Family Honor

by Robert B. Parker

  Sister didn’t look too nunnish. She was dressed in an Aerosmith tee shirt, jeans, and loafers, no socks. I showed her my picture of Millicent Patton.

  “Yes,” Sister said after a long look, “she was here. All she would tell us was that her name was Millie.”

  “She’s not here now?”

  “No.”

  “Had she been abused?”

  “Not that we could see,” Sister said.

  “She tell you why she was running?”

  “No. We try to help, but we try to do so without prying.”

  “I have to pry.”

  Sister smiled. For a non-dog person she had a good smile.

  “I know,” she said.

  “Why’d she leave?”

  “She just left without a word,” Sister said. “But here’s my guess. Every day or so, Bobby Doyle, who’s the youth service officer at District 13, comes down and brings some donuts and we have coffee and sort of talk over who’s shown up and what we should do about them.”

  “And Millicent spotted him?”

  “Not even him, I think. She spotted the police car outside.”

  “And she was gone.”

  Sister nodded. She looked down at Rosie who was being completely seductive under the table.

  “What’s wrong with this dog?” Sister said. “It is a dog, isn’t it?”

  I decided to ignore the second part of the question.

  “She wants you to rub her belly,” I said.

  The prospect of rubbing a dog’s belly seemed deeply unappealing to Sister Mary John.

  “Why do you suppose she ran at the first sign of a cop?”

  “Afraid he’d come to take her home,” Sister said.

  “Any idea where she would go from here?”

  Sister shook her head.

  “I assume that sooner or later a pimp will find her,” Sister said.

  “That seems the prevailing assumption,” I said.

  “And rightly so,” Sister said.

  “Any thoughts on why kids do this?”

  “Not brain surgery, Ms. Randall—they don’t like it at home.”

  “There must be more to it than that.”

  Sister leaned back a little in the folding chair she was sitting on, and looked at me more closely. I felt as if I might have asked a good question.

  “Lot of people settle for the easy answer,” Sister said. “Of course there must be more than that.”

  “So many of them run away from home and end up degraded,” I said. “It’s almost a pattern.”

  “Maybe it’s what they deserve for running away.”

  “Excuse me, Sister,” I said. “But no one deserves to be giving oral sex to strangers in the backseat of a car.”

  “No, of course not. I’m a nun, not a shrink, but I’ve seen a lot of these kids, and they have equal measures of defiance and guilt. The defiance causes them to run away, and the guilt helps them end up selling their bodies.”

  “So they can run away and get punished for it, too,” I said.

  “Maybe.”

  “Some of it must be economic,” I said. “They haven’t finished high school. They haven’t got a social security card. They have no hirable skills. Some of them, perhaps, simply have no other way to stay alive.”

  “Things usually have several causes,” Sister said.

  “So what causes them to run in the first place, in Millicent’s case, from affluence?”

  “Whatever is in that home is intolerable to her,” Sister said.

  “Molestation?”

  “Maybe. Maybe a situation which must be resolved and she can’t resolve it. Maybe simply the way being there makes her feel. What I know is that kids don’t give up a secure home for a desperately uncertain alternative simply because loving parents are firm with them.”

  “There’s something wrong in that house,” I said.

  “You can bank on it,” Sister said.

  Rosie gave up on Sister Mary John and nosed my foot. I rubbed her belly with my toe.

  “You save many of them?” I said.

  “I don’t even know. They come here. They stay awhile. They move on. Some straighten out as they get older. Some we get psychiatric help for. Some we may save with prayer. A lot of them, I would guess, we don’t save at all.”

  “Hard work,” I said.

  “Brutally hard, sometimes,” Sister said.

  “You ever want to give it up?”

  “I’m a nun,” Sister said. “I believe in a divine purpose. I believe I am an instrument of it. I did not become a bride of Christ for the perks.”

  We sat in silence for a moment in the small basement room paneled in cheap plywood, sitting in folding chairs on either side of a card table, with the shelter’s files stacked in milk crates around the walls.

  “And you?” Sister said. “You seem in an odd profession.”

  “My father is, was, a policeman. He’s retired now.”

  “And you wanted to be like him?”

  “Well, no, actually I got out of college with a degree in social work, but I wanted to be a painter. My father got me a police job to support myself until I sold my paintings.”

  “And you’ve not yet sold them?”

  “Some, now and then, and I’m trying to get a Master of Fine Arts at night, and this work supports me while I do the art.”

  “You are no longer with the police?”

  “Too hierarchical for me,” I said.

  Sister smiled. “I often think that of the church,” she said. “If you became wildly successful as a painter, would you give this up?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “If you became wildly successful at this would you stop painting?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Sister smiled as if I had said something smart. We were quiet again. Sister looked down at Rosie.

  “What kind of dog is that?”

  “An English bull terrier,” I said.

  “Like General Patton’s dog?”

  “Yes, only Rosie is a miniature.”

