Stardust

by Robert B. Parker

  “I am,” I said, “part of a fulfilling monogamous relationship.”

  “Holy shit,” Hawk said.

  “I knew you’d just forgotten that for a moment,” I said. “What’s your excuse?”

  Hawk paused for a moment and picked up a towel and wiped off his face and head. I stopped too and got a drink from the cooler of spring water. Everyone in all health clubs had simultaneously decided that municipal water was undrinkable.

  “Strange babe,” Hawk said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Most broads want to fuck me for the usual reasons,” Hawk said. “ ’Cause I’m handsome, manly, and slicker than goose shit.”

  “Or because they want to get even with their husbands, or they were just separated and want to prove they’re still attractive,” I said.

  “Or because they heard about how once you go black you never go back,” Hawk said.

  “I never believed that one,” I said.

  “But Jill.” Hawk shook his head. “Jill wants to fuck me for reasons got nothing to do with me, got nothing to do with pleasure. Jill wants to fuck me ’cause I’m black and it be a bad thing to do, you follow?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Help her feel bad about herself.”

  “Un huh,” Hawk said.

  “But it’d help her feel comfortable with you,” I said. “If you’d tag somebody as bad as she is, you’re not such a big deal either, and if she can get you to do it, then she’s still got the power, the only one she can count on.”

  “Sigmund Spenser,” Hawk said.

  “You think I’m wrong?”

  Hawk grinned and did a paradiddle on the speed bag.

  “Think you right on target,” he said. “You got no natural moves like me, but you learn pretty good.”

  “So where’d she go?” I said.

  “Meet some man,” Hawk said.

  “That’s the easy part,” I said. Hawk began again on the speed bag. “Which man? Where?”

  “You know some of the men in her life,” Hawk said.

  “That’s about all there were,” I said.

  “Check them out.”

  I was hooking the heavy bag, three left hooks, one right. The bag bounced and swayed on the heavy chain. The shock of the punches went up my forearms. It had been one of my first surprises when I began to box, all that long time ago, punches hurt the wrists and forearms, you have to build up both to hit hard. Until you build them up you get not only arm weary, but arm sore.

  “Cops are doing that,” I said. “They got more manpower and clout than I have. They can do it quicker.”

  “They know all the names?” Hawk said.

  “Sure,” I said. “Almost.”

  “Figured you’d get sentimental ’bout one or two people.”

  “Guy out in the Berkshires, be too tough on him,” I said. “Besides, she wouldn’t go with him.”

  “Un huh.”

  “Guy in L.A., married, he wouldn’t have her.”

  “Un huh.” Hawk moved around the speed bag, hitting it in changing combinations like a man playing an instrument. “Maybe she threaten to tell the wife,” he said.

  “She’s not that crazy,” I said.

  “Bad man?”

  “He’d take Joe Broz with a Q-tip.”

  “Hell,” Hawk said, “we can do that.”

  I hit the bag.

  “I don’t think she’s that crazy,” I said.

  “She pretty crazy,” Hawk said.

  We both worked on our punches for a bit. The room was hot, there was light coming in through an ocean-facing window, and dust motes danced in its bright stream. Outside there were people tightening the upper abs, expanding the cardiovascular piping, firming up the pecs. In here there were only two guys beating hell out of simulated opponents. It seemed sort of silly, in that perspective. But it felt good.

  “I was wondering,” I said, when we were finished and the hot water was sluicing over us in the shower room, “how come you’re so sure she went amok when you turned her down.”

  Hawk raised his head and stared at me.

  “You can’t be serious,” he said.

  31

  I had my feet up on the windowsill in my office. Across the way they had torn down the building where Linda Thomas had once worked. I used to watch her through the window, bent over her art board, then she’d been in my life, then she’d been gone. She was still gone, and now the building was gone. Sic transit the whole caboodle.

  The phone rang behind me on the desk. I swiveled and answered. It was Quirk.

  “Got a possible suicide you might be interested in,” he said. “I’ll pick you up outside your office in about two minutes.”

  “Okay,” I said and hung up.

  I had on my down-lined leather jacket and my Chicago Cubs baseball hat and was on the corner of Berkeley and Boylston with more than a minute to spare when Frank Belson wheeled the gray Chevy in toward me and backed up traffic on the green light while I climbed in the back. Belson hit the siren through the intersection and left it on.

  “Cuts right through the holiday traffic,” Belson said.

  “Can’t you get one that plays ‘Silent Night’?” I said. “Whoop whoop just isn’t jolly-sounding.”

  “Security guard saw a car go into the water off the pier behind the Army base,” Quirk said, “across from Castle Hill Terminal.”

  We went into town on Boylston and turned right on Arlington. The store windows were full of red ribbon and spray-on snow. The streets were full of slush.

  “Area C got a truck out there with a winch and hauled it out. It’s a rental from Western Mass. There’s a stiff in it.”

  “I.D. the stiff yet?” I said.

  “No,” Quirk said. “But there’s a note for you.”

