“He died–the Frenchman–and no one was left to run it. It’s an art, education.”
“Didn’t he have a daughter?”
His eyebrows arched. “She offered me the place, but I turned her down.
Error on my part–I should have done it for the land alone. Now they’ve come and built those.” He cast a glare at the stone wall.
“They?”
“Some sort of foreign group. Asians, of course. She offered me all of it, lock, stock. But she wanted an outlandish amount of money and refused to negotiate. For them, money’s no object.”
“She’s still here in town, isn’t she?”
“She’s in Santa Barbara,” he said.
I wondered where he thought he was, then I answered my own question: Montecito wannabee.
“This unpleasantness,” he said. “It isn’t anything that would –impinge upon my school, is it? I don’t want publicity, the police traipsing around.”
“Did de Bosch’s students ever impinge?”
“No, because I made sure they didn’t. For all practical purposes, this property line was as impermeable as the Berlin Wall.” He drew a line in the gravel with the toe of one wingtip. “Some of them had been to reform school.
Fire setters, bullies, truants–all sorts of miscreants.”
“Must have been difficult being this close.”
“No, it wasn’t difficult,” he reprimanded. “If they chanced to wander, I sent them hopping right back.”
“So you never had any problems?”
“Noise was a problem. There was always too much noise. The only untoward thing occurred after they were gone. One of them showed up and made quite a nuisance of himself.” Smile. “His condition didn’t speak well of the Frenchman’s methods.”
“What condition was that?”
“A tramp,” he said. “Unwashed, uncombed, high on drugs– his eyes had that look.”
“How do you know he was an alumnus?”
“Because he told me he was. Said it in those words: I’m an alumnus.”
As if that should have impressed me.”
“How long ago was this?”
“Quite a while–let’s see, I was interviewing the Crummer boy. The youngest one, and he applied around. .. ten years ago.”
“And how old was this tramp?”
“Twenties. A real churl. He barged right into my office, past my secretary. I was interviewing young Crummer and his parents –a fine family, the elder boys had attended Bancroft quite successfully. The scene he created dissuaded them from sending the youngest lad here.”
“What did he want?”
“Where was the school? What had happened to it? Raising his voice and creating a scene–poor Mrs. Crummer. I thought I’d have to call the police, but I was finally able to convince him to leave by telling him the Frenchman was long dead.”
“That satisfied him?”
The eyebrows dipped. “I don’t know what it did to him but he left.
Lucky for him–I’d had my fill.” A big fist shook. “He was insane–must have been on drugs.”
“Can you describe him?”
“Dirty, uncombed–what’s the difference? And he didn’t have a car, he walked away on foot–I watched him. Probably on his way to the highway. God help anyone who picked him up.”
He watched me leave, too, standing with his arms folded across his chest as I drove away. I realized I hadn’t heard or seen any children at his school.
Bullies and fire setters. A tramp in his twenties.
Trying to dig up the past.
The same man who’d called Harrison?
Merino.
Silk. A thing for fabrics.
Hewitt and Gritz, two tramps who would have been in their twenties back then.
Myra Paprock was killed five years ago. Two years after that, Shipler.
Then Lerner. Then Stoumen. Was Rosenblatt still alive?
Katarina was, just a few miles up this beautiful road. That gave us something in common.
I was ready to talk to her.
* * Cabrillo Boulevard swept up past the ocean, cleansed of the weekend tourist swarm and the bad sidewalk art. The wharf looked depopulated and its far end disappeared in a bank of fog. A few cyclists pumped in the bike lane and joggers and speed walkers chased immortality. I passed the big new hotels that commandeered the prime ocean views and the motels that followed them like afterthoughts. Passed a small seafood place where Robin and I had eaten shrimp and drunk beer.