God Save the Child

“No, sir,” I said. “Anyone who knows me will tell you that I’m really into candor. Only don’t give me that hard look anymore; it makes it hard to swallow my beer.”

“Keep it up, Spenser, and you’ll see how hard things can get. Understand?”

I drank some more beer. It’s one of the things I’m outstanding at. I said, “Okay, what was it you wanted to get out in the open?”

He kept the hard stare on me. “I did some checking with a few people I know in the AG’s office, after Rog told me he’d hired you. And I found out some things I don’t like hearing.”

“I’ll bet,” I said.

“Among them is that you think you’re kind of fancy and act like you’re kind of special. You don’t always cooperate with local authorities, they said.”

“Jesus, I was hoping that wouldn’t get out,” I said.

“Well, let me tell you something right now, Mister; out here in Smithfield you’ll cooperate. You’ll keep in close touch with my department, and you’ll be under the supervision of my people, or you’ll be hauling your ass — excuse me, Marge — right back into Boston. You got that?”

“How long you been working on that stare?” I said.

“Huh?”

“I mean, do you work out with it every morning in the mirror? Or is it something that once you’ve mastered it you never forget, like, say, riding a bicycle?”

Trask brought his open hand down hard on the tabletop. The ice in Margery Bartlett’s glass jingled. She said, “George, please.”

“This isn’t getting us nowhere, you know? This isn’t getting us nowhere at all,” Roger Bartlett said. Outside I could hear the low murmur of the power mower as it trimmed up the far side of the acre.

Trask took a deep forbearing breath and said, “Gimme another beer, will you, Rog?”

Bartlett did and put down another can by me, although I wasn’t halfway through the first one.

I said, “What have you got, Chief?”

“Everything there is to get; we’ve covered everything. The kid has run off and there’s no way to find him. I say he’s probably in New York or maybe California by now.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because he’s not around here. If he was we’d have found him.” Trask drank again from the can.

“What did he take when he left?”

“Just a pet whatchamacallit,” Margery Bartlett said. “Guinea pig.”

“Yeah,” Trask said, “guinea pig. He took that and what he was wearing and nothing else. Haven’t the Bartletts told you all this?”

“What was he wearing?”

“Blue short-sleeved shirt, tan pants, white sneakers.”

“Did he take any food for the guinea pig?”

Trask looked at me as if I were crazy. “Food?”

“Yeah. Food. Did he take any for the guinea pig?”

Trask looked at Margery Bartlett. She said, “I don’t know. I had nothing to do with the guinea pig.” She shivered. “Dirty little things. I hate them.”

I looked at her husband. He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“What goddamned difference does that make? We ain’t worrying about the whatchamacallit; we’re after a missing kid. I don’t care if the whatchamacallit eats well or not.”

“Well,” I said, “if the kid cared enough about the guinea pig to come home and get it before taking off, he wouldn’t have left without food for it, would he? How about a carrying case or a box or something?”

All three of them looked blank.

“Did the shirt he was wearing have a big pocket, big enough for a guinea pig?”

Roger Bartlett said, “No, I put it through the wash the day before he left, and I noticed there were no pockets. I always go through the pockets before I put things in the wash, ya know, because the kids are always sticking things in their pockets and then forgetting them and they get ruined in the machine. So I checked and I noticed, ya know?”

“Okay,” I said, “let’s see if we can figure out whether he took any food or anything to carry the guinea pig. If you’re going to New York or California, you probably don’t want to carry a guinea pig in your hand the whole way. You can’t put him in your pants pocket, and you probably don’t buy him a cheeseburger and a Ho-Jo at Howard Johnson’s.”

Roger Bartlett nodded and said, “Come on.”

We went up through a center hall off the kitchen to the front stairs. The stairs were wide enough to drive a jeep up. Where they turned and formed a landing, a floor-to-ceiling window looked out over the bright blue pool. There was a trumpet vine fringing the window, and its big bugle-shaped red flowers obscured a couple of the window lights.