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?”

  I oiled the griddle and turned the heat on under it.

  “And there was a black kid about fifteen screwing some middle-aged white guy in a chemical suit on a bare mattress in an empty room. He took off when we showed up looking for April, and the kid wanted to know if I was interested.”

  I put four small circles of batter on the hot griddle and watched them spread and begin to rise. When the bubbles began to show through I flipped them and after another minute I put two on Susan’s plate and two on mine.

  Susan put on butter and homemade maple syrup and took a bite. “Yum,” she said.

  “Only one yum?”

  “I don’t want you to get arrogant.”

  I ate a pancake. “Carbohydrate replenishment,” I said. “After the exhausting run.”

  “It wasn’t the run that exhausted you,” Susan said.

  “Maybe I should have scalloped some oysters.”

  We ate two pancakes apiece and I put on four more.

  “It makes you feel helpless,” Susan said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Hawk have any reaction?”

  I shook my head. “Far as I can tell, the world amuses the hell out of Hawk.”

  “What fools these mortals be?”

  I put two more corn cakes on each plate. “Yeah,” I said, “him and Puck.”

  “Does the fact that so many of these women are black make you feel more of an outsider? More … naïve’s not the right word, but somewhere in that area.”

  “Possible,” I said. We ate. Susan poured me some more coffee. I put on another quartet of corn cakes. “How many do you suppose we can eat before we hurt ourselves?”

  “I can’t speak for you,” Susan said. “I’ll stop with these two.”

  “But mostly,” I said, “it’s spending time in a world where fifteen-year-old girls are a commodity, like electrified dildos, or color-coordinated merkins, and crotchless leather panties. It’s a world devoted to appetite, and commerce.” I sipped some coffee. “I think we are in rats’ alley,” I said, “where the dead men lost their bones.”

  “Well,” Susan said, “we are bleak about this. You want to stop?”

  “No.” I said.

  “I know you’re doing this for me. I care more about you than about April Kyle. If you drop it, I’ll understand.”

  I shook my head.

  “You can’t,” she said.

  “No.”

  We were quiet. “Maybe just two more,” I said.

  Susan nodded. She looked at me with that power of concentration that she had. “Why can’t you?” she said.

  I shrugged. “It’s what I do,” I said.

  “Even when it bothers you like this?”

  “If you only do it when it’s easy, is it worth doing?”

  She smiled. Her mouth was wide, and when she smiled her whole face smiled and her eyes gleamed.

  “You never disappoint,” she said. “You and Cotton Mather.”

  I kept looking at her smile. It made up for a lot of things. Maybe it made up for everything.

  “I’m not sure,” I said, “that I could make it without you.”

  “You could,” Susan said, “but you’ll never have to.”

  Chapter 13

  I went back to work Sunday afternoon. At four o’clock I was having a drink with Hawk at J.J. Donovan’s in the North Market.

  “You want me to come along and keep you from getting mugged?” Hawk said. He had white wine. I had beer.

  “No, I’ll risk that alone,” I said. “I want you to look into things from the other end.”

  “Tony Marcus?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s the top end.”

  “True,” I said. “You start there and I’ll keep rooting around down here at the bottom. Maybe if I work up and you work down we’ll meet somewhere and know something.”

  “You care how I do it?” Hawk said. He sipped some wine.

  “No. You know Marcus. You know the people around him. See if anything is up. All I want is the kid.”

  Hawk nodded. He sipped some more wine. “You going back and look around the Zone again.”

  I nodded. My beer was gone. The bartender drew me another.

  Hawk was looking at me. “You know Marcus,” Hawk said.

  “Yeah.”

  “You know if something is up, it is something very heavy.”

  “Yeah.”

  “There be a lot of weight to take,” Hawk said. “I don’t mind. But you sure you ready?”

  “What’s bothering you, Hawk?” I said.

  “This thing is queer,” he said. “Since Friday I been asking around—a few pimps, a few hookers, some people I know. Everybody tight on this. Everybody don’t know a thing. Everybody changes the subject. Everybody awful careful about some sixteen-year-old high school kid going home to her mommy.”

  “See what you can get from Marcus,” I said. “And try not to make him mad.”

  Hawk smiled his antediluvian smile and left. I paid the bill and headed for the Zone.

  It was jumping on a late Sunday afternoon, glowing like rotten wood. Somebody had said that about the English court once. Raleigh? I couldn’t remember. I drifted south along Washington Street looking for a young white whore. I saw some, but they weren’t April. Near Stuart Street I saw a white Jaguar sedan that might have been Trumps’s. I felt the weight of my gun in its hip holster. A pleasing weight. Comforting. The Jag pulled away from the curb and disappeared in the traffic. I saw the black whore with the crescent-shaped scar that I’d seen with Trumps my first night in the Zone. She was standing in front of a club that advertised ALL BOTTOMLESS on several cardboard signs in the window. She was wearing a white dress with a fluffy white fake fur collar. She spoke to a man walking past. He shook his head and walked faster. I stood beside her and said, “How much for the night?”

  She looked at me and opened her mouth and then closed it. “I know you,” she said.

