Ceremony

by Robert B. Parker

  I gave Red a card. "If you run into April, get in touch with me," I said.

  He nodded, still holding his throat. His eyes were wet. Hawk and I got up.

  "Shoulda been scared," Hawk said.

  Chapter 10

  The South End was a mix of winos and upscale young ad men in Gucci loafers. Some of the old red brick row houses had been sandblasted and festooned with hanging plants, so that they looked like the kind of restaurant where they serve carafe wine and quiche. Others had been left in their natural state and in them people slept four and five to the bed.

  Three Eighteen and a half Chandler was not upscale. The door to the foyer was warped, so it wouldn't close. I pushed it open, and Hawk and I stepped into the foyer. It was empty except for a crumbled Nissen's bread wrapper and a long-dead starling. There were brass mailboxes along the left-hand wall. The fronts of all of them had been torn off and there was no mail in any of them. There were doorbell buttons with name tag slots beside them. All the slots were empty. The glass inner door had been broken and patched with plywood. Graffiti was spray painted all over the plywood in intricate curves.

  Hawk pushed at the inner door. It swung open. The doorjamb where the latch tongue fitted was torn away as if a strong person had kicked it in. We went in. The floor inside was small octagonal tiles that must have been white when they were put down but now seemed a brownish gray. Stairs went up the right wall. ,

  Hawk said, "I think I rather get laid in an MG."

  "It would be discouraging to have your date bring you here," I said.

  We started up the stairs. The walls were plaster that had been painted and repainted so that the surface was now lumpy and thick with the layers. The color was about the same as the floor. On the second-floor landing was an empty bottle. LIME FLAVORED VODKA, the label said. There were three doors on the third floor. A ceiling fixture glared, shadeless, down on us.

  There were no numbers on the doors. In the tiny hallway under the ugly light surrounded by blank doors I felt a little disengaged, remote from Susan, from open water, from baseball. I put my ear against the door nearest me. No sound. Hawk listened at the next door and I moved on to the third. Nothing.

  "B should be the middle one," I said, "counting from either direction."

  Hawk nodded and rapped on the middle door. No one answered. He rapped again. No one. He tried the knob. The door didn't open.

  "Gimme room," I said. Hawk stepped out of the way. I kicked the door. And in we went. There were two people on a mattress on the floor. One was a young black woman, the other was a middle-aged white man with a roll around his middle. He was trying to scramble into his pants. He had them on and pulled up but not yet buttoned when we went in. The girl was naked and made no attempt to cover herself. She sat with her back against the wall, her legs out straight in front of her. She had the same look on her face that the dancers did in The Slipper. Nobody said anything. The man continued to struggle with his pants.

  "Don't worry," I said. "This isn't trouble. We're looking for a young woman named April Kyle."

  "She ain't here," the girl said.

  "We were told she was," I said. "Apartment Three B."

  "This Three C," the girl said.

  "Elementary, my dear Holmes," Hawk said.

  I ignored him. "Which is B? I said.

  The man had his pants buckled and was working on his shoes. They were boots, actually-black, with a zipper on the side-and he struggled to ram his foot in from his half-sprawled position with obsessive intensity.

  "Other end of the hall."

  "Do you know April Kyle?" I said.

  She shook her head. The harsh light spilling in from the hall was nearly theatrical, making shadows under her cheekbones and breasts. I held out April's picture. "How about her-ever see her?"

  The girl didn't bother to look. She kept shaking her head.

  "Take a look," I said.

  She kept shaking her head. Her dark eyes were empty. Her shoulders were hunched a little by the way she rested her hands, palm flat on the mattress. Her partner had one boot on and bent his every effort on the other one. His fat hairy upper body bent nearly double over his thighs as he struggled with the zipper.

  I put the picture away. "Would you like us to take you anywhere?" I said to the girl.

  Same thing, slow headshakes right and left and right and left.

