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.
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?"