God Save the Child (14 page)

“Oh, Spenser,” she said, “I’d like you to meet Doctor Croft.” I said, “We met briefly. How are you, Doctor Croft?”

He smiled and put out his hand. “Ray,” he said. “Good to see you again.”

We shook hands. His fingers were very long and showed the marks of a manicurist. They thickened at the ends.

“What’s your specialty?” I asked.

“General practice.” Again the big brilliant smile. When he smiled, the lines around his mouth became very pronounced. “I’m a specialist in general practice. It’s what medicine is about, I believe. People to people. Is Mrs. Silverman here with you?”

“Yes.” I phrased a remark about hip touchers but thought it would be immature to make it. So I didn’t.

“I understand you’re a detective.”

“Yes.”

“I understand you kicked Vaughn Meadows through a screen a little while ago.” His wide mouth was almost lipless, and when he smiled he looked less like an Arabian horse and more like a shark.

“Mistaken identity,” I said.

“That’s okay,” he said. “Vaughn Meadows would be a far better person if someone would give him a kick in the ass about weekly.” His smile shut off, and a serious frown replaced it. “It’s a terrible sequence of things that has befallen this family.”

I nodded. Susan said, “Isn’t it? The Bartletts seem so resilient, though. They keep bearing up.”

“How about the boy?” Croft asked. “Is there any trace of him?”

I shook my head. “Haven’t been able to look for him lately. I’ve had to stick around his mom.”

Croft rattled the ice cubes in his glass. “Looks like I’m empty,” he said. “Excuse me while I fix myself a new one.

Getting through one of these parties sober is more than I could do.” He bared his brilliant shark smile again and then closed it off like a trap shutting and went to the kitchen.

“He appeared to be patting you on the hip,” I said.

“That’s why you came over.” Susan smiled and shook her head. “Were you prepared to defend my virtue?”

“I’m in pursuit of it myself, and I don’t like poachers.”

“He’s a very big man in this town,” Susan said. “Board of Selectmen, Conservation Commission, adviser to the Board of Health, used to be Planning Board chairman. All the best people have him when they’re sick.”

“He’s a hip patter,” I said.

“Very wealthy,” she said. “Very big house.”

“Pushy bastard,” I said.

“I wonder what it is in women,” she said. “Whenever they find a big strong guy with a wide adolescent streak running through him, they get a powerful urge to hold his head in their laps.”

“Right here?” I said.

“About now I think we could probably marry and raise a family here without anyone noticing.”

She was right. It looked like a Busby Berkeley production of Dante’s Inferno. To my left in the dining room the food was scattered on the table and floor. The platters were nearly empty, and the tablecloth was stained and littered with potato salad, cole slaw, miniature meatballs, tomato sauce, mustard, ham scraps, ring tabs, ashes, and things unrecognizable. The detritus of jollity.

The hockey coach had departed, but his buddy remained, red-eyed and nearly motionless, in his oversized right hand a can of beer, and a platoon, perhaps a company, of its dead companions in silent formation on the highboy beside him.

His wife was speaking sharply to him with no effect.

Marge Bartlett was back on the couch between two of the business types in the razor-styled haircuts and the double knit suits. She was talking thickly, her mouth loose and wet, an iceless drink in her right hand, her left rubbing the thigh of one of the men. As she talked, the two men exchanged grins behind her head, and one of them rolled his eyes upward and stuck his tongue out of the left corner of his mouth.

“I’m a very nice person,” she was saying. It came out “nishe pershon.”

“Hey Marge,” one of the business types said, “you know the definition of a nice girl?”

“One who puts it in for you,” I murmured to Susan.

“I know,” she said. “It’s a very old joke.”

“One that puts it in for you,” the business type answered his own question, and both men laughed very loudly.

Marge Bartlett looked puzzled, a look I’d seen before.

She took a slug from her glass.

Roger Bartlett had gone to bed. The good-looking guy who ran confidence courses seemed to be running one in the oversized chair in the corner with a woman I hadn’t seen before. There was a flash of bare thigh and lingerie as they moved about.

“Maybe I will take that guy’s confidence seminar,” I said to Susan.

She looked and glanced away quickly. “Jesus,” she said, “I think I’m shocked.”

“I guess you don’t want to make reservations for the chair later on then?”

She shook her head. “That poor kid,” she said. “No wonder he’s gone.”

