“Hadn’t seen her in twenty-five years, and carrying the torch the whole time.”
“He drink?” Quirk said.
“Used to. Quit, he said, five years ago.”
Quirk looked at the stiffening corpse. “Why bother?” he said.
I shrugged. “Then she shows up in Boston,” I said. “Two hours away, on location, shooting this television series.”
Two guys from the Medical Examiner’s office eased Pomeroy’s remains into a body bag and heaved it into the back of the wagon.
“It was too much,” I said. “He started trying to see her. She didn’t want him around. She didn’t want some reformed drunk shitkicker from Waymark, Mass., turning out to be her husband, and the press hear of it. Guy was on welfare, hadn’t heard from her since she dumped him.”
“Wouldn’t help her image,” Quirk said.
“So she gets Rojack to get Randall to chase him off, which Randall does.”
“And then you talk to Rojack and he tells you about Pomeroy and you go out to see him.”
“Yeah.”
“And you didn’t tell us about him.”
“Guy is about two-thirds of a person,” I said. “Or he was. He’s a sober alcoholic, hanging on barely, living in the woods with three dogs, trying to get over something that happened to him twenty-five years ago. He didn’t kill Babe Loftus.”
“You might wanta let us reach that conclusion on our own,” Quirk said.
I shrugged. The body was in the back of the Examiner’s wagon. The two technicians went around and got in front. Lupo walked past us toward his car.
“I’ll be in touch,” he said to Quirk. “Anything says it isn’t suicide?”
“Not yet,” Lupo said.
Quirk nodded.
“I give you a lot of slack,” he said, “because usually you end up on the right side of things, and sometimes you even help things. But don’t think I won’t rein you in if I need to.”
“My mistake was talking to that goddamn shitkicker police chief,” I said.
“You’d have been better talking to me,” Quirk said.
“At least we agree on that,” I said.
“How come he drove all the way here from Wayfar,” Quirk said, “to take the jump?”
“Waymark,” I said. “He wanted to be sure she’d hear about it. If he did it in Waymark it might make the Berkshire Argus, and who’d know? Who’d tell her? That’s why he left the note for me too.”
“And you can’t tell her,” Quirk said, “after all that trouble, because you don’t know where she is.”
“Yet,” I said.
Chapter 32
SUSAN 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 aniti.st-dly 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.”
