“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 lame 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 ugainst 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, master 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 sound stage. 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.

Chapter 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 sound stage 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.