School Days (17 page)

M
Y BACKUP GUN
was a .357, which was heavy to wear, but I thought it worth the weight on this occasion. I was with Major Johnson and the bald guy with the prison tattoos who had shown such instant affection for me the first time we met. We were sitting on a bench at the edge of a hot top walkway in a playground in Roxbury. I was once again uniquely white.

There were black children playing on the swings and slides that the park commission had set up. There were black mothers and grandmothers, most of whom were younger than I was, watching the kids. There were some black teenagers
smoking cigarettes and looking bad in gangsta-rap jeans and hats on sideways.

Past the play area, I could see Jose Yang and two of his people coming toward us. They sat across the hot top walkway from us on a bench just like ours. The management team of Los Diablos was as black as everyone else, except for Yang, whose skin tone was lighter, but far darker than mine.

The scary-looking teens watched us covertly. I was an aberration, and they would naturally have stared at me. But I was with two legitimate gangbangers, and I knew the kids were struggling to look just as dangerous, while desperately trying to do nothing that would annoy any of us.

Nobody spoke for a while. Jose Yang looked at me without expression.

“I killed your brother,” I said.

Yang's face didn't move. No expression. The men on each side of him didn't do anything.

“Why?” Yang said.

“He tried to kill me,” I said.

“Tell me.”

I did. In outline form. Yang listened without any reaction.

“He shot the broad for talking to you,” Yang said when I was finished.

I nodded.

“What it looks like,” I said.

“And he tried to backshoot you?” Yang said.

I shrugged.

“He tried to shoot me from cover,” I said.

“But at the end, he come out,” Yang said.

“Yes.”

“And you come out.”

“Yes.”

“Face-to-face,” Yang said.

I nodded.

“He was looking at you when he died,” Yang said.

“He was.”

Yang stood suddenly and walked down the hot top walkway to the far end of the park and stood with his back to us, looking out at the tightly packed neighborhood around us. None of us on the benches did anything. After a time, Yang turned and walked back down the walkway and stood in front of me. He looked at me. I looked at him.

“He straight?” Yang said to Major.

“Yeah.”

“You believe what he say?”

“Yeah.”

“Why you come tell me?” Yang said to me.

“Didn't want to be looking behind me the rest of my life.”

“He was my brother,” Yang said.

I nodded.

“He a fucking fool, too,” Yang said.

I nodded.

“Never knew how to act,” Yang said.

“He stood up,” I said. “At the end. He came at me straight-on.”

Yang nodded.

“You got some big balls coming here like this,” Yang said.

“Had to be done,” I said.

“Like killing Luis,” Yang said.

“Yeah,” I said.

Yang nodded some more. He looked back at the corner of the park where he had stood, as if there was something there only he could see.

“I got no problem with you,” he said finally, still staring at the far corner of the park.

“Good,” I said and stood.

Yang's gaze came slowly back from the corner and settled on me. He nodded.

“Sorry about your brother,” I said.

Yang nodded again. He didn't speak. I had nothing else to say, so, with Major and his pal behind me, I turned and walked out of the park.

I
SAT IN A BIG
maple captain's chair in the a small office in the Bethel County Courthouse and talked to Francis X. Cleary, the Bethel County Chief Prosecutor.

“I've heard a lot about you already,” Cleary said.

He had longish silvery hair, which he combed straight back, and high color, and pale blue eyes that were very bright and never seemed to blink.

“So you are fully prepared to admire me,” I said.

Cleary laughed.

“I'm maintaining a wait-and-see attitude,” he said. “You convinced the Clark kid did it?”

“Yes,” I said. “But I don't know why.”

“And you care why,” Clearly said.

“Yes.”

“I don't,” Cleary said. “We got his confession. His accomplice supports it.”

Cleary spread his hands, palms up.

“Slam, bam,” he said. “Thank you, ma'am.”

He grinned at me happily.

“You had a shrink talk with him?”