  “She looks rather like a possum,” Sister said.

  “No,” I said very firmly, “she doesn’t.”

  Sister shrugged and stood up and put out her hand. “Good luck, Sunny Randall.”

  I stood up, too. We shook hands.

  Outside the church, walking to my car I looked down at Rosie.

  “Possum?” I said.

  CHAPTER 6

  There wasn’t much point strolling around Boston looking for hookers until later in the evening. So I went to see Spike, at a place called Beans & Rice, near Quincy Market, in which he was a part owner. It was open for dinner, but it was early and they weren’t busy when I got there. Spike was in the back, a phone hunched against his ear.

  “Ma’am,” the maitre d’ said when Rosie and I walked in. “I’m sorry, but you can’t bring the dog in here.”

  “Shh,” I said. “You want her to hear you?”

  From the back, Spike said, “Dog’s a friend of mine, Herb, let her in.”

  When Rosie heard Spike’s voice she strained toward him on her leash. Herb looked a little uneasily at Spike and somewhat less uneasily at Rosie, and smiled at me, and in we went.

  Spike hung up the phone.

  “Out walking our armadillo?” Spike said.

  He pulled a chair out from one of the empty tables and I sat down.

  “Rosie is not an armadillo,” I said. “Nor, by the way, a possum.”

  “I never said she looked like a possum,” Spike said.

  He dropped to his knees and let Rosie lap his face.

  “Not a tall dog,” he said. “You want some foo
d?”

  “No, I’ve eaten,” I said. “I need to talk a little.”

  “Sure.”

  He took a soup bowl off the china rack near the kitchen and put it on the floor and poured water into it from a pitcher. Rosie drank some. Rosie was a very noisy drinker.

  A woman in sandals and a print skirt, with an Instamatic camera hanging from her wrist, was at a table near us. She was sitting with a woman wearing a Black Dog sweatshirt that was too tight and a long-billed yachting cap that was too big.

  “Waiter,” the woman in the print skirt said, “I’d like to order.”

  “I’m waiting on her right now,” Spike said, nodding at Rosie, “I’ll get to you.”

  “Isn’t it illegal for dogs to be in a restaurant?” the woman said.

  “No, ma’am,” Spike said. “You and your friend are fine.”

  The woman and her companion put their heads together and whispered. I assumed they were trying to figure out if Spike had insulted them.

  “Sit here for a minute,” Spike said, “while I swill the customers.”

  A large man with a red face joined the two women at the table. He was wearing green plaid shorts and oversized black running shoes, and an orange tee shirt. He must have recently gained weight because everything seemed a little too tight except the shoes, which didn’t look as if they’d ever been run in. The women whispered to him, and when Spike walked to the table he looked at him hard.

  “What can I get you?” Spike said.

  “You just insult these ladies?” the man said.

  “Yes,” Spike said. “The special today is a chicken burrito with salsa fresca and black beans, for eight ninety-five.”

  The red-faced man stared up at Spike. Spike smiled down at him.

  “Would you like a moment to decide?” he said.

  “I don’t think so,” the red-faced man said, and he got up with the two women and walked out.

  Spike went to the service station, poured himself a cup of coffee, and came and sat at the table with me. We were alone in the restaurant.

  “That was my agent on the phone,” Spike said. “He thinks he can get me something with the road company of Cabaret.”

  “He better,” I said. “You’re going to be fired here pretty soon.”

  “They can’t fire me,” Spike said. “I’m one of the owners.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “It’s so hard to imagine, I keep forgetting.”

  “Entrepreneurship, babe. You need something?”

  “I’m looking for a fifteen-year-old runaway girl,” I said. “Any thoughts?”

  “She got a boyfriend?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Girlfriend?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Cops find her body?”

  “No.”

  “Try the shelters?”

  “This afternoon.”

  “And they don’t have her.”

  “They did. She left.”

  “Well, if they don’t have her, and she’s still around here, I’d say she’s probably hooking.”

  Rosie rolled over on her back beside Spike’s chair.

  “She wants her belly rubbed,” I said.

  “Me, too,” Spike said.

  “But not by me,” I said.

  Spike gently rubbed Rosie’s belly with the ball of his foot.

  “No, but your ex-husband’s studly-looking.”

  “I’ll tell him you think so,” I said. “If she’s hooking, I suppose she’s with Tony Marcus?”

  Spike smiled at me.

  “Sunny,” he said. “Every whore in the city is with Tony Marcus.”

  “But Tony wouldn’t know her.”

  “Does the president of GM know the guy that installs floor mats?”

  “So what pimp might she be with, if she’s hooking? Who specializes in runaways?”

  “She white?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe Pharaoh Fox,” Spike said.

  “Does he still work St. James Ave. and Arlington?”

  “Not so much anymore. Mostly it’s male prostitutes there. Pharaoh moves the girls around every night: convention, ball game, wherever the johns are, Pharaoh drives them up in a van and lets them out right when the crowd breaks.”

