“You want Cambridge to send somebody over to keep an eye out?” Belson said. “Now that there’s a homicide involved.”
“Yes,” Salzman said. “And the hotel security staff is alerted.”
“Fine,” Belson said. “I’ll want Spenser for an hour or so.”
Salzman was already guiding Jill out of his office. She looked back at me.
“You’ll come, won’t you?” she said. “You’ll stay with me?”
“I’ll be along,” I said.
They left the room. Belson got up and closed the door behind them and walked across to the big picture window and stood looking out at the snow. His cigar had gone out some time ago, as it almost always did. He lit it with a kitchen match that he scratched on the windowsill. Outside the pleasant snow came steadily down. Belson turned from the window, folded his arms, leaned against the sill.
“What do you think?” he said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t known since I got involved. I never more than half believed there was anyone harassing her.”
“Tell me about it,” Belson said.
I did. When I was through Belson took the little cigar, now down to a stub, from his mouth and pursed his lips.
“This thing is going to be a hair ball.”
I nodded.
“M.E. show up yet?” I said.
“Not while I was there. She looks to have been shot twice in the back with a big gun. Three fifty-seven maybe. Been dead awhile. No sign of a struggle. Nobody we’ve talked to so far has heard anything. Nobody so far knows why she would have been in here on a Sunday night.”
“Even if she were, why would the murderer be here?” I said. “If he was after Jill he wouldn’t expect to find her here.”
“Maybe he was after the victim, and maybe he came with her.”
“Or brought her,” I said.
Belson had the cigar back in his mouth. He rolled it directly into the center of his mouth and talked around it.
“Why would he bring her?”
“Maybe it wasn’t mistaken identity,” I said. “Maybe it was a sign, more harassment, like the hanged Jill Joyce doll.”
Belson nodded. “Or maybe it’s all a fake. Maybe the whole Jill Joyce harassment is to make us think the wrong thing, and the murderer really just wanted to kill this stuntwoman.”
“Babe Loftus,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Possible,” I said. “Kind of bizarre, though.”
“Like your scenario isn’t?” Belson said.
I shrugged.
“Where’s Quirk?” I said. “This is a hot enough squeal to bring him out.”
Belson showed no expression. He had one of those permanent five o’clock shadows that no razor could successfully obliterate.
“Command staff meeting,” Belson said. “Strategies for improving police/community interface.”
“Honest to God?” I said.
“Honest to God.”
14
JILL looked at Hawk the way a mackerel eyes a minnow.
“Well,” she said as Hawk walked across the Quiet Bar at the Charles. He had on black cowboy boots and an ankle-length black leather trench coat. The coat was open, the collar up, and a black turtleneck showed at the throat. His skin was maybe half a shade lighter than the leather coat, and his smooth head gleamed in the bar’s indirect lighting.
“You just wear those boots to be taller than me,” I said.
“Taller than you anyway,” Hawk said.
“Are not,” I said.
“Better-looking, too,” Hawk said.
“Aren’t you going to introduce us?” Jill Joyce said.
I did. Jill was sitting on a couch quietly, but as she looked at Hawk she seemed somehow to wiggle without moving.
“Well,” she said, “aren’t you something.”
“Un huh,” Hawk said.
He sat on the couch beside Jill. The waitress appeared eagerly.
“Laphroig,” Hawk said, “straight, in a lowball glass.”
“Yes, sir,” the waitress said and hurried off on her mission. She placed her order at the service end of the bar and glanced back at Hawk while she waited.
“Why didn’t you tell me about him,” Jill said to me.
“I did. I told you he would look out for you while I was away and that he was almost as good as I was, and better than anyone else.”
“But you didn’t mention . . .” Jill spread her hands in a voilà gesture at Hawk.
“She means you didn’t tell her about me being a sexual icon.”
“You’re right,” I said. “I didn’t tell her that.”
“Are you almost as good as he is?” Jill said. Like most things she said, it was larded with innuendo.
“Better,” Hawk said.
“Really?” Jill’s eyes were wide and excited. “The other day he knocked down a great tall man, bing! bing! just like that.” Jill made two darling little punching movements.
“Just like that?” Hawk said.
“More or less,” I said.
The waitress brought Hawk’s scotch and another white wine for Jill. They had learned her habits here and seemed to have mastered the technique of keeping her glass filled.
“Can you do that?” Jill asked. She smiled at him, a TV Guide cover smile, over the rim of her wineglass and drank a bit.
“Don’t know about bing! bing!” Hawk said.
Jill reached over and squeezed Hawk’s biceps. A moment of genuine surprise popped for only a moment into her eyes before the flirty TV-star cuteness slipped back in place.
“Whooooa,” she said.
Hawk stared at me.
“Pay’s excellent,” I said.
Hawk nodded. “Good to remember that,” he said.
Jill slugged back most of the rest of her wine.
“So here’s how it’s going to work,” I said. “Hawk will take care of you at work and to and from. Cambridge P.D. will have a car here from six at night to six in the morning. Hotel security will watch your room. They’ll be connected to the prowlies by radio.”
“Prowlies?” Jill said. She was glancing toward the bar. The waitress started toward her with another glass of wine, and I could see the tension ease as Jill spotted her.
“Police car,” I said.
The waitress put the wine down. Jill picked it up, took a genteel sip.
“You want to go out nights, or whatever, you arrange it with Hawk.”
“And will he go out with me?”
“That’s for you and him to work out.”
“Will you?” Jill leaned toward Hawk as she spoke. The throat of her simple white blouse was open and as she leaned forward there was a clear line of cleavage.
“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.
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 showing, 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 litt
er. 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.
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