“Naw. If the putz that's representing him goes for an insanity defense, I'll have somebody talk to him and say he's legally sane. If not, why waste the taxpayers' money.”

“You've talked with him,” I said.

“The kid? Sure. We've had several conversations with him. Always, of course, with his attorney present.”

“Lawyer seems a little weak,” I said.

“You want to do time,” Cleary said. “Hire him. I wouldn't let him search a title for me.”

“Off the record,” I said. “Just you and me. What do you think?”

“About the kid?” Cleary said. “Oh, he did it. No doubt. But . . .”

“But?”

“But, there's something wrong with him,” Cleary said.

I nodded.

“Besides the fact that he shot up his school,” I said. “For no good reason.”

“Besides that,” Cleary said. “I been doing this a long time. I like it. I like putting them away and not letting them out.
It's why I'm still doing it. I've talked to a lotta killers, a lotta whack jobs. But this kid . . . there's something missing, and I don't know what it is.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I'm not in the business of helping people I'm prosecuting. I'm in the business of throwing away the key, and I'll do it with this kid, and never look back. But . . .”

“There's no sport in it,” I said.

“Everybody wants to bury the kids, bury the crime, forget about it all. Parents want to bury him and move on. School. His fucking lawyer.”

Cleary shook his head.

“It's barely an adversarial procedure,” I said.

“At least the other kid's got Taglio.”

“Good defense lawyer?”

“Decent,” Cleary said. “I mean, he's got no case, but he's trying.”

“If I can get somebody,” I said, “will you let my shrink evaluate him?”

“So he can show up in court and say the poor lad's crazy, and I'll have to get my expert and put him on the stand and we'll have dueling shrinks?”

“No,” I said. “The eval will be private, just with me. I won't make it available to anyone. Without your say-so.”

Cleary looked at me, frowning.

“There's something wrong with him,” I said.

Cleary kept frowning.

“Fish in a barrel?” I said.

Cleary grinned.

“I talked to Healy about you,” he said.

I nodded.

“And I got a professional courtesy–type call from an attorney named Rita Fiore at Cone, Oakes and Beldon,” he said. “In Boston. Used to be a prosecutor in Norfolk County.”

“I know Rita,” I said.

“Led me to believe that if I was nice to you, she'd come out some day and fuck my brains out.”

“Ever met Rita?” I said.

Cleary grinned.

“Yes,” he said. “That's why I'm being so nice.”

“Can I send in my shrink?”

“Yeah. Call me when you're ready.”

I stood up.

“Healy say nice things?” I said.

“Sort of,” Cleary said. “But he made no mention of fucking.”

“Isn't that good,” I said.

I
T WAS ALMOST MIDNIGHT
when Susan called. She had been out to dinner.

“Magnolia Grill,” she said, “in Durham, very nice.”

“Anybody there I need to be jealous of?” I said.

“Lovenik,” she said. “These are all highly educated mental-health professionals.”

“Anyone there I need to be jealous of?”

“Several,” she said. “Thank God.”

“You still got it, kid.”

“I hope so,” she said.

We were quiet for a moment. Then we talked about how
we wished we were together and what we would be doing if we were together.

“Is this phone sex?” I said at one point in the conversation.

“I think so,” Susan said. “I hope the baby can't hear you.”

“At this hour?” I said. “She's zonkered under the covers.”

“Is she all right?”

“She's fine,” I said. “She's been crime-busting with me.”

“And brilliantly, too, I'll wager,” Susan said.

“Think Rin Tin Tin,” I said.

“Are you still on that school shooting?” Susan said.

“Yep.”

“Is it hard going?”

“Yes.”

“Did that boy really do it?” Susan said.

“I'm sure he did.”

“So . . . ?”

“I want to know why,” I said.

“There's always a
why
,” Susan said.

“But there's not always somebody who knows what it is,” I said.

“Not even the perpetrator sometimes,” Susan said. “
Why
is hard.”

“I need a shrink,” I said.

“I've told you that for years,” she said.

