Ceremony (2 page)

"Sure," I said. "You shouldn't add the scallions at the same time you do the potatoes. By the time the potatoes are done the scallions will be burned." Susan smiled at me. "Why don't you take a flying fuck at a rolling donut," she said.

I handed her the wine. "Do I hear you saying you can get on okay without my instruction?" I said. She stirred the potatoes and scallions around with a spatula.

"Only your body," she said, "is indispensable."

"Everyone tells me that," I said.

"I assume you can find April," Susan said.

"Does a cat have an ass?" I said.

"Ah, the poetry of it," Susan said, "the pure pleasure of your discourse."

"But," I said.

"Yes," Susan said, "I know. But once you find her, then what?"

"I would guess that if she'll come home with me, she won't stay."

"I don't know," Susan said. "It depends on too many things. On what her options are, how bad it has been in Boston. How bad it is at home. Perhaps if you bring her back she'll run away to someplace better."

"There are a lot of places better," I said, "than Harry Kyle's house." Susan and I ate her potato and scallion omelet and drank two bottles of Great Western champagne with it. The scallions were a little overcooked, but I managed to down two portions and four hot biscuits that Susan had made from a package.

"Domestic champagne," I said.

"I don't use Dom P6rignon as a table wine," she said.

"The sparkle from your eyes is all I need, honey bunny," I said.

"How much trouble is she in," Susan said, "if she really is a streetwalker?"

"In terms of whores," I said, "it's unskilled labor, the pay is lousy, the clientele is not top drawer. You gotta turn a lot of tricks to make any money, and a pimp usually takes most of it."

"Is she in physical danger?"

"Sure." I buttered another biscuit and put on a small dab of boysenberry jam. "It's not inevitable, but some of your clients could be uncivilized."

Susan sipped at her champagne. We were eating in the kitchen, but Susan had put candles on the table, and the moving light from them made her face seem animated even in repose. It was the most interesting face I'd ever seen. It never looked quite the same, as if the planes of it shifted minutely after each expression—-even when she slept she seemed to radiate force.

"However gratifying it may be to flaunt at her parents," Susan said, "ultimately it must make you feel like somebody's rag toy."

"I imagine," I said.

"The best we can do is find her," Susan said. "Once we've done that, we'll worry about what to do with her."

"Okay."

"You shouldn't do it for nothing."

I shrugged. "Maybe she can split her earnings with me," I said.

I was sitting in the front seat of a Smithfield patrol car talking to a cop named Cataldo. We were cruising along Main Street with the windshield wipers barely keeping up with a cold, hard rain. As he drove, Cataldo's eyes moved back and forth from one side to the other. It was always the same, I thought-big cities, little towns mops were cops, and when they'd been cops for very long, they looked both ways all the time.

"Kid's hot stuff," Cataldo said. "Queen of the burnouts. I've hauled her home four, five times now, puking drunk. Usually the old lady will take her in and clean her up and get her into bed so the old man won't know."

"During the day'?"

"Sometimes-sometimes middle of the afternoon, sometimes later at night. Sometimes one of us will find her on some back road five miles from anywhere and pick her up and bring her home."

"She get left?" I said.

Cataldo slowed and looked at a parked car and then moved on. "She never says, but I'd say so. Some guys pick her up in the old man's car, take her for a ride, get their ashes hauled, and drop her off."

"Guys?"

"Yeah, sure-queen of the gang bang, that's old April."

"She always drunk?" I said.

Cataldo took a right. "Nope. Sometimes she's stoned. Sometimes she's neither, sometimes she's just goddamned crazy," he said.

"High on life."

"Yeah."

The houses on either side of the street were set among trees and their yards were broad. In the driveways were Volvo station wagons and Volkswagen Rabbits, here and there a Mercedes sedan. Only occasionally a Chevy Caprice or a Buick Skylark. Smithfield was not obsessive about buying American.

"You ever have to bust her?"

Cataldo shook his head. "I don't think there's a town ordinance against gang bangs. If there is, we don't enforce it. We've brought her in a couple of times for failing to disperse when ordered but, christ, we don't even have a matron full time. Her mother always comes down."

"How's the kid act when you pick her up?" I said.

