Stardust (4 page)

6

“W
ELL,
well,” Jill Joyce said as she came off the set. “The cutie-pie cop with the big muscles.”

“I didn't think you'd noticed,” I said.

“You here to take care of me?” she said. Her on-camera makeup was a little heavy, but standing there in front of me she was fresh-faced and beautiful. Her cheeks dimpled as she spoke. Her skin was clear and smooth, her eyes sparkled with life and a hint of innocent sexuality. She looked like orange juice and fresh laundry, the perfect date for the Williams-Amherst game, in a plaid skirt, picnicking beforehand on a blanket. Her lips would taste like apples. Her hair would smell like honey. Fresh-scrubbed, spunky, compliant, brave, beautiful, decent, cute. With a TVQ that made your breath come short.

“I'm here to discuss it,” I said.

“Your place or mine?” Jill said and dimpled at me.

“Your place,” I said, “but remember, I'm armed.”

Jill giggled deep in her throat.

“I hope so,” she said. She looked at the director. “Half an hour, Rich?”

“Sure, Jilly,” the director said. “No more, though, I'm trying to bring this thing in under, for once.”

“Maybe you could make your mind up where to put the fucking camera, Rich,” Jill said. She spoke without heat, almost absently, as she walked away.

I followed her, watching her hips sway as she walked. Her back was perfectly straight. Her hair was glossy and thick. The skirt fit smoothly over her elegant backside. We went out a side door into the cold, walked twenty feet to Jill's mobile home and went in. Jill was all business today. She sat in the driver's seat sideways, crossed her legs, rested her left arm on the steering wheel.

“Okay, cutie,” she said. “Talk.”

I didn't answer. I was looking down the length of the mobile home toward the bed. Above the bed, suspended from a ceiling fixture, was a plastic doll, dressed in a gold lamé evening gown, hanging with a miniature slipknot around her neck. Jill saw me looking and shifted her glance, and saw the swaying doll.

“What's that?” she said.

I walked down the length of the mobile home and looked more closely at the doll without touching it. I could hear Jill's footsteps behind me. The doll gazed at me from a face that looked a little like Jill Joyce, its happy smile entirely incongruous above the hangman's knot around its throat. The knot caused the doll to cant at an angle. I could feel Jill press against me. Her hand was on my arm just above the elbow. She squeezed.

“What is that?” she said.

“Just a doll,” I said. “You recognize it?”

She stayed behind me but moved her head around for a closer look, her cheek pressed against my upper arm. She looked for a moment.

“Jesus God,” she said.

“Yeah?” I said.

“It's me,” she said. “It's me.”

She slid around over my arm and pressed herself against me, both arms around me, her head against my chest.

“It's a doll of me,” she said, “as Tiffany Scott.”

Even I had heard of Tiffany Scott, the spunky, lovable girl reporter, caught up in a series of hair-raising adventures, week after week, for six years on ABC. It was the series that had made her the preeminent television star in the country. Her body was tighter against me than my gunbelt and she seemed to insinuate herself at very precarious spots.

“Got any theories?” I said.

“He did it,” she said. Her voice was hoarse, throaty with fear. “It's . . .” She squeezed tighter against me. I would not have thought that possible, but she did it. “It's a warning.” Her breath was short, and audible.

“Who's he?” I said. Spenser, master detective, asker of the penetrating questions.

“I don't know,” she said.

“Then how do you know it's him?” I said. “Or is it he?”

“He's done things like this before.”

“He has,” I said. “But we don't know who he is.”

I was losing control of my pronouns. “Or whom?” I said.

She turned her face in against me.

“It's not funny,” she said.

I reached up with my free hand, the one she wasn't clinging to, and took the doll down.

“His name isn't Ken, is it?”

“I told you,” she said. “I don't know who he is. I just know he's after me.”

I got my arm free of her clutch and turned her around and steered her back to the front of the mobile home.

“I'll need to talk to your driver,” I said.

“Paulie,” she said.

“Paulie what?”

“I don't know. I just call him Paulie. You got a cigarette?”

“I don't smoke,” I said.

“Well, hand me some from the table there,” she said.

I gave her the cigarettes and she took one out and put it into her mouth and looked at me expectantly. There were matches on the dashboard in front of the driver's seat. I stood, stepped past her, took a book of matches and lit her cigarette, then I tucked the matches inside the cellophane wrapper on the cigarette pack and put them in her lap.

“Who would know Paulie's full name?” I said.

“I don't know, for God's sake, ask Sandy. I don't keep track of every sweat hog that works on this picture.”

“The bigger they are, the nicer they are.”

