Jill frowned beautifully, a lovely vertical frown line appearing briefly between her eyebrows and smoothing out at once.
“Whoever he is,” she said. “Mostly this guy told me what he’d like to do to me when he got me alone.”
“Abusive?” I said.
She was sipping her martini now; apparently the edge of need had softened.
“Actually,” she said, “no. It wasn’t, it was more, you know, ah, romantic.”
“Romantic?”
“Yeah, lovey-dovey. Except he used all the dirty words. But he used them, like, romantically.”
I nodded.
“And you don’t, I suppose, have even a guess as to who he might be?” I said.
“If I did, you think I wouldn’t have already told you? What kind of dumb jerk question is that?”
“The kind if you don’t ask, you feel like a fool when it comes out that you should have asked.”
“No, I don’t know the guy. I don’t recognize his voice. I don’t have any idea who he is.”
“Any letters?”
She shook her head. The martini was gone. She gestured at the waitress.
“No.”
“Get any recordings of his calls?”
“No.”
“Not on any answering machines, or anything?”
“I don’t have answering machines,” Jill said. The waitress brought her a third martini. I didn’t have too much longer before talking with her would be useless.
Jill giggled. “I don’t know how they work.”
“You get any fan letters that seem odd?” I said.
“They’re all odd,” Jill said. “I mean, for crissake, fan letters.”
“Any unusually odd?”
“I don’t know. I don’t read them. Ask Sandy.”
“Sandy reads them?”
“Sandy, or some girl in the office. I don’t have time for it. Somebody reads them and writes up a little cover, saying how they sound. You know? If there’s a trend.”
“Do you read that?” I said.
“No, they send it to my agent.”
“Whose name is?”
“My agent?”
“Un huh.”
“Why do you want my agent’s name?”
“So I can talk with him,” I said. “See, I’m a detective. That means I make an attempt to detect what’s going on, by asking questions. By looking for, ah, clues. Stuff like that.”
“You’re making fun of me,” Jill said.
“One would have to have a heart of stone . . .” I said.
“I get you in bed, I’d show you something,” Jill said. She got another cigarette and leaned toward me while I lit it, her eyes fixed on me in a look that, I think, was supposed to make my blood race.
“What’s your agent’s name?” I said.
She leaned back and blew smoke out at me in disgust.
“Ken Craig,” she said.
“He in L.A.?”
“Yes.”
“How about relationships? Any that have ended lately?”
“Relationships?”
“Yeah. Marriages, lovers, business arrangements, anybody that you’ve cut loose that might be mad at you?”
Jill was holding the martini glass in both hands and resting it against her lower lip. She gazed at me over it, her eyes closed a little so that she had a smoky look.
“There are things a girl doesn’t talk about to a man,” she said.
“Aren’t you the same woman who expressed an interest in something this long?” I said. I made the measuring gesture with my hands.
Her eyes widened and seemed to get brighter. The rim of her glass was still pressed against her lower lip; the tip of her tongue appeared above it and darted laterally, back and forth.
“Maybe I did,” she said.
“And now there’s things a girl doesn’t discuss with a man?” I said.
She tilted the martini glass up suddenly and drank the rest of it in a long swallow. She put the glass down with a thump and stood up.
“I’m going to bed,” she said.
The brightness left her eyes and they seemed unfocused now.
“I’m not saying another word to you. I’m going to bed.”
“My loss,” I said. She walked toward the elevator without another sound. I glanced at the bartender. He spread his hands, palms down in a don’t-worry-about-it gesture. I left my beer half drunk and followed her out.
9
AT 6:10 the winter morning was as bright as a hooker’s promise and warmer than her heart. The temperature was already in the thirties and by noon the plowed streets would be dark and glistening with snow melt. I was in the lobby of the Charles Hotel, fresh showered, clean shaven, armed to the teeth, and dressed to the nines: sneakers, jeans, a black polo shirt, and a leather jacket. The collar of the polo shirt was turned up inside the collar of the jacket. I took off my Ray-Bans to see if I could catch another glimpse of myself in some lobby glass, but there wasn’t any. I’d have to live on memories till we got to a mirror. I could go outside and look at myself in the smoked glass windows of the Lincoln Town Car parked out there, but the slight curve of the window enlarged things, and when you’re a fifty regular you don’t want enlargement.
At the far end of the lobby a solitary desk clerk shuffled paper behind the counter. A tall guy with rimless glasses was admiring the huge floral display in the middle of the lobby. Faintly, I could smell coffee, as, in the recesses of the building, the kitchen began to crank up for breakfast. Past the floral display, to the left of the wide staircase, an elevator door opened and Jill Joyce came out, along with a bulky black man in a blue blazer. The black man carried a walkie-talkie. He nodded when he saw me and moved away, and she was mine for the day.
Jill was wearing jeans which appeared to have been applied with a spray gun, high emerald boots with three-inch heels, a white blouse unbuttoned to exactly the right depth of cleavage. She had her black mink coat thrown over her shoulders. Until you got very close she looked as if she weren’t wearing any makeup. Close up I could see that she was, and that it was so artfully applied that it gave the illusion of fresh-faced innocence, with a touch of lip gloss. She was carrying an alligator bag that was either a large purse or the carrying case for a small tuba. She handed it to me.
