Robert B Parker - Spenser 10 - The Widening Gyre

by The Widening Gyre(lit)

  "I'd like to talk to you," I said.

  She squinted at me uneasily.

  "Get in the car," I said.

  "What'd I do?"

  "You have the right to remain silent," I said. "You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be assigned you."

  I opened the door. And with a hand on her arm ushered her into the car.

  "Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law."

  I closed the door and went around the car and got in behind the wheel.

  "What'd I do?" she said again. She was smoking the cigarette awkwardly, as though she hadn't much experience with it.

  I put the car in gear and we rolled slowly along O Street.

  "I've got a few questions to ask you," I said.

  "I want to see my parents," she said.

  "Okay," I said. "We'll go to your home and see them. I'll question you in their presence."

  "No," she said.

  "Okay then, let's cut the crap. You're drunk in public, you're underage, you've been to a sex orgy, and you're in big trouble."

  The part about the orgy was a tribute to invention. Two high school girls with four college boys, drunk in the afternoon, made it a plausible guess. And even if it weren't true, the charge would scare her.

  "You got no right to say that to me," she said. But her outrage was weak.

  "What's your name?" I was very much the authority figure. "Linda."

  "Linda what?"

  She shook her head. I reached over and took her purse. "You can't do that," she said, and she got much more animated.

  I ignored her. Holding the purse between my knees, I fumbled it open with one hand and shuffled through it as I drove.

  In her wallet I found a District of Columbia automotive learner's permit that said her name was Linda Remmert and that she was sixteen and a half. I also found a small packet of cocaine.

  I looked at her. She had shrunk back in the corner of the seat looking nowhere near sixteen and a half. There were tears on her cheeks. She had close-cut black hair and a slightly uptilted nose. She had obviously begun the day with makeup, but there wasn't much left. I turned left on Wisconsin Avenue without saying anything. I put the cocaine and her learner's permit into my shirt pocket.

  "That's not mine," she said.

  I didn't say anything.

  "It isn't," she said. Her voice was snuffly and the tears continued to trickle down her cheeks.

  "Honest to God," she said. "I don't know how it got there."

  I kept driving.

  "Where we going?" she said.

  I shook my head. We drove some more. She had started to cry softly beside me. I felt like a child molester. Sometimes the end justified the means, sometimes it didn't. It seemed to me that lately I was having more trouble sorting out when it did and when it didn't. At the top of the hill on the right was Washington Cathedral. I pulled over in front of it and stopped.

  Linda looked at me and tried not to cry.

  I turned sideways and leaned my right arm on the back of the seat and said, "Linda, it's going to be all right."

  She stared at me blankly.

  "What d'ya mean?"

  "I mean there's a way out of this for you."

  She stared at me and didn't say anything.

  "I don't want to put a sixteen-year-old kid in the house of blue lights. I'm after more important stuff. If you'll help me, I'll help you."

  "What d'ya want me to do?"

  "First I want you to tell me where you got the coke and then I want you to tell me what you were doing in there with Gerry Broz and then we'll go from there."

  "I don't want to get no one in trouble," she said.

  I nodded. "Least of all you," I said. "Listen, honey, I gotta have something out of this. I don't want it to be you, so give me somebody else. Somebody that deserves it more.

  Chapter 21

  In twenty minutes I had it all.

  Gerry Broz dealt coke. If you didn't have money for coke, he'd trade for sex.

  "If he thought you were sexy," Linda said with pride.

  "For himself?"

  "For himself and his friends," Linda said.

  "If they thought you were sexy."

  Linda nodded. Broz also dealt among many of the Washington fashionables, Linda said. She didn't know who, but Gerry bragged of the people he sold to.

  "Or traded with," I said.

  "Not just kids," Linda said. "Grownups, middle-aged women."

  "How do you know?"

  "They have parties, granny parties they call them. Gerry calls the older women grannies. They let us come and watch."

  "Watch?"

  Linda nodded. She thought it was neat. "They have a way to peek. In the bathroom there's a one-way mirror. You can watch."

  It was obviously the most interesting thing Linda did and she liked to talk about it once she got going. It was as if she'd forgotten why I was asking. She was an excited teenage girl telling about her adventures, except her speech was slurring while she talked. "Sonofagun," I said. "I'd like to see that." Linda nodded. "It's really bogus," she said. "Some of those women, really high-class women." She shook her head at the bogusness of it all. "Could you sneak me in?" I said. Her eyes widened.

