God Save the Child

22

I stopped to buy a bottle of Dom Perignon and still made it to Susan Silverman’s by 10:35. Susan let me in without comment. I held the wine out to her. “They were out of Annie Greenspring,” I said.

She took it. “Thank you,” she said. She had on a chocolate satin shirt with an oversized collar and copper-colored pants. “Do you want some now?”

“Yes.”

“Then come out in the kitchen and open it. I have trouble with champagne corks.”

The house was a small Cape with some Early American antiques around. A small dining room ran between the living room and the kitchen. There was a miniature harvest table set for two with white china and crystal wineglasses. Gulp!

The kitchen was walnut-paneled and rust-carpeted with a wagon wheel ceiling fixture hanging over a chopping-block table. She put the champagne on the table and got two glasses out of the cabinet. I twisted the cork out, poured, and handed her a glass.

“I’m sorry as hell, Susan,” I said.

“Where were you?”

“Mostly sitting in the lobby at the Hideaway Inn reading ‘Broom Hilda’ and eating a Baby Ruth.”

She picked up the champagne bottle and said, “Come on. We may as well sit by what’s left of the fire.” I followed her into the living room. She sat in a black Boston rocker with walnut arms, and I sat on the couch. There was a cheese ball and some rye crackers on the coffee table, and I sampled them. The cheese ball had pineapple and green pepper in it and chopped walnuts on the outside.

“This is even better than a Baby Ruth,” I said.

“That’s nice,” she said.

I picked up the champagne bottle from where she’d set it on the coffee table. “Want some more?” I said. “No, thank you,” she said. I poured some in my glass and leaned back. The fire hissed softly, and a log shifted with a little shower of sparks. The living room was papered in royal blue, with the woodwork white and a big print of Guernica over the fireplace.

“Look, Suze,” I said. “I work funny hours. I get into places and onto things that I can’t stop, and I can’t call and I gotta be late. There’s no way out of that, you know?”

“I know,” she said. “I knew all the two and one half hours I was walking around here worrying about you and calling you a bastard.”

“Is the dinner ruined?” I said.

“No, I made a cassoulet. It probably improves with age.”

“That’s good.”

She was looking at me now, quite hard. “Spenser, what the hell happened to you? What were you doing?”

I told her. Halfway through she got up and poured herself some more champagne and refilled my glass. When I finished she said, “But where’s Kevin?”

“I don’t know. I figure that Harroway’s got him stashed somewhere else. In Boston, maybe. He must have gotten nervous after we were out to his house.”

“And Harroway’s running a whole, what, vice ring? Right here in town? How can he get away with it? I mean, this isn’t a big town. How can the police not know?”

“Maybe they do know.”

“You mean bribery?”

“Maybe, or maybe Harroway has friends in high places. Remember Doctor Croft was the one who shilled old Fraser Robinson onto Vicki’s scam.”

“But to corrupt the police...”

“Cops are public employees, like teachers and guidance counselors. They tend to give a community what it wants, not always what it should have. I mean, if you happen to go for an evening out with five broads and a goat, and you are a man of some influence, maybe the cops won’t prevent it. Maybe they’ll try to contain it and keep everybody happy.”

The bottle of Dom Perignon was empty. Susan said, “I bought some too,” and went to the kitchen to get it. I got another log out of the hammered-brass wood bucket on the hearth and settled it on top of the fire. Susan returned with the champagne. Mumm. Good. I was more than a domestic champagne date. Next time, she’d said. Tuesday, at my house. Hot-diggity. She sat down on the couch beside me and handed me the bottle. I twisted the cork out and poured.

“I always thought you had to pop it and make a mark in the ceiling and spill some on the rug,” she said.

“That’s for tourists,” I said.

“Where are you now, Spenser? What do you make of everything?”

“Well, I know that Kevin is with Vic voluntarily. I know Vic is a homosexual.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I haven’t proved it, but I know it. I heard it from people I trust. I don’t need to prove it.”

“That’s an advantage you have on the police, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, one. Okay, so Harroway’s gay and Kevin’s staying with him. You told me that Kevin had unresolved sexual identity problems...”

“I said he might have...”

“Right, he might have sexual identity problems, so the relationship between them might be romantic. Agree?”

“Spenser, you can’t just say things like that; there’s so much more that goes into that kind of diagnosis. I’m not qualified...”

“I know, I’m hypothesizing. I don’t have the luxury of waiting to be sure.”

“I guess you don’t, do you?”

