“Nope,” Hawk said.
Jill’s head swiveled toward him and there was real alarm in her face.
“No?”
“I work for him.” Hawk nodded toward me. “He go, I go.”
“You work for me,” Jill said.
Hawk smiled pleasantly and shook his head. Jill looked back at me and then to Hawk.
“You don’t mean that, Hawk,” she said. She moved her body a little on the couch and waited for Hawk to bark. He didn’t.
“Jill…” Sandy said.
“You fucking men.” Jill’s face was red. “You’re good for one thing. All I deal with is men, I got no one to trust, no one to talk to, no one who gives a shit about me.” Tears started down her face. “I want them gone, off this set, out of here. Now. Goddamned…”
Salzman got up and walked around his desk. “Jilly,” he said and put an arm around her shoulder. “Jilly, come on. We’ll work this out. You work so hard, you’re tired.” He patted her shoulder. She leaned her head against his hip. “Jilly, take a break. Here, I’ll get Molly to walk over to your trailer with you. Come on.”
He eased Jill to her feet and with an arm around her edged her to the door.
“Oh, Sandy,” Jill was sniffling. “Oh, Sandy, sometimes I feel so alone.”
“You’re a star, honey. It happens to stars. But I’m here for you, all of us are.”
“Not those two bastards,” Jill said.
“Sure. I’ll straighten that out, Jilly,” Salzman said. He sounded like he was talking to an excitable puppy.
They walked to the door. Salzman opened it.
“Molly,” he said to a woman at the desk in the outer office. “Take Jill to her trailer and stay with her. She’s not feeling well.”
“Sure, Sandy.”
Molly put her arm through Jill’s and squeezed it. “Got some coffee over there, Jill?” Molly said. “Maybe get some cake. Some girl talk? Who needs men.”
Jill went with her. As they left, Molly, who was dark-eyed and thin-faced, gave Salzman a look of savage reproach over her shoulder. Salzman shrugged and came back into his office and closed the door. He rubbed his hands over his face. “Christ,” he said.
He stood that way for a moment, rubbing his face, then he turned and went back behind his desk. He looked at me and Hawk.
“How are we going to work this?” he said.
“Can you stand her?” I said to Hawk.
“Seen worse,” Hawk said.
“Jesus,” Salzman said. “I’d like to know where.”
I said, “So we’ll keep Hawk with her, and I’ll try to run this thing down. You can tell her you fired me and prevailed upon my, ah, colleague to stay on.”
“What are you going to do?” Salzman said.
“I’ve got another name. I’ll go see if I can find the name and ask some questions and get other names and go see them and ask them questions and…” I spread my hands.
“Magic,” Hawk said.
“What’s this gonna cost me?” Salzman said.
“A round trip to San Diego,” I said.
“Can’t you call?” Salzman said.
“Yeah, but it’s not the same. You don’t see people, you don’t notice peripheral things, people don’t see you.”
“Why should they see you?” Salzman said.
“Case you big and mean-looking like him,” Hawk said, “might be able to scare them a little.”
“Ahhh,” Salzman said. “Okay, probably cheaper than Jill’s bar bill, anyway.”
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.