God Save the Child

18

I woke up about twenty minutes of ten within the bright tangible silence of my bedroom. I was glad to be there. I got up and went to the kitchen. The cleaning woman had been there yesterday, and the place gleamed. I squeezed a big glass of orange juice and drank it while I put the coffee on to perk. Then I took a shower and shaved very carefully. When I was through, the coffee was ready, and I drank a cup while I made breakfast. I took two egg rolls from the freezer and put them in the oven, sliced two pieces of Williamsburg ham, a thick slice from a wedge of Swiss cheese, added a paper-thin slice of red onion, and arranged them on a plate with some tomato quarters. When the egg rolls were heated, I split them and put them on the plate too. I put out a saucer of sour cream, then I poured a new cup of coffee and sat down on a stool at the counter to eat, and read the Globe.

It was eleven when I left the apartment, full of stomach and clear of eye. I drove over to the Harbor Health Club, the second floor of an old building on Atlantic Avenue. Until the new high-rise apartments had started going in along the waterfront, it had been the Harbor Gym, and once, when I’d thought I was a boxer, I’d trained there. I still went in sometimes to hit the speed bag and work on the heavy bag and maybe do some bench presses, but mostly I went to the Y. The Harbor Gym had become upwardly mobile. Now it had steam rooms and inhalant rooms and exercise devices which jiggled your body while you leaned on them and chrome plating on the barbells and carpeting in the weight room.

I asked a receptionist in a toga where Henry Cimoli was, and she sent me to the Roman bath room. Henry was in there talking with two fat, hairy men who sat in a circular pool of hot water. Henry looked like an overdeveloped jockey. He was about 5'4" in a snow-white T-shirt and maroon warm-up pants. The muscles in his arms bulged against the tight sleeve of the T-shirt, and his neck was thick and muscular with a prominent Adam’s apple. There was scar tissue around his eyes. His thick black hair was cut close to his head and brushed forward.

“Spenser,” he said when he saw me, “want a free go on the irons?”

“Not today, Henry. I want to talk.”

“Sure.” He spoke to the fat men in the hot water, “Excuse me, I gotta talk with this guy.”

We walked back toward the cubbyhole office beyond the weight room.

“You still lifting?” Cimoli asked.

“Yeah,” I said, “some. Too bad about how you’re letting yourself go.”

“Hey, I gotta work at it all the time. Guy my height, man, you let it go and you look like a fat broad in about two weeks.”

“Yeah, after I go you better go sit in the tub with those two guys, get a real workout.”

Cimoli shrugged. “Aw, you gotta offer that shit. They come in and sit in the steam room and soak in the pool and go home and tell everybody how they’re getting in shape. But we got the real stuff too. You remember.”

I nodded. “I’m looking for a guy, Henry.” I showed him the picture of Vic Harroway. He took it and looked at it. “One of those guys, huh?” He shook his head. “Assholes,” he said. I nodded again. Cimoli studied the picture. Then he broke into a big grin. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I know this bastard. That’s Vic Harroway. I’ll be goddamned, old Vicki Harroway, la de da.”

“What do you mean, la de da?” I said.

“He’s a fag. He’s building himself up for the boys down the beach, you know?”

“Do you know that or do you just think it?”

“Well, hell, I mean he never made no pass at me, but everybody knows about Vicki. I mean, all the lifters know Vic, you know? He’s queer as a square doughnut.”

“He work out here?”

“Naw, he used to be the pro at a health club in one of the big hotels, but I heard he got canned for fooling around. I ain’t heard of him in about a year or so.”

“Any place he hangs out?”

Cimoli shook his head and shrugged. “Beats me,” he said.

“Friends? People who knew him?”

“Christ, I don’t know. I barely knew the guy. I seen him in a couple contests I had to judge — it’s hokey, but it’s good PR for the club — and you hear talk, but I don’t know the guy myself. Why?”

“He’s my weight-lifting idol. I want to find him so he can autograph this picture.”

“Yeah, me too,” Cimoli said. “Well, look, if I hear anything I’ll give you a buzz, okay? Still in the same crummy dump?”

“I have not relocated my office,” I said. “Better check the boys in the pool. Don’t want them exhausting themselves first time out.”

“Yeah, I better. They tend to get short of wind just climbing in.”

When I got back out on the street, the bright day had turned dark. The city and the sky were the same shade of gray, and they seemed to merge so that there was no horizon. Vicki Harroway? Goddamn.

I drove back up onto the expressway, around Storrow Drive, off at Arlington Street, and parked in a tow zone by the Ritz a block from Boylston Street. The gray sky was spitting a little rain now, just enough to mist on my windows. Enough to make me turn the collar up on my sport coat as I headed up Newbury Street.

Halfway up the block, past the Ritz, on the same side was a five-story brick building with a windowed, five-story, pentagonal bay and a canopied entry. The bay window on the third floor said Race’s Faces across it in black script outlined with gold.

I took the open-mesh black iron elevator up. It let me out right in the waiting room. Gold burlap wallpaper, gold love seat, gold glass-topped coffee table, gold wall-to-wall carpet, and a blond receptionist with centerfold boobs, in a lime-green chiffon dress, sitting at a lime-green plastic desk. On the walls were black and white photographs of women with lots of fancy-focus blurring and light glinting on their hair. To the right of the receptionist was a lime-green door with a blacks-lettered gold-trimmed script sign that said Studio.

The receptionist pointed her chest at me and said, “May I help you?”

“Yes, you may,” I said, “but it would involve wrinkling your dress.”

“Did you wish to make an appointment with Mr. Witherspoon, sir?”

