"A real kick, huh?"
She grunted a little laugh. "Yeah, if high school football scores and amateur concerts and church bazaars jingle your chain."
"Then why the smile?"
And she did have one going—the kind that turns up at the corners in that cat-munching-a-canary way.
"I'll order first," she said.
"Tease," I said.
"Look who's talking."
I got the knockwurst again and she had a corned beef sandwich, requesting the fat be trimmed, which ought to be criminal in the state of New York. Her coffee came, with cream and sugar just how she liked it (courtesy of George), and she sipped it, then nodded to the manila folder.
"Those are crummy copies," she said. "You know how those microfilm machines are."
They were crummy, all right—gray and smeary, the stuff coming off on your fingers. But the content was worth the trouble. As I thumbed through the pages, Velda did a running commentary.
"Davy Harrin was the top athlete everybody said he was," she said. "But there are interesting wrinkles. His sophomore year, he sat out two games on disciplinary action."
"Does it say for what?"
"No. But the clerk at the News was a little guy who'd been in school with Davy, and he helped me read between the lines. His sophomore year, Davy was arrested for drunk and disorderly, along with half a dozen other kids, at an all-night party. You won't find any records on that, because he was a juvenile."
"Plus, his pop was a prominent doctor."
"Right." She pointed at the gray copy I was perusing. "The News gives four pages over every week to the local high school—it's apparently in lieu of a school paper. The articles are by the students, including a kind of gossip column. Again, I got some help from the clerk, who seemed to like me for some reason..."
"Imagine."
"...and the jokey, coy copy written by various giddy girls makes it clear that Davy was a legendary bad boy around campus ... very popular, but linked with just about every pretty girl in school, from cheerleaders to Honor Society, and known to be a real 'party animal.' That phrase even gets into the gossip column, more than once."
I had a drink of beer. "We know Davy was into booze when he was probably only, what, fifteen? What else was he into? Your clerk pal say?"
"No, just that Davy was 'wild' and also 'kind of a jerk.' But I don't think my pal and the Harrin kid ran in the same circles. Davy was your most-likely-to-succeed type, and Between the Lines was treasurer of the chess club."
I was still flipping through the pages. She was watching me, that catlike smile going again—only I was no canary she was stalking. A mouse maybe, or a rat.
Then I came to the piece of cheese she had for me—a page dominated by a picture of three girls and two boys, facing the camera with big smiles, the pair of guys in the center holding up a plaque together—the cut line said, DEBATE CLUB WINS DIVISION. One of the guys was Davy.
"The other one," Velda said, "is Jay Wren."
My mouth dropped and my eyes rose. "Davy Harrin and the Snowbird were in school together?"
"Yup. And not just classmates, but teammates, on the debate club. Davy was a freshman, Jay a senior. Could be innocent. A guy I went to school with became a United States senator, and that doesn't make me a crook."
Our food came, and we ate in silence.
Then I said, "I need to talk to Wren. Time we met."
"I doubt he's in the book."
"No ideas?"
She thought. "I did some checking. Word is, Wren is a silent partner backing that new club in the Village—the Pigeon?"
"That club was a favorite hangout of Russell Frazer's, according to Susie, our little supermarket chick."
"Makes sense." She shrugged. "I could try calling over there, but they don't even open for business till ten-thirty at night."
"Try till you get somebody. For now, I'm heading over for another Dorchester Medical College visit. There's somebody I want to talk to again, who'll either be there or at Saxony Hospital."
"Billy?"
"No. No use talking to him again. He's a good kid, and straight as they come. But he won't fink on other kids. That's the code."
Velda shook her head. "He gets jumped by these freaks, and still feels loyalty to them?"
"That's not it. We're over thirty, kitten. We can't be trusted."
She smirked at me. "You couldn't be trusted at twenty."
This time I found Dr. Alan Sprague at Saxony Hospital. It took a little doing, because he was in surgery, and I sat around for an hour reading year-old Life magazines.
When I finally caught up with him, the round little doc was sitting on a bench with a blood-spattered smock on and his surgical mask hanging loose, like a stagecoach robber who'd been foiled.
The doctors' locker room might have been in a YMCA or attached to a high school gym, an aquamarine chamber with metal hallway-type lockers and communal showers. Twenty or more could have used the locker room at once, but Sprague was alone, sitting slumped, dejected, smoking a cigarette. Or anyway he had a cigarette between the fingers of a hand draped over one leg as ashes drifted to the tile floor.
The mood was somber enough that I took off my hat and said, "Excuse me, Dr. Sprague—this may be a bad moment...."
The little man glanced up, glazed-looking, and it took a couple of seconds for him to recognize me. Since I have one of the more easily made maps in New York, this demonstrated how deep in the dumps he was.
"Mr. Hammer," he said. "No, please. Sit down." The humidity and sweat from his recent surgical effort had conspired to flatten down his bristly gray hair. "You'll have to excuse my appearance...." He gestured to the bloodstained smock.
"I have the same problem sometimes," I said.
I sat next to him, but giving him some space. "Lose one?"
"Yeah."
"It happens."
"A child. Mere child. Not even ten." He remembered his smoke and had a drag. "It's not easy to lose any patient, but surgeons learn to cope with that early on, or they don't last. Still, when a life gets cut off before it's had a chance to really begin. ..."
"What about a teenager who makes a bad choice, doc?"
That question pulled him back from where he'd been and he turned to look at me, curiously. "What do you mean?"
"When do they have to take responsibility? We're in a do-your-own-thing world right now. If a sixteen-year-old, a seventeen-year-old goes the wrong way, is it the parents' fault? Or society's?"
"Did you drop by for a philosophical discussion, Mr. Hammer? Or perhaps you're taking a sociological survey."
I grinned at him, got out my deck of Luckies, and shook one free. "I'm just asking. I really don't know. I was a stupid kid once. I started smoking at fifteen—Christ, I'd like to kick this habit someday."
"That makes two of us," Sprague said, making a disgusted face. He dropped his smoke to the tile and crushed it with a heel. "What are you really asking me, Mr. Hammer?"
I fired up the Lucky with my Zippo, then snapped it shut, a sound that bounced off the ceramic-tile walls. "I know you and Dr. Harrin are tight. I know you're good friends...."
"He's my best friend," Sprague said. "He could be my brother."
"How about his kid—Davy? Was he like a nephew, then?"
Sprague's eyes tensed and they turned away from my gaze. "I wasn't really close to Davy. When he was a little boy, yes ... but later on, no. He was a gifted youth. It's a tragedy, of course. So many scholarship offers, so much potential, and to ... to die like that."
"To die like what?"
He swallowed. "After that track meet. Exerted himself. Heart attack. Surely you know the story."