Stardust (8 page)

15

H
AWK
was still nursing his first Laphroig, I was two-thirds through my first Sam Adams, and Jill was just beginning her fifth white wine.

“Before you doze off,” I said, “can we talk about Wilfred Pomeroy?”

Jill had no reaction for a moment, then she looked very carefully up from under her lowered gaze and said to me, “Who?”

“Wilfred Pomeroy. Rojack says he was harassing you and had to be chased away.”

“I don't know anything about it,” she said.

“As far as I can tell, Jill, you don't know anyone and you've never done anything. Why would Rojack make up a story about Wilfred Pomeroy?”

“Rojack's a creep.”

“Who could think up a name like Wilfred Pomeroy?” I said.

“Who cares about Pomeroy?” Jill said. “Why are you bothering me with all these creeps?”

There were two well-groomed young women in tailored suits sitting on the next couch. They both wore very high heels and they both were sipping Gibsons. Everything about them said,
We have MBAs.

“This is called detecting,” I said. “I'm trying to find out who murdered your stunt double, in the hopes that I can dissuade him, or her, from murdering you.”

Hawk had leaned back in the couch and crossed his feet on the cocktail table. He held the single-malt scotch in both hands and rested it on a point above his solar plexus. He was examining the two MBAs with calm interest, the way one examines a painting.

“Her?”

“Could be a her, couldn't it?”

“Why would any woman want to kill me? I don't even know any women.”

“You know Wilfred Pomeroy?”

“No.”

One of the MBAs had become aware of Hawk's gaze. She kept looking back at him in covert ways: pretending to glance out the window, casually surveying the room. She murmured something to her friend, who leaned forward to put her drink down and peeked at Hawk from under her bangs. Hawk continued to examine them without any reaction to their behavior.

“And Rojack's lying?” I said.

“Yes,” Jill said. She had some wine.

“But you have no idea why he would tell lies like this?”

“No.”

I leaned back and rested my head against the back of the couch and drummed my fingers lightly on the tops of my thighs. Jill had some wine.

Hawk said, “Hard to imagine why anyone want to harass her, isn't it?”

I rolled my head a little to the left so I could look at Hawk.

“Hard,” I said.

“Susan met her?” Hawk said.

“Yes.”

“She a suspect?”

I grinned.

“She has motive,” I said.

Jill was savoring her wine. She seemed capable of not hearing any conversation she didn't want to hear.

“Are you a detective too?” she said to Hawk.

Hawk's smile was radiant. He shook his head.

“Well, what do you do?”

“Mostly what I feel like,” Hawk said.

“But, I mean, do you protect people all the time?”

Again the big smile from Hawk.

“Nope,” he said. “Sometimes I'm on the other side.”

Jill looked at me.

I shrugged.

“I didn't say he was nice. I said he was good.”

“I don't think either one of you is very nice,” Jill said. Her voice was very small and girlish.

“Maybe,” Hawk said to me, “we should can this job and protect those two.”

He nodded at the MBAs. Jill looked at them.

“I could show you some things that those two tight asses don't know between them.”

“Good to know,” Hawk said.

16

I
N
the morning I headed west on the Mass. Pike with the sun gleaming off the new snow and the temperature in the low thirties. I felt good. I'd looked up Waymark on the map and it was there. It was as close as I'd gotten to a clue in this whole deal. For the first time since I'd met Jill Joyce, I knew where I was going.

Waymark was in the Berkshire Hills, maybe two hours and twenty minutes west of Boston. There was a high gloss of rustic chic in the Berkshires, Tanglewood, Stockbridge, Williamstown Theater Festival; and there were enclaves of rural poverty where the official town mascot was probably a rat. Waymark was one of those. Driving into the east end of town after a long winding climb out of the valley, I saw a small house with a porch sagging across the length of the front and a discarded toilet bowl with a ratty Christmas tree stuck in it. In the next lot was a trailer, set on cinder blocks, its front yard fenced with bald tires, set in the ground to form a series of half-circles, black against the snow. Two brown cows, their ribs showing, stood silently at a wire fence and gazed at me as I rolled by, and in a yard next to a convenience store a milk goat was tethered to the wheel of a broken tractor.

