and intact. I stroked it with pleasure. The prowlie was putting a butterfly closure on a cut in Hawk's eyebrow.
'How's his nose?' I said. 'Fine,' he said.
'Oh.' The cop looked over at me. 'You sound disappointed,' he said. Hawk said, 'He five breaks ahead of me. He hoping I'd catch up.'
Four plainclothes vice squad cops were busy hauling out incriminating evidence in cardboard cartons. Poitras was in the kitchen with McNeely and an assistant DA. They were explaining his rights to him. Amy refused to leave him and they had only brought one policewoman, and she was busy, and they didn't know what to do with her. So as they talked in the kitchen she sat beside him in a straight chair and patted his thigh.
The diplomat had vanished and so had the surlylooking man named Mickey that Hawk and I had thrown over the railing when we came in. But Vince was still around. He was just coming around now and he wasn't talking because his jaw was broken. April was gone. The other guests were in ragged clusters trying to get their attire straightened out-the vomit washed off, the blood wiped away. Trying to get their eyes focused and their brains reintegrated. There were three reporters and a news photographer there and the guests were avoiding them and covering their faces.
The policewoman said to the photographer, 'Most of these girls are juveniles.'
The photographer nodded and concentrated on the men. His strobe made small lightning flashes in the room. The assistant commissioner of education kept a handkerchief over his face and murmured to the vice cop who was taking his name that he was a friend of a city councilman. The cop nodded and asked to see his driver's license. The state rep kept asking to speak with McNeely and being told to sit down. 'Lieutenant will get to you when he gets to you.'
The state rep told the reporter that he'd be in touch with his editor and the reporter said, 'Whyn't you get in touch with yourself.' And the photographer snapped his picture.
McNeely came out of the kitchen and gestured one of the detectives in to watch Poitras. Or maybe to watch the assistant DA.
'You know the girl?' he said to me.
'Yes. Name's Amy Gurwitz.'
'You know where she lives?'
'Here.'
'She told me that. But hasn't she got parents or something?'
'Ask her,' I said.
'I did ask her. What the fuck do you think I'm asking you for?'
I shrugged. Beyond him I could see her in the kitchen in her straight chair. She was still patting Poitras's knee. He had his head hanging forward and his shoulders slumped, slouched in the chair so that he was almost shapeless, his stomach covering most of his thighs as he sat. There was nothing left. He was shapeless with defeat.
'Love is a many-splendored thing, McNeely,' I said. 'She wants to stay with him.'
'Don't lecture me about love, cowboy,' McNeely said. “I got six kids. Where he's going she can't go.'
'How about you haul her down to Charles Street?' I said.
'You know we don't put women in Charles Street,' McNeely said. 'Besides, she's a kid. Besides, she hasn't done anything that I know of. We got nothing to arrest her for.' 'She says she lives here?' I said.
'Yeah.'
'Why don't you leave her here?'
McNeely spread his hands and looked around at the room with a look that encompassed the whole building. 'She's sixteen years old,' he said.
'You got a better idea?'
He looked around again. At the litter of bottles and cigarettes, pills, snack food ground into the carpet, people grouped in frightened huddles waiting for the trip to night court. He breathed the smell of booze and dope and sweat and vomit.
'No,' he said. 'Maybe later I can get somebody to send a social worker over.'
'I'll look in on her occasionally,' I said. 'And my friend Susan will too.'
Hawk had rummaged behind the bar and came out with two more bottles of Schlitz.
'Man got a fine taste in long necks,' Hawk said. He handed me one. 'Sorry 'bout you being on duty, Lieutenant.'
McNeely ignored him. I took a long pull on the beer bottle. It felt clean and cold going down. I could use clean and cold for a while.
I said, 'The night is young, McNeely. Hawk and me got places to go, people to see. You need us anymore?'
He shook his head. He was staring into the kitchen. 'Not now,' he said. 'Somebody in the DA's office will want to talk with you one of these days. We'll let you know. '
Hawk and I walked out into the cold night. There were police cars all over the street, their blue lights turning, the mechanical sound of radios rasping and crackling in some of them. A station wagon with the tailgate down was half full of cardboard boxes. A motorcycle cop in a helmet and leather jacket was directing traffic past the congestion and a bunch of Beacon Street neighbors were standing around hugging themselves and staring. To the right down across the street near the corner of Fairfield, Susan's big red-and-white Bronco stuck out into the traffic. People gave way as we walked toward it, looking at both of us, noticing the Band-Aids and the bruises, not saying anything.
