Vulgar Boatman (23 page)

I nodded. “Six is okay.”

“He says six will be fine,” she said into the phone. She looked up at the ceiling and sighed. “Well, I do appreciate it, Gil. This could be important… It has to do with a grade that may have been changed on a student’s transcript… Alice Sylvester, as a matter of fact. … No, nobody’s accusing anybody. Mr. Coyne… Well, for that matter, I’m curious, too, Gil. … Well, good. Thank you. He’ll be there at six.”

She placed the receiver carefully back on its cradle. “A difficult man, sometimes. But irreplaceable. I’m sorry he couldn’t see you sooner.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “I appreciate your help.”

“Well, it’s true that I am more than a little curious myself. If some kid has gotten into those files, we’ve got major problems.”

“My hunch is that Alice Sylvester’s is the only grade that’s been changed around here.”

She shrugged. “I hope you’re right.”

I stood up. “Thanks for your help,” I said.

We shook hands with excessive formality, and I left her office, wondering why I had failed to take her up on her suggestion that we have a drink together sometime. She was intelligent, gorgeous, sexy. My kind of lady. No harm in having a little drink with a lady like that. My own perversities confused me.

I had a leisurely cup of coffee in the little restaurant on the main drag in Windsor Harbor, smoked a few cigarettes, accepted a refill of coffee, and scanned the previous day’s
Herald
that I found on the chair beside me. A little after five customers began to trickle in, so I left. I still had an hour before my date with Gil Speer. I found an outdoor pay phone and called the Windsor Harbor police station. Chief Harry Cusick wasn’t in, but I left a message for him. I was in town and would try to get back to him before I left. Had some possible new developments in the Sylvester case. Would be visiting Gil Speer, the computer expert in the high school. The on-duty cop read my message back to me. He had it exactly right.

Then I wandered down the street until I found myself standing in front of Computer City, the place where Buddy Baron had sold computers.

Through the front window I could see Bob Pritchard, the bearded guy who worked there, sitting at a computer monitor. He was alone in the store.

A bell on the door jangled when I went in, and Pritchard glanced over his shoulder at me for an instant before returning his attention to the screen. I went to him and looked over his shoulder.

He was playing a game that seemed to require the operator to shoot falling objects out of the sky before they landed on a fortress. He seemed very skilled at it. The computer made beeping and booming sounds, and the falling objects appeared to explode when struck.

“Can I sell you something?” he said to me without turning around.

“Nope.”

He maneuvered the joystick rapidly. “Wanna look around, help yourself. Turn on the machines, play with them, if you want.”

“I was hoping we could talk.”

He grunted and muttered “Damn” under his breath. “What do you want to talk about?”

“Buddy Baron again.”

He swiveled his head around. “Who’re you?”

“Brady Coyne. We met before.”

He scowled, then turned his body in his chair to face me. “You look familiar.”

“I was in last week. I was looking for Buddy.”

He nodded. “Oh, sure. Right. Guess you’re not looking for Buddy now.”

“No. He’s been found.”

He nodded and sighed. He pivoted around to face his machine. He switched it off, slid a disk out of the disk drive, inserted it into an envelope, and placed it in a rack. Then he stood up. “Come on over here. I got a few minutes. Got to be at the hotline at six-fifteen. Close up around six. Miss my dinner. Worth it, though.”

He went over to a small desk near the front door and sat behind it. I pulled a metal chair alongside it.

“I want to ask you about crack,” I said.

“Why me?”

“Last time we talked, I got the impression that you knew what was going on in this community. If you work at a drug hotline, you must be pretty concerned about it. And I’ve been led to believe that there’s a problem here.”

“Two kids dead, I guess we’ve got a problem. Though neither Buddy nor Alice OD’d.”

“I think drugs are at the center of it, though.”

He nodded. “I’d say you’re probably right.”

“What can you tell me?”