  Hawk gestured at 3B with his head. I nodded. The man got his other boot zipped. I looked again at the girl sitting stock still. Her head still moved back and forth. I turned and went back in the hall. Hawk stepped out behind me.

  "There's no logic to the numbering system," I said.

  "Why'd you think there would be?" Hawk said.

  I knocked on 3B. All was quiet. I knocked again. Hawk said, "My turn," and I moved out of the way, and he kicked the door in. There was a bed in this room. A narrow metal bed painted white with a mattress on it and threadbare tufted chenille spread over the mattress. The bed was empty. So was the room.

  Besides the bed, the only thing in the room was a picture on the wall. It was a Polaroid color snapshot of a house. It looked familiar. It was April Kyle's house. In the hall behind us the man from 3C scooted down the stairs. The girl was standing in the open doorway watching us, left shoulder leaning against the doorjamb, hand on right hip. I looked around this room. There was a light switch beside the door. I turned it on. The overhead bulb was as unkind as the one in the hall. We stripped the spread back off the bare mattress, looked under the mattress, under the bed, felt around the door molding. At the far end of the narrow room a dirty window faced onto an airshaft. I opened it and felt around within arm's reach in all directions.

  "There's nothing here, babe," Hawk said.

  "I know."

  "You wanna try A?" he said.

  "Good to be thorough," I said. No one was in A. No girl. No man. No passion. No commerce. No ecstasy. No clues, either. It took five minutes to be certain of that. When we were through, all we had was the naked girl standing in the doorway of the empty room with the bare light dramatizing everything.

  I looked at her. "What are we going to do with her?" I said.

  Hawk said, "Nothing to do with her."

  I still looked at her.

  "You looking to have a little fun?" she said.

  "No," I said. "I'm not looking to have any fun at all."

  Hawk started down the stairs. "C'mon, man, you keeping her from her work."

  I went after him. Down the narrow, filthy stairs. We checked the rest of the building. It was empty. On Chandler Street I said, "I don't like that. There ought to be something."

  We walked toward the car.

  "Ought?" Hawk said. "We both know what ought is worth."

  I nodded. "How old you figure she is?" I said.

  "Middle-aged, babe. She be dead when she's thirty." His face under the streetlight as we got in the car was entirely without expression.

  Hawk and I went back to The Slipper, but Red wasn't there, and he wasn't anyplace else, either, that we could discover. Trumps was gone too. I was beginning to feel like Winnie-the-Pooh.

  The more I looked for April Kyle, the more she wasn't there. It was eleven o'clock-my second night out in the Combat Zone. I had almost as much thrill as I could handle.

  Outside a movie advertising an adult double feature with an all-male cast, Hawk said to me, "This got a funny smell to you?"

  "You mean how much trouble we're having finding one kid when we started out knowing where she was?"

  "Yeah."

  "You think people don't want her found?"

  "Yeah."

  "Maybe," I said. "Or maybe we just haven't run across her."

  "We usually pretty good at running across things," Hawk said.

  "Yeah. Probably been distracted by the excitement of our surroundings," I said.

  Several men going into the theater eyed Hawk as they passed. No one spoke to him or to me.

  "Make the blood just boil through your vein
s, don't it?" He said. "All that glamour?"

  "Yippee," I said. "I think I'll go home and brush my teeth. You want me to drop you someplace?"

  Hawk shook his head. "Just soon walk," he said.

  I nodded and started up Tremont.

  "You keep an eye out for Trumps," Hawk said. "He hate to lose."

  "It's hard to get used to," I said.

  Chapter 11

  I took a long hot shower before I went to bed, and drank three bottles of Rolling Rock extra pale, and ate a meatloaf sandwich on wheat bread from Rebecca's. My copy of Sartoris still lay on the bedside table at Susan's, so I made do with a novel by John le Carry. And liked it. I fell asleep after one more beer and dreamed that Hawk and I were being chased by George Smiley, who looked just like Alec Guinness. I kept looking without success for Susan.

  I woke up at ten past seven with the sun making the dust motes dance in the air. It was Saturday. Susan would be off. If I was prompt, we could have breakfast together.

