I told her.
'What if Quirk hadn't showed up to cover your back?' Susan said when I got through.
'Can't say, maybe nothing. Maybe we'd have had to shoot some people. No use thinking about what didn't happen.'
'I was scared all day,' Susan said. 'I knew you'd do something like that. I was afraid you'd do it alone. That you wouldn't even ask Hawk.'
'I didn't ask Hawk,' I said. 'He came along uninvited. Like Quirk and Belson.'
She nodded. 'I was scared for you. I was scared you'd be hurt, or killed. And I was scared for me. Scared I'd have to deal with what I know about Poitras alone.'
I nodded. 'Quirk would have helped you,' I said. 'And Frank Belson.'
'You think that Marcus will stick to his bargain?'
'Yes. Hawk says he will.'
'And if Hawk is wrong?'
'Hawk isn't wrong about things like that,' I said. 'There are things Hawk doesn't know anything about. But what he knows, he knows for certain.'
She nibbled at another cookie. She was wearing a new perfume, and the light from the window behind her made her black hair shine. Seeing her was a tangible physical sensation for me. I could feel the sight of her move through my body. It was always difficult not to touch her.
'We have to decide about Poitras and April and, I suppose, Amy Gurwitz,' I said.
'I know.'
'Busting Poitras will be easy. There's plenty of evidence in the place. Juries and judges are inclined to be unsympathetic to child pornographers, and I imagine the Department of Education frowns upon them as well, at least as far as official policy goes.' 'Yes. I'm sure it does,' Susan said. 'It's the girls.' 'Yeah, it is. I don't know what to do with the goddamned girls.'
There was one cookie left on the plate. I took it and ate it while Susan held her coffee cup to her lips and tapped her bottom teeth slowly against the rim. Then she drank some coffee, put the cup down, and said, 'I don't know either.'
Chapter 27
My jaw was very sore where Marcus had hit me. It had stiffened up overnight, and I had to talk through my teeth. I sounded as if I'd just graduated from Harvard.
It didn't impress a vice squad detective named McNeely who sat behind his desk on Berkley Street and listened while I told him my plan.
'We got nothing better to do than hang around with a handful of warrants and wait for you to give the nod?' he said.
'It's the only way it can go down,' I said. 'It's a deal I made, and I'll stick to it.'
'You made,' McNeely said. 'Who the hell are you? You got information about a porn operation, you give it to me.'
Belson was leaning against a file cabinet beside McNeely's desk. His cigar was burned short, and before he spoke he picked a shred of wet cigar wrapper off his lip.
'For crissake, Tom,' Belson said. 'He's handing you the garbage all wrapped and neat. All you got to do is swing by and pick it up.'
'This ain't homicide, Belson,' McNeely said. 'This is vice. You brought him over and introduced him, you don't need to hang around and kibitz.'
Belson winked at me. 'Must be a slow month on the kickbacks,' Belson said. 'Vice guys are all grouchy.'
McNeely was a thick slouchy man with a bald head. He looked at Belson hard for a long minute. Belson smiled at him. His thin face looking good-humored. A faint blue shadow of his heavy beard already showing, although it was only ten in the morning.
'I'll let that pass, Belson,' he said finally.
'Thought you might,' Belson said.
McNeely looked back at me. 'How do I know you won't blow this?'
'Because I'm good, and this is easy,' I said. 'I didn't have to bring it to you first. I could have done my business and then called nine one. one. I'm giving you notice so it'll all be clean. The right papers, that sort of thing. The thing is going to blow statewide, and probably interstate. I could have called in the Staties, or the FBI, and left you sucking hind tit.'
McNeely looked at Belson again. 'He level?' he said.
'He's a real pain in the ass,' Belson said. 'But he does what he says he'll do.'
McNeely was playing with a rubber band, stretching it between the thumb and little finger of his left hand. He leaned back in his swivel chair and examined the stretched elastic. He opened his three middle fingers out and stretched the band into a crude circle and looked at that.
'Okay. I'll go along,' he said. 'You fuck it up and you're out of business. I can promise you that.'
'That's the kind of endorsement I was hoping for,' I said.
'You got it,' McNeely said, and let the rubber band slip off his fingers and skitter across the desktop. 'I'll be
