28

Fred drove to the house in Charlestown. He was relieved, given the nature of Pearl Street, that the material he’d taken out of Russell’s apartment—the computer disks and the two cardboard Porta-file boxes that Russ had taken from Smykal’s place, and the video camera (after the man was dead, and before Fred got there? that didn’t sound like Russ, but it wasn’t Fred’s concern)—was all still in his car.

Dawn, the one with balls, was also the smart one—smart enough to know, yesterday morning, after looking Fred over, that it was finished, and time for her to get lost.

It was four in the morning. The city of Charlestown was not dark, but its buildings and its Bunker Hill monument made silhouettes of black against a sky in which light was struggling to establish itself.

Teddy was at the desk, on watch, his eyes wide. He was dressed in a black suit, looking like a Mormon missionary, but missing shirt and tie and haircut. Here, in the safety of the house and with sentry duty to give him focus, he seemed more like himself.

“I’m in your room, Fred,” Teddy said. “I told you you’d be back. You carryin’?”

Fred nodded. Teddy, alert, was referring to the gun under his arm, not to the file boxes.

“I’m on until eight,” Teddy said. “So go ahead, sleep. It’s your bed anyway.”

“Gotta work,” Fred said. “Bill Radford still got his TV stuff in the kitchen? I have to look through some tapes.”

Bill Radford was inclined toward brief, expensive hobbies.

Teddy nodded, saying, “Don’t tell him I told you.”

Fred took the things upstairs. They had the whole three-decker, but it was a small one, with a total of only ten bedrooms. Some people bunked together; the normal population varied from five to thirteen. The only rules were no drink, no stealing, no women, mind your business, and it helps if you play chess.

Teddy made little more impression in the room than Clay made in his.

Fred had looked into the file boxes already, before he took them from Russell’s neatly arranged apartment. The lighter one held cassette tapes labeled with names and dates. The other was divided into compartments for individual clients, with names, addresses, prurient stills, and, in some cases, notations of collections made—in surprisingly small amounts. Smykal had been a cautious man, bleeding his people in two- and three-hundred-dollar increments at intervals of several months. The quick impression was of an operation going back three years.

Fred recognized several names but dismissed them as not his business, unless one had done for Smykal. The man had wanted to have a Clayton Reed—or Arthur Arthurian—folder, too, not content with the windfall in an amount much larger than what he was used to.

Fred would study the client list if he had to, but only if he had to. He had no doubt that what he wanted was on the tape Sheila had been hoarding for her own purposes.

He dropped Sheila’s cassette into Bill’s machine and rewound it, sitting on the floor next to his mat, which now smelled somewhat of Teddy. The tape presented segments, bits and pieces, filmed surreptitiously from a position in Smykal’s bedroom (if he recalled the layout correctly), from which the camera had the advantage over the studio, its bed, its doorway, and—through that—the front door, visible when the studio door was open.

What Smykal got was depressing: portraits of men intent on deluding themselves into a parody of art that was also a parody of sex. A microphone hidden in the studio collected sound. It was ugly and pathetic, with occasional flashes of sadism or bravura. The women worked, exhibiting their limbs and parts, responding and suggesting, and seducing their clients into further creative invention. “I know, why don’t we take your clothes off, too?” “Twenty bucks more and you can put that camera down and put your head up in here instead.”

A running date and time moved along with the image on the film. That would be useful.

“Honey, what did you say you were doing at eleven twenty-two P.M. on the evening of April second?” the little woman asks.

“I was at that PTA thing. It ran late.”

“Funny, I just got this tape in the mail that shows you being sucked off by a girl with red hair,” she says, confused, handing him the pipe and slippers. “You wanna talk about this?”

Aside from Sheila and Dawn, three other women appeared. Some segments were brief and others as long as ten minutes. The show was worse than the educational painter with the hair. Smykal himself seldom appeared, though on occasion he would step into the frame to give suggestions or reassurance—“It’s all right, they are professional models, this is art.”

It was mostly sleazy, soft-core stuff—like mud wrestling—but it was sufficient, on the Boston scene, to inspire guilt and terror in carefully screened men if publication was threatened. It was enough to ruin lives and plenty, if the victim was timid, to form the basis for extortion.

It took an hour to reach last Friday night.

The TV screen showed Sheila in the studio, on the white bed, in front of the vague roses on the wallpaper, naked, curled on her side, reading a magazine. Beyond her, in the same frame, the studio door opened on the view across Henry Smykal’s living room, to the inside of the front door. The sound on the tape was of a phone ringing, which Smykal did not answer.

Smykal, wearing that suit, entered the room, Pentax around his neck.

“I don’t want to miss this guy,” the dead man said, his voice clear on the microphone. “You lying here, him coming into the apartment, first thing we see is him seeing the first thing he sees, which is your crotch, right?”

“Lie here with my legs open,” Sheila said. “I’m not brilliant, but I can understand that, I guess. What else is new?”

“Not much,” Smykal said. “Let’s not drown the guy. There. Just enough so he thinks, Hey, I got an idea.”

“When is he coming?”

“He’ll be here,” Smykal said. He walked out of the room, and shortly afterward the tape went blank, then started again to show—across Sheila, now striking a pose of lascivious welcome on the bed—Smykal going to the apartment’s front door, opening it a crack.

Hot lights burned, and the telephone was ringing.

Smykal said, “You’re not him,” and the camera showed his back as he tried to force the door closed. There was a voice on the other side of the door that Fred couldn’t hear precisely. Sheila lolled.

Smykal said, “I’m filming,” as he pushed against the door. “What letter?”

A foot in Fred’s shoe was stuck in the crack of the door. Fred heard the sound of the name Arthurian, spoken in a voice he recognized.

Smykal said, “You can’t come in. It’s art film. I guarantee privacy.”

There was a murmur from the far side of the door.

Smykal said, “You can’t come in, not now.”

Sheila posed, increasing the welcome, lifting her legs.

Smykal pushed at the door, saying, “Just get out.” Then, softer, “It’s not here.”

Fred got the reprise, the Smykal’s-eye view of his first visit of Saturday morning, until he pulled out his foot and Smykal, in his shiny suit, closed the door again.

“Forget it, Sheila,” Smykal said, walking out of the picture. “Knock it off.”

The screen went blank. Fred put it on pause.

Sheila had said, “The guy came back.”

That was the part that interested Fred. He started the film forward, the picture focusing on Sheila tossing her magazine to one side and assuming her position again. Smykal came into the picture, going to the door, listening a moment, taking off the chain.

“Now,” Fred said.

Smykal’s door was pushed in. Buddy Mangan, in the man-of-the-soil outfit, shoving Smykal backward past the studio, gave the naked woman a glance, said, “Get lost,” and pushed Smykal off camera.

Sheila rolled over, scratched her backside, picked up her magazine, and said, “Shit.”

She stepped out of the camera’s frame, and there was nothing to see but empty rooms. Mangan’s voice, hard to make out, came from somewhere else: “What do you mean telling my guy the deal’s off? Where’s the fucking picture? What’s wrong with my fucking money, Smykal?”

Sheila, now in jeans and sandals and a pink sweatshirt, carrying the black bag, walked into camera range and out of the studio. A loud slap sounded, and Mangan’s voice again: “What’s wrong with my fucking money?”

The picture stopped. It was over.

Fred stared at the machine.

He looked at his watch. He could afford to sleep for an hour, in Teddy’s bed.