Stardust

by Robert B. Parker

  “Sure,” he said.

  “And I, meanwhile, will chase down whoever has been annoying you and urge them to stop,” I said.

  “Can you find him?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “How?”

  “You start looking,” I said. “And you ask people things, and then that leads you to somebody else and you ask them and they tell you something that hooks you into somebody, and so on.”

  “But where on earth will you start?”

  She had a little trouble with the separation between earth and will.

  “I already have,” I said. “I started with your friend Rojack.”

  She frowned. She took a drink. She frowned again.

  “I told you I don’t know him.”

  “Know his name though,” I said.

  “ ’Course I know his name.”

  “He says you and he were an item.”

  “He’s a creep,” Jill said.

  “Is there anything you’d like to add to that appraisal?”

  Hawk sat quietly. Now and then he took a small taste of his scotch. He watched Jill’s behavior happily, as if he’d paid a modest admission fee and felt he’d gotten a bargain.

  “I don’t want to talk about him,” Jill said.

  “You think he did it?” I said.

  Jill shook her head angrily.

  “I’ll find it out anyway,” I said. “Wouldn’t it make sense to tell me what you know, and get it over with quicker?”

  “I’m hungry,” Jill said.

  I slid the bowl of smokehouse almonds toward her. She took a handful and ate them silently, then drank some more wine. She had turned away from me as she did so and was eyeing Hawk.

  “You married?” she said.

  Hawk shook his head.

  “Got anybody?” Jill said.

  “Lots,” Hawk said.

  “I mean anybody special,” Jill said.

  “They all special,” Hawk said.

  “You like white girls?”

  Hawk looked at me again.

  “Tell me ’bout that pay again?” he said.

  “Good. It’s good as hell,” I said. “And you get a free watermelon, too.”

  Hawk nodded. Jill bored in on him.

  “Do you?”

  “Not stupid,” Hawk said. “Mostly I prefer not stupid.”

  “Did Spenser tell you what I’ve been looking for ever since I got to Boston?” She put an h in Boston.

  “A noble black savage,” Hawk said.

  Jill shook her head. She was implacable. She probably didn’t listen to what I said or Hawk said or the byplay between us.

  “I want something about this long,” she said and made her two-foot measuring gesture again.

  Hawk examined the distance between her hands seriously, then nodded thoughtfully.

  “Could send over my little brother,” he said.

  15

  HAWK was still nursing his first Laphroig, I was two-thirds through my first Sam Adams, and Jill was just beginning her fifth white wine.

  “Before you doze off,” I said, “can we talk about Wilfred Pomeroy?”

  Jill had no reaction for a moment, then she looked very carefully up from under her lowered gaze and said to me, “Who?”

  “Wilfred Pomeroy. Rojack says he was harassing you and had to be chased away.”

  “I don’t know anything about it,” she said.

  “As far as I can tell, Jill, you don’t know anyone and you’ve never done anything. Why would Rojack make up a story about Wilfred Pomeroy?”

  “Rojack’s a creep.”

  “Who could think up a name like Wilfred Pomeroy?” I said.

  “Who cares about Pomeroy?” Jill said. “Why are you bothering me with all these creeps?”

  There were two well-groomed young women in tailored suits sitting on the next couch. They both wore very high heels and they both were sipping Gibsons. Everything about them said, We have MBAs.

  “This is called detecting,” I said. “I’m trying to find out who murdered your stunt double, in the hopes that I can dissuade him, or her, from murdering you.”

  Hawk had leaned back in the couch and crossed his feet on the cocktail table. He held the single-malt scotch in both hands and rested it on a point above his solar plexus. He was examining the two MBAs with calm interest, the way one examines a painting.

  “Her?”

  “Could be a her, couldn’t it?”

  “Why would any woman want to kill me? I don’t even know any women.”

  “You know Wilfred Pomeroy?”

  “No.”

  One of the MBAs had become aware of Hawk’s gaze. She kept looking back at him in covert ways: pretending to glance out the window, casually surveying the room. She murmured something to her friend, who leaned forward to put her drink down and peeked at Hawk from under her bangs. Hawk continued to examine them without any reaction to their behavior.

  “And Rojack’s lying?” I said.

  “Yes,” Jill said. She had some wine.

  “But you have no idea why he would tell lies like this?”

  “No.”

  I leaned back and rested my head against the back of the couch and drummed my fingers lightly on the tops of my thighs. Jill had some wine.

  Hawk said, “Hard to imagine why anyone want to harass her, isn’t it?”

  I rolled my head a little to the left so I could look at Hawk.

  “Hard,” I said.

  “Susan met her?” Hawk said.

  “Yes.”

  “She a suspect?”

  I grinned.

  “She has motive,” I said.

  Jill was savoring her wine. She seemed capable of not hearing any conversation she didn’t want to hear.

  “Are you a detective too?” she said to Hawk.

  Hawk’s smile was radiant. He shook his head.

  “Well, what do you do?”

  “Mostly what I feel like,” Hawk said.

  “But, I mean, do you protect people all the time?”

  Again the big smile from Hawk.

  “Nope,” he said. “Sometimes I’m on the other side.”

