Ceremony (15 page)

"You got it," McNeely said, and let the rubber band slip off his fingers and skitter across the desktop. "I'll be waiting to hear from you."

I nodded and got up, and Belson and I walked out of the squad room.

"Lovable," I said to Belson as we walked to the elevator.

"Nicest guy in the vice squad," Belson said.

The elevator came and I went down. It was cold on Berkeley Street. As I walked the three blocks from Police Headquarters to my office the wind was blowing grit around and doing a good job of penetrating my leather trench coat. If I zipped in the pile lining, then the coat was too small. One of those life choices that remind us of reality. Tight or cold. Maybe I should get a new coat. Something to make me look like a young Robert Mitchum. The choices in size 48 were fairly narrow, however. Maybe a young Guinn "Big Boy" William would be enough.

I sat in my office with my chair swiveled around and looked out the window. I could see a portion of Boylston Street from this position. If I stood up I could look down onto Berkley Street. On windy days like this I usually liked to stand and look down and watch the skirts swirl on the young women who worked in the insurance companies. But today I was too busy trying to think of what to do about April Kyle when we busted Poitras. She was unlikely to go home, and if she went she was unlikely to stay, and if she stayed it was unlikely to do her any good. Susan said there were some social service organizations that might take her, but what experience I had with them was not encouraging.

Across the street the young art director with the black hair and the good hips was leaning on her drawing board looking out the window. Our eyes met. She grinned and waved. I waved back. We had never met and our relationship was conducted solely through windows across a busy street. Maybe when I got my new coat… The more I thought about April the more I didn't know what to do with her.

Susan was breathing down my neck about Poitras. She was tougher minded, sometimes. To keep Poitras away from next year's crop of burnouts she'd let April go. She was right, of course. The greatest good for the greatest number. Democracy. Western civilization. Humanism. A working definition of ethical behavior.

The mail came through the letter slot. I got up and picked it off the floor. There was nothing in it I wanted to read. I threw it away unopened. I stood at the window with my hands in my hip pockets and looked down into the street. The wind was swirling newspapers and Big Mac wrappers around, but almost all the women from the insurance companies were wearing pants. Why doesn't the breeze excite me? I walked across the room and leaned my forearms on my file cabinet and my chin on my forearms. Why didn't I know any nuns? A strong-willed, smiling sister with a sense of humor who looked like Celeste Holm. Sister Flanagan's Girls Town. She ain't heavy, she's my sister. Where the hell is the woman's movement when you need it? I didn't know any nuns. I didn't even know any priests. I knew some pimps and some leg breakers and some cops and some junkies and some whores and a few madams. Actually I knew one madam.

I could hear the faint chatter of a typewriter from somewhere down the hall and the occasional ping of the steam pipes in my office. I could hear traffic sounds, muffled by the closed window, and in the corridor a pair of high-heeled shoes tapped briskly past my office door.

I knew a madam in New York named Patricia Utley. Or I used to. I straightened up and pulled out the second file drawer in the cabinet. I found a manila folder marked Rabb, in about the right alphabetical sequence, and took it out and brought it to my desk. I riffled through the details of some business I'd done about seven years ago. On a piece of note paper from a Holiday Inn was Patricia Utley's name and address and phone number. I put the file back and sat down at my desk again and called Patricia Utley's number.

A man's voice answered. I asked for Ms. Utley. The voice asked who was calling and I told him. The line clicked on to hold and in maybe thirty seconds I heard her voice.

"Spenser?" she said.

"You remember, then?"

"Yes," she said. "Summer, 1975. I remember quite clearly."

I said, "I owe you a favor and this isn't going to be it. This is going to be a request for another favor." "Um-hum."

"Are you still in business?" I said.

"Yes."

"I'd like you to meet a young woman I know. She's interested in a career," I said.

"Are you working on commission?" Patricia Utley's voice sounded as if she were smiling.

"No." "Well, I must say it's a surprising request coming from the man I remember, but yes. I would talk with her…

"Okay," I said. "I don't know exactly when. I'm working on that, but soon. I'll call ahead."

"Certainly," she said. "Have things worked out for the young woman we once had mutual interest in seven years ago?"

"Yes," I said.

"Good," she said. "I'll look forward to seeing you soon."

