Stardust

by Robert B. Parker

  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 car 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 fiftee
n 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.”

  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 Jil
l 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?”