Stardust

by Robert B. Parker

“You work?” I said.

  “A little, lawns in the summer. Shovel some sidewalks. Mostly I get welfare.”

  “Anything from Jill?”

  He shook his head.

  “You got any idea why anyone would threaten Jill Joyce, want to kill her?”

  “Somebody tried to kill her?”

  “Somebody killed her stunt double. Whether it was a mistake or a warning, none of us know.”

  “I wouldn’t want her to get hurt,” Pomeroy said.

  “Lot of people would, I think. I don’t know what she was in San Diego twenty-five years ago, but she’s turned into a high-octane pain in the ass since.”

  Pomeroy didn’t say anything. We turned away from the swale and walked back through the woods, the dogs coursing ahead of us, one or another of them looking back over its shoulder now and then to be sure we were there.

  “Took your damned sweet time,” Phillips said when we got there.

  “Boy, that police training,” I said. “You don’t miss a trick.”

  18

  HAwk sat in perfect repose on the wide windowsill in Salzman’s office, with the winter landscape behind him. He had on a white shirt and black jeans and black cowboy boots and a black leather shoulder holster containing a pearl-handled, chrome-plated .44 mag, excellent against low-flying aircraft. Salzman was at his desk. Jill was on the couch, her legs tucked demurely under her, a bright plaid skirt tucked around her knees. I was pacing.

  “You tell me you don’t know Rojack,” I said. “I go out there and find out you do. You tell me you never heard of Wilfred Pomeroy. I go out there and he tells me you’re married.”

  “He’s a liar,” Jill said serenely. “I never have heard of him.”

  “He tells me that you never got a divorce.”

  “I did too,” Jill said. “I told you he’s a liar.”

  Hawk smiled from the windowsill, like a man appreciating a funny remark.

  “If you had told me the truth you’d have saved me a couple of days’ driving and talking.”

  “Sandy,” Jill said, “are you going to let him treat me this way?”

  “He’s trying to help you, Jilly, like we all are.”

  “The hell he is,” Jill said. “He’s trying to dig up a lot of dirt from my past and make something out of it.”

  “Like sense,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if he was really working for one of those shows,” she said. She glanced at Hawk.

  “Geraldo Spenser,” Hawk said.

  “Don’t be fooled,” I said, “by my good looks. I’m just a simple gumshoe.”

  “Simple snoop,” Jill said. She was warming to her role. She’d decided her motivation and had a real handle on her character. “I hired you to protect me, not to snoop around looking for cruddy gossip.”

  “That’s a tautology,” I said.

  “Whaat?” Jill said. She cocked her head a little and her eyelashes nearly fluttered. Cute was what she did when she didn’t understand something.

  “All gossip is cruddy,” Hawk said.

  “I don’t care,” Jill said. “I don’t want him around; get rid of him. Hawk will protect me.”

  “Nope,” Hawk said.

  Jill’s head swiveled toward him and there was real alarm in her face.

  “No?”

  “I work for him.” Hawk nodded toward me. “He go, I go.”

  “You work for me,” Jill said.

  Hawk smiled pleasantly and shook his head. Jill looked back at me and then to Hawk.

  “You don’t mean that, Hawk,” she said. She moved her body a little on the couch and waited for Hawk to bark. He didn’t.

  “Jill . . .” Sandy said.

  “You fucking men.” Jill’s face was red. “You’re good for one thing. All I deal with is men, I got no one to trust, no one to talk to, no one who gives a shit about me.” Tears started down her face. “I want them gone, off this set, out of here. Now. Goddamned . . .”

  Salzman got up and walked around his desk. “Jilly,” he said and put an arm around her shoulder. “Jilly, come on. We’ll work this out. You work so hard, you’re tired.” He patted her shoulder. She leaned her head against his hip. “Jilly, take a break. Here, I’ll get Molly to walk over to your trailer with you. Come on.”

  He eased Jill to her feet and with an arm around her edged her to the door.