“Good morning, cute buns,” I said.
“I was hoping you’d notice.”
We went out through the revolving door. The tall guy with the rimless glasses went out through the swinging doors to the left of the revolving door and when we reached the sidewalk he said, “Miss Joyce.”
Jill shook her head.
“Not now,” she said. “I’ve got a six-fifteen call.”
He moved very smoothly for a geek, and he was in her path and saying, “Miss Joyce, Mr. Rojack wishes to speak with you.”
I moved between Jill and the tall guy. “What is your wish?” I said to Jill.
“I want to go to work,” she said.
“Miss Joyce prefers to go to work,” I said to the tall guy.
The tall guy’s voice flattened out like a piece of hammered tin.
“Buzz off,” he said.
“Buzz off?” I said. “Buzz? Off? Which one are you? Archie? Or Jughead?”
The tall guy’s face reddened, but not enough. He was very pale with short white-blond hair and a big Adam’s apple. He put one hand, his left, gently on my chest.
“Just back off, cowboy,” he said. “You don’t know what you’re getting into.”
I didn’t like him putting his hand on me, but defending my honor was not the first order of business here.
“Let’s go,” I said to Jill.
I moved to the left of the tall guy, keeping Jill behind me. My c
ar was parked on the walkway, back of the limo with the tinted windows. As we moved, one of the windows slid silently down and a guy with a fine profile looked out.
“Randall,” the guy with the fine profile said, “get rid of him.”
The tall guy smiled. The hand on my chest slid over and gripped my leather jacket. He started to turn his left hip in toward me when I kneed him in the groin. He grunted and started to sag. I turned my left shoulder in on myself and brought up a left uppercut that straightened him against, then bounced him off the car. His head banged against the edge of the car roof and he slid down the door and sat with his legs sprawled in front of him on the cold brick of the hotel turnaround.
Behind me Jill said, “Jesus,” softly.
I bent and looked into the car at the man with the profile. He wasn’t showing it to me. He was showing me full face, and there was a gun in his hand.
“Wow,” I said. “A Sig Sauer, just like the cops are getting.”
Profile said to me, “What the hell is your name?”
“Zorro,” I said. “I forgot my cape.”
“Never seen anyone deal with Randall quite like that.”
“Randall’s too confident,” I said. “Makes him careless.”
“Perhaps this will have been good for him.”
“I surely hope so,” I said.
Profile looked past me at Jill Joyce.
“I’ve been trying to reach you, Jill,” he said.
She didn’t look at him.
“You’ve not returned my calls.”
“Come on,” Jill said to me. “We’re late already.”
I straightened.
“I won’t be put off, Jill,” the Profile said.
Jill started to walk away. I straightened from the window.
“See you around,” I said.
“Yes, you will,” the Profile said.
“Tell Randall,” I said, “that hip throw went out about the same time buzz off did.”
“Perhaps he knows that now,” the Profile said. “I’m sure you’ll see him again too.”
I followed Jill and got there in time to hold the door for her. As I pulled out around the Town Car, I saw the Profile getting out and walking around toward where Randall sat on the cold bricks.
We drove out past the Kennedy School and right onto JFK Street and headed out across the Larz Anderson Bridge.
“What was that in the car?” I said. “Darryl F. Zanuck?”
“I have no idea,” she said.
“About many things, I think that’s true,” I said. “About the guy in the car—I don’t believe you.”
The Anderson Bridge looks like a bridge that would connect Cambridge to Boston. It is short. The river here was maybe a hundred yards wide. The bridge arched the way bridges do over the Seine, and was made of brick, or seemed to be, having enough brick dressing to fool your eye. To the right the river was broad and empty up as far as Mt. Auburn Hospital where it meandered west and out of sight. Downstream, looking left, it was spanned by the Western Avenue Bridge and the River Street Bridge before it meandered east near Boston University. The ice on the river still held, but the warmer weather would have its way and by late afternoon there would be water on top of the ice.
“Really—fans. They think they know you, and they are so insistent sometimes.” Jill stared out the window of the Cherokee as she talked. They were shooting on location today, in the Waterfront Park near the Marriott Hotel. I turned east onto Soldiers Field Road in front of the Business School. Jill stared at the big snow-covered lawn and the red brick Georgian buildings in a self-important cluster around it.
“What’s that?”
“Business School,” I said.
“Which one?”
“Harvard Business School,” I said. “There are people in there who would suffer dyspepsia if they heard you ask which one. They don’t even use its abbreviated name. Mostly they call it the B School. Graduates platoons of people each year who are Captains of Industry at once.”
“Don’t sound so critical,” Jill said as we slid under the Western Avenue overpass. “What are you captain of?”
“My soul,” I said. “Who’s the guy in the Lincoln?”
“Why won’t you believe what I tell you,” she said. “I probably met him at some reception when we were slugging the series, and he thinks he’s in love with me.”