“Kevin?”

She nodded.

“You think he ran away?”

“Wouldn’t you,” she said, “if you lived here?”

“I’ve been thinking about it,” I said.

Marge Bartlett got to bed about four. I helped her up the stairs, and she stumbled into her bedroom in a kind of stupefied silence. The lights were on. Roger Bartlett was sleeping on his back with his mouth open. On the bureau a small color TV set flickered silently, the screen empty, a small barren buzz coming from it. Marge Bartlett moved painfully toward her twin bed. I closed the door, went to the guest room, undressed, and flopped on the bed. If I lived here, I might run away. The room was warm, and some of the smoke from downstairs had drifted up. But if the kid ran away, why the merry prankster kidnap gig? Why all that childish crap with the coffin? Maybe that was it. Childish. It was the kind of thing a kid would do. Why? “The little sonova bitch hates us,” Marge Bartlett had said. But Maguire, that wasn’t the kind of thing a kid would do. Or could do. Somebody had hit Maguire very hard. Where would the kid go if he ran away? Harroway’s place? He had something for Harroway, obviously. Harroway could hit somebody very hard. I fell asleep.

When I woke up it was ten o’clock. No one else was up. I stood for a long time under the shower before I got dressed.

Downstairs looked like the rape of Nanking. Everywhere there was the smell of stale cigarettes and booze and degenerating shrimp salad. Punkin appeared very pleased to see me and capered around my legs as I let him out the back door. The Smithfield police cruiser was parked in the driveway again. Ever vigilant. I found an electric percolator and made coffee. I brought a cup out to the cop in the driveway.

I hadn’t seen him before. He had freckles and looked about twenty-one. He was glad to get the coffee.

“You going to be here all day?” I asked.

“I’m on till three this afternoon, then someone else comes on.”

“Okay. I’m going to be gone for a while, so stay close. If they’re looking for me, tell them I’m working. Don’t let her go out alone, either.”

“If I have to take a leak, is it okay if I close the door?”

“Why don’t you wait till you’re off duty,” I said.

“Why don’t you go screw an onion,” he said.

There seemed little to say to that, so I moved off. The morning was glorious, or maybe it just seemed so in contrast to the situation indoors. The sky was a high bright blue with no clouds. The sun was bright, and the leaves had begun to turn. Some of the sugar maples scattered along Lowell Street were bright red already. There weren’t many cars out. Church or hangover, I thought. I found the turn for Harroway’s house, drove about a hundred yards beyond it, and pulled off on the side of the road.

If my mental map was right, I could cut across the woods and get a look at the house and grounds from a hill to the right of the road we’d driven in. It had been awhile since I took a walk in the woods, and the sense of it, alone and permanent, was strong as I moved through the fallen leaves as quietly as I could. I was dressed for stalking: Adidas sneakers, Levi’s jeans, a black turtleneck sweater, blue nylon warm-up jacket, thirty-eight caliber Smith and Wesson.

Kit Carson.

A swarm of starlings rose before me and swooped off to another part of the woods. Two sparrows chased a blue jay from a tree. High up a 747 heaved up toward California, drowning out the protests of the jay. There was low growth of white pine beneath the higher elms and maples, and thick tangles of thorny vines growing over a carpet of leaf mold that must have been two feet thick.

The land rose slowly but steadily enough so that I began to feel it in the tops of my thighs as I reached the crest. The hill down was considerably steepe, and the house was below in a kind of punch-bowl valley, a shabby building in a cleared patch of gravel and weeds among the encroaching trees.

The engine noise had been a generator. I could see it from here. There were five-gallon gasoline cans clustered around it, but it was silent at the moment. Conserving energy? Out of gas? A late model two-toned pink and gray Dodge Charger was parked, sleek and incongruous, behind the house. I looked at my watch. Twelve minutes past ten in the morning. Probably sleeping late out here on nature’s bosom.

I sat down and leaned against the base of a maple tree and watched. In the next two hours six more planes flew over.

Then about twelve fifteen the young girl I’d seen before came out with a big cardboard box, jammed it into a rusty perforated barrel, and set it ablaze. She had on, as far as I could tell, exactly what she’d been wearing before. White too-big T-shirt, wide-flared jeans, no shoes. Maybe she had ten outfits all the same. She paused to light a cigarette from the blaze and then went back inside. At twelve thirty the mongrel bitch came out and nosed around near the burning trash till she found a scrap of bone that hadn’t made it to the incinerator She rolled on it several times, then took it to the corner of the house and buried it.