  “Oh, Sandy,” Jill was sniffling. “Oh, Sandy, sometimes I feel so alone.”

  “You’re a star, honey. It happens to stars. But I’m here for you, all of us are.”

  “Not those two bastards,” Jill said.

  “Sure. I’ll straighten that out, Jilly,” Salzman said. He sounded like he was talking to an excitable puppy.

  They walked that way to the door. Salzman opened it.

  “Molly,” he said to a woman at the desk in the outer office. “Take Jill to her trailer and stay with her. She’s not feeling well.”

  “Sure, Sandy.”

  Molly put her arm through Jill’s and squeezed it.

  “Got some coffee over there, Jill?” Molly said. “Maybe get some cake. Some girl talk? Who needs men.”

  Jill went with her. As they left, Molly, who was dark-eyed and thin-faced, gave Salzman a look of savage reproach over her shoulder. Salzman shrugged and came back into his office and closed the door. He rubbed his hands over his face.

  “Christ,” he said.

  He stood that way for a moment, rubbing his face, then he turned and went back behind his desk. He looked at me and Hawk.

  “How are we going to work this?” he said.

  “Can you stand her?” I said to Hawk.

  “Seen worse,” Hawk said.

  “Jesus,” Salzman said. “I’d like to know where.”

  I said, “So we’ll keep Hawk with her, and I’ll try to run this thing down. You can tell her you fired me and prevailed upon my, ah, colleague to stay on.”

  “What are you going to do?” Salzman said.

  “I’ve got another name. I’ll go see if I can find the name and ask some questions and get other names and go see them and ask them questions and . . .” I spread my hands.

  “Magic,” Hawk said.

  “What’s this gonna cost me?” Salzman said.

  “A round trip to San Diego,” I said.

  “Can’t you call?” Salzman said.

  “Yeah, but it’s not the same. You don’t see people, you don’t notice peripheral things, people don’t see you.”

  “Why should they see you?” Salzman said.

  “Case you big and mean-looking like him,” Hawk said, “might be able to scare them a little.”

  “Ahhh,” Salzman said. “Okay, probably cheaper than Jill’s bar bill, anyway.”

  19

  THE slender mirrored face of the John Hancock Building rose fifty stories on the southern edge of Copley Square, reflecting the big brownstone Trinity Church back upon itself. Across the new plaza, snow covered now and crisscrossed with footpaths, opposite the church was the Public Library. There were Christmas lights in the square, and the uniformed doorman at the Copley Plaza stood between the gilded lions and whistled piercingly for a cab. I’d always wanted to do that and never been able to. Anyone can whistle, any old time, easy. I pursed my lips and whistled quietly. I put two fingers in my mouth and blew. There was a flat-sounding rush of air. So what? I headed for the library with the doorman’s whistle soaring across Dartmouth Street. The hell with whistling. I went past the bums lounging in the weak winter sun on the wide steps to the old entrance, and went in the ugly new entrance on Boylston Street.

  A half hour among the out-of-town phone directories gave me three Zabriskies in greater San Diego. I copied down addresses and phone numbers, and
walked back down Boylston Street toward my office.

  When I went inside, Martin Quirk was sitting at my desk with his feet up.

  “Spenser,” I said. “Boy, you’re much uglier than I’d heard.”

  Quirk let his feet down and stood and walked around to the chair in front of my desk, the one for clients, when any came to my office.

  “You don’t get any funnier,” Quirk said.

  “But I don’t get discouraged, either,” I said.

  “Too bad,” Quirk said.

  I sat behind my desk. He sat in the client chair.

  I said, “Can you whistle, loud, like doormen do?”

  “No.”

  “Me either. You ever wonder why that is?”

  “No.”

  “No, I suppose you wouldn’t,” I said.

