Ceremony

Chapter 27

My jaw was very sore where Marcus had hit me. It had stiffened up overnight, and I had to talk through my teeth. I sounded as if I'd just graduated from Harvard.

It didn't impress a vice squad detective named McNeely who sat behind his desk on Berkley Street and listened while I told him my plan.

"We got nothing better to do than hang around with a handful of warrants and wait for you to give the nod?" he said.

"It's the only way it can go down," I said. "It's a deal I made, and I'll stick to it."

"You made," McNeely said. "Who the hell are you? You got information about a porn operation, you give it to me."

Belson was leaning against a file cabinet beside McNeely's desk. His cigar was burned short, and before he spoke he picked a shred of wet cigar wrapper off his lip.

"For crissake, Tom," Belson said. "He's handing you the garbage all wrapped and neat. All you got to do is swing by and pick it up."

"This ain't homicide, Belson," McNeely said. "This is vice. You brought him over and introduced him, you don't need to hang around and kibitz."

Belson winked at me. "Must be a slow month on the kickbacks," Belson said. "Vice guys are all grouchy."

McNeely was a thick slouchy man with a bald head. He looked at Belson hard for a long minute. Belson smiled at him. His thin face looking good-humored. A faint blue shadow of his heavy beard already showing, although it was only ten in the morning.

"I'll let that pass, Belson," he said finally.

"Thought you might," Belson said.

McNeely looked back at me. "How do I know you won't blow this?"

"Because I'm good, and this is easy," I said. "I didn't have to bring it to you first. I could have done my business and then called nine one. one. I'm giving you notice so it'll all be clean. The right papers, that sort of thing. The thing is going to blow statewide, and probably interstate. I could have called in the Staties, or the FBI, and left you sucking hind tit."

McNeely looked at Belson again. "He level?" he said.

"He's a real pain in the ass," Belson said. "But he does what he says he'll do."

McNeely was playing with a rubber band, stretching it between the thumb and little finger of his left hand. He leaned back in his swivel chair and examined the stretched elastic. He opened his three middle fingers out and stretched the band into a crude circle and looked at that.

"Okay. I'll go along," he said. "You fuck it up and you're out of business. I can promise you that."

"That's the kind of endorsement I was hoping for," I said.

"You got it," McNeely said, and let the rubber band slip off his fingers and skitter across the desktop. "I'll be waiting to hear from you."

I nodded and got up, and Belson and I walked out of the squad room.

"Lovable," I said to Belson as we walked to the elevator.

"Nicest guy in the vice squad," Belson said.

The elevator came and I went down. It was cold on Berkeley Street. As I walked the three blocks from Police Headquarters to my office the wind was blowing grit around and doing a good job of penetrating my leather trench coat. If I zipped in the pile lining, then the coat was too small. One of those life choices that remind us of reality. Tight or cold. Maybe I should get a new coat. Something to make me look like a young Robert Mitchum. The choices in size 48 were fairly narrow, however. Maybe a young Guinn "Big Boy" William would be enough.

I sat in my office with my chair swiveled around and looked out the window. I could see a portion of Boylston Street from this position. If I stood up I could look down onto Berkley Street. On windy days like this I usually liked to stand and look down and watch the skirts swirl on the young women who worked in the insurance companies. But today I was too busy trying to think of what to do about April Kyle when we busted Poitras. She was unlikely to go home, and if she went she was unlikely to stay, and if she stayed it was unlikely to do her any good. Susan said there were some social service organizations that might take her, but what experience I had with them was not encouraging.

Across the street the young art director with the black hair and the good hips was leaning on her drawing board looking out the window. Our eyes met. She grinned and waved. I waved back. We had never met and our relationship was conducted solely through windows across a busy street. Maybe when I got my new coat… The more I thought about April the more I didn't know what to do with her.

Susan was breathing down my neck about Poitras. She was tougher minded, sometimes. To keep Poitras away from next year's crop of burnouts she'd let April go. She was right, of course. The greatest good for the greatest number. Democracy. Western civilization. Humanism. A working definition of ethical behavior.

The mail came through the letter slot. I got up and picked it off the floor. There was nothing in it I wanted to read. I threw it away unopened. I stood at the window with my hands in my hip pockets and looked down into the street. The wind was swirling newspapers and Big Mac wrappers around, but almost all the women from the insurance companies were wearing pants. Why doesn't the breeze excite me? I walked across the room and leaned my forearms on my file cabinet and my chin on my forearms. Why didn't I know any nuns? A strong-willed, smiling sister with a sense of humor who looked like Celeste Holm. Sister Flanagan's Girls Town. She ain't heavy, she's my sister. Where the hell is the woman's movement when you need it? I didn't know any nuns. I didn't even know any priests. I knew some pimps and some leg breakers and some cops and some junkies and some whores and a few madams. Actually I knew one madam.

I could hear the faint chatter of a typewriter from somewhere down the hall and the occasional ping of the steam pipes in my office. I could hear traffic sounds, muffled by the closed window, and in the corridor a pair of high-heeled shoes tapped briskly past my office door.

I knew a madam in New York named Patricia Utley. Or I used to. I straightened up and pulled out the second file drawer in the cabinet. I found a manila folder marked Rabb, in about the right alphabetical sequence, and took it out and brought it to my desk. I riffled through the details of some business I'd done about seven years ago. On a piece of note paper from a Holiday Inn was Patricia Utley's name and address and phone number. I put the file back and sat down at my desk again and called Patricia Utley's number.

A man's voice answered. I asked for Ms. Utley. The voice asked who was calling and I told him. The line clicked on to hold and in maybe thirty seconds I heard her voice.

"Spenser?" she said.

"You remember, then?"

"Yes," she said. "Summer, 1975. I remember quite clearly."

I said, "I owe you a favor and this isn't going to be it. This is going to be a request for another favor." "Um-hum."

"Are you still in business?" I said.

"Yes."

"I'd like you to meet a young woman I know. She's interested in a career," I said.

"Are you working on commission?" Patricia Utley's voice sounded as if she were smiling.

"No." "Well, I must say it's a surprising request coming from the man I remember, but yes. I would talk with her…

"Okay," I said. "I don't know exactly when. I'm working on that, but soon. I'll call ahead."

"Certainly," she said. "Have things worked out for the young woman we once had mutual interest in seven years ago?"

"Yes," I said.

"Good," she said. "I'll look forward to seeing you soon."

We hung up and I sat back and thought some more.