newsletter this year.
“You knew him?” Boone asks.
“I knew him.”
“Trouble?”
Nerburn looks thoughtful. Then he says, “That’s the thing—no. God knows we got our rich-kid chuckleheads around here, think they can get away with anything, but the Blasingame kid wasn’t one of those. Never came blasting in or out of my gate.”
“What’d he drive?”
“Had a Lexus,” Nerburn says, “but he totaled it. Then his old man got him a preowned Honda.”
“Good cars.”
“Run forever.”
“He get hurt in the accident?”
Nerburn shakes his head. “Bumps and bruises.”
“Thank God, huh?”
“Truly,” Nerburn says. Then he asks, “The dad hired you?”
“Indirectly. The lawyer.”
“That’s the way it works?”
“Usually.”
“Maintains the privilege,” Nerburn says.
“I guess.”
Nerburn reaches inside the booth, pulls out a clipboard, and scans it. “You have an appointment with anyone?”
“I could lie to you and say I did.”
“You’re supposed to have an appointment.”
“You’re right,” Boone admits. “But, you know how it is, you let people know you’re coming, they start to think about what they’re going to say . . .”
“You get canned stuff?”
“Yup.”
Nerburn thinks it over for a few seconds and then says, “I’ll give you a pass for an hour, Boone. That’s it.”
“I don’t want to cause you any aggro.”
“I can take care of myself.”
“I get that.”
Nerburn writes on a piece of paper and hands it to Boone. “I’m going to assume you’re not carrying.”
“I’m not,” Boone says. Then he asks, “Hey, Ken didn’t go here, did he?”
Nerburn shakes his head. “I could have sent him here—they have a program for long-term employees’ kids— but I didn’t.”
“Can I ask why?”
“I didn’t want him thinking he was someone he wasn’t.”
“Got it.”
And so much, Boone thinks as he winds down the window, for my condescending, full-of-shit theory about loyal dogs guarding the gates.
Boone maneuvers the Deuce along the narrow, winding driveway, past pink stucco buildings and broad green soccer, football, baseball, and lacrosse fields. Some boys are out playing lacrosse, and Boone is tempted to sit and watch, but he has work to do.
He parks in a slot marked “Visitor” and finds the admin building.
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.
