Stardust (15 page)

32

S
USAN
had on glistening spandex tights and a green shiny leotard top and a white headband and white Avia workout shoes and she was charging up the stair climber like Teddy Roosevelt. I had on a white shirt and a leather jacket and I was leaning against one of the Kaiser Cam weight machines in her club watching her. When she exercised Susan didn't glow delicately. She sweated like a horse, and as she thundered up the Stair Master she blotted her face with a hand towel. I was admiring Susan's gluteus maximi as she climbed. She saw me in the mirror and said, “Are you staring at my butt?”

“Yes,” I said.

“What do you think?” she said. I knew she was making a large effort to speak normally and not puff. She was a proud woman.

“I think it's the stuff dreams are made of, blue eyes.”

“My eyes are black,” Susan said.

“I know, but I can't do a good Bogart on ‘black eyes.'”

“Some would say that was true of any color eyes,” Susan said.

“Some have no ear,” I said.

Susan was too out of wind to speak more, a fact which she concealed by shaking her head amusedly and pretending to concentrate harder on the stairs.

“You still working on the glutes?” I said.

“Un huh.”

“No need,” I said. “They get any better you'll have to have them licensed.”

“You are just trying to get me to admit I can't talk and exercise,” Susan said. “Go downstairs.”

“You know the only other times I see you sweat like this?” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “Go downstairs.”

“Sure,” I said.

An hour and a half later Susan was wearing a vibrant blue blouse and a black skirt and we were sitting across from each other at a table in Toscano Restaurant eating tortellini and drinking some white wine, for lunch.

“Did you hear anything from the police?” Susan said. “About Jill?”

“No,” I said. “Not about Jill.”

I broke off a piece of bread and ate it.

“Wilfred Pomeroy killed himself.”

“The one Jill was married to?”

“Yeah. Came down to Boston, left a note for me, and drove off a pier.”

“Why?”

“Press got hold of his story,” I said. “He couldn't stand it, I guess. As if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen.”

“Maybe,” she said. “And maybe it was his chance to make the
beau geste,
to die for her, rather than let his life be used against her.”

“And a chance to say, simultaneously,
See how I loved you, see what you missed, see what you made me do.
”

“Suicide is often,
see what you made me do,
” Susan said. “It is often anger coupled with despair.”

I nodded. Susan nibbled on one of the tortellini. She was the only person I knew who could eat one tortellini in several bites.

“Is tortellini better than sex?” she said.

“Not in your case,” I said. “If you eat only one at a time of tortellini, are you eating a tortellenum?”

“You'll have to ask an Italian,” Susan said. “I can barely conjugate
goyim.
”

We were quiet for a time. Concentrating on the food, sipping our wine. As always when I was with her, I could feel her across the table, the way one can feel heat, a tangible connection, silent, invisible, and realer than the pasta.

“Poor man,” Susan said.

“Yeah.”

“Will you find her, you think?”

“Yeah,” I said.

Susan smiled at me and the heat thickened.

“Yes,” she said, and leaned across the table and put her hand on top of mine, “you will.”

33

A
FTER
lunch I dropped Susan at Harvard, where she taught a once-a-week seminar on analytic psychotherapy.

“You're going to stumble into the classroom reeking of white wine?” I said.

“I'll buy some Sen-Sen,” Susan said.

“You consumed nearly an ounce,” I said, “straight.”

“A slave to Bacchus,” she said. “Drive carefully.”

She got out and I watched her walk away, until she was out of sight. “Hot damn,” I said aloud, and pulled out into traffic.

I went through Harvard Square and down to the river, and across and onto the Mass. Pike. In about an hour and forty-five minutes I was in Waymark again. It took me a couple of tries but I found the road leading into Pomeroy's cabin. There had been snow here, that we hadn't gotten in eastern Mass., and I had to shift into four-wheel drive to get the Cherokee down the rutted road.

