Robert B. Parker: The Spencer Novels 1?6

by Robert B. Parker

  His voice had a hard nasal sound to it, the old Yankee sound, and he talked like the class bully at Deerfield Academy. A tough WASP?

  “Sure,” I said. “I still need to talk with Rojack.”

  He wasn’t sure. He didn’t have authority to screen callers.

  “Wait here,” he said and closed the door in my face. I waited in the tinkling silence, listening to the wind chimes and the roof drip. Then he opened the door again.

  “This way,” he said. I stepped in. He closed the door behind me. The house inside was all angles and slants. I followed him through an open hallway that appeared to cut the house diagonally. Rooms full of glass and stone and costly furniture opened off it as we went. I got a glimpse of Oriental rugs and the kind of early-twentieth-century Mission Oak furniture from a factory in Syracuse that sells for $25,000 a couch. I also got the impression of a lot of Tiffany glass before I came out into an English conservatory, all glass, fully enclosed, heated, and furnished in white wicker with floral cushions.

  Rojack sat on the wicker couch among some huge potted ferns. He was wearing a Black Watch plaid shirt open at the neck, pressed chino pants and mahogany-colored penny loafers with no socks. On the couch next to him was a stack of manila file folders. On the coffee table before him was a laptop computer, its screen aglow with printing. He was drinking coffee from a white china cup that had a gold strip around the rim, and there was a full coffee service in silver on the table next to the computer.

  He was a good-looking man, short dark hair brushed straight back, dark expressive face. Medium sized, in shape. His nails glistened as he lowered the coffee cup and looked directly at me.

  “A private detective,” he said.

  “Sad but true,” I said.

  “Randall’s dying to throw you out,” Rojack said.

  “Why should he be different?”

  Rojack nodded. “You are often unwelcome?”

  “I often bring bad news,” I said.

  “That is usually unwelcome. Do you bring bad news to me?”

  “No,” I said. “I bring questions.”

  I felt like I was trapped in a Hemingway short story. If I got any more cryptic I wouldn’t be able to talk at all.

  Rojack nodded, carefully. It was as if everything he did he had learned to do.

  “Sit down,” he said. “Will you have coffee?”

  “Yes, please. Cream, two sugars.” Asking for decaf seemed somehow inappropriate.

  Rojack nodded at Randall. Without expression he poured some coffee for me, added a splash of cream and two lumps of sugar, put a small silver spoon on the white saucer and handed the coffee to me. Outside, the bright pasture sloped away to the riverbank in the midday sunlight, while the water ran across the glass roof of the atrium in thick rivulets and dripped rhythmically down the sides. Somewhere in the house there was a wood fire burning. I could smell it. After he gave me the coffee, Randall stood back against the archway that led to the atrium and waited with his arms folded. He was wearing a white warm-up suit with a cobalt stripe down the arm and leg seams, and some sort of off-white canvas slippers. The zipper on the warm-up suit was down about halfway, and he appeared to be wearing a lisle tank top underneath. Without uncrossing his arms he inspected the nails on his right hand.

  “What questions do you have for me, Mr. Spenser?”

  “First let me tell you my situation,” I said. I drank a little coffee. It was good. What’s a little rapid heartbeat now and then.

  “I have been employed to do a couple of things for Jill Joyce, the television star with whom you were trying to speak this morning.”

  Rojack nodded. Randall admired his nails. I sipped a bit more coffee.

  “One,” I said, “I’m supposed to protect her from harassment, hence my unkindness to old Randall here.”

  Rojack nodded again. Randall examined the nails on his left hand.

  “Second,” I said, “I’m supposed to find out who’s harassing her.”

  We all paused.

  “Hence, as it were, my visit here.”

  “You think I am harassing Jill Joyce?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t know what you are doing with Jill Joyce. But I need to know, in order to do what I was hired to do. So I thought I’d come out and ask.”

