"Her parents think she's become a prostitute, and they are worried about her."
"You a cop… policeman?"
"I am a private detective," I said.
She raised her eyebrows and smiled. "Oh, isn't that interesting."
I nodded and sipped a little more beer. She smiled at me.
"Are you thinking?" I said.
"Excuse me?"
"Are you thinking about my question?"
"Oh… No."
"Can you put me in touch with April? Do you know where she is?"
She smiled again, the apex of courtesy. "No, I'm terribly sorry. I don't know where April is."
I didn't get a ring of sincerity in her voice. Or insincerity. I didn't hear the ring of anything in her voice. She was like a kid playacting. Playing grown-up. She offered me a filter-tipped cigarette from a box on the coffee table. I said, "No, thank you."
She said, "Do you mind if I smoke?"
I said, "No."
She lit her cigarette with a big silver table lighter.
"Would you have any ideas on where I might look for April?" I said.
Amy held her cigarette carefully out near the fingertips of her index and middle fingers. She inhaled and exhaled, carefully blowing the smoke away from me. "Gracious, I really couldn't say. I haven't seen April since I moved from Smithfield."
I nodded. "You think she might be a whore?" I said.
"Oh, I hope not. She was always so nice. I don't think she'd do that."
"Do you live here with Mitchell Poitras?"
She smiled and shook her head vaguely. It was neither a negative nor affirmative movement-it was something in between, an avoidance gesture.
"Do you work?"
"I'm at home just now," she said. Her eyes were shallow and meaningless as she spoke. Her smile was polite. She looked like a Barbie doll.
"So who pays the rent?"
She made her vague head movement again and smoked some more of her cigarette.
"What does Mitchell do for a living?" I said.
She looked up at the clock. "I really must be starting my dinner pretty soon. I'm afraid you'll have to excuse me." She stood. I was being outclassed by a sixteenyear-old girl. Should I give her the famous Spenserian arm squeeze? Or I could shoot her. I said, "Okay, thanks for your time." I took a card from my shirt pocket and gave it to her. "If you should hear from April, could you give me a call?" She put the card on the coffee table and walked in stately cadence to the door and opened it. She smiled. I smiled. I went out. She shut the door. I turned up my coat collar and walked to my car. The small rain still fell.
Chapter 7
I was not happy. I had learned so little from Amy Gurwitz that I felt as if I'd gotten stupider while I was in there. It wasn't so much that I suspected her of lying. I had no sense at all of her or her reactions. It bothered me. She seemed in some ways the full realization of what a sixteen-year-old kid would imagine adult sophistication to be. Like a cartoon of a rich Back Bay matron. But that's all she was. There was no fun in her, no pleasure in the game. No showing off. No rebellion. No flirtation. And she was living with some guy old enough to have amassed the bundle it had cost for that town house. None of it was right. I didn't like it. I had the feeling that maybe she didn't care if I liked it.
I looked at my watch-after four. I was hungry. I left my car where it was and walked over to the Cafe Vendome on Commonwealth and had a cheeseburger and three beers. When I got through it was 5:05. With the rain still coming I walked down Commonwealth and across the Common and on into the Combat Zone at the foot of Boylston Street. It was twenty-five to six when I got there. But that didn't matter. Time stood still in the Combat Zone. You could see a dirty movie or a quarter peep show at most hours of the day or night. You could purchase a skin magazine specialized for almost every peculiarity. You could get a drink. Fellatio. Pizza by the slice, adult novelty items. Everything necessary to sustain the human spirit. The neon lights and oversized flashing bulbs and crudely drawn signs that advertised all of this and much more (All Live Acts! Nude College Girls!) were plastered onto old commercial buildings, some of them once elegant in the red brick and brownstone that Boston had been built in. Above the one-story glitz of the Combat Zone the ornamental arched windows and the intricate rooflines of the old buildings were as incongruous as a nun at a stag film.
I moved along lower Washington Street with my hands in my pockets, trying to look like a guy from Melrose whose wife was away till Thursday. Except for the Back Bay, Boston's streets are routinely narrow and twisted. Washington Street where it descends into the Combat Zone is notably so. Cars cruised slowly by. Often they were filled with young men drinking beer from the bottle and yelling out the window at women. Sailors from other countries, women in suggestive clothes, men in stretch fabric suits and miracle fabric raincoats with epaulets and belts, an elderly Oriental man moving through on his way to Chinatown, seeming oblivious of the crudely packaged lust about him. Winos shuffled about down here too, and kids wearing black warm-up jackets with yellow leather sleeves that said Norfolk County Champs 8Q-81 in the center of a large yellow football on the left front.
I had April Kyle's picture in my inside pocket, but I didn't need it. I'd studied it. I knew what she looked like. At least, I knew what she looked like when she'd had it taken for graduation. The Combat Zone look Was a little different. I hadn't seen a cashmere sweater or a pair of Top-Siders down here in some time.
Two girls came out of a bar ahead of me. One was black, one was white. They both wore blond wigs. They both had on slit skirt evening gowns with sequins and cleavage. The white girl wore open-toed sling-back high heels. The black girl had on boots. Both wore transparent plastic raincoats with transparent hoods up over their wigs. The white girl was smoking a joint. I smiled at them as they came toward me.
"Hi, girls," I said. "What's happening?"
The black girl said to her friend, "Now, he ain't no cop, is he?"
The white girl said, "Oh, no. He's a dentist probably from Cow Hampshire."
The black girl said, "Bullshit," making it a foursyllable phrase, and the two of them kept moving. I'd have to work on my suburban look a little.
In the window of a store next to a peep show there was an assortment of leather items. Their uses weren't apparent, but bondage and discipline seemed a good estimate. Two men with crew cuts held hands while they looked in the window beside me. One of them had on a black motorcycle jacket. The other wore a black turtleneck jersey and a down vest. Both wore low white sneakers and dark socks. The one in the leather jacket nudged the other one and whispered something. They both giggled, and I moved on.
Rock music with a heavy thumping drive racketed out of the bars and strip joints, the multicolored neon reflected from the shiny streets and rain-polished windows, someone blared his automobile horn insistently, between two parked cars a man vomited while another man in a long blue overcoat held him around the waist to keep him from pitching forward. In the window of an adult bookstore there was a collection of magazines devoted to naked children of both sexes, hairless and innocent, wearing makeup.
A thought occurred to me that had not occurred before. What was Harry Kyle doing in the Zone when he'd seen his daughter? Selling clap insurance? Catching the Harry Reems retrospective at the Pussycat Cinema? I'd never fallen under the spell of the Combat Zone. I was in favor of female nudity, but the Zone left me with the queasy feeling I used to get when I smoked first thing in the morning on an empty stomach. I had quit smoking in 1962, but I could still remember it clearly. The pack of Camels in the shirt pocket, the first drag with coffee after breakfast, the days in Korea when we'd take a break and light up, the automatic gesture I always made leaving the house of patting my chest to make sure I had cigarettes, the satisfied feeling when I did, like having money in your wallet. Now when I left the house I patted my hip to check the gun.