Текст книги "Stardust"

Автор книги: Robert B. Parker

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Chapter 28

I STOOD in Forest Lawn Cemetery and looked down I at the marker. Candace Sloan, it said. B. 1950 D. 1981. The headstones stretched out around me in all directions, measuring the green sweep of the hillside. Behind me the rental car was parked on the drive. My suitcase was in it with the big red letters spelling ADIDAS On the side. In an hour and a half I’d be flying to Boston. In six or seven hours I’d be with Susan.

There were flowers at many of the grave sites. And there were a few other people looking at gravestones the way I was. The only sound was the swish of the water sprinklers as they arched repetitiously over the green grass; and, more distantly, the sound of traffic on the Ventura Freeway; and, over all, the hard silence-made more resounding by the hints of punctuation.

I could feel the high hot California sun on the back of my neck as I stood with my hands in my hip pockets staring down at Candy’s grave. I hadn’t been there for the funeral. The last time I’d seen her was in a degenerating oil field, faceup in a hard rain with the blood washing pinkish off her face.

I pursed my lips a little.

Above us the sky was bright blue. There were a few white clouds and they were moving very lazily west toward the Pacific. Some sort of bird chittered somewhere. On the freeway a truck shifted gears on a grade. Still I stared down at the grass in front of the headstone. She wasn’t there. Whatever there was of her there didn’t matter. She probably wasn’t anywhere. I looked up and back, toward the Valley and beyond the Valley, toward the mountains. There wasn’t any smog today, and the snowcaps on some of the highest peaks were clear to see, white above the clay color of the mountains.

None of the stuff that anyone had ever written seemed useful. I had nothing much to offer either. The bird chittered again. Above me the clouds drifted west, and the sun imperceptibly followed. The sky stayed blue, the earth below stayed green. I looked again briefly at the gravestone and blew out my breath once, and turned and walked back toward my rental car.

“Some bodyguard,” I said, and even though I spoke softly, my voice sounded very loud in the still burial ground and the words seemed to hang there as I drove away.

Chapter 29

REALITY again. Outside Quirk’s office, looking down into an alley off Stanhope Street, the temperature was maybe fifteen. The grime-streaked snow was packed like concrete in the rutted areas where the plows couldn’t get because there were always cars. Inside Quirk’s office was Marty Riggs, the big executive– from Zenith Meridien. He had hung up his long scarf. He was holding forth intensely to an audience composed of Quirk; me; Sandy Salzman; Milo Nogarian, the executive producer; Herb Brodkey, a lawyer for Zenith; and Morris Callahan, a lawyer for the network.

“Who the hell was guarding her?” Riggs said. He was every inch the captain of a damaged ship, angry and indomitable in the face of near disaster.

“Spenser assured us the guy was very good,” Salzman said.

I looked at Quirk. His face was expressionless. He was carefully looking at a paper clip, manipulating it in his fingers, apparently trying to straighten it out with only one hand.

“Well, where is he? He’s so good, why isn’t he here?”

Quirk glanced at me and smiled faintly. Riggs saw him.

“Something amusing you, Lieutenant?”

“Whether Hawk’s good enough hasn’t got anything to do with whether Hawk’s here, if you see what I mean. It’s, you might say, ah…” He revolved his hand at me to fill in.

“Non sequitur,” I said.

“Don’t get cute with me, Lieutenant. This is your case and so far you haven’t shown me anything.”

“Actually, Mr. Riggs, it’s not my case. You asked for this meeting, and being a courteous person and a dedicated public servant, I agreed. But my case is who killed your stunt woman. What happened to your star is missing persons-unless she turns up dead.”

“Bureaucracy,” Riggs said. “Herb, I told you we should have arranged a meeting with the commissioner.”

Brodkey looked like Fernando Lamas. He had a rich tan and his nails gleamed. He had probably last been in criminal court when they indicted Fatty Arbucklc. He made a placating gesture at Riggs.

“I understand you’ve interviewed the bodyguard,” Brodkey said.

“Sergeant Belson did,” Quirk said. “He knows Hawk. It’s easier that way.”

“Is this man getting special treatment?” Riggs snapped.

“Not like you are,” Quirk said softly.

“This is a difficult case, Lieutenant. Just tell us what you know.” It was Callahan, the network lawyer. He had white hair and a big nose and the look of a man eager to get the 7:30 shuttle back to New York. Even if it was on time there was still the ride to Greenwich.

“Hawk took Miss Joyce back to the hotel as usual,” Quirk said. “It was about six-fifteen. He sat with her while she had a couple of drinks in the bar, and then he started to turn her over to hotel security. But she insisted that he take her up to her room himself. When he did she went in and left the door ajar. He started to close it when she screamed. Hawk went into the room, and when he did she closed the door and stood in front of it and laughed and said she wanted to see what he’d do if she screamed.”

Quirk looked at me. “It is, I understand, a ploy she’s used in the past.”

No one said anything.

“Miss Joyce then insisted that Hawk make love to her. He declined, courteously he says.” Again Quirk looked at me. I didn’t say anything. “She was starting to disrobe,” Quirk said.

“In front of the goddamned buck nigger?” Riggs said.

“His name’s Hawk,” I said.

“Well, what are we, touchy?”

“Call him Hawk,” I said.

“I’ll call him what I goddamned please,” Riggs said. “I’ve got more to take up with you later.”

“Call him Hawk,” I said, “or I will bounce your ass down two flights of stairs and out onto Berkeley Street.”

