“ Goddamnit, man, I don't know what you're talking 'bout, man!”
“ Supposing Kia and Linda were tortured to death, their bodies horribly disfigured and mangled. Don't you know that we need somebody to put away, to show that we're doing our job? Suppose you won our little lottery, Georgie?”
“ This is nuts! I didn't do anything like that to Linda or Kia or anyone else!
“ There's got to be someone you know that Linda and Kia also knew, someone who could have kidnapped, tortured and murdered them. Among your friends, Georgie… someone you fucking know. It's in you, this knowledge, buried but it's there. Now, I want you to search for it. Try… try, damn you, you little fuck!”
The music in the box ended just as Parry swore out his threat. Parry was almost across the table, his eyes flaming with intensity, his fists white and pounding the table for splinters. Tony tried to calm him. The college boy put his hands to his head and gave the appearance of trying to tear from his mind the information Jim sought. “There's nobody like that, not that I know, no one that could make all those women disappear like-”
“ Mutilate, Georgie, try mutilate, disembowel, eviscerate. They teach you all them big words here at the university, Georgie?”
“ No one… nobody I know could do a thing like that, none of my friends.”
The music came back up, a freakish clatter of horns over steel guitars and a screeching rapper that Parry could not place.
“ Friends? Who the hell said anything about friends? Did I say that the bastard had to be a friend?” Parry asked Gagliano, turning to his partner for help.
“ All right, maybe he's not a friend,” suggested Tony, easing the situation a bit.
George considered this as if he'd been told for the first time that the world wasn't flat.
Brain-dead, Gagliano was thinking. We're dealing with a brain-dead. “Just someone you would all have had to come into contact with at some time, maybe somebody employed here at the college?”
“ Well… no,” he reconsidered. “Naaah.”
“ What naaahl Who? Give or the chief going brok' yo' face, kid,” pressed Gagliano.
Oniiwah looked stricken now. “Claxton.”
“ Who's Claxton?”
“ Dr. Claxton just popped into my head, but no, that's not possible. “Who's this guy?” pushed Tony.
“ Her English professor,” said Parry. “Shakespeare, right?”
“ Shakespeare?” asked Tony.
“ Yeah, Shakespeare. Tell me, George, why'd you mention Dr. Claxton?”
“ Well, he's sometimes kinda scary, you know what I mean?”
“ No, why don't you explain to me what the hell you mean?”
“ He's a huge man, for one, but it's not even that; it's how he talks when he gets the least mad at you; makes bad, awful jokes, sometimes about your family, your nationality, stuff like that; and the guy's morbid, real graveyard-bound, man.”
“ Give us an example of graveyard-bound, George.”
George squirmed in his seat. “I don't want this getting back to me, man.”
“ Don't you worry, George,” said Tony.
“ Well, he's into heavy-duty heavy metal, satanic shit, really.”
“ So's a lot of people,” Parry pressed.
“ And once, I swear, I was an eyewitness to this, once he took a kid and threw him out of class and-”
Tony laughed. “Real bad dude.”
“- and smashed his face into the door first; said it was all an accident, but it wasn't an accident. And nothing was done about it, and a time before that he… he made a move on Lina.”
“ What kind of a move?” Parry was instantly interested, as was Tony.
“ I only heard about it from her after.”
“ Go on.”
“ Called her in… something to do with a grade he said. One of those late afternoon conferences, man, and the building's as empty as a crypt. He forced Lina into a corner of his office, tore her clothes before she got outta there. Lina claimed he didn't get far, that she brought her knee up right into his nuts. Nex' day I did notice him staring at her like he was going to kill or rape her if he ever got a chance.”
“ This is beginning to sound like bullshit,” said Gagliano, unconvinced.
“ It was him who gave her the poem book! I saw him give it to her. And those passages that're marked? Lina didn't mark 'em; he did, he did!”
“ George, you lied to us about the last time you saw Linda,” said Parry, immediately waving off Oniiwah's objections. “I think I'm hearing some lying going on now. I can tell when a man lies. I'm a walking detector. Now, do you want to amend anything you've said about this Professor Claxton before I go after his ass?”
“ What I said was the truth… only…”
“ Only what, George?”
“ The part about his having marked the pages. I don't know that for sure. Could've been her that marked the pages. I don't know. She was in his ten o'clock class. I had him at nine, an hour earlier.”
“ Anything else you wish to amend?”
“ I tol' you what Lina tol' me. What reason did she have to lie? She was real upset. I think it was one of the things that led her to the street; I mean, think of it. Someone in a position of trust and power over you, someone like a teacher that you look up to all of a sudden trying to put his hands all over you and shit like that?”
“ Yeah,” Tony agreed, “the bastard.”
Trying or succeeding? Parry wondered. It was an all-too- familiar story in these days of sex, scandal and betrayal in the American classroom.
“ I want to meet this guy Claxton,” said Parry.
“ He's got morning classes only. Disappears at night. Nobody knows where…” George's Sherlock Holmes intonation didn't help his credibility.
Outside, Tony said to Parry, “Damned if you didn't shake something out of that punk, but what's with the book? You copped it from Linda Kahala's room, didn't you? And why'n hell didn't you tell me about it?”
“ Picked it up from Lina's room the other night, and-”
“ Now you're calling her Lina?”
“ She went by Lina, the Hawaiian equivalent. Guess she preferred it. So maybe we should, too.”
“ If it'd make a difference…” Gagliano began, but let it go.
“ I took the book home with me that first night.”
“ You might've told me about it.”
“ Did a little bedtime reading. Wasn't sure how I might use it until I saw Georgie's smug face. But after laying it on him, I agree, he's not our killer.”
“ I knew that much.”
“ Now we locate this Claxton character.”
“ I wanna know why you didn't tell me about the Shakespeare, and why you didn't hash it over with me, Boss.”
“ I didn't know if it was relevant or not, and the case didn't need another confusing dead end, Tony; simple as that, all right?”
“ You're raising your voice, getting angry at me for asking about an oversight on your part?”
“ I thought it best to keep her private thoughts private if they held no bearing on the-”
“ Private? Christ, Jim, private?”
“ Yeah, private, you remember the word?”
'There's nothing in this world that's private when it comes to a murder victim, Jim. You know that!”
“ Yeah, yeah, I know that… sorry, Gag.”
Like silence broken the moment you said something, privacy was shattered the moment a crime was committed.
