Stardust Read online

“Remember you’ve got the teamster guys at eleven forty-five,” she said.

  “Page me when they arrive,” Salzman said. We went down the corridor past glassed-in office space where people labored over computers and drawing boards and typewriters. We went down the stairs and through the lobby, with a huge promotional poster of Jill Joyce on the wall, and a receptionist at her desk, and down another corridor, past the wardrobe office and the property room and the carpenter shop to a soundstage. On the thick door to the soundstage was a big sign that said DO NOT ENTER WHEN RED LIGHT IS ON. Above the door was a red light. It was on. Salzman opened the door quietly and we went in. We were on the back side of some walls that had been assembled from plywood and two-by-fours. On the other side of those walls the space was brightly lit. I followed Salzman around the cluster of ragged crew members loitering off camera, waiting to do what they were employed to do.

  The set was of an office, or two walls of an office, in which a psychiatrist, Dr. Shannon Cassidy, was confronting an obviously demented man who was armed with a Browning automatic and was pointing it at her the way everybody points guns on television, with two hands, straight out, at shoulder level. Shannon was played by the delectable Jill Joyce, clear-eyed, kind, intuitive yet passionate, in a crisply tailored suit. In her bearing and in every word she spoke there was the kind of wise and sexy innocence that had guaranteed thirteen-week on-air pickups for twenty years. The demented man was a guest star whom I’d never heard of.

  “You make any sudden moves, Doc,” the demented man was saying, “and you’re gonna be real sorry.”

  Dr. Cassidy’s smile was caring and brave.

  “Don’t you realize, Kenneth, that you’re the victim?” Doc Cassidy said. “I can’t let you hurt yourself this way . . . someone does care.”

  She slowly extended her hand.

  “I care.”

  She held her hand out toward the guy, whose face ran the gamut of emotions from A to B. His face contorted, the gun shook.

  “You’re not alone if someone cares,” Doc Cassidy said softly.

  The demented guy suddenly lunged forward and put the gun into her hand. The director said “Cut.” And the demented guy straightened up and took his hands from his face and stopped being demented.

  “Who writes this stuff?” he said.

  A grayish woman with ample hips came around the desk where Jill Joyce was sitting. She wore a hand mirror on a ribbon around her waist and she held it in front of Jill while she made small dabbing motions at Jill’s hair with a little bristly brush. A makeup woman also appeared and dusted Jill’s face with a small, soft brush, the kind you might use to baste a spare rib. A young production assistant in jeans and a man’s flannel shirt handed Jill a lit cigarette and Jill dragged on it intently while makeup and hair hovered over her.

  “Places,” the director said. Without his earflaps he was a thin-faced man with short reddish hair.

  An assistant director said, “Quiet, everybody.” Then he said, “Rolling for picture.”

  The director said, “Action.”

  And they did the scene again. The sound man with his earphones, hovering over the sound console, said “Cut” after the demented guest star said his first line.

  “We’re picking up a whir, Rich.”

  Somebody went around the corner of the set and said something I couldn’t hear and came back.

  “Okay?” he said.

  The director looked at the sound man.

  “Okay,” the sound man said.

  And the scene rolled again, and then again.

  “First one was the cover shot,” Salzman whispered between takes. “Others are for close-ups, so when they get it back in L.A. in the editing room, Milo and the film editor can cross-cut, you know?”

  “Un huh,” I said.

  “What do you think?” Salzman said.

  “I think you’re hiring me for the wrong job,” I said. “I think you should hire me to go beat up the writers.”

  Salzman shrugged. “Hard cranking out a script a week,” he said.

  “Obviously,” I said.

  6

  “WELL, well,” Jill Joyce said as she came off the set. “The cutie-pie cop with the big muscles.”

  “I didn’t think you’d noticed,” I said.

  “You here to take care of me?” she said. Her on-camera makeup was a little heavy, but standing there in front of me she was fresh-faced and beautiful. Her cheeks dimpled as she spoke. Her skin was clear and smooth, her eyes sparkled with life and a hint of innocent sexuality. She looked like orange juice and fresh laundry, the perfect date for the Williams-Amherst game, in a plaid skirt, picnicking beforehand on a blanket. Her lips would taste like apples. Her hair would smell like honey. Fresh-scrubbed, spunky, compliant, brave, beautiful, decent, cute. With a TVQ that made your breath come short.

  “I’m here to discuss it,” I said.

  “Your place or mine?” Jill said and dimpled at me.

  “Your place,” I said, “but remember, I’m armed.”

  Jill giggled deep in her throat.

  “I hope so,” she said. She looked at the director. “Half an hour, Rich?”

  “Sure, Jilly,” the director said. “No more, though, I’m trying to bring this thing in under, for once.”

  “Maybe you could make your mind up where to put the fucking camera, Rich,” Jill said. She spoke without heat, almost absently, as she walked away.

  I followed her, watching her hips sway as she walked. Her back was perfectly straight. Her hair was glossy and thick. The skirt fit smoothly over her elegant backside. We went out a side door into the cold, walked twenty feet to Jill’s mobile home and went in. Jill was all business today. She sat in the driver’s seat sideways, crossed her legs, rested her left arm on the steering wheel.