  "I'll bet you could," I said. "You sneak me in and you're home free. It'll be like I never saw you. I give you back the coke and the learner's permit as soon as we're out."

  Linda said, "I don't know."

  I said, "I'll bet you could. You can go right in the front door and through the living room and into the bathroom. If everything's happening in the bedroom, there's no way they'd see you."

  Linda was silent. "Yeah, that's... How do you know what the place looks like?"

  "There's not much I don't know," I said. "Keep it in mind." Delphic.

  "I don't know."

  "When's the next, ah, performance?" I said.

  "Tomorrow morning," she said. "Eleven o'clock."

  "The early bird catches the worm," I said. "I'll pick you up right here at ten of eleven. We'll slip right on in."

  "Okay. I guess. I mean, what if I say no?" I smiled at her without warmth. Every year it got easier to smile without warmth. I was starting to feel like Jimmy Carter.

  "Well, how will we do it?"

  "You'll go in," I said. "Then when the action gets under way, you'll come and get me."

  "I usually watch with my friend. What if she says something?"

  "Tell her not to. Tell her I'm your dad and I believe in togetherness. That's your problem."

  "You're older than my dad," she said.

  "Maybe not, maybe I've just had a harder life."

  She giggled a little and hiccuped. "Not unless you've been married to my mother," she said.

  I let that pass. I didn't ask how old her father was. I was afraid to.

  "Margy's okay," Linda said. "She'll keep quiet."

  I took the cocaine and her learner's permit from my shirt pocket.

  "Remember," I said. "I have you locked, if I want to press it."

  She nodded.

  "Don't get smart when the booze wears off," I said. "Don't think I'm too swell a person to bust you."

  She shook her head vigorously. More vigorously than I liked. I drove her to the corner of her street and let her out.

  "Here, tomorrow," I said. "Ten of eleven."

  "Yes," she said, and got out and walked away from me fast without looking back.

  Chapter 22

  Susan and I were having a drink in The Class Reunion on H Street. The place was full of journalists and booze was at flood tide.

  "An orgy?"

  I nodded.

  "You have a date with a sixteen-year-old girl to go watch an orgy?"

  I nodded again.

  "And you got the date how?"

  "By impersonating a police officer," I said.

  Susan nodded. She drank a small swallow of Dewar's and water.

  "Do you plan to participat
e?" she said.

  "Not unless you turn up there."

  Susan nodded and kept nodding. "At a-what did the little dear call it?"

  "A granny party."

  "Yes, a granny party."

  "Well, they're not really grannies," I said. "The kids are so young, that's all. They just say that."

  Susan nodded again. I poured some Budweiser from the bottle.

  "I didn't order by name," I said. "Wonder if this is the house beer."

  Susan ignored me.

  "What do you expect to find?" she said.

  "Same old thing," I said. "I won't know till I look. I just keep pushing and looking. Better than sitting and waiting."

  "It requires a rather considerable negative capability," Susan said.

  "Lots of things do," I said.

  "Want to walk?" she said. "I don't get enough exercise down here."

  "Sure."

  I paid for the drinks and we left. It was a fine night. Temperature in the fifties, clear. At the corner of H Street we turned east, toward the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue.

  "Do you think Alexander would really drop out of the race rather than expose his wife?"

  "Absolutely," I said.

  "It would be hard to choose otherwise," Susan said. "Be hard to avoid feeling guilty."

  "Yes, it would," I said. "But I think he is better than that. I think he doesn't want her hurt."

  "If he dropped out," Susan said, "he could feel virtuous and make her feel guilty."

  "He says he doesn't want her ever to know that he even knows about the films."

  "It would allow him to feel superior to her," Susan said.

  We walked by the enormous granite pile of the Executive Office Building next to the White House, across from Blair House. It was everything an executive office building should be.

  "You shrinks are so cynical," I said. "Is there any behavior that is not self-serving?"

  Susan was silent for a bit as we walked along in front of the White House.

  "Probably not," Susan said.

  "So that the woman who dies trying to save her child does so because if she didn't she couldn't live with herself?"

  "Something like that. People will do a great deal to support the image they have of themselves."

  "Hard to be romantic seeing life that way," I said.

  Susan shrugged.

  "Doesn't allow you to believe in heroes or villains or good or bad, does it?" I said. "If all actions are selfish."

  "Heroes and villains, good and bad, are not applicable in my work."

  "Grant that," I said. "But mightn't they be applicable in your life? How do you know how to act?"

  We turned down along the east side of the White House.

