Stardust

by Robert B. Parker

  “Whaaat?” she said.

  I shrugged and flipped up my palms. I smiled engagingly.

  More silence. More staring with her reptilian slits. She picked up her wineglass and drank most of it and lowered the glass and gazed at me over the rim of it. Then she threw the contents at me. She missed.

  “Probably better than drinking it,” I said.

  “Sonovabitch,” she said.

  The flaccidity left her body. She rolled suddenly out of the banquette and stood in front of me and threw a punch with her clenched right fist. I blocked it with my left forearm.

  “Oww,” she said. “You bastard.”

  She swung at me with the other hand and I blocked that and she said “Ow” again and called me a bastard.

  “Does this mean you’re not going to call me dickie-bird anymore?” I said.

  She was rubbing both wrists where I blocked her punches with my forearms, her shoulders bent, huddling over the sore arms.

  “Limp dick motherfucker,” she said. Her voice sounded tight, as if her throat were closing. “Get the fuck out of here. You’re fired, you prick.”

  “Fired,” I said. “How can I be fired? I haven’t been hired yet.”

  She lunged against me suddenly. Her face tilted up at me, her eyes closed all the way, her face very white except for two red spots that glowed feverishly on her cheekbones. Her mouth was open, her tongue protruded a little.

  “You bastard,” she gasped. “You better, you bastard. You better.” Some tears squeezed out under the tightly closed lids. “You better,” she said. Then she passed out on me. I caught her under the arms as she started to slide.

  “Star quality,” I said aloud.

  I looked around the mobile home. Across the back was a big double bed with a pink puff on it, and half a dozen white pillows with lace ruffles. I turned and dragged Jill Joyce to the bed. Her legs were entirely limp. Her heels made little drag marks in the carpet. When I reached the bed, I got her over my hip and plumped her backside onto the bed and eased her down. She lay crossways, her feet still on the floor. Her skirt bunched up around her waist.

  A voice said, “This would be more exciting in the pre-pantyhose era.”

  It was my voice and it sounded extraordinarily normal. I got hold of her ankles and half spun her around so her head was among the pillows and her feet were on the bed. Then I arranged her head so she wouldn’t smother, and rearranged her skirt and put the mink coat over her.

  The voice said, “What becomes a legend most.”

  It was me again. I sounded sane.

  I stood back and looked down at her. Her cheeks were still wet with the faint tracing of tears. Her mouth was slightly open. She was snoring, not very loudly, but quite clearly. The only other noises in the mobile home were the faint hum of the refrigerator somewhere forward and a faint tingling sound which was probably from the heaters.

  My voice seemed booming when it spoke again.

  “You are a mess,” my voice said thoughtfully, “you are a terrible mess.”

  I went out of the mobile home and closed the door carefully behind me.

  4

  I collected Susan from the wardrobe trailer, and we walked down across the Common toward Boylston Street. As the afternoon shortened it had gotten colder, and now in the late half-light of a winter afternoon the temperature was maybe ten above. The wind had died and it was still and brittle among the black trees. Around the Common the city lights had begun to show weakly, pale heatless flickers at the fringe of the hard silence. There was no one on the Common. Susan’s shoulder touched mine as we walked. Her hands were jammed into the big pockets of her coat. Only a small white oval of her face showed inside the turned-up collar, under the fur hat, framed by the black hair. I had my hands in my jacket pockets. There were times for holding hands, and times for not. I had my watch cap pulled down over my ears too. It wasn’t raffish but I knew Susan would let it pass.

  “Cold, cold, cold, cold,” Susan said.

  “Cold,” I said.

  “Ah, the master of compression,” Susan said. “How far is Biba?”

  “Other side of Charles Street,” I said.

  Susan had been to Biba exactly as often as I had, since she’d always gone with me. But she always asked distances like that as if she was just in from Boise.

  At Charles Street the commuter traffic had started to develop and the exhaust of newly started engines plumed in the iron air. We crossed Charles and then Boylston and went past the Four Seasons Hotel and turned in under Biba’s blue awning.

  The bar was not crowded. The cold slowed everything down. Susan ordered a cup of tea with Courvoisier on the side. I had a brandy and soda. She had draped her coat open over the back of her chair and pulled off her gloves. Her face was bright with the cold. She kept the fur hat on and it seemed almost to blend with her thick black hair. Her chin rested on the heavy fold of a black turtleneck sweater. With our drinks we ordered some crab tacos and some empanadas. It was warm in the bar and I knew that upstairs the brick oven was baking bread. A hint of its warmth and smell drifted down, or it seemed to. I could feel the stiffness leave me as I drank maybe a third of the brandy and soda and felt the warmth under the cold soda ease through my system. I looked at Susan, at the width of her mouth, the fullness of her lower lip, the line of her cheekbone. I watched her dab a microscopic portion of salsa on one corner of a crabmeat taco and bite off an edge. It was a small taco, the kind you pop into your mouth all at once, if you’re any kind of an eater at all. It would take Susan fifteen minutes to finish it. She chewed her tiny bite carefully, watching me look at her.