  “Okay, cutie,” she said. “Talk.”

  I didn’t answer. I was looking down the length of the mobile home toward the bed. Above the bed, suspended from a ceiling fixture, was a plastic doll, dressed in a gold lamé evening gown, hanging with a miniature slipknot around her neck. Jill saw me looking and shifted her glance, and saw the swaying doll.

  “What’s that?” she said.

  I walked down the length of the mobile home and looked more closely at the doll without touching it. I could hear Jill’s footsteps behind me. The doll gazed at me from a face that looked a little like Jill Joyce, its happy smile entirely incongruous above the hangman’s knot around its throat. The knot caused the doll to cant at an angle. I could feel Jill press against me. Her hand was on my arm just above the elbow. She squeezed.

  “What is that?” she said.

  “Just a doll,” I said. “You recognize it?”

  She stayed behind me but moved her head around for a closer look, her cheek pressed against my upper arm. She looked for a moment.

  “Jesus God,” she said.

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “It’s me,” she said. “It’s me.”

  She slid around over my arm and pressed herself against me, both arms around me, her head against my chest.

  “It’s a doll of me,” she said, “as Tiffany Scott.”

  Even I had heard of Tiffany Scott, the spunky, lovable girl reporter, caught up in a series of hair-raising adventures, week after week, for six years on ABC. It was the series that had made her the preeminent television star in the country. Her body was tighter against me than my gunbelt and she seemed to insinuate herself at very precarious spots.

  “Got any theories?” I said.

  “He did it,” she said. Her voice was hoarse, throaty with fear. “It’s . . .” She squeezed tighter against me. I would not have thought that possible, but she did it. “It’s a warning.” Her breath was short, and audible.

  “Who’s he?” I said. Spenser, ma
ster detective, asker of the penetrating questions.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Then how do you know it’s him?” I said. “Or is it he?”

  “He’s done things like this before.”

  “He has,” I said. “But we don’t know who he is.”

  I was losing control of my pronouns. “Or whom?” I said.

  She turned her face in against me.

  “It’s not funny,” she said.

  I reached up with my free hand, the one she wasn’t clinging to, and took the doll down.

  “His name isn’t Ken, is it?”

  “I told you,” she said. “I don’t know who he is. I just know he’s after me.”

  I got my arm free of her clutch and turned her around and steered her back to the front of the mobile home.

  “I’ll need to talk to your driver,” I said.

  “Paulie,” she said.

  “Paulie what?”

  “I don’t know. I just call him Paulie. You got a cigarette?”

  “I don’t smoke,” I said.

  “Well, hand me some from the table there,” she said.

  I gave her the cigarettes and she took one out and put it into her mouth and looked at me expectantly. There were matches on the dashboard in front of the driver’s seat. I stood, stepped past her, took a book of matches and lit her cigarette, then I tucked the matches inside the cellophane wrapper on the cigarette pack and put them in her lap.

  “Who would know Paulie’s full name?” I said.

  “I don’t know, for God’s sake, ask Sandy. I don’t keep track of every sweat hog that works on this picture.”

  “The bigger they are, the nicer they are.”

  She seemed recovered from her panic.

  “You do coke?” she said.

  I shook my head.

  “Well, I do,” she said. “You got a problem with that?”

  I shook my head again. She went to the breakfast nook, got the stuff out of a cabinet and did two lines off the tabletop.

  “I got to work this afternoon,” she said. “You try getting up every time the light goes on. You try sparkling eight hours a day, sometimes ten or fifteen.”

  “For me, it’s easy,” I said, and gave her a sparkling smile.

  She paid me no attention. She was bobbing her head slightly and tapping her fingers on the tabletop.

  “You going to do something about this?” she said.

  I looked at her, jeeped from the coke, waiting to go out and pretend to be wonderful; evasive and self-deluded and kind of stupid, and startlingly beautiful. For all I knew she’d hung the doll herself. For all I knew “he” didn’t exist.

  “Are you?” she said. She was impatient now, tapping her foot, her eyes very bright. “I’ve got to go to work. I need to know.”

  Still I stared at her. She was trouble, alcoholic, drug addicted, nymphomaniac, egocentric, spoiled brat trouble. She leaned a little toward me, her eyes the size of dahlias. She moistened her lower lip with the tip of her tongue.

  “Are you?” she said. “Please?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m going to do something about this.”

  She nodded her head too many times and then headed out toward the soundstage. I was reminded of a child, off to kindergarten, frightened, sad, trying to be grown up; marching off like a little soldier, with two lines of coke up her nose.

  7

  PAULIE spent most of his time downstairs in the production office drinking coffee with the other drivers. Someone beeped him when Miss Joyce was ready. Anyone could have wandered in there and hung the doll.

  The transportation captain, a big gray-haired guy named Mickey Boylan, sat in while I talked with Paulie.

  “You need any help on this, you let me know,” he said when Paulie had told me all he knew. And maybe a little more. “This show is good for us, gotta lot of people driving.”

  Boylan was a business agent with the union.