“Doesn’t he mind wrinkling his dress?”

She said, “I beg your pardon.”

I said, “Never mind. I would, in fact, like to see Mr. Witherspoon.”

“Did you have an appointment?”

“No, but if you’d tell him Spenser is here, I bet he’d see me.

“What is it you wish to see him about?”

“I’m posing for the centerfold in the December Jack and Jill and wondered if Race would be willing to handle the photography.”

She picked up the phone and pressed the intercom button. “Mr. Witherspoon? I’m sorry to bother you, but there’s a man here who says his name is Spenser. He said something about posing for some pictures in Jack and Jill. I’m not familiar with it. Yes sir.” She hung up and said to me, “Mr. Witherspoon says to come in. He’s right through that door.”

“Jack and Jill,” I said, “is a magazine that celebrates the heterosexual experience.” She looked at me without expression and said, “Why don’t you shove Jack and Jill magazine up your ass.”

“Class will out,” I said and went into the Studio.

It was white: floor, ceiling, walls, rugs, except one wall which was covered in uninterrupted black velvet. Opposite the door the room bellied out into the pentagonal bay I’d seen from the street. There were black velvet drapes gathered at each side of the windows. On a Victorian-looking black sofa a very thin girl reclined with her head propped on one elbow and a rose in her teeth. She was wearing a billowy diaphanous white gown, very red lipstick, and nail polish. Her black hair was very long and very straight. Surrounding her was a cluster of light poles and bounce lighting. Extension cords tangled around the floor near the sofa. Around her moved a graceful man with a Hasselblad camera.

Race Witherspoon was six feet tall, slim, tanned, and entirely bald. I never did know whether he was naturally bald or if he shaved his head. His eyebrows were black and symmetrical, and a blue shadow of closely shaved beard darkened his jaw and cheeks. He had on tight black velvet pants that rode low on his hips and tucked into white leather cowboy boots. His shirt was white silk, open almost to his belt. The sleeves were belled. His tanned chest was as tight-skinned and hairless as his head, and a big silver medallion hung on a silver chain against his sternum. Susan had an outfit like it. But Race’s was more daring. He moved fluidly around the model with the Hasselblad, snapping pictures and cranking the film ahead.

“I’ll be with you in a minute, old Spenser, my friend.” He spoke while he shot. He wore a large onyx ring on his right index finger, and a black silk kerchief was knotted around his throat. Outside the bright bath of the photography lights, the room was dim, and the misting rain that had begun while I walked up Newbury Street had become a hard rain that rattled on the windows. I sat on the edge of an ebony free-form structure which I took to be a desk.

“All right, Denise, take a break while I talk to the man.”

The model got up off the couch without any visible effort, like a snake leaving a rock, and slunk off through a door behind the velvet hangings on the far wall. Witherspoon walked over to me and put the camera down beside me on the desk.

“What is it I can do for you, Chickie?” he said.

“I’ve come for one last try, Race,” I said. “I’ve got to know. What is your name, really?”

“Why do you doubt me?”

I shook my head. “No one is named Race Witherspoon.”

“Someone is named anything.”

I took out my photo of Vic Harroway and handed it to Witherspoon.

“I’d like to locate this guy, Race. Know him?”

“Hmm, fine-looking figure of a man. What makes you think I might know him?”

“I heard he was gay.”

“Well, for crissake, Spenser. I don’t know every queer in the country. It’s one thing to come out of the damned closet. It’s quite another to run a gay data bank.”

“You know him, Race?”

“I’ve seen him about. What’s your interest? Want me to fix you up; maybe you could go dancing at Nutting’s on the Charles?”

“Naw, he’d want to lead. I think I’ll just stay home and wash my hair and listen to my old Phil Brito albums. What do you know about Harroway?”

“Not much, but I want to know the rap on him before I say anything. I owe you some stuff, but, you know, I don’t owe you everything I am.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You don’t. Okay, there’s a missing boy, about fifteen. I saw him with Harroway. I want the kid back, and I would like to ask Harroway about a murder.”

Witherspoon’s thick eyebrows raised evenly. “Heavy,” he said. “Very heavy. A fifteen-year-old kid, huh? Harroway was always a damned baby-raper, anyway.”

“He’s got no record,” I said.

“I know. I didn’t mean literally. He’s the kind of guy who likes young kids. If he were straight, he’d be queer for virgins, you know.”

“He is gay, then?”

“Oh hell, yes.”

“Where’s he hang out?”

“I see him at a gay bar over in Bay Village, The Odds’ End. Isn’t that precious? I don’t go there much. It attracts a kinkier crowd than I like.”

“Know what he does for a living?”

“No. I thought he lifted weights all the time. I know he was fired from a health club a year or so ago, and as far as I know he never got another job. He’s around with a lot of bread, though. Fancy restaurants, clothes, new car. That kind of thing.”

“Think he might kill someone?”

“He’s a mean bitch, you know. He’s a fag that doesn’t like fags. He likes to shove people around. One of those I’m-gay-but-I’m-no-fairy-types.”

“Anything else you know that could help? Friends, lovers, anything?”

Witherspoon shook his head. “No, I don’t know him all that well, only seen him around. He’s not my type.”

“Okay,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Now, on the other hand,” Witherspoon said, “you are.

“Not with someone who won’t give his real name,” I said.

“Well, how about Denise then?”

“Not till you feed her,” I said. “Your secretary, however, is another matter”

Witherspoon gave me a big smile. “Sorry, old Spenser, she’s hot for Denise.”

I said, “I think I’ll go look for Harroway before I find myself mating with a floor lamp,” and I left.