Ceremony

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 veins, 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.