Playmates

13

MAYBE a minute after Deegan left, the paralegal across the hall came back from wherever she'd been. Worth the wait.

I put my feet up on my desk and looked at the toes of my Reeboks. Okay. I knew that Dwayne was shaving points for some New York guys of whom Bobby Deegan was one. Maybe Danny Davis. Deegan hadn't mentioned him, but he had no reason to. I hadn't talked to Davis. Bobby had no reason to think he was a suspect. But the kid at the school paper had said the story source was somebody's girlfriend, and I was willing to bet it hadn't been Chantel. Which meant at least one of the others was in on it. So what? If I decided to take Dwayne down, anyone else involved would have to go down too. If I let Dwayne off, they got off too. No point thinking about them at the moment. The thing was, a lot of Deegan's arguments were right. Some bookies took a bath, but otherwise nobody much suffered from point shaving. The integrity of the game maybe suffered, but that was too abstract for me.

Outside my door the corridor was still. All around me people were working away on bills of sale, and order forms and service calls. No one had time to be hanging around the corridor, not if they were going to get ahead, or be number one, or not get fired. Actually it was probably Dwayne who got hurt. Shaving points couldn't do much for your self-respect unless you got a good feeling from slipping one by the establishment. It would make a guy like Deegan feel good. He was a nearly ideal wiseguy. He'd love the shiftiness, the hustle of it, the smart money he was making. I didn't think Dwayne was like Deegan ... He might want to be. Who knew. So was I going to bust Dwayne for his own good? Hurts me more than it does you, Dwayne.

"Shit," I said.

I owed Baron Morton and Taft University the job I'd agreed to do when they hired me. I owed Dwayne Woodcock nothing. He was an arrogant kid, but he was sullen. Okay. So I don't turn the kid in.

I got up and looked out my office window at the still bleak spring. Berkeley Street was washed in a pale yellow sun. On the corner of Boylston, opposite me, a young woman walked with two short gray woolly dogs on a pair of leashes. She held the leashes in one hand and carried a pooper scooper in the other. The task was a challenge to her. The dogs, who looked straight from a Disney movie, were crisscrossing in front of her tangling their leashes, and the young woman was trying to untangle them without letting go of the pooper scooper.

"You think you've got problems," I said.

I sat back down and began admiring the toes of my shoes again. I couldn't just walk away from it. I couldn't blow the whistle on Dwayne yet, but I couldn't leave Deegan and company in place either, and there was the matter of literacy. I figured Deegan wouldn't try to shoot me for the moment. If I was killed while investigating point shaving it would produce just the result they were trying to avoid. If they were logical. I picked up the Taft file from my desk and flipped through it looking at my notes. Madelaine Roth, Ph.D.

I got up and put on my leather jacket and went out and closed the office door behind me. When in doubt do something; and hope that if you keep doing it you'll come to understand what it is. Across the hall the door to the paralegal office was open. She was at her desk thumbing through The Harvard Law Review.

She looked up as I stepped out of my office, and smiled. I smiled back and gave her the kind of wave where you hold your hand still and wiggle your fingers. She wiggled back.

Enthralled.