We hung up and I sat back and thought some more.

"You're going to encourage her to be a whore?" Susan said. We were at my place, with a fire going, sitting on the couch with our feet on the coffee table.

"It's all she wants to do," I said. "At least with Patricia Utley she'll be a high-class whore."

There was feta cheese and fresh Syrian bread and Kalamata olives and cherry tomatoes and green pepper rings and smoked kielbasa from Karl's Sausage Kitchen on a large platter between our feet. We had opened a bottle of new Beaujolais.

Susan drank some wine. "You are an original thinker," she said. "I'll give you that."

"Give me a better choice," I said.

"There are agencies to deal with this sort of thing."

"Uh-huh. Or maybe a nice foster home?"

"Perhaps," Susan said. "Often either of those choices is a good one for a child." I always knew when she was speaking professionally. Her language became more formal.

"We did consider the possibility that being a whore offered her more than she was used to getting."

"Yes," Susan said, "but only in comparison to her home life, to the sterility of her parents and their expectations and the conventional town that reiterated those expectations. Life in Smithfield is not easy unless you are nearly interchangeable with everyone else. Especially in the public schools."

"Maybe being a whore in fact is better than being a whore to the expectations of your neighborhood," I said.

Susan shook her head.

"Let me call some people in Youth Services," she said.

"Sure," I said. "Want me to ask Poitras for some names?"

Susan shook her head again and frowned. "`Not fair," she said. "There are lots of good people out there. Poitras doesn't represent them all."

"I know," I said. "I guess I am just dysfunctional about institutional solutions."

We were quiet. I spat an olive pit into the fireplace. It made a barely audible sizzle. I drank some Beaujolais. Then I made a small triangular sandwich out of a piece of Syrian bread and some cheese, with a pepper ring, one cherry tomato, and an olive. I pitted the olive before I slipped it into the sandwich. The proportions are the secret in eating feta cheese and raw vegetables. I sampled the sandwich. Too much cheese obliterated the other flavors. I ate it anyway. Plenty of time to experiment, plenty of time to get it right. I ate some sausage. Susan was swirling the wine about in her glass and watching the small turbulence she'd created.

"Distaste," I said, "is our automatic response to prostitution. It's almost impossible for us to think about it beyond deploring it, you know?"

I poured a little more wine in my glass.

"Yes," Susan said. "I know. I suppose if you do think about it beyond the normal assumptions you have to recognize that prostitution is not a single experience."

"No," I said. "It isn't. There's lots of kinds of prostitution. Metaphorically the kinds are almost limitless. Everyone who does things for money instead of pride, I suppose."

Susan smiled at me. "Didn't I see you building a cabin out by a pond in Concord the other day?"

"Uncle Henry," I said. "Not me. He was always a little dippy, Henry was."

The wine was gone. I got another bottle. Beaujolais is new but once a year.

"But even not metaphorically, prostitution is more than. one experience. Some kid doing twenty, thirty tricks a night in hallways and cars isn't having the same experience that someone has who performs once an evening in a good hotel."

"I suppose someone might argue that the acts were morally the same," Susan said.

"Ah, Suze, you're toying with me. We both know what we both think about that."

"I know," Susan said, "I just like to hear how you'll put it."

"Her morality is her business. My business is to get her free so she can take care of her business." "And you think setting her up with a high-priced madam in New York is the way?"

"I think it's possible. I think she has a right to be a whore if she wants to .be. Just like she has the right to stop if she wants to."

"But do you have the right to make the opportunity easy for her?"

"Yes."

"To be a whore?"

"Yes. If she likes the work. I have no business telling her she's not supposed to like it."

"Would you feel the same way about heroin?" Susan said.

"No. I know heroin is destructive to her. I know no such thing about the right kind of whoring."

The fire hissed and a slow bubble of sap oozed from one end of a log. I tried less cheese and two rings of green pepper in my next sandwich.

"I think you're wrong," Susan said. "I think in the long run selling yourself, rather than your product, is destructive. I guess I'm willing to say that metaphorically as well as literally."

"Maybe we're just choosing which kind of destructive experience to offer her," I said.

"Maybe we are," Susan said.

Hawk wanted in.