  “To know me is to love me,” I said. “How much?”

  “No deal, mister. Just stay away from me.”

  “Two bills,” I said. “We’ll go to my place.”

  “Trumps would kill me,” she said.

  “He doesn’t need to know. I’m just across the Common. We’ll spend a couple of hours and then you’re back. He doesn’t have to know. Two hundred bucks.”

  She shrugged. “Sure, why not,” she said.

  We caught a cab at Boylston Street. It was maybe a ten-minute walk to my place, but she was wearing three-inch heels and could barely stand.

  In my apartment she checked herself in the hall mirror and looked around.

  “You want a drink?” I said.

  “Gin and Seven-Up,” she said. I controlled a shudder.

  “I don’t have any Seven-Up,” I said. “Gingerale?”

  “Sure.”

  I went into the kitchen to make her drink. When I came back she had taken off her dress. She had on scanty rayon underclothes. K mart erotica. “You like to undress me or you want I should strip all the way?” she said.

  “I just want to talk,” I said. “I’m very lonely.”

  She shrugged. “Long as I get the bread,” she said. “You gonna give me the bread?”

  I handed her the gin and ginger ale, put my bottle of Rolling Rock extra pale on the coffee table, took out my wallet, and extracted two hundred-dollar bills. That left me $5, but I didn’t let her see. I held them out. She took them, folded them over, and slipped them inside her underpants. Then she sat on the couch, put her feet on the coffee table, leaned back, and took about a third of her drink.

  “Talk,” she said. “Tell me about your life.”

  There were bruises on her ribs.

  “I’m interested in finding this kid, April Kyle,” I said.

  She drank some more of her drink. Her face was empty. “That’s nice,” she said.

  “There’d be a good reward.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What harm if I find her? Who cares? Why not help me?”

  Her drink was gone. I got up and made her another one. When I came back she was looking at the picture of Susan on the bookcase.

  “Yours?” she said, and pointed her chin at the picture.

  “Yes.”

  “Married?”

  “No.”

  “That why you just wanna talk?”

  “One reason.”

  “What else, I don’t turn you on?”

  “Oh, yeah, you get my attention sitting around with your ass sticking out. It’s just that I’m working, and I sort of need to concentrate on that.”

  She nodded. “And you don’t like paying for it none, either.”

  “Not too much.”

  “How you know somebody like Hawk?”

  “We used to fight on some of the same cards a long time ago,” I said.

  “Hawk ain’t nobody to mess with,” she said.

  “How do you know I know Hawk?”

  She took a long swallow. “I heard,” she said. “I heard you was with him.”

  “Trumps give you those bruises?”

  “Uh-huh.” She finished the drink and held the glass out. “This is an easy two hundred, honey.”

  I brought the gin and ginger ale and ice out on a tray and put them on the coffee table. I fixed her a fresh drink.

  “Not too much ginger ale, honey. Don’t want to spoil the gin.”

  “So how come nobody wants me to find April?”

  She smiled and drank and smiled again and shook her head.

  “What’s your name?” I said.

  “Velma,” she said. “Velma Fontaine.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Velma. I’m Lance Cartaine.”

  She squinted at me a little. “Your name’s Spenser.”

  “Well, maybe.”

  “You jiving me?”

  “Just a little, Velma. It’s a bad habit of mine. I tend to jive almost everybody.”

  She drank some more gin and ginger ale. She liked it. I thought it would gag a skunk, but I never had any skill with gin anyway.

  “You jiving with the wrong people now,” Velma said.

  “Like who?”

  She smiled again. And shook her head again. I was beginning to think better of Trumps for whacking her.

  “You know where the kid is?”

  “Maybe.”

  I drank another sip of Rolling Rock.

  “You don’t believe me?” Velma said. Her glass was empty. She leaned over and made herself another drink.

  I shrugged.

  “She ain’t anyplace you’ll find her.”

  I didn’t say anything. Susan says that’s my best conversational ploy. Velma drank her drink. It was mostly gin, one ice cube, a splash of ginger.

  “She been bad.”

  I nodded.

  “Stupid little bitch. She had it easy and she fucked it up. Then you come poking around and now she in real trouble.” More gin. “She fixed up in a nice house, nice call job, no street hooking, and she couldn’t handle it. So Red gets her.”

  I smiled slightly, encouraging, Yes, yes, my dear, tell me all about it, nondirective.

  “You ain’t gonna find her.”

  “Probably not,” I said. Sad. Defeated. Winsome and childlike.

  “You know why you ain’t gonna find her?”

  “No.”

  Velma smiled again. “‘Cause she ain’t even in the city,” Velma said. “You got any cigarettes?”

  I shook my head.

  “There’s some in my dress, you want to get them for me, honey-Lance.” She laughed, a bubbly choked laugh, as if she had a bad cold. I got up and found a package of NOW menthol 100’s in her pocket and a book of matches. I took out a cigarette and lit it and handed it to her. She’d better be drunk if she was going to go for that one. She was. She did.

  “Hey, Lance. You got a lot of class, honey.”