  Belson went under the expressway and up and through the South Station Tunnel with his siren whooping and his blue lights flashing. He slid off onto Atlantic Avenue and turned out Summer Street at the South Station.

  The Boston Army Base is shabby, half used, dilapidated and full of nostalgia for most of us who processed through it on the way to wars someplace, quite some time ago. It had been the first stop on my long trip to Korea. At the end of the pier, there were three white cruisers with the blue stripe on the sides, a big tow truck with a crane arrangement on the back, the Fire Department rescue truck, and a couple of pickup trucks with diver’s gear in the back. Belson flicked off the siren and lights and pulled in behind the rescue truck. Another nondescript municipal car pulled up behind us.

  “Lupo,” Belson said. “Medical Examiner.”

  We all got out and walked toward the red Chevette that sat on the hot top in a puddle of water. Water dripped from the open doors. The body was streaked with salt water, and in the front seat, still strapped with a safety belt; a sodden dark mass of someone. Lupo, the assistant M.E., went briskly over and squatted on his haunches by the open side door and looked at the sodden someone. Quirk and I walked over and stood behind Lupo. Belson leaned on the car and began to look at the crime area, not looking for anything, just cataloguing.

  Lupo straightened and spoke to Quirk.

  “He’s dead.”

  “I’m with you so far,” Quirk said.

  Lupo was a mild-looking man with a plain horsey face and prominent teeth. He had a pronounced widow’s peak on his forehead and his hair was jet black though his face looked sixty-five. He wore a gabardine storm coat with a dark brown fur collar and lapels.

  “Neck’s broken,” Lupo said. His upper teeth looked even and shiny as if they’d been capped. “Might have killed him, might have been dead when it got broken. He’s pretty banged up.”

  “You want to look?” Quirk said to me.

  “Oh, boy,” I said.

>   I leaned in past Lupo and looked at the sodden thing. It had been Wilfred Pomeroy. His head lay on his shoulder at an odd angle. There was blood crusted in his nostrils. Some sort of sea sludge had clung to his cheek as the car was hauled out of the water. He was wearing a gray crew sweater and corduroy slacks that had probably been white, and a pair of cheap sneakers. His bare ankles were gray, the skin puckered a little by the seawater.

  “Full rigor,” Lupo was saying to Quirk.

  I took in a long breath of cold sea air. It was mixed with the taste of gasoline slick, and garbage and the exhaust from the motors idling in the Area C prowl cars.

  “Name’s Wilfred Pomeroy,” I said. “Was married to Jill Joyce once.”

  “Good how you knew him and we didn’t,” Quirk said.

  I nodded. The wind off the water was hard, and in the twenty-degree air it felt arctic. Some seagulls who didn’t appear to give a rat’s ass about the wind or the temperature squalled and swooped around us, lighting on some of the pilings and then swooping off again almost as soon as they’d landed. Like most of the gulls on the East Coast they were herring gulls, white and gray, with webbed feet and big wings. Their beaks were sharp and their eyes glittered as they rode the winds about us.

  Quirk spoke to one of the uniformed cops.

  “You talk to the security guard?”

  “Yes, sir,” the cop said. “He’s over here. You want to see him?”

  “What’d he tell you?”

  “Says he was making his rounds, about four-thirty this morning. Says he makes them every hour and last time there wasn’t nothing there, but at four-thirty he sees the tail end of this car sticking out of the water over the pier. So he calls us.”

  “Where was the envelope?” Quirk said.

  “Watchman found it on top of one of the pilings there, near where the car went over. There was a brick on top of it.”

  “Gimme,” Quirk said.

  The young cop went to the squad car and returned with a manila envelope wrapped in some sort of clear plastic and taped along the seams. Quirk took it and looked at it and handed it to me. Through the plastic wrap I could see that it was addressed to me, care of the Boston Police Department.

  “Open it,” Quirk said.

  I did. Inside was a page from a newspaper, the Berkshire Argus. The headline read, “Waymark Man Linked to TV Murder.” There was an old picture of Pomeroy in his Navy uniform, and a story that quoted Waymark police chief Buford Phillips. It mentioned that Pomeroy had been married to the famous Jill Joyce and had recently been questioned by a Boston detective about the murder on the set of Fifty Minutes.

  “Shit,” I said.

  Across the top of the tear sheet was scribbled, Say good-bye to Jill for me.

  I handed the tear sheet to Quirk. He read it.

  “A detective from Boston,” he said.

  “That goddamn Phillips,” I said. “Couldn’t wait to go blat to the papers.”

  “Tell me about this detective from Boston,” Quirk said.

  He carefully put the tear sheet back in the envelope and rewrapped it with the plastic wrap.

  “Wanted to make sure it wouldn’t get wet,” I said.

  “Suicides are sometimes very careful,” Quirk said.

  “Rojack told me about Pomeroy. He was Jill Joyce’s first husband, maybe only. I don’t know if they were divorced or not. He lived up in the Berkshires in Waymark.”

  “Waymark?” Quirk said.

  “Out around Goshen,” I said. “Ashfield.”

  “Sure,” Quirk said.

