Ceremony (16 page)

At Fairfield, Susan turned toward the river, crossed Marlboro Street, and turned onto Beacon.

"Hydrant," I said, and Susan saw it and pulled the Bronco into the space frontward. She began to jockey the truck back and forth trying to get parallel to the curb beside the hydrant. Hawk and I were silent as she went forward and backward, getting very little closer to the curb in the process.

"I know," she said, "I know I'm supposed to back in, but I hate to back in."

Hawk and I were silent. Across the street and two doors up was Poitras's town house. There was no light on at the front door, but I could see light spilling out from around the drawn curtains.

Susan finally parked with one wheel up on the curb and the back end of the Bronco jutting aggressively out into the street.

"The hell with it," Susan said.

Hawk and I were quiet. It had gotten very cold. There were no stars showing in the narrow channel of black sky above Beacon Street as we crossed. At the door I stopped and listened. Faintly I could hear music. I put my ear against the door. The music was a little stronger. I thought I could hear also, maybe, a faint sound of talk and movement, almost as if there were a party.

"Let's cruise around back," I said, "and take a peek in."

We went in single file, no more laughing, very little talk. First me, then Susan, and Hawk a soundless, nearly invisible third.

The drapes were drawn across the French doors, but I was able to peer through a narrow gap and catch a glimpse of a crowd. The sound of music and crowd noise was louder through the glass doors. Looking up, I could see the shades drawn on all three floors with light leaking out. I gestured with my hand toward the street and we walked back down the alley to Fairfield and around the corner back onto Beacon.

"It's a large party," I said.

"Friday night," Hawk said.

"Never set up a raid on a Friday night," I said.

"Can we do it anyway?" Susan said.

Hawk looked at me.

I said, "Why not. I got a key. Let's go in and have a look. If the party's big and wild enough, no one will pay any attention."

Hawk nodded once. Susan said, "Party, party." In the dim light from the streelamp I could see her eyes wide and the slight indentation around her mouth that meant repressed excitement.

We went to the door and I knocked lightly. No answer. I tried the knob. It was locked. I took out the duplicate keys and opened the front door. The place must have been soundproofed because when the door was open the blast of sound was overpowering. Hard rock music thumped and voices were shrill and glasses clattered. We stepped inside and closed the door. The air was thick with tobacco smoke and pot and the smell of booze, and hot with human scent. We took off our coats in the hallway and laid them across the umbrella stand. While we were doing that a big surly-looking man appeared at the end of the hall and walked toward us. He was wearing a blue blazer that was too small for him and the gun he wore under it made a clear bulge. He had long muttonchop sideburns and his hair was longish, so that it trailed over his collar in back. Hawk smiled.

"What are you people doing here?" the surly man said. Hawk smiled some more.

"We been over there," he said vaguely, pointing with his right hand across his body at the wall next to his shoulder. The surly man was close now and frowning as he looked in the direction that Hawk was pointing. He said, "Huh?"

And Hawk hit him with the edge of his pointing right hand across the bridge of his nose. I could hear the bone break. The man grunted, put his hands toward his face, and Hawk hit him, still with the edge of his right hand, this time just back of the left ear. The surly man's hands never made it to his face. They dropped straight in front of him and the surly man's body followed. He fell face forward on the floor and he lay still. I opened the front door. Hawk and I each took hold of the back of his coat collar and dragged him outside. Hawk reached down and slipped his gun out of its holster and we shoved him over the ornamental railing in behind the bare winter shrubs. Then we came back in and Susan closed the door behind us. Her eyes were shiny. Hawk handed her the surly man's gun, a short-barreled Colt detective special. "Stick that in your purse," he said. "Don't want to leave it laying around." Susan plonked it into her shoulder bag. It disappeared easily. She could have kept a collection of blunderbusses in there without being discovered.

We followed the noise and smoke and smell along the hall and down the three steps to the living room. Susan's hand was on my arm.

Susan said, "Jesus Christ."