“You heard that, Lieutenant? You heard him threaten me.”

“Call him Hawk,” Quirk said. He kept his gaze on Riggs for a moment and no one spoke. Then Quirk continued. “Hawk was apparently sincere in his disinterest. While she was disrobing he moved her forcibly but, ah, graciously, as I understand it, from the door and left. He told hotel security on his way out that they had her for the night, and he went home.”

Quirk looked around the room. Riggs was still angry and struggling to find circumstances in which he could be commanding. The lawyers sat like lawyers, being careful. Salzman was leaning back in his chair, his legs out before him, his arms folded across his chest.

“Sometime that night, she left the hotel. Probably went out the back door, down the steps to University Road, to dodge the Cambridge prowl car out front, cut through JFK Park, walked up to Harvard Square. She got a cab near the Harvard Coop. He took her to Boston, to the Four Seasons Hotel. Said he dropped her off there about I0:00 P.M. She registered, under her own name, gave them an American Express card and went upstairs. She had no luggage. In the morning she had breakfast sent up about quarter to seven, and that’s the last anyone has seen of her.”

“And you have failed totally to find a single clue as to where she might be,” Riggs said.

“Completely,” Quirk said without expression.

“Do you have any idea who Jill Joyce is, Lieutenant? What she means to the American public? The amount of money her absence costs?”

“Save it for missing persons, Mr. Riggs,” Quirk said. “I do murders.”

“Goddamned bureaucrat,” Riggs said only half aloud.

Quirk had been tipped back in his chair. He let it tip slowly forward and put his hands very lightly on the top of his desk.

“You are a very big deal in the TV business,” Quirk said, “and the governor thinks you’re the cat’s ass, and I’ve been trying to help out because there’s been a lot of heavy hitters juicing your case. But you are not a big deal in the Boston Police Department. I am. And I don’t think you’re the cat’s ass. So you either shut your trap or I’ll make you go sit in the corridor until the grown-ups are through.”

Riggs’ mouth opened like a carp. He seemed like he was having trouble getting his breath. He looked at the lawyers. Neither looked at him.

“I’ll speak to your superiors,” Riggs mumbled. But there was no heart in it.

“Good,” Quirk said. “They like that. Gives them something to do.” He looked at me. “You talk with Hawk?”

“No. I just came in from the, ah, coast last night.”

“How nice for us,” Quirk said. “You have anything to offer on this thing?”

“She wouldn’t go alone,” I said.

“No?”

“No. She needed somebody to take care of her, and it needed to be male. She might have scooted out alone, but she’d have had to know that a man was going to be around somewhere.”

“What do you think?” Quirk said to Salzman.

Salzman shrugged. “I make film,” he said. “I’m in so far over my head with the rest of this stuff that, I don’t know which way is up.”

“Who’s got this in missing persons?” I said.

“Lipsky,” Quirk said. “I’m hanging around because it might be connected to the murder investigation.”

I nodded.

“You talked about Jill Joyce with Susan?” Quirk said.

“Sure,” I said.

“This theory about a man, Susan buy that?”

“Haven’t asked her,” I said. “Last night when I came home we barely spoke of Jill Joyce.”

“Hard to imagine,” Quirk said.

“Didn’t even know she was gone,” I said.

“We called L.A., yesterday morning,” Salzman said. “Hotel said you’d checked out.”

“I suppose you’ll be looking for her too,” Quirk said.

I nodded.

“Lipsky will be pleased to know he’s not alone on this,” Quirk said.

“Like you,” I said.

“Just like me,” Quirk said.

Chapter 30

HAWK and I were in the boxing room at the Harbor Health Club. We were pretty much the only ones that ever went in there. There were people waiting to get on the stair climbers and bicycles and treadmills. There were platoons of young women with body stockings and water bottles in constant rotation on the chrome weight machines. But in the boxing room there was only Hawk and me and now and then Henry Cimoli, when he wasn’t conferring with some stockbroker on the best way to sculpt the gluteus maximi. On the wall was a picture of Henry in his boxing shorts, taken the year after he’d fought Willic Pep. It was Henry’s connection to his roots, that the boxing room still existed at the club. When Hawk and I started, it had been a gym, and as times changed and Henry changed with them, it had turned into a health club and spa. Hawk and I still went there because of Henry; and Henry didn’t charge us. But all of us remembered the times when you couldn’t get an herbal wrap where you worked out.

I was hitting combination cycles on the heavy bag, and Hawk was playing the speed bag, whistling soundlessly the way he did. I don’t think he needed to work on hand speed. I think he just liked the sound.

“We wouldn’t be in this mess,” I said, “if you’d just come across for her.”

“Man’s got standards,” Hawk said. The speed bag danced musically against the backboard.

“I didn’t know you had standards,” I said. I did two left jabs and an overhand right on the body bag. “I knew you insisted they be alive…”

“So how come you didn’t give her a jab?” Hawk said. He was wearing a pair of violet silk sweat pants and white Avia basketball shoes. He had no shirt on and the muscles in his upper body coiled and uncoiled under his sweat-shiny black skin like liquid. The speed gloves he wore were red and when he hit the speed bag his hands were a red blur.

“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.“

”Must 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.

Chapter 31

I had my feet up on the window sill in my office. I 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 tumed 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, was 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 grey, 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, aml 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 envrlope 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 shitkicker 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 shitkicker 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.