Ceremony

by Robert B. Parker

  I said, "My name's Spenser. I'm looking for Amy Gurwitz."

  "Why do you want to see her?" the girl said. Her voice

  went with her face. It was a voice for saying, Oh, wow! and Far out! It was a voice to be raised in praise of rock musicians. She spoke carefully with her little voice, and slowly, as if nothing she said came easy to her. "Because her friend, April Kyle, is in some trouble, and I'm trying to find April so I can help her."

  The rain continued to drip off the roof, splashing into a puddle that had formed in the hard dirt where the base of the granite steps met the foundation of the house. The girl bit her lower lip, moving her lower jaw so that the lip scraped slowly across the edge of her top teeth. When it scraped free, she did it again.

  Finally, after cycling the lower lip past the upper teeth five or six times, she said, "Won't you come in, please?"

  I said, "Thank you," and in we went.

  There was a hallway with stairs along the left wall leading up. A doop on the right wall, another door past the stairs. A large oil pinting with romanticized mountains in it hung on the wall next to the right-hand door. The only other thing in the hall was a brass umbrella stand with maybe five umbrellas in it. They didn't look as if they'd ever been used. They were for show. Like a breast-pocket hankie. We went straight back past the stairs and through the door at the end of the hall. Then down three stairs to the living room. At the far end of the living room French doors opened out onto a patio. On the right-hand wall a large marble-faced fireplace, above it another picture of purple mountain's majesty. In the left corner was a bar, directly beside the step down, and in between the bar and the French doors were several beige armchairs and a large beige couch. The walls were beige, the carpet was beige. The woodwork was walnut.

  "Won't you sit down?" She gestured carefully at the sofa.

  "Thank you." I sat on the sofa.

  "Would you care for a drink?"

  Was it legal for a child to serve beer to a consenting adult in the privacy of her home? What if the Alcoholic Beverage Commission had the place bugged? There was one way to find out.

  "I'll take a beer if you have one," I said.

  If she was an agent, undercover for ABC, I could claim entrapment.

  "Certainly," she said. "Excuse me." She walked behind the bar and bent over. I heard a door open. She stood up with a bottle of Molson Golden Ale. She found an opener, popped the top, reached under her bar, came up with a beer mug, poured the beer into the glass, taking her time, trying to get the whole bottle into the mug without overflowing the foam. When she had it full to the brim and the bottle was empty, she put the bottle out of sight, put the mug on a little walnut tray, and brought it to me. From a drawer in the coffee table she took out a coaster, put the coaster in front of me, and carefully put the beer on the coaster. She smiled again and then brought the tray back and put it out of sight behind the bar. She then came back and sat down in one of the armchairs across from me and crossed her legs, smoothing her skirt over her thighs.

  "I am Amy Gurwitz," she said.

  I picked up my beer mug, carefully so as not to spill, and took a small sip. I didn't dare guzzle it-she'd think she had to get me another one and that would kill the afternoon.

  "Do you know where April Kyle is?" I said.

  She frowned slightly, and I knew she was trying to think. "May I ask why you wish to know?" Amy said. Her hands were folded still in her lap. She had her head tilted delicately so that she seemed to be looking down over her cheekbones at me. Elegant.

  "Her parents think she's become a prostitute, and they are worried about her."

  "You a cop… policeman?"

  "I am a private detective," I said.

  She raised her eyebrows and smiled. "Oh, isn't that interesting."

  I nodded and sipped a little more beer. She smiled at me.

  "Are you thinking?" I said.

  "Excuse me?"

  "Are you thinking about my question?"

  "Oh… No."

  "Can you put me in touch with April? Do you know where she is?"

  She smiled again, the apex of courtesy. "No, I'm terribly sorry. I don't know where April is."

  I didn't get a ring of sincerity in her voice. Or insincerity. I didn't hear the ring of anything in her voice. She was like a kid playacting. Playing grown-up. She offered me a filter-tipped cigarette from a box on the coffee table. I said, "No, thank you."

  She said, "Do you mind if I smoke?"

  I said, "No."

  She lit her cigarette with a big silver table lighter.