  Spike was still rubbing Rosie’s stomach with his foot. Rosie was motionless in some sort of ecstatic trance. No one could stand to rub Rosie’s stomach for as long as she wanted them to.

  “Pharaoh’s a bad sonovabitch,” Spike said.

  “You don’t meet all that many pimps who aren’t,” I said.

  Spike drank some coffee.

  “I was you,” he said, “I’d get your ex to arrange a meeting with Tony Marcus, maybe Tony can do something for you.”

  “Richie’s not in the family business.”

  “He’s not out of it either,” Spike said. “Tony wants to get along with the Burkes.”

  “Well, I don’t,” I said.

  Spike shrugged. He took his foot off Rosie’s stomach and rested it on the floor. Rosie remained on her back, her flat-black watermelon-seed eyes staring up at Spike. Spike stared back down at her.

  “I’m not rubbing your stomach again,” he said.

  Rosie stared up some more, her feet in the air, one paw bent. Spike put his other foot onto her stomach and began to rub gently.

  “You going to go looking for Pharaoh? Maybe I should tag along,” he said.

  “To protect me?”

  “More or less,” Spike said.

  “I can protect myself.”

  “It’s like safe sex,” Spike said. “Two protect better than one.”

  I shook my head. “I’ll be fine,” I said. “Besides, there’s my savage black-and-white attack dog.”

  Spike looked down at Rosie, whose eyes were now slitted, her tongue hanging out one side of her mouth.

  “Should work,” Spike said. “You unleash her on Pharaoh and he’ll fall down laughing.”

  CHAPTER 7

  I spent the week with pimps and hookers and an occasional john who thought I might be available. I hung out in Kenmore Square after Red Sox games. I was down near the Prudential Center mingling with the convention tourists. I wandered through Park Square, and along Charles Street where it runs between the Common and the Public Garden. I cruised the Landsdowne Street clubs at closing time, although it didn’t look to me that anyone would have to pay for sex along Landsdowne Street. I strolled hopefully around the South End, but most of the action there was gay.

  Time flies when you are having a really swell time. All of a sudden it was the Wednesday after Labor Day and I had no idea where Millicent Patton was. Tactical support might help after all, and I had a date with some that night.

  Neither my ex-husband nor I was willing to give up on us entirely. We had dinner every Wednesday, which I looked forward to more than seemed reasonable. So did he. Neither one of us said so; we were very careful about giving mixed messages. But the conversation was always about us and always charged and exciting. At the end of the evening there was always the unasked and unanswered question of whether we might have sex again. Which both of us wanted and, so far, neither of us dared. The uncertainty of the relationship seemed to give it a greater charge than marriage had.

  “Remember,” Richie was saying, “it’s my weekend for Rosie.”

  “She’s got new jammies,” I said, “and she wants to know if she can bring her Lou Reed albums.”

  Richie smiled. It was always nice when he smiled. He had a big jaw and a wide mouth and I liked the way the parenthetic lines deepened at each side of his mouth. He poured a little red wine into my glass and then into his.

  “Whoever the hell Lou Reed is,” h
e said.

  We were eating in Cambridge in a small Middle European restaurant named Salt. Richie had on a blue blazer and a starched white shirt with the collar open. He had good color, as if he spent a lot of time outdoors, and his neck was strong.

  “Anything new in the saloon business?” I said.

  “Same old thing, ever-increasing profits, wild success,” Richie said, turning the red wine glass on the table. His hands were clean and strong looking. I always hated delicate hands on a man.

  “You started with a lot of seed money,” I said.

  “Yep.”

  The waitress came with some cherry soup for each of us. I sipped my wine while she put the plates down.

  When she left I said, “That was bitchy. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” he said.

  “Whatever the seed money, if you are turning a profit you are doing a good job.”

  “Yes.”

  We ate some soup and drank a little wine. The restaurant was full. We were sitting close together at a table for two. The energy between us was almost tactile.

  “You need any money?” Richie said.

  “No.”

  “It’s clean,” Richie said. “It comes from the saloon profits.”

  “The seed money wasn’t clean.”

  Richie shrugged. “Let’s not dance that dance again,” he said.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t want to either. I’m okay money-wise. Thank you for asking.”

  “Selling any paintings?”

  “A couple. Not enough.”

  “The sleuthette business is going okay?”

  “Sleuthette?”

  “You find something patronizing in that?” Richie said.

  “Of course not,” I said. “Any woman loves diminutives.”

  “Lucky for me,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “I remember.”

  We laughed. Any expression of feeling—laughter, anger, affection—threatened to surge out of control when we were together. Life without that pounding kinesis was unimaginable. So was life with it. The waitress reappeared.

  “Are you finished with your soup?” she said.

  We both were.

  “Was everything all right?” she said.

  “Wonderful,” Richie said. “We’re just saving room for the entrée.”