. She was with me on a take-your-dog-to-work day, which she spent, as she often did, on the couch in my office. I looked at her.

  “La, la,” I said.

  She didn’t know what I was talking about, but she was used to that. She could also sense that whatever it was, it had no connection to food. So she put her head back down on her paws and watched me in silent resignation.

  I liked the myth elements of Christmas. The way in which its origins reach back far beyond Jesus, to the rituals of people unknown to us. The celebration of the winter solstice. The coming of light in the darkest time. And with it the promise of spring to come and beginning again. I liked it better than Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

  I went to my desk and sat down.

  “Actually,” I said to Pearl, “I’ve had bad colds I liked better than Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

  I sensed movement in her look. Then she lost interest and snapped her head toward the door and made a low growl. Hospitality dog.

  The door opened and a kid came in.

  He looked at Pearl and said, “That dog going to bite me?”

  “Not,” I said, “unless you attack me.”

  “Attack you?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “For crissake, I’m a fucking kid.”

  “I guessed that. Have a seat.”

  Still watching Pearl, the kid sat down opposite my desk. His face was pointy and his eyes were close. He was wearing gray sweatpants that were too long for him. The bottoms of the pant legs were torn and ragged where the heel of his sneakers had repeatedly caught in them. His jacket was a threadbare navy peacoat, also too big, with the sleeves turned back. Under it was a gray hoodie. His baseball cap had a flat brim, and he wore it level and straight under the hood.

  “How old are you?”

  “Eleven, I think.”

  “You think?”

  “Yeah. I was there, but I don’t remember it, you know.”

  “What about your parents? You know them?”

  “My old lady was a drunk. I don’t think she knew who my old man was.”

  “She the one who raised you?”

  “Awhile,” the kid said. “Then she didn’t.”

  “Run off?”

  “Wherever she went, she went.”

  “So who raised you?”

  “The orphanage.”

  “How was that?”

  “Sucked,” the kid said. “You wanna hear why I come to see you?”

  “I do.”

  “I live in a place.”

  “Where,” I said.

  He made a looping gesture with his right hand.

  “Around,” he said.

  “Nice neighborhood.”

  The kid frowned at me. He was so street-worn and tough-talking and life-weary that I forgot he was only eleven. Irony is not the long suit of eleven-year-olds.

  “You don’t know where I live,” he said.

  “No,” I said. “I was just making a little joke.”

  “Ain’t funny.”

  “No,” I said. “Probably not. What’s your name?”

  “Slide.”

  “Last name?”

  “Slide,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “What do you want me to do for you?”

  “I want you to talk with Jackie,” Slide said.

  “Who’s Jackie?” I said.

  “Jackie asked me to come here and deliver his message. He needs to see you.”

  “What does he want to talk to me about?”

  “He’ll tell you.”

  “Why me?”

  “He seen you on the TV.”

  “Why didn’t Jackie come?” I said.

  “He sent me. He wanted to know if you would see him,” Slide said.

  “How long have you known Jackie?”

  “A few weeks,” he said.

  I nodded. “And before that?”

  He shuffled uncomfortably in the chair. “Did odd jobs. Slept where I could. The Y. You know.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “Will you see Jackie?”

  I took a card out of the middle drawer of my desk and gave it to him.

  “You or Jackie call me when you’re ready,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said.

  The kid took the card and put it in the side pocket of his pants without looking at it. Then he stood up and looked at me and didn’t say anything and turned and went out.

  I went to my window and watched him walk through the snow, his shoulders hunched, hands in his pockets, staying close to the walls of buildings, until he turned the corner onto Boylston Street and disappeared in the direction of the Public Garden.

  WE WERE AT MY PLACE. I was making supper. Susan was at my kitchen counter. Pearl had stretched out the length of the sofa, longer than one would think possible for a seventy-five-pound dog.

  “Tell me more about this boy who came to see you,” Susan said.

  “His name is Slide, he’s eleven, and he lives with someone named Jackie in a place whose location is unknown.”

  “That’s all?” she said.

  I mixed bread crumbs and pignolis with a little olive oil and began to toast them in a fry pan on low.

  “Except he’s terrified of his own shadow.” I stirred the contents of the pan, which were beginning to brown.

  “And who is Jackie?” she said.

  “Not much to go on,” I said.

  I took the fry pan off the fire and emptied the toasted crumbs and pignolis into a bowl. I took an Amstel Light out of the refrigerator and opened it. I poured it into a tall glass. After a swallow, I said, “If you didn’t know, how old would you think you were?”

  “Twenty-eight,” Susan said.

  “Plausible,” I said. “But you’re far too smart to be only twenty-eight.”

  “I try to conceal that.”

  “You fail.”

  “I wonder why Jackie sent a boy instead of coming himself,” Susan said. I watched her sip her wine. After an hour, the glass was still half full. “You’ll talk with Jackie?”

  “If he gets in touch,” I said.

  “What if it’s something illegal,” Susan said.

  “There’s illegal and illegal,” I said. “I make part of my living from that fact.”

  Susan nodded.

  I turned up the heat under the pot of water on the stove and put some whole-wheat linguine in it and set my timer. I sat on a bar stool opposite Susan, who took another sip and said, “Let me see if I have this right. Slide is sent by this guy named Jackie, who may or may not ever appear. And although you don’t fully grasp the situation, something about Slide has got you interested in helping him, whether Jackie’s activities are legal or not.”

  “Slide’s eleven going on thirty. So
far life hasn’t been full of good times for him. He’s afraid. Somewhere along the line he got scared, real bad. Of who, or what?”

  “And maybe Jackie is the key to figuring out what’s happening,” Susan said.

  The timer went off and I went over and drained the linguine. “Whatever Jackie turns out to be, or whether or not he shows up, Slide is definitely in some kind of trouble.”

  “Slide is a convenient cover for Jackie to hide whatever he’s up to,” Susan said. “And since he didn’t come himself, it would appear that at the very least Slide is being used.”

  “A Boston version of Oliver Twist,” I said. I plated the pasta and brought the plates over to the counter.

  “There wasn’t much Charles Dickens in our house,” Susan said.

  “That’s because you spent your time reading the diaries of Sigmund Freud.” I picked up my fork. “A match made in heaven.”

  “So deep down, we’re really just a couple of Victorians?” she said.

  “Maybe not. Just that we were educated early in the analysis of motivation,” I said. “Dickens, Freud, they’re all alike in the dark.”

  Susan laughed. “Mrs. Freud might disagree with you on that.”

  It was quiet for a moment. Then Susan said, “Have you given any thought to how we should spend Christmas?”

  “Only that we should be together.” I glanced over at the softly snoring Pearl. “With Pearl, of course. Hawk, too. Maybe ask Paul if he can join us.”

  “We’ll do it at my place. You know how I love to set a nice table for Christmas.”

  “A beautiful paradox,” I said. “But anywhere you are, it’s Christmas to me.”

  THE NEXT MORNING I met Hawk at the Harbor Health Club. Hawk was doing combinations on the heavy bag and I was hitting the double-end jeeter bag with my left hand. Hawk didn’t break a sweat. After ten minutes I was sodden and winded.

  “You do any more damage to that bag, we’ll have to get Henry a new one for Christmas,” I said.

  “Fuck Christmas,” he said.

  “Wow,” I said. “And people say you’re not sentimental. You still bitter that Santa Claus is a white man?”

  Hawk began to hit the bag alternately with both hands.

  “Whole holiday be a white man’s scam. All those rich honkies running in and out of stores like they might miss buying the last Rolls on the floor. Bentley’s beneath them.” He shifted his feet a little and started hitting the heavy bag with his left hand.