She seemed recovered from her panic.

“You do coke?” she said.

I shook my head.

“Well, I do,” she said. “You got a problem with that?”

I shook my head again. She went to the breakfast nook, got the stuff out of a cabinet and did two lines off the tabletop.

“I got to work this afternoon,” she said. “You try getting up every time the light goes on. You try sparkling eight hours a day, sometimes ten or fifteen.”

“For me, it's easy,” I said, and gave her a sparkling smile.

She paid me no attention. She was bobbing her head slightly and tapping her fingers on the tabletop.

“You going to do something about this?” she said.

I looked at her, jeeped from the coke, waiting to go out and pretend to be wonderful; evasive and self-deluded and kind of stupid, and startlingly beautiful. For all I knew she'd hung the doll herself. For all I knew “he” didn't exist.

“Are you?” she said. She was impatient now, tapping her foot, her eyes very bright. “I've got to go to work. I need to know.”

Still I stared at her. She was trouble, alcoholic, drug addicted, nymphomaniac, egocentric, spoiled brat trouble. She leaned a little toward me, her eyes the size of dahlias. She moistened her lower lip with the tip of her tongue.

“Are you?” she said. “Please?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I'm going to do something about this.”

She nodded her head too many times and then headed out toward the soundstage. I was reminded of a child, off to kindergarten, frightened, sad, trying to be grown up; marching off like a little soldier, with two lines of coke up her nose.

7

P
AULIE
spent most of his time downstairs in the production office drinking coffee with the other drivers. Someone beeped him when Miss Joyce was ready. Anyone could have wandered in there and hung the doll.

The transportation captain, a big gray-haired guy named Mickey Boylan, sat in while I talked with Paulie.

“You need any help on this, you let me know,” he said when Paulie had told me all he knew. And maybe a little more. “This show is good for us, gotta lot of people driving.”

Boylan was a business agent with the union.

“I'll take anything I can get,” I said.

“You think there's somebody really after her?” Boylan said.

“I guess so,” I said. “Otherwise what am I doing here?”

Boylan grinned. “This sow's got a lot of tits,” he said. “Could feed one more easy enough.”

I gave Boylan my card.

“I hate to spin my wheels,” I said. “Even for money.”

“No other reason to do it,” Boylan said as I left.

I wandered back down to the soundstage and leaned against the wall out of the way and waited for Jill Joyce. Watching a television show being filmed was like watching dandruff form. It was a long, slow process and when you were through, what did you have? Maybe Boylan was right. Maybe this was just a boondoggle and I was getting paid to make Jill Joyce feel good. She had yet to tell me a goddamned thing about herself. The hanging doll was easy to fake and came at the right time. I didn't even know what other harassment there had been. So why didn't I take a walk? The money was good, but there's always money. Why didn't I walk right now instead of standing around listening to some of the worst dialogue ever uttered, over and over again? I had my leather jacket hanging on a light tripod. Now and then someone would glance my way and do a short double-take at the gun under my left arm. The rest of the time things were much calmer. My head itched. The watch cap made my hair sweaty, but if I took it off, the way it matted my hair down made me look like an oversized rock musician.

On set, out of sight, but sadly not out of hearing, Jill Joyce was selling the closing lines of her scene for the fifth time.

“Where there's love,” she said, “there's a chance.”

I knew why I was waiting for her. It was what Susan had said at dinner.
She doesn't have anyone to look out for her.
There was something so small and alone in her, so unconnected and frightened, that I couldn't walk away from her. If she was staging these harassments she needed help. If she wasn't staging them she needed help. I was better equipped to give one kind of help than I was the other. And equipped or not, whatever she needed, I was the only one willing.

At 4:25 the director said, “That's it, thanks, Jilly. See you tomorrow.” And without answering, Jill Joyce walked around the set partition and stopped in front of me.

“You'll drive me home,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

The people who'd been lounging around glancing at my gun were now busy dismantling the set wall in front of us. They swung it out to open up the set and two people moved the camera dolly around into the space where I was standing.

“Excuse me,” someone said, “coming through.”

“We'll get my coat in wardrobe,” Jill said.

“Sure.”

I followed her off the soundstage and down the corridor past the carpenter shop to the wardrobe office. Jill went in and came out in a moment wearing a silver-tipped mink.

“Kathleen,” she spoke back through the open door, “did Ernie get me that white sable we talked about?”

A woman's voice from the wardrobe office said, “Got it right here, Jilly.”

“Excellent,” Jill said. “I'll come in tomorrow for a fitting.”

“Give us a little notice if you can,” the woman's voice said.