Cataldo swung into the curving drive in front of the high school. In the faculty lot to the right I could see Susan's Bronco, looming like a rhinoceros above the Datsuns and Chevettes. The school was mid-sixties red brick, square and graceless. One of the glass doors in the entry had been shattered, and a piece of plywood closed the gap. Susan had moved up from the junior high school when someone retired. No more eighth graders she had said at the time, and two years later she showed no regrets. Susan doing high school guidance had always seemed to me like Greta Garbo co-starring with Dean Jones.

"Mostly depends on how drunk or stoned or whatever, you know. If she was drunk she'd be abusive, if she was stoned she'd be sort of quiet and not with it-go-aheadarrest-me-I-don't-give-a-shit sort of attitude. If she was sober, she'd be sullen and tough and smoke cigarettes in the corner of her mouth." "She have any boyfriends?"

Cataldo drove on out of the driveway of the high school and we cruised across the street into a development of high-priced homes.

"April." He grinned. "She has several at a time, usually for half an hour in the back seat of Dad's Buick."

"Besides that?"

He shook his head. "No. She hangs on the wall with Hummer a lot, but no dating or that crap." He looked over at me for a moment. "You got to understand these kids, Spenser. Having a boyfriend just isn't something you ask about kids like her. You know? I mean, she don't go down to the fucking malt shop either."

"You got a malt shop in this town?"

"No." Behind the lifeless November lawns, merged one into the next, the new colonial houses gleamed in the rain, expensive variations of the same architectural plan like the Kyles' furniture on a larger scale, a neighborhood set: grand, functional, costly, neatly organized, and as charming as a set of dentures. It made me think fondly of L.A. In L.A. there was room for lunacy.

"If you were going to look for her, where would you start?" I said.

Cataldo shrugged, "Boston, I suppose. She's not around town. Or at least I haven't seen her in the last few days. Usually kids take off from here, they go to Boston."

"Anyplace special?"

"In Boston, how the hell do I know? That's your area, man. I get in maybe twice a year for a Sox game."

"Why do you think she acts like she does?" I said.

Cataldo laughed. "Before I got on the cops I worked ten years as a roofer. What the hell do I know about why she acts that way? She's a goddamned creep, like a lot of the kids in this town."

"How about Hummer and his group-can you get me in touch with them, would they know where she went?"

"I can put you in touch. They won't tell you shit. Hummer's the worst creep in town."

"Bad kid?"

Again Cataldo shrugged. "Yeah-bad in the wrong way, you know?"

We turned down a hill and took a right. The rain came steady and cold against the windshield and rattled on the roof of the car. "When I was a kid we were bad-a lot of guys I grew up with are in the joint. But they were bad for a reason. They stole stuff because they wanted money. Or they got in fights because somebody insulted their sister or made a pass at their girl or came onto their turf, you know? These kids sneak around and break Coke machines and trash the school windows or set fire to. some guy's store-for what? Prove how tough they are. Shit. Toughest kid in this town would get his ass kicked by one of the pom-pom girls in East Boston." He shook his head. "They don't know how to act. It's like they never learned about how to act, about how a guy is supposed to act."

We were near the south edge of town now. Across the street a gas station, a bowling alley, and a small cluster of stores. The gas station was one that sold gas only. Correct change or credit cards after 6 P.m. The bowling alley had been converted from something else. There were kids leaning against the front wall under the marquee out of the rain, collars turned up, smoking with cigarettes cupped in their hands.

"The one with the fur collar," Cataldo said, "and the boots half laced?"

"Yeah."

"That's Hummer," he said.

"Why don't you swing down back and drop me off, and I'll stroll over and talk with him."

"He'll give you some shit," Cataldo said. "Want me along?"

I shook my head. "My line of work," I said, "taking shit."

Cataldo nodded. "Me too," he said.

Hummer looked about seventeen. He must have spent a half hour getting his look right before he came downtown to hang out. His pale tan Timberland boots were carefully half laced and the cuffs of the jeans were carefully caught inside the loose uppers. Despite the cold rain, his bombardier jacket was open, the fur collar up, the collar of his plaid shirt turned up inside the jacket collar. There were, three other boys and two girls with Hummer. They were all dressed with the same careful pretense of sloppiness. Suburban tough. I always figured I could take a guy wearing eighty-dollar boots and a crocodile on his sweater, but that's probably just a form of prejudice. On the other hand, I was wearing a leather trench coat with epaulets and a belt. I felt like Joel McCrea in Foreign Correspondent.

