Ceremony s-9

by Robert B. Parker

  "Yes."

  "All of this is, of course, dehumanizing," Susan said. She wasn't eating or drinking. She was single-mindedly following the trail of her speculation. She was explaining to me, but she was also explaining to herself. Thinking out loud. As I often did with her. She had very little peripheral vision. But I had never known anyone who could concentrate the way she could, once some- thing got her attention. "But perhaps being dehumanized is a kind of sedative for someone full of self-hate. It's a way of desensitizing yourself, and of course, your every experience tells you that the rest of the world is pretty lousy too."

  "Which makes you not so bad," I said.

  "So maybe she's better off."

  "Turning tricks instead of cheering for Smithfield High? Better not spread that around the guidance office. Wasn't it Smithfield where heretics were burned?"

  Susan smiled. "That was Smithfield, England, I believe."

  "You suggesting I stop looking for her?"

  "I suppose I can't say that. I suppose her parents should decide." I shook my head. "I'm not doing it for the parents."

  "I know. And we both know the parents. Kyle will say he doesn't want her darkening his door, and Mrs. Kyle will cry and want her back."

  I nodded.

  "What do you think?" Susan said.

  "I think a couple of things," I said, "maybe several." The waitress brought dessert, menus. "I think there's no point finding her and dragging her home because she'll just split again, and as far as I can tell, I don't blame her. I won't make her go home."

  "Indian pudding," she said to the waitress, "with vanilla ice cream. And black coffee."

  The waitress looked at me. "Same," I said. She smiled and went away.

  "However," I said to Susan, "I don't think her life is all that good for her whoring. She may feel better about herself than she would at home being June Allyson, but there's not much there, either. She could get killed or onto smack or graduate to something worse than the sheep ranch"-I drank the rest of my beer-"and," I said, "there's something funny going on. They shipped her down to Providence almost the minute I started looking for her. I talked with Amy Gurwitz one afternoon, and April was off to the ranch before supper. They didn't want her found."

  "You mean Amy Gurwitz is involved?"

  "Must be. Or someone in Smithfield. She was on the road before I ever started talking to management."

  Dessert arrived.

  "All of which means what?" Susan said.

  "Hell, I don't know. I can barely keep track of the news, let alone analyze it. But I think we better locate April again and see how she is, and while we're doing that maybe we can figure out what to do with her if she isn't swell."

  Susan was smiling. "Also," she said, "you can't stand to have lost her, and you won't quit on this until you find her again."

  I swallowed some pudding. "I'm a very neat person," I said. "I never leave an unmade bed. Want to go back to my place for a nightcap and a bit of free love?"

  "We might get your bedclothes all wrinkled," Susan said over her coffee cup.

  I sighed. "I know," I said. "I thought of that, but life is a trade-off.

  It'll be worth it."

  Susan finished her coffee and put her cup down and leaned a little toward me. Her dark eyes were enormous. "You better believe it," she said.

  Chapter 18

  Hawk was drinking white wine and soda at the bar in Gallagher when I came in. He had on a dark gray three-piece suit with a fine pinstripe, white shirt, pin collar, pink silk tie, and pink pocket hankie. There were diamonds winking in his gold cuff links and another glimmering in his right earlobe. His head gleamed in the bar's soft light as if he'd oiled it. I'd felt pretty good about my leather trench coat until I saw him.

  "You stop somewhere and get your head buffed?" I said.

  He made room for me at the bar. "That's a halo," he said.

  I ordered beer. "You know something or are you just lonely and I'm the only, one can stand you?"

  "Tony Marcus says they going to put you in the ground if you don't stop messing with his whores," Hawk said. He drank some wine and soda. I raised my eyebrows. "So she is his," I said.

  "They all his, babe," Hawk said.

  "So why does he care about one more or less?" I said.

  "He didn't say. He just said tell you that you going in the ground unless you back away."

  "He told you that himself?"