The room was a swarm of debauchery, a maelstrom of naked and part-naked limbs and torsos. It looked like a feverish animation of one of those Gustave Dor6 illustrations for The Inferno. Somewhere in the swarm rock music was playing at top volume on a good stereo. The smoke hung under the ceiling, eddying around the table lamps as the hot light bulbs caused a tiny thermal updraft. The thump of the music made a discernible vibration in the stairs as we stood looking in. I let Hawk stand in front of us in case Poitras or Amy or April spotted us.

The laughter that had filtered out through the French doors as I stood there in the dark a few moments ago now snarled with the music, raw and harsh and gilded at the edges with hysteria. Slicing through the thick smell of pot and booze and perfume and sweat was a thin medicinal smell I wasn't sure of. Ether maybe. The heat was threatening. The air seemed hard to breathe. Hawk was whistling softly through his teeth again. He was less than a foot away and I could barely make out the tune; it was "Stars and Stripes Forever."

"Thank God it's Friday," I murmured to Susan.

The room was the same one in which I'd had my correct beer with Amy the first time I'd come, but just barely. Much of the furniture was gone and what remained had been pushed against the walls. On the bar there were half-gallon bottles of vodka and saucers of bright capsules. I could see reds and yellows and blues from where I was. There were plastic glasses in a stack and a large bag of ice tipped over and partially melted in a big puddle near the vodka. There was jug wine and some bourbon and a freezer-size baggy of grass open and some spilling. The lights around the edges of the room were bright and, reflecting off the beige walls, lit the living room like a movie set. On the wall to the right of the bar a large-screen TV was showing in color a video-tape in which two naked women and one naked man in a shower stall were involved in active foreplay while the shower head fanned a steady spray of water down on them. The actors appeared to be speaking lines, but they were soundless in the face of the music and the laughter.

"We better move down among them," I said to Susan and Hawk. "We're too out of place up here looking down." They nodded and, Hawk first, we went down the three steps and into the maw of the beast. T. J. Eckleberg, where are you when I need you?

I said, "Pay attention to those movies, Suze. Pick up your technique a little."

"Anything anyone in this room or on that screen is doing," Susan said quietly, "I never wish to do with you ever."

"Oh," I said. "Close your eyes, then, and hang on to me."

The men in the room were generally middle-aged, the women generally children. Most of the people were sprawled on the floor, and while there seemed to be a good deal of fondling going on, I saw no actual intercourse. Nothing declassi here. We skirted a couple on the floor near the big-screen television. He had short gray hair and a clipped gray mustache and a white broadcloth shirt and a red bow tie. She was wearing only a camisole. He had one hand under the camisole as she giggled and tipped a glass of what appeared to be straight vodka against his lower lip for him to drink. Her fingernails were painted blue and so were her toenails. She appeared to be maybe fifteen. A tall angular man with gold-rimmed glasses was trying to dance to the shattering music. His partner was a tall still-faced blond girl with a long single braid down her back. She wore high-heeled shoes and tight designer jeans and no shirt. The strap of her black bra made a thin line across her white back. They were having trouble dancing because they were both drunk and because the man was trying to waltz to the music, holding the girl close against him. He bumped into me as we circled the room and said, "'Scush me," and stumbled away. As we moved on he tried to dip with his partner and they fell down, she on top of him. They stayed there.

Susan said in my ear, "That's Foster Carmichael. He's an associate commissioner of education."

"What dedication," I said. "Devotes even his weekends to kids."

A black-haired kid with a freckled Irish face was standing on the coffee table against the far wall doing a slow strip-tease to music that must have come from a different drummer. She moved slowly, her face fixed in adolescent imitation of a sultry smile as she struggled with her clothes. She was too zonked to figure it out, but it was hard to strip in real clothes. It was hard to scrunch out of your designer jeans and look like Gypsy Rose lee at the same time.

We didn't see April in the room, or Amy, or Poitras. Susan saw two other people she recognized, and I spotted a state rep that I knew. As we wedged back toward the stairs a man on the floor ran his hand up

Susan's calf. I stepped on his stomach and he took his hand away.

"A real compliment," I said in her ear. "Thinks you're a high school kid."

"And he thinks you're a bully," she said.

