Stardust

Chapter 19

THE slender mirrored face of the John Hancock Building rose fifty stories on the southern edge of Copley Square, reflecting the big brownstone Trinity Church back upon itself. Across the new plaza, snow covered now and crisscrossed with footpaths, opposite the church was the Public Library. There were Christmas lights in the square, and the uniformed doorman at the Copley Plaza stood between the gilded lions and whistled piercingly for a cab. I’d always wanted to do that and never been able to. Anyone can whistle, any old time, easy. I pursed my lips and whistled quietly. I put two fingers in my mouth and blew. There was a flatsounding rush of air. So what? I headed for the library with the doorman’s whistle soaring across Dartmouth Street. The hell with whistling. I went past the bums lounging in the weak winter sun on the wide steps to the old entrance, and went in the ugly new entrance on Boylston Street.

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 funnier,” Quirk said.

“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 dinner?”

“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.