Beside the convenience store, which advertised Orange Crush on an old-time sign that rose vertically beside the door, was a tall narrow two-story house with roofing shingles for siding. The shingles were a faded mustard color. Like a lot of the houses out here, it had a full veranda across the front. The veranda roof sagged in the middle enough so that the snow melt dripped off in the middle and puddled in front of the broken front step. There was a sign done in black house paint on a piece of one-by-ten pine board.
TUNNYS GRILL
it said. In front, on what once might have been a lawn, a couple of cars were parked nose in. I pulled in beside them. The space hadn't been cleared, merely rutted down by cars parking and backing out. I could see where some of them had gotten stuck and spun big hollows with their rear wheels. The dark earth below had been spun up onto the snow, mixing with exhaust soot and litter. I nosed in beside a vintage 1970 Buick and parked and got out. From Tunnys Grill came the odor of winter vegetables cooking—cabbage maybe, or turnips. I walked across the buckling wooden porch and in through a hollow-core luan door that was probably intended to go on the closet in a housing development ranch. It was not meant to be an outside door and the veneer was blistering and the color had faded to a pale gray brown. When I pushed it open the coarse smell of cooking was more aggressive.

Inside was a lightless corridor with a stairwell running up along the right wall to a closed door at the top. In front of the stairway to the right was an archway that had probably led into the living room. It had been closed off with a couple of pieces of plywood. Whoever had done it was an inexpert carpenter. Several of the nails were bent over, and instead of butting in the middle, one sheet of plywood lapped over the other. To the left was a similar archway, this one still open, and in what must once have been a dining room was a bar. There was a brown linoleum floor, three unmatched tables and some kitchen chairs, and a bar which had been worked up out of two long folding tables, the kind they use in church halls, with some red-checkered oilcloth tacked over it. Behind the bar was a tall dirty old refrigerator and some shelves with bottles on them. One shelf contained a row of unmatched glasses sitting mouth down on a folded dish towel. There was an old railroad wood stove set in a sandbox in the far corner opposite the bar, and on the wall to the left of the bar was a big florid picture of Custer's Last Stand, with a very Errol Flynnesque Custer standing, the last man upright, in the center of his fallen troop, his blond hair blowing in the wind of battle, firing a long pistol at the circling Indians.

There were two overweight guys in overalls and down vests sitting together near the stove drinking highballs and smoking cigarettes. The stove was putting out enough heat to bake bread, but both men seemed not to notice. They had on woolen shirts under the vests, and the sleeves of long underwear showed where they had turned their cuffs back. One of them had on a red woolen watch cap and the other a “Day-Glo” orange hunting cap with imitation fur inside the earflaps. He had pushed it back a little on his head, but otherwise made no accommodation to the heat. The woman behind the bar was smoking a cigarette on which nearly an inch of ash had accumulated. As I came in, she got rid of the ash by leaning forward in the direction of an ashtray on the bar and flicking the cigarette with her forefinger. The ash missed the ashtray by maybe three feet, and she absently brushed it off the bar and onto the floor.

I assumed she was a woman, because she wore a dress. But that was the only clue. Her graying hair looked as if it had been cut with a hatchet. She had a lipless slash of a mouth that went straight across her wide square face. Her eyebrows were thick and grew together over her nose, and her skin was gray and harsh. She stood with her massive forearms folded over her shapeless chest and raised her chin maybe an eighth of an inch in my direction. I glanced at my watch. It was quarter of ten in the morning.

“You got any coffee?” I said.

She shook her head.

One of the guys at the table said, “Hey, Gert, couple more.”

She went around the bar and got their glasses. She took a couple of ice cubes out of a bag in the freezer top of the refrigerator, plunked one cube in each glass, poured some bourbon over it, and added ginger ale from a screw-top bottle. She walked back around, put the drinks down and said, “Two bucks.”

Each of the drinkers gave her a dollar bill. She came back around the bar, put the two bills into a small, square, green metal box on the shelf. Then she looked at me again.

“Beer or hard stuff,” she said. Her voice had a thick wheezy sound to it.

“Anything to eat?” I said.

“Got a Slim Jim,” she said.

I shook my head. “I'm looking for a guy named Wilfred Pomeroy,” I said.

She had no reaction. She didn't care if I was looking for Wilfred Pomeroy or not.

“Know him?” I said.

“Yuh.”

“Know where I can find him?”

“Yuh.”

“Where?”

She simply shook her head.

“Owe him money,” I said. “I'm looking to pay him.”

She looked across at the two fat guys drinking bourbon and ginger ale. Both of them wore high-laced leather boots. The steel toe of one showed through where the pale leather had worn away.

“Guy here says he owes Wilfred Pomeroy money,” she said. The wheeze rattled in her chest. Her cigarette had burned down close to her lips. She spat it on the floor and let it smolder there while she got another one out of the pocket of her shapeless cotton dress. She lit it.

