Free Ceremony by Robert B. Parker Page A

you want to tip any of the broads, that's between you and them."
    I nodded.
    "Gimme two hundred," he said. "I'll drive you up."
    I took a hundred and five twenties from my wallet and gave them to Eddie. He counted them and. put them away and led me down a narrow cross street to a Pontiac Firebird Trans Am. We got in and headed up the hill toward the university. We went past the School of Design and Brown University, past some of the most elegant Victorian houses anywhere. In ten minutes Eddie parked the Trans Am on Angell Street near the corner of Stimson, in front of a deep blue three-storied Victorian house with a vast mansard roof. Over the windows was an ornamental sunrise design in yellow and black.
    "This is it," he said, and got out of the car. I followed him. We went up three wide wooden stairs and across a deep veranda and Eddie rang the doorbell. A husky young man wearing a green Lacoste sweater over a white shirt opened the door. He had a health club tan, a bushy mustache, and dark hair blown dry.
    Eddie said, "Fella to see Mrs. Ross."
    The man nodded. Eddie gave him my hundred-dollar bill. The man smiled at me and said, "This way, sir."
    He showed me into a high-ceilinged living room with a marble fireplace and bow windows on two walls. I sat on a hard sofa with claw-and-ball feet, and the man went away. In maybe a minute a woman came in. She was a small woman, middle-aged, with her gray hair in a frizzy perm. She wore a black turtleneck sweater and a pleated red plaid skirt and black boots. There was a gold medallion on a chain, and large hoop earrings, and rings on most of her fingers. She came in and stood in front of me. She had no makeup except for some red color on her cheeks that stood out against her white skin.
    "Good afternoon," she said. "I'm Mrs. Ross. We have ten girls here. What kind of arrangement would you like to make?"
    "I heard your girls do specialty stuff."
    "Anything you want," she said firmly.
    "All of them'?"
    "Absolutely."
    "Maybe I better meet them," i said.
    "Of course," she said. "Two are busy at the moment, but I'll ask the rest to come in and say hello. Would you care for a drink?"
    I shook my head. "Not right now."
    Mrs. Ross nodded. "Certainly. I'll get the girls."
    She went back out and down the corridor and I sat quietly in the nineteenth-century room. Students on bicycles went by on
    Angell Street outside. I heard Mrs. Ross's boot heels tapping briskly along the hardwood floor of the corridor, and then she came through the archway. Behind her came eight young women. Four were white, three were black, and one was Oriental. The third one through the door was April Kyle.
    The eight girls stood in an informal semicircle, staring blankly into the middle distance the way models do at a fashion show. They had each their own expression, and it didn't change. It was their stage face, I realized. The oldest was maybe nineteen, the youngest fourteen or fifteen. They were all dressed young, too, with a kind of buttons-and-bows little-girl look that must have been calculated. April, for instance, was wearing a white blouse under a green plaid jumper with black knee socks and penny loafers. Her blond hair was caught back on one side with a barrette. The fun-loving Bobbsey. "Your choice?" Mrs. Ross was not a dawdler, nor did she encourage it in others. I wondered if I ought to check their teeth.
    "That one," I said.
    "Fine," Mrs. Ross said. "April, show the gentleman to your room." The other seven girls went out of the living room and April stepped toward me, put out her hand, and said, "My name's April, what's yours?"
    "Alley Oop," I said.
    She smiled without warmth or meaning. "Okay, Alley, want to come with me?"
    "Hey," I said with a big hearty smile, "I'd follow you anywhere, honey."
    She took my hand. In the hallway there was a wide stairway that turned halfway up. We went up the stairs hand in hand-with wand'ring steps and slow, I thought -turned at the landing, and continued to the big