“We’ll see him again,” I said.
“I’m sure you can take care of that,” Jill said. “You certainly hit that other man hard enough.”
“That guy’s better than he looked,” I said.
“How can you tell?”
“He was very confident. He was used to winning.”
“Well, he certainly underestimated you,” she said.
“Next time he won’t.”
10
FROM a pay phone on Atlantic Avenue, I called a guy I knew named Harry Dobson at the Registry of Motor Vehicles and got a name and address to go with the plate number I’d lifted from this morning’s Lincoln Town Car: Stanley Rojack, Sheep Meadow Lane, Dover. Then I found Morrissey the detail cop and told him I had an errand.
“She’ll be here all day,” I said, “according to the call sheet.”
“ ’Less she gets into a funk and goes in her mobile home to cry,” Morrissey said.
“In which case all you have to do is hang around outside,” I said. “It’s better than chasing some crack dancer up a dark alley.”
“You got that right,” Morrissey said.
It was bright along the waterfront the way it only is when the snow isn’t dirty yet, and the sun is out, and the light reflected off the gray ocean and the white snow makes you squint. Even if you are wearing your Ray-Bans. This wasn’t a working waterfront. This was a stockbrokers’ and young lawyers’ waterfront. The boats along the dock were sloops and Chris-Crafts, and the long gray granite warehouses had been turned into condominiums with sand-blasted brick interiors and bleached timbers showing. You could buy a blue margarita on ten seconds’ notice down here.
I got my car from where I’d parked it back of the prop truck, next to a hydrant under a sign that said TOW ZONE. One of the nice things about working for a movie company, you could park in the mayor’s office and people would just walk around your car and smile and say “Love the show.”
I went along under the artery to the South Station Tunnel, and through, and bore right onto the Mass. Pike that cruised along the old railroad right-of-way through, and mostly below, the center of the city. I went under the Prudential Center, which was built on the old railroad yards, and on out past Fenway, and Boston University, past the old Braves Field with its bright ugly carpet of Astroturf, where once the grass had grown. In maybe fifteen minutes I hit 128 and headed south. The roads were thick with surly Christmas shoppers, but there were no shopping centers yet between the turnpike and the Dover exit, and the pace quickened. Route 128 was clear of snow, and the exits were fully plowed and clear. I didn’t even need to put the Jeep in four-wheel drive. I rarely needed to put it in four-wheel drive. Sometimes I went out and drove around in snowstorms just to justify it. I took Route 109 and then Walpole Street and I was in Dover.
Dover is a WASP fantasy of the nineteenth century. The streets were arched with trees, bare black limbs now, crusted with snow, but in the summer effulgent with leaves. The houses were infrequent, and often invisible at the far end of winding driveways disguised as dirt roads. The architecture was white clapboard and the voters would probably have supported Caligula. Sheep Meadow Lane was at the far end of Walpole Street, curving off to the right among trees and bushes. Along each side was the kind of white three-board fence that you see around Lexington, Kentucky, and sure enough, pushing the snow aside and grazing below it were horses, oddly shaggy in their winter coats.
Parts of the pasture looked like an old apple orchard with the squat trees misshapen in their leaflessness. In several stretches along the winding road, disheveled stone walls, superseded by the neat white fencing, ran parallel to it, no longer functional; now only quaint.
It was nearly 11:00 in the morning and the winter sun was warmer than it should have been. Moisture dripped from the trees, and the plowed road was glistening with snow melt. Around a turn was Rojack’s house. It was one of those places that an architect had been given a free hand with, and too much money. He had decided that he could make a totally postmodern statement without violating the traditional forms implicit in the setting. The place looked like it had been designed by Georges Braque while drunk. It was slabs and angles and cubes and slants in fieldstone and brick and glass and timber, and it flaunted itself against the pastured landscape in self-satisfied excess. Beyond it the pasture land, studded with an occasional apple tree, rolled down toward a river. Horses moved about in the pasture. Beyond the horses and facing the pasture was a barn, newly built, that mimicked the old barns of New England the way fashion mimics clothing.
I parked in the big driveway that made a half-circle in front of the house. It was done in paving stones. Water dripped from the roofline of the house and made a pleasant winter sound as I walked up the sinuous brick path to the glass and redwood entryway. A wind chime at the entry made a small tinkle. I rang the bell. Wherever it rang in the house I couldn’t hear it. But it worked because in a minute the door opened and there was the tall mean geek I had disagreed with earlier this morning. His eyes behind the rimless glasses were expressionless when he looked at me.
“What do you want?”
“I’m with Dover Welcome Wagon,” I said. “I wanted to stop by and drop off some soap samples and the name of your nearest plumber.”
He started to say buzz off, caught himself and changed it.
“Beat it,” he said.
I took a card out of my shirt pocket and handed it to him.
“I lied about Welcome Wagon,” I said.
“Don’t get foolish because you were able to sucker punch me this morning. I’ve pulverized tougher guys than you.”
Robert B. Parker: The Spencer Novels 1?6 Page 22