"I want to see what this dude Poitras is like, babe," he said. "Always admired that streak of intellectual curiosity in you, Hawk."

"Only go this way, one time," Hawk said.

Susan and I sat side by side on one side of the table and Hawk sat across. We were on top of the Hyatt Regency Hotel on the Cambridge side of the Charles. The room rotated very slowly, and you got a grandiloquent view of Boston half the time.

Susan had a large pina colada with fruit in it and was sipping it sparingly through a straw. It looked good, but I was embarrassed to order one. I had beer. Hawk had a pina colada. Nothing embarrassed him.

"It would be easier with two," Susan said. "And he has been in it from the start. He's got a right to be in at the finish."

"See that," Hawk said. "Suze know. Except for who she hang around with she got a lot of style."

"That's not why he wants to help bust Poitras," I said to Susan. "He's got as much curiosity as a parsnip. He wants to be there to remind Tony Marcus that he's in it with me."

"Which will make Marcus more likely to keep his word," Susan said.

"Yes."

She reached over and patted the top of his motionless hands where they rested beside his glass. "What a darling man you are," Susan .said, her face serious. "Some of my best friends are black." Hawk burst out laughing. Several people turned their heads in mild annoyance and turned them quickly back.

"You like all honky broads," Hawk said. "Sentimental."

Then they both giggled.

"When you get through with the interracial humor," I said, "I have a goddamned plan."

"We listening," Hawk said.

"Okay, when I burgled Poitras's pad…"

"Sexist whitey goyim," Susan murmured, and the two of them got hysterical. "Always talking at us minorities," Hawk gasped. And they giggled even more. I put my chin in my hand and watched them. They were like grade-school kids who had started laughing at something innocuous and then couldn't stop. It was the only time I could recall Hawk out of control about anything. In fact, Susan was the only person I'd ever seen toward whom he showed anything but pleasant disinterest.

I tried twice again before they finally got it under control.

"When I burgled Poitras's pad, I copped a set of keys and had duplicates made," I said. Susan was staring at me with her elbows on the table and both hands pressed against her mouth and her eyes moist.

"Um-hum," she said. Her shoulders shook.

"Christ," I said. "Did George Patton have to deal with Amos and Andrea? We'll go over tonight and walk in unannounced." I said it in a rush.

Hawk nodded.

"And we'll send April out with Susan, and Amy Gurwitz if she wants to go.

Then we check that the dirty movies are still there for evidence and call the cops. Can you handle April, Suze, even if she doesn't want to go?"

She had it under control now. "I think so. If not, Hawk can help me."

"If he's not too busy doing his Pigmeat Markham impressions," I said.

"I bring a stick," he said. " 'Case she get vicious."

"Okay, let's drink up and do it," I said.

"Just like that?" Susan said.

"If it's to be done," I said.

"And April?" Susan said.

"You keep her in the car, and after the cops come, we'll take her back to my place and talk." I shrugged. "It's the best I can think of."

"It's the best I can think of too," Susan said.

We paid the check and went down in the elevator. Susan and I had come in her Bronco. Hawk had met us there. We decided to go in the Bronco and left Hawk's Jaguar in the parking garage.

It was dark, and the lights of Boston across the Charles made elegant starry patterns against the hard early-winter blackness. We crossed the river on the B.U. bridge and Susan turned left onto Commonwealth at the NO LEFT TURN Sign.

"Lawless," I said.

"It's a dumb rule," Susan said. "There's no reason not to turn left there."

"That's true," I said.

Boston University had us surrounded as we drove down Commonwealth.

"Commanding architectural integrity," Susan said as we passed through.

"Better-looking than some Burger Kings," Hawk said.

In Kenmore Square the punk rockers and the college kids were feasting on pizza and subs and hot dogs and doughnuts and cheeseburgers and thick shakes and beer, and being cool. Beyond Kenmore, Commonwealth Avenue became more sedate, and after we dipped under Mass. Ave. it became positively haughty. The wide mall in the middle of Commonwealth Avenue runs flat and straight between Kenmore Square and the Public Garden. There are trees and benches in the mall and on pleasant summer days there are kids and dogs and couples, joggers, and roller skaters and Frisbee players in sufficient number to make things seem lively. Now in the dark three weeks before Christmas it was empty and cold and still.