Pritchard rolled his shoulders, as if they were stiff from playing at the machine. “I volunteer at this hotline,” he said. “Five nights a week. Sometimes I’m there all day Sunday. I figure I owe something to somebody. I had a bad problem once, and I called this place. I had a shotgun between my knees, and I was looking down the double barrels, and I called this place so there’d be somebody to listen when I pushed on the trigger with my toe. I had been high, and then I crashed, and I didn’t have any money for more coke, and I couldn’t stand it. And damned if the guy on the other end of the phone didn’t talk me out of it. He came and got me and persuaded me to enroll in a program. And I climbed out of it. Similar to what happened to Buddy. So now, I figure there’ll be a kid sometime with a gun in his mouth who’ll call me.” He shrugged. “I do it because it makes me feel good. It also makes me feel shitty. At least, so far nobody has made me listen to a gun going off.”

“Lots of problems out there, huh?”

He nodded. “Even a small town like this. Bad problems. Especially lately.”

“What’s going on?”

“Crack, like you thought. Somebody’s giving it away.”

“Giving it away? Free, you mean?”

“Free,” he repeated. “So far, free.”

“To get kids hooked.”

“Right. And it’s damn effective. You understand about crack?”

“Very little.”

“It’s ninety, ninety-five percent pure cocaine, okay? Comes in these little hunks. They sell them in glass vials. When they smuggle them, they sometimes disguise them as firecrackers. Down in New York you can get a vial for ten bucks. Up here it’ll go for twenty, twenty-five. Supply and demand, I suppose. Lots of competition in the Big Apple. So far around Boston the market is more closely controlled. Anyhow, you take one of these little hunks of coke and you put it into your water pipe and you light it and suck it into your lungs, and in about ten seconds—I’m not exaggerating, here—it hits your brain. The high is intense as hell. They say it’s like nothing else. A million times better—if that’s the word for it—than when you snort the stuff. It lasts only about ten minutes. Then comes the crash. And that’s a million times worse. The kids tell me, they say, as soon as you crash you feel like you’ve absolutely got to have another hit. It’s virtually instant addiction. That’s why it’s good business for these scumbags to give it away.”

“I’ve got a question.”

He peered at me with his eyebrows raised.

“Who?” I said. “Who’s giving this stuff to the kids?”

“I don’t know. If I knew, I’d have told the police. Chief Cusick keeps asking me what I hear. Hell, I’d tell him in a minute. I want it stopped as much as he does. But the kids won’t say. They absolutely will not say where they’re getting the stuff. I ask them straight out. I have no problem asking them. But, hey. The stuff is free, right? You don’t rat on Santa Claus.”

“Santa might kill them if they did,” I said.

Pritchard shrugged. “There’s that, too.”

“But these kids know they’ve got a problem.”

“Mainly, I hear from them because their problem is they don’t have any more crack to smoke. They get more, their problem’s solved.”

“Pretty soon, though, they’re going to have to buy it.”

“Oh, absolutely. That’s the scheme. See, I figure Windsor Harbor is like a trial market. You know, the way McDonald’s might introduce spareribs or tofu sandwiches or something. They do their demographics and sell the new thing in a few stores, see how the folks take to it, try to project their profits. Windsor Harbor’s like that. The new product is crack. If it looks like it’s going to be a winner here, then the big boys’ll move in. First here, then the whole North Shore. Crack, they say, is three times as profitable as snow. Foolproof to prepare, no special equipment needed.” He shrugged. “Real bad news, crack.”

I lit a cigarette and looked around for an ashtray. Pritchard opened a drawer in his desk and took one out. It was square glass with the logo of a computer company on it. “So how do you figure Alice Sylvester?” I said.

“Alice Sylvester got herself hooked on crack. I don’t know, maybe she threatened to go to the cops. Whatever. They killed her. Object lesson, I suppose.”

“Object lesson?”

“Sure. This is what happens if you even threaten to tell anybody where you’re getting your crack. You get cut off. And then you get strangled to death. Only way to explain it.”

“And that’s why the kids are so close-mouthed.”

“They’re scared,” he said. “Hooked and scared.” Pritchard grinned at me.

“You might have a small idea of what it’s like.”

“Huh?”

“You’re hooked on those things, right?”

I looked at my cigarette. “I guess. It’s hardly the same.”

“It’s closer than you think.” He glanced at his watch. It prompted me to glance at mine. Ten of six.

I stood up, and he stood, too. He held out his hand to me. “Good luck, whatever it is you’re up to.”

I shook hands with him. “I appreciate your help,” I said.

