Ceremony s-9

by Robert B. Parker

  "I know," I said.

  "I realize it's a source of strength for you," she said, and turned her head from profile to full face, lying close to mine on the pillow, "but you pay a high price for it too, and so does Hawk."

  "Hawk higher than I do," I said.

  "Because of me?"

  "Yes. I have you. He has no one."

  "He has you," she said.

  I said, "He and I are part of the same cold place. You aren't. You're the source of warmth. Hawk has none. You're what makes me different from Hawk."

  "How different?" she said. Close to me her eyes were enormous.

  "I'm here for Thanksgiving dinner," I said.

  "Yes," she said. "You are. Let's get to it."

  I said nothing about Mitchell Poitras and Amy Gurwitz and the Department of Education. It was just Susan and me today, and I would wait till tomorrow for anything else.

  Susan started the coffee and I built a large fire in the den. We squeezed a small pitcher of orange juice and shared it while .I mixed up some johnnycake batter and dropped spoonfuls of it onto the hot griddle. Johnnycake is made with white cornmeal and is somewhere between cornmeal mush and a pancake. It may be an acquired taste, but Suze and I were nothing on a holiday if not authentic. We ate the johnnycake with butter and maple syrup in front of the fire in the den and drank coffee.

  "Pilgrims," I said.

  "Speak for yourself, John," she said.

  "Did you know that Priscilla Alden's maiden name was Mullins?" I said. "Incredibly, no," Susan said.

  "Or that a guy writing at the time referred to Miles Standish as Captain Shrimp?"

  "Much like yourself," Susan said, and grinned at me that fallen-angel grin-the one that Eve must have grinned at Adam.

  "Ah," I said, "how quickly they forget."

  The fire settled more densely, the logs feeding each other's intensity like mutual enemies. The newspaper came. Susan got both the Globe and the Herald- American. We took turns reading through them, Susan much more quickly than I. We fueled the fire once or twice and returned to the couch in front of it, feet up on the old sea chest that Susan used as a coffee table, spines bent, sprawled on the cushions with our thighs touching in warm torpor. Susan went to shower. I asked her not to use all the hot water. She said she wouldn't. -I read the sports page. Already, barely a month after the World Series, there was talk of a baseball strike. There were ten contract renegotiations. The Red Sox had decided not to pay anyone, and everyone was threatening to be a free agent. It read like The Wall Street Journal. If 1 were a player, would I want six trillion dollars? Yes. I guessed I would. Did 1 find it interesting? No, I did not. Has the game changed? Say it ain't so, Joe.

  Susan appeared in half an hour wearing jeans no tighter than the skin on a grape and a white oxford shirt with a button-down collar and cowboy boots, smelling of perfume and shampoo and soap. I inhaled. "Sensual," I said, "but not too far from innocence."

  "Far enough," Susan said. I went to shower and shave and put on clean clothes. When I came back we went to the kitchen and began Thanksgiving dinner. Johnny Hartman was on the stereo. The sun was halfway to zenith and made the tile kitchen glisten. The cooking steamed the windows a bit, filtering the sun slightly and making the brilliance of the kitchen a bit muted as we progressed. At noon Susan brought out a bottle of Dom Pdrignon 1971, which we shared as we cooked. The barrel-bodied Lab appeared at the back door and scratched to come in. Susan put down a bowl of water and she drank noisily and long. When she finished she looked expectantly at Susan, her ears a little forward, her tail in a slow scimitar wag. Susan took a round dog biscuit from a box in the cupboard and gave it to the Lab.

  "Just one," she said. "You're on a diet," The dog took the biscuit to the other side of the kitchen, wolfed it down, and lay down with a heavy exhalation and a solid thump. She lay on her side against the back door with her feet toward us and her tongue out and appeared to go to sleep. "Whose dog is that?" I said.

  "People down the street."

  By two o'clock dinner was nearly done, and Susan went to set the table while I did the last few tricks, and at 2:30 we sat down to dinner in Susan's dining room with a white linen tablecloth and pink linen napkins and champagne in a silver cooler. It was Susan's good English china and the silver she'd gotten for a wedding present from her ex-mother-in-law. The tall tulip-shaped champagne glasses I had bought her. I'd bought four, but mostly we used just two and drank champagne alone. Sonny Rollins was spinning softly in the background. We didn't insist on complete authenticity.

