Jill stopped sobbing after a while. But she kept her face pressed against my chest.
“Ready for that drink?” I said.
“I can’t go in there,” she said. Her voice was muffled. “I look awful.”
“You could look twice as bad,” I said, “and still look wonderful.”
She leaned away from me and raised her face. It was red and her eyes were puffy and some of her make-up was tear-washed. I revised my opinion, but kept it to myself.
“You mean it?” she said.
“Absolutely,” I said.
She fumbled some Kleenex out of her purse and dabbed at her eyes.
“Show must go on,” I said.
“Give me five minutes,” she said, “in the ladies’ room.”
“Okay.”
We walked to the ladies’ room.
“I’ll be right outside the door. You need me, you holler.”
“And you’ll come in and catch all the Cambridge ladies making peepee?”
“Cambridge ladies don’t do that,” I said.
She smiled at me softly, with her head down, moving only her eyes to look up at me. It was a wan smile, I think. Then she went into the ladies’ room and I leaned on the wall outside. For more than five minutes. One of the suburban ladies who’d admired my watch cap admired it again as she went past me into the ladies’ room, and admired it at even greater length when she came out a few minutes later.
“This a technique for picking up girls?” she said.
“Have you fallen for me because of my watch cap?” I said.
“No,” she said and walked off.
It was maybe fifteen minutes and I was beginning to wonder when I heard Jill Joyce scream, “Spenser ! ”
I slammed through the ladies’ room door with my gun out, did a little peek around a partition, and there I was. A startled woman in a green paisley dress was just emerging from a stall. She froze when she saw the gun and then ducked back into the stall. At the far end of the ladies’ room in front of the handicapped stall Jill Joyce stood with her mouth a little open, her eyes glittering, her arms folded across her breast, right hand holding left elbow. There was no one else in there. The other stall doors were ajar.
“Testing?” I said.
She laughed. It wasn’t a good laugh; it was off-key and it wobbled up and down the scale, teetering on hysteria. I slid my gun back under my arm out of sight, inside my jacket.
“I wondered if you’d really burst into a ladies’ lounge.”
“You through in here?” I said.
She did her fluty laugh again. “For now,” she said.
I jerked my head toward the door and started out. She followed me. We walked across the lobby and into the cocktail lounge. There was a bar with stools along the left wall. In the rest of the room were couches and easy chairs grouped around low cocktail tables. We got a grouping for two in a corner near the big windows that opened out onto the courtyard. In the summer there were umbrellas out there and tables and jazz concerts on Wednesday nights. Now there was a huge Christmas tree and the residue of vigorously removed snow. People walking from the shops to the hotel hunched stiffly against the cold.
The waitress came by. Jill ordered a double vodka martini. I had a beer. When she came back with the drinks she brought two dishes of smoked almonds. I nodded toward the bartender. He nodded back and gave me a thumbs-up gesture.
“Why two?” Jill said.
“Bartender knows me,” I said and took a handful of nuts. Jill took a long pull on her martini. She looked at my glass.
“Beer?” she said.
“Very good,” I said.
“You don’t have to be a wise guy,” she said. Her eyes were only a touch red now, and her make-up was all back in place. Her eyes were the color of cornflowers.
“I know,” I said. “I do it voluntarily.”
She drank another third of her martini and with only a third left her eyes already began to flick about looking for the waitress.
“Aside from the doll hanging,” I said, “what instances have there been of harassment?”
She drank the rest of her martini, and again her eyes flicked around the room. I looked over at the bartender, who saw me and nodded. Jill shook a cigarette from the pack she’d placed on the table and put it in her mouth and leaned toward me. There were matches in the ashtray. I lit her cigarette, blew out the match and put it in the ashtray. I put the book of matches beside her cigarettes.
“What instances of harassment have there been?” I said. When interrogating a suspect, cleverly rephrasing the question is often effective.
“I think this is harassment,” Jill said, her eyes searching for the waitress. “We have a nice evening together and you just want to talk about icky business.”
“Icky business is my profession,” I said. “Tell me about the harassment.”
The waitress arrived with another double martini. Jill said, “Ah.”
The waitress looked at my beer, saw that it was nearly untouched, and went away. Jill dipped right in. I waited. Jill looked at me with her lovely innocent cornflower-blue eyes. I crossed my legs and tossed my foot a little to pass the time.
“Phone calls,” Jill said. “Mostly phone calls.”
“From a man?”
“Yes.” There was surprise in Jill’s voice, as if only men would ever call her.
“Where’d the calls come?”
“You mean where did I get them?”
“Un huh.”
“On the phone in my mobile home. Here, at the hotel.”
“There’s been enough press about this show so that anyone would know you were staying here. How about the mobile home. How would he get that number?”
“I don’t know. How, for Christ’s sake, would I know?”
“Is it listed?”
She shook her head in disgust and flapped her hands in front of her, the cigarette smoking in her right one.
“Spenser, I don’t know about stuff like that. I don’t know if it’s listed or not. Some gopher takes care of that. Ask Sandy, or the UPM.”
“UPM?”
“Unit production manager, for God’s sake. Why didn’t they get somebody who at least knows something about the business.”
“What’s the name of the unit production manager?”
“Bob,” Jill said. She was well into the second double martini.
“Bob what?” I said.
Jill flapped her hands again and shook her head. “You think I memorize lists of names? I have to memorize sixty pages of dialogue every week. I don’t have time to get chummy with every member of the office staff.”
“Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,” I said.
“Where’s that from?” Jill said.
“Some play,” I said. “What did this caller say when he called?”
“Different stuff. Sex stuff, mostly.”
“Like what?” I said.
“That a turn-on for you?” Jill said. “Having me talk about it?”
“Sure is,” I said. “This whole conversation is more exciting than dinner with Jesse Helms.”
Jill frowned beautifully, a lovely vertical frown line appearing briefly between her eyebrows and smoothing out at once.
“Whoever he is,” she said. “Mostly this guy told me what he’d like to do to me when he got me alone.”
“Abusive?” I said.
She was sipping her martini now; apparently the edge of need had softened.
“Actually,” she said, “no. It wasn’t, it was more, you know, ah, romantic.”
“Romantic?”
“Yeah, lovey-dovey. Except he used all the dirty words. But he used them, like, romantically.”