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Walrus"—in the
bench drawer, along with two good-sized roaches, a box of flat picks, a
nail file, a couple of pencils, a package of guitar strings, and a sheaf
of Bobby's own music written out on blank music paper. I flipped on the
bench light and took a look at the lyrics. One of them was called "Robbie."
    The first stanza and chorus went:
Come out, Robbie darling, come out and play,
Tomorrow will be a brand new day,
We'll share it together, come what may—
Only promise me, darling, that you'll stay,
Stay by me, stay by me, stay by me.
Don't ever go—back into the night,
Robbie darling, back into the night.
    I didn't read the rest. At the bottom of the page
a different hand had written the words, "You better" or "Your better."
I couldn't tell which. There were also some figures jotted down in the
margins. Probably the prices of auto parts.
    I put the music back where I'd found it and flipped off
the bench light and the overhead fixture. It was fully dark outside. And
Robbie was still lost. But, at least, I'd learned something about her friend—a
romantic teenager with a sweet, insipid face who wanted to rescue his love
from darkness, like Orpheus and Eurydice. I just hoped, if Robbie was with
him, that he hadn't taken her back to that black-haired man again. It was
hard to tell from a single photograph, but that one had the look of a user
to me—the look of a self-styled guru, who could twist an impressionable
boy like Bobby around his finger. I didn't want to think about what he
could do to the girl, because if she were ripe for Bobby Caldwell's maudlin
songs, then she was ripe for picking.
 

    6
    I MADE MY WAY BY WINDOW LIGHT BACK UP THE DRIVEWAY to
the front of the apartment. It was well past seven by my watch and still
no signi of Bobby. He might have been keeping an eye on the Segal home,
I thought, and spotted me and decided to lay low for awhile. Or Sylvia
Rostow might have called him after I'd left her house. Or it might have
been that he'd gotten delayed, like his father had said, and that he had
no idea where Robbie Segal had gone. The fact that he had a crush on the
girl and wrote love songs to her didn't mean that she felt the same way
about him—a bitter lesson I could remember learning when I was about
Bobby's age. Still, he was my best lead and I wanted the chance to talk
to him.
    I ducked my head against the icy wind and decided to pay
one more visit to Ca1dwell's apartment before calling it a night—to put
the fear of the law into Pastor C. in case Bobby did come home later that
evening. So I trudged back down that dim, shadowy corridor to the rear
apartment and knocked. I could hear the rustle of the newspaper and the
cackle of the TV behind the door."Yes?" he called out.
      "Open up," I said.
    He opened the door. "What do you want now?" he said, staring
at me coldly. He'd apparently done a bit of thinking while I'd been gone—enough
to get a little of his lost nerve back.
    "The same thing I wanted before—to talk to your son."
    "You know damn well he ain't here." He threw the door
open and said, "Or do you want to search my place?"
    He was on the verge of making a scene—shouting and whining
and bringing in the neighbors.
    I jabbed him in the chest with a forefinger and said,
"You tell your son when you see him that if he doesn't get in touch with
me in the next twenty-four hours, I'm going to get a warrant for his arrest."
    "On what charge?" he said slyly.
    "Are you kidding? Robbie Segal's been gone for four days.
She's a genuine missing person. I can have.your son up on statutory rape
and felonious abduction by tomorrow night. You think you can make bail
on two felony counts, Mr. Caldwell?"
    I could almost hear the air going out of him. "What do
you want to make trouble for Bobby for?" he whined. "My son never did you
no harm. He never done no harm to Robbie, neither. He worships that girl.
He'd do anything for her. And she for him. Why can't you just leave
them alone?"
    "Because