“I figure Vic and Kevin are living together, and he finds in Harroway a combination of qualities he misses in his parents. I figure the kid ran off with Harroway and then afterward, out of hatred or perversity or boyish exuberance, they decided to put on the straights and make some money to boot. So they rigged the kidnapping, and they sent the notes and made the phone calls and shipped the guinea pig after it died. Then they went, maybe to get some things of Kevin’s, maybe to steal the old man’s booze, maybe to play a new trick, and broke into the house. Actually Kevin probably had a key. And Earl Maguire caught them and they panicked, or Harroway did, and he killed Maguire. You saw Harroway; you can imagine how he could hit someone too hard, and if he did he could make it permanent.”

“But what do you suppose Doctor Croft has to do with all this?”

“Maybe nothing, maybe just doing a favor for his buddy, Fraser Robinson. Maybe he’s no more than a satisfied customer. Or maybe he’s a convenient source of drugs. An M.D. has a better shot than most people at getting hold of narcotics. I can’t see the mob doing business with the likes of Harroway.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Well, I was thinking of putting my hand on your leg and quoting a few lines from Baudelaire.”

“No, dummy, I mean what are you going to do about Vic Harroway and Doctor Croft and Kevin?”

“One thing I’ll do right now. Where’s your phone?”

“In the kitchen.”

I got up and called Boston Homicide. “Lieutenant Quirk, please.” Susan came out with me and looked at the cassoulet in the oven.

“Who’s calling?”

“My name’s Spenser.”

“One moment.” The line went dead and then a voice came on.

“Spenser, Frank Belson. Quirk’s home asleep.”

“I need a favor, Frank.”

“Oh, good, me and the Lieutenant spent most of today hanging around thinking what could we do to be nice to you. And now you call. Hey, what a treat.”

“I want to know anything you can find out about a medical doctor named Raymond Croft, present address...” I thumbed through the Smithfield phone book on the shelf below the phone, “Eighteen Crestview Road, Smithfield, Mass. Specializing in internal medicine. I don’t know his previous address. Call me here when you can tell me something.” I gave him Susan’s number. “If I’m not here leave a message.”

“You’re sure you don’t want me to hand-carry it out there?”

“Maybe I can do you a favor sometime, Frank.”

“Oh, yeah, you could do everybody a favor sometime, Spenser.”

The conversation wasn’t going my way, so I let it go and hung up. “How’s the cassoulet?” I said.

“On warm,” she said. “It’ll keep. I think we need more wine.”

“Yes,” I said, “I believe we do.”

We went back into the living room and sat on the couch and drank some more. My head felt expanded, and I felt very clever and adorable.

“Darling,” I said, leaning toward Susan, “je vous aime beaucoup, je ne sais pas what to do.”

“Ah, Spenser, you romantic fool,” she said and looked at me over the rim of her champagne glass while she drank. “Are you really a detective, or are you perhaps a poet after all?”

“Enough with the love talk,” I said, “off with the clothes.”

She put the champagne glass down and looked at me full face and said, “Be serious, now, please. Just for now.” My throat got tight, and I swallowed audibly.

“I am serious,” I said.

She smiled. “I know you are. It’s funny, isn’t it? Two sophisticated adult people who want to make love with each other, and we don’t know how to make the transition to the bedroom. I haven’t felt this awkward since college.”

I said, “May I kiss you?” and my voice was hoarse.

She said, “Yes, but not here. We’ll go in the bedroom.”

I followed her down a short corridor and into her bedroom. There was a spool bed with a gold-patterned spread. An air conditioner hummed softly in the far window. The walls were covered in a beige burlap paper, and there was a pine sea chest at the foot of the bed.

She turned toward me and began to unbutton her blouse. “Would you turn the spread down, please?” she said. I did. The sheets were gold with a pattern of coral flowers. As I undressed I looked at Susan Silverman on the other side of the bed. She unhooked her bra. There is something enormously female in that movement. I stopped with my shirt off and my belt unbuckled to watch her. She saw me and smiled at me and let the bra drop. I took a deep inhale and finished undressing. We were naked together then, on opposite sides of the bed. I could see the pulse in her throat. She lay down on her side of the bed and said, “Now you may kiss me.”

I did. With my eyes closed, for a long time. Then I opened my eyes and discovered that she had hers open too and we were looking at each other from a half inch away. With her eyes wide open she darted her tongue into my mouth and then giggled, a rich bubbling half-smothered giggle that I caught. We lay there pressed together kissing and giggling with our eyes open. It was a different beginning, but a very good one. Then we closed our eyes again, and the giggling stopped.