"Johnnie Walker Blue," Rita said.
"I deserve no less," I said and took a pull.
"Susan still gone?" Rita said.
"Yes."
"Is it possible she's not coming back?" Rita said.
"No."
"Well, it happened once before," Rita said.
"That was two other people," I said.
"So not this time?"
"No."
"Damn," Rita said. "Any chance we could pretend, like for an evening?"
"I could not love thee half so well," I said, "if I loved not honor more."
"Oh ... fuck!" Rita said.
"Or not," I said.
"You probably didn't even quote it right."
"Everybody's a critic," I said.
She reached across and patted my hand.
"How's everything in Dowling?" she said.
"The community is united in its conviction that I'm a nosy pain in the ass and should be stonewalled."
"Poor baby," Rita said.
"The thing is, nobody, not even their parents, seems interested in how two teenaged boys acquired four semiautomatic handguns and ammo, and enough skill to hit two-thirds of their targets."
"Close range," Rita said.
"Maybe. But when people pick up a hammer for the first time, they miss the nail more often than that."
"So you're saying it wasn't the first time."
I nodded.
"Were these kids marginal?" Rita said.
"It's hard to tell," I said. "The Grant kid played football. The kids I've talked with so far say that Clark was sort of a nobody."
"Any pattern to who they killed?" Rita said.
The waiter came by. We ordered another round. He went away.
"I don't know enough yet," I said. "DiBella says no."
"He any good?" Rita said.
"Healy says he is."
"And Healy is good."
"Very," I said.
Trying to stay out of the rain, a youngish woman wearing a stylish red raincoat and walking a small dog pressed in against the window next to where I was sitting. I looked at her.
"Are you looking at her ass?" Rita said.
"I am," I said. "I'm a detective. It's my nature."
The waiter brought the fresh drinks.
"You are right across the table from one of the great asses on the East Coast, and you're looking at her ass out the window."
"I can't see yours," I said. "If you wanted to go outside and press it against the window . . ."
"In the rain?"
I shrugged. Rita grinned.
"Besides," she said. "I'm using it to sit on."
"What a waste," I said.
We each drank.
"Maybe they just hated school," Rita said.
I nodded.
"I was talking to some kids yesterday," I said. "One of them said something."
Rita waited quietly. For all her mouthiness, she had a great capacity for intelligent silence as needed.
"She said that everybody's walking around in school barely able to stand it, and these guys just went a little further and couldn't stand it. `These guys went kaboom,' she said."
Rita nodded.
"My brother," she said, "married a nearly perfect knee-jerk upclass suburban mom. She's dreadful. But the poor bastard loves her, and there it is. When my nephew was three, she was worrying about getting him into the right preschool. Kid's fifteen now. He's under pressure to make sure he gets good grades so he can get into a good school. He needs to show good extracurricular activities to get into a good school. He needs to be popular with his classmates. Which means be just like them. Dress right, use the proper slang, listen to the proper music, go away on the proper vacations. Live in the right neighborhood, be sure his parents drive the right car, hang with the right group, have the right interests. He has homework. He has soccer practice and guitar lessons. The school decides what he has to learn, and when, and from whom. The school tells him which stairwell he can go up. It tells him how fast to move through the corridors, when he can talk, when he can't, when he can chew gum, when he can have lunch, what he is allowed to wear. . ."
Rita paused and took a drink.
"Boy," I said. "Ready for corporate life."
She nodded.
"And the rest of the world is telling him he's carefree," she said. "And all the time he's worried that the boys will think he's a sissy, and the school bully will beat him up, and the girls will think he's a geek."
"Hard times," I said.
"The hardest," she said. "And while he's going through puberty and struggling like hell to come to terms with the new person he's becoming, running through it all, like salt in a wound, is the self-satisfied adult smirk that keeps trivializing his angst."
"They do learn to read and write and do numbers," I said.
"They do. And they do that early. And after that, it's mostly bullshit. And nobody ever consults the kid about it."
"You spend time with this kid," I said.
"I do my Auntie Mame thing every few weeks. He takes the train in from his hideous suburb. We go to a museum, or shop, or walk around and look at the city. We have dinner. We talk. He spends the night, and I usually drive him back in the morning."
"What do you tell him?" I said.
"I tell him to hang on," Rita said.
She was leaning a little forward now, each hand resting palm-down on the table, her drink growing warm with neglect.
"I tell him that life in the hideous suburb is not all the life there is. I tell him it will get better in a few years. I tell him that he'll get out of that stultifying little claustrophobic coffin of a life, and the walls will fall away and he'll have room to move and choose, and if he's tough enough, to have a life of his own making."
As she spoke, she was slapping the tabletop softly with her right hand.
"If he doesn't explode first," she said.
"Your jury summations must be riveting," I said.
She laughed and sat back.
"I love that kid," she said. "I think about it a lot."
"He's lucky to have you. Lot of them have no one."
Rita nodded.
"Sometimes I want to take him and run," she said.