  No one was in front of the bowling alley as I drove toward Smithfield at ten of eight. Plenty of time for hanging out, good seats available all day. Life moved easy in Smithfield. In Boston women were already hooking in the Combat Zone. When I got to Susan's she was up and wearing a blue warm-up suit with a white stripe down the leg. She gave me a kiss when I came in the kitchen door.

  "I was going to run," she said. "Want to come along? I'll slow down for you."

  The running stuff I kept at Susan's was somewhat more informal than hers: maroon sweat pants with a drawstring, a black wool turtleneck sweater, and a gray sweat shirt with the sleeves cut off to wear over the sweater. My gray New Balance running shoes had a lot of shoe glop patching.

  "You look like you run for the Rescue Mission Track Club," Susan said.

  We jogged slowly along Main Street. Susan's pace was not a challenge. The temperature was in the forties. There was no wind. The sun splashed clean shadows on the road ahead of us. Nobody much was out in Smithfield at 8:15 on a Saturday.

  "No luck on April," Susan said.

  "No." "Do you know if she is in fact a whore?"

  "Yes. She's got a pimp named Red. I've talked with him. I talked with Amy Gurwitz. Hawk and I found a place on Chandler Street where she'd been. There was a picture of her house on the wall."

  "Her house?"

  "Yeah. No Mommy and Daddy, no friends or siblings just the house." We passed the junior high school, its lawn still green in November. Its circular drive empty of cars.

  "That's very sad," Susan said.

  "Yes."

  "You've brought Hawk into this?"

  "Yeah."

  "Is this a more complicated thing than it looked when you started?"

  "Maybe," I said. "I aggravated a pimp, and I figured I'd better have Hawk to watch my back. Also Hawk knows the guy that runs most of the street prostitution around there. Guy named Tony Marcus. I figured he'd be useful."

  "And you haven't found her, you and Hawk?"

  I shook my head. Susan looped around the circular drive at the junior high school and headed back toward her house.

  "This is going to be about two miles," I said.

  "Yes. That's what I always run."

  "You're doing the two hardest," I said. "The first and the last miles are always bad."

  "If I did more than two," Susan said, "I wouldn't do any."

  We'd had the conversation twenty times before. I nodded.

  Susan said, "Isn't it odd that you and Hawk together can't find her? I mean, if she's in the Combat Zone. It's not that big."

  "Yes. It's odd. We could keep missing her while she's plying her trade, but…" I shrugged.

  Behind the small shopping center in the center the same barrel-bodied Lab I'd seen before was foraging in the dumpster near the market. The buildings around the Common were square and graceful, the sun emphasizing their whiteness, the unleaved trees black in filigreed contrast. We were quiet. As we turned down Susan's street I could smell wood smoke.

  Conservation chic.

  "A shower will feel good," Susan said as we walked in her driveway.

  "I'd better stay with you," I said. "Never can tell who might be lurking in behind the shower curtain."

  "Golly," Susan said. "I feel so safe with you."

  I built a fire in the living room while Susan started the coffee. Then we showered. Susan's downstairs shower was very roomy with a sliding door and we were damned near hysterical with laughter in there before we got clean. I made a suggestion that Susan turned down.

  "I'll drown," she said.

  Clean and wrapped in large towels but not quite dry, we went into the living room. The fire was hot and bright.

  "I wouldn't drown in here," Susan said.

  "Couch or floor," I said.

  "The rug is thick."

  "Floor it is," I said, and put my arms around her. Both towels slipped to the floor.

  With her mouth against mine Susan said, "No missionary position, big fella. The rug's not that soft."

  "Neither am h."

  "Elegant," she murmured. "Positively ritzy."

  Chapter 12

  Across the kitchen table Susan was wearing a white T-shirt that said on the front BALLOONS OVER BOSTON. Under the legend there were some multicolored balloons. She sipped coffee and watched me make breakfast.

