Chapter 21
We were having leftover cherry cobbler for breakfast on Friday morning when I asked Susan about Mitchell Poitras.
"Oh, sure," she said. "I know Mitch."
"He's living in a very expensive town house on Beacon Street with Amy Gurwitz," I said.
"Poitras?" Susan said. It always irked me when she called people by their last name. One of the boys. Tough as a ten-minute egg. Wasn't my job to tell her how to talk, so I sat on the irksomeness.
"The very same," I said. "And he has a studio and lab set up for making porn films and tapes of very young girls and boys."
"Poitras?"
"Mitchell Poitras," I said. "I gather he hadn't put that down in his curriculum vitae."
"My God, are you sure?"
.`Yep." "How do you know for sure?" she said.
"I burgled his house Wednesday while he and Amy were off celebrating the harvest."
"But how did you think… yes, of course, because that's where you found Amy and she used to be a friend of April's and you had nothing else to do. Why in hell didn't you mention him to me before?"
"Until I found evidence that he worked for the Department of Education I had no reason to think you might know him," I said.
"Mitchell Poitras?" Better I thought. "But, Jesus Christ, do you realize who he is?"
"Letters say he's Executive Coordinator, comma, Student Guidance and Counseling Administration."
Susan nodded.
"It's a job that gives him access to every disturbed kid in the state-access to psychological profiles, teacher reports, principal evaluations, guidance recommendations, often police material. My good sweet Jesus," Susan said. Her mind could integrate very swiftly.
"What big teeth you have, Granny," I said.
"Yes," she said. "Like finding out your baby-sitter is a werewolf. You say he has facilities to make these things?"
"Yes. Not just a collector, a producer. A distributor."
"A collector would be bad enough," Susan said.
"Now, my dear, consenting adults in the privacy of their home…
"Not for a man doing what he does. That's bullshit if you're Poitras. But to produce… could it be the wrong man?" "Ugly fat guy," I said, "dresses like he's got a charge at Woolworth's."
Susan nodded. Her face was sharp with concern. "What are you going to do?"
"Eventually I'm going to blow the whistle on him, but first I want to see if he knows where April is."
"Eventually?"
"I didn't hire on to clean up the state," I said. "I hired on to find April. First things first."
"But-"
"No," I said. "Don't give me the well-being-of-themany-against-the-one speech. The many are an abstraction. April is not. She rode in my car. I'm going to find her first."
"One of the rules," Susan said. There was no smile when she said it.
"Sure," I said.
"How much is it for April?" she said. "How much for you?"
"Doesn't matter," I said. "It's a way to live. Anything else is confusion." Susan sat and looked into her coffee cup. "I disapprove," she said.
I nodded.
"But it's yours. There are things you disapprove of that I do anyway," she said.
I nodded again.
"So first you find April, and then you…" She made a twisting gesture with her right hand, turning the palm up and quickly down again.
"Then I air out the Student Guidance and Counseling Administration," I said.
"Yes," she said. "And in the meantime I might do some research." "See whether Poitras recruits?" I said. She nodded. "I'll bet he does," I said. She nodded again.
Chapter 22
By Monday night we knew that Poitras almost certainly recruited, and on a pretty good scale. I spent Monday staring alertly at his town house on Beacon Street. Susan spent Monday on the phone to people she knew in high school guidance offices around the state. In nearly every case of a dropout, male or female, there was clear evidence of contact with Poitras.
"Either he met the students during crisis intervention sessions," Susan said to me on the telephone, "or at coordinative evaluation conferences or he's been a resource person during attempts at therapeutic redirection."
"You are, I hope, quoting," I said.
"You mean the jargon? You hear it so much you get used to it."
"Talking like that will rot your teeth," I said.
"Never mind that. I checked back in my own files on
Amy Gurwitz and April Kyle. He talked with both of them not long before they dropped out."
"How long?"
"Well, it's hard to say," Susan said. "A kid doesn't just one day drop out. First he or she starts to cut classes and that increases in frequency and after a while it blends into having left school. He spoke to both of them within two weeks of the missing persons report to the Smithfield police-that we could be precise about."
"How usual is that?" I said.
"That a man in Poitras's position would talk with the students?"
..Yeah."
"It's not improbable," Susan said. "But it's not entirely routine, either. Most people yat the state level have no contact at all with students."
"An educator's dream," I said.
"Counseling reports and S.I.J.'s are routinely sent to his office," Susan said, "but the amount of personal contact is sort of unusual. But not so you'd comment on it unless you discovered that your experience was typical -you know, that he was doing this everywhere."
"What is an S.I.J.?" I said.
"Student-in-jeopardy forms."
"Ah, of course," I said.
"So Poitras, assuming that my sample is representative, had a ready list of children ready to drop out of school, beset with emotional problems, vulnerable to anyone who'd want to exploit them."
"Chance of a lifetime," I said. "King of the chicken flicks."
"He mustn't be allowed to continue," Susan said. "Soon," I said. "April will show up soon."
"I cannot wait too much longer," she said. "I cannot permit this to go on."
"The end of the week," I said. "If she doesn't show up by then we'll blow the whistle on Poitras and I'll look elsewhere for April."
Susan agreed and I hung up and went to bed.
Tuesday morning I was back out on Beacon Street and Tuesday afternoon there came April Kyle. She was wearing a man's army field jacket with a first cavalry patch on it and she looked sort of bedraggled, as if she'd been sleeping in subways and eating light. She slouched along Beacon Street from the direction of Kenmore Square, reading the numbers on the buildings until she reached Poitras's. She stopped for a minute and stared at it, then she went up and rang the bell. The door opened and she went in. I stayed put. Maybe she was just passing through. Maybe just a visit and then back home to Park Street Under. Some cocoa and a Twinkie, a little talk of boys and sock hops, thumb through the yearbook, giggle, maybe a stroll down to the malt shop, or maybe not. Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang. April didn't come out again. Poitras waddled home at his usual time and let himself in with his key. Still no one came out. I walked three blocks up to Boylston Street and found a public phone and called Susan.
"April's in with Amy and Poitras," I said. "What do you think?"
"Stay there. I'll come in. We'll talk to her together."
"No," I said. "I don't want you involved. This deal is tied into some really bad folks, and I don't want them to know your name."
"I have as much right to be frightened as you do," Susan said.
"Suze," I said. "There've been threats made. By people who can back them up."
"I have the right to be threatened too," Susan said. "I'm coming in."
"No.
"Yes. You have no right to protect me against my will. I have the right to my own pride and my own self-respect. This is the ugliest piece of business I've ever seen. I'm involved. I got you involved and I want to be part of ending it."