Death at Charity's Point (8 page)

I looked at him for a moment. He returned my stare with neither hostility nor humor. Neutrality, I read there. Patience. Boredom, maybe. His look said, “I don’t give a shit,” but I didn’t read “Up yours” in it.

Finally I said, “I understand you probably have better things to do with your time than escort me around your campus, Mr. Binh, and I apologize for putting you in this position. However, a man has died. We think it’s important to understand that death.”

Binh’s expression didn’t change. “You’re doing your job. I’m doing mine. I’m instructed to introduce you to some of our staff. Fine. If you’ll follow me, please, I’ll take you to Miss Wolcott.” He turned on his heel and glided away from me. I dropped the cigarette butt, stepped on it, and hurried after him.

“Who’s Miss Wolcott?” I asked when I caught up to Binh.

“Latin teacher. Also Greek.”

“And she knew George Gresham?”

“We all did. More or less.”

He led me diagonally across the grassy quadrangle. Dandelions bloomed in clumps here and there, making bright yellow washes of color against the pale green spring grass. Big old oaks and maples and a few surviving elms grew up from the manicured lawn, casting broad areas in shade. Here and there young boys and girls sat or lay, some engaged in quiet, intense conversations, some dozing, and some with their faces close together and fingers entwined.

Binh stopped by one girl sitting with her back against a thick tree trunk. She wore a long, full dress. Bare feet peeped from beneath its hem. A notebook lay opened on her lap. Her face was lifted to a beam of sunlight which streamed through a hole in the foliage above her. Her eyes were closed. Freckles dotted the bridge of her nose.

“This is Jenny Wolcott.” The girl’s eyes popped open. “Jenny, Mr. Coyne would like to talk with you about George Gresham. And,” he said, turning to me, “if you don’t mind, I’ll leave you. I’ve got some things to do back at the office, and I’m not sure who else it would be worth your while to talk to, anyway. You can find your way out?”

I nodded. “Thanks for your time.”

He shrugged and walked quickly away.

Jenny Wolcott patted the ground beside her. “Pull up a seat, Mr. Coyne. What can I do for you? And why are you looking at me like that?”

I laughed. “You know, I imagined you were—well, older. Like Miss Partridge, my old Latin teacher. She had a bald spot on the back of her head and a mustache that she bleached. I do have this unfortunate tendency to make stereotypes.”

Jenny Wolcott smiled prettily. “Apology accepted.”

“It wasn’t exactly an apology,” I said. “Matter of fact, it was supposed to be kind of a compliment. You’re very young and very pretty. I didn’t expect that.”

She lowered her eyes. “Thank you.”

“How well did you know George Gresham?”

Her eyes flickered, then met mine. She nodded her head slowly. “I knew him—I knew him pretty well, Mr. Coyne. He was, well, like a father to me, sort of. This is only my first year here at Ruggles. It’s a pretty closed little world, you know, and a public school girl from Des Moines can feel pretty out of place in a dour old New England prep school. You know?”

I nodded.

“And George, he was really the only one who made the effort. Oh, there were the men—well, never mind that. You know what I mean. But George, he wasn’t like that. I mean, he seemed to really care if I was happy here. There was nothing sexual or anything. He was just nice to me.”

“Sure,” I said. “Do you remember anything about the way he was before he died? Anything unusual about the way he acted? Did anything happen to him that you know of?”

She widened her eyes a little. “I know what you mean. I’ve tried to think about that ever since I heard that he—that he, you know, killed himself.” She shrugged her shoulders and gave me a wan smile. “He was a sad sort of man, anyway. You never knew what he was really thinking, because he always seemed to be focusing on you. He was so concerned about how I was doing that we never really talked about him. I feel very guilty about that. I was so selfish. He must’ve been very unhappy, very lonely, to do that. And I never even thought about
him
and
his
problems. Maybe I could have helped him. I could have at least encouraged him more. To talk about himself.” She flapped her hands in her lap. “Anyway, he didn’t.”

I nodded and smiled at her. I took my cigarette pack from my pocket, hesitated, and offered it to her. She shook her head. “Do you mind?” I said.

“No. Go ahead.”

I lit the cigarette. “Did his suicide surprise you?”

“Oh, well, sure it did. I mean, no offense, but isn’t that kind of a dumb question?”

“Yes. I guess it is. What I meant was, when you heard that his death was caused by suicide…”

“Can you imagine,” she interrupted, “
anyone
you know killing himself
not
surprising you?”

