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nodded. "You think she might be a whore?" I said.
    "Oh, I hope not. She was always so nice. I don't think she'd do that."
    "Do you live here with Mitchell Poitras?"
    She smiled and shook her head vaguely. It was neither a negative nor affirmative movement-it was something in between, an avoidance gesture.
    "Do you work?"
    "I'm at home just now," she said. Her eyes were shallow and meaningless as she spoke. Her smile was polite. She looked like a Barbie doll.
    "So who pays the rent?"
    She made her vague head movement again and smoked some more of her cigarette.
    "What does Mitchell do for a living?" I said.
    She looked up at the clock. "I really must be starting my dinner pretty soon. I'm afraid you'll have to excuse me." She stood. I was being outclassed by a sixteenyear-old girl. Should I give her the famous Spenserian arm squeeze? Or I could shoot her. I said, "Okay, thanks for your time." I took a card from my shirt pocket and gave it to her. "If you should hear from April, could you give me a call?" She put the card on the coffee table and walked in stately cadence to the door and opened it. She smiled. I smiled. I went out. She shut the door. I turned up my coat collar and walked to my car. The small rain still fell.

Chapter 7

    I was not happy. I had learned so little from Amy Gurwitz that I felt as if I'd gotten stupider while I was in there. It wasn't so much that I suspected her of lying. I had no sense at all of her or her reactions. It bothered me. She seemed in some ways the full realization of what a sixteen-year-old kid would imagine adult sophistication to be. Like a cartoon of a rich Back Bay matron. But that's all she was. There was no fun in her, no pleasure in the game. No showing off. No rebellion. No flirtation. And she was living with some guy old enough to have amassed the bundle it had cost for that town house. None of it was right. I didn't like it. I had the feeling that maybe she didn't care if I liked it.
    I looked at my watch-after four. I was hungry. I left my car where it was and walked over to the Cafe Vendome on Commonwealth and had a cheeseburger and three beers. When I got through it was 5:05. With the rain still coming I walked down Commonwealth and across the Common and on into the Combat Zone at the foot of Boylston Street. It was twenty-five to six when I got there. But that didn't matter. Time stood still in the Combat Zone. You could see a dirty movie or a quarter peep show at most hours of the day or night. You could purchase a skin magazine specialized for almost every peculiarity. You could get a drink. Fellatio. Pizza by the slice, adult novelty items. Everything necessary to sustain the human spirit. The neon lights and oversized flashing bulbs and crudely drawn signs that advertised all of this and much more (All Live Acts! Nude College Girls!) were plastered onto old commercial buildings, some of them once elegant in the red brick and brownstone that Boston had been built in. Above the one-story glitz of the Combat Zone the ornamental arched windows and the intricate rooflines of the old buildings were as incongruous as a nun at a stag film.
    I moved along lower Washington Street with my hands in my pockets, trying to look like a guy from Melrose whose wife was away till Thursday. Except for the Back Bay, Boston's streets are routinely narrow and twisted. Washington Street where it descends into the Combat Zone is notably so. Cars cruised slowly by. Often they were filled with young men drinking beer from the bottle and yelling out the window at women. Sailors from other countries, women in suggestive clothes, men in stretch fabric suits and miracle fabric raincoats with epaulets and belts, an elderly Oriental man moving through on his way to Chinatown, seeming oblivious of the crudely packaged lust about him. Winos shuffled about down here too, and kids wearing black warm-up jackets with yellow leather sleeves that said Norfolk County Champs 8Q-81 in the center of a large