  “Even though you had reason to assume that Randall would be, ah, angry with you?”

  “I can live with Randall’s anger,” I said.

  Rojack smiled without any humor. “Perhaps,” he said.

  We all thought about that for a moment.

  “What has Jill told you about our relationship?” Rojack said.

  “She says she doesn’t know you.”

  Rojack was too carefully practiced in his every mannerism to show surprise. But he was expressionless for a moment and I guessed that maybe my answer had affected him.

  “She is a liar,” Rojack said, finally.

  “She certainly is,” I said.

  “What do you wish to know?”

  “Anything,” I said. “I can’t get her to tell me her birthday. I don’t even know enough to ask an intelligent question. Tell me anything about her, and it will be progress.”

  “She is a drunk,” Rojack said.

  “That I know.”

  “And, I don’t know if the term is used anymore, a nymphomaniac.”

  “I don’t think it is, but I know that too.”

  “She uses drugs.”

  “Yeah.”

  Rojack shrugged. “So what else is there to know?”

  “How do you know her?” I said.

  “At a cocktail party,” Rojack said. “The governor had a party in the State House rotunda for the stars and top executives of Fifty Minutes, when it first came to town to shoot the pilot. Three years ago. I went—I am a substantial contributor to the governor’s campaigns—and I met her there. I gave her a card. A couple of days later she called and said that she was alone in town, living in a hotel, and wanted someone to take her out and help her not be lonely.”

  Far down in the pasture, at the edge of the stream, one of the horses put his head down and drank. He was a red roan horse, and he made an ornamental contrast to the white pasture and the black trees, blacker than usual with the snow melt glistening on their sides.

  “I was pleased—most men would be. I took her to dinner at L’Espalier. We had wine. We went to the Plaza Bar. We came home here . . .” Rojack made a shrugging hand-spread gesture; among us men of the world, it would be clear what happened next.

  “So you were going steady?”

  “I don’t enjoy your manner very much, Spenser.”

  “Damn,” I said. “Everybody says that. Did you and Jill Joyce spend a lot of time together?”

  “We were intimate for several years. Then she stopped seeing me.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I had done her several favors. Perhaps once they were accomplished she felt no further need of me.”

  “Tell me about the favors,” I said. My cup was empty. I put it down on the coffee table. Automatically Rojack picked up a small napkin from the coffee service tray and put it under my saucer.

  “Some were merely routine: reservations at a restaurant, tickets for a sold-out event, a drunken driving charge—I have a good deal of influence.”

  “Congratulations. Were there any favors that weren’t routine?”

  Rojack leaned back thoughtfully and gazed out at his trees and horses. He looked healthy and very satisfied. He was talking about himself, and he took it seriously.

  “I suppose one must define routine,” Rojack said.

  I waited.

  “There was a somewhat salacious piece of gossip that I was able to keep out of the papers.”

  I wait
ed.

  “It involved a young driver on the show and Jill in an elevator.”

  I nodded encouragingly. There was no need to prod him. He liked talking about the things he could fix. He’d tell me all there was. Maybe more.

  “And there was a young man whom she’d known before she went to Hollywood.”

  Rojack said Hollywood the way a lot of people did, as if it were a place where one might actually run into Carole Lombard on any corner. As if it were glamorous. The sun had edged up to its low winter zenith as we’d sat talking, and now it shone directly in on the atrium from above and reflected in whitely from the unlittered snow. Everything shone with great clarity.

  “Apparently this young man had been calling Jill, trying to see her, and Jill wanted nothing to do with him. But he persisted until Jill spoke to me about it, and I sent Randall to ask him to stop.”

  “And he stopped?” I said.

  “Randall can be very convincing,” Rojack said.

  Leaning on the archway, Randall looked as pleased with himself as Rojack did. He was one of those rawboned, square-shouldered Yankee types with long muscles and big knuckley hands—all angles and planes, as if he’d been designed to go with the house.

