The Gentlemen's Hour

33

The head of school is real happy to see him.

The name Corey Blasingame is an automatic smile-killer.

“Come into my office,” Dr. Hancock says. She’s a tall woman, gray hair cut short. Khaki suit jacket over a matching skirt, white blouse with a rounded collar. Boone follows her into her office and takes the offered chair across from her desk.

Framed diplomas decorate the walls.

Harvard.

Princeton.

Oxford.

“How can I help you, Mr. Daniels?” she asks. Right down to business.

“I’m just trying to get a sense of the kid.”

“Why?” Hancock asks. “How is your getting a ‘a sense of the kid’ going to help him?”

Fair enough, Boone thinks. He says, “Because you can’t know what you don’t know, and you don’t know what may or may not be useful until you find it out.”

“For instance?”

“For instance,” Boone says, “was Corey in a lot of fights in school? That’s something the prosecution is going to ask, so we’d like to know it first. Was he popular, unpopular, maybe picked on? Did he have friends . . . a girlfriend, maybe? Or was he a loner? Did he do well in school? How were his grades? Why didn’t he go to college, for instance?”

“Ninety-seven percent of our graduates go on to a four-year institution,” Hancock says.

Boone is tempted to say that Corey is also going on to an institution, probably for a lot longer than four years, but he keeps his mouth shut. She senses it anyway.

“You have an attitude, Mr. Daniels.”

“No.”

“Yes,” she insists, “you do. You may or may not be aware of it—I suspect you are—but let me tell you what it is, just in case. You look down on these kids.”

“Hard to do from where I stand, Dr. Hancock.”

“That’s just what I mean,” she says. “You’re a reverse snob. You believe that kids in a school like this shouldn’t have any problems because they have money. And when they do have a problem, you sneer at them as spoiled and weak. How am I doing?”

Pretty damn well, Boone thinks. Why is every woman I sit down with lately using me like a dartboard and hitting bull’s-eyes?

“You’re doing great, Dr. Hancock, but I’m here to talk about Corey Blasingame.”

“You can call me Lee.” She leans back in her chair and looks out the window at the immaculately groomed sports fields, where girls are out for soccer practice. “The problem with my giving you a sense of Corey is that, sadly, I never had one. I consider him one of my failures, in that I never really got to know him myself.”

Getting a grasp of Corey Blasingame was like grabbing Jell-O, she told Boone. No teenager’s personality is solidly formed by that age, but Corey’s was unusually amorphous. He deflected attention, was particularly adept at finding cracks and slipping through them. He was neither exceptionally good nor exceptionally bad. He got Cs, not As or Fs, which might have called attention to him. He never ran for student office, joined any clubs, associated with cliques. But neither was he your classic loner—he always sat with people in the lunchroom, for instance, and seemed to join in their conversations.

No, he was not shunned or picked on, certainly not bullied. Girlfriends? He had dates to dances and such, but there was no particular girl, certainly not one of those conspicuous high school romances. But he was never a homecoming king, or on the court, or anything like that.

He did play baseball in his sophomore year.

“And now you are wondering,” Lee says, “why I don’t know more. Yes you are, and don’t bother to deny it. I know because I’ve asked myself a few thousand times why I didn’t know more, and the hard truth that I’ve had to tell myself is that I really didn’t notice him. He wasn’t a kid you

noticed.

He just wasn’t, and I have spent many a sleepless night trying to convince myself that I didn’t fail him by not noticing, that I didn’t fail the man he killed as well. You just never imagine that . . .”

She trailed off and gazed out the window.

“No, you don’t,” Boone says. He wants to say something to take her off the hook but he can’t think of anything that’s not just stupid, and he also knows from experience that no one else can take you off the hook you made yourself.

Boone’s in the parking lot when a guy trots up behind him.

“You were just in the office asking about Corey Blasingame?” the guy asks. He’s pretty young, maybe in his late twenties, and has that look of a teacher who’s still excited about being a teacher.

“My name’s Daniels,” Boone says. “I’m working for Corey’s lawyer. Do you remember him?”

“Ray Pedersen. I was the jayvee baseball coach.”

“I wondered about that one year,” Boone says. “Was he any good?”

“No,” Pedersen says. “He thought he was a pitcher on his way to the bigs. He had a decent slider, but his fastball never broke out of the seventies. A lot of his pitches went deep the other way.”

“Did he get cut or did he quit?”

“He quit,” Pedersen says.

“Because . . .”

“Have you met the dad?” Pedersen asks.

Boone shook his head.

“Meet the dad,” Pedersen says. “It explains everything.”