“You’ve got a point,” I said. “Okay, then, what about George’s other friends? I’ve met some of them. Mr. Baker, the baseball coach. Mr. Elliott, of course, and Mr. Binh. I met Miss Prescott briefly.”

She looked at me expectantly. “What about them?”

I waved my hands. “I don’t know. Anything that would help me understand this.”

Jenny Wolcott stared at the hole in the leaves over her head toward the sunlight that streamed down on her. She didn’t speak for what seemed like several minutes. Finally she said in a low voice, “I don’t think those people knew him at all. He never talked about them. I thought
I
knew him. I thought I was the only one.” She turned to look at me. “Now I’m not so sure of that. Maybe no one knew him. Anyhow, it doesn’t much matter, now, does it?”

I stood up. “I guess you’re right, Miss Wolcott. I’ll let you get back to your work. I appreciate your time.”

“Sorry I couldn’t be more help.”

“That’s okay. I enjoyed talking with you.” I lifted my hand to her, then headed back for my car. My digital watch read 4:37. I calculated that, if I took my time, I could pass by Gert’s at a little after five. A bit early. Still, I could nurse an Old Fashioned or two, and then, fresh-baked striped bass…

I sauntered across the lawn, enjoying the clean air with its hint of salt water and May flowers. I hadn’t learned much to help Florence Gresham. Life at The Ruggles School went on, closing in on whatever void George Gresham had left in it, and I supposed the most responsible thing I could do for Florence would be to help her fill in her own void. If I hadn’t discovered any definitive reasons for this solitary man to end his own existence, I certainly didn’t feel I had uncovered anything that could contradict the verdict of suicide, either.

As I approached my car, I saw that a knot of perhaps a dozen young people had gathered in the parking lot, blocking my way. There seemed to be a great deal of loud conversation and arm-waving. I started to walk around them when I felt a hand on my shoulder.

“Take some literature, mister.” It was a command, not a request. I do not, as a rule, take kindly to commands. I turned and faced a young man dressed in what appeared to be Army surplus fatigues—high boots, with baggy pants tucked in, a camouflage shirt, and a cartridge belt around his waist. I noticed that there were no cartridges in the loops. He wore a wispy adolescent goatee and a snarling grin. His head had been shaved bald.

I shook my arm where he gripped me, and he dropped his hand. His other hand waved some sort of pamphlet in my face. I took it from him.

Its title read
Do You Know Where You Stand?
in bold red letters. Beneath the title, in neon red against the black background of the cover, a large red swastika glowed. I held the pamphlet away from me with two fingers and dropped it to the ground as if it were a dirty diaper.

“Not interested,” I said. I rolled my shoulders to get around him. He stepped into my path, still grinning, his dark eyes glittering like a cornered rodent’s. The other young people began to crowd around us. They wanted a confrontation, I thought. I wanted no part of it.

“Afraid of the truth, mister?” said the bald kid softly.

“Move,” I said.

He held his ground. “I know your type,” he said. “Feed the niggers, vote for the commies, give your money to the Jews. Well, it’s gonna happen, and it’s gonna happen here, and you’d better be ready for it. So why don’t you just pick up that literature you dropped, huh?”

I tried again to walk past him. His hand gripped me hard by my arm. His fingers dug unerringly into a spot just above my elbow, sending a shaft of pain to my brain. “Pick it up,” he said more loudly.

I turned around slowly and put my face up close to his. I reached up and grabbed the strands of hair growing from his chin. “I said,” I repeated softly, “I’m not interested. Take your filth somewhere else, sonny.” I gave his little beard a hard tug and was gratified to see tears come to his eyes.

“You’ll be sorry,” he muttered.

“I doubt that,” I said, turning away from him.

“Asshole!”

This was a different voice. It belonged to a girl who, at first, I took to be no more than twelve years old. She had the vanilla complexion and naive blue eyes of a pre-adolescent, with a little rosebud mouth and a tangle of blonde curls piled on her head like a fluffy helmet.

Except those eyes were glowering at me, and that sweet mouth was twisted into a hateful sneer, and beneath her sweatshirt rose a pair of decidedly post-adolescent breasts.

“You talk that way to your father, young lady?” I said.

“Fuck him,” she replied.

“Forget it, Barb,” said one of the other kids. “He’s too old to understand.”

The bald boy spoke again. “It’s for your own good, man. Prepare yourself. Our civilization is collapsing. This—” and he again thrust one of his pamphlets at me “—explains it.”

“Why don’t you kids go do your history homework or something?” I said.