I got into my car and drove over to the high school. The long curving driveway was illuminated by tall lights, but the place looked abandoned. No cars in the big parking lot out front. No lights shone from inside. Just some floodlights up in the eaves of the sprawling brick schoolhouse, bathing the surrounding lawns and shrubbery in a surreal orange glow.

The driveway narrowed where it curved around the side of the building. This, Ingrid Larsen had told me, would take me to a direct entrance to the computer room. Here the drive was poorly illuminated. It ended in a little turnaround beside the building. One first-floor room was brightly lit. I parked beside a newish Volkswagen Golf and went to the doorway. I tried the handle, found it unlocked, and went inside.

I had entered directly into the large, air-conditioned computer room. The machines hummed almost sub-audibly. In a corner a printer was clattering. Gil Speer was sitting in front of it, watching the paper roll out of the machine. He was wearing well-faded jeans, cowboy boots, and a blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows.

“Excuse me,” I said after I walked up behind him.

He didn’t turn. “Hang on a minute.”

I hung on. A few minutes passed, during which the perforated paper slid out of the printer and folded itself neatly in a shallow box. Speer seemed mesmerized by the mechanics of it.

Abruptly the printer stopped. Speer tore the paper where it exited from the printer and picked up the folded stack. It looked to be about half an inch thick. Then he turned to look at me.

I was struck again by his youth and the softness of his appearance. A man of the future, all brain, vestigial body, with superior manual dexterity built into his genes in order to manipulate the machinery that would make civilization function. I felt awkward and out of proportion beside him, a crude throwback to a time when bulk and strength were survival tools.

Speer smiled. “I crunched some serious numbers, here. You want to decide whether you should repair roofs, build new schools, consolidate, whatever, all you’ve really got to do is know how to ask the machine. Lots of variables, of course, which makes it fun. Like the town’s bond rating, demographics, enrollment projections, tax rates, state reimbursements. Factor all that stuff in there, turn on the switch, and this is what you get.” He hefted the stack of paper in the palm of his hand as if he were weighing it.

I smiled. “I really don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr. Speer. But I think my question will sound pretty simple in comparison to all that.”

He stood up, gestured for me to follow, and walked across the room to a large metal desk. He bent and slid open a drawer, placed his stack of papers into it, slammed it shut, and sat in the swivel chair behind the desk. I took a seat beside him.

“So,” he said, “what can I do for you? Ingrid said it had something to do with a grade being changed?”

I took Alice Sylvester’s report card from my pocket, unfolded it, and placed it on the desk facing him. He glanced at it and looked up. “How did you get ahold of this?”

“That’s not important now—”

“These things are in the files. This is a copy, see? On this kind of cheap paper. It’s a carbon. This is not the report card that went home. This came from a school file. How in hell did you get it?”

I shook my head. “Can I ask you a question?”

He picked up the paper. “This is two years old. All of this information is transferred to the permanent record section. It’s printed out on transcripts. Then these files are erased. This was printed out year before last. Most of the stuff here—these term grades, the absences, that stuff—it all disappears. Only the final course grades stay.”

“One of the final grades on this report card got changed along the way.”

He shrugged. “Occasionally teachers will authorize that.”

“Not in this case.”

He shook his head. “You’re wrong.”

“Unless Mr. Tarlow is lying.”

He cocked his head at me. “Ira Tarlow doesn’t change grades. He doesn’t lie, either.”

“Then how did this D in biology end up as an A on the transcript?”

Speer gazed across the room toward the bank of computers, as if he were seeking answers there. “Alice was good,” he said slowly. “Quick. But she was no hacker. She never could’ve broken the codes.”

“That’s one thing I wondered.”

“Of course, it’s possible somebody else…”

“Somebody else?”

He grinned at me. “I must admit, I’ve trained some pretty accomplished hackers over the past few years. Anything’s possible.”

“So you’re saying that some kid changed this grade for Alice?”

He shook his head. “No. It’s not really likely.”

“I thought the system was supposed to be absolutely hackerproof. Dr. Larsen seemed quite certain of it.”

“And this,” he replied, tapping the green-and-white paper with his finger, “suggests to you that she is wrong. Am I right? Look. I change the codes every week. I don’t write them down anywhere. They are only in my head. Mine and Ingrid’s. Unless she writes them down.”