  "Would you have any ideas on where I might look for April?" I said.

  Amy held her cigarette carefully out near the fingertips of her index and middle fingers. She inhaled and exhaled, carefully blowing the smoke away from me. "Gracious, I really couldn't say. I haven't seen April since I moved from Smithfield."

  I nodded. "You think she might be a whore?" I said.

  "Oh, I hope not. She was always so nice. I don't think she'd do that."

  "Do you live here with Mitchell Poitras?"

  She smiled and shook her head vaguely. It was neither a negative nor affirmative movement-it was something in between, an avoidance gesture.

  "Do you work?"

  "I'm at home just now," she said. Her eyes were shallow and meaningless as she spoke. Her smile was polite. She looked like a Barbie doll.

  "So who pays the rent?"

  She made her vague head movement again and smoked some more of her cigarette.

  "What does Mitchell do for a living?" I said.

  She looked up at the clock. "I really must be starting my dinner pretty soon. I'm afraid you'll have to excuse me." She stood. I was being outclassed by a sixteenyear-old girl. Should I give her the famous Spenserian arm squeeze? Or I could shoot her. I said, "Okay, thanks for your time." I took a card from my shirt pocket and gave it to her. "If you should hear from April, could you give me a call?" She put the card on the coffee table and walked in stately cadence to the door and opened it. She smiled. I smiled. I went out. She shut the door. I turned up my coat collar and walked to my car. The small rain still fell.

  Chapter 7

  I was not happy. I had learned so little from Amy Gurwitz that I felt as if I'd gotten stupider while I was in there. It wasn't so much that I suspected her of lying. I had no sense at all of her or her reactions. It bothered me. She seemed in some ways the full realization of what a sixteen-year-old kid would imagine adult sophistication to be. Like a cartoon of a rich Back Bay matron. But that's all she was. There was no fun in her, no pleasure in the game. No showing off. No rebellion. No flirtation. And she was living with some guy old enough to have amassed the bundle it had cost for that town house. None of it was right. I didn't like it. I had the feeling that maybe she didn't care if I liked it.

  I looked at my watch-after four. I was hungry. I left my car where it was and walked over to the Cafe Vendome on Commonwealth and had a cheeseburger and three beers. When I got through it was 5:05. With the rain still coming I walked down Commonwealth and across the Common and on into the Combat Zone at the foot of Boylston Street. It was twenty-five to six when I got there. But that didn't matter. Time stood still in the Combat Zone. You could see a dirty movie or a quarter peep show at most hours of the day or night. You could purchase a skin magazine specialized for almost every peculiarity. You could get a drink. Fellatio. Pizza by the slice, adult novelty items. Everything necessary to sustain the human spirit. The neon lights and oversized flashing bulbs and crudely drawn signs that advertised all of this and much more (All Live Acts! Nude College Girls!) were plastered onto old commercial buildings, some of them once elegant in the red brick and brownstone that Boston had been built in. Above the one-story glitz of the Combat Zone the ornamental arched windows and the intricate rooflines of the old buildings were as incongruous as a nun at a stag film.

  I moved along lower Washington Street with my hands in my pockets, trying to look like a guy from Melrose whose
wife was away till Thursday. Except for the Back Bay, Boston's streets are routinely narrow and twisted. Washington Street where it descends into the Combat Zone is notably so. Cars cruised slowly by. Often they were filled with young men drinking beer from the bottle and yelling out the window at women. Sailors from other countries, women in suggestive clothes, men in stretch fabric suits and miracle fabric raincoats with epaulets and belts, an elderly Oriental man moving through on his way to Chinatown, seeming oblivious of the crudely packaged lust about him. Winos shuffled about down here too, and kids wearing black warm-up jackets with yellow leather sleeves that said Norfolk County Champs 8Q-81 in the center of a large yellow football on the left front.

  I had April Kyle's picture in my inside pocket, but I didn't need it. I'd studied it. I knew what she looked like. At least, I knew what she looked like when she'd had it taken for graduation. The Combat Zone look Was a little different. I hadn't seen a cashmere sweater or a pair of Top-Siders down here in some time.

