'Good afternoon,' she said. 'I'm Mrs. Ross. We have ten girls here. What kind of arrangement would you like to make?'
'I heard your girls do specialty stuff.'
'Anything you want,' she said firmly.
'All of them'?'
'Absolutely.'
'Maybe I better meet them,' i said.
'Of course,' she said. 'Two are busy at the moment, but I'll ask the rest to come in and say hello. Would you care for a drink?'
I shook my head. 'Not right now.'
Mrs. Ross nodded. 'Certainly. I'll get the girls.'
She went back out and down the corridor and I sat quietly in the nineteenth-century room. Students on bicycles went by on
Angell Street outside. I heard Mrs. Ross's boot heels tapping briskly along the hardwood floor of the corridor, and then she came through the archway. Behind her came eight young women. Four were white, three were black, and one was Oriental. The third one through the door was April Kyle.
The eight girls stood in an informal semicircle, staring blankly into the middle distance the way models do at a fashion show. They had each their own expression, and it didn't change. It was their stage face, I realized. The oldest was maybe nineteen, the youngest fourteen or fifteen. They were all dressed young, too, with a kind of buttons-and-bows little-girl look that must have been calculated. April, for instance, was wearing a white blouse under a green plaid jumper with black knee socks and penny loafers. Her blond hair was caught back on one side with a barrette. The fun-loving Bobbsey. 'Your choice?' Mrs. Ross was not a dawdler, nor did she encourage it in others. I wondered if I ought to check their teeth.
'That one,' I said.
'Fine,' Mrs. Ross said. 'April, show the gentleman to your room.' The other seven girls went out of the living room and April stepped toward me, put out her hand, and said, 'My name's April, what's yours?'
'Alley Oop,' I said.
She smiled without warmth or meaning. 'Okay, Alley, want to come with me?'
'Hey,' I said with a big hearty smile, 'I'd follow you anywhere, honey.'
She took my hand. In the hallway there was a wide stairway that turned halfway up. We went up the stairs hand in hand-with wand'ring steps and slow, I thought -turned at the landing, and continued to the big second-floor hallway. There were no rugs on the floor and no furniture. It was as if by the time you got here you were sold, and they didn't need to impress you. April's room was at the end of the hall on the right. We went in.
Chapter 15
The room was Spartan. There was a good mahogany double bed and bureau. The window in the wall opposite the bed was covered with red drapes. Behind the entry door was a door that I assume led to a closet. April sat on the bed, letting her legs fall carelessly open. Unless she had a lot of self-control, she'd be fat when she was forty. Right now she was pretty in a pink-cheeked, almost plump way. Her mouth was pouty and her teeth were white and even. There was something theatrical about her movements when they occasionally became unrestrained, as when she had flopped on the bed.
I opened the door that I took to be a closet. It was. There were a few dresses hanging in it. There were also various leather restraints hanging from hooks and a wooden paddle that was too long for Ping-Pong and too short for canoeing. On the floor were a pair of sneakers and a pair of sling-back spike-heeled pump.s Apparently she had more than one image. There was nothing else in the closet.
I turned back toward April. She had hiked the jumper skirt up over her thighs so that I was aware that she wore nothing beneath it. She looked at me with her stage look -pouty innocence, Lolita, Debbie Does Dallas. Probably practiced her look in the mirror between tricks.
I parted the drapes on the window. Under the drapes the window was secured with thick wire mesh. I let the drapes drop back in place. I looked over the rest of the room. There was no other way out. I didn't see any signs of a bug, though that didn't mean there wasn't one. On the top of the mahogany dresser was a radio. I turned it on. Loud.
On the bed April was naked except for her knee socks. There were dark bruises on her buttocks that had begun to yellow, her wrists were chafed red. I remembered the time when a girl her age would have excited me. But it was a long time ago-when I was her age. Now it was like looking at a naked child.
I lay down on the bed beside her and put my arm around her and held her close against me and whispered, 'My name is not Alley Oop, it's Spenser, and your parents hired me to find you.' Her body went rigid and she tried to pull away. I held her against me. I said, 'You won't have to do anything you don't want to do. But if you want out of here, I'll take you out.'
April was perfectly rigid and silent. I had my mouth against her ear. 'I don't know if there's a bug in here, but there could be, so we'll whisper and leave the radio up loud.'
'A bug'?' 'A microphone for listening to us,' I whispered.
'I don't know.'
'Now, you want out of here?'
She was silent.
'I think you do,' I said. 'It couldn't have been fun getting those bruises on your backside.'
'Don't you want to fuck me?' she said.