The wind shifted outside, and the rain began to rattle against the big picture window next to us. It collected and ran down, distorting reality and blurring the headlights and taillights and traffic lights and colorful umbrellas and bright raincoats into a kind of Parisian shimmer.
"I know," I said.
Chapter 23
SINCE WE WERE WALKING through a park arid down by the lake, away from any roads, I took Pearl off the leash and let her bound about like a rhebok. The rocks were an outcropping of basalt left by some vast meltdown some eons back. Scattered in the area were some boulders, probably deposited by a glacier some other eons back. The basalt sloped over the lip of a hill and down toward the lake shore. Scattered about on its surface were a bunch of prototype suburban dropouts who had been deposited more recently. I counted three girls and ten boys, plus one guy who was too big to be a boy. He was an obvious bodybuilder, heavily tattooed and of apparently mixed ethnicity. I guessed Asian and Hispanic. Riding the smell of the lake was the rich scent of marijuana. Pearl smelled it and stopped. She was not bumptiously friendly. When she spotted the group, her ears went down and she came over beside me.
"My name is Spenser," I said. "I'm looking into the school shooting."
"Well yippee iyoh ki yay," one of the kids said.
He was a gangly guy with hair so red it was nearly maroon. He looked a little unfocused. Beside him, the big older guy stared at me silently. He had on jeans and motorcycle boots and no shirt. Most of his upper body was ornamented.
"I was wondering what you all could tell me about Wendell Grant," I said.
"So who's that with you," the red-haired kid said, "Dr. Watson?"
One of the three girls threw a pebble at Pearl. It missed, but Pearl shied a little closer
to me. I looked at the girl. I knew how it was going to go, but there was no help for it.
"Next person bothers the dog, goes in the lake."
Everybody looked at the big guy with the tattoos. He remained seated on the rock.
"That's my girlfriend you talking to," he said.
"Good to know," I said. "Wendell Grant hang around with you all?"
"I'm talking to you, pal," the big guy said.
"Squint your eyes a little," I said.
He stood.
"What's that supposed to mean," the big guy said.
"Makes you look more dangerous," I said. "You squint up, like this, and you say, `I'm talking to you, pal.' No emphasis on any of the words, you know. Scares the shit out of people."
"Jesus, mister, don't fuck with Animal," the red-headed kid said.
"Animal needs to be fucked with," I said, "about once a day."
Animal walked at me with his fists chest-high and tried to kick me in the groin. He was ferocious but slow. I turned away from the kick and hit him a straight left on the nose. The nose broke and began to bleed. I didn't want this to take long, because I didn't want Pearl to get scared and run off. I hit him with a flurry of lefts and rights while he was still trying to get over the initial pop on the schnozzle. He took a couple of steps backward, trying to cover up, trying to regroup. I put my hands on his shoulders and spun him and put my foot in the small of his back and shoved, and he stumbled and slid down the hill and fell in the lake.
I looked around. Pearl was about thirty feet away in a full, belly-scraping cower. I went over to her and squatted down beside her and put an arm around her.
"Okay," I said. "All over. Okay." She sniffed at my mouth. "Okay," I said.
She gave me a lap on the nose. I stood, keeping one hand on her neck, patting her. The silence around the Rocks was vast. I could still smell the weed, but I heard nothing. At the foot of the hill, Animal was sitting in the lake trying to splash water on his face. The blood from his nose was seeping pink through his hands.
"Jesus," the red-haired kid said.
"I'm looking for information," I said, "about Wendell Grant."
"I never seen anything like that."
I was still pumped, and it made me a little brusque. "Care to see it again?" I said. "Throw something at the dog."
Nobody said anything. At the foot of the hill, Animal sat in the water. He wasn't splashing water on his nose anymore. He was simply sitting, slumped in the water, his reputation in ruins about him.
"Wendell close with anyone in the group."
Nobody spoke.
"Anybody got any idea why he might have shot up the school?"
Silence.
"Or where he got the guns?"
Silence. The three girls got up as if they were one. They were in full costume. A lot of hair. A lot of makeup. Cropped T-shirts that stopped well above the navel. Low-rider pants that barely covered the pubic bone.
"I'm sorry I threw something at your dog," one of them said. "I like dogs."
"You Animal's girlfriend?" I said.
"We all are," she said. "Can I pat your dog?"
"No."
They all three shrugged at almost the same time and moved away. Seeing the group diminish, the red-haired kid got to his feet.
"I gotta go, man," he said.
I took out a card and gave it to him.
"You think of anything, call me," I said. "You might as well get the reward as anyone."
"Reward?"
I nodded. He looked at my card and put it in the back pocket of his jeans and walked away. The rest of the kids left. At the bottom of the hill, Animal sat alone in the water. I stared down at him for a while, then I looked at Pearl, who was exploring where the kids had been sitting, in case they had left edible refuse. She was not successful, but there was no quit in her. She coursed back and forth among the rocks, exploring all possibilities. Hot on the trail of nothing much. Like me.
