God Save the Child

In the lobby I looked at my watch, 10:15; I was missing the Tuesday night movie again. Then it hit me. Tuesday night I was supposed to be having dinner with Susan Silverman, with maybe a surprise treat afterward. I was two hours and fifteen minutes late.

I called her from a pay phone. “Susan,” I said, “I’m being held captive by the West Peabody Republican Women’s Club which wishes to exploit me sexually. If I overpower my captors and escape, is it too late?”

There was silence. Then she said, “Almost,” and hung up.

As I left the phone booth I saw Fraser Robinson walk out of the lobby and toward the parking lot. Five girls, I thought, and a goat? Jesus Christ.

22

I stopped to buy a bottle of Dom Perignon and still made it to Susan Silverman’s by 10:35. Susan let me in without comment. I held the wine out to her. “They were out of Annie Greenspring,” I said.

She took it. “Thank you,” she said. She had on a chocolate satin shirt with an oversized collar and copper-colored pants. “Do you want some now?”

“Yes.”

“Then come out in the kitchen and open it. I have trouble with champagne corks.”

The house was a small Cape with some Early American antiques around. A small dining room ran between the living room and the kitchen. There was a miniature harvest table set for two with white china and crystal wineglasses. Gulp!

The kitchen was walnut-paneled and rust-carpeted with a wagon wheel ceiling fixture hanging over a chopping-block table. She put the champagne on the table and got two glasses out of the cabinet. I twisted the cork out, poured, and handed her a glass.

“I’m sorry as hell, Susan,” I said.

“Where were you?”

“Mostly sitting in the lobby at the Hideaway Inn reading ‘Broom Hilda’ and eating a Baby Ruth.”

She picked up the champagne bottle and said, “Come on. We may as well sit by what’s left of the fire.” I followed her into the living room. She sat in a black Boston rocker with walnut arms, and I sat on the couch. There was a cheese ball and some rye crackers on the coffee table, and I sampled them. The cheese ball had pineapple and green pepper in it and chopped walnuts on the outside.

“This is even better than a Baby Ruth,” I said.

“That’s nice,” she said.

I picked up the champagne bottle from where she’d set it on the coffee table. “Want some more?” I said. “No, thank you,” she said. I poured some in my glass and leaned back. The fire hissed softly, and a log shifted with a little shower of sparks. The living room was papered in royal blue, with the woodwork white and a big print of Guernica over the fireplace.

“Look, Suze,” I said. “I work funny hours. I get into places and onto things that I can’t stop, and I can’t call and I gotta be late. There’s no way out of that, you know?”

“I know,” she said. “I knew all the two and one half hours I was walking around here worrying about you and calling you a bastard.”

“Is the dinner ruined?” I said.

“No, I made a cassoulet. It probably improves with age.”

“That’s good.”

She was looking at me now, quite hard. “Spenser, what the hell happened to you? What were you doing?”

I told her. Halfway through she got up and poured herself some more champagne and refilled my glass. When I finished she said, “But where’s Kevin?”

“I don’t know. I figure that Harroway’s got him stashed somewhere else. In Boston, maybe. He must have gotten nervous after we were out to his house.”

“And Harroway’s running a whole, what, vice ring? Right here in town? How can he get away with it? I mean, this isn’t a big town. How can the police not know?”

“Maybe they do know.”

“You mean bribery?”

“Maybe, or maybe Harroway has friends in high places. Remember Doctor Croft was the one who shilled old Fraser Robinson onto Vicki’s scam.”

“But to corrupt the police...”

“Cops are public employees, like teachers and guidance counselors. They tend to give a community what it wants, not always what it should have. I mean, if you happen to go for an evening out with five broads and a goat, and you are a man of some influence, maybe the cops won’t prevent it. Maybe they’ll try to contain it and keep everybody happy.”

The bottle of Dom Perignon was empty. Susan said, “I bought some too,” and went to the kitchen to get it. I got another log out of the hammered-brass wood bucket on the hearth and settled it on top of the fire. Susan returned with the champagne. Mumm. Good. I was more than a domestic champagne date. Next time, she’d said. Tuesday, at my house. Hot-diggity. She sat down on the couch beside me and handed me the bottle. I twisted the cork out and poured.

“I always thought you had to pop it and make a mark in the ceiling and spill some on the rug,” she said.

“That’s for tourists,” I said.

“Where are you now, Spenser? What do you make of everything?”

“Well, I know that Kevin is with Vic voluntarily. I know Vic is a homosexual.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I haven’t proved it, but I know it. I heard it from people I trust. I don’t need to prove it.”

“That’s an advantage you have on the police, isn’t it?”