  "Of course I have vestiges of my upbringing, and religious training, and school inculcation that nag me under the heading of conscience. But consciously and rationally I try to do what serves me most at least cost to others."

  "And when there's a conflict?"

  "I try to resolve it."

  The White House was brightly lit from all sides inside the iron fence that surrounds it. There must have been security apparatus, but I didn't see much. We turned left on Pennsylvania again.

  "You don't understand, do you?" Susan said.

  "Seems pretty Hobbesian to me," I said.

  "Despite the fact that I have much more formal education than you do, and despite your somewhat physical approach to problem solving, you are an intellectual and I am not. You speculate on questions just like this one- how does one determine his behavior. You read Hobbes and God knows who else. I don't even know Hobbes's first name."

  "Thomas," I said.

  "Or what he said, or when. The kinds of questions about how to act that you are asking rarely come up for me, or the people in my work. We are results-oriented."

  "They come up quite often," I said, "in my work."

  "Of course they do. Partly because it's you that is doing the work, and partly because you've chosen a kind of work where those questions will come up."

  The august march of government architecture reared on either side of us, the Federal Energy Administration, the Post Office Building, the Justice Department, and across the street the FBI Building. My knee started to bend in genuflection before I caught myself. The municipal neo-classicism of the architecture was a little silly, but on the other hand it looked the way it ought to. What would have been less silly?

  "Can you analyze our relationship in the light of Silvermanian pragmatism?" I said.

  "I love you because I find it compelling to be loved so entirely. You love me because as long as you do you can believe in romantic love."

  Ahead on the right was the National Gallery with its new wing. Beyond rose the Capitol, on its hill.

  We turned back up Pennsylvania Avenue.

  "Too bad it's so late," I said. "If it were still daytime, we could take the FBI tour and maybe they'd show me a tommy gun."

  "That's your closing comment?" Susan said.

  "I have no closing comment," I said.

  "What do you think of what I have been saying?"

  "I think it is bullshit," I said.

  "Would you care to support that view?"

  "No," I said.

  Chapter 23

  Linda was there at ten of eleven. Without any booze in her she looked tight and pinched and scared and embarrassed and shy and as restless as a willow in a windstorm.

  I smiled when she got into the car.

  "I hope I'm dressed okay," I said. "I've never been to a granny party before."

  Linda didn't speak. She looked straight ahead. As I slid away from the curb I said, "We need a plan."

  She nodded.

  "Who'll be there?" I said.

  "Me and Margy," she said. "And Jerry and Butch and Claude and Jimmy and the two grannies."

  "And moi," I said.

  She nodded.

  "Who'll be watching through the one-way mirror?"

  "Just me and Margy."

  "Okay," I said. "I'll wait outside. You and Margy go ahead and get comfortable in the bathroom. Then when the four men and the two ladies get to it, you go out through the other bedroom and around through the living room and open the apartment door.

  "What if they catch me?"

  "I'll protect you."

  "Against four guys?"

  I made a muscle in my upper arm. "My strength, little lady, is as the strength of ten."

  "And you have a gun," she said.

  I shrugged. "That's part of it," I said.

  "How come there's no other cops with you? Don't you have any back-up?"

  Everybody watches television.

  "If I had back-up, honey, I couldn't cover up for you."

  She nodded and looked at me for the first time.

  "You really are going to let me off, aren't you?"

  "Yes," I said. "I am."

  We stopped on M Street in sight of Gerry's building. I looked up at the apartment windows. "The window in the bathroom is blacked out, for the one-way mirror. The last windows on top there must be the spare bedroom."

  Linda said, "Yes."

  "After you open the door for me, open the bedroom window. I'll see it and come up."

  "Okay."

  We sat quietly. Linda was pale. Her swallowing was audible. Two well-dressed women in maybe their early forties walked past up on M Street and turned into the building. The grannies? In another minute Linda said in a strained voice, "There's Margy."

  "Okay," I said. "Go to it."

  Linda looked condemned as she got out of the car. But she went, passively. She fell in beside Margy, and as they talked Margy glanced back once, toward the car, and then nodded, and together she and Linda went into the apartment.

  At 11:15 three college boys came down the hill on Thirty-fifth Street and went into Gerry's building. I took a Polaroid camera out of the Speedo gym bag I used to carry gear in. Casey, Crime Photographer. It was almost noon when I saw the bedroom windo
w go up. I got out of the car and walked across the street into the apartment building. I had no more trouble with the outside door than I had the last time.