  “What’s this guy’s name?” I said.

  Rojack looked at Randall.

  “Pomeroy,” Randall said. “Wilfred Pomeroy.”

  “Where’s he live?”

  “Place out in Western Mass., Waymark, one of those Berkshire hill towns.”

  “Waymark?”

  “Un huh.”

  “What was Jill’s connection to him?”

  Rojack pursed his lips for a moment. “Pelvic,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “So,” I said, “why were you after her this morning?”

  Rojack picked up his coffee cup, saw that it was empty, gestured toward Randall with it. Randall came over, took it, filled it, put it back. During which time I watched the red roan horse browse beneath the soft snow.

  Rojack took a sip of coffee. He held the cup in both hands, like people do in coffee commercials, and then they say ahhh! He didn’t say ahhh! He stared for a moment into the cup and then he raised his eyes.

  “We agree,” he said, “that Jill has many failings.”

  I nodded. At the end of the pasture, the red roan browsed too close to a chestnut with a red mane. The chestnut stretched out its neck and took a nip at the roan. The roan shied, kicked at the chestnut, and moved away. The peaceable kingdom.

  “But what you probably don’t see is the Jill that is so . . .” He searched thoughtfully for the right adjective. He spoke as if every word were being reported to an eager world. “Compelling,” he said. “When she is intimate with you she is totally intimate, she is completely yours and her . . .” Again he examined a choice of several words, turning them over the way a housewife buys fruit. “Her aura is so enveloping . . . it’s quite hypnotic.”

  “So when she dumps you it’s hard to believe,” I said.

  “And harder still to accept,” Rojack said.

  “You tried calling, and stopping by, and such.”

  “Without success,” Rojack said.

  “So you thought you’d get her early, and you brought Randall along to help you reason with her.”

  “I always bring Randall along, everywhere,” Rojack said.

  “You been calling her anonymously, sending scary messages?”

  “No. I’ve called her, yes; but she knew it was me, and she always hung up on me. The calls were not . . . criminal. I have written her, but again, there was nothing of an harassing nature.”

  He actually said “an harassing.”

  “You haven’t threatened her?”

  “No.”

  “Dirty tricks of any kind?”

  “Spenser, I am a man who does not find any need to resort to dirty tricks.”

  “Too important for stuff like that,” I said.

  “Quite simply,” Rojack said, “yes.”

  We sat wordlessly for a moment or two in the sun-flooded glass room.

  “Anything else you can tell me about Jill?” I said.

  Rojack shook his head.

  “Sort of funny,” I said. “She got you to chase Wilfred away. Now she’s got me to chase you away.”

  “I don’t plan to be chased away, Spenser. I am not a man who is used to being dumped, as you put it.”

  Again the sunny silence. I shrugged. And stood.

  “You seem very physical, Spenser. Do you work out?”

  “Some,” I said.

  “Perhaps I can show you our gym, before you go. Perhaps,” Rojack smiled, a formal gesture of self-deprecation, as sincere as a congressman’s handshake, “I can impress you.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  Rojack stood and let me out of the atrium. Randall followed.

  11

  THE gym was better than the Harbor Health Club, except Henry Cimoli wasn’t there. It had a full Nautilus setup, a complete set of York barbells, some parallel bars, some rings, a treadmill, a stair climber, jump ropes, a heavy bag, a speed bag. There was a lap pool off the gym part, and a sauna and steam and massage setup between the two. The walls of the gym were mirrored. The floor was done in some sort of resilient rubber padding. There were fluorescent lights recessed in a textured ceiling, and there were skylights through which the bright blue sky glistened.

  “Zowie,” I said.

  “Randall,” Rojack said, “perhaps you’d like to show Spenser how some of the equipment works.”

  “I know how it works,” I said.

  Nobody paid any attention. Randall shucked off his warm-up jacket and stepped out of his canvas shoes. His bare feet were white and bony with long toes and a tuft of hair on each instep. There were many distended veins in his pale arms, and the knobby muscles knotted and slacked as he moved.