Jill didn't answer, nor did she appear to have heard the request for notice. We went on out through the production office and into the front parking lot where I had my car.

“You need to tell anybody, drivers, anyone like that?” I said.

Jill made a dismissive motion with her hand.

“Which car is yours?” she said.

“The glorious black Cherokee,” I said. “Ideal for all-weather surveillance.”

“Well, it's better than I expected,” she said.

I held the door, she got in, ran a hand over the leather upholstery, and nodded approvingly.

“The Charles Hotel?” I said.

“In Cambridge. You know where it is?”

I did my Bogart impression with the flattened upper lip. “I know where everything is, sweetheart.”

She got out a cigarette, pressed in my lighter and waited for it to pop. When it did she put it against the cigarette and the pleasing smell of tobacco lit with a car lighter filled the front seat. She put the lighter back and leaned her head against the back of the seat with the cigarette glowing in her mouth and closed her eyes. Her face was very white and still, nestled in the big collar of her fur coat. Without raising her hand to the cigarette, she took a big drag and let the smoke out slowly from the corners of her mouth. The early winter evening had settled around us, and the automobile headlights on Soldiers Field Road had a pale cold look to them. I let the motor idle while I looked at her, her hands plunged deep into the pockets of her mink, her body tucked well inside it, a little shivery from the cold as we waited for the heater. In the faint light she looked about twelve, except for the glowing cigarette, a tired child, not yet pubescent, the apple unbitten on the tree, the serpent yet to tempt her.

“I need a drink,” she said.

I didn't say anything. Across the river lights were popping on as people came home from work. The mercury lamp streetlights on our side of the river had the weak orange look they get before it's fully dark and they turn blue-white. Wind whipped a small dervish of powdery snow off the frozen river and spun it west where the river turned toward Watertown.

“I said I need a drink.” Jill spoke around a slow drift of smoke.

“Yes, you did,” I said.

“Well for Christ's sake, do something about it.”

“Maybe I could siphon off a little gasoline?”

“Don't be cute with me, stupid. Just get this thing in gear and get us to the hotel.”

“I saw Gene Tierney do that once,” I said. “Smoked a cigarette just like that. Head back, eyes closed. And Sterling Hayden was her boyfriend . . .”

“Will you drive this fucking car?” she said.

I did.

8

T
HE
doorman at the Charles Hotel was a young guy with a go-to-hell Irish face made red by the cold. He wore a fur-collared greatcoat and the kind of hat Russian ministers wear. He said he'd hold my car for me.

“No problem,” he said, and started the revolving door turning for Jill Joyce as she preceded me into the lobby.

“Come up for a drink,” she said.

“Last time I came to your place for a drink you attempted to molest me,” I said.

She turned with her mink coat open and her hands on her hips. She tossed her head back a little and her pelvis forward a little.

“You scared?” she said.

“Yuh,” I said.

She shook her head in disgust. “Like most men,” she said, “never had a real woman.”

I let that pass. Discussing it in the lobby of the Charles Hotel didn't seem like a way to bring clarity to the argument.

“Buy me a drink in the Quiet Bar,” she said. “Then if I frighten you, you can yell for the house dick.”

“Okay,” I said, “but you've got to promise to talk with me.”

We started up the wide staircase to the second level of the Charles.

“Talk to you?” She stopped one step ahead of me and turned and looked back.

“With,” I said.

She shook her head in open amazement, and continued up the stairs, talking over her shoulder.

“What are you?” she asked. “Queer? You some kinda faggot?”

“You're going to have to talk with me,” I said, “about yourself, your past, your fans, your lovers.”

“You get your rocks off talking?” she said. Her voice was loud. “You are a fucking queer.”

I took a quick two steps and caught her from behind and lifted her, holding her by her upper arms, up the last stair and steered her around the stairwell into an alcove near and to the left of the entrance to the bar. Her feet were still clear of the ground. She started to twist loose, but with her feet in the air she didn't have much purchase.

“I'm tired of you,” I said. “I was tired of you halfway through lunch the first time I met you. But you need some help, and there doesn't seem to be anyone else but me. So I'm hanging in there, and I haven't hit you yet. But I will soon if it keeps going the way it's going.”

I gave her a little shake.

“You understand that?” I said.

Her breath was coming in little gasps.

I shook her again.

“You understand?”

Still making her gasping sound, she nodded her head.

“Now,” I said, “I'm going to ask you about things, and you're going to answer me and we're not going to play all this seductive teenager grab-ass that we've been playing. Right?”

She nodded again.

