‘Chip . . . ?’ She looked at him doubtfully.
‘Charles Osway,’ Jim amended. ‘Chip’s a nickname.’
She leafed through a pile of slips, glanced at one, and pulled it out., ‘He’s absent, Mr Norman.’
‘Can you get me his phone number?’
She pushed her pencil into her hair and said. ‘Certainly.’ She dug it out of the 0 file and handed it to him. Jim dialled the number on an office phone.
The phone rang a dozen times and he was about to’ hang up when a rough, sleep-blurred