  Two girls came out of a bar ahead of me. One was black, one was white. They both wore blond wigs. They both had on slit skirt evening gowns with sequins and cleavage. The white girl wore open-toed sling-back high heels. The black girl had on boots. Both wore transparent plastic raincoats with transparent hoods up over their wigs. The white girl was smoking a joint. I smiled at them as they came toward me.

  "Hi, girls," I said. "What's happening?"

  The black girl said to her friend, "Now, he ain't no cop, is he?"

  The white girl said, "Oh, no. He's a dentist probably from Cow Hampshire."

  The black girl said, "Bullshit," making it a foursyllable phrase, and the two of them kept moving. I'd have to work on my suburban look a little.

  In the window of a store next to a peep show there was an assortment of leather items. Their uses weren't apparent, but bondage and discipline seemed a good estimate. Two men with crew cuts held hands while they looked in the window beside me. One of them had on a black motorcycle jacket. The other wore a black turtleneck jersey and a down vest. Both wore low white sneakers and dark socks. The one in the leather jacket nudged the other one and whispered something. They both giggled, and I moved on.

  Rock music with a heavy thumping drive racketed out of the bars and strip joints, the multicolored neon reflected from the shiny streets and rain-polished windows, someone blared his automobile horn insistently, between two parked cars a man vomited while another man in a long blue overcoat held him around the waist to keep him from pitching forward. In the window of an adult bookstore there was a collection of magazines devoted to naked children of both sexes, hairless and innocent, wearing makeup.

  A thought occurred to me that had not occurred before. What was Harry Kyle doing in the Zone when he'd seen his daughter? Selling clap insurance? Catching the Harry Reems retrospective at the Pussycat Cinema? I'd never fallen under the spell of the Combat Zone. I was in favor of female nudity, but the Zone left me with the queasy feeling I used to get when I smoked first thing in the morning on an empty stomach. I had quit smoking in 1962, but I could still remember it clearly. The pack of Camels in the shirt pocket, the first drag with coffee after breakfast, the days in Korea when we'd take a break and light up, the automatic gesture I always made leaving the house of patting my chest to make sure I had cigarettes, the satisfied feeling when I did, like having money in your wallet. Now when I left the house I patted my hip to check the gun.

  A silver-gray Buick Electra pulled up to the curb near me and a black woman in a lavender jump suit got out. The Buick pulled away and the woman stepped into the doorway of a pinball arcade out of the rain. The pants of the jump suit were tucked into the tops of black suede boots with very high heels. She wore no coat and she shivered as she stood in the doorway. A middle-sized black man with long arms got out of a white Jaguar sedan parked at the curb and joined her in the doorway. She gave him something and he put it in his pocket. I went over to the doorway and stood beside them. The woman's hair was in a silver-tipped natural. She had prominent teeth and her lipstick was the same shade of lavender as her jump suit. There was a small, new moon scar beside her left eye. The man's nose was flat and broad. He had a mustache trimmed thin and high cheekbones that made him look Oriental. He was wearing a white cowboy hat with a peacock feather and a white leather trench coat with the collar turned up and the belt knotted in the front, the big gold buckle dangling free beyond the knot. I said, "Excuse me, I'm looking for a girl-maybe you could help."

  The black man eyed me. The woman looked at him.

  "What'd you have in mind, man?" he said.

  I took April's picture out of my pocket and showed it to them. "Her," I said.

  The man looked at the picture in the light that spilled out of the arcade. He shook his head. "Ain't one of mine," he said. "What's your interest? I mean, I know some girls just as good if your taste run that way."

  "Nope," I said. "I want to find her."

  The man grinned. "Figured you wasn't no tourist," he said. "Cop'?"

  I said to the woman, "How about you?" I showed her the picture. "You ever see her'.'"

  "She don't know nothing," the man said.

  I ignored him. I looked at the woman. She shrugged. The man moved more fully between us. "I say she don't know nothing," he said. "She don't talk. I talk." His shoulders were sloping and the neck that showed at the open collar of his coat was thick and muscular.

  "I noticed that," I said.

