God Save the Child

by Robert B. Parker

  “Who owns the house?”

  “I don’t know, but there is a kind of leader, an older man, maybe thirty or so, this Vic Harroway. I would think he’d be the owner.”

  “And Kevin was hanging around with this group?”

  “With some of them. Or at least with some kids who were said to be associated with this group. I’d see him now and then sitting on the cemetery wall across from the common with several kids from the group. Or maybe from the group. I’m making this sound a good deal more positive than it is. I’m not sure of any of this or of even the existence of such a group. Although I’m inclined to think there is a group like that.”

  “Who would know?”

  She frowned. “I don’t know. Chief Trask, I suppose.”

  “How bizarre is this group?”

  “Bizarre? I don’t know. I hadn’t heard anything very bizarre about them. I imagine there’s grass smoked there, although not many of us find that bizarre anymore. Other than that I can’t think of anything particularly bizarre. What kind of bizarre do you mean?”

  The wine was gone, and I was looking a little wistfully at the empty bottle. It was hard concentrating on business. I was also looking a little wistfully at Susan Silverman. Neither rain nor sleet nor snow nor dark of night maybe, but red wine and a handsome woman—that was something else.

  She said, “What kind of bizarre are you looking for?”

  “Any kind at all. The kind of bizarre that would be capable of that dummy trick in the coffin, the kind of bizarre that would make a singing commercial out of the telephone call. The kind of bizarre that would do the ransom note in a comic strip. Would you like some brandy?”

  “One small glass.”

  “Let’s take it to the living room.”

  She sat where she had before, at one end of the couch. I gave her some Calvados and sat on the coffee table near her.

  “I don’t know anything bizarre about the group. I have the impression that there is something unusual about Vic Harroway, but I don’t know quite what it is.”

  “Think about it. Who said he was odd? What context was his oddness in?”

  She frowned again. “No, just an idea that he’s unusual.”

  “Is he unusual in appearance?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Size?”

  “Really, I can’t recall.”

  “Is he unusual in his sex habits?”

  She shrugged and spread her hands, palms up.

  “Religious zealot?”

  She shook her head.

  “Unusual family connections?”

  “Damn it, Spenser, I don’t know. If I knew, I’d tell you.”

  “Try picturing the circumstances when you got the impression he was unusual. Who said it? Where were you?”

  She laughed. “Spenser, I can’t do it. I don’t remember. You’re like a hammer after a nail.”

  “Sorry, I tend to get caught up in my work.”

  “I guess you do. You’re a very interesting man. One might misjudge you. One might even underrate you, and I think that might be a very bad error.”

  “Underrate? Me?”

  “Well, here you are a big guy with sort of a classy broken nose and clever patter. It would be easy to assume you were getting by on that. That maybe you were a little cynical and a little shallow. I half figured you got me in here just to make a pass at me. But I just saw you at work, and I would not want to be somebody you were really after.”

  “Now you’re making me feel funny,” I said. “Because half the reason I invited you in here was to make a pass at you.”

  “Maybe,” she said and smiled. “But first you would work.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I worked. I am a sleuth, and being a sleuth I can add two and two, blue eyes. If you half expected me to make a pass and you came anyway, then you must have half wanted me to do so … sweetheart.”

  “My eyes are brown.”

  “I know, but I can’t do Bogart saying ‘brown eyes.’ And don’t change the subject.”

  She took the final sip from her brandy glass and put it on the coffee table. When she did she was close to my face. “See?” she said looking at me steadily. “See how brown they are?”

  “Black, I’d say. Closer to black.”

  I put my hands on either side of her face and kissed her on the mouth. She kissed me back. It was a long kiss, and when it ended I still held her face in my hands.

  “Maybe you’re right,” she said. “Maybe they are more black than brown. Perhaps if you were to sit on the couch you might be able to see better.”

  I moved over. “Yes,” I said, “this confirms my suspicion. Your eyes are black rather than brown.”