The cabin door was locked when I got there, and inside I heard the dogs bark. I knocked just to be proper and when no one answered but the dogs I backed off and kicked the door in. The dogs barked hysterically as the door splintered in, and then came boiling out past me into the yard. They stopped barking and began circling hurriedly until they each found the proper spot and relieved themselves, a lot. Inside the cabin there was a bowl on the floor half full of water, and another, larger bowl that was empty. I found a 25-pound sack of dry dog food and poured some into the bowl and took the rest out and put it in the back of the Cherokee. Finished with their business, the dogs hurried indoors and gathered at the food bowl. They went in sequence, one after another until all three were eating at once. While they ate I found some clothesline in the cabin and fashioned three leashes. When they were done I looped my leashes around their necks and took them to the car. They didn't leap in easily, like the dogs in station wagon commercials. They had to be boosted, one after the other, into the backseat. Once they were in I unlooped the rope and dropped it on the floor of the backseat, closed the back door, got in front and pulled out of there.

On the paved and plowed highway I shifted out of four-wheel drive and cruised down to police headquarters. The patrol car was parked outside. It looked like a cop car designed by Mr. Blackwell. I left the dogs in the Cherokee and went on in to see Phillips.

He was behind his desk, his cowboy boots up on the desktop, reading a copy of
Soldier of Fortune.
He looked up when I came in, and it took him a minute to place me.

“You went out and hassled him, didn't you?” I said.

Phillips was frowning, trying to remember who I was.

“Huh?” he said.

“Pomeroy. When I left you went back out there and made him tell you everything he told me, and then you couldn't keep it to yourself, you went to the
Argus
and blatted out everything you knew, and got your picture taken and your name spelled right, and ruined what was left of the poor bastard's life.”

Phillips had figured out who I was, but he kept frowning.

“Hey, I got a right to conduct my own investigation,” he said. “I'm the fucking law out here, remember?”

“Law, shit,” I said. “You're a fat loudmouth in a jerkwater town playacting Wyatt Earp. And you cost an innocent man his life.”

“You can't talk to me that way. Whose life?”

“Pomeroy killed himself this morning, in Boston. He had a copy of the Berkshire
Argus
story with him.”

“Guy was always a loser,” Phillips said.

“Guy loved too hard,” I said. “Too much. Not wisely. You understand anything like that?”

“I told you, you can't come in here, talk to me like that, that tone of voice. I'll throw your ass in jail.”

Phillips let his feet drop off the desk top and stood up. His hand was in the area of his holstered gun.

“You do that,” I said. “You throw my ass in jail, or go for the gun, or take a swing at me, anything you want.”

I had moved closer to him, almost without volition, as if he were gravitational.

“Do something,” I said. I could feel the tension across my back. “Go for the gun, take a swing, go for it.”

Phillips' eyes rolled a little, side to side. There was a fine line of sweat on his upper lip. He looked at the phone. He looked at me. He looked past me at the door.

“Whyn't you just get out of here and leave me alone,” he said. His voice was hoarse and shaky. “I didn't do nothing wrong.”

We faced each other for another long, silent moment. I knew he wasn't going to do anything.

“I didn't do nothing wrong,” he said again.

I nodded and turned and walked out. And left the door open behind me. That'd fix him.

34

“I
know people who might take one dog,” Susan said. “But three? Mongrels?”

“I'm not breaking them up,” I said.

We were in my living room and the dogs were around looking at us. The alpha dog was curled in the green leather chair; the other two were on the couch.

“Where did they sleep last night?” Susan said.

I shrugged.

Susan's eyes brightened.

“They slept with you,” she said.

I shrugged again.

“You and the three doggies all together in bed. Tell me at least they slept on top of the quilt.”

I shrugged.

“Hard as nails,” Susan said.

“Well,” I said. “I started them out in the kitchen, but then they started whimpering in the night . . .”

“Of course,” Susan said, “and they got in there and you sleep with the window open, and it was cold . . .”

“You're the same way,” I said.

Susan laughed. “Yes,” she said. “I too think the bedroom's too cold.”

“Dogs do not respect one's sleeping space much,” I said.