  "It's Spenser's famous corn cakes, this morning," I said. "We got any of that maple syrup we made last spring?"

  "In the peanut butter jar in the refrigerator."

  I got it out and put it to warm in a saucepan. Then I measured equal parts of cornmeal and corn flour into a bowl.

  "You're not happy with this April Kyle thing," Susan said.

  "No." I put in some baking powder. "No, I don't like the way we can't find her, and then we went back and looked for her pimp and we couldn't find him." "There's more," Susan said. "There's something else. You are not…"

  Susan thought a minute. "You're a little inward."

  I beat two eggs and some milk together with a whisk.

  "It's the scene," I said. "I am not new to misery, but it is the flat unalterability of it, I guess. You spend a couple days in the Combat Zone and you feel like you've eaten a bowl of grease."

  Susan nodded. "It's not like you've never encountered depravity," she said.

  I added the milk and eggs to the flour and made a batter.

  "I know, but it's depressing. Maybe there's a depravity tolerance and I've reached it. There was a black whore, maybe twenty-five, maybe thirty, and her pimp was going to beat her up for no good reason and I said I'd take her with me and she laughed." I added a little corn oil to the batter. "And she was right. Where in hell was I going to take her? Look in the yellow pages under C for convent?"

  I oiled the griddle and turned the heat on under it.

  "And there was a black kid about fifteen screwing some middle-aged white guy in a chemical suit on a bare mattress in an empty room. He took off when we showed up looking for April, and the kid wanted to know if I was interested."

  I put four small circles of batter on the hot griddle and watched them spread and begin to rise. When the bubbles began to show through I flipped them and after another minute I put two on Susan's plate and two on mine. Susan put on butter and homemade maple, syrup and took a bite. "Yum," she said.

  "Only one yum?"

  "I don't want you to get arrogant."

  I ate a pancake. "Carbohydrate replenishment," I said. "After the exhausting run."

  "It wasn't the run that exhausted you," Susan said.

  "Maybe I should have scalloped some oysters."

  We ate two pancakes apiece and I put on four more.

  "It makes you feel helpless," Susan said.

  "Yeah."

  "Hawk have any reaction?"

  I shook my head. "Far as I can tell, the world amuses the hell out of Hawk."

  "What fools these mortals be?"

  I put two more corn cakes on each plate. "Yeah," I said, "him and Puck
." "Does the fact that so many of these women are black make you feel more of an outsider? More… narve's not the right word, but somewhere in that area."

  "Possible," I said. We ate. Susan poured me some more coffee. I put on another quartet of corn cakes. "How many do you suppose we can eat before we hurt ourselves?"

  "I can't speak for you," Susan said. "I'll stop with these two."

  "But mostly," I said, "it's spending time in a world where fifteen-year-old girls are a commodity, like electrified dildos, or color-coordinated merkins, and crotchless leather panties. It's a world devoted to appetite, and commerce." I sipped some coffee."I think we are in rats' alley," I said, "where the dead men lost their bones."

  "Well," Susan said, "we are bleak about this. You want to stop?"

  "No." I said.

  "I know you're doing this for me. I care more about you than about April Kyle. If you drop it, I'll understand."

  I shook my head.

  "You can't," she said.

  "No." We were quiet. "Maybe just two more," I said.

  Susan nodded. She looked at me with that power of concentration that she had. "Why can't you?" she said.

  I shrugged. "It's what I do," I said.

  "Even when it bothers you like this?"

  "If you only do it when it's easy, is it worth doing'?"

  She smiled. Her mouth was wide, and when she smiled her whole face smiled and her eyes gleamed.

  "You never disappoint," she said. "You and Cotton Mather."

  I kept looking at her smile. It made up for a lot of things. Maybe it made up for everything.

  "I'm not sure," I said, "that I could make it without you."

  "You could," Susan said, "but you'll never have to."

  Chapter 13

  I went back to work Sunday afternoon. At four o'clock I was having a drink with Hawk at J.J. Donovan's in the North Market.