"He's correct."

We made it back to the stairs. The sweat was soaking through my shirt, my collar felt as limp as an old dandelion. I realized I was holding Susan's hand. Hawk's face was shiny with sweat as he joined us on the steps.

"Sure do know how to have a good time, don't they?" Hawk said.

The man whose stomach I had stepped on was throwing up on the floor. Nobody paid him any attention.

"Trendy," I said.

The hall that had seemed oppressive when we came in now seemed cool and open after the living room. I led the way upstairs, still holding Susan's hand, with Hawk behind her. When we got to the second floor there were three December-May couples in the hallway, sitting on the floor in a circle passing a bong around. They paid no attention to us as we went past them and looked into the master bedroom. In the bed was a man and three young girls. All were without clothes. They were busy. None of the girls was April so I closed the door. There were people busy in Poitra's office also, using his swivel chair -which was tricky.

"In a swivel chair?" Susan said.

"To seek, to strive, and not to yield," I said. There was more activity in the guest room, and even something energetic happening in the bathroom. None of it involved Poitras or the two girls. They were on the third floor.

When we opened the door to the photo shop, Poitras was sitting in a canvas-backed director's chair, spilling out on both sides of it. Amy stood on one side of him holding a tray of canap6s from which Poitras was eating as we entered. April stood behind him, her hands on his shoulders, massaging the base of his neck quietly. Sitting opposite was a middle-sized fiftyish man with a round face and an unhealthy-looking flush to his skin. He was wearing a gray pinstriped double-breasted suit and a conservative soft hat with a narrow brim. He looked like an unsuccessful diplomat. Behind the diplomat, leaning against the wall looking bored, with his arms folded, was an overweight slugger wearing a suede trench coat. The diplomat was reading a large sheet of lined paper. A half-drunk glass of something with a lime wedge in it was on the floor beside him. When we walked in they all turned and looked at us. Not startled, just annoyed. I looked at Hawk and then toward the slugger. Hawk nodded.

Poitras said, "I'm sorry, this is private up here… and then recognized me and Susan.

I said, "Say, Mitchell, you know how to throw some swell party."

Without looking up from his lined paper the diplomat said, "Didn't Mickey tell you the third floor was off limits? Get the fuck out of here."

The overweight slugger was still leaning against the wall, but he had uncrossed his arms and he didn't look bored.

I said, "We had a communications problem with Mickey when we arrived and had to ask him to leave."

The diplomat looked up. Poitras said, "He's a private cop, Hal."

The diplomat said, "What the fuck are you running here, you fat jerk? A private cop? Who's that with him, the fucking police commissioner?"

"I don't know, Hal. I don't know what he's doing here. He's been bothering me about the girls."

"You fucking baby raper, I shoulda known better than to try to do business with a goddamn child molester." He looked at the slugger. "Get them outta here, Vince."

The slugger straightened from the wall and Hawk pointed a handgun at him. "I think Vince overmatched," Hawk said in his friendly, gliding voice. He grinned at the diplomat. "You too, Hal." I went and took the slugger's gun and dropped it in my jacket pocket.

Everyone was still looking at the gun, steady in Hawk's hand, pointing at Vince. L went to the files and opened the top drawer. It was still full of evidence. I stepped across to Hal and took his sheet of lined paper from his hands. It was an inventory list for video cassettes with titles like Grade School Gals and Teeny Boppers. I folded it twice and put it in my shirt pocket. I didn't bother to pat Hal down. Guys like him never carried guns. They had employees like Vince to do that.

"Okay, April," I said. "You go with Mrs. Silverman."

` No.

"Yeah. Go sit in the car with her until we get through in here and then we'll go back to my place and have some milk and Fig Newtons, and we'll talk."

"No."

"You too, Amy, you should go too."

She didn't even look up. She had her head down, looking at the plate of canap6s, and she shook it.

"In a little while there's going to be cops here," I said.

"Cops?" Hal said.

"Yeah. Soon as the girls are out I'm going to call them."

Hal said, "That's no way to make a buck."

"Neither is this," I said.