“Then you have learned your lesson. Go on in. Move very slowly, but feel free to avoid the mess.”
Pete steps in on legs he can barely feel, edging to his left along one of the bookcases, trying to keep his loafers on the part of the rug that hasn’t been soaked. There isn’t much. His initial panic has been replaced by a glassy sheet of terror. He keeps thinking of those red lips. Keeps imagining the big bad wolf telling Red Riding Hood, The better to kiss you with, my dear.
I have to think, he tells himself. I have to, or I’m going to die in this room. Probably I will anyway, but if I can’t think, it’s for sure.
He keeps skirting the blotch of blackish-purple until a cherrywood sideboard blocks his path, and there he stops. To go farther would mean stepping onto the bloody part of the rug, and it might still be wet enough to squelch. On the sideboard are crystal decanters of booze and a number of squat glasses. On the desk he sees a hatchet, its blade throwing back a reflection of the overhead light. That is surely the weapon the man with the red lips used to kill Mr. Halliday, and Pete supposes it should scare him even more, but instead the sight of it clears his mind like a hard slap.
The door clicks shut behind him. The clerk who probably isn’t a clerk leans against it, pointing the jolly little gun at Pete. “All right,” he says, and smiles. “Now we can talk.”
“Wh-Wh—” He clears his throat, tries again, this time sounds a little more like himself. “What? Talk about what?”
“Don’t be disingenuous. The notebooks. The ones you stole.”
It all comes together in Pete’s mind. His mouth falls open.
The clerk who isn’t a clerk smiles. “Ah. The penny drops, I see. Tell me where they are, and you might get out of this alive.”
Pete doesn’t think so.
He thinks he already knows too much for that.
28
When the girl emerges from Mr. Ricker’s homeroom, she’s smiling, so her conference must have gone all right. She even twiddles her fingers in a little wave—perhaps to all three of them, more likely just to Jerome—as she hurries off down the hall.
Mr. Ricker, who has accompanied her to the door, looks at Hodges and his associates. “Can I help you, lady and gentlemen?”
“Not likely,” Hodges says, “but worth a try. May we come in?”
“Of course.”
They sit at desks in the first row like attentive students. Ricker plants himself on the edge of his desk, an informality he eschewed when talking to his young conferee. “I’m pretty sure you’re not parents, so what’s up?”
“It’s about one of your students,” Hodges says. “A boy named Peter Saubers. We think he may be in trouble.”
Ricker frowns. “Pete? That doesn’t seem likely. He’s one of the best students I’ve ever had. Demonstrates a genuine love of literature, especially American literature. Honor Roll every quarter. What kind of trouble do you think he’s in?”
“That’s the thing—we don’t know. I asked, but he stonewalled me.”
Ricker’s frown deepens. “That doesn’t sound like the Pete Saubers I know.”
“It has to do with some money he seems to have come into a few years back. I’d like to fill you in on what we know. It won’t take long.”
“Please say it has nothing to do with drugs.”
“It doesn’t.”
Ricker looks relieved. “Good. Seen too much of that, and the smart kids are just as much at risk as the dumb ones. More, in some cases. Tell me. I’ll help if I can.”
Hodges starts with the money that began arriving at the Saubers house in what was, almost literally, the family’s darkest hour. He tells Ricker about how, seven months after the monthly deliveries of mystery cash ceased, Pete began to seem stressed and unhappy. He finishes with Tina’s conviction that her brother tried to get some more money, maybe from the same source the mystery cash came from, and is in his current jam as a result.
“He grew a moustache,” Ricker muses when Hodges has finished. “He’s in Mrs. Davis’s Creative Writing course now, but I saw him in the hall one day and joshed him about it.”
“How did he take the joshing?” Jerome asks.
“Not sure he even heard me. He seemed to be on another planet. But that’s not uncommon with teenagers, as I’m sure you know. Especially when summer vacation’s right around the corner.”
Holly asks, “Did he ever mention a notebook to you? A Moleskine?”
Ricker considers it while Holly looks at him hopefully.
“No,” he says at last. “I don’t think so.”
She deflates.
“Did he come to you about anything?” Hodges asks. “Anything at all that was troubling him, no matter how minor? I raised a daughter, and I know they sometimes talk about their problems in code. Probably you know that, too.”
Ricker smiles. “The famous friend-who.”
“Beg pardon?”
“As in ‘I have a friend who might have gotten his girlfriend pregnant.’ Or ‘I have a friend who knows who spray-painted anti-gay slogans on the wall in the boys’ locker room.’ After a couple of years on the job, every teacher knows about the famous friend-who.”
Jerome asks, “Did Pete Saubers have a friend-who?”
“Not that I can recall. I’m very sorry. I’d help you if I could.”
Holly asks, in a small and not very hopeful voice, “Never a friend who kept a secret diary or maybe found some valuable information in a notebook?”
Ricker shakes his head. “No. I’m really sorry. Jesus, I hate to think of Pete in trouble. He wrote one of the finest term papers I’ve ever gotten from a student. It was about the Jimmy Gold trilogy.”
“John Rothstein,” Jerome says, smiling. “I used to have a tee-shirt that said—”
“Don’t tell me,” Ricker says. “Shit don’t mean shit.”
“Actually, no. It was the one about not being anyone’s birthday . . . uh, present.”
“Ah,” Ricker says, smiling. “That one.”
Hodges gets up. “I’m more of a Michael Connelly man. Thanks for your time.” He holds out his hand. Ricker shakes it. Jerome is also getting up, but Holly remains seated.
“John Rothstein,” she says. “He wrote that book about the kid who got fed up with his parents and ran away to New York City, right?”
“That was the first novel in the Gold trilogy, yes. Pete was crazy about Rothstein. Probably still is. He may discover new heroes in college, but when he was in my class, he thought Rothstein walked on water. Have you read him?”
“I never have,” Holly says, also getting up. “But I’m a big movie fan, so I always go to a website called Deadline. To read the latest Hollywood news? They had an article about how all these producers wanted to make a movie out of The Runner. Only no matter how much money they offered, he told them to go to hell.”
“That sounds like Rothstein, all right,” Ricker says. “A famous curmudgeon. Hated the movies. Claimed they were art for idiots. Sneered at the word cinema. Wrote an essay about it, I think.”
Holly has brightened. “Then he got murdered and there was no will and they still can’t make a movie because of all the legal problems.”