The drapes were drawn across the French doors, but I was able to peer through a narrow gap and catch a glimpse of a crowd. The sound of music and crowd noise was louder through the glass doors. Looking up, I could see the shades drawn on all three floors with light leaking out. I gestured with my hand toward the street and we walked back down the alley to Fairfield and around the corner back onto Beacon.
"It's a large party," I said.
"Friday night," Hawk said.
"Never set up a raid on a Friday night," I said.
"Can we do it anyway?" Susan said.
Hawk looked at me.
I said, "Why not. I got a key. Let's go in and have a look. If the party's big and wild enough, no one will pay any attention."
Hawk nodded once. Susan said, "Party, party." In the dim light from the streelamp I could see her eyes wide and the slight indentation around her mouth that meant repressed excitement.
We went to the door and I knocked lightly. No answer. I tried the knob. It was locked. I took out the duplicate keys and opened the front door. The place must have been soundproofed because when the door was open the blast of sound was overpowering. Hard rock music thumped and voices were shrill and glasses clattered. We stepped inside and closed the door. The air was thick with tobacco smoke and pot and the smell of booze, and hot with human scent. We took off our coats in the hallway and laid them across the umbrella stand. While we were doing that a big surly-looking man appeared at the end of the hall and walked toward us. He was wearing a blue blazer that was too small for him and the gun he wore under it made a clear bulge. He had long muttonchop sideburns and his hair was longish, so that it trailed over his collar in back. Hawk smiled.
"What are you people doing here?" the surly man said. Hawk smiled some more.
"We been over there," he said vaguely, pointing with his right hand across his body at the wall next to his shoulder. The surly man was close now and frowning as he looked in the direction that Hawk was pointing. He said, "Huh?"
And Hawk hit him with the edge of his pointing right hand across the bridge of his nose. I could hear the bone break. The man grunted, put his hands toward his face, and Hawk hit him, still with the edge of his right hand, this time just back of the left ear. The surly man's hands never made it to his face. They dropped straight in front of him and the surly man's body followed. He fell face forward on the floor and he lay still. I opened the front door. Hawk and I each took hold of the back of his coat collar and dragged him outside. Hawk reached down and slipped his gun out of its holster and we shoved him over the ornamental railing in behind the bare winter shrubs. Then we came back in and Susan closed the door behind us. Her eyes were shiny. Hawk handed her the surly man's gun, a short-barreled Colt detective special. "Stick that in your purse," he said. "Don't want to leave it laying around." Susan plonked it into her shoulder bag. It disappeared easily. She could have kept a collection of blunderbusses in there without being discovered.
We followed the noise and smoke and smell along the hall and down the three steps to the living room. Susan's hand was on my arm.
Susan said, "Jesus Christ."
The room was a swarm of debauchery, a maelstrom of naked and part-naked limbs and torsos. It looked like a feverish animation of one of those Gustave Dor6 illustrations for The Inferno. Somewhere in the swarm rock music was playing at top volume on a good stereo. The smoke hung under the ceiling, eddying around the table lamps as the hot light bulbs caused a tiny thermal updraft. The thump of the music made a discernible vibration in the stairs as we stood looking in. I let Hawk stand in front of us in case Poitras or Amy or April spotted us.
The laughter that had filtered out through the French doors as I stood there in the dark a few moments ago now snarled with the music, raw and harsh and gilded at the edges with hysteria. Slicing through the thick smell of pot and booze and perfume and sweat was a thin medicinal smell I wasn't sure of. Ether maybe. The heat was threatening. The air seemed hard to breathe. Hawk was whistling softly through his teeth again. He was less than a foot away and I could barely make out the tune; it was "Stars and Stripes Forever."
"Thank God it's Friday," I murmured to Susan.
The room was the same one in which I'd had my correct beer with Amy the first time I'd come, but just barely. Much of the furniture was gone and what remained had been pushed against the walls. On the bar there were half-gallon bottles of vodka and saucers of bright capsules. I could see reds and yellows and blues from where I was. There were plastic glasses in a stack and a large bag of ice tipped over and partially melted in a big puddle near the vodka. There was jug wine and some bourbon and a freezer-size baggy of grass open and some spilling. The lights around the edges of the room were bright and, reflecting off the beige walls, lit the living room like a movie set. On the wall to the right of the bar a large-screen TV was showing in color a video-tape in which two naked women and one naked man in a shower stall were involved in active foreplay while the shower head fanned a steady spray of water down on them. The actors appeared to be speaking lines, but they were soundless in the face of the music and the laughter.
"We better move down among them," I said to Susan and Hawk. "We're too out of place up here looking down." They nodded and, Hawk first, we went down the three steps and into the maw of the beast. T. J. Eckleberg, where are you when I need you?
I said, "Pay attention to those movies, Suze. Pick up your technique a little."
"Anything anyone in this room or on that screen is doing," Susan said quietly, "I never wish to do with you ever."
"Oh," I said. "Close your eyes, then, and hang on to me."
The men in the room were generally middle-aged, the women generally children. Most of the people were sprawled on the floor, and while there seemed to be a good deal of fondling going on, I saw no actual intercourse. Nothing declassi here. We skirted a couple on the floor near the big-screen television. He had short gray hair and a clipped gray mustache and a white broadcloth shirt and a red bow tie. She was wearing only a camisole. He had one hand under the camisole as she giggled and tipped a glass of what appeared to be straight vodka against his lower lip for him to drink. Her fingernails were painted blue and so were her toenails. She appeared to be maybe fifteen. A tall angular man with gold-rimmed glasses was trying to dance to the shattering music. His partner was a tall still-faced blond girl with a long single braid down her back. She wore high-heeled shoes and tight designer jeans and no shirt. The strap of her black bra made a thin line across her white back. They were having trouble dancing because they were both drunk and because the man was trying to waltz to the music, holding the girl close against him. He bumped into me as we circled the room and said, "'Scush me," and stumbled away. As we moved on he tried to dip with his partner and they fell down, she on top of him. They stayed there.
Susan said in my ear, "That's Foster Carmichael. He's an associate commissioner of education."
"What dedication," I said. "Devotes even his weekends to kids."
A black-haired kid with a freckled Irish face was standing on the coffee table against the far wall doing a slow strip-tease to music that must have come from a different drummer. She moved slowly, her face fixed in adolescent imitation of a sultry smile as she struggled with her clothes. She was too zonked to figure it out, but it was hard to strip in real clothes. It was hard to scrunch out of your designer jeans and look like Gypsy Rose lee at the same time.
We didn't see April in the room, or Amy, or Poitras. Susan saw two other people she recognized, and I spotted a state rep that I knew. As we wedged back toward the stairs a man on the floor ran his hand up
Susan's calf. I stepped on his stomach and he took his hand away.