“Did we sleep curled up on one small corner of the bed while the three pooches spread out luxuriously?” Susan said.

“I wanted them to feel at home,” I said.

“We must be very clear on one thing. When I visit, we are not sleeping with three dogs.”

“No,” I said.

“And when we make love we are not going to be watched by three dogs.”

“Of course not,” I said. “Hawk says he knows some woman owns a farm in Bridgewater and is an animal rights activist.”

“Don't tell her about my fur coat,” Susan said.

“He thinks she'll take them.”

Susan put the palm of her right hand flat on her chest and did a Jack E. Leonard impression. “I hope so,” she said, “for your sake.”

“You wouldn't like to take them over to your place today,” I said. “I need to go to my office.”

“I have meetings all day,” she said. “It's why I'm here for breakfast.”

“Oh yeah.”

“I'm sure they'll love your office,” Susan said.

And they did, for brief stretches. Every hour or so they felt the need to be walked down to the Public Garden. In between walks they sat, usually in a semicircle, and looked at me expectantly, with their mouths open and their tongues hanging out. All day.

Outside, Christmas was making its implacable approach. The dryness in the mouth of merchandising managers was intensifying, the exhaustion had become bone deep in the parents of small children, the television stations kept wishing me the best of the joyous season every station break, and the street gangs in Roxbury and Dorchester were shooting each other over insults to their manhood at the rate of about three a week. In the stores downtown people jostled each other; bundled uncomfortably in clothing against the cold, they were hot and angry in the crowded aisles where people sold silk show handkerchiefs and imported fragrances for the special person in your life. Liquor stores were doing a land-office business, and the courts were in double session trying to clear the calendar for the holiday break.

I got up and went to the old wood file cabinet behind the door and got out a bottle of Glenfiddich that Rachel Wallace had delivered to me last Christmas. It was still half full. I poured about two ounces in the water glass and went back to my desk. I sipped a little and let it vaporize in my mouth. Outside my window the dark winter afternoon had merged into the early darkness of a winter evening. I sipped another taste of the scotch. I raised my glass toward the dogs.

“Fa la la la la,” I said.

I could feel the single-malt scotch inch into my veins. I sipped another sip. In my desk was a letter from Paul Giacomin in Aix-en-Provence in France. I took it out and read it again. Then I put it back into the envelope and put the envelope back in my desk drawer. I swiveled my chair so I could put my feet on the windowsill and gaze out at the unoccupied air space where Linda Thomas had once worked. Beyond it was a building that looked like an old Philco radio. A Philip Johnson building, they said. I raised my glass to it.

“Way to go, Phil,” I said. Lucky I hadn't been assigned to guard it. Probably lose it.
Was right here when I left it.
My glass was empty. I got up and got the bottle and poured another drink and went back and sat and stared out the dark window. The dogs stood when I stood, sat back down when I did.

The light fused up from the street the way it does in a city and softened into a pinkish glow at the top of the darkened buildings. Maybe she was dead. Maybe she wasn't. Maybe the pills and powders and booze and self-delusion and bullshit had busted her, and she had simply run and was running now.

I looked at the pinkish glow some more. I had nowhere I needed to be, nothing I needed to do. Susan was shopping. What if Jill had gone home? To her mother. To the hovel in the middle of the putrid hot field in the back alley of Esmeralda. I called Lipsky.

“Maybe she went to her mother's,” I said.

“Esmeralda police checked,” Lipsky said. “No sign of her. Just the old lady, or what's left of her.”

“You thought of it,” I said.

“Honest to God,” Lipsky said and hung up.

I drank a little more scotch. I had a feeling I might drink a lot more scotch. One of the dogs got up and went to the corner and drank from the bowl of water I'd put down. He came back with water dripping from his muzzle and sat and resumed staring.

The phone rang. When I answered an accentless voice at the other end said, “This is Victor del Rio.”

“Hey,” I said.
“Qué pasa?”

“She is here,” del Rio said.

“In L.A.?” I said.

“Here, with me,” del Rio said. “I think you better come out and get her.”