I set her down and let go of her upper arms. She leaned forward against the wall for a moment, and then turned slowly, leaning on the wall as she did, and rubbed her upper arms with her hands. Her breathing was still a series of half-stifled gasps and two bright streaks of crimson color smudged along her cheekbones.

“Limp . . . dick . . . mother . . . fucker,” she gasped, and then fell forward and began to sob against my chest. The sobbing wasn't loud but it was wracking. Her whole body shook with it. Her arms hung straight down and still against her sides. I put my arms around her and patted her back gently while she cried. Two couples got off the elevator and came around the corner and studiously didn't look at us. The men wore dark suits and red ties. The women wore frilly dresses with padded shoulders. Both men and women had too much hair. In from the suburbs. I had on a leather jacket and jeans and my Adidas Countries—white leather with the green stripes. An oldie but goodie. One of the women glanced back as they headed into the bar. Probably admiring the rakish cant to my watch cap.

Jill stopped sobbing after a while. But she kept her face pressed against my chest.

“Ready for that drink?” I said.

“I can't go in there,” she said. Her voice was muffled. “I look awful.”

“You could look twice as bad,” I said, “and still look wonderful.”

She leaned away from me and raised her face. It was red and her eyes were puffy and some of her makeup was tear-washed. I revised my opinion, but kept it to myself.

“You mean it?” she said.

“Absolutely,” I said.

She fumbled some Kleenex out of her purse and dabbed at her eyes.

“Show must go on,” I said.

“Give me five minutes,” she said, “in the ladies' room.”

“Okay.”

We walked to the ladies' room.

“I'll be right outside the door. You need me, you holler.”

“And you'll come in and catch all the Cambridge ladies making peepee?”

“Cambridge ladies don't do that,” I said.

She smiled at me softly, with her head down, moving only her eyes to look up at me. It was a wan smile, I think. Then she went into the ladies' room and I leaned on the wall outside. For more than five minutes. One of the suburban ladies who'd admired my watch cap admired it again as she went past me into the ladies' room, and admired it at even greater length when she came out a few minutes later.

“This a technique for picking up girls?” she said.

“Have you fallen for me because of my watch cap?” I said.

“No,” she said and walked off.

It was maybe fifteen minutes and I was beginning to wonder when I heard Jill Joyce scream, “Spenser!”

I slammed through the ladies' room door with my gun out, did a little deke around a partition, and there I was. A startled woman in a green paisley dress was just emerging from a stall. She froze when she saw the gun and then ducked back into the stall. At the far end of the ladies' room in front of the handicapped stall Jill Joyce stood with her mouth a little open, her eyes glittering, her arms folded across her breast, right hand holding left elbow. There was no one else in there. The other stall doors were ajar.

“Testing?” I said.

She laughed. It wasn't a good laugh; it was off-key and it wobbled up and down the scale, teetering on hysteria. I slid my gun back under my arm out of sight, inside my jacket.

“I wondered if you'd really burst into a ladies' lounge.”

“You through in here?” I said.

She did her fluty laugh again.

“For now,” she said.

I jerked my head toward the door and started out. She followed me. We walked across the lobby and into the cocktail lounge. There was a bar with stools along the left wall. In the rest of the room were couches and easy chairs grouped around low cocktail tables. We got a grouping for two in a corner near the big windows that opened out onto the courtyard. In the summer there were umbrellas out there and tables and jazz concerts on Wednesday nights. Now there was a huge Christmas tree and the residue of vigorously removed snow. People walking from the shops to the hotel hunched stiffly against the cold.

The waitress came by. Jill ordered a double vodka martini. I had a beer. When she came back with the drinks she brought two dishes of smoked almonds. I nodded toward the bartender. He nodded back and gave me a thumbs-up gesture.

“Why two?” Jill said.

“Bartender knows me,” I said and took a handful of nuts. Jill took a long pull on her martini. She looked at my glass.

“Beer?” she said.

“Very good,” I said.

“You don't have to be a wise guy,” she said. Her eyes were only a touch red now, and her makeup was all back in place. Her eyes were the color of cornflowers.

“I know,” I said. “I do it voluntarily.”

She drank another third of her martini and with only a third left her eyes already began to flick about looking for the waitress.

“Aside from the doll hanging,” I said, “what instances have there been of harassment?”

She drank the rest of her martini, and again her eyes flicked around the room. I looked over at the bartender, who saw me and nodded. Jill shook a cigarette from the pack she'd placed on the table and put it in her mouth and leaned toward me. There were matches in the ashtray. I lit her cigarette, blew out the match and put it in the ashtray. I put the book of matches beside her cigarettes.

“What instances of harassment have there been?” I said. When interrogating a suspect, cleverly rephrasing the question is often effective.

