corral a corner booth for myself. I waited for my eyes to adjust to the dim lighting before I began what I hoped was an unobtrusive inspection of the bar customers. Then I examined the occupants of the booths. There were plenty of dark faces-even no shortage of hooked noses-but there was no Hawk. It came to me again, as it had in Tucson when Erikson first proposed it, that this search was really far out.
'Hello, again,' a little-girl voice said beside my booth.
I looked up to see Chryssie, the flower child. Her blond hair was in a tangled mass, and her burnt-orange sari looked dirtier and more wrinkled than before. 'Sit down and have a beer,' I invited her. She was evidently a regular in the place, and I would attract less attention if I sat with her.
She floated down into the booth across from me as if she were boneless. She propped her chin in both hands and studied my face. Her eyes had the same glazed look I'd seen before, and one corner of her soft-looking mouth twitched occasionally. I caught a waitress' eye and placed my order. When the beer and the Jim Beam arrived, Chryssie picked up her glass, held it to her lips, then set it down again without drinking. After a moment, though, she picked it up again and took two long swallows. 'What have you been doing while I was gone?' I broke the silence.
'Nothing.'
'Did you eat?' It reminded me I was hungry. 'How about a sandwich?'
Her nose wrinkled in distaste. 'No food, thank you.'
'What are you going to do tomorrow?' I continued, knowing the answer before I received it.
'Nothing.' She stared at me wide-eyed, then drank some more beer. Her eyes were on mine above the rim of the glass. 'Why did you come back?'
'I didn't think you were real. I had to make sure.'
She attempted a smile. It was a dim, damped-out effort. The tip of a pink tongue circled her lips. 'And now you know?'
'Now I know. Why do you wear-' I stopped. The childish face across the table from me had gone slack suddenly. The blue eyes bulged, slitted, then bulged again. 'What's the matter?'
A dirty hand was at her slim throat. 'Shouldn't- have mixed beer-with grass.' Her voice was a whisper. 'Know-better.'
'Then why the hell do it if you know better?'
Her eyes had gone completely out of focus. 'What difference-does it make? Goin' be-got to get-home.'
'Where's home?'
She didn't answer me. The upper part of her body began to bend forward over the table. I forestalled the collapse by sliding out of my side of the booth and moving in beside her. I propped her up and leaned her against the booth's back. 'Where do you live, Chryssie?'
No answer.
She had no handbag. I glanced around to make sure we weren't attracting attention, then frisked her. My quick-patting hands discovered only that she probably didn't have a stitch on beneath the sari. I tried it again. This time I found a small green purse safety-pinned to a shoulder of the sari under a loose fold.
I unpinned the purse and examined its contents which I held on my lap. There were three one-dollar bills, an emerald ring that looked genuine, a bronze door key, and a last year's driver's license made out to sixteen-year-old Cornelia Lavan Rouse. The address on the license was 229 East Fiftieth, four blocks away. I put my lips against the girl's ear. 'Who's Cornelia Rouse, Chryssie?'
She stirred, then became semi-comatose again. 'Use'- t'-be me,' she muttered thickly.
'Where's your car?'
'Sold-it. Long-time ago.'
'Don't you have any friends here?'
'No friends-anywhere.'
I hesitated, but this youngster was prey for the vultures. 'Stand up,' I ordered.
She made no move. I stood up myself, lifted her erect, then supported her with an arm around her slender waist. I got her out of the booth and we moved toward the door in a slue-footed shuffle. I kept waiting for someone to challenge our departure, but nothing happened.
The first four cabs passed us up-not that I blamed them-but the fifth one stopped. Chryssie's address turned out to be a building that could have been anything from a mortuary to a warehouse loft. There was nothing on the first floor but a scruffy-looking lobby. I half lugged the girl up a narrow flight of stairs. I still had the key I'd extracted from her purse. There were four doors opening off a second-floor landing, and I tried the key in each door in turn. I half expected a smash in the mouth from an irate householder, but the whole building was quiet.
The key opened the third door, and I wrestled Chryssie inside. There were two rooms, tenement rooms, indescribably filthy. Dirty dishes were stacked on every item of furniture, and empty wine bottles lined the walls. In the bedroom the bed looked as though it hadn't been made for a month. I moved aside the curtain on the bedroom's single window and looked down at a narrow alley below with headlights passing through it.
I dumped Chryssie on the lumpy bed and scouted the bathroom. It had a long, narrow, old-fashioned tub sitting up on four legs. I scoured a couple layers of grime from it, ran hot water, and returned to the bedroom for Chryssie. Surprisingly, in view of the general wasteland atmosphere, there was a telephone in the bedroom.
I shucked Chryssie out of her bedraggled sari and carried her nude, dead weight to the tub. She stirred at the touch of hot water on her flesh and murmured something unintelligible, but she didn't open her eyes. I left her there to soak while I went back and remade the bed with some semi-clean linen I found in a drawer. I went back to Chryssie and soaped and rinsed her a few times. Her skin that had felt coarse and pebbled gradually became paler and softer.
While drying her off, I made a discovery. There were dark striations at the base of her lower abdomen. At the ripe old age of seventeen Chryssie had already had a baby. I brought a pillow from the bedroom, folded it over the side of the tub, and laid the girl across it. She sprawled limp as a jellyfish with her childish, bare behind pointing up in the air.
I washed her hair, twice. She slid forward on the pillow once until her head went under the water, but even that didn't rouse her. I dried her hair and toted her back to the bedroom. She was breathing shallowly but evenly, and her color seemed better.
The bureau drawers yielded nothing but soiled underwear and nightgowns. I finally dumped her into bed naked and pulled the sheet up over her. There was a sofa in the sitting room, and I cleared the debris from it before sponging off the top layer of crud with a wet rag. Then I went back into the bedroom and called Erikson at the office. 'I'm staying here tonight,' I said, and gave him the phone number.
'Where is it?'
I gave him the address.
'Anything doing?'
I looked toward Chryssie's slim form huddled under the sheet. 'Nothing.'
'Call me no later than noon tomorrow,' Erikson said.
'Fine.'
I stripped to my underwear and stretched out on the couch.
A fly buzzed around my head, and it was hot in the close apartment, but neither fact kept me awake long.
It had been a full day.
5
The persistent ringing of a telephone woke me.
When I forced my eyes open, I couldn't orient myself for a moment. Then the meaning of the cluttered, dirty room came flooding back. The phone kept ringing, and I stumbled to my feet from the couch. Cramped muscles protested as I went into the bedroom.
Chryssie was sprawled face down on the bed. One knee was drawn up to her chest, the sheet had fallen to the floor, and she looked about twelve years old. The ringing phone was only inches from her ear, but she never
