Susan and I were sitting on her back steps, throwing the ball for Pearl, Susan’s German Short Hair. This was more complicated than it had to be because Pearl had the part about chasing the ball and picking it up; but she did not have the part about bringing it back and giving it to you. She wanted you to chase her and pry it loose from her jaws. Which was not restful.
“She can be taught,” Susan said.
“You think anyone can be taught,” I said. “And you think you can do it.”
“You have occasionally shaken my confidence,” Susan said. “But generally that’s true.”
She had on nearly knee-high black boots and some sort of designer jeans that fit like nylons, and a windbreaker that looked like denim and was made of silk, which puzzled me. I’d have thought it should be the other way around. Her thick black hair had recently been cut, and was now a relatively short mass of curls around her face. Her eyes remained huge and bottomless. She had a cup of hot water with lemon which she held in both hands and sipped occasionally. I was drinking coffee.
“Got any thoughts on gangs?” I said.
“Gangs?”
“Yeah, youth gangs,” I said.
“Very little,” Susan said. Pearl came close and then shied away when Susan reached for the ball.
“You’re a shrink,” I said. “You’re supposed to know about human behavior.”
“I can’t even figure out this dog,” Susan said. “Why do you want to know about gangs?”
“Hawk and I are going to rid a housing project of them.”
“How nice,” Susan said. “Maybe it could become a subspecialty for you. In addition to leaping tall buildings at a single bound.”
“Spenser’s the name. Gangs are the game,” I said. “You know anything about youth gangs?”
“No,” Susan said. “I don’t think many people do. There’s a lot of literature. Mostly sociology, but my business is essentially with individuals.”
“Mine too,” I said.
Pearl came to me with the yellow tennis ball chomped in one side of her mouth, and pushed her nose under my forearm, which caused my coffee to slop from the cup onto my thigh. I put the cup down and reached for the ball and she turned her head away.
“Isn’t that adorable,” Susan said.
I feinted with my right and grabbed at the ball with my left, Pearl moved her head a quarter inch and I missed again.
“I haven’t been this outclassed since I fought Joe Walcott,” I said.
Susan got up and went into her kitchen and came out with a damp towel and rubbed out the coffee stain in my jeans.
“That was kind of exciting,” I said.
“You want to tell me about this gang thing you’re involved in?”
“Sure,” I said. “If you’ll keep rubbing the coffee stain out of my thigh while I do it.”
She didn’t but I told her anyway.
While I told her Pearl went across the yard and dropped the tennis ball and looked at it and barked at it. A robin settled on the fence near her and she spotted it and went into her point, foot raised, head and tail extended, like a hunting print. Susan nudged me and nodded at her. I picked up a pebble and tossed it at the robin and said “Bang” as it flew up. Pearl looked after it and then back at me.
“Do you really think the `bang‘ fooled her?” Susan said.
“If I fired a real gun she’d run like hell,” I said.
“Oh, yes,” Susan said.
We were quiet. In the Globe I had read that coffee wasn’t bad for you after all. I was celebrating by drinking some, in the middle of the morning. Susan had made it for me: instant coffee in the microwave with condensed skim milk instead of cream. But it was still coffee and it was still officially not bad for me.
“I don’t see how you and Hawk are going to do that,” Susan said.
“I don’t either, yet.”
“I mean the police gang units in major cities can’t prevent gangs. How do you two think you can?”
“Well, for one thing it is we two,” I said.
“I’ll concede that,” Susan said.
“Secondly, the cops are coping with many gangs in a whole city. We only have to worry about the gangs’ impact on Double Deuce.”
“But even if you succeed, and I don’t see how you can, won’t it just drive them into another neighborhood? Where they will terrorize other people?”
“That’s the kind of problem the cops have,” I said. “They are supposed to protect all the people. That’s not Hawk’s problem or mine. We only have to protect the people in Double Deuce.”
“But other people deserve it just as much.”
“If the best interest of a patient,” I said, “conflicts with the best interest of a nonpatient, what do you do?”
Susan smiled. “I am guided always,” she said, “by the best interest of my patient. It is the only way I can do my work.”
I nodded.
Pearl picked up the tennis ball and went to the corner of the yard near the still barren grape arbor and dug a hole and buried the ball.
“Do you suppose that this is her final statement on chase-the-bally?” I said.
“I think she’s just given up trying to train us,” Susan said. “And is putting it in storage until someone smarter shows up.”
“Which should be soon,” I said.
CHAPTER 3
Twenty-two Hobart Street is a collection, actually, of six-story brick rectangles, grouped around an asphalt courtyard. Only one of the buildings fronted Hobart Street. The rest fronted the courtyard. Therefore the whole complex had come to be known as Twenty-two Hobart, or Fouble Deuce. A lot of the windowglass had been replaced by plywood. The urban planners who had built it to rescue the poor from the consequences of their indolence had fashioned it of materials calculated to endure the known propensity of the poor to ungraciously damage the abodes so generously provided them. Everything was brick and cement and cinderblock and asphalt and metal. Except the windows. The place had all the warmth of a cyanide factory. To the bewilderment of the urban planners, the poor didn’t like it there much, and after they’d broken most of the windows, everyone who could get out, got out.
Hawk parked his Jag at the curb under a streetlight and we got out.
“Walk in here,” Hawk said, “and you could be anywhere. Any city.”
“Except some are higher.”
“Except for that,” Hawk said.
There was absolutely no life in the courtyard. It was lit by the one security spotlight that no one had been able to break yet. It was littered with beer cans and Seven-up bottles and empty jugs of Mogen David wine. There were sandwich wrappers and the incorruptible plastic hamburger cartons that would be here long after the last ding dong of eternity.
The meeting was in what the urban planners had originally no doubt called the rec room, and, in fact, the vestige of a Ping-Pong table was tipped up against the cinderblock wall at the rear of the room. The walls were painted dark green to discourage graffiti, so the graffiti artists had simply opted for Day-Glo spray paints in contrasting colors. The Celotex ceiling had been pulled down, and most of the metal grid on which the ceiling tiles had rested was bent and twisted. In places long sections of it hung down hazardously. There were recessed light cans with no bulbs in amongst the jumble of broken gridwork. The room light came from a couple of clamp-on portable lights at the end of extension cords. In the middle of the room, in an incomplete circle, a dozen unmatched chairs, mostly straight-backed kitchen chairs, had been set up. All but two of the chairs were occupied. All the occupants were black. I was with Hawk. He was black. I was not. And rarely had I noticed it so forcefully.
A fat black man stood as Hawk and I came in. His head was shaved like Hawk’s and he had a full beard. He wore a dark three-piece suit and a pastel flowered tie. His white-on-white shirt had a widespread collar, and gold cuff links with diamond chips glinted at his wrists. When he spoke he sounded like Paul Robeson, which pleased him.