A Catskill Eagle

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.