“Right,” Gregor said.
Sheila waltzed off, and Brian began moving the sugar cannister around on the wooden table. It was an old-fashioned diner cannister, made of glass with a stainlesssteel top. “So what is it?” Brian said. “If he’s not a stoner, what do you think is wrong with him?”
“I don’t know,” Gregor said. “That’s what I came up to find out really. I like the kid. He’s not acting like himself. He worries me.”
“If I liked the kid, I’d worry about him, too,” Brian said, “but I’d worry about—”
“Drugs, I know. He did tell me some interesting things though before I came out this evening. He said that Michael Feyre was dealing drugs. Is that true?”
“Yeah,” Brian said. “We couldn’t have proved it, but I’d bet anything. Not that we could have done anything about it.”
“Why not?”
Brian laughed. “Look, this place is backed by serious money, you understand? Rockefeller money. Vanderbilt money. Roosevelt money. Some of the Kennedy kids went there. When they want to hush things up, they don’t bother to schmooze around with me; they schmooze around with the governor. Or better. We stay off that campus. We have to. And if we pick up one of the kids in town, we go by the book, keep the papers out of it, make sure he gets probation, and then they just send him home.”
The beers came. Sheila put them down next to two clean glasses and walked away again.
“But this Michael Feyre,” Gregor said. “He wasn’t old money, was he? Walter Cray said that his mother—”
“Won the Powerball, yeah. Have you met her?”
“I’ve never even seen her,” Gregor said. “I’d never even heard of her until I talked to Walter Cray.”
“Well,” Brian said, “she’s a gas, really. She’s real young for having a fifteen-, sixteen-year-old kid. She must have been sixteen herself when she had him. And she looks like just what she was, except that her clothes are better. She looks like a high-school-drop-out single mother who works in a convenience store. And she’s ignorant as hell in a lot of ways, but she’s not stupid.”
“She sounds more interesting all the time.”
“Oh, she’s interesting all right,” Brian said. “And what’sbetter is, she’s here. She’s been here for a couple of days. She has to arrange for her son’s body to get back home for one thing, but I don’t think that explains it. I think she’s looking for something.”
“Looking for what?”
“I don’t know exactly. Maybe an explanation. Maybe she doesn’t believe he committed suicide. Although, let me say again—”
“I know, there’s no question.”
“Right, there really isn’t one. But she’s his mother. Mothers aren’t always rational about sons. If they were, they’d probably kill them at birth.”
“So she’s here, and she’s looking for something. And Mark DeAvecca is here, and he’s looking for something too, he just doesn’t know what. And he’s acting very oddly. And Michael Feyre was dealing drugs, and nobody could catch him at it. And I’m here. What’s wrong with this picture?”
“What’s wrong is that the press isn’t here,” Brian said. “They’re good at covering things up over there, but this is a miracle. You know what the scary thing is? If they’re careful, the press may never be here.”
“Are they careful?”
“Not particularly. It’s a weird place over there. I don’t like it. Almost nobody in town does. They talk a really good game about ‘diversity’ and ’inclusion,’ but it’s money that talks at that place, and they don’t ever let you forget it. If you’ve got the cash, you can be a drugged-out crack addict with a D average, and they’ll do everything but change your underwear to help you to stay; but you come in on a scholarship, and they’ll find a way to get rid of you if they have to, unless you’re one of those ultimate scholastic stars that could have gotten into Harvard without bothering with high school at all. It used to be a girls’ school, did you know that?”
“No.”
“I liked it better when it was a girls’ school. It was still stuck-up as all hell, but it was a kind of stuck-up I could get.
It didn’t tell you how wonderfully committed to fairness and social justice it was while stabbing you in the back.”
“You, personally?”
The food had arrived. Gregor sat back a little to let Sheila put his cheeseburger in front of him. It was the size of the old Volkswagen bug and buried in a mountain of french fries that could have shown up on satellite pictures from space. Brian asked for another beer.