“I think this is harassment,” Jill said, her eyes searching for the waitress. “We have a nice evening together and you just want to talk about icky business.”

“Icky business is my profession,” I said. “Tell me about the harassment.”

The waitress arrived with another double martini.

Jill said, “Ah.”

The waitress looked at my beer, saw that it was nearly untouched, and went away. Jill dipped right in. I waited. Jill looked at me with her lovely innocent cornflower-blue eyes. I crossed my legs and tossed my foot a little to pass the time.

“Phone calls,” Jill said. “Mostly phone calls.”

“From a man?”

“Yes.” There was surprise in Jill's voice, as if only men would ever call her.

“Where'd the calls come?”

“You mean where did I get them?”

“Un huh.”

“On the phone in my mobile home. Here, at the hotel.”

“There's been enough press about this show so that anyone would know you were staying here. How about the mobile home. How would he get that number?”

“
I
don't know. How, for Christ's sake, would
I
know?”

“Is it listed?”

She shook her head in disgust and flapped her hands in front of her, the cigarette smoking in her right one.

“Spenser, I don't know about stuff like that. I don't know if it's listed or not. Some gopher takes care of that. Ask Sandy, or the UPM.”

“UPM?”

“Unit production manager, for God's sake. Why didn't they get somebody who at least knows something about the business.”

“What's the name of the unit production manager?”

“Bob,” Jill said. She was well into the second double martini.

“Bob what?” I said.

Jill flapped her hands again and shook her head.

“You think I memorize lists of names? I have to memorize sixty pages of dialogue every week. I don't have time to get chummy with every member of the office staff.”

“Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,” I said.

“Where's that from?” Jill said.

“Some play,” I said. “What did this caller say when he called?”

“Different stuff. Sex stuff, mostly.”

“Like what?” I said.

“That a turn-on for you?” Jill said. “Having me talk about it?”

“Sure is,” I said. “This whole conversation is more exciting than dinner with Jesse Helms.”

Jill frowned beautifully, a lovely vertical frown line appearing briefly between her eyebrows and smoothing out at once.

“Whoever he is,” she said. “Mostly this guy told me what he'd like to do to me when he got me alone.”

“Abusive?” I said.

She was sipping her martini now; apparently the edge of need had softened.

“Actually,” she said, “no. It wasn't, it was more, you know, ah, romantic.”

“Romantic?”

“Yeah, lovey-dovey. Except he used all the dirty words. But he used them, like, romantically.”

I nodded.

“And you don't, I suppose, have even a guess as to who he might be?” I said.

“If I did, you think I wouldn't have already told you? What kind of dumb jerk question is that?”

“The kind if you don't ask, you feel like a fool when it comes out that you should have asked.”

“No, I don't know the guy. I don't recognize his voice. I don't have any idea who he is.”

“Any letters?”

She shook her head. The martini was gone. She gestured at the waitress.

“No.”

“Get any recordings of his calls?”

“No.”

“Not on any answering machines, or anything?”

“I don't have answering machines,” Jill said. The waitress brought her a third martini. I didn't have too much longer before talking with her would be useless.

Jill giggled. “I don't know how they work.”

“You get any fan letters that seem odd?” I said.

“They're all odd,” Jill said. “I mean, for crissake, fan letters.”

“Any unusually odd?”

“I don't know. I don't read them. Ask Sandy.”

“Sandy reads them?”

“Sandy, or some girl in the office. I don't have time for it. Somebody reads them and writes up a little cover, saying how they sound. You know? If there's a trend.”

“Do you read that?” I said.

“No, they send it to my agent.”

“Whose name is?”

“My agent?”

“Un huh.”

“Why do you want my agent's name?”

“So I can talk with him,” I said. “See, I'm a detective. That means I make an attempt to detect what's going on, by asking questions. By looking for, ah, clues. Stuff like that.”

“You're making fun of me,” Jill said.

“One would have to have a heart of stone . . .” I said.

“I get you in bed, I'd show you something,” Jill said. She got another cigarette and leaned toward me while I lit it, her eyes fixed on me in a look that, I think, was supposed to make my blood race.

“What's your agent's name?” I said.

She leaned back and blew smoke out at me in disgust.

“Ken Craig,” she said.

“He in L.A.?”

“Yes.”

“How about relationships? Any that have ended lately?”

“Relationships?”

“Yeah. Marriages, lovers, business arrangements, anybody that you've cut loose that might be mad at you?”

Jill was holding the martini glass in both hands and resting it against her lower lip. She gazed at me over it, her eyes closed a little so that she had a smoky look.