The guy in the “Day-Glo” cap said, “Shit.”

Nobody else said anything.

“You're not buying that?” I said.

The other guy at the table said, “Wilfred never done nothing that anyone would owe him money for, mister.”

The guy in the “Day-Glo” cap spat against the stove. It sizzled for a minute and then everything was quiet again.

“You from Boston or New York?” the other guy said.

“Boston,” I said.

“How much that fancy jacket cost you?” “Day-Glo” said. At 9:50 in the morning he was already a little glassy-eyed. I was wearing jeans and a leather jacket, and in Tunnys Grill I felt like Little Lord Fauntleroy.

“Free,” I said. “I took it away from a loudmouth in a barroom.”

“Day-Glo's” brow furrowed for a minute while he thought about that.

“You think you're funny?” he said.

“No,” I said, “I think you're funny. You know where I can find Wilfred Pomeroy, or not?”

“Maybe you want to get your wise city-boy ass stomped.”

“Don't be a dope,” I said. “You're half gassed already and you're fifty pounds out of shape.”

“Day-Glo” looked at his pal.

“You want to show this city mister something?”

His pal was looking at me thoughtfully, or what passed for thoughtfully in Waymark. Then he made a dismissive gesture with his left hand.

“Fuck him, Francis.”

The woman at the bar said, “You gonna buy something or not? If you ain't I don't want you loitering around my bar.”

I looked around at the three of them, slowly.

“Have a nice day,” I said, and departed haughtily. Mr. Charm, smooth-talking the bumpkins.

17

T
HE
Waymark Town Hall was one of those Greek Revival buildings with white-pillared fronts that abound in the Berkshires. It stood at the end of a small wedge-shaped town common in its elegant white simplicity, like a fashion model at a rescue mission. Around back the land dropped off a level and the police and fire departments were housed there in the basement. The fire department was probably all volunteer. There were two engines and no people in the firehouse. Next to it was a single door in the concrete foundation wall, with a blue light beside it. I parked next to one of the gaudiest police cruisers ever customized. It had a light rack with two blue lights and a chrome siren mounted on the roof. There were chrome spotlights on both front window columns, running lights mounted on the fenders, and mud flaps and three antennas, and a giant shield painted on each door and on the hood in gold. Each one carried the legend
WAYMARK POLICE.
There was a shotgun locked upright at the dashboard, and a long black five-cell flashlight clipped beside it. The cruiser was painted light blue and white.

Inside the station was a square cinder-block room painted light green with a single large desk in front and a barred cell with washbasin, toilet and steel cot in back. The cell door was ajar. There was a stuffed bobcat mounted on a slab of pine, sitting on top of a single file cabinet, there was a calendar on the wall with a picture of a stag at bay on it, and behind the desk sat a guy in a pale blue uniform shirt with white epaulets. A Sam Brown belt crossed over his chest, and a Western-style campaign hat sat on the desk in front of him next to the phone. A sign on the desk said
BUFORD F. PHILLIPS, CHIEF.
He had a big gold shield pinned to his chest. It too said
CHIEF
on it.

I took out my wallet and showed the chief my I.D.

I said, “I'm investigating a murder in Boston.”

Phillips leaned back in his swivel chair and I could see the big pearl-handled .44 revolver he carried on the Sam Brown belt. He propped one foot up on an open drawer and held my wallet out a little to read it. He was wearing tooled leather cowboy boots.

“What the hell is this?” he said, studying my license at arm's length.

“Private detective,” I said.

He didn't speak. He turned the wallet a little to catch the light better and compared my photo on the gun permit with the real me. While he was doing that, the tip of his tongue appeared between his lips, and his forehead wrinkled slightly. Studying things was hard work for Buford Phillips.

I waited. The room was quiet except for the sound of Phillips' breath coming noisily through his nose. He was very pale, the color of salt pork. His light hair was brush cut, and he was fat, the kind of puffed fat that seemed boneless, like an unbaked dinner roll.

Finally he slid my wallet back toward me.

“You carrying a gun?” he said.

I opened my jacket and showed him the gun.

“You got a license for that?”

“You just looked at it,” I said.

He didn't have any reaction, just looked at me, and again, the tip of his tongue showed near the middle of his mouth.

“I'm looking for a guy named Wilfred Pomeroy,” I said.

Phillips nodded.

“I'd like to question him about a murder in Boston.”

Phillips nodded again.

“Would you know where he is?” I said.

“Who wants to know?” Phillips said.

I looked carefully around the office.

