Besides the bed, the only thing in the room was a picture on the wall. It was a Polaroid color snapshot of a house. It looked familiar. It was April Kyle's house. In the hall behind us the man from 3C scooted down the stairs. The girl was standing in the open doorway watching us, left shoulder leaning against the doorjamb, hand on right hip. I looked around this room. There was a light switch beside the door. I turned it on. The overhead bulb was as unkind as the one in the hall. We stripped the spread back off the bare mattress, looked under the mattress, under the bed, felt around the door molding. At the far end of the narrow room a dirty window faced onto an airshaft. I opened it and felt around within arm's reach in all directions.
'There's nothing here, babe,' Hawk said.
'I know.'
'You wanna try A?' he said.
'Good to be thorough,' I said. No one was in A. No girl. No man. No passion. No commerce. No ecstasy. No clues, either. It took five minutes to be certain of that. When we were through, all we had was the naked girl standing in the doorway of the empty room with the bare light dramatizing everything.
I looked at her. 'What are we going to do with her?' I said.
Hawk said, 'Nothing to do with her.'
I still looked at her.
'You looking to have a little fun?' she said.
'No,' I said. 'I'm not looking to have any fun at all.'
Hawk started down the stairs. 'C'mon, man, you keeping her from her work.'
I went after him. Down the narrow, filthy stairs. We checked the rest of the building. It was empty. On Chandler Street I said, 'I don't like that. There ought to be something.'
We walked toward the car.
'Ought?' Hawk said. 'We both know what ought is worth.'
I nodded. 'How old you figure she is?' I said.
'Middle-aged, babe. She be dead when she's thirty.' His face under the streetlight as we got in the car was entirely without expression.
Hawk and I went back to The Slipper, but Red wasn't there, and he wasn't anyplace else, either, that we could discover. Trumps was gone too. I was beginning to feel like Winnie-the-Pooh.
The more I looked for April Kyle, the more she wasn't there. It was eleven o'clock-my second night out in the Combat Zone. I had almost as much thrill as I could handle.
Outside a movie advertising an adult double feature with an all-male cast, Hawk said to me, 'This got a funny smell to you?'
'You mean how much trouble we're having finding one kid when we started out knowing where she was?'
'Yeah.'
'You think people don't want her found?'
'Yeah.'
'Maybe,' I said. 'Or maybe we just haven't run across her.'
'We usually pretty good at running across things,' Hawk said.
'Yeah. Probably been distracted by the excitement of our surroundings,' I said.
Several men going into the theater eyed Hawk as they passed. No one spoke to him or to me.
'Make the blood just boil through your veins, don't it?' He said. 'All that glamour?'
'Yippee,' I said. 'I think I'll go home and brush my teeth. You want me to drop you someplace?'
Hawk shook his head. 'Just soon walk,' he said.
I nodded and started up Tremont.
'You keep an eye out for Trumps,' Hawk said. 'He hate to lose.'
'It's hard to get used to,' I said.
Chapter 11
I took a long hot shower before I went to bed, and drank three bottles of Rolling Rock extra pale, and ate a meatloaf sandwich on wheat bread from Rebecca's. My copy of Sartoris still lay on the bedside table at Susan's, so I made do with a novel by John le Carry. And liked it. I fell asleep after one more beer and dreamed that Hawk and I were being chased by George Smiley, who looked just like Alec Guinness. I kept looking without success for Susan.
I woke up at ten past seven with the sun making the dust motes dance in the air. It was Saturday. Susan would be off. If I was prompt, we could have breakfast together.
No one was in front of the bowling alley as I drove toward Smithfield at ten of eight. Plenty of time for hanging out, good seats available all day. Life moved easy in Smithfield. In Boston women were already hooking in the Combat Zone. When I got to Susan's she was up and wearing a blue warm-up suit with a white stripe down the leg. She gave me a kiss when I came in the kitchen door.
'I was going to run,' she said. 'Want to come along? I'll slow down for you.'
The running stuff I kept at Susan's was somewhat more informal than hers: maroon sweat pants with a