  “I’ll take anything I can get,” I said.

  “You think there’s somebody really after her?” Boylan said.

  “I guess so,” I said. “Otherwise what am I doing here?”

  Boylan grinned. “This sow’s got a lot of tits,” he said. “Could feed one more easy enough.”

  I gave Boylan my card.

  “I hate to spin my wheels,” I said. “Even for money.”

  “No other reason to do it,” Boylan said as I left.

  I wandered back down to the soundstage and leaned against the wall out of the way and waited for Jill Joyce. Watching a television show being filmed was like watching dandruff form. It was a long, slow process and when you were through, what did you have? Maybe Boylan was right. Maybe this was just a boondoggle and I was getting paid to make Jill Joyce feel good. She had yet to tell me a goddamned thing about herself. The hanging doll was easy to fake and came at the right time. I didn’t even know what other harassment there had been. So why didn’t I take a walk? The money was good, but there’s always money. Why didn’t I walk right now instead of standing around listening to some of the worst dialogue ever uttered, over and over again? I had my leather jacket hanging on a light tripod. Now and then someone would glance my way and do a short double-take at the gun under my left arm. The rest of the time things were much calmer. My head itched. The watch cap made my hair sweaty, but if I took it off, the way it matted my hair down made me look like an oversized rock musician.

  On set, out of sight, but sadly not out of hearing, Jill Joyce was selling the closing lines of her scene for the fifth time.

  “Where there’s love,” she said, “there’s a chance.”

  I knew why I was waiting for her. It was what Susan had said at dinner. She doesn’t have anyone to look out for her. There was something so small and alone in her, so unconnected and frightened, that I couldn’t walk away from her. If she was staging these harassments she needed help. If she wasn’t staging them she needed help. I was better equipped to give one kind of help than I was the other. And equipped or not, whatever she needed, I was the only one willing.

  At 4:25 the director said, “That’s it, thanks, Jilly. See you tomorrow.” And without answering, Jill Joyce walked around the set partition and stopped in front of me.

  “You’ll drive me home,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  The people who’d been lounging around glancing at my gun were now busy dismantling the set wall in front of us. They swung it out to open up the set and two people moved the camera dolly around into the space where I was standing.

  “Excuse me,” someone said, “coming through.”

  “We’ll get my coat in wardrobe,” Jill said.

  “Sure.”

  I followed her off the soundstage and down the corridor past the carpenter shop to the wardrobe office. Jill went in and came out in a moment wearing a silver-tipped mink.

  “Kathleen,” she spoke back through the open door, “did Ernie get me that white sable we talked about?”

  A woman’s voice from the wardrobe office said, “Got it right here, Jilly.”

  “Excellent,” Jill said. “I’ll come in tomorrow for a fitting.”

  “Give us a little notice if you can,” the woman’s voice said.

  Jill didn’t answer, nor did she appear to have heard the request for notice. We went on out through the production office and into the front parking lot where I had my car.

  “You need to tell anybody, drivers, anyone like that?” I said.

  Jill made a dismissive motion with her hand.

  “Which car is yours?” she said.

  “The glorious black Cherokee,” I said. “Ideal for all-weather surveillance.”

  “Well, it’s better than I expected,” she said.
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  I held the door, she got in, ran a hand over the leather upholstery, and nodded approvingly.

  “The Charles Hotel?” I said.

  “In Cambridge. You know where it is?”

  I did my Bogart impression with the flattened upper lip. “I know where everything is, sweetheart.”

  She got out a cigarette, pressed in my lighter and waited for it to pop. When it did she put it against the cigarette and the pleasing smell of tobacco lit with a car lighter filled the front seat. She put the lighter back and leaned her head against the back of the seat with the cigarette glowing in her mouth and closed her eyes. Her face was very white and still, nestled in the big collar of her fur coat. Without raising her hand to the cigarette, she took a big drag and let the smoke out slowly from the corners of her mouth. The early winter evening had settled around us, and the automobile headlights on Soldiers Field Road had a pale cold look to them. I let the motor idle while I looked at her, her hands plunged deep into the pockets of her mink, her body tucked well inside it, a little shivery from the cold as we waited for the heater. In the faint light she looked about twelve, except for the glowing cigarette, a tired child, not yet pubescent, the apple unbitten on the tree, the serpent yet to tempt her.

  “I need a drink,” she said.

  I didn’t say anything. Across the river lights were popping on as people came home from work. The mercury lamp streetlights on our side of the river had the weak orange look they get before it’s fully dark and they turn blue-white. Wind whipped a small dervish of powdery snow off the frozen river and spun it west where the river turned toward Watertown.

  “I said I need a drink.” Jill spoke around a slow drift of smoke.

  “Yes, you did,” I said.

  “Well for Christ’s sake, do something about it.”

  “Maybe I could siphon off a little gasoline?”

  “Don’t be cute with me, stupid. Just get this thing in gear and get us to the hotel.”

  “I saw Gene Tierney do that once,” I said. “Smoked a cigarette just like that. Head back, eyes closed. And Sterling Hayden was her boyfriend . . .”

  “Will you drive this fucking car?” she said.