“Which of the people here,” I said, “would you guess?”

“Hey, I asked you a question,” Phillips said.

I took in a long breath.

“I would like to know where Wilfred Pomeroy is, so I may go and ask him some questions about a murder that took place recently in the city of Boston.” I spoke very slowly.

Phillips nodded again.

“Where can I find him?” I said.

“Who was murdered?” Phillips said.

“Woman named Babe Loftus,” I said.

“Sex murder?”

“No.”

Phillips was silent again. His tongue moved about on his lip. His forehead wrinkled again.

“You think Wilfred did it?” he said.

“Don't know who did it,” I said. “I'd just like to talk with him.”

“If you don't know, why do you think it's Wilfred?”

I put my palms flat on Phillips's desktop and leaned over it until I was about six inches away from him and stared into his eyes.

“What the hell you doing?” Phillips said.

“Looking to see if there's anyone in there,” I said.

“Hey, you got no business being a wise guy,” Phillips said. “I got a right to make sure you're on the level.”

“You sure yet?” I said.

“Yeah, yeah, you seem okay to me.”

I straightened up. “Good,” I said. “Can we go see Wilfred Pomeroy?”

“Sure, yeah, we can. I'll go with you. It's my town, you know, I got to make sure everything is done right, you know. It's my town.”

“Dandy,” I said. “Where's Wilfred?”

“I'll go along,” Phillips said. “Take you there.”

He let his chair come forward, and using the movement as propulsion he came to his feet. He shook his pants down over the tops of his boots; they were two inches too short and the boots looked too big, like the feet of a cartoon character. As Phillips came around the desk I noticed he had a blackjack in a low pocket on his striped uniform pants, and a come-along in a black leather case on his cartridge-studded belt. He got a pale blue jacket off a hook on the wall and slipped into it. The jacket had a mouton collar dyed a darker blue. He put on his campaign hat and waddled over to the door. He held it open, I went out, and he came after me and locked it.

“We'll go in the cruiser,” he said.

I went around and waited until he got in and unlocked my side. Then I got in with him.

The cruiser fishtailed slightly on the snowy parking area as Phillips floored it in first, and we half skidded onto the plowed street, where the spinning rear wheels grabbed the dry pavement and sent the car squealing off west along the main street.

“An LTD,” Phillips said. “Biggest engine they make.”

I fumbled the safety belt around me and got it fastened.

“No use running,” I said, “with you at the wheel.”

“You can say that again, mister. You'd have to have a Corvette or something to get away from me.”

We careened around a corner and up a short hill. The pavement stopped about twenty yards up the hill and the road became two ruts worn by oversized tires. The cruiser lurched and slithered as it went too fast for the road. There were trees on either side and a shambled stone wall on my side that slouched in disarray along the margin of the road among the leafless trees. Birches mostly, with an occasional maple.

In a clearing, where the road ended in a rutted turnaround, there was what appeared to be an old school bus with a shack built off of it. The shack was made of plywood and covered with felt paper. The paper had been nailed on with roofing nails, and their silver galvanized heads spotted randomly over the black surface. Tears in the paper had been repaired by nailing scraps of felt over the tear with more roofing nails, so that the studded appearance was without order. A stovepipe protruded through the roof of the shack, and a rusting fifty-gallon barrel stood on its side on two sawhorses next to the shack. I could smell kerosene. A big television antenna was nailed high in a tree above the shack and a cable ran from it into the shack. A power line snaked among the trees and ran down a weathered board into the shack. The windows of the bus were hung with cloth that looked mostly like it was made from potato sacks. Three mongrel dogs, all with their tails arching up over their hindquarters, came toward the cruiser, barking without rancor.

“This is Wilfred's place,” Phillips said. “He done it himself.”

“Handy,” I said.

We walked across the snow-trampled, mud-mixed front lawn with the dogs roiling in a friendly fashion around our ankles. They were all about 35 pounds, tan blending to black. They were of parentage so mixed that they had regressed to basic Dog, nearly identical with mongrel dogs in China and Bolivia.

Phillips banged on the door.

“Hey, Wilfred,” he yelled, “it's Chief Phillips.”

The door opened slowly and stopped halfway.

“What do you want?” someone said.

Phillips shoved the door fully open.

“Come on, come on, Wilfred. This is official business.”

Phillips walked through the fully open door, and I followed him.

