Five Classic Spenser Mysteries Read online

  A Catskill Eagle, Early Autumn, God Save the Child, The Godwulf Manuscript, and Mortal Stakes are works of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A Bantam Dell eBook Edition

  A Catskill Eagle copyright © 1985 by Robert B. Parker

  Early Autumn copyright © 1981 by Robert B. Parker

  God Save the Child copyright © 1974 by Robert B. Parker

  The Godwulf Manuscript copyright © 1973 by Robert B. Parker

  Mortal Stakes copyright © 1975 by Robert B. Parker

  All Rights Reserved.

  Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Dell Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The novels contained in this omnibus were each published separately by Dell Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1985, 1981, 1974, 1973, and 1975.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-54607-4

  www.bantamdell.com

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  A Catskill Eagle

  Early Autumn

  God Save the Child

  The Godwulf Manuscript

  Mortal Stakes

  Published by

  Dell Publishing

  a division of

  Random House, Inc.

  1540 Broadway

  New York, New York 10036

  CIVILIZATION (BONGO, BONGO, BONGO)

  By Bob Hilliard & Carl Sigman

  © 1947 EDWIN H. MORRIS & COMPANY,

  A Division of MPL Communications, Inc.

  © Renewed 1975 EDWIN H. MORRIS & COMPANY,

  A Division of MPL Communications, Inc.

  International Copyright Secured, All Rights Reserved.

  Copyright © 1985 by Robert B. Parker

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photo-copying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, New York, New York.

  The trademark Dell is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-75448-6

  Reprinted by arrangement with Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence

  v3.1

  Contents

  Master - Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  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

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Dedication

  “And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he forever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than the other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.”

  HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby-Dick

  CHAPTER 1

  It was nearly midnight and I was just getting home from detecting. I had followed an embezzler around on a warm day in early summer trying to observe him spending his ill-gotten gain. The best I’d been able to do was catch him eating a veal cutlet sandwich in a sub shop in Danvers Square across from Security National Bank. It wasn’t much, but it was as close as you could get to sin in Danvers.

  I got a Steinlager from the refrigerator and opened it and sat at the counter to read my mail. There was a check from a client, a consumer protection letter from the phone company, the threat of a field collection from the electric company, and a letter from Susan.

  The letter said:

  I have no time. Hawk is in jail in Mill River, California. You must get him out. I need help too. Hawk will explain. Things are awful, but I love you.

  Susan

  And no matter how many times I read it, that’s all it said. It was postmarked San Jose.

  I drank some beer. A drop of condensation made a shimmery track down the side of the green bottle. Steinlager, New Zealand, the label said. Probably some corruption between the Dutch Zeeland and the English Sealand. Language worked funny. I got off the stool very carefully and went slowly and got my atlas and looked up Mill River, California. It was south of San Francisco. Population 10,753. I drank another swallow of beer. Then I went to the phone and dialed. Vince Haller answered on the fifth ring. I said it was me.

  He said, “Jesus Christ, it’s twenty minutes of one.”

  I said, “Hawk’s in jail in a small town called Mill River south of San Francisco. I want you to get a lawyer in there now.”

  “At twenty minutes of fucking one?” Haller said.

  “Susan’s in trouble too. I’m going out in the morning. I want to hear from the lawyer before I go.”

  “What kind of trouble?” Haller said.

  “I don’t know. Hawk knows. Get the lawyer down there right now.”

  “Okay, I’ll call a firm we know in San Francisco. They can roust one of their junior partners out and send him down, it’s only about quarter of ten out there.”

  “I want to hear from him as soon as he’s seen Hawk.”

  Haller said, “You okay?”

  I said, “Get going, Vince,” and hung up.

  I got another beer and read Susan’s letter again. It said the same thing. I sat at the counter beside the phone and looked at my apartment.

  Bookcases on either side of the front window. A working fireplace. Living room, bedroom, kitchen and bath. A shotgun, a rifle, and three handguns.

  “I’ve been here too long,” I said. I didn’t like the way I sounded in the empty room. I got up and walked to the front window and looked down at Marlborough Street. Nothing was happening down there. I went back to the counter and drank some more beer. Good to keep busy.

  The phone rang at four twelve in the morning. My second bottle of beer had gone flat on the counter, half finished, and I was lying on my back on the couch with my hands behind my head looking at my ceiling. I answered the phone before the third ring.

 
; At the other end, a woman’s voice said, “Mr. Spenser?”

  I said yes.

  She said, “This is Paula Goldman, I’m an attorney with Stein, Faye and Corbett in San Francisco and I was asked to call you.”