At one twenty-two Kevin Bartlett came out of the house with Vic Harroway. The boy’s arm was around Harroway’s waist and Harroway’s arm was around the boy’s shoulder.

Like lovers. They walked to the Charger, separated. The boy got in the passenger’s side, Harroway got in the driver’s side, and they drove away. Just like that. They drove away, and I sat on my butt under the maple tree and watched them.

We never sleep. We just sit and watch.

I sat and watched for the rest of the day and into the night. They didn’t come back. I was beginning to hallucinate about cheeseburgers and cashew nuts by the time I gave up. It was after eleven when I headed back through the woods, stumbling more in the dark. Visions of pepper steaks danced in my head. When I got really hungry, I never thought about coq all vin or steak Diane. I wondered why that was, but I had trouble concentrating because I kept thinking about the American chop suey my mother used to make and how I felt after I had eaten it. It was a lot better than thinking how I’d found Kevin Bartlett and lost him in the space of say, fifteen seconds. By the time I got to my car, I had a long scratch across the back of one hand from the thorny vines, and one eye was tearing from a twig. That time of night is cold in September north of Boston, and I turned on the heater I found a place to eat that advertised itself as a “pub.” I think I was the only person there to eat. I jammed in at a stool at the bar and ordered three hamburgers and a beer The beer came in a big stein that must have held half a quart. I drank two before the hamburgers arrived with two slices of kosher dill pickle and a handful of potato chips on an oval platter It was a little hard to distinguish the hamburg from the bun, but I didn’t mind; I was busy trying not to break into a sweat as I ate. The place was obviously a singles spot or pickup bar. The sound system was up full blast and featured high velocity hard rock music without interruption. All the booths and tables were filled, with people, mostly subthirty, standing together in between them and moving but barely on a very small dance floor. It was dim and very smoky. The decor was standard: dark panels, red carpet, psuedobarn. I was jostled often as I ate, once while drinking, and the beer dribbled down my chin and soaked through my stalking sweater A bartender in a red Ike jacket and a mod blond haircut put a bowl of peanuts in front of me and refilled my beer glass.

I sipped at it now that the beast within had been pacified.

At least I knew that Kevin’s stay with Harroway was voluntary. They liked each other Maybe stronger. That was apparent from the hillside. Almost like lovers. His parents would be relieved at least that he was safe. But that didn’t do anything for explanation. Or maybe it did. Maybe it made the explanation worse. Maybe Kevin was in on all that stuff. Maybe he was in on the death threats. Maybe he was in on Maguire’s death. Good news and bad news, Mr and Mrs. Bartlett, your kid’s not dead. He’s a murderer.

Which is the good news you say? How the hell do I know?

If I knew that kind of stuff, would I be sitting alone in a singles bar in a strange suburb at twelve thirty-five on a Sunday night? I’m a detective; I just find out things. I don’t solve things. Well no, I don’t know where your boy is right this minute, ma’am. Yes, sir, they drove away while I was up on the hill watching. I watched closely, though. Balls.

The next guy that jostled me while I was drinking beer I was going to level. Trouble was the place was so crowded if I swung at someone, I’d hit three people. I got up and shoved my way out of the pub. I couldn’t stand the thought of going back to the Bartletts’. I drove on into Boston and went to bed in my own apartment. I took the phone off the hook, went right to sleep, and didn’t dream.

I woke up about twenty minutes of ten within the bright tangible silence of my bedroom. I was glad to be there. I got up and went to the kitchen.

The cleaning woman had been there yesterday, and the place gleamed. I squeezed a big glass of orange juice and drank it while I put the coffee on to perk. Then I took a shower and shaved very carefully. When I was through, the coffee was ready, and I drank a cup while I made breakfast.

I took two egg rolls from the freezer and put them in the oven, sliced two pieces of Williamsburg ham, a thick slice from a wedge of Swiss cheese, added a paper-thin slice of red onion, and arranged them on a plate with some tomato quarters. When the egg rolls were heated, I split them and put them on the plate too. I put out a saucer of sour cream, then I poured a new cup of coffee and sat down on a stool at the counter to eat, and read the Globe.