  We began by eating hot pumpkin soup and then some cold asparagus with green herb mayonnaise on a bed of red lettuce. After that we each had half a pheasant with raspberry vinegar sauce and a kind of salon pilaf that Susan made from white and wild rice with pignolia nuts. For dessert we had sour cherry cobbler with Vermont cheddar cheese, and after we had finished with the last of the champagne and I had embarrassed myself with a second serving, we took coffee and Grand Marnier into the den and drank it in a near stupor on the couch before the' dwindling fire with the football game on the televi- sion. Susan hated football, so we turned the sound off. She had three back issues of The New Yorker and read a series on psychoanalysis that had run there, or pretended to, while I watched the Lions and the Packers, or pretended to. With a last desperate effort I got some more wood on the fire and then settled back on the couch. In fifteen minutes Susan's head rested against my shoulder, her mouth slightly open and her breath shifting occasionally into a faint snore. Before halftime my chin was against my chest and my cheek was pressed against the top of Susan's head.

  It was dark when we woke up. The fire barely shimmered on the hearth. A newscast was progressing silently on the TV screen and Thanksgiving Day was nearly past. They ran the local college and high school football results on a crawl, and as the mesmerizing sequence went on it was like a rehearsal of small-town Massachusetts: clean-lined white buildings around a common, square brick schools, cheerleaders with pony- tails and chunky thighs, and parents in pride and contentment watching the children play. "Nice day," Susan murmured. "For some," I said. "Not for most?" "Pretty to think so," I said.

  Chapter 21

  We were having leftover cherry cobbler for breakfast on Friday morning when I asked Susan about Mitchell Poitras.

  "Oh, sure," she said. "I know Mitch."

  "He's living in a very expensive town house on Beacon Street with Amy Gurwitz," I said.

  "Poitras?" Susan said. It always irked me when she called people by their last name. One of the boys. Tough as a ten-minute egg. Wasn't my job to tell her how to talk, so I sat on the irksomeness.

  "The very same," I said. "And he has a studio and lab set up for making porn films and tapes of very young girls and boys."

  "Poitras?"

  "Mitchell Poitras," I said. "I gather he hadn't put that down in his curriculum vitae."

  "My God, are you sure?"

  .`Yep." "How do you know for sure?" she said.

  "I burgled his house Wednesday while he and Amy were off celebrating the harvest."

  "But how did you think… yes, of course, because that's where you found Amy and she used to be a friend of April's and you had nothing else to do. Why in hell didn't you mention him to me before?"

  "Until I found evidence that he worked for the Department of Education I had no reason to think you might know him," I said.

  "Mitchell Poitras?" Better I thought. "But, Jesus Christ, do you realize who he is?"

  "Letters say he's Executive Coordinator, comma, Student Guidance and Counseling Administration."

  Susan nodded.

  "It's a job that gives him access to every disturbed kid in the state-access to psychological profiles, teacher reports, principal evaluations, guidance recommendations, often police material. My good sweet Jesus," Susan said. Her mind could integrate very swiftly.

  "What big teeth you have, Granny," I said.

  "Yes," she said. "Like finding out your baby-sitter is a wer
ewolf. You say he has facilities to make these things?"

  "Yes. Not just a collector, a producer. A distributor."

  "A collector would be bad enough," Susan said.

  "Now, my dear, consenting adults in the privacy of their home…

  "Not for a man doing what he does. That's bullshit if you're Poitras. But to produce… could it be the wrong man?" "Ugly fat guy," I said, "dresses like he's got a charge at Woolworth's."

  Susan nodded. Her face was sharp with concern. "What are you going to do?"

  "Eventually I'm going to blow the whistle on him, but first I want to see if he knows where April is."

  "Eventually?"

  "I didn't hire on to clean up the state," I said. "I hired on to find April. First things first."

  "But-"

  "No," I said. "Don't give me the well-being-of-themany-against-the-one speech. The many are an abstraction. April is not. She rode in my car. I'm going to find her first."