  She leaned forward and kissed me. I put my arms around her. She turned across my lap so I was holding her in my arms and put her arms around my neck. The kiss lasted longer than the first one and had some body English on it. I ran my hand under her sweater up along the depression of her spine, feeling the smooth muscles that ran parallel. We were lying now on the couch, and her mouth was open. I slid my hand back down along her spine and under the waistband of her pants. She groaned and arched her body against me, turning slightly as I moved my hand along the waistband toward the front zipper. I reached it and fumbled at it. Old surgeon’s hands. She pulled back from the kiss, reached down, and took my hand away. I let her. We were gasping.

  “No, Spenser,” she managed. “Not the first time. Not in your apartment.”

  I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t think of anything to say, and I was concentrating on breathing.

  “I know it’s silly. But I can’t get rid of upbringing; I can’t get rid of momma saying that only dirty girls did it on the first date. I come from a different time.”

  “I know,” I said. “I come from the same time.” My voice was very hoarse. I cleared my throat. We continued to lie on the couch, my arm around her.

  “There will be other times. Perhaps you’d like to try my cooking. In my house. I’m not cold, Spenser, and I would have been hurt if you hadn’t tried, but not the first time. I just wouldn’t like myself. Next time …”

  “Yeah,” I said. Clearing my throat hadn’t helped, but I was getting my breathing under control. “I know. I’d love to try your cooking. What say we hop in the car and drive right out to your place now for a snack?”

  She laughed. “You’re not a quitter, are you.”

  “It’s just that I may be suffering from terminal tumescence,” I said.

  She laughed again and sat up.

  I said, “How about dinner together next week? That way you won’t feel quite so hustled, maybe?”

  She sat and looked down at me for some time. Her black hair falling forward around her face. Her lipstick smeared around her mouth. “You’re quite nice, Spenser.” She put her hand against my cheek for a moment. “Will you come and have dinner with me at my home next Tuesday evening at eight?”

  “I will be very pleased to,” I said.

  We stood up. She put her hand out. I shook it. I walked to the door with her She said, “Good night, Spenser.”

  I said, “Good night, Susan.”

  I opened the door for her, and she went out. I closed it. I breathed as much air as I could get into my lungs and let it out very slowly. Next time, I thought. Tuesday night. Dinner at her house. Hot dog.

  10

  Susan Silverman called me at my office at nine thirty the next morning.

  “I’ve found out about that commune,” she said.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  “It’s an old house in the woods back from Lowell Street near the Smithfield-Reading line.”

  “Can you tell me how to get there?”

  “I’ll take you.”

  “I was hoping you would. I’ll be out in an hour.”

  “Come to my office,” she said.

  “At the school?” I said.

  “Yes, what’s wrong?”

  “Mr. Moriarty might assault me with a ruler. I
don’t want to start up with no assistant principal.”

  “He probably won’t recognize you without your white raincoat,” she said. “The sun’s out.”

  “Okay,” I said, “I’ll run the risk.”

  It was sunny, and the first hint of a New England fall murmured behind the sunshine. Warm enough for the top down on my convertible. Cold enough for a pale denim jacket. I drank a large paper cup of black coffee on the way and finished it just before I got to the Smithfield cutoff.

  I found a space in the high school parking lot and went in.

  The receptionist in the guidance office was in brown knit today and displaying a lot of cleavage. I admired it. She wasn’t Susan Silverman, but she wasn’t Lassie either, and there was little to be gained in elitist thinking.

  Susan Silverman came out of her office with a red, blue, and green striped blazer on.

  “I’ll be back in about half an hour, Carla,” she said to the redhead and to me. “Why don’t we take my car? It’ll be easier than giving you directions.”

  I said, “Okay,” and we went out of the office and down a school corridor I hadn’t walked before. But it was a school corridor. The smell of it and the long rows of lockers and the tone of repressed energy were like they always were. The guidance setup was different, though. Guidance counseling in my school meant the football coach banged your head against a locker and told you to shape up.