  "Uh-huh." Hawk grinned. "I was visiting with him, being slick, seeing if I couldn't acquire a little intelligence without letting on, you know. And he say, `You still tight with Spenser?'-well, actually he say, `You still tight with that honky muthafucker?' but I knew who he meant, and I say, `Yeah,' and he say, `You tell him stay away from my whores or he going in the ground."'

  "Man's a racist," I said.

  "No doubt," Hawk said, "but he got enough people to do it."

  "I know," I said. "Why do you suppose it matters to him. What's special about this kid?"

  Hawk shrugged. "You making any progress finding her?"

  "I found her and lost her."

  Hawk smiled with pleasure. "Lost her? Hell, I figured you was overmatched. How old is she?"

  "Sixteen."

  "She didn't take your gun away, did she?"

  "Hell, no," I said. "I'm no amateur."

  "What you going to do now?"

  "I'm going to look for her some more. How about you? You still working for me or did Tony Marcus hire you away?"

  "Always happy," Hawk said, "to take your money, long as you still alive."

  "Okay, pick up Red and stay with him. See if she surfaces there. If she does, bring her to me."

  "What if Red don't like it?"

  "Reason with him."

  Hawk nodded. "You sure it wouldn't be better for me to stick with you?

  Marcus wasn't jiving."

  "No. I'm going over and sit in the Back Bay and watch a house and see what goes in and out."

  "Okay." Hawk finished the wine and left a five on the bar. "You get aced, Susan gonna be awful mad," he said.

  "At both of us," I said. "You paying for mine too?"

  "Sure. It'll go on my bill."

  We got up and moved through the lunch hour crowd and out to the street.

  Hawk headed up State Street to Washington and I went to get my car.

  I drove round and round the block until I found a parking space on Beacon from which I could see Amy Gurwitz's house. Hawk could cover the Zone better than I could, especially since April would recognize me and not him, and the other option was watching this house. It wasn't much of an option, but it was better than driving around looking in windows, which was the only other thing I could think of.

  Amy and April had been friends—or so they said at the bowling alley in Smithfield-on the run, with no money-hell, no coat. April might end up there. It was sunny and clear, not too cold for November, and the sun on the canvas roof of the MG had a greenhouse effect that made it comfortable without the heater. I tilted the seat back and stretched my legs out and stared at the Gurwitz front door for the rest of the afternoon. Nobody came out. Nobody went in. No one looked out a window. No smoke signals emanated from the chimney. No sound of demented laughter echoed from its corridors.

  The streetlights went on, and lights in the windows up and down Beacon Street. At about 5:15-the front porch light went on at Amy's. At a little after six the same fat guy I'd seen before came trundling down Fairfield from the same alley as before and went up the steps and let himself in. He had on a plaid overcoat that looked like the saddle blanket for a hippopotamus. Then the light went out on the front porch and that was it. I hung on until nearly eleven at night and then went home and ate a baked bean sandwich on whole wheat with mayonnaise and lettuce and went to bed.

  I was back on the job on Beacon Street before eight the next morning. It was the day before Thanksgiving and the street was busy with college kids going home for the holiday. I was prepared for a long siege today. I had
some caponata from Rebecca's and some feta cheese and black olives and Syrian bread. I also had a large Thermos of coffee and a portable radio. I ate and listened to jazz and drank coffee and watched the coeds in their designer jeans and thought about what Susan and I would do for Thanksgiving dinner, and the day wore on.

  I was listening to Ron Della Chiesa on WGBH. He was playing an album by Anita Ellis when the fat man came his usual route and went into the house. Early. I looked at my watch. 3:20. Out of work early for the holiday. I was listening to Teddi King with Dave McKenna's thumping piano behind her, when Fatso came out of the house with Amy and two suitcases. Off to Grandma's for a turkey dinner? Off to a country inn for roast goose with plum sauce? They went around the corner, up Fairfield Street, down the alley, and in maybe two minutes came driving out in a Volvo station wagon that fit the fat guy like a tailored shirt. They headed up Beacon while I decided what to do. By the time they reached the corner of Gloucester I knew what I'd do. I'd sit here for a while and if they didn't come back I'd burglarize their home and see what was what.

