Stardust

“She’s home for Christmas,” he said.

I nodded. To my left Chollo got up and squatted before the fireplace on the left wall. He fiddled with it for a moment while del Rio and I watched. Then a gas flame appeared. Chollo put a couple of dry, barkless logs on top of the grate and stood and went back to his chair. The blue gas flame began to move among the logs, turning orange where it hit them and caught.

“So I told Jill,” del Rio said, “I take care of the kid. The kid is mine. She is no longer yours. She belongs to me and to my wife. My wife is her mother now. I said if she ever caused me trouble, if she ever hurt my daughter or my wife, if she ever spoke of this… ”

Del Rio held his right hand out, with the first two fingers apart like the blades of a scissors, and closed them. Nobody said anything. The flame had caught the bone-dry wood and made bright heatless orange movements in the Mexican tile fireplace. A California fire. All light, no heat.

“Jill never really had any luck,” del Rio said. He was sitting back in his chair now, his hands locked behind his head, staring into the fire. “Sounds fu

Del Rio paused again. I could hear him breathing softly through his nose.

“I got her started. She came from nowhere. Mother’s a drunk. Old man left when she was a kid. Had a baby, had to give it up. She never knew what she was, then she got to be a star and everybody started treating her like she was a princess, you know… the fucking emperor’s daughter… so she thought she was.”

“She knows she isn’t,” I said.

Del Rio shifted his eyes to me thoughtfully. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe she does.”

“Makes it worse,” I said.

Del Rio nodded slowly with the right side of his face lit by the fire and the left side in darkness. “Si,” he said.

Chapter 26

JILL’S agent worked for an agency that occupied the top‘ half of a new skyscraper in Century City where, if you looked out the windows, you could see Twentieth Century Fox. While I sat in the waiting room two would-be starlets with flat blue eyes and a lot of blond hair chanted at the switchboard. “Robert Brown Agency, good morning.”

Each of them said it maybe a hundred times while I waited. Each time they said it exactly as they had said it previously. Then they would listen and touch a button and the call would be processed. There was a mindless fascination to it, like watching water boil. The waiting room was done in beige marble and pale green carpeting. On the wall above the blond bentwood chair I sat in was a picture of the founder of the agency. Robert Brown had a wide face and red cheeks, and the smile of a child molester. Under the portrait was a brass plaque bearing his name and the single word INTEGRITY.

On some of the other chairs sat people trying to look in control while they waited hopefully. There was a guy in a silk tweed jacket and starched jeans carrying a manila envelope that reeked of manuscript. He had no socks on, and his ankles were tan above the low cut of his woven leather loafers. Under the silk tweed he wore a tuxedo shirt, open at the throat. Agents, mostly men, mostly young, strolled through the waiting room to and from the i

A good-looking young woman with more hair than the switchboard ladies came out from one of the doors behind the switchboard. She wore a cobalt silk dress spattered with red flowers. Her hips rolled as she walked.

“Mr. Spenser?” she said. Her eyes sparkled, her smile gleamed.

I nodded.

“Hi, I’m Jasmine, Ken’s assistant. Ken’s on the phone long distance to London and he asked me to see if you wanted coffee or anything.”

“Hot diggity,” I said.

Jasmine’s smile gleamed even more brightly. “Excuse me?” she said.

“London is exciting,” I said. “I mean, how would I feel if you came out and said I’d have to wait because Ken was on the phone to Culver City?”

Jasmine seemed a bit confused, but it in no way interfered with the luminosity of her smile.

“Exactly,” she said. “Did you say you wanted coffee?”

“No, thank you, Jasmine.”

“Tea, juice, Perrier?”

“No, thank you, Jasmine.”

“Well, you be comfortable, and Ken will be with you as soon as he can get off the phone.”

“Sure,” I said.

Jasmine rolled her hips away from me, walking with a long stride on high heels which emphasized her natural wiggle. I waited. Behind the switchboard operators was a floor-to-ceiling picture window for looking at Twentieth Century. On either side were doors that opened into the working spaces of the Robert Brown Agency, where clients and agents conspired on who knows what unspeakable project. A fat woman with extensive make-up came in carrying an animal that looked like a fluffy rat. She was wearing a fur coat, though when I’d come in a half hour ago the temperature at Century City had been eighty-seven. Her hair in its natural state was probably brown turning gray. In its present state, however, it was the color of a lemon, and stiff with hair spray so thick that you could cut yourself on her curls. She spoke inaudibly to one of the switchboard operators, then took up a seat with the fluffy rat on her lap, and gazed at the room before her the way Marie Antoinette must have gazed at the crowds in Paris. The small white animal wiggled out of her lap and waded through the pale green carpet and stood in front of me and began to yap. It was a persistent high yap that had the same metronomic quality that the ladies of the switchboard displayed.

“Oh, Beenie,” the fat blonde said, “stop that noise right now.”

Beenie paid her no heed at all.

“He won’t hurt you,” the blonde said.

“That’s for sure,” I said.

The blonde looked startled. “Well, he won’t. He’s usually very good with strangers.”

The yaps continued. It was a piercing sound. Even the two switchboard receptionists turned glazed eyes toward the sound.

“What kind of rat is this?” I said politely.

“Rat?” The blonde’s voice went up an octave in the middle. Not easy to do in a one-syllable word.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “Of course he’s not a rat. Guinea pig maybe?”

“You fucking creep,” the blonde said.

Jasmine appeared radiantly at the door. She frowned a little, but only for a moment, at the yapping and the “fucking creep” and then smiled even more brilliantly than before and said, “Ken can see you now, Mr. Spenser.”

I scooped up the yapping animal and dropped it into the blonde’s lap as I headed for the office door. “Spenser,” she said. “I’ll remember that name.” I smiled my killer smile at her. She remained calm.

I followed Jasmine through the door. I went down the long corridor lined with glass-partitioned cubicles. At the end was a bigger office, with real walls as befits a senior agent representing the highest TVQ in the industry. He stood and walked around his desk, a tall elegant man in a double-breasted blazer and a soft white shirt. He had the kind of tan that would soon lead to basal cell carcinoma, and his dark hair, touched with gray at the temples, was combed back in easy waves, longish in the back. His grip was firm as we shook hands.

“Ken Craig,” he said. “Really glad to meet you.” There was a faintly British sound to his speech, either long forgotten or recently cultivated, I couldn’t tell which. His office was done in the same beige and green tones and the walls were covered with abstract art which lent color, but no meaning, to his surroundings. It was a corner office and you could look at the Twentieth Century lot from two different angles.

“Please,” Craig said, and gestured toward an armchair done in pale peach. I sat. “I know you’re helping Jill out with that trouble in Boston,” he said. “How can I help?”