After a while I said to no one in particular, "Okay."
Pearl looked up.
"Okay," I said again.
I jerked my head for her to follow and started down the hill.
Chapter 24
I SAT AT THE water's edge on a small rock. Pearl moved along the edge of the lake, looking for frogs. Animal sat with his back to me, not moving, not saying anything.
"Three girlfriends," I said. "Way to go, Animal."
He didn't answer. His head was down, his hands resting lightly over his broken nose, sheltering it, not quite touching it.
"Put ice on it," I said. "I've had, I think, eight broken noses. They heal."
His head was forward on his chest. He didn't answer.
"You're going to be a tough guy, you need to be a lot quicker."
He didn't move.
"Or pick someone you can scare."
Nothing.
"They'll forget it," I said. "You can reestablish. Slap one of those asshole kids around and they'll think you're heroic again."
"I ain't forgetting it," he said in a thick voice.
"No, probably shouldn't. Make it a learning experience."
He stared at the pinkish lake water between his knees. His nose still dripped blood.
"I got connections," he said. "This ain't the end of it."
"You the candy man?" I said.
He didn't answer.
"Yeah, 'course you are," I said. "You're the one sells them dope."
He shook his head. It hurt. He stopped.
"You could probably get them a gun, too, they needed it," I said.
He was still.
"I'm not a cop," I said. "I'm only interested in Wendell Grant and the Clark kid."
He didn't speak.
"You sell them any guns?"
Silence. To my right, Pearl kicked up a frog from the growth at the water's edge, and it bounded ten feet out into the lake, with Pearl bounding right behind it.
"What's your name?" I said. He didn't answer.
Pearl put her head underwater and pulled it out, but she'd missed the frog. She swam in circles, looking for it.
I said, "If I have to stand you up and take your wallet and look at your ID, it'll start your nose bleeding again and probably hurt. What's your name."
"Yang," he said.
"First or last?"
"Last."
"What's your first name? "
"Luis."
"Luis Yang."
"Yes."
Pearl swam one more circle and gave up and came back into shore and began rummaging in the waterweeds again.
"Emergency room can clean that thing up and pack it for you. Maybe give you some pain pills."
Animal didn't move or speak or look at me. I stood up.
"Don't take aspirin," I said. "It'll make it bleed more."
Then I made a little chuck sound to Pearl, and she and I went back up the hill.
Chapter 25
IT WAS SATURDAY. Lee Farrell had come to spend the day with Pearl. This made Pearl happy because she liked Farrell, and he would almost certainly overfeed her.
So I was back in Dowling alone, sitting at a table on the sidewalk outside Coffee Nut in the bright morning with a large cup of coffee, cream, two sugars. The girl who had worn the pink top came by and saw me and sat down with me. Her top was white today. And her short pleated skirt was tan.
"Janey, isn't it?" I said.
"Yes."
"Can I buy you some coffee?"
"Black," she said.
I went in and got some and brought it back. She lit a cigarette.
"I heard you had a fight with Animal," she said.
I nodded.
"I heard you threw him in the lake," she said.
"He fell in the lake."
"They said you, like, creamed him," she said.
I smiled.
"I won the fight," I said.
She stared at me.
"Everyone is scared of Animal," she said. "The football players, everybody."
"He's pretty scary," I said.
"He's a perv," Janey said. "They're all pervs out there at the Rocks anyway."
I nodded. She kept looking at me.
"What's the perviest thing they do?" I said.
"All the girls have to, like, have sex with Animal," she said.
"Or what?"
"Or they can't hang out."
"Do they have any other boyfriends?" I said.
"If Animal says."
"How do you know so much about this?" I said.
"One of the girls went to junior high with me. I see her sometimes."
"What's her name?"
"It's really Annette George," Janey said. "But everybody calls her George."
"Was she there when I had the fight with Animal?" I said.
"Yuh." Janey giggled. "She threw the stone at your dog."
"You suppose we could talk with her?" I said.
"You and me?"
"Yeah."
"Sure, I guess so," Janey said. "I could call her."
"Why don't you," I said.
Janey took a cell phone out of her purse and dialed. I went to get us two more coffees. I bought us some doughnuts, too. Balanced nutrition.
"She'll meet us at the mall in an hour," Janey said.
"Melwood Mall?"
"Yes."
"Not here."
"God no."
"You don't want to be seen with her," I said.
Janey shrugged.
"Or she with you," I said.
Janey nodded.
"Or me," I said.
Janey nodded more vigorously.
"Of course," I said.
We drank some coffee.
"How come you could like beat up Animal so easy?" Janey said.
"Purity of heart," I said.
"Huh?"
"My strength is as the strength of ten, because my heart is pure?"
"What are you talking about?" Janey said.
"I rarely know."
"Seriously, how come? I mean Animal is . . ." She spread her hands; words failed her in the face of Animal's prowess.
"It's what I do," I said.
"Beat people up?"
I shrugged.
"Like everything else," I said. "It helps to know how."
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