Taming a Sea Horse (5 page)

"Fuck you," she said. "You want to save some floozie, go ahead, save her yourself. I don't have to tell you shit."

"How come you can't tell me how you got into hooking?"

"'Cause it's none of your fucking business," Ginger said. "You probably one of those creeps likes to get off hearing about it. I thought you was gonna save me."

"Not if you're where you want to be."

"Goddamned right," Ginger said. "I'm where I want to be. I could show you some goddamned tricks too. You think I'm not good?"

"Good's not what you do," I said. "It's how you feel when you do it."

"You think so, huh."

I nodded. Ginger ate the rest of her cheeseburger. I was quiet. When she finished she wiped her mouth with a napkin. Then she drank some beer and wiped her mouth again, and looked at me across the table.

"Let me tell you something, you smug son of a bitch," she said. Eating and drinking and wiping her mouth had smeared away most of her lipstick. Behind me, down in the street, a bus downshifted. A horn sounded. Ginger closed her mouth and opened it and nothing came out. As I watched her, tears began to fill her eyes and when they had filled her eyes they began to run down her cheeks. She seemed to be trying to get her breath in big sighs, then she put her face in her hands and bent forward and rested her forehead on the room service table in the space between her cheeseburger plate and the water glass, and sobbed. The sobbing became harsher and her shoulders shook. A fork fell off the table and onto the floor and a water glass tipped and wet her hair and she didn't stop sobbing.

I went over and moved the table away and sat on the bed beside her and put my arm around her. She pressed her face against my chest and sobbed. I patted her hair.

She cried for maybe ten minutes, her chest heaving, gasping for air, her left hand clutched onto my shirt front, her right holding on to my back. Then she stopped sobbing and her body began to shake less. Then it stopped. Then her breathing began to get more controlled. Deep breaths but regular.

With her face still pressed against my chest she said, "My father's name is Vern Buckey, toughest man in Lindell, Maine. When I was a little kid he used to fool around with me, by the time I was twelve he was dicking me." I patted her hair.

"My old lady knew about it but she was scared to say anything. Everybody knew about it. Kids used to call me Fucky Buckey. But nobody did anything about it. Everybody was scared of Vern. When I was fourteen he sold me to a whorehouse in Portland."

The overhead light was on. It had seemed cheerful in the gathering evening, with the room service table being wheeled in. Now it seemed too bright. Like the lights in an operating room. But I couldn't reach the switch, so I sat still in the harsh light and patted Ginger's hair and let her clutch me and didn't say anything at all.

Ginger and I slept apart on the same bed. In the morning I gave her most of my cash and put her in a cab. She gave me her phone number. I gave her my card.

"You need me, you call me," I said.

She nodded. Since she'd told me about her father she hadn't said five words. The cab pulled away and I watched it turn downtown on Fifth Avenue. Vern Buckey, Lindell, Maine. I got in the next cab and went to Patricia Utley's town house on 37th Street, west of Lexington. It was as elegant and quiet as it had been ten years ago when I'd come here looking for another young woman.

Steven let me in. Patricia Utley was waiting in her library. There was a silver service for two laid out with coffee and some half-size croissants.

"Have you breakfasted?" she said.

"No, ma'am, but, begging your pardon, this don't look like it."

She smiled. "Shall I have Steven bring some Froot Loops?" She poured coffee from the silver pot into a white china cup with a silver band around the rim. I ate a croissant.

"Do I have to save any for you?" I said.

"Perhaps one," Patricia said. "Have you spoken with April?"

"Yeah. She's in love with a pimp named Robert Rambeaux, who studies music at Juilliard and needs her money to complete his education."

Patricia poured herself some coffee.

"I met Rambeaux," I said. "Tall, lean, light-colored man of African ancestry. Thinks he's tough, carries a straight razor. He told me to stop bothering his lady."

"Did you agree?"

"No. Robert and I agreed to disagree."

She smiled and took a small lump of sugar from a small silver bowl with small silver tongs and dropped it into her coffee. "And?" she said.

"And I tailed him and noticed that he spends a lot of time with attractive young women during the day and that he runs a string of streetwalkers at night."

