“Okay,” he said. “You make sure Poitras knows what not to talk about. He talks, it’s on you.”

  “Okay,” I said. “We clean?”

  “Almost,” Marcus said, and hit me an overhand right on the jaw. He rolled off the desk as he threw the punch, and his full weight was behind it. It was a good punch. I had to take a quick backward step to keep from falling.

  “Now we’re clean,” Marcus said. “Your lucky day, honky. You and your lady.”

  My head was ringing. “Not bad,” I said. “Not a bad punch for a pimp.”

  Chapter 26

  As we walked out through the restaurant Hawk said, “I seen you slip better punches than that one.” There was no one in the restaurant except Buster, behind the bar, holding ice against his forehead.

  “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.”

  I nodded and got up, and Belson and I walked out of the squad room.

  “Lovable,” I said to Belson as we walked to the elevator.

  “Nicest guy in the vice squad,” Belson said.

  The elevator came and I went down. It was cold on Berkeley Street. As I walked the three blocks from Police Headquarters to my office the wind was blowing grit around and doing a good job of penetrating my leather trench coat. If I zipped in the pile lining, then the coat was too small. One of those life choices that remind us of reality. Tight or cold. Maybe I should get a new coat. Something to make me look like a young Robert Mitchum. The choices in size 48 were fairly narrow, however. Maybe a young Guinn “Big Boy” William would be enough.

  I sat in my office with my chair swiveled around and looked out the window. I could see a portion of Boylston Street from this position. If I stood up I could look down onto Berkley Street. On windy days like this I usually liked to stand and look down and watch the skirts swirl on the young women who worked in the insurance companies. But today I was too busy trying to think of what to do about April Kyle when we busted Poitras. She was unlikely to go home, and if she went she was unlikely to stay, and if she stayed it was unlikely to do her any good. Susan said there were some social service organizations that might take her, but what experience I had with them was not encouraging.

  Across the street the young art director with the black hair and the good hips was leaning on her drawing board looking out the window. Our eyes met. She grinned and waved. I waved back. We had never met and our relationship was conducted solely through windows across a busy street. Maybe when I got my new coat … The more I thought about April the more I didn’t know what to do with her.

  Susan was breathing down my neck about Poitras. She was tougher minded, sometimes. To keep Poitras away from next year’s crop of burnouts she’d let April go. She was right, of course. The greatest good for the greatest number. Democracy. Western civilization. Humanism. A working definition of ethical behavior.

  The mail came through the letter slot. I got up and picked it off the floor. There was nothing in it I wanted to read. I threw it away unopened. I stood at the window with my hands in my hip pockets and looked down into the street. The wind was swirling newspapers and Big Mac wrappers around, but almost all the women from the insurance companies were wearing pants. Why doesn’t the breeze excite me? I walked across the room and leaned my forearms on my file cabinet and my chin on my forearms. Why didn’t I know any nuns? A strong-willed, smiling sister with a sense of humor who looked like Celeste Holm. Sister Flanagan’s Girls Town. She ain’t heavy, she’s my sister. Where the hell is the woman’s movement when you need it?

  I didn’t know any nuns. I didn’t even know any priests. I knew some pimps and some leg breakers and some cops and some junkies and some whores and a few madams. Actually I knew one madam.

  I could hear the faint chatter of a typewriter from somewhere down the hall and the occasional ping of the steam pipes in my office. I could hear traffic sounds, muffled by the closed window, and in the corridor a pair of high-heeled shoes tapped briskly past my office door.

  I knew a madam in New York named Patricia Utley. Or I used to. I straightened up and pulled out the second file drawer in the cabinet. I found a manila folder marked Rabb, in about the right alphabetical sequence, and took it out and brought it to my desk. I riffled through the details of some business I’d done about seven years ago. On a piece of note paper from a Holiday Inn was Patricia Utley’s name and address and phone number. I put the file back and sat down at my desk again and called Patricia Utley’s number.

  A man’s voice answered. I asked for Ms. Utley. The voice asked who was calling and I told him. The line clicked on to hold and in maybe thirty seconds I heard her voice.

  “Spenser?” she said.

  “You remember, then?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Summer, 1975. I remember quite clearly.”

