Stardust

A half hour among the out-of-town phone directories gave me three Zabriskies in greater San Diego. I copied down addresses and phone numbers, and walked back down Boylston Street toward my office.

When I went inside, Martin Quirk was sitting at my desk with his feet up.

“Spenser,” I said. “Boy, you’re much uglier than I’d heard.”

Quirk let his feet down and stood and walked around to the chair in front of my desk, the one for clients, when any came to my office.

“You don’t get any fu

“But I don’t get discouraged, either,” I said.

“Too had,” Quirk said,

I sat behind my desk. He sat in the client chair. I said, “Can you whistle, loud, like doormen do?”

“No.”

“Me either. You ever wonder why that is?”

“No.”

“No, I suppose you wouldn’t,” I said.

I swiveled half around in my chair and pulled out a bottom drawer and put my right foot on it. I could see out the window that way, down to the corner where Berkeley crosses Boylston. There were people there in large number, carrying packages. I looked back at Quirk. He always looked the same. Short black hair, tweed jacket, dark knit tie, white shirt with a pronounced roll in the button-down collar. His hands were pale and strong-looking with long blunt fingers and black hair on the backs. Everything fit, and since Quirk was about my size, it meant he shopped the Big Man stores or had the clothes made. He’d been the homicide commander for a long time, and he probably should have been police commissioner except that nothing intimidated him, and he wasn’t careful what he said.

“What you got on this TV killing?” he said.

“Babe Loftus?”

“Un huh.”

“Nothing directly. Jill is not an open book,” I said. “She sort of doesn’t get it that I’m working for her.”

“She doesn’t get that about us, either.”

“What have you got?” I said.

“I asked you first,” Quirk said.

“I know she’s had a relationship with a guy named Rojack, lives out in Dover.”

“Stanley,” Quirk said. “Got a big geek of a bodyguard named Randall.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Whom you knocked on his ass in front of the Charles one morning last week.”

“It seemed the right thing to do,” I said.

“It was,” Quirk said.

“Jill’s story is she doesn’t know him, and anyway he’s a creep.”

“Tell me about him,” Quirk said. “What you know.”

I did, everything except the detail about Wilfred Pomeroy.

“Don’t underestimate Randall,” Quirk said when I finished. “He’s bad news.”

“Me too,” I said.

Quirk nodded, a little tiredly. “Yeah,” he said. “Aren’t we all.” He scrubbed along his jawline with the palms of both hands. Across Boylston Street there were three or four guys in coveralls stringing Christmas lights around Louis‘.

“Rojack is not exactly a wise guy,” Quirk said, “and he’s not exactly Chamber of Commerce. He’s a developer and what he develops is money. He’s enough on the wild side to have a bodyguard. He gets to go to receptions at City Hall, and I’m sure he’s got Joe Broz’s unlisted number.”

I nodded.

“You want something fixed, he’s a good guy to see. People he does business with are shooters, but Rojack stays out in Dover and has lunch at Locke’s.”

“He’s dirty,” I said.

“Yeah, he’s dirty; but almost always it’s secondhand, under the table, behind the back. We usually bust somebody else and Rojack goes home to Dover.”

“Why would he shoot Babe Loftus?” I said. Quirk shrugged.

“What’s the autopsy say?”

“Shot once, at close range, in the back, with a three fifty-seven magnum, bullet entered her back below the left shoulder blade at an angle, penetrated her heart and lodged under her right rib cage. She was dead probably before she felt anything.”

“Think the killer’s left-handed?” I said.

“If he stood directly behind her,” Quirk said, “which he may or may not have done. Even if he is, it narrows the suspects down to maybe, what, five hundred thousand in the Commonwealth?”

“Or maybe he was right-handed and shot her that way so you’d think he was left-handed.”

“Or maybe he was ambidextrous, and a midget, and he stood on a box,” Quirk said. “You been reading Philo Vance again?”

“So young,” I said, “yet so cynical.”

“What else you got?” Quirk said.

“That’s it,” I said.

“You think it’s mistaken identity?”

“I don’t know.”

“You think Rojack did it, or had Randall do it?”

“No.”

“Why not?” Quirk said.

“Doesn’t seem his style,” I said.

Outside the light was gone. The early winter evening had settled and the artificial light in storefronts and on street corners had taken hold. Nothing like colored light to spruce up a city.

“Why do I think you know more than you’re telling?” Quirk said.

“Because you’ve been a copper too long. It’s made you suspicious and skeptical.”

“I’ve known you too long,” Quirk said.

I was about to make a devastating response when my door opened and Susan came in, bringing with her a light scent of lilac. Quirk rose and Susan came and kissed him on the cheek.

“If you are going to arrest him, Martin, could you wait until he’s taken me to di

“If being a pain in the ass were illegal,” Quirk said, “he’d be doing life in Walpole.”

“He’s kind of cute, though, don’t you think?”

“Cuter than lace pants,” Quirk said.

Chapter 20

It was one of my favorite times in winter, the part of the day when it is dark, but the offices haven’t let out yet. All the windows are still lighted, and people are at their desks and walking about in the offices-bright vignettes of ordinary life.

Susan and I held hands as we strolled down Boylston Street toward Arlington. The store windows were full of red bows, and Santa cut-outs, and tinsel rope, and fake snow. Real snow had begun again, lightly, in big flakes that meandered down. Not the kind of snow that would pile up. Just the kind of snow the Chamber of Commerce would have ordered pre-Christmas. After the recent chill it was mild by comparison, maybe thirty degrees. Susan was wearing a black hip-length leather coat with fake black fur on the collar. Her head was bare and she wore her thick black hair up today. A few of the snowflakes settled on it.

“No fur coat?”

“Last time I wore it someone in Harvard Square called me a murderer.”

“That’s because they haven’t met a real murderer,” I said.

“Still, I don’t feel right wearing it,” Susan said. “The animals do suffer.”

“You didn’t know that?” I said.

“No. I had this lovely little vision of them romping about in green pastures until they died a quiet death of natural causes.”

“Of course,” I said. “Who would think otherwise?”

“I know, it’s a ludicrous idea; but when they said ranch raised that’s what I thought.”

“Complicity’s hard to avoid,” I said.

“Probably impossible,” Susan said. “But it doesn’t hurt to try a little.”

“Especially when it’s easy,” I said.

“Like giving up fur,” Susan said. She banged her head gently against my shoulder. “Next I may have to reexamine my stand on whales.”

The snow was falling fast enough now to give the illusion of snowfall, without any real threat of a blizzard. The stoplights fuzzed a little in the falling snow, radiating, red or green in a kind of impressionist splash in the night. We turned left on Arlington and walked past the Ritz. Across the street, in the Public Garden, Washington sat astride his enormous horse, in oblivious dignity as the snow drifted down past him. To our left, the mall ran down Commonwealth Avenue. There was a man walking his dog on the mall. The dog was a pointer of some kind and kept shying against the man’s knee as the snow fluttered about her. Every few steps she would look up at the man as if questioning the sense of a walk in these conditions.