“Yes.”
“I mean, a total nerd, but—do you remember that time he pranked the teachers’ Christmas party?”
“Something to do with their snacks, right?”
“Right. So the teachers are all getting smashed. Hank sneaks in. He’s mixed together bowls of M&M’s with bowls of Skittles—”
“Oh gross.”
“. . . so the teachers, they’re wasted, right, and they reach and grab a fistful of candies and . . .” He starts laughing. “Hank filmed it. It was hilarious.”
“I remember now.”
“He didn’t mean any harm. That was Hank. It was more a science experiment to him than a prank.” David grows quiet for a moment. I follow his eyes. He’s watching Myron take a jump shot. Swish.
“Hank isn’t well, Nap. It isn’t his fault. That’s what I tell the guys who don’t want him here. It’s like he has cancer. You’d never tell a guy he can’t play with us because he has cancer, right?”
“Good point,” I say.
David is focused a little too much on the court. “I owe Hank.”
“How so?”
“When we graduated, Hank went to MIT. You know that, right?”
“Right,” I say.
“I got accepted to Harvard, a mile away. A thrill, right? We were close to each other. So freshman year, Hank and I still hung out. I’d come pick him up and we’d grab a burger somewhere or we’d go to parties, mostly on my campus but sometimes his. Hank could make me laugh like no one else.” There is a smile on his face now. “He wasn’t one for drinking, but he would stand in the corner and observe. He liked that. And girls liked him too. There was a certain type drawn to him.”
The night has a hush to it now. The only sounds are the concentrated cacophony on the court.
The smile slides off David’s face like a veil. “But things started to change,” he says. “The change was so slow, I barely noticed it at first.”
“Change how?”
“Like when I’d come to pick him up, Hank wouldn’t be ready. Or as we left, he’d check the door lock two or three times. It got worse. I’d come and he’d still be in a bathrobe. He would shower for hours. He would keep locking and unlocking the door. Not two or three times, but twenty or thirty. I’d try to reason with him: ‘Hank, you already checked it, you can stop now, no one wants any of the crap in your room anyway.’ He started to worry his dorm would burn down. There was a stove in a public room. We’d have to stop by it and make sure it was off. It would take me an hour to get him outside.”
David stops. We watch the game for a few moments. I don’t push him. He wants to tell it his own way.
“So one night, we’re going out on a double date at this expensive steak house in Cambridge. He says to me, ‘Don’t pick me up, I’ll take the bus.’ I say fine. I get the girls. We’re there. I’m not telling this right. This girl, Kristen Megargee, I can see Hank is crazy about her. She’s gorgeous—and a math geek. He was so excited. Anyway, you can probably guess what happened.”
“He didn’t show.”
“Right. So I make up some excuse and take the girls home. Then I drive over to his dorm. Hank’s still locking and unlocking the door. He won’t stop. Then he starts blaming me. ‘Oh, you said that was next week.’”
I wait. David lowers his head into his hands, takes a deep breath, lifts his head back up.
“I’m in college,” David continues. “I’m young, it’s exciting, I’m making new friends. I got my studies, I got a life, and Hank, he isn’t my job, right? Going over to fetch him is getting to be a real pain in the ass. So after that, I start going less. You know how it is. He texts, I don’t answer so fast. We drift apart. Suddenly it’s a month. Then a semester. Then . . .”
I stay silent. I can feel the guilt coming off him.
“So these guys”—he gestures to the court—“think Hank is a weirdo. They don’t want him here.” He sits up. “Well, too bad. Hank is going to play if he wants to play. He’s going to play with us, and he’s going to feel welcome.”
I give it a moment. Then I ask, “Do you have any idea where he might be?”
“No. We still don’t . . . we don’t really talk, except on the court. Hank and I, I mean. A lot of us go to McMurphy’s after we play, you know, for a few pitchers and some pizza. I used to invite Hank, but when I did, he would actually run away. You’ve seen him walking around town, right?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Same route every day, you know. Same time. Creature of habit. I guess that helps. Routine, I mean. We finish here at nine o’clock, give or take. But if we go long, Hank still leaves at exactly nine. No good-bye, no explanation. He has an old Timex with an alarm. It dings at nine, he sprints away, even if it’s the middle of a game.”
“How about his family? Would he stay with them?”
“His mom passed away last year. She lived in that old condo development in West Orange. Cross Creek Point. His dad might be there now.”
“I thought his parents divorced when we were little,” I say.
On the court, someone cries out and falls to the ground. He wants a foul, but the other guy is claiming that he’s being a drama queen.
“They split up when we were in fifth grade,” David says. “His dad moved somewhere out west. Colorado, I think. Anyway, I think they might have reconciled when Mrs. Stroud got sick. I forget who told me that.”
The game in front of us ends when Myron hits a fadeaway jumper that kisses the backboard before dropping through the net.
David rises. “I got next,” he reminds me.
“Did you ever hear of the Conspiracy Club?” I ask him.
“No, what’s that?”
“Some guys in our class back in high school formed it. Hank was a member. So was my brother.”
“Leo,” he says with a sad shake of his head. “He was a good guy too. Such a loss.”
I don’t reply to that. “Did Hank ever talk about conspiracies?”
“Yeah, I guess. Nothing specific, though. He never made much sense.”
“Did he talk about the Path maybe? Or the woods?”
David stops and looks at me. “The old military base, right?”
I say nothing.
“When we were in high school, Hank was obsessed with that place. He would talk about it all the time.”
“What would he say?”
“Nutty stuff, that the government was running LSD testing out of it or mind-reading experiments, stuff like that.”
You would sometimes wonder the same kinds of things, wouldn’t you, Leo? But I wouldn’t call you obsessed. You said it, you had fun with it, but I don’t think you ever really bought into it. It seemed to me to be just a game to you, but maybe I misread your interest. Or maybe you were all in it for different reasons. Hank thought about big government plots. Maura liked the edge element, the mystery, the danger. You, Leo, I think you liked the comradery of the friends traipsing through the woods on an adventure like something in an old Stephen King novel.
“Yo, David, we’re ready to start!” one guy yells.
Myron says, “Give him a minute. We can wait.”
But they are all lined up and ready to play and there is a protocol here: You don’t make the group wait. David looks at me for permission. I nod that we are done and he can go. He starts to step toward the game, but then he turns to me.
“Hank is still obsessed with that old base.”
“Why do you say that?”
“The walk Hank takes every morning? He starts by hiking up the Path.”
Chapter Eleven
Reynolds calls me in the morning. “I found the divorce attorney who hired Rex.”
“Great.”
“Not really. His name is Simon Fraser. He’s a bigwig partner at bigwig Elbe, Baroche and Fraser.”
“You reach out to him?”
“Oh yes.”
“I bet he was cooperative.”
“I bet you’re being sarcastic. Mr. Fraser won’t speak with me due to attorney-client privilege and subsequent work product therein.”
I frown. “Did he actually say ‘therein’?”
“He did.”
“We should be able to arrest him for that alone.”
“If only we made the laws,” Reynolds says. “I was thinking of going back to his clients to see if they would waive privilege.”
“You mean the wives he represented?”