  Chapter 19

  Carol Sloan was just beginning to sing when I regretfully snapped off the radio and climbed out of the MG. I got a Speedo gym bag out of the trunk and went up Fairfield and down the alley behind the buildings and counted until I was behind Amy's. There was a small yard with a cast-iron fence around it, a gate that closed off a parking space, three green plastic trash barrels with lids, and beyond the little yard the French doors that I'd seen from the inside.

  I stepped over the low fence and went to the French doors. They were locked. I knocked on the door and then smiled and waved through the glass at the empty living room. That was for anyone watching. Then I made a gesture at the doors, nodded, and set down my bag. I took a thin chisel and a hammer out of it and began, quite carefully, to chip away the glazing compound around the frame of one pane in the French doors. The pane next to the latch. The process took maybe half an hour. The putty was old and dried hard. When I had it cleaned away, I put the hammer and chisel back in the bag and got out some long-nosed pliers and a screwdriver with a thin head and pried out the little V-shaped wedges they use to hold the glass in place under the putty. I got them out without bending them badly and put them in the bag. Then I took out a roll of adhesive tape, tore off a length, pressed about half of the length against the loosened pane, used the other half for a handle, and prying carefully with my screwdriver, I took the pane out without breaking it. I put it down out of the way and reached in through the opening and unlatched the French doors. With the door ajar I put the pane back into the frame, tapped the glaziers' wedges back into place, got out a can of glaziers' putty, and reputtied the pane into place. When I was done, you'd have to be very alert to notice it had happened. Then I put my tools back in the bag and picked up the bag and went into the living room and shut the door behind me and relocked it.

  The house was as neat as I remembered. I took off my coat and laid it over a chair and walked through once to make sure it was empty. Walking quietly, listening hard, my gun offering a reassuring weight in my right hip pocket. I'd probably burgled a hundred homes in my life, but it was always the same, the tense feeling of intrusion. Uncertain, concentrated, full of tiny building sounds that you only heard when you were breaking and entering. And always in part listening for the distant siren getting louder. There was no one home.

  Back in the living room I started to search. I took my time, one room at a time. If you don't want it known that you've searched a place it takes a lot longer. But I had time and I saw no reason to let anyone know I was still interested in Amy-or April. What Tony Marcus didn't know wouldn't hurt me.

  The place looked like the world according to Bloomingdale's-wineglasses and bread baskets and copper cookware, Irish linen and English china and Scotch whisky and cookbooks by Julia Child, lacquerware and unglazed earthenware and brass umbrella stand and silver champagne buckets and crystal chandeliers and a wine rack full of French wines and chopping block counters and delft tile bathrooms.

  On the second floor was an office with a rolltop desk and big black leather executive chair and a dictating machine and an IBM Selectric typewriter. On a coffee table was a briefcase in black leather that said MITCHELL POITRAS in gold embossing on the top. I opened it. It was full of correspondence on stationery headed Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Department of Education. The letters were full of gobbledygook about Chaptr 762 and Title IX and programs impacting student populations, and people developing the pedagogical strategies, and a lot of stuff much less exciting than that. Most of them were addressed to Poitras. His title was Executive Coordinator, Student Guidance and Counseling Administration. I felt humble. The desk was full of more of the same, including a lot of Core Evaluation forms, some of which seemed to have been coded in different-colored inks. There were also bills and a checkbook that indicated a balance of $23,000. Not bad for a state worker. Neither was the house. In the middle drawer there was a set of spare keys on a key ring. I pocketed them.

  The master bedroom was pink silk, velvet, and satin with an enormous canopied bed. The other furniture was white and gold. The place looked like one of those bedrooms in the Pocono Mountain resorts with names like Honeymoon Haven and Wedding Night Manor-all it lacked was a heart-shaped bathtub. In the bottom drawer of the bureau was a matched set of vibrators. I was getting embarrassed. There was also a batch of nude pictures of Amy Gurwitz. She looked like a contestant in a Brooke Shields look-alike contest. High voltage.