“I have you,” I said. “But you're not here.”

“We both regret that,” Susan said.

“I want somebody to evaluate the kid for me,” I said.

Susan was quiet for a moment. Under the covers, Pearl
made a soft lip-smacking noise, and shifted so that her head stuck out. The process took most of the covers from me.

“There's a man named Dix,” Susan said. “He's in private practice, works a lot with cops.”

“Alcohol and depression,” I said.

“Of course,” Susan said. “He also consults forensically. I don't know from here how to get him. But he's probably in the book. Or you can find him through the Boston Psychiatric Institute.”

“He a psychiatrist?”

“Yes.”

“He got a first name?”

“Of course, but I don't know it. I met him last year during a seminar at Brandeis. He calls himself Dix. He's quite handsome.”

“Handsomer than anyone?” I said.

“Sure,” Susan said.

I waited. She didn't say anything. I waited some more.

Then she said, “Except, of course, you, Hunko.”

“Thank you,” I said.

I
WAS DRIVING
a dark green Mustang this year, with a tan top, which, when I drove it with the top down, wearing my Oakley shades, did in fact suggest the designation
Hunko.
While Susan was away and I had Pearl, I parked the Mustang in Susan's driveway and used Susan's white Explorer so that Pearl would have sufficient room to jump around and annoy me.

But now I was at the last desperate fallback position, where, under Spenser's rule #113, you find someone to follow, and follow them. So I rented a tannish-grayish Toyota Camry sedan, which looked like 40 percent of the other cars on the
road, and, with Pearl looking a little disgruntled in the backseat, I parked outside Channing Hospital and watched for Beth Ann Blair.

Like everyone else who had come and gone while I sat there, she paid me no heed as she came down the front walk of the hospital and turned left toward the parking lot. The Toyota was working. It was so effective that I could still wear my Oakleys and be overlooked. I admired her stride as she went into the lot. Susan had explained to me that the amount of hip sway was usually dependent on the kinds of shoes you were wearing, but I was pretty sure that in Beth Ann's case, it also suggested a kind of pelvic awareness that might be prideful.

She had one of those little boxy Audi sports cars that reminded me of German sports cars from the 1930s. It was silver. She turned left out of the parking lot, and I fell in a ways behind and followed. Tailing somebody in the country is easy in the sense that you won't lose them, but hard in the sense that you're easy to spot. Beth Ann wasn't expecting to be followed, which was an advantage. My car was not noticeable. And, of course, city or country, it helped that I could track better than Natty Bumppo.

She stopped at the village market. I lingered up the street. She came out with a bag of something and got back in her car. Off we went. She stopped for gasoline on Route 20. I lingered around a turn. She pumped it herself, which was impressive. Susan would run out of gas and leave the car and walk home before she'd use a self-service pump. Then, with a full tank, she got back in the car, started up, and drove past me, and I followed. We got all the way to Framingham before she turned
off into the parking lot of a large brick condominium complex that overlooked a lake. She parked and got out with her groceries and went in.

Pearl and I sat. Beth Ann didn't come out. After a time, I took Pearl out for a short, necessary stroll to a small patch of grass under a single tree. I could still see the door of Beth Ann's building while Pearl occupied herself. Then we got back in the car. And sat. It got dark. I broke out a bag of sandwiches, which I had hidden in the trunk to keep Pearl from ravaging them, and a couple of bottles of spring water. I ate a ham and cheese on light rye, and gave Pearl a roast beef on whole wheat. She finished first. There were two sandwiches left. I put them back in the trunk. Back in the car, I drank some water and gave some to Pearl. Drinking from the bottle, she slobbered a lot onto the backseat but managed to swallow enough to alleviate thirst and prevent dehydration.

At about 9:30, I gave it up. Beth Ann had made no further appearance. She might slip out later and perform some criminal act, but it was more likely that she was in bed in her jammies, reading
Civilization and Its Discontents,
and I was tired. Pearl and I gave it up and went home.