  “Have you seen Hawk?” I said.

  “Yes. He’s in jail, in Mill River, California, on a charge of murder and assault. There’s no bail, and no realistic hope of any.”

  “Who’d he kill?”

  “He is accused of killing a man named Emmett Colder, who works as a security consultant for a man named Russell Costigan. There are also several accounts of assault on other security personnel and several police officers. He is apparently difficult to subdue.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “He admits he killed Colder, and assaulted the various others, but says he was set up, says it was self-defense.”

  “Can you make a case?”

  “On the facts, maybe. But the problem is that Russell Costigan’s father is Jerry Costigan.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said.

  “You know Jerry Costigan.”

  “I know who he is. He owns many things.”

  “Yes.” Paula Goldman’s voice was firm and unhesitant. “And one of the things he owns is Mill River, California.”

  “So he doesn’t have much chance,” I said, “if he gets to trial.”

  “If he gets to trial, he’s a gone goose.”

  I was quiet for a minute, listening to the little transcontinental noises on the open line.

  “Did he say anything about Susan Silverman?” I said.

  “He said he’d come out at her request, and that they’d been waiting for him. The interview was conducted under close scrutiny and was given very grudgingly. Stein, Faye and Corbett is a major law firm in the Bay area. We have a lot of clout. If we’d had less, there might have been no interview at all.”

  “That’s all you know?”

  “That’s all I know.”

  “What are his chances of beating this thing?”

  “None.”

  “Because it’s an iron-solid case?”

  “Yes, it’s iron solid, but he also broke three of Russell Costigan’s front teeth. That’s like beating up Huey Long’s kid in his home parish in Louisiana in 1935.”

  “Un huh.”

  “And, for crissake, he’s black.”

  “The Costigans are not egalitarian?”

  “They are not,” she said.

  “Tell me about the jail?”

  “Four cells off the police station, which is in a wing of the town hall. Hawk is the only prisoner at the moment. The civilian dispatcher, female, and two cops, male, were on duty when I was there. As an officer of the court it is my obligation to remind you that abetting a jailbreak is a felony under the California penal code.”

  “It’s never loosened up out there since Reagan was governor,” I said.

  “When the sun comes up,” she said, “I’ll scramble around and work on the bail. But that’s shoveling shit against the tide. If you need me call the office.” She gave me the number.

  I said, “Thank you, Ms. Goldman.”

  She said, “Mrs. Goldman. I work criminal law fifteen, sixteen hours a day. I’m already more liberated than I want to be.”

  CHAPTER 2

  At six forty-five in the morning I was at the harbor health Club. Henry Cimoli had an apartment on the ground floor past the racquetball courts, and I was drinking coffee with him and making a plan.

  “I thought you quit coffee,” Henry said. He was doing handstand push-ups on the beige shag wall-to-wall carpet.

  “This is an emergency,” I said. I was not sleepy but I was tired. “You get the idea?”

  “Sure,” Henry said. “All the years I was a trainer. I can rig any kind of cast you want. I’ll make it big, and you can slide your foot right in it when you get there.”

  “We’ll need to get that little walker sole for it.”

  Henry eased out of the handstands. There was a chinning bar across the door to the kitchen. At five four Henry had to jump to reach it. He began to do pull-ups, touching the back of his neck to the bar, his arms apart to the width of the doorframe.

  “There’s a medical supply house up on Beacon Street, just past Kenmore Square. It’s on the left past the old Hotel Buckminster going toward Brookline.”

  Henry was wearing gray cotton shorts and nothing else, and his body pumped up and down on the bar like a small piston. There was no suggestion of strain. His voice was normal and unforced, his movements precise and prompt.

  “Maybe you should work less on strong,” I said, “and more on tall.”

  Henry dropped from the pull-up bar. “Tall enough to kick you in the balls,” he said.

  “Take a number,” I said, and went looking for the medical supply house.

  The place didn’t open until eight. So I drank three coffees sitting in my car in front of the Dunkin’ Donuts in Kenmore Square watching punk rockers unlimber for the day. A kid with tie-dyed hair strolled by wearing a white plastic vest and soft boots like Peter Pan. He had no shirt on and his chest was white and hairless and thin. He glanced at himself covertly in the store windows, filled with the pleasure of his outlandishness. He was probably hoping to scare a Republican, though in Kenmore Square they were sparse between ball games.

  I had Susan’s letter in my shirt pocket, folded up. I didn’t read it again. I knew what it said. I knew the words. I knew the tone. The tone was frantic. I looked at my watch. Almost eight. There was a nonstop at nine fifty-five. I was packed. All I had to do was rig this leg cast with Henry and get going. I could be there by one o’clock their time.