  "One of the rules," Susan said. There was no smile when she said it.

  "Sure," I said.

  "How much is it for April?" she said. "How much for you?"

  "Doesn't matter," I said. "It's a way to live. Anything else is confusion." Susan sat and looked into her coffee cup. "I disapprove," she said.

  I nodded.

  "But it's yours. There are things you disapprove of that I do anyway," she said.

  I nodded again.

  "So first you find April, and then you…" She made a twisting gesture with her right hand, turning the palm up and quickly down again.

  "Then I air out the Student Guidance and Counseling Administration," I said.

  "Yes," she said. "And in the meantime I might do some research." "See whether Poitras recruits?" I said. She nodded. "I'll bet he does," I said. She nodded again.

  Chapter 22

  By Monday night we knew that Poitras almost certainly recruited, and on a pretty good scale. I spent Monday staring alertly at his town house on Beacon Street. Susan spent Monday on the phone to people she knew in high school guidance offices around the state. In nearly every case of a dropout, male or female, there was clear evidence of contact with Poitras.

  "Either he met the students during crisis intervention sessions," Susan said to me on the telephone, "or at coordinative evaluation conferences or he's been a resource person during attempts at therapeutic redirection."

  "You are, I hope, quoting," I said.

  "You mean the jargon? You hear it so much you get used to it."

  "Talking like that will rot your teeth," I said.

  "Never mind that. I checked back in my own files on

  Amy Gurwitz and April Kyle. He talked with both of them not long before they dropped out."

  "How long?"

  "Well, it's hard to say," Susan said. "A kid doesn't just one day drop out. First he or she starts to cut classes and that increases in frequency and after a while it blends into having left school. He spoke to both of them within two weeks of the missing persons report to the Smithfield police-that we could be precise about."

  "How usual is that?" I said.

  "That a man in Poitras's position would talk with the students?"

  ..Yeah."

  "It's not improbable," Susan said. "But it's not entirely routine, either. Most people yat the state level have no contact at all with students."

  "An educator's dream," I said.

  "Counseling reports and S.I.J.'s are routinely sent to his office," Susan said, "but the amount of personal contact is sort of unusual. But not so you'd comment on it unless you discovered that your experience was typical -you know, that he was doing this everywhere."

  "What is an S.I.J.?" I said.

  "Student-in-jeopardy forms."

  "Ah, of course," I said.

  "So Poitras, assuming that my sample is representative, had a ready list of children ready to drop out of school, beset with emotional problems, vulnerable to anyone who'd want to exploit them."

  "Chance of a lifetime," I said. "King of the chicken flicks."

  "He mustn't be allowed to continue," Susan said. "Soon," I said. "April will show up soon."

  "I cannot wait too much longer," she said. "I cannot permit this to go on."

  "The end of the week," I said. "If she doesn't show up by then we'll blow the whistle on Poitras and I'll look elsewhere for April."

  Susan agreed and I hung up and went to bed.

  Tuesday morning I was back out on Beacon Street and Tuesday afternoon there came April Kyle. She was wearing a man's army field jacket with a first cavalry patch on it and she looked sort of bedraggled, as if she'd been sleeping in subways and eating light. She slouched along Beacon Street from the direction of Kenmore Square, reading the numbers on the buildings until she reached Poitras's. She stopped for a minute and stared at it, then she went up and rang the bell. The door opened and she went in. I stayed put. Maybe she was just passing through. Maybe just a visit and then back home to Park Street Under. Some cocoa and a Twinkie, a little talk of boys and sock hops, thumb through the yearbook, giggle, maybe a stroll down to the malt shop, or maybe not. Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang. April didn't come out again. Poitras waddled home at his usual time and let himself in with his key. Still no one came out. I walked three blocks up to Boylston Street and found a public phone and called Susan.

  "April's in with Amy and Poitras," I said. "What do you think?"

  "Stay there. I'll come in. We'll talk to her together."

  "No," I said. "I don't want you involved. This deal is tied into some really bad folks, and I don't want them to know your name."

  "I have as much right to be frightened as you do," Susan said.