  Susan Silverman said, “Were you looking down the front of my secretary’s dress when I came out?”

  “I was looking for clues,” I said. “I’m a professional investigator.”

  She said, “Mmmm.”

  We went out a side door to the parking lot. Behind it the lawn stretched green to a football field ringed with new-looking bleachers and past that a line of trees. There was a group of girls in blue gym shorts and gold T-shirts playing field hockey under the eye of a lean tan woman in blue warm-up pants and a white polo shirt with a whistle in her mouth.

  “Gym class?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  Susan’s car was a two-year-old Nova. I opened the door for her, and she slipped into the seat, tucking her blue skirt under her.

  We drove out of the parking lot, turned left toward the center of town, and then right on Main Street and headed north.

  “How’d you locate this place so quickly?”

  “I collected a favor,” she said, “from a girl in school.”

  We turned left off Main Street and headed east. The road was narrow, and the houses became sparser. Most of the road was through woods, and it seemed incredible that we were but fifteen miles from Boston and in the northern reaches of a megalopolis that stretched south through Richmond, Virginia. On my right was a pasture with black and white Ayrshire cows grazing behind a stone wall piled without benefit of mortar. Then more woods, mostly elm trees with birch trees gleaming through occasionally and a smattering of white pine.

  “It’s along here somewhere,” she said.

  “What are we looking for?”

  “A dirt road on the left about a half mile past the cow pasture.”

  “There,” I said, “just before the red maple.”

  She nodded and turned in. It was a narrow road, rocky and humpbacked beneath the wheel ruts. Tree branches scraped the sides and roof of the car as we drove. Dogberry bushes clustered along the edge of the path. A lot of rust-colored rock outcroppings showed among the greenery, and waxy-looking green vines grew among them in the shade, putting forth tiny blue flowers. All that waxy green effort for that reticent little flower.

  We pulled around a bend about two hundred yards in and stopped. The land before us was cleared and might once have been a lawn. Now it was an expanse of gravel spattered with an occasional clump of weeds, some of which, coarse and sparse-leafed, looked waist-high. Behind one clump was a discarded bicycle on its back, its wheelless forks pointing up. The scavenged shell of a 1937 Hudson Terraplane rusted quietly at the far edge of the clearing. The remnants of a sidewalk, big squares of cracked cement, heaved and buckled by frost, led up to a one-story house. Once, when it was newly built, an enthusiastic real estate broker might have listed it as a contemporary bungalow. It was a low ranch built on a slab. The siding was asphalt shingle faded now to a pale green. A peak over the front door had been vertically paneled with natural planks, and a scalloped molding, showing traces of pink paint, ran across the front. Attached to the house was a disproportionate cinder block carport, partly enclosed, as if the owner had given up and moved out in mid-mortar. From the carport came the steady whine of a gasoline engine. Not a car, maybe a generator. I saw no utility wires running in from the road.

  A narrow mongrel bitch, about knee-high, with pendulous dugs, burrowed in an overturned trash barrel near the front door. A plump brown-haired girl of maybe fourteen sat on the front steps. She had big dark eyes that looked even bigger and darker in contrast with her white, doughy face. She had on a white T-shirt, blue dungarees with a huge flare at the bottom, and no shoes. She was eating a Twinkie and in her right hand held an open can of Coke and a burning filter tip cigarette. She looked at us without expression as we got out of the car and started up the walk.

  “I don’t like it here,” Susan Silverman said.

  “That’s the trouble with you urban intellectuals,” I said. “You have no sense of nature’s subtle rhythms.”

  The girl finished her Twinkie as we reached her and washed it down with the rest of the Coke.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  She looked at me without expression, inhaled most of her filter tip cigarette, and without taking it from her mouth, let the smoke out through her nose. Then she yelled, “Vic.”

  The screen door behind her scraped open—one hinge was loose—and out he came. Susan Silverman put her hand on my arm.