  I swiveled half around in my chair and pulled out a bottom drawer and put my right foot on it. I could see out the window that way, down to the corner where Berkeley crosses Boylston. There were people out in large number, carrying packages. I looked back at Quirk. He always looked the same. Short black hair, tweed jacket, dark knit tie, white shirt with a pronounced roll in the button-down collar. His hands were pale and strong-looking with long blunt fingers and black hair on the backs. Everything fit, and since Quirk was about my size, it meant he shopped the Big Man stores or had the clothes made. He’d been the homicide commander for a long time, and he probably should have been police commissioner except that nothing intimidated him, and he wasn’t careful what he said.

  “What you got on this TV killing?” he said.

  “Babe Loftus?”

  “Un huh.”

  “Nothing directly. Jill is not an open book,” I said. “She sort of doesn’t get it that I’m working for her.”

  “She doesn’t get that about us, either.”

  “What have you got?” I said.

  “I asked you first,” Quirk said.

  “I know she’s had a relationship with a guy named Rojack, lives out in Dover.”

  “Stanley,” Quirk said. “Got a big geek of a bodyguard named Randall.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Whom you knocked on his ass in front of the Charles one morning last week.”

  “It seemed the right thing to do,” I said.

  “It was,” Quirk said.

  “Jill’s story is she doesn’t know him, and anyway he’s a creep.”

  “Tell me about him,” Quirk said. “What you know.”

  I did, everything except the detail about Wilfred Pomeroy.

  “Don’t underestimate Randall,” Quirk said when I finished. “He’s bad news.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  Quirk nodded, a little tiredly. “Yeah,” he said. “Aren’t we all.” He scrubbed along his jawline with the palms of both hands. Across Boylston Street there were three or four guys in coveralls stringing Christmas lights around Louis’.

  “Rojack is not exactly a wise guy,” Quirk said, “and he’s not exactly Chamber of Commerce. He’s a developer and what he develops is money. He’s enough on the wild side to have a bodyguard. He gets to go to receptions at City Hall, and I’m sure he’s got Joe Broz’s unlisted number.”

  I nodded.

  “You want something fixed, he’s a good guy to see. People he does business with are shooters, but Rojack stays out in Dover and has lunch at Locke’s.”

  “He’s dirty,” I said.

  “Yeah, he’s dirty; but almost always it’s secondhand, under the table, behind the back. We usually bust somebody else and Rojack goes home to Dover.”

  “Why would he shoot Babe Loftus?” I said.

  Quirk shrugged.

  “What’s the autopsy say?”

  “Shot once, at close range, in the back, with a three fifty-seven magnum, bullet entered her back below the left shoulder blade at an angle, penetrated her heart and lodged under her right rib cage. She was dead probably before she felt anything.”

  “Think the killer’s left-handed?” I said.

  “If he stood directly behind her,” Quirk said, “which he may or may not have done. Even if he is, it narrows the suspects down to maybe, what, five hundred thousand in the Commonwealth?”

  “Or maybe he was right-handed and shot her that way so you’d think he was left-handed.”

  “Or maybe he was ambidextrous, and a midget, and he stood on a box,” Quirk said. “You been reading Philo Vance again?”

  “So young,” I said, “yet so cynical.”

  “What else you got?” Quirk said.

  “That’s it,” I said.

  “You think it’s mistaken identity?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You think Rojack did it, or had Randall do it?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?” Quirk said.

  “Doesn’t seem his style,” I said.

  Outside the light was gone. The early winter evening had settled and the artificial light in storefronts and on street corners had taken hold. Nothing like colored light to spruce up a city.

  “Why do I think you know more than you’re telling?” Quirk said.

  “Because you’ve been a copper too long. It’s made you suspicious and skeptical.”

  “I’ve known you too long,” Quirk said.

  I was about to make a devastating response when my door opened and Susan came in, bringing with her a light scent of lilac. Quirk rose and Susan came and kissed him on the cheek.

  “If you are going to arrest him, Martin, could you wait until he’s taken me to dinner?”

  “If being a pain in the ass were illegal,” Quirk said, “he’d be doing life in Walpole.”