  I said, “I owe you a favor and this isn’t going to be it. This is going to be a request for another favor.”

  “Um-hum.”

  “Are you still in business?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “I’d like you to meet a young woman I know. She’s interested in a career,” I said.

  “Are you working on commission?” Patricia Utley’s voice sounded as if she were smiling.

  “No.”

  “Well, I must say it’s a surprising request coming from the man I remember, but yes. I would talk with her.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I don’t know exactly when. I’m working on that, but soon. I’ll call ahead.”

  “Certainly,” she said. “Have things worked out for the young woman we once had mutual interest in seven years ago?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Good,” she said. “I’ll look forward to seeing you soon.”

  We hung up and I sat back and thought some more.

  Chapter 28

  “You’re going to encourage her to be a whore?” Susan said. We were at my place, with a fire going, sitting on the couch with our feet on the coffee table.

  “It’s all she wants to do,” I said. “At least with Patricia Utley she’ll be a high-class whore.”

  There was feta cheese and fresh Syrian bread and Kalamata olives and cherry tomatoes and green pepper rings and smoked kielbasa from Karl’s Sausage Kitchen on a large platter between our feet. We had opened a bottle of new Beaujolais.

  Susan drank some wine. “You are an original thinker,” she said. “I’ll give you that.”

  “Give me a better choice,” I said.

  “There are agencies to deal with this sort of thing.”

  “Uh-huh. Or maybe a nice foster home?”

  “Perhaps,” Susan said. “Often either of those choices is a good one for a child.”

  I always knew when she was speaking professionally. Her language became more formal.

  “We did consider the possibility that being a whore offered her more than she was used to getting.”

  “Yes,” Susan said, “but only in comparison to her home life, to the sterility of her parents and their expectations and the conventional town that reiterated those expectations. Life in Smithfield is not easy unless you are nearly interchangeable with everyone else. Especially in the public schools.”

  “Maybe being a whore in fact is better than being a whore to the expectations of your neighborhood,” I said.

  Susan shook her head.

  “Let me call some people in Youth Services,” she said.

  “Sure,” I said. “Want me to ask Poitras for some names?”

  Susan shook her head again and frowned. “‘Not fair,” she said. “There are lots of good people out there. Poitras doesn’t represent them all.”

  “I know,” I said. “I guess I am just dysfunctional about institutional solutions.”

  We were quiet. I spat an olive pit into the fireplace. It made a barely audible sizzle. I drank some Beaujolais. Then I made a small triangular sandwich out of a piece of Syrian bread and some cheese, with a pepper ring, one cherry tomato, and an olive. I pitted the olive before I slipped it into the sandwich. The proportions are the secret in eating feta cheese and raw vegetables. I sampled the sandwich. Too much cheese obliterated the other flavors. I ate it anyway. Plenty of time to experiment, plenty of time to get it right. I ate some sausage Susan was swirling the wine about in her glass and watching the small turbulence she’d created.

  “Distaste,” I said, “is our automatic response to prostitution. It’s almost impossible for us to think about it beyond deploring it, you know?”

  I poured a little more wine in my glass.

  “Yes,” Susan said. “I know. I suppose if you do think about it beyond the normal assumptions you have to recognize that prostitution is not a single experience.”

  “No,” I said. “It isn’t. There’s lots of kinds of prostitution. Metaphorically the kinds are almost limitless. Everyone who does things for money instead of pride, I suppose.”

  Susan smiled at me. “Didn’t I see you building a cabin out by a pond in Concord the other day?”

  “Uncle Henry,” I said. “Not me. He was always a little dippy, Henry was.”

  The wine was gone. I got another bottle. Beaujolais is new but once a year.

  “But even not metaphorically, prostitution is more than one experience. Some kid doing twenty, thirty tricks a night in hallways and cars isn’t having the same experience that someone has who performs once an evening in a good hotel.”

  “I suppose someone might argue that the acts were morally the same,” Susan said.

  “Ah, Suze, you’re toying with me. We both know what we both think about that.”

  “I know,” Susan said, “I just like to hear how you’ll put it.”

  “Her morality is her business. My business is to get her free so she can take care of her business.”

  “And you think setting her up with a high-priced madam in New York is the way?”