  I telescoped the three paper coffee cups and got out of my car and put them in a trash can. Then I got back in and drove up and was the first customer at the medical supply house. By 9:05 Henry had the leg cast made, too big, and I was able to put it on and take it off like a fisherman’s boot. I put it in my Asics Tiger gym bag, under my clean shirts.

  “You want a ride?” Henry said.

  “I’ll leave the car at the airport.”

  “You need any dough?”

  “I got out a couple of hundred with the bank card,” I said. “That’s all there is in the account. Plus the American Express card. I can’t leave home without it.”

  “You need anything,” Henry said, “you call me. Anything. You need me out there I’ll come.”

  “Paul knows to call you if he can’t get me,” I said. “He’s back in school.”

  Henry nodded. “Christ, you’d think you were his old man.”

  “Sort of,” I said.

  Henry put his hand out. I shook it.

  “You call me,” he said.

  I headed for Logan Airport at a high speed, working against the morning traffic. If I missed the plane there were other flights, but this one was nonstop and quicker. I wanted to get there quicker.

  I was twenty minutes early. I checked my bag through. If they lost it on me it would be a mess. But I couldn’t carry it on with a handgun in it. At nine fifty-five we were heading out to the runway, at ten we were banking up over the harbor and heading west.

  CHAPTER 3

  At Hertz I got a Buick Skylark with the window crank handle missing on the driver’s side. Where was O.J. when you needed him. I went straight south on 101 along the west side of the bay and at a little after three I turned off south of San Jose and headed east, on Mill River Boulevard. A mile off the highway there was a big shopping center built around a modernistic Safeway supermarket made of poured concrete, with large round windows and a broad quarry-tile apron where groceries could be loaded. A big redwood sign at the entrance to the parking lot said COSTIGAN MALL 30 Stores for Your Shopping Pleasure. The lettering was carved in the wood and painted gold. I pulled in and parked near the Safeway and got my cast from the bag. When we’d made it, Henry had rubbed it with some dirt and ashes from one of the club sand buckets. It looked a month old. In the foot, indented, was a hollow space, and
I put a .25-caliber automatic in there, flat on its side. Over it I put a sponge rubber inner-sole. Then I took off my left shoe and slipped the cast on. I shook my pants leg down over it and got out of the car. It worked fine. Comfort was not its strong suit, but it looked right. I walked on it a little and then went in the Safeway. I bought a pint of muscatel and got directions from a customer to the town hall. Then I went back to the Buick and got in. I stashed my wallet in the glove compartment. I took a Utica Blue Sox baseball cap from my bag, messed my hair, and jammed the cap on my head. I checked in the mirror. I hadn’t shaved since yesterday morning and it was beginning to show. Strands of hair stuck out nicely under the cap and through the small opening in the back where the plastic adjustable strap was. I was wearing a white shirt and jeans. I ripped the pocket on the shirt, roiled the sleeves up unevenly, and splashed some muscatel on it. I poured more of the muscatel onto my jeans. Then I put the bottle on the seat beside me and drove on into Mill River. The town hall was white stucco and red tile roof and green lawn with a sprinkler slowly revolving, trailing the water in a slightly laggard arc behind it. There was a fire station on the left side and then a kind of connecting wing, in front of the connecting wing was a pair of blue lights on either side of a sign just like the shopping center sign, except this one said MILL RIVER POLICE. There was a small lot in front of the police station and a bigger one beyond the town hall that looked like it went around back. I turned into the big lot and circled the building. A public works garage was out back. Not stucco, cinder block. Not tile, corrugated plastic. One for show, one for blow. I could see the jail windows in the back, covered with a thick wire mesh. Two police cars were back there beside a blank door with no outside handle. I went on around the building and out the driveway past the fire station and turned toward the center of town. Fifty yards down and across the street was the town library. A sign out front said J. T. COSTIGAN MEMORIAL LIBRARY. There was a parking lot in back. I pulled in, shut off the Buick, took my bottle of muscatel and rinsed my mouth out a couple of times. The wine tasted like tile cleaner. But it smelled bad. I took the half-empty bottle, put the car keys on a window ledge behind a shrub at the rear of the library, and strolled around front. As soon as I came into public view I began to weave, my head down, mumbling to myself. It is not easy to mumble to yourself if you don’t feel moved to mumble. I didn’t know what to mumble and finally began to mumble the starting lineup for the impossible-dream Red Sox team of ’67. “Rico Petrocelli,” I mumbled, “Carl Yastrzemski … Jerry Adair.”