"Won't hurt if he feels better about things," I said.
"We could have zipped him."
"But then there'd be people trying to zip us. This way is better. It puts Susan out of it, if he'll keep his word."
"He will," Hawk said.
In front of the restaurant, as we went out onto Tremont Street, was an unmarked car with the motor idling, and its give-away buggy whip antenna trembling slightly in synch with the engine vibrations.
"That's why no reinforcements came," I said.
"Henry called Quirk," Hawk said.
I bent over and looked in the window. Belson sat behind the wheel and Martin Quirk was beside him. Quirk rolled down the window. The smell of Belson's cheap cigar was strong.
"Henry call you?" I said.
"Uh-huh."
"You down here officially?" I said.
"Nope. Henry told us somebody took a swipe at Susan, and you and your pet shark"quirk pointed at Hawk with his chin -"were coming down to talk with Marcus about it."
Hawk grinned and drifted over to his car and put the shotgun in the trunk.
I said, "We did. It's all straightened out." There was a shotgun between Quirk's knees and another one locked upright into the catch on the dashboard.
"Thanks," I said.
Quirk was immaculate, as he always was. Hair recently cut, face newly shaved. His trench coat just out of the cleaners.
Quirk nodded. Belson chewed his cigar into a more comfortable corner of his mouth.
"Best to Susan," Quirk said. And the car pulled slowly away and drove Tremont Street.
Hawk was leaning against his car with his arms crossed. I said, "Let's go." And Hawk walked around and got into the driver's side.
As we headed back for the Harbor Health Club, Hawk said, "You tell Henry to do that?"
"No. I told him to let Quirk know if we didn't come back. You were there."
"Not sure how legal that is," Hawk said, "cops sitting backup while you and me roust some citizens." "About as legal as you and me rousting the citizens," I said.
"That's what I thought," Hawk said.
Hawk dropped me at the Health Club and I picked up my car and drove out to Smithfield. I was in Susan's kitchen drinking coffee and eating oatmeal cookies when she came home from school. Cataldo came into the house with her.
"You don't have to watch her anymore," I said. "It's been fixed."
Susan put her coat across the back of a kitchen chair and said to Cataldo, "Coffee?"
Cataldo shook his head. "No, thanks. I hope," he said to me, "there was no crime committed in fixing things?"
"Cynical and suspicious," I said. "Years of police work will do that to you, Suze."
She was making instant coffee for herself at the counter and her face was serious. She nodded. Cataldo said, "See you, Susan."
She said, "Thank you very much, Lonnie."
He nodded at me, and Susan walked him to the door. When she came back, she put her arms around my neck from behind as I sat at the table and pressed her cheek against the top of my head for a moment. Then she got her coffee from the counter and came and sat across the table from me. She took a cookie and bit a small half-circle from the edge and sipped some coffee.
"What did you do," she said, "to fix it?"
I told her.
"What if Quirk hadn't showed up to cover your back?" Susan said when I got through.
"Can't say, maybe nothing. Maybe we'd have had to shoot some people. No use thinking about what didn't happen."
"I was scared all day," Susan said. "I knew you'd do something like that. I was afraid you'd do it alone. That you wouldn't even ask Hawk."
"I didn't ask Hawk," I said. "He came along uninvited. Like Quirk and Belson."
She nodded. "I was scared for you. I was scared you'd be hurt, or killed. And I was scared for me. Scared I'd have to deal with what I know about Poitras alone."
I nodded. "Quirk would have helped you," I said. "And Frank Belson."
"You think that Marcus will stick to his bargain?"
"Yes. Hawk says he will."
"And if Hawk is wrong?"
"Hawk isn't wrong about things like that," I said. "There are things Hawk doesn't know anything about. But what he knows, he knows for certain."
She nibbled at another cookie. She was wearing a new perfume, and the light from the window behind her made her black hair shine. Seeing her was a tangible physical sensation for me. I could feel the sight of her move through my body. It was always difficult not to touch her.
"We have to decide about Poitras and April and, I suppose, Amy Gurwitz," I said.
"I know."
"Busting Poitras will be easy. There's plenty of evidence in the place. Juries and judges are inclined to be unsympathetic to child pornographers, and I imagine the Department of Education frowns upon them as well, at least as far as official policy goes." "Yes. I'm sure it does," Susan said. "It's the girls." "Yeah, it is. I don't know what to do with the goddamned girls."
There was one cookie left on the plate. I took it and ate it while Susan held her coffee cup to her lips and tapped her bottom teeth slowly against the rim. Then she drank some coffee, put the cup down, and said, "I don't know either."
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."