crane arrangement on the back, the Fire Department rescue truck, and a couple of pickup trucks with diver’s gear in the back. Belson flicked off the siren and lights and pulled in behind the rescue truck. Another nondescript municipal car pulled up behind us.
“Lupo,” Belson said. “Medical Examiner.”
We all got out and walked toward the red Chevette that sat on the hot top in a puddle of water. Water dripped from the open doors. The body was streaked with salt water, and in the front seat, still strapped with a safety belt, was a sodden dark mass of someone. Lupo, the assistant M.E., went briskly over and squatted on his haunches by the open side door and looked at the sodden someone. Quirk and I walked over and stood behind Lupo. Belson leaned on the car and began to look at the crime area, not looking for anything, just cataloguing.
Lupo straightened and spoke to Quirk. “He’s dead.”
“I’m with you so far,” Quirk said.
Lupo was a mild-looking man with a plain horsey face and prominent teeth. He had a pronounced widow’s peak on his forehead and his hair was jet black though his face looked sixty-five. He wore a gabardine storm coat with a dark brown fur collar and lapels.
“Neck’s broken,” Lupo said. His upper teeth looked even and shiny as if they’d been capped. “Might have killed him, might have been dead when it got broken. He’s pretty banged up.”
“You want to look?” Quirk said to me.
“Oh, boy,” I said.
I leaned in past Lupo and looked at the sodden thing. It had been Wilfred Pomeroy. His head lay on his shoulder at an odd angle. There was blood crusted in his nostrils. Some sort of sea sludge had clung to his cheek as the car was hauled out of the water. He was wearing a gray crew sweater and corduroy slacks that had probably been white, and a pair of cheap sneakers. His bare ankles were grey, the skin puckered a little by the seawater.
“Full rigor,” Lupo was saying to Quirk.
I took in a long breath of cold sea air. It was mixed with the taste of gasoline slick, and garbage and the exhaust from the motors idling in the Area C prowl cars.
“Name’s Wilfred Pomeroy,” I said. “Was married to Jill Joyce once.”
“Good how you knew him and we didn’t,” Quirk said.
I nodded. The wind off the water was hard, aml in the twenty-degree air it felt arctic. Some seagulls who didn’t appear to give a rat’s ass about the wind or the temperature squalled and swooped around us, lighting on some of the pilings and then swooping off again almost as soon as they’d landed. Like most of the gulls on the east coast they were herring gulls, white and gray, with webbed feet and big wings. Their beaks were sharp and their eyes glittered as they rode the winds about us.
Quirk spoke to one of the uniformed cops. “You talk to the security guard?”
“Yes, sir,” the cop said. “He’s over here. You want to see him?”
“What’d he tell you?”
“Says he was making his rounds, about four-thirty this morning. Says he makes them every hour and last time there wasn’t nothing there, but at four thirty he sees the tail end of this car sticking out of the water over the pier. So he calls us.”
“Where was the envelope?” Quirk said.
“Watchman found it on top of one of the pilings there, near where the car went over. There was a brick on top of it.”
“Gimme,” Quirk said.
The young cop went to the squad car and returned with a manila envelope wrapped in some sort of clear plastic and taped along the seams. Quirk took it and looked at it and handed it to me. Through the plastic wrap I could see that it was addressed to me, care of the Boston Police Department.
“Open it,” Quirk said.
I did. Inside was a page from a newspaper, the Berkshire Argus. The headline read, “Waymark Man Linked to TV Murder.” There was an old picture of Pomeroy in his Navy uniform, and a story that quoted Waymark police chief Buford Phillips. It mentioned that Pomeroy had been married to the famous Jill Joyce and had recently been questioned by a Boston detective about the murder on the set of Fifty Minutes.
“Shit,” I said.
Across the top of the tear sheet was scribbled, Say good-bye to Jill for me.
I handed the tear sheet to Quirk. He read it. “A detective from Boston,” he said.
“That goddamn Phillips,” I said. “Couldn’t wait to go blat to the papers.”
“Tell me about this detective from Boston, ” Quirk said.
He carefully put the tear sheet back in the envrlope and rewrapped it with the plastic wrap.
“Wanted to make sure it wouldn’t get wet,” I said.
“Suicides are sometimes very careful,” Quirk said.
“Rojack told me about Pomeroy. He was Jill Joyce’s first husband, maybe only. I don’t know if they were divorced or not. He lived up in the Berkshires in Waymark.”
“Waymark?” Quirk said.
“Out around Goshen,” I said. “Ashfield.”
“Sure,” Quirk said.