Patricia said, "He turns the girls over to a high-class service and takes the used ones and turns them out for himself. He gets a commission from the high-class house and he gets the income from the street girls. It's quite a profitable arrangement."

"Like a car dealer," I said. "Sells you a new car, takes your car in trade and sells it. Gets a double profit."

Patricia nodded.

"The funny thing is," I said, "he really is enrolled at Juilliard."

"People aren't one thing," Patricia said.

"Yeah, I know. Hitler loved dogs."

"He probably did in fact," Patricia Utley said.

"Didn't make him not Hitler," I said.

"True."

"I met one of the street whores. Kid named Ginger Buckey. Actually not so much a kid anymore. Except by my standards."

"Our standards," Patricia Utley said. "We're about the same age."

"But we don't look it. She asked me if I was going to save her."

"And you think you can?" Patricia Utley said.

"No," I said. "That's what makes it lousy. I know I can't."

Patricia took a very small bite off the narrow end of one of the croissants. "Care to tell me about her?" she said.

I did.

When I was through Patricia Utley said, "And you have noted her father's name?"

"Vern Buckey," I said.

"And where he lives."

"Lindell, Maine," I said.

She smiled. "And you won't forget it."

"No."

She smiled more. "You are a piece of work," she said.

"Un huh."

"Oh, I know you won't race up to Maine burning with a passion to right old wrongs. You are in your own idealistic way as cynical as I am. But you'll store that up and maybe, someday, if you have occasion to go to Maine…"

I shrugged. "One never knows," I said.

"Perhaps the most charming part of it all is that it's not just because he was bestial to his child. It's that. But it's also because you would want to find out if he really is the toughest man in Lindell, Maine."

"For a person I see every ten years you seem to know a lot about me," I said.

"I know a great deal about men," she said.

"And I'm typical?"

"No, you are entirely untypical. You're not like other men and it makes you interesting and I think about you."

"Jeepers," I said.

"Filing away Vern Buckey's name for future reference is perfect you. You feel compassion for her suffering and anger at his cruelty and competition in his toughness. You want to save her, punish him, and prove you're tougher. Man/boy. Lover/killer. Savior/ bully."

"When I run into Vern Buckey," I said, "I'm going to bust his ass for him."

Patricia Utley put her head back and laughed with pleasure. "I'm sure you will," she said. "And what I like best of all, is after you've done it, you'll feel kind of bad for him."

"So what shall we do about April Kyle?" I said.

"Let her go," Patricia Utley said. "She loves this guy. She's having a good time. She's making a lot of money."

"Ginger said fifty to a hundred thousand," I said.

"Certainly," Patricia said. "If the girl is attractive and willing, she can make excellent pay. Even more if she is black or oriental."

"Black and oriental?"

"Yes. They are perceived as exotic and are in greater demand."

"Exotic," I said.

"There are not many jobs at which a woman, or a man for that matter, can make a hundred thousand a year," she said.

"For a while," I said.

"Certainly for a while. That's true of baseball players and ballet dancers as well."

"And then what. Ginger says there's a place in Miami where the girls never get out of bed."

"A slaughterhouse," Patricia Utley said. "Certainly. There are such places. There's one in Paris, too. But such places are not necessarily the elephant graveyards of old whores. Some go into management." She smiled slightly and glanced at her library with its bookshelves crowded and the spring sun sprawling across her Afghan carpet. "Some marry and lead ordinary lives. You remember Donna Burlington."

"Aka Linda Rabb," I said. "Sure. It's how we met."

"Not all whores are full-time. There are many part-timers. Housewives who turn tricks in the afternoon while the kids are in school and the hubby is at work. Sometimes the husband knows. Sometimes he doesn't. There are college girls and actresses and models and computer programmers. I've employed all of the above and some others."

"Why do they do it?"

"Besides the money?"

"Yes."

"The money matters," Patricia Utley said. "I know it doesn't matter very much to you. But you have enough, and you're so self-sufficient that most things don't matter very much. But money matters a great deal to a lot of people, including me. It is power. It is freedom. It is a support and a security and a sense that you have tangible worth."

"I understand that, but what else?"

"Most whores don't like men very much," she said. "They are quite scornful of them."

"And the men?"