  The taste of the cigarette was still in my mouth. How the hell had I ever smoked them? They were as bad as gin and ginger ale.

  Velma took a long drag on the cigarette, a big pull at her drink, swallowed, and let the smoke ooze out through her nostrils.

  “Providence,” she said.

  “Providence.”

  She smoked some more, another long drag that made the end of the cigarette glow. “You know what a sheep ranch is?”

  “No.”

  She was quiet. She smoked. She drank some gin. She refilled her glass and drank some more gin. She was older than I’d thought. Her thighs had thickened and there was a suggestion of dimpling to them. The line where her buttocks merged with her upper thigh had blurred. Her stomach folded a little as she sprawled on the couch.

  “Sheep ranch for people like it kinky. You a whore and you bad, you end up there.”

  “And April’s at a sheep ranch in Providence?”

  “I never said that,” Velma said.

  “You know where there’s a sheep ranch in Providence?”

  “Never been there,” Velma said. “Never been nowhere. Never been out of Boston.” Tears filled Velma’s eyes and spilled over and traced down her face. Her voice thickened. “Never been nowhere,” she said. “Never going.” She sprawled lower onto my couch, her legs sprawled across my coffee table. She spilled her drink and didn’t notice.

  “There an address for the sheep ranch?” I said.

  She didn’t answer. She was crying and snuffling and mumbling things I couldn’t understand. She slipped down farther and closed her eyes and stopped crying. She snuffled for another minute, then she was silent. Then she started to snore. I got up and went to the kitchen and got another bottle of beer and brought it back and sat down and stared at Velma while she slept.

  It was two hours before she woke up, and when she did she was unfriendly. I got her dressed and into a cab and went back upstairs to drink beer and think about sheep ranches.

  Chapter 14

  Providence is an hour south of Boston on Route 95. It has Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design and a good-looking State House and a civic center and Federal Hill, a recycled Italian neighborhood with concrete arches at the entrance on Atwell Avenue.

  I didn’t go to Federal Hill this trip. I went to the Biltmore Plaza on the square by the railroad station and checked in.

  “Where can a guy get a little action in this town?” I said to the bellhop when he showed me my room. I was wearing a white wash-and-wear shirt, red and white checked polyester jacket, and maroon double-knit flare-bottomed slacks with white loafers and a white belt. I had spent nearly $100 on the outfit at Zayre’s. When I go undercover I spare no expense. I wore a maroon tie with many small white horse heads on it, loosened at the collar. I had a pinky ring with a zircon set in onyx, and I reeked of Brut.

  “We have music in our lounge, sir.”

  I folded a five and tucked it into his hand. “Uh-huh,” I said. “You don’t follow my drift. I mean action, broads, huh?”

  “Sorry, sir,” he said. “I really wouldn’t know about that. He smiled and backed out and shut the door. I hung up my garment bag and went out to the front of the hotel and caught a cab.

  “Ride down Dorrance,” I said. “I want to look over the town.”

  “Yes, sir,” the cabby said.

  “I’m looking to have a little fun,” I said. I had another five folded between my fingers and I tapped it on the back of the seat as I leaned forward to talk with him. “Anyplace in this town a guy can have a little fun?”

  The cabby glanced back at me. “What kind of fun, mister?”

  “You know—wine, women, and song.” I grinned. Man to man. “And I could do without the song, if I had to.”

  The cabby was a middle-aged black man with short graying hair and a salt-and-pepper mustache. “You looking for whores?”

  “You got it, man. You got my message. Can you help me out?”

  The cabby shook his head. “I’m not a pimp,” he said. “You got an address, I’ll take you there.”

  “I was hoping you’d know.” I flourished the five a little.

  “Nope.” He pulled over at a corner. “Whyn’t you try another cabby.”

  I got out without saying anything and he drove off. I flagged another cab and we went through the routine again. I rode around Providence in a succession of cabs for about three hours with the worst collection of prudes I’d ever seen. It was twenty minutes to four when I finally scored. The cabby I scored with looked like a toad.

  “I might be able to put you in touch with a guy,” he said. He was fat and short and he seemed to have settled seatwards from years of driving a hack. He didn’t turn around as we drove along Fountain Street past the Providence police and fire headquarters. In Providence the cops wore brown uniforms and drove brown-and-white cruisers. I was pretty sure you could never solve a crime wearing a brown uniform. Maybe it was in honor of the university.

  “Appreciate it,” I said. “There’s a sawbuck in it for you.” I had upped the ante after hour two.

  “Cost you twenty dollars for me to put you in touch with this guy,” the cabby said. “Plus the fare.”

  “Just to meet a guy? Hey, that’s pretty stiff.”

  “Take it or leave it.” The cabby had a hoarse voice. The folds of his neck spilled over his collar.

  “Aw, what the hell,” I said. “It’s only money, huh? You can’t take it with you.”

  The cabby put his hand back over the seat without looking. I put two tens in it. He tucked it into a shirt pocket, turned right, and in two minutes he pulled in at the curb on Dorrance Street in front of the Westminster Mall. Without looking back he said, “That’ll be three-eighty.” I gave him a five and he put that in a different pocket.