“I don’t want to get anybody in trouble,” said Sweeney virtuously.

“You mean you don’t want to get yourself in trouble.”

Jerry Sweeney cradled his jaw with a fleshy hand. “That too.”

Leo Flynn leaned back on the couch, stuck out his legs, and tried to look inoffensive. “What interests me is Sal Procopio’s murder and this guy Frank. The larceny and general thievery, that’s not my department.”

“Sal and Frank,” said Sweeney, lowering his voice and taking a quick glance toward the kitchen, “they’d been knocking off some liquor stores.”

“I already know that. Where can I find Frank?”

“He left town.”

“I know that as well. Where’d he go?”

“No place around here. Someplace out of state. He said he was going back to school, he made a joke about it.”

“Yeah? And what was he planning to study?”

Sweeney looked at Flynn with surprise. “Hey, that’s just what I asked him.”

“And?”

“He made it clear he was going to do a number, at least that’s what I took him to be saying. But it’d be different from the others. He said it’d be something new for him. Like that was what he was going to school to learn.”

“What’d he mean by that?”

“Beats me. I told you, he gave me the willies. He’d get mad and you couldn’t figure how it happened. Like one moment he’d be laughing and the next he’d be all over you.”

“So what do you think he might have meant?”

“I figured he’d been hired to ice someone but it was going to be different from his other jobs. Jesus, what do you expect me to say? Just different, that’s all. Maybe he’d iced a bunch a short people and now he was going to do a tall guy.”

Leo Flynn refitted his uncomfortable smile onto his thin lips. “That’s a joke, right?”

“I’m just telling you I don’t know.”

Flynn watched Sweeney’s round face, waiting to see if anything twitched. Sweeney was the fourth of Procopio’s friends that Flynn had managed to find. Of the others, only one had known about Frank and the liquor stores—a discovery that had led the friend, a cardplayer named Exley, to cut all connection with Procopio. But Exley had claimed to know nothing about Frank except that he was a Canuck. Flynn thought that if he had been blessed with friends like these, he’d prefer to buy a dog, which, if things turned sour, could only bite him.

“Who hired him?”

“No one around here. Least that was my impression.”

“Was it somebody from Portsmouth?” Flynn had learned that Frank LeBlanc or LeBon, whatever his name was, had been working as a short-order cook in Portsmouth prior to coming to Boston and, if all went well, Flynn meant to drive up there in a week or so.

“If it was, he didn’t share it with me.” Sweeney widened his eyes in mock innocence.

“We could still go downtown,” said Flynn conversationally. “But you know how it is, all that red tape. And you still on parole—no telling when you’d get home.”

A drop of perspiration appeared on Jerry Sweeney’s puffy brow and Flynn felt gratified to see it. “I tell you, I got no idea,” Sweeny insisted. “You didn’t ask him questions. If he said something, then you nodded and smiled and let it go. He was touchy.”

“Murderous.”

“Yeah, that too.” Sweeney wiped his face with the back of his hand.

“How well’d you know him?”

“I’d see him in the bar with Sal. Even Sal was scared of him.”

“You’re lying to me again.”

Another drop of sweat seemed to emerge from nowhere. “Okay, okay, he wanted me to drive for him. I didn’t like it. I said I was busy. He started to get pissed off and I told him about Sal. That Sal was a good bet.”

“So you introduced them and now Sal’s dead.”

“Yeah, well, at least it’s not me. But before that I’d see him in the bar. We shot pool a few times. Like we’d be partners. He bet the dogs; he even won some.”

“And he talked about doing a number now and then.”

“Not directly, but, yeah, it’d come up.”

“You never thought of giving us a call? An anonymous tip?”

“Hey,” said Sweeney, looking offended, “I got my reputation to consider.”

Flynn drew an old Kleenex from the side pocket of his jacket and blew his nose. The next time Sweeney was brought in for questioning, Flynn decided, he’d have a friendly word with the assistant prosecutor, maybe get Sweeney some extra time in Walpole. “So, tell me, what’s so special about this number that Frank’s planning to do?”

“Different, that’s all. Frank didn’t confide in me. But it worried him. I don’t mean it scared him, I don’t think anything scared him. It was just something he had trouble making jokes about. And it was connected to the school, like the thing that worried him was something he had to get over. You know, like a defect of character.”

—

Scott McKinnon had piled his textbooks on his desk and was using them as a pillow, but he was listening. He made sure of that because every so often Dr. Hawthorne would ask him a question to check and he always got the answer right. If Scott was asked why he didn’t sit up like the other students, he’d say he didn’t feel like it or he was tired or it wasn’t any of your business. But he liked Dr. Hawthorne and he saw himself as the headmaster’s special pet and so he did things like putting his head down on his desk just to show he could get away with it. Dr. Hawthorne treated him different. Like the two times they’d gone for a drive and Hawthorne had let him smoke. Scott felt good about that and he’d talked to him about the school and what the kids were like, although, of course, most of them were pretty dumb. It wasn’t like being a snitch. He was Dr. Hawthorne’s agent.

There were eleven kids seated in a semicircle and Dr. Hawthorne was up at the blackboard, drawing several lines indicating the northern boundary of the Roman Empire in what was now Austria, Hungary, and Romania. He had gotten chalk on his jacket but he didn’t seem to care. He was talking about the Second Marcomannic War between AD 169 and 175, when Marcus Aurelius and his legions fought the German tribes—the Iazyges, the Marcomanni, the Quadi, the Sarmatians—defeating them and pushing them north into the Carpathian Mountains. For these victories a triumphal column was raised to Marcus Aurelius that still stood in Rome’s Piazza Colonna.

It was last period on Monday and getting dark. All afternoon Scott had been thinking about Mr. Evings’s office being wrecked. While not exactly exciting, it was more interesting than most of the stuff at Bishop’s Hill. Scott had caught a glimpse of the room before he got shooed away: a great pile of busted books. And Scott had seen the police arrive in two different cars. A little later Dr. Hawthorne had taken the cops into his office. Scott felt frustrated because he knew nothing about who might have done it, nor did he know who might be suspected. Usually he knew stuff, but today he hadn’t heard anything and nobody looked guilty. Scott looked forward to prowling around the dorms after dinner to see if he could learn anything. He was sure some kids had done it, or almost sure. On the other hand, if kids weren’t to blame, then Scott couldn’t figure it out, unless it was evil spirits. He liked the idea of evil spirits. Or maybe it had been gay bashers from off campus. Scott had never talked to Mr. Evings, though he knew Mr. Newland. When Scott had entered seventh grade some kids had told him to watch out for Evings, that he would try to grab your pecker, but Scott didn’t know if that was true or just a story. Anyway, he hadn’t tried to find out.

As for history, Scott enjoyed the battles best and Mr. Campbell had made them exciting. The Greek and Persian wars had been absolutely great. Dr. Hawthorne wasn’t as good at battles as Mr. Campbell. And Scott didn’t really get stuff like Stoicism. “Everything that happens, happens justly.” What kind of sense did that make? “For a thrown stone there is no more evil in falling than there is good in rising.” Not only did Scott not understand it, he didn’t care about the riddle it posed except to stay friendly with Dr. Hawthorne. “The business of the healthy eye is to see everything that is visible.” Now, that made sense, because Scott prided himself on trying to see everything there was to be seen. Secret agents had to be on the alert.