  Jill looked at me.

  I shrugged.

  “I didn’t say he was nice. I said he was good.”

  “I don’t think either one of you is very nice,” Jill said. Her voice was very small and girlish.

  “Maybe,” Hawk said to me, “we should can this job and protect those two.”

  He nodded at the MBAs. Jill looked at them.

  “I could show you some things that those two tight asses don’t know between them.”

  “Good to know,” Hawk said.

  16

  IN the morning I headed west on the Mass. Pike with the sun gleaming off the new snow and the temperature in the low thirties. I felt good. I’d looked up Waymark on the map and it was there. It was as close as I’d gotten to a clue in this whole deal. For the first time since I’d met Jill Joyce, I knew where I was going.

  Waymark was in the Berkshire Hills, maybe two hours and twenty minutes west of Boston. There was a high gloss of rustic chic in the Berkshires, Tanglewood, Stockbridge, Williamstown Theater Festival; and there were enclaves of rural poverty where the official town mascot was probably a rat. Waymark was one of those. Driving into the east end of town after a long winding climb out of the valley, I saw a small house with a porch sagging across the length of the front and a discarded toilet bowl with a ratty Christmas tree stuck in it. In the next lot was a trailer, set on cinder blocks, its front yard fenced with bald tires, set in the ground to form a series of half-circles, black against the snow. Two brown cows, their ribs sho
wing, stood silently at a wire fence and gazed at me as I rolled by, and in a yard next to a convenience store a milk goat was tethered to the wheel of a broken tractor.

  Beside the convenience store, which advertised Orange Crush on an old-time sign that rose vertically beside the door, was a tall narrow two-story house with roofing shingles for siding. The shingles were a faded mustard color. Like a lot of the houses out here, it had a full veranda across the front. The veranda roof sagged in the middle enough so that the snow melt dripped off in the middle and puddled in front of the broken front step. There was a sign done in black house paint on a piece of one-by-ten pine board. TUNNYS GRILL it said. In front, on what once might have been a lawn, a couple of cars were parked nose in. I pulled in beside them. The space hadn’t been cleared, merely rutted down by cars parking and backing out. I could see where some of them had gotten stuck and spun big hollows with their rear wheels. The dark earth below had been spun up onto the snow, mixing with exhaust soot and litter. I nosed in beside a vintage 1970 Buick and parked and got out. From Tunnys Grill came the odor of winter vegetables cooking—cabbage maybe, or turnips. I walked across the buckling wooden porch and in through a hollow-core luan door that was probably intended to go on the closet in a housing development ranch. It was not meant to be an outside door and the veneer was blistering and the color had faded to a pale gray brown. When I pushed it open the coarse smell of cooking was more aggressive.

  Inside was a lightless corridor with a stairwell running up along the right wall to a closed door at the top. In front of the stairway to the right was an archway that had probably led into the living room. It had been closed off with a couple of pieces of plywood. Whoever had done it was an inexpert carpenter. Several of the nails were bent over, and instead of butting in the middle, one sheet of plywood lapped over the other. To the left was a similar archway, this one still open, and in what must once have been a dining room was a bar. There was a brown linoleum floor, three unmatched tables and some kitchen chairs, and a bar which had been worked up out of two long folding tables, the kind they use in church halls, with some red-checkered oilcloth tacked over it. Behind the bar was a tall dirty old refrigerator and some shelves with bottles on them. One shelf contained a row of unmatched glasses sitting mouth down on a folded dish towel. There was an old railroad wood stove set in a sandbox in the far corner opposite the bar, and on the wall to the left of the bar was a big florid picture of Custer’s Last Stand, with a very Errol Flynnesque Custer standing, the last man upright, in the center of his fallen troop, his blond hair blowing in the wind of battle, firing a long pistol at the circling Indians.

  There were two overweight guys in overalls and down vests sitting together near the stove drinking highballs and smoking cigarettes. The stove was putting out enough heat to bake bread, but both men seemed not to notice. They had on woolen shirts under the vests, and the sleeves of long underwear showed where they had turned their cuffs back. One of them had on a red woolen watch cap and the other a “Day-Glo” orange hunting cap with imitation fur inside the earflaps. He had pushed it back a little on his head, but otherwise made no accommodation to the heat. The woman behind the bar was smoking a cigarette on which nearly an inch of ash had accumulated. As I came in, she got rid of the ash by leaning forward in the direction of an ashtray on the bar and flicking the cigarette with her forefinger. The ash missed the ashtray by maybe three feet, and she absently brushed it off the bar and onto the floor.

  I assumed she was a woman, because she wore a dress. But that was the only clue. Her graying hair looked as if it had been cut with a hatchet. She had a lipless slash of a mouth that went straight across her wide square face. Her eyebrows were thick and grew together over her nose, and her skin was gray and harsh. She stood with her massive forearms folded over her shapeless chest and raised her chin maybe an eighth of an inch in my direction. I glanced at my watch. It was quarter of ten in the morning.

  “You got any coffee?” I said.

  She shook her head.

  One of the guys at the table said, “Hey, Gert, couple more.”