“History’s a lie,” said the kid with the shiny head. “It’s the future that counts.”

I wondered what George Gresham might have said to this young fanatic. Something more rational than what sprang to my mind, I imagined.

I shouldered my way through the kids and climbed into my white BMW. As I pulled out of my parking space, I saw that they were all watching me, identical frowns distorting their young faces. For an instant my mind flashed images of Berkeley and Chicago and Kent State in a rapid television kaleidoscope, and the phrase “the future of our nation is our youth” sprang to my lips. I repressed the urge to say it.

“If you’re not with us, you’re against us,” one of them yelled as I backed out of my parking space.

“God bless free speech,” I whispered as I drove away.

“F
IRM WRISTS, COYNE,” I
told myself. “Don’t worry about being long.” I set the blade of the pitching wedge behind the ball, opened up my stance, moved my weight slightly forward, and glanced up at the hole.

The pin was tucked right behind the big bunker that gaped temptingly in front of me. A devilish little pitch shot.

“Keep your stupid head down,” I muttered. I looked at the ball, up at the pin again, then down, trying to lock my visual measurement of the distance into my muscles. A little flick, up and over, drop it down beyond the big lip of the trap with enough backspin to stop it near the hole, where Charlie’s ball already rested a birdie putt away. I focused my mind on the imagined flight of the ball. Head down, balance, firm left elbow…

“Don’t leave it short,” said Charlie pleasantly.

I stepped away from the ball and looked at him. He grinned at me. He leaned on his putter, his legs crossed jauntily.

“Goddamn it, Charlie,” I said.

“Big hole,” he replied. “You need it for the match.”

“Jesus, I know.”

I stepped back, took a couple of practice swipes at the grass, then stepped back to the ball. I tried again to visualize the shot I needed to make. Instead, I saw Charlie McDevitt’s cocky grin.

I gritted my teeth, took the wedge back, shifted my hips, and began my short, compact swing. I knew it was all wrong. I glanced up to see the results of my shot. I glanced up too soon. The club head dug into the turf behind the ball, which popped lazily into the air and splatted into the sand under the overhanging lip of the bunker.

“Hard lines, old man,” said Charlie cheerfully.

“Up yours,” I said.

Charlie McDevitt had always planned to become a Supreme Court Justice, which has turned out to be nearly as funny as my becoming a public defender. He and I rented a big old house on the water in New Haven our second year at Yale Law nearly twenty years ago. Charlie had a whole bevy of girls. We’d gather in my bedroom on a Saturday night, Gloria and I and Charlie and whatever girl he had with him, and we’d sit on my bed in our underwear drinking beer and eating steamers and listening to the surf.

There was a hole in the plaster right above the head of my bed. Charlie’s bedroom was on the other side. He or I used to put our faces up to the hole in the plaster when the other one of us had a girl in our bedroom, to do a play-by-play of the action in the other room.

“You can cut this tension with a knife, fans,” Charlie would say, his lips flapping in his Mel Allen imitation. “Big Bumppo Coyne is up there with that big bludgeon of his. He tugs at his cap. He takes a couple of practice swings. He scratches his crotch thoughtfully. And now he eases himself into the box…”

I did a pretty mean Curt Gowdy, myself. Coitus was more often than not interruptus that year in New Haven, and the girls who dissolved into tears—and there were fewer of them than you might expect—weren’t invited back.

Gloria tended to dissolve into laughter, for which I loved her enormously. Sometimes she was able to ignore Charlie completely; other times she joined him, commenting on my stance, grip, and the size of my bat. “It’s high and deep,” she’d say. “Going going—gone! It’s out of here! And big Coyne is getting the congratulations of his teammates back in the dugout, having completed his triumphant jaunt around the bases. He got all of that one, baseball fans!”

Charlie hasn’t become a Supreme Court Justice yet. He might one day, which is more than I can say for the likelihood of my becoming a public defender. Charlie still wants one of those robes. For now, though, he’s an assistant of some kind to the Attorney General of the United States. Charlie has been with the Justice Department’s Boston office since the days of Ramsey Clark, which is an awfully long time without moving if you want to join the brethren in Washington. And Charlie, being neither black nor a woman, is going to have trouble getting appointments. But he’s a patient man with excellent ears that he keeps close to the political ground. He also has superior anticipation. He knows the ball takes a lot of funny bounces, and Charlie somehow always manages to be there to snag it. He’s still a young man, politically, and he’s stashing lots of credits in the bank.