  “Hadn’t seen her in twenty-five years, and carrying the torch the whole time.”

  “He drink?” Quirk said.

  “Used to. Quit, he said, five years ago.”

  Quirk looked at the stiffening corpse. “Why bother?” he said.

  I shrugged. “Then she shows up in Boston,” I said. “Two hours away, on location, shooting this television series.”

  Two guys from the Medical Examiner’s office eased Pomeroy’s remains into a body bag and heaved it into the back of the wagon.

  “It was too much,” I said. “He started trying to see her. She didn’t want him around. She didn’t want some reformed drunk shit-kicker from Waymark, Mass., turning out to be her husband, and the press hear of it. Guy was on welfare, hadn’t heard from her since she dumped him.”

  “Wouldn’t help her image,” Quirk said.

  “So she gets Rojack to get Randall to chase him off, which Randall does.”

  “And then you talk to Rojack and he tells you about Pomeroy and you go out to see him.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you didn’t tell us about him.”

  “Guy is about two-thirds of a person,” I said. “Or he was. He’s a sober alcoholic, hanging on barely, living in the woods with three dogs, trying to get over something that happened to him twenty-five years ago. He didn’t kill Babe Loftus.”

  “You might wanta let us reach that conclusion on our own,” Quirk said.

  I shrugged. The body was in the back of the Examiner’s wagon. The two technicians went around and got in front. Lupo walked past us toward his car.

  “I’ll be in touch,” he said to Quirk.

  “Anything says it isn’t suicide?”

  “Not yet,” Lupo said.

  Quirk nodded.

  “I give you a lot of slack,” he said, “because usually you end up on the right side of things, and sometimes you even help things. But don’t think I won’t rein you in if I need to.”

  “My mistake was talking to that goddamn shit-kicker police chief,” I said.

  “You’d have been better talking to me,” Quirk said.

  “At least we agree on that,” I said.

  “How come he drove all the way here from Wayfar,” Quirk said, “to take the jump?”

  “Waymark,” I said. “He wanted to be sure she’d hear about it. If he did it in Waymark it might make the Berkshire Argus, and who’d know? Who’d tell her? That’s why he left the note for me too.”

  “And you can’t tell her,” Quirk said, “after all that trouble, because you don’t know where she is.”

  “Yet,” I said.

  32

  SUSAN had on glistening spandex tights and a green shiny leotard top and a white headband and white Avia workout shoes and she was charging up the stair climber like Teddy Roosevelt. I had on a white shirt and a leather jacket and I was leaning against one of the Kaiser Cam weight machines in her club watching her. When she exercised Susan didn’t glow delicately. She sweated like a horse, and as she thundered up the Stair Master she blotted her face with a hand towel. I was admiring Susan’s gluteus maximi as she climbed. She saw me in the mirror and said, “Are you staring at my butt?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “What do you think?” she said. I knew she was making a large effort to speak normally and not puff. She was a proud woman.

  “I think it’s the stuff dreams are made of, blue eyes.”

  “My eyes are black,” Susan said.

  “I know, but I can’t do a good Bogart on ‘black eyes.’”

  “Some would say that was true of any color eyes,” Susan said.

  “Some have no ear,” I said.

  Susan was too out of wind to speak more, a fact which she concealed by shaking her head amusedly and pretending to concentrate harder on the stairs.

  “You still working on the glutes?” I said.

  “Un huh.”

  “No need,” I said. “They get any better you’ll have to have them licensed.”

  “You are just trying to get me to admit I can’t talk and exercise,” Susan said. “Go downstairs.”

  “You know the only other times I see you sweat like
this?” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “Go downstairs.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  An hour and a half later Susan was wearing a vibrant blue blouse and a black skirt and we were sitting across from each other at a table in Toscano Restaurant eating tortellini and drinking some white wine, for lunch.

  “Did you hear anything from the police?” Susan said. “About Jill?”

  “No,” I said. “Not about Jill.”

  I broke off a piece of bread and ate it.

  “Wilfred Pomeroy killed himself.”

  “The one Jill was married to?”

  “Yeah. Came down to Boston, left a note for me, and drove off a pier.”

  “Why?”

  “Press got hold of his story,” I said. “He couldn’t stand it, I guess. As if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “And maybe it was his chance to make the beau geste, to die for her, rather than let his life be used against her.”

  “And a chance to say, simultaneously, See how I loved you, see what you missed, see what you made me do.”

  “Suicide is often, see what you made me do,” Susan said. “It is often anger coupled with despair.”

  I nodded. Susan nibbled on one of the tortellini. She was the only person I knew who could eat one tortellini in several bites.

  “Is tortellini better than sex?” she said.

  “Not in your case,” I said. “If you eat only one at a time of tortellini, are you eating a tortellenum?”

  “You’ll have to ask an Italian,” Susan said. “I can barely conjugate goyim.”

  We were quiet for a time. Concentrating on the food, sipping our wine. As always when I was with her, I could feel her across the table, the way one can feel heat, a tangible connection, silent, invisible, and realer than the pasta.

  “Poor man,” Susan said.

  “Yeah.”