  She went around the bar and got their glasses. She took a couple of ice cubes out of a bag in the freezer top of the refrigerator, plunked one cube in each glass, poured some bourbon over it, and added ginger ale from a screw-top bottle. She walked back around, put the drinks down and said, “Two bucks.”

  Each of the drinkers gave her a dollar bill. She came back around the bar, put the two bills into a small, square, green metal box on the shelf. Then she looked at me again.

  “Beer or hard stuff,” she said. Her voice had a thick wheezy sound to it.

  “Anything to eat?” I said.

  “Got a Slim Jim,” she said.

  I shook my head. “I’m looking for a guy named Wilfred Pomeroy,” I said.

  She had no reaction. She didn’t care if I was looking for Wilfred Pomeroy or not.

  “Know him?” I said.

  “Yuh.”

  “Know where I can find him?”

  “Yuh.”

  “Where?”

  She simply shook her head.

  “Owe him money,” I said. “I’m looking to pay him.”

  She looked across at the two fat guys drinking bourbon and ginger ale. Both of them wore high-laced leather boots. The steel toe of one showed through where the pale leather had worn away.

  “Guy here says he owes Wilfred Pomeroy money,” she said. The wheeze rattled in her chest. Her cigarette had burned down close to her lips. She spat it on the floor and let it smolder there while she got another one out of the pocket of her shapeless cotton dress. She lit it.

  The guy in the “Day-Glo” cap said, “Shit.”

  Nobody else said anything.

  “You’re not buying that?” I said.

  The other guy at the table said, “Wilfred never done nothing that anyone would owe him money for, mister.”

  The guy in the “Day-Glo” cap spat against the stove. It sizzled for a minute and then everything was quiet again.

  “You from Boston or New York?” the other guy said.

  “Boston,” I said.

  “How much that fancy jacket cost you?” “Day-Glo” said. At 9:50 in the morning he was already a little glassy-eyed. I was wearing jeans and a leather jacket, and in Tunnys Grill I felt like Little Lord Fauntleroy.

  “Free,” I said. “I took it away from a loudmouth in a barroom.”

  “Day-Glo’s” brow furrowed for a minute while he thought about that.

  “You think you’re funny?” he said.

  “No,” I said, “I think you’re funny. You know where I can find Wilfred Pomeroy, or not?”

  “Maybe you want to get your wise city-boy ass stomped.”

  “Don’t be a dope,” I said. “You’re half gassed already and you’re fifty pounds out of shape.”

  “Day-Glo” looked at his pal.

  “You want to show this city mister something?”

  His pal was looking at me thoughtfully, or what passed for thoughtfully in Waymark. Then he made a dismissive gesture with his left hand.

  “Fuck him, Francis.”

  The woman at the bar said, “You gonna buy something or not? If you ain’t I don’t want you loitering around my bar.”

  I looked around at the three of them, slowly.

  “Have a nice day,” I said, and departed haughtily. Mr. Charm, smooth-talking the bumpkins.

  17

  THE Waymark Town Hall was one of those Greek Revival buildings with white-pillared fronts that abound in the Berkshires. It stood at the end of a small wedge-shaped town common in its elegant white simplicity, like a fashion model at a rescue mission. Around back the land dropped off a level and the police and fire departments were housed there in the basement. The fire department was probably all volunteer. There were two
engines and no people in the firehouse. Next to it was a single door in the concrete foundation wall, with a blue light beside it. I parked next to one of the gaudiest police cruisers ever customized. It had a light rack with two blue lights and a chrome siren mounted on the roof. There were chrome spotlights on both front window columns, running lights mounted on the fenders, and mud flaps and three antennas, and a giant shield painted on each door and on the hood in gold. Each one carried the legend WAYMARK POLICE. There was a shotgun locked upright at the dashboard, and a long black five-cell flashlight clipped beside it. The cruiser was painted light blue and white.

  Inside the station was a square cinder-block room painted light green with a single large desk in front and a barred cell with washbasin, toilet and steel cot in back. The cell door was ajar. There was a stuffed bobcat mounted on a slab of pine, sitting on top of a single file cabinet, there was a calendar on the wall with a picture of a stag at bay on it, and behind the desk sat a guy in a pale blue uniform shirt with white epaulets. A Sam Brown belt crossed over his chest, and a Western-style campaign hat sat on the desk in front of him next to the phone. A sign on the desk said BUFORD F. PHILLIPS, CHIEF. He had a big gold shield pinned to his chest. It too said CHIEF on it.

  I took out my wallet and showed the chief my I.D.

  I said, “I’m investigating a murder in Boston.”

  Phillips leaned back in his swivel chair and I could see the big pearl-handled .44 revolver he carried on the Sam Brown belt. He propped one foot up on an open drawer and held my wallet out a little to read it. He was wearing tooled leather cowboy boots.

  “What the hell is this?” he said, studying my license at arm’s length.

  “Private detective,” I said.

  He didn’t speak. He turned the wallet a little to catch the light better and compared my photo on the gun permit with the real me. While he was doing that, the tip of his tongue appeared between his lips, and his forehead wrinkled slightly. Studying things was hard work for Buford Phillips.