God Save the Child

It was eleven when I left the apartment, full of stomach and clear of eye. I drove over to the Harbor Health Club, the second floor of an old building on Atlantic Avenue. Until the new high-rise apartments had started going in along the waterfront, it had been the Harbor Gym, and once, when I’d thought I was a boxer, I’d trained there. I still went in sometimes to hit the speed bag and work on the heavy bag and maybe do some bench presses, but mostly I went to the Y. The Harbor Gym had become upwardly mobile. Now it had steam rooms and inhalant rooms and exercise devices which jiggled your body while you leaned on them and chrome plating on the barbells and carpeting in the weight room.

I asked a receptionist in a toga where Henry Cimoli was, and she sent me to the Roman bath room. Henry was in there talking with two fat, hairy men who sat in a circular pool of hot water. Henry looked like an overdeveloped jockey. He was about 5'4" in a snow-white T-shirt and maroon warm-up pants. The muscles in his arms bulged against the tight sleeve of the T-shirt, and his neck was thick and muscular with a prominent Adam’s apple. There was scar tissue around his eyes. His thick black hair was cut close to his head and brushed forward.

“Spenser,” he said when he saw me, “want a free go on the irons?”

“Not today, Henry. I want to talk.”

“Sure.” He spoke to the fat men in the hot water, “Excuse me, I gotta talk with this guy.”

We walked back toward the cubbyhole office beyond the weight room.

“You still lifting?” Cimoli asked.

“Yeah,” I said, “some. Too bad about how you’re letting yourself go.”

“Hey, I gotta work at it all the time. Guy my height, man, you let it go and you look like a fat broad in about two weeks.”

“Yeah, after I go you better go sit in the tub with those two guys, get a real workout.”

Cimoli shrugged. “Aw, you gotta offer that shit. They come in and sit in the steam room and soak in the pool and go home and tell everybody how they’re getting in shape. But we got the real stuff too. You remember.”

I nodded. “I’m looking for a guy, Henry.” I showed him the picture of Vic Harroway. He took it and looked at it. “One of those guys, huh?” He shook his head. “Assholes,” he said. I nodded again. Cimoli studied the picture. Then he broke into a big grin. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I know this bastard. That’s Vic Harroway. I’ll be goddamned, old Vicki Harroway, la de da.”

“What do you mean, la de da?” I said.

“He’s a fag. He’s building himself up for the boys down the beach, you know?”

“Do you know that or do you just think it?”

“Well, hell, I mean he never made no pass at me, but everybody knows about Vicki. I mean, all the lifters know Vic, you know? He’s queer as a square doughnut.”

“He work out here?”

“Naw, he used to be the pro at a health club in one of the big hotels, but I heard he got canned for fooling around. I ain’t heard of him in about a year or so.”

“Any place he hangs out?”

Cimoli shook his head and shrugged. “Beats me,” he said.

“Friends? People who knew him?”

“Christ, I don’t know. I barely knew the guy. I seen him in a couple contests I had to judge — it’s hokey, but it’s good PR for the club — and you hear talk, but I don’t know the guy myself. Why?”

“He’s my weight-lifting idol. I want to find him so he can autograph this picture.”

“Yeah, me too,” Cimoli said. “Well, look, if I hear anything I’ll give you a buzz, okay? Still in the same crummy dump?”

“I have not relocated my office,” I said. “Better check the boys in the pool. Don’t want them exhausting themselves first time out.”

“Yeah, I better. They tend to get short of wind just climbing in.”

When I got back out on the street, the bright day had turned dark. The city and the sky were the same shade of gray, and they seemed to merge so that there was no horizon. Vicki Harroway? Goddamn.

I drove back up onto the expressway, around Storrow Drive, off at Arlington Street, and parked in a tow zone by the Ritz a block from Boylston Street. The gray sky was spitting a little rain now, just enough to mist on my windows. Enough to make me turn the collar up on my sport coat as I headed up Newbury Street.

Halfway up the block, past the Ritz, on the same side was a five-story brick building with a windowed, five-story, pentagonal bay and a canopied entry. The bay window on the third floor said Race’s Faces across it in black script outlined with gold.

I took the open-mesh black iron elevator up. It let me out right in the waiting room. Gold burlap wallpaper, gold love seat, gold glass-topped coffee table, gold wall-to-wall carpet, and a blond receptionist with centerfold boobs, in a lime-green chiffon dress, sitting at a lime-green plastic desk. On the walls were black and white photographs of women with lots of fancy-focus blurring and light glinting on their hair. To the right of the receptionist was a lime-green door with a blacks-lettered gold-trimmed script sign that said Studio.

The receptionist pointed her chest at me and said, “May I help you?”