  “So,” she said, and her teeth flashed white and even as she smiled at me. “How do I stack up against Jill Joyce?”

  I popped one of the empanadas into my mouth and chewed. I washed it down with more brandy and soda.

  “I think I’d need to see you both naked before I can make a full judgment,” I said.

  Susan nodded thoughtfully.

  “Well, I could arrange that at my end,” she said.

  “Nicely phrased,” I said. “Jill has already made a similar offer.”

  Susan poured a splash of cognac into her tea, took a small sip, and put the teacup down. She watched a couple of guys in tweed overcoats and plaid scarves come in, rubbing their hands and hunching their shoulders from the cold. They crossed to the bar, put briefcases on the floor, and ordered Jack Daniel’s on the rocks. Susan looked back at me. Her big dark eyes seemed bottomless.

  “Hard to blame her,” Susan said.

  “Yes,” I said, “of course it is. I think for her it was love at first sight.”

  “It happens to her a lot, I understand.”

  “You mean there’s someone else?” I said.

  Susan’s smile widened. She sipped a little more tea, assessed its impact, added another small splash of cognac. “I think so,” she said.

  “Oh, well,” I said. “There’s always you.”

  “I adore it when you sweet-talk me,” Susan said.

  “Emphasis on the always,” I said.

  “Yes,” Susan said. She finished the first crab taco. “So,” she said, “she made a pass at you?”

  “Almost an assault,” I said.

  “And you turned her down.”

  “I didn’t get the chance to. She passed out.”

  “Tell me about it,” Susan said. “Everything. Every detail.”

  I did. By the time I’d finished it was time for another brandy and soda. When it arrived I slid down a little in my chair and stretched out my legs in front of me and watched the amusement play on Susan’s face. Outside in the darkness life barely moved in the sullen cold. Inside was food and drink and Susan and the whole evening ahead. Susan made the measuring gesture with her hands, mimicking Jill Joyce.


  “This long?” she said. “Good heavens.”

  She looked at me, looked back at the measured distance between her hands, looked at me again, and slowly shook her head. I shrugged.

  “I thought I could bluff it through,” I said.

  “You think that about everything,” Susan said. “Are you going to take the job?”

  I turned the glass around in little circles on the table in front of me, holding it lightly with both hands, watching it revolve.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “She’s awfully difficult,” Susan said. She had her elbows on the table and she held her teacup in both hands, talking to me over the rim.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Today was not unusual,” Susan said.

  “What about the four and a half pages they had to shoot this afternoon?” I said.

  “Sandy will shoot around it,” Susan said. “He’s amazing.”

  “Why don’t they just fire her?” I said. “Get someone who’s sober all day?”

  “TVQ,” Susan said and smiled like she does when she’s able to kid me and herself at the same time.

  The maître d’ came over and told us our table was ready for dinner.

  “Whenever you’re ready, sir. No hurry.”

  He went back to his post near the door.

  “TVQ?” I said sadly.

  “Television Quotient. It’s a way of rating star appeal,” she said.

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Jill Joyce has the highest TVQ of anyone now on television,” Susan said.

  “And to think she wanted to jump on my bones,” I said. “Makes you feel sort of humble, doesn’t it?”

  “And a TVQ like that translates into ratings which translate into renewal which translates eventually into a big syndication deal which translates . . .”

  “Into money,” I said.

  “Bingo,” Susan said. “Mucho dinero, sweetheart.”

  “Have you gone, just a twidge, ah, Hollywood?” I said.

  “I’ll say. Film is my life.” Susan’s eyes crinkled and her smile was brighter than Jill Joyce’s TVQ.

  “And it doesn’t cut into your work?”

  “My patients? No. Nothing cuts into that.”

  “Nothing? I remember a Monday morning three months ago . . .”

  “Except you,” Susan said. “Occasionally, and, if it’s the Monday morning I’m thinking about, I feel that you overpowered me. That doesn’t count.”

  “Then how come I was on the bottom?”

  “Just never mind,” Susan said. “It’s time to go up for dinner.”

  We went up and sat and looked at the menus. The room looked out over the Public Garden which was lit with concealed spots and stiller than death in the brute cold evening.

  “Actually,” Susan said as she scanned the menu, “my formal duties don’t require me to be on the set. I read scripts and make suggestions. That’s really the extent of my technical advice. The rest of the time I come around and watch because it fascinates me.”

  I nodded, contemplating the herbed chicken with mashed potatoes.

  “It doesn’t fascinate you?” Susan said.

  “Fascinated me for about ten minutes,” I said. “But I gather they do this for more than ten minutes.”

  “Twelve hours a day,” Susan said. “Six days a week. More if they’re behind.”

  “And a show starring Jill Joyce often gets behind,” I said.

  “Sandy and most of the directors have worked with her before,” Susan said. “They try to arrange to shoot most of her scenes before lunch. Close-ups and stuff. Long scenes they can use a double, or they can loop her dialogue afterwards.”

  “Loop her dialogue,” I said.

  “Aren’t I awful?” Susan said. She smiled happily about it. “I’m totally stagestruck. I talk the jargon. I’m not sure I can be saved.”