I said, "You Hummer?" He looked up at me slowly, took a drag on his cupped cigarette, and said, "Who wants to know?"

"Now there you go," I said. "You've been watching Starsky and Hutch again and stealing all their good lines."

Hummer said, "Yeah."

And I said, "Yeah, you're Hummer? Or yeah, you been watching Starsky and Hutch?"

"What's it to you?"

I looked at one of the girls-she was slim and blond and wore high-heeled black boots and tapered jeans and a down vest over a black turtleneck sweater. She had a plaid umbrella folded up, and she leaned on it like a cane. "This is slow going, isn't it?" I said.

She shrugged and said, "Maybe."

Two of the boys looked at each other and snickered. I never cared much for being snickered at. I took a slow breath. "I'm trying to locate April Kyle-man any of you help me on that?"

"April May," the girl with the umbrella said.

"April will," one of the snickerers said, and they all laughed without letting it really out.

"Whyn't you get lost, man?" Hummer said. "We ain't got nothing to say about April."

"Hummer," I said, "just because you haven't had your growth spurt yet doesn't mean you're too little to hit."

"You hit me, and my old man will sue your ass," Hummer said.

"I imagine so," I said. "Any of you care if April Kyle's in trouble?"

"What kind of trouble?"

"Grown-up trouble," I said. "She's got herself in- volved with people who will beat her up for a dollar and kill her for five." "How do you know?" It was the girl with the umbrella talking.

I thought about it for a minute. April's reputation didn't have anything to lose. "She's tricking," I said, "in the Combat Zone. That means a pimp, that means the real possibility of abuse, maybe dying."

"I told her she should stop doing it free," Hummer said.

"You start her hooking?" I said. I was looking straight into his face.

"Hey, man, no way. I just used to kid her, is all. She got into trouble, she done it on her own."

"You got any idea where she's living?"

"You a cop?" the umbrella girl said.

"I know it's corny as hell," I said, "but I'm a private eye. Couldn't you tell by my leather trench coat?"

"How do we know that?" Hummer said.

"Besides the leather trench coat? I could show you my license. One of your buddies could read it to you."

One of the other boys said, "Hey, you cant' a gun?"

"Knowing I was going to talk with you toughies, I thought I'd better."

"What kind you got?"

"Smith and Wesson," I said. "Detective special." I'd found a subject that interested them. "Thirty-eight caliber. Sam Spade autograph model."

"Hey, lemme see it," the kid said.

"No. I'm not here to play guns. I'm trying to find out how to get hold of April Kyle."

"She had a friend in Boston," the umbrella girl said. "Hey, I said we're not telling him nothing," Hummer said. "That goes for you too, Michelle." I took hold of Hummer's upper arm with my right hand and squeezed it. He tried to flex up his biceps to counteract me, but I was much stronger than he was. From the feel of his upper arm a lot of people were.

"Hummer," I said, "be quiet."

He tried to yank his arm away. I tightened the squeeze a little more. The fixed expression of tolerant superiority began to dissolve. What replaced it looked a lot like discomfort.

"What's the friend's name?" I said to Michelle.

"Come on, man," Hummer said. He pulled at my grip with his free hand.

"You mind if I discuss the name of April's friend?" I said.

He kept working on my grip without much progress. I squeezed a little more.

"Ow, man, shit-you're busting my goddamned arm."

"You mind if Michelle tells me stuff?"

"No, ow, no, go ahead, man-tell him, Michelle-let go."

I eased up on the squeeze, but still held his arm.

"Michelle?"

"Amy Gurwitz," she said. "She used to live here, but she moved to Boston."

"Parents move?"

"No, just her. They threw her out."

"Address?"

"I don't know."

Hummer was trying to tug his arm loose.

"Anybody else?" I said.

All of them were silent. The arm squeeze had scared them. I had the secret to dealing with the difficult teen years. Violate their civil rights a little. Cause some pain. Bully them a bit. No such thing as a bad boy.