Jesse finished his beer. One more wouldn’t hurt. It was Lite beer anyway. You could drink a lot of Lite beer before you got drunk enough to show it. He plunged his hand into the ice-filled cooler and rummaged out another can. It had a round solid feel to it, cold in his hand.
“You have a lot of groupies in the minors, Jess?”
“Not enough,” Jesse said.
“When I was playing football,” someone said, “we’d go into some town for an away game, they’d be waiting outside the visitors’ locker room.”
“You score?”
“During the game or after?”
They all laughed.
“After.”
“A lot more than during,” the football player said.
“What about AIDS?”
“It was before AIDS,” the football player said.
It was dark now. The kind of thick summer darkness that feels soft. Oddly the bugs hadn’t found them yet in thick enough quantity to drive them home.
“I remember playing hockey in Helsinki,” somebody said. “Outdoor rink. Was so fucking cold the puck froze. One of our guys tees up a big slap shot from the blue line and the goddamned puck shatters.”
People began to drift home. To wives. And children. And late suppers. And living rooms lit by the glow of a large-screen television.
“You find out who killed that girl yet, Jesse?”
“Not yet,” Jesse said. “But I went three for three tonight.”
Chapter Twelve
“I got twelve names,” Jesse said to Lilly Summers. “Kids gave their class rings to a girl.”
“Makes last year’s class seem embarrassingly unromantic,” Lilly said.
“Embarrassingly,” Jesse said. “Seven of these kids can account for their girlfriends’ whereabouts, and we’ve verified it.”
“Which leaves you five.”
“Four of them are supposed to be at summer homes with their parents, but we haven’t been able to reach them yet. One boy doesn’t know where she is.”
“And her parents?”
“Kid didn’t know anything about her parents,” Jesse said.
“How could that be?” Lilly said. “What are the names?”
“Boyfriend’s name is William Royce,” Jesse said.
Lilly smiled. “Hooker,” she said.
“And the girlfriend is Elinor Bishop.”
“Oh dear,” Lilly said.
“You know them.”
“Yes, of course.”
“You have an address for her?”
“She called herself Billie. Yes, I have her address.”
“Could you talk to me,” Jesse said, “about Hooker and Billie?”
“How long do you have?”
“If it’s a longish story we could do it over lunch.”
Lilly smiled. She was wearing a pale yellow silk dress today.
“What a very good idea,” she said.
It was low tide. They sat in a small restaurant that looked out over Fisherman’s Beach at the gunmetal Atlantic rolling stolidly in onto the shiny sand. The ocean smell was strong. Even if you didn’t look at it, it was there in that mysterious way that the sea asserts itself.
“I hope it’s not Billie,” Lilly said.
“It’s going to be somebody,” Jesse said.
They ordered iced tea and looked at their menus. Lilly ordered a house salad, dressing on the side. Jesse had a tuna fish sandwich.
“Hooker Royce,” Lilly said, “is our All-American. Honor roll since first grade. Three sports, captain in all of them. All-state in football. Scholarship to Yale.”
