“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