  "Suze," I said. "There've been threats made. By people who can back them up."

  "I have the right to be threatened too," Susan said. "I'm coming in."

  "No.

  "Yes. You have no right to protect me against my will. I have the right to my own pride and my own self-respect. This is the ugliest piece of business I've ever seen. I'm involved. I got you involved and I want to be part of ending it."

  "Jesus Christ," I said.

  "And if April has to go wee wee again," Susan said, "I can go with her."

  "Corner of Fairfield and Beacon," I said. "I'll look for you in about twenty minutes. Bitch."

  "Gracefully," Susan said. "You give in so gracefully."

  I hung up. It was dark and wet as I walked back down Fairfield. A mixture of rain and snow slopped down, making the street glisten in the streetlights and causing the top of the Prudential and Hancock buildings to disappear in the haze and swirl of it. The commuter traffic had largely drained out of the Back Bay by now -it was twenty of seven, and few people were about on foot. There was a spectral quality to the city. The mist that hovered forty stories up reflected the city lights back in a muted glow, and everything looked a little moonie.

  At about quarter past seven I saw Susan walking up Beacon toward me. She had on a poplin trench coat and a large felt hat. The heels of her boots made a clear firm sound in the hushed pale evening. The street seemed somehow to organize around her. Wherever she was she was the focal point, or maybe it just seemed that way because she was my focal point. No way to decide that. If a tree falls in the forest with no one to hear it, does it make a sound? She crossed Fairfield and stopped beside me.

  "Has anyone ever told you," I said, "that you coalesce reality?"

  "No. They only say that I'm good in the sack."

  "They are accurate but limited," I said. "And if you give me their names I'll kill them."

  "Is April still in there?"

  I nodded. "Unless she slipped out while I was calling you, and why should she?"

  "Do we just go knock on the door?"

  "Sure," I said. "They've got plenty to hide, but they don't know we know it."

  We mounted Poitras's three steps and rang his doorbell. The porch light went on. Amy opened the door. I was wearing a pair of thick-soled Herman su
rvivor boots in deference to the weather and I slipped one of them quietly across the threshold.

  Susan said, "Hello, Amy, remember me?"

  Amy looked out closely at Susan and then at me. She remembered me too. "Hello, Mrs. Silverman, I didn't recognize you at first," Amy said.

  "You know Mr. Spenser," Susan said.

  Amy nodded. She glanced once back over her shoulder.

  "May we come in?" Susan said.

  Amy looked back over her shoulder again. Then back at us. I smiled. Friendly. From the house behind Amy a voice said, "Who is it, Amy?"

  It was a deep, harsh voice, a growl almost. Poitras appeared in the doorway behind Amy. "What do you need," he said in his ferocious voice. His bulk filled the doorway, and I realized he was one of those fat guys who had gotten confused about size as opposed to strength, the way he held himself, the self-consciousness of his looming posture in the doorway. He had gotten a lot of mileage out of bullying people with his size.

  Susan said, "Hello, Mitchell."

  He looked at us the same way Amy had, and then he recognized Susan. "Susan Silverman. What the hell do you want?"

  "We'd like to come and talk, Mitch."

  "About what?"

  "About Amy," Susan said, "and April Kyle."

  "Get the hell out of here," Poitras said, and slammed the door on my Herman survivor. Which did what it was there to do. It stopped the door ajar. I was always careful not to do that when I was wearing my Nikes.

  "Mitch, let us in," Susan said.

  "Get your foot out of the door," Poitras said in his scary voice, "or I'll chop your balls off."

  I looked at Susan. "Wouldn't that make you mad?" I said.

  She didn't smile. She was intent on other things. Poitras shoved on the door. "Here we go," I said to Suze.

  I put my right hand against the doorjamb and my left hand along the edge of the partly open door and slowly spread my arms. Poitras gave ground. The door opened wide enough for me to get my body in. When I did that, I got my back against the doorjamb and both hands on the half-open door and shoved. The door opened wide and Poitras stumbled back a step into his lavish front hall. I went in after him and Susan came after me. Poitras caught his balance and stretched his right arm out at me and pointed with his index finger.