  “You were right,” I said. “He is unusual, isn’t he?”

  Vic Harroway was perhaps five ten, three inches shorter than I, and twenty pounds heavier Say, 215. He was a body builder, but a body builder gone mad. He embodied every excess of body building that an adolescent fantasy could concoct. His hair was a bright cheap blond, cut straight across the forehead in a Julius Caesar shag. The muscles in his neck and chest were so swollen his skin looked as if it would burst over them. There were stretch marks pale against his dark tan where the deltoid muscles drape over the shoulder and stretch marks over his biceps and in the rigid valley between his pectoral muscles. His abdominal muscles looked like cobblestones. The white shorts were slit up the side to accommodate his thigh muscles. They too showed stretch marks. My stomach contracted at the amount of effort he’d expended, the number of weights he’d lifted to get himself in this state.

  He said, “What do you turds want?” Down home hospitality.

  I said, “We’re looking for Walden Pond, you glib devil you.”

  “Well there ain’t no Walden Pond around here, so screw.”

  “I just love the way your eyes snap when you’re angry,” I said.

  “If you came out here looking for trouble, you’re gonna find it, Jack. Take your slut and get your ass out of here, or I’ll bend you into an earring.”

  I looked at Susan Silverman. “Slut?” I said.

  Harroway said, “That’s right. You don’t like it? You want to make something out of it?” He jumped lightly off the steps and landed in front of me, maybe four feet away, slightly crouched. I could feel Susan Silverman lean back, but she didn’t step back. A point for her. A point for me too, because as Harroway landed I brought my gun out, and as he went into his crouch he found himself staring into its barrel. I held it straight out in front of me, level with his face.

  “Let’s not be angry with each other, Vic. Let us reason together,” I said.

  “What the hell is this? What do you want?”

  “I am looking for a boy named Kevin Bartlett. I came out here to ask if you’d seen him.”

  “I don’t know anybody named Kevin Bartlett.”

  “Ho
w about the young lady,” I asked, still looking at Harroway. “Do you know Kevin Bartlett?”

  “No.” I heard a match strike and smelled the cigarette smoke as she lit up. Imperturbable.

  The generator in the garage whined on. The dog had found a bone and was crunching on it vigorously. There was color on Harroway’s cheekbones; he looked as if he had a fever. I was stymied. I wanted to search the place, but I didn’t want to turn my back on Harroway. I didn’t want to have to herd him and the girl around with me. I didn’t want Susan out of my sight. I was trespassing, which bothered me a bit. And I had no reason not to believe them. I didn’t know who might be in the house or behind it or in the garage.

  “If at first you don’t succeed,” I said to Susan Silverman, “the hell with it. Come on.”

  We backed down the sidewalk to her car and got in. Harroway never took his eyes off me as we went. Susan U-turned on the lawn, and we drove away. Another point for Susan. She didn’t spin gravel getting out of there.

  She didn’t say anything, but I noticed her knuckles were white on the steering wheel. When we got back to Main Street, she pulled over to the side of the road and stopped.

  “I feel sick,” she said. She kept her hands on the wheel and stared straight ahead. She was shivering as if it were cold. “My God, what a revolting creature he was. My God! Like a … like a rhinoceros or something. A kind of impenetrable brutality.”

  I put a hand on her shoulder and didn’t say anything.

  We sat maybe two minutes that way. Then she put the car in gear again. “I’m okay,” she said.

  “I’ll say.”

  “What do you think?” she said. “Did you learn anything?”

  I shrugged. “I learned where that place is and what Vic Harroway is like. I don’t know if Kevin is there or not.”

  “It seemed like an unpleasant experience for nothing,” she said.

  “Well, that’s my line of work. I go look at things and see what happens. If they were lying, maybe they will do some things because I went there today. Maybe they will make a mistake. The worst thing in any case is when nothing is happening. It’s like playing tennis: you just keep returning the ball until somebody makes a mistake. Then you see.”