  “He’s kind of cute, though, don’t you think?”

  “Cuter than lace pants,” Quirk said.

  20

  IT was one of my favorite times in winter, the part of the day when it is dark, but the offices haven’t let out yet. All the windows are still lighted, and people are at their desks and walking about in the offices— bright vignettes of ordinary life.

  Susan and I held hands as we strolled down Boylston Street toward Arlington. The store windows were full of red bows, and Santa cutouts, and tinsel rope, and fake snow. Real snow had begun again, lightly, in big flakes that meandered down. Not the kind of snow that would pile up. Just the kind of snow the Chamber of Commerce would have ordered pre-Christmas. After the recent chill it was mild by comparison, maybe thirty degrees. Susan was wearing a black hip-length leather coat with fake black fur on the collar. Her head was bare and she wore her thick black hair up today. A few of the snowflakes settled on it.

  “No fur coat?”

  “Last time I wore it someone in Harvard Square called me a murderer.”

  “That’s because they haven’t met a real murderer,” I said.

  “Still, I don’t feel right wearing it,” Susan said. “The animals do suffer.”

  “You didn’t know that?” I said.

  “No. I had this lovely little vision of them romping about in green pastures until they died a quiet death of natural causes.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Who would think otherwise?”

  “I know, it’s a ludicrous idea; but when they said ranch raised that’s what I thought.”

  “Complicity’s hard to avoid,” I said.

  “Probably impossible,” Susan said. “But it doesn’t hurt to try a little.”

  “Especially when it’s easy,” I said.

  “Like giving up fur,” Susan said. She banged her head gently against my shoulder. “Next I may have to reexamine my stand on whales.”

  The snow was falling fast enough now to give the illusion of snowfall, without any real threat of a blizzard. The stoplights fuzze
d a little in the falling snow, radiating red or green in a kind of impressionist splash in the night. We turned left on Arlington and walked past the Ritz. Across the street, in the Public Garden, Washington sat astride his enormous horse, in oblivious dignity as the snow drifted down past him. To our left, the mall ran down Commonwealth Avenue. There was a man walking his dog on the mall. The dog was a pointer of some kind and kept shying against the man’s knee as the snow fluttered about her. Every few steps she would look up at the man as if questioning the sense of a walk in these conditions.

  The next block was mine, and we turned down Marlborough Street and into my apartment. Susan looked around as she took off her coat and draped it over the back of one of my counter stools.

  “Well,” she said, “fire laid already, table set for two. Wineglasses?”

  She shook her hair a little to get rid of the snowflakes, her hand making those automatic female gestures which women make around their hair.

  “What did you have in mind?” she said.

  “I’d like to emulate the fire,” I said. “Shall we start with a cocktail?”

  “We’d be fools not to,” Susan said.

  “Okay,” I said. “You light the fire while I mix them up.”

  “Jewish women don’t make fires,” Susan said.

  “It’s all made,” I said. “Just light the paper in three or four places.”

  “All right,” she said, “I’ll try. But I don’t want to get any icky soot on me.”

  She crouched in front of the fire, smoothing her skirt under her thighs as she did so, and struck a match. I went around the counter into my kitchen and made vodka martinis. I stirred them in the pitcher with a long spoon. I used to stir them with the blade of a kitchen knife until Susan saw me do it one day and went immediately out to buy me a long-handled silver spoon. I put Susan’s in a stemmed martini glass with four olives and no ice. I put mine in a thick lowball glass over ice with a twist. I put both drinks on a little lacquer tray and brought them around and put them on the coffee table.

  The fire was going and the paper had already ignited the kindling. Small ventures of flame danced around the edge of the yet unburning logs. Susan had retired to the couch, her feet tucked up under her. She had on a black skirt and a crimson blouse, open at the throat with a gold chain showing. Her earrings were gold teardrops. She had enormous dark eyes and a very wide mouth and her neck, where it showed at the open throat of the blouse, was strong.