Stardust

The Anderson Bridge looks like a bridge that would co

“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 wi

“Well, he certainly underestimated you,” she said.

“Next time he won’t.”

Chapter 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. 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 timber 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 th prop truck, next to a hydrant under a sign that sad 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 Statio Tu

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.