Pomeroy was a sturdily built, middle-sized guy with a big guardsman mustache, and brown curly hair that fell in a kind of love curl over his forehead. He was wearing jeans and a maroon sweatshirt with a hood. UMASS was printed across the front of the sweatshirt, in big letters. The first thing that I noticed about the shack was that it was neat. The second thing I noticed was the huge poster of Jill Joyce that nearly filled the wall above the bed. It was a publicity poster for a previous show, and it showed Jill in a frilly apron looking delectably confused over a steamy pot.

“Wilfred,” Phillips said, “this here is a guy named Spenser. He's a detective, from Boston, and he wants to talk to you about some murder.”

“I love your technique, Chief,” I said. “First put him at ease.”

“I don't know about no murder,” Pomeroy said.

I put my hand out.

Pomeroy took it without enthusiasm. He had one of those handshakes that die on contact. It was like shaking hands with a noodle. The three dogs had come in with us and repaired to various places of repose; one, presumably the alpha dog, was curled on the bed. The other two lay on the floor near the kerosene stove. Everything in the place was folded neatly, secured just right, dusted and aligned. The bed was covered with an Army blanket with hospital corners. Everywhere on the walls were pictures, mostly clipped from magazines, tacked to the exposed two-by-fours that framed the shack. The walls themselves were simply the uncovered kraft paper backing of fiberglass insulation. There were pictures of movie stars, of singers and television performers, famous politicians, athletes, writers, scientists, and business tycoons. There was a picture of Lee Iacocca clipped from a magazine cover, and one of Norman Mailer. I saw no famous detectives.

Pomeroy's table was an upended cable spool with oilcloth tacked to the top. The oilcloth was a red-checkered pattern and shone as if it had just been washed. Pomeroy moved behind the table.

“What do you want?” he said again. His eyes were big and soft and eager for approval.

“Just some questions,” I said. The kerosene stove was pouring out heat. “Mind if I take off my jacket?”

He shook his head. I took off my leather jacket and hung it on a hook on the back of the door where his red plaid mackinaw hung. He looked at the gun under my arm without saying anything. Phillips went and pushed the dog out of the way and sat on the bed. He left his coat on. The dog gave a short sigh and moved to the foot of the bed and turned around twice and lay down again.

“Nice poster of Jill Joyce,” I said. “She your favorite?”

He nodded.

“You know she's in Boston now shooting her series.”

He nodded again.

“She didn't get killed,” he said. “I'd a seen it on TV if she got killed.”

“No,” I said, “she's fine.”

“You know her?” Pomeroy said.

“Yes,” I said.

We were quiet. One of the dogs sleeping by the stove got up and went over and sniffed at Phillips' shoe. Phillips pushed it away with his foot. I saw Pomeroy's eyes shift nervously.

“Don't be rude to the dog,” I said to Phillips. “Dog lives here and you don't.”

Phillips got two bright spots on his pale cheeks.

“Who the hell you talking to?” he said. His hand brushed instinctively against his gun butt. I turned my head slowly and looked at him without saying anything.

“I don't like dogs,” he said.

I looked at him for another moment, then turned back to Pomeroy.

“Do you know her?” I said.

“Jill?”

“Yeah.”

He shook his head slowly. “No. I'm a big fan of hers, but I don't know her.”

“I heard you did know her,” I said.

Pomeroy looked past me nervously.

“No, honest.”

“I heard you knew her pretty well,” I said. “Guy named Randall says you knew her.”

The big soft eyes got wider and less focused. His gaze moved around the room, looking for someplace to settle.

“I haven't been near her since he said.”

“How'd you get to know her in the first place?” I said.

Pomeroy shook his head.

“Why not?” I said. “What's not to talk about?”

Pomeroy looked at Phillips. I nodded, lifted my jacket off the back of the door and shrugged it on, lifted his off and handed it to him.

“You cover it here,” I said to Phillips. “Wilfred and I will take a walk.”

“You need me to back you up?” Phillips said.

“No, I'll be okay,” I said.

When the dogs saw Pomeroy put his jacket on, all three of them were at the door, mouths open, tongues lolling, tails wagging. I opened the door and they surged out ahead of us and stopped in the yard looking back.

“Come on,” I said.

Pomeroy went past me and I followed him and shut the door. The dogs moved out ahead of us in a businesslike way, sniffing along sinuous spoors, wagging their tails. The woods were empty at this time of year except for squirrels. The midday sun was warm in the southern sky and water dripped from the tree branches and made half-dollar-sized holes around the trees in the crust of the old snow. We followed the dogs along a path among the trees that had been pressed out by footfalls.

“Phillips is a mean bastard,” Pomeroy said. He never looked at me as he spoke, and his speech was soft.