by Parker
"Eek," I said.
"Did you go to college, Miss Randall?"
"Yes."
I knew Miss Plum was dying to know where, but I was too perverse to tell her, and she was too well-bred to ask. I'd known a lot of Miss Plums, people who couldn't form an opinion of you until they knew where you went to college, and what your father or husband did for a living, and where you grew up. I was sure in Miss Plum's world that no accomplished young lady became a private eye.
"So what was wrong with Millicent Patton?" I said. "Why didn't she fit in? Why is she the one that won't go to a good school and has no friends and might end up, God forbid, in a public junior college?"
"As I say, she is unmotivated."
"That's not really an answer," I said. "That is just another way of describing the problem."
"What answer would you prefer, Miss Randall?"
"Why was she unmotivated?"
"I can't say. I can tell you that the failure is not at Pinkett. We have tried every possible way to encourage her participation in the educational experience here."
"Do you know her parents?" I said. "Yes."
"And?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"And what do you think of them?" I said.
"I am not here to render an appraisal of Mr. and Mrs. Patton," she said.
"Do you think her home environment has something to do with her lack of motivation?"
Miss Plum didn't like this. No accomplished woman of any age running an exclusive girls' school talked about the parents of her students, especially if they were rich and influential and might make a bequest. On the other hand, if there wasn't a problem at home, then the finger of disapproval pointed back at Pinkett.
"Let me prime the pump here," I said. "I've talked with Millicent's parents. They seem very, ah, contrived. As if they were performing life rather than living it."
Miss Plum didn't say anything.
"They did not seem to get along very well with each other in my short visit."
Miss Plum smiled a little uneasily.
"Millicent was gone for ten days before they took steps to find her."
"Have they gone to the police?" Miss Plum said. "No."
"Wouldn't that be the, ah, usual first step?"
"Yes."
"Why did they hire you instead?"
"They mentioned something about discretion," I said.
"Wealthy people often value that," Miss Plum said.
"So do poor people," I said. "But they can't always afford it. What do you suppose they wanted me to be discreet about?"
"Why, I assume, Millicent's disappearance."
"Because it's so shameful?"
"I don't know. Miss Randall, these people are your employer."
"Doesn't exempt them," I said. "This shouldn't be adversarial, Miss Plum. You must want Millicent found."
She was silent again, her head barely nodding, as she looked at her folded hands. Then she raised her eyes.
"I am," she said, "a traditionalist in education. I believe in Latin, grammar, and decorum. I believe in math and repetition and discipline. I am not much taken with theories about self-worth and mal-adjustment."
I nodded.
"But I believe two things about Millicent Patton. I believe that she has never been loved. And I believe that sometime this year something happened. Her grades and her behavior, never admirable, have declined precipitously in the last two marking periods."
"You don't know what that thing might have been?"
"No."
"You think her parents don't care about her?"
Pauline Plum took in as much air as she could and let it out slowly in a long sigh, and then fortified by the extra oxygen, she said, "That is correct."
I nodded.
"We agree," I said.
"But they have hired you to find her."
"Decorum?" I said.
Miss Plum shook her head. She had already gone further than she wished.
"I really have a school to run, Ms. Randall."
"Or maybe she ran away for a reason and they don't want the reason known," I said.
Miss Plum's eyes widened with alarm. She was far too accomplished to discuss anything like that with a woman who, for all she knew, might have gone to a public junior college. She stood up.
"I hope you'll excuse me," she said.
I said I would and she showed me out.
CHAPTER 5
It was 4:30 in the afternoon. Rosie and I had been to seven shelters. The eighth was the basement of a dingy Catholic church on Centre Street in Jamaica Plain. We were talking to Sister Mary John. Actually I was doing most of the talking. Rosie was working on Sister to rub her belly. Sister Mary John was apparently not a dog person. She paid no attention to Rosie. I thought about mentioning St. Francis of Assisi, but decided it wouldn't help me find Millicent Patton, which was what I'd been hired for. 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.
<
br /> "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 cartons 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 hierarchichal 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 food?"
"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 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.
"Entreprenuership, 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?"
"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 crow
d 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 sonova bitch," 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.