"I would say that most men who patronize whores don't like women very much."

"Intimate distaste," I said.

"Sex and power are pretty tightly connected," she said. "In ways I'm not sure even I understand. And I've had a close-up view for quite some years now."

"It doesn't explain why April loves Robert," I said.

"Or thinks she does," Patricia said.

"Maybe he could love her," I said. Patricia Utley simply stared at me.

"Love comes in odd shapes sometimes," I said.

"Spenser," she said, "I don't know very much about love. But I know a hell of a lot about whores and pimps. April Kyle is in the machine. The machine will process her. When the process is through it won't have mattered whether she and Robert Rambeaux love each other or not. You are a man, and you are a romantic-which is probably two ways of saying the same thing. You think love is something. A thing. A force in human affairs. It is not a force in whore-pimp affairs. It's just another word for fucking."

"So why does April think she's in love?" I said.

"I don't know. I don't even care. I'm sick of the word. Isn't your girlfriend a shrink? Ask her."

The croissants were gone. So was the coffee. I sat quietly for a while.

"I can tell April what I know about Rambeaux," I said. "But…"

"She knows it already," Patricia said.

"Yes."

"It's all you can do," she said.

"Yeah."

She stood and put out her hand. "It was good to see you again."

I took her hand. "You too," I said.

We walked to the door. She opened it. "I'll pay you for your time," she said.

"Better than paying me for results," I said.

April wasn't around. I tried Tiger Lilies Escort Service and they said she was not there. I asked where she was and they said they were sorry but they were not able to give me that information. I said I wanted to speak with the manager and they hung up. I looked her up in the Manhattan directory. There were twenty-seven Kyles but none named April. Perhaps Robert could help me locate her.

I cabbed up to 77th Street and rang his bell at three-thirty. It was after lunchtime and he was probably still in bed. I rang again and heard a voice badly muffled on the intercom. I said, "It's me," into the speaker. In a moment the door buzzed open. I knew he didn't know who "It's me" was any more than I'd recognize his voice. The sound was so distorted that you might be able to distinguish species and gender but no more than that.

I took the elevator to the fifth floor and looked at myself in the mirrored wall of the elevator till we got there. The hall was short. There were maybe four apartments to the floor. Opposite the elevator door was a stairwell, rimmed with a dark oaken railing. Rambeaux's apartment was to the left, in the front of the building. I knocked. I could hear a small rustle behind the door. And the peephole darkened. Then silence. I knocked again. No, answer. I knocked again. The door opened a crack, held narrow by a chain.

"What the fuck you want?" Rambeaux said. I could see just the strip of him that showed through the narrow door.

"Ah, you syrup-tongued dandy," I said. "No wonder you're hell with the ladies."

"Whyn't you get fucking lost, huh?"

"I'm looking for April. She's not at Tiger Lilies and they won't say where she is."

"She's not here. I don't know where she is. Maybe out with a john."

"No," I said, "the way they said it was that she wasn't there. Like she wouldn't be there later, either."

"Maybe she don't want to see you."

"How cruel," I said, "but even if it were true, they didn't know who I was. I could have been a customer." I had leaned my shoulder against the door as I talked. I was wearing the gray Nikes with a charcoal swoosh, and putting my foot in the door didn't seem like the best way to deal with it. It was Nikes' only flaw.

Rambeaux pushed back. "I don't know where she is and I don't want to," he said. "I got nothing to do with her anymore."

"What about tuition?" I said.

"Just get the fuck away from me, man." Rambeaux was pushing harder. "I got a gun." He shifted behind the door and I saw the other side of his face through the opening. His left eye was closed and his cheek was swollen and discolored.

"Somebody beat you up?" I said.

"Nobody done shit," he said. "Please, man. Get the fuck away from me."

I relaxed my lean on the door for a minute and he closed the opening again. Then I pressed my right foot flat against the wall behind me and lunged the door inward. The chain pulled out of the doorjamb, screws and all, and the door flew open. Rambeaux bounced back against the wall, on the other side of the door, and I was in. I pulled the door away from him and closed it. Rambeaux did in fact have a gun. A squat blue shortbarreled S&W .32 that he held in front of him with both hands like they do on the cop shows.