School Days by Robert B. Parker Read Free Book Online Page A

walls. I looked under the bed. Nothing. Not even dust. I felt around under the mattress. Nothing. I stood and went to the closet. It was empty. I opened the bureau drawers. They were empty and lined with clean white paper. I went back and sat down on the kid’s bed again.
    As soon as he was gone they had cleaned out his room. It was as if they had emptied the room of him. Tried to render it pre-Jared, as if they could return life to the time when they had moved here and it was mostly possibility. There was no vestige of him. There had been no pictures in the living room. None of the cheap garish cardboard-framed school photographs that every parent had of every kid. No team photographs. No musical instruments. No CDs. It was as if he’d never existed, as if he’d never lain on this bed in the darkness and thought about sex or eternity or the American League. As if there had been no imaginary passions, no fantasized moments of derring-do, no terrifying moments of imagination when life’s limitations nearly overwhelmed him. No graphic sexual conquests of women older than himself.
    The room was empty and neutral and impenetrable. The only story it told me was that it had no story to tell. I got up and very carefully smoothed out the quilt where I had sat. I looked out the window. From here, I could see my parked car. I couldn’t see clearly from here, but Pearl might have been sitting in the driver’s seat. It was darker now than it had been,and rain began to spat disinterestedly against the window. I wondered if Jared had had a dog. I looked at the neat, color-coordinated, blank room upstairs in the neat, color-coordinated, blank house.
    No. He didn’t have a dog.

14
    I WAS WALKING ACROSS the parking lot with Alex Taglio, toward the main entrance of the Bethel County Jail.
    â€œWhat good does it do my guy to talk with you?” Taglio said.
    â€œWhat harm?” I said.
    â€œSay somehow, crazy as it is, you convince people that Clark isn’t guilty,” Taglio said. “My guy already rolled on him. Where would that leave us?”
    â€œMaybe if he’s innocent, he shouldn’t be rolled on,” I said.
    â€œHe is not innocent,” Taglio said. “I said what if you convince people.”
    â€œIf he’s guilty, I don’t want to get him off,” I said.
    â€œOh, fuck,” Taglio said, “I don’t know what I’m arguing about. Rita already talked me into it.”
    â€œSexual favors?” I said.
    â€œI wish,” Taglio said. “You ever?”
    I shook my head.
    â€œMarried?”
    â€œSort of,” I said.
    â€œSort of?”
    â€œYou?” I said.
    â€œMary Lou Monaghan,” he said. “Five kids. She caught me fooling around, she’d cut off my wanker.”
    We went into the jail.
    They got us seated, as far as I could tell, in the same interview room where I’d talked with Jared. When the guards brought Wendell in, they put him in the same chair. Might have been the same guards.
    â€œFirst of all, Wendell,” Taglio said, “Mr. Spenser’s got no legal authority here. You don’t have to talk with him if you don’t want to.”
    â€œLike I got something else to do?” Wendell said.
    He was a big, robust kid with pink cheeks and thick lips and smallish eyes. He had a white-blond crew cut. And he seemed to swagger even sitting down.
    â€œHe asks you something you don’t like, you don’t have to answer,” Taglio says. “He asks you something and I tell you not to answer, you don’t answer. Unnerstand.”
    â€œSure, you bet, Alex. I do just what you say and every-thing’ll be really fucking swell,” the kid said.
    Taglio sat back and let his face go neutral.
    â€œI want to talk with you about Jared Clark,” I said.
    â€œNo shit,” Wendell said.
    â€œWhich one of you got the guns?” I said.
    â€œMan, I told everybody already. I