  "You fucking with me, man," he said. His dark eyes gleamed at me.

  "Not me," I said. "I'm just looking for this little girl." "How come?" "Parents want her home," I said.

  "They think she around here?"

  "Yeah."

  "And they don't like their little sweetie giving blow jobs in the back seat of some John's car?" he said.

  ".Yeah." "Ain't our problem," he said.

  "No. It's mine," I said.

  "They paying you?" he said. The woman stood motionless, hugging herself, shivering, paying attention only to the black man. Like an attentive dog. That's probably where she got the scar near her eye. Obedience training.

  ..Yes… "Whyn't they come look for her themselves? I had a kid run off, I'd go get her myself. I wouldn't waste money on some shoofly."

  "Too busy, probably." I said. "Maybe too scared. Guys like you would scare them."

  “I don't scare you'?" he said.

  "Not very much," I said. He grinned and took his hands out of his coat pockets. In the right hand was a brown leather sap. He tapped his palm with it. I reached out with my left hand and snapped it away from him.

  "Reflexes," I said. "You spend your time pushing around drunken high school kids and your reflexes go."

  He looked at me with his eyes half shut.. I was about three inches taller than he was and he had to look up slightly. Never an asset.

  "Quick," he said. He looked at the woman. "See? I told you he ain't no tourist." As he talked he was absently untying his belt that held his trench coat closed.

  I said, "If you open that coat I will clean your teeth with your sap."

  He was indignant. "What's the matter with you, man?" he said.

  "If you got a piece," I said, "it's dumb to keep it buttoned up under your coat."

  He looked at my coat. It was hanging open. "I got no piece, man," he said.

  "I do," I said. "And now I got a blackjack too."

  "You asking for a lot of trouble, Jim."

  "I can handle a lot of trouble," I said. If only I still smoked. A line like that needs cigarette smoke curling around it. "While we're waiting for it to start, why don't you take a walk?"

  "You keeping the sap?" he said.

  "I'm going to count five. If you're still here, I'm going to rattle your face with it."

  He raised his hands slightly, "All right, man. All right, be cool." He jerked his head at the woman.

  "No," I said. "Just you."

  He put one hand out to take the woman's arm. I flicked the blackjack out
and tapped him on the forearm. It was a light tap, but the weighted head of the thing would make his arm go numb.

  "One," I said. "Two."

  He turned and walked down the street away from us. There was no expression on the woman's face. She still hugged herself and shivered. "He ain't gonna let you roust him like that," she said.

  "I think he just did."

  She shook her head. "Nope. He gotta be first man. Specially in front of one of his girls. He be back."

  "You know the girl," I said.

  "What's the difference?"

  "I'm worried about her. She's sixteen and tricking in the Zone." "Little blond honky do it, everybody gets worried. How come you ain't worried about me?"

  "Nobody hired me to worry about you," I said. "You want to retain me?" "I seen her around," the woman said. "Suburb pussy." "Who's her pimp?"

  She shrugged again. "Red, maybe?"

  "Red got a last name?"

  "I don't know. White dude, red hair."

  "Coincidence," I said.

  "Huh?"

  "Never mind. Where's Red hang out?"

  "Bar called The Slipper, down toward Boylston."

  "I know where it is. You want my coat?"

  She shook her head. "Trumps don't let us wear none," she said. "Say it's not sexy." "Trumps? The guy I just talked with?"

  She nodded. "You better remember it. You gonna see him again, you hang around here." I held the blackjack out to her. "Here. When you see him give this back to him."

  She shook her head. "Naw. He gonna be mad enough. I gotta take a beating now. I don't want to make him madder."

  "What's he going to beat you up for?"

  " 'Cause I seen you roust him."

  The water dripped off the doorway canopy like a beaded curtain. A trio of sailors pushed past us in the doorway and went into the arcade. They all wore peacoats with the collars up.

  I said, "You want to come with me?"

  She looked straight at me for the first time. "Come with you?" She laughed. Derision. "Come with you? And do what? You gonna marry me? Take me away from all this?"

  "I could take you someplace where Trumps wouldn't beat you up."