  I felt something like relief when I got out of the bedroom and up to the third floor. Maybe there'd be something to cleanse the palate up here-a woodworking set, or a model train collection. When I went in it looked encouraging. It seemed a photo setup. But it wasn't encouraging, it was a place for taking and processing dirty pictures. For an hour and a half I waded through a variety of glossy photos, video-tapes, and 8-millimeter reels. The room had it all-video-tape camera and recorder, movie camera, an old Rolleiflex on a tripod for still work, and files upon files of the product.

  There is a limit to human invention, and pornographers seem to reach it early, but besides the sameness of pornography this collection had a special unifying theme. All the actors were young-high school age or less-both genders, and aimed at all sexual preferences. "Ah, sweet bird of youth," I said out loud. I was trying to work back up to embarrassment. My voice in the empty house was hoarse. Obviously some of the scenes had been shot in this town house. Some on the ornate canopied bed downstairs. Some in the living room where Amy had so properly served me a glass of beer on a walnut tray. Some you couldn't tell. I looked at all the snapshots to see if April was in any of them. She wasn't. I sampled a couple of tapes and a couple of films and didn't see her. It would liave taken a week to go through the tapes and films.

  I put everything back and went out and down the stairs. There was nothing more to do there. I went back and checked the French doors to be sure they were latched. Then I put my coat on and went out the front door, which locked behind me. I took the spare keys to a Sears store and had copies made. Then I went back to Poitra's place, unlocked his front door with my duplicate, returned his spares to the middle drawer, and left.

  It was dark. I'd been in there for maybe six hours and it felt as if I'd been gone for the winter. I got in the MG and started it up and let the motor idle while I thought. In the dark November night the car was cold. When the engine warmed up I put the heater fan on. One of the things I thought about was the fact that Poitras seemed to be heavily invested in teen sex and that he was Executive Coordinator of the Student Guidance and Counseling Administration. Another thing that I thought about was that he must have more than his state salary coming in to support the life-style he maintained. In Massachusetts that's not unusual. In Massachusetts people don't do state work for the salary. It's the fringe benefits-rapine and pillage-that attract the best and the brightest here.

  Chapter 20

  Susan and I lay in bed in her house on Tha
nksgiving morning. It was sunny outside the window, and it looked like it wouldn't be cold. I looked at the bedside clock. 7:35. No sound. The room was whitewashed and furnished with colonial pine, and the full flood of sunlight made it almost dazzling in its simple brightness.

  Susan said; "You think it's too early to open the champagne?"

  "We could mix it with orange juice and argue for vitamins," I said.

  Susan took my hand under the covers and we lay quietly on our backs amongst the flowered sheets and pillows. "What does Hawk do on Thanksgiving?" Susan said.

  "I have no idea," I said. "Probably has honey-roasted pheasant served to him by an Abyssinian maiden with a dulcimer." "You are peculiar," Susan said. "You trust Hawk with your life or mine. You expect him to risk his life for you -I know you'd risk yours for him-and you don't even know what he does on Thanksgiving. Did you think about inviting him out for dinner?"

  "Hawk?" I said.

  "Yes." "Have Hawk for Thanksgiving dinner?"

  "Certainly. Doesn't he have holidays?"

  "Suze," I said. "You just don't have Hawk for Thanksgiving dinner."

  "Why not?"

  "Well, it's…" I tried to think of the right way to say it. Hawk and I both knew and we knew without having to say it or even think it. "You know how in medieval landscape painting the artists would often include an allegorical representation of death to remind us that it is always present and imminent?"

  She nodded.

  "That's like inviting Hawk to Thanksgiving dinner. He'd be the figure in the landscape, and that would compromise him. Hawk would not want you to invite him."

  "That doesn't make any sense," Susan said.

  "It would to Hawk," I said.

  Susan was quiet, her hand in mine, our bodies close together. Then she said, "It's where you lose me, this arcane male thing. It's like a set of rituals from a religion that no longer exists, the rules of a kingdom that disappeared before memory. It can't be questioned or explained, it simply is-like gravity or inertia."