  “In fact, one of the eighty-two things, by actual count, that I like about you is the totality of your enthusiasms,” I said.

  “What are the other eighty-one?” Susan said.

  “I think I mentioned them to you that Monday morning.”

  “Actually, I think you concentrated rather heavily that day on maybe one or two,” she said.

  The waitress came, we ordered, the waitress went away. Susan leaned toward me a little, her chin resting on her folded hands. The play was gone from her eyes.

  “Actually, I hope you will help her,” she said.

  “Jill Joyce?”

  “Yes. I don’t know if someone’s bothering her or not; but she is so lost.”

  “I’m supposed to be the detective,” I said. “You’re supposed to be the shrink.”

  “I can’t help her,” Susan said. “She won’t come near me. She doesn’t have anyone. Sandy tries to take care of her, but he’s got to make the pictures. She has no one who’s simply looking out for her. Not because of her TVQ, or the syndication deal we can get five years down the road. Not because she’s Jill Joyce.”

  “Think anyone’s ever done that?” I said.

  “No,” Susan said.

  I looked out at the Public Garden, at the leafless willows through whose spidery branches the back lighting showed.

  “And you think I should,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Even at the risk of my, ah . . .” I held my hands out in the two-foot measuring motion.

  Susan smiled at me as sweetly as a convent acolyte.

  “You have little to lose,” she said.

  5

  I sat in the production office on Soldiers Field Road and talked with Sandy Salzman. Without his tasseled ski cap he was balding.

  “Do you want me to protect Miss Joyce,” I said, “or do you want me to find out who’s harassing her?”

  “Or if,” Salzman said. Through the picture window in his office you could look across Soldiers Field Road at the Charles River, and across the Charles to Cambridge on the other side. The river was frozen now and snow covered. There were cross-country ski tracks on it, and trampled paths where kids and dogs had cut across. It was a steady-moving river, and it took a deep chill to freeze it enough to walk on. Every year there was a thaw and someone went through.

  “Or if,” I said. “But someone needs to decide. I can’t do both at the same time.”

  “What’s Jill say?”

  “Jill says she’s looking for one this long.” I made the measuring motion for him.

  “Yeah, Jill says stuff like that,” Salzman said. “What’d you say?”

  “I told her she was in luck.”

  Salzman laughed.

  “Then she had another glass of wine and fainted at me.”

  Salzman nodded. “She does that too,” he said.

  “Makes a swell date,” I said.

  Salzman spread his hands and shrugged. “Jill’s a television star,” he said. “She’s been one for twenty years in a medium where a lot of people are reading weather in Topeka six months after their first show is canceled. You got Jill Joyce on a project and you’ve got a thirteen-week on-air commitment, and all three networks fighting to make it.”

  “That explains why she gets loaded every lunch and swoons on strangers?” I said.

  “No, it explains why she gets away with it.”

  “So which is it? Protect her or investigate the incidents, whatever the hell they are, no one seems too clear on that.”

  “I know,” Salzman said. “The truth is, nobody pays a hell of a lot of attention to Jill beyond keeping her in shape to go on. Line producer earns his money on one of her shows.”

  “So you don’t know what you want me to do,” I said. “But you haven’t got time to deal with her.”

 
Salzman tapped the sharpened end of a prone pencil on his desk, causing it to flip up and somersault in the air.

  “Exactly,” he said and jabbed his forefinger toward me while he said it.

  There were pictures all around the office, most of Salzman; a couple with actors, the rest with dead pheasant and elk and trout.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll talk to Jill and I’ll decide what I should do. If I decide I need to do both, I’ll hire someone to watch Jill while I investigate.”

  “You have someone in mind?” Salzman said. “Jill is very tough about people.”

  I grinned. “Yeah,” I said. “I got a guy in mind.”

  It made me happy, thinking of Hawk with Jill Joyce.

  Salzman frowned a little, but he let it pass. He was affable in the Hollywood way, and permanently pleasant, but behind it there was a pretty good mind working. And most of the time it was working on getting his show made on time, on budget. He knew when to go with the flow, and if I’d take the matter of Jill Joyce’s harassment off his back he’d agree to hiring Geraldo Rivera as a bodyguard if I said so. He knew that. I knew that. And he knew that I knew that.

  “We got you through the police commissioner,” Salzman said. “Commissioner himself said you were good.”

  “Man loves me,” I said.

  “Actually,” Salzman said, “he remarked that he didn’t like you a bit, but you were the best at what you did.”

  “Same thing,” I said. “Where’s the lovely Miss Joyce?”

  “We’re shooting here today. Too cold out for Jill.”

  Salzman got up.

  “I’ll take you down. Ever seen film being made?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Exciting?”

  “Like watching ice melt,” I said.

  “I can see you’re a fan,” Salzman said.

  We went out through the outer office where two young women hunched over typewriters. There was a fax machine on the windowsill, and six file cabinets, and on the wall a big, and detailed, map of Boston.

  “I’ll be on the set,” Salzman said to one of the young women. She nodded without looking up.