  He jumped off the ground, caught the rings that hung straight down from the ceiling, and proceeded to do a series of gymnastic loops and frolics on them that were pretty impressive for a guy who looked to be about six feet four. He dismounted with a somersault and launched an all-out karate attack on the heavy bag, spinning in midair to kick it, whirling balletically to drive home an elbow or a sharp-knuckled fist. His movements were sometimes too quick to follow and the heavy bag pitched and shivered as he hit it, kicked it, slashed it, and butted it, all at what appeared to be the speed of sound. For the coup de grace he leaped into the air, scissor-kicked the bag with both feet and went into a backward somersault as he landed on his back, rolling to his feet in one continuous motion. He was breathing hard and his pale angular body was glistening with sweat as he stood erect, almost at attention, still wearing his rimless glasses, his flat blue eyes fixed on me. Rojack looked at him like the father of an Eagle Scout.

  “That kind of thing happen to you often?” I said.

  Rojack said, “We both felt it important that you understand about Randall, that you recognize clearly that this morning was merely a very lucky misjudgment on Randall’s part . . . lucky, that is, for you.”

  Randall was so thrilled by his performance that his face was fluorescent with excitement.

  “Is he going to do anything else?” I said. “Juggle four steak knives while whistling ‘Malaguena’? Something like that?”

  Randall’s breath was still coming a little short. “You like to . . . show us . . . what you . . . can do on the bag?”

  I looked at Rojack.

  “Be my guest,” he said. I think the sound in his voice was mockery.

  “Go ahead . . . big shot,” Randall said.

  I shrugged, reached under my left shoulder, pulled my gun and put a bullet into the middle of the body bag. The sound of the shot was shockingly loud in the silent gym. The
body bag jumped. I put the gun back under my arm, smiled in a friendly way at Rojack and Randall, and walked out. As I headed through the house to the front door, the smell of the pistol shot lingered gently after me.

  12

  THE next day was Saturday and Jill wasn’t working so Susan and I took her to sightsee. Susan was a little annoyed that she had to share her weekend with Jill Joyce, and when I thoughtfully pointed out to her that I wouldn’t be stuck guarding Jill’s body in the first place if it weren’t for Susan, she didn’t seem any happier.

  I was in the lobby when hotel security brought her down. She was wearing a pink cashmere workout suit, and white, high-topped, leather aerobic shoes with pink and white laces. She carried her black mink over her arm, her copper-blond hair glistened as if fresh from a hundred brush strokes, and her face looked as fresh and innocent as Daisy Duck’s. She hit the security guy with a smile so radiant that he’d probably have thrown himself on his sword, if she’d asked. If he’d had a sword.

  “Well, my incredible hulk,” she said. “Where will you take me today?”

  “Wherever you want to go,” I said. “Within reason.”

  Jill linked her arm through mine. “Lead on, Macbeth,” she said.

  We went out to where Susan was waiting in the Cherokee. The windows were tinted and Jill didn’t know that Susan was there until I opened the back door for Jill and she stopped and shook her head.

  “I’ll ride up front,” she said.

  “Front’s taken,” I said.

  The side window went down and Susan smiled out at Jill.

  “You remember Susan Silverman,” I said.

  “I didn’t know she’d be here,” Jill said to me.

  “We try to spend most weekends together,” I said. “When we can.”

  “Spenser’s Boston tour has become legendary,” Susan said. “I think you’ll enjoy it.”

  “You’ve been hired to protect me,” Jill said to me.

  “I know. Susan’s going to work free,” I said.

  “Hop in, Jill.” Susan was jollier than two yule logs.

  I held the back door open, and after a short pause Jill got in. I went around, got behind the wheel, and off we went. Jill sat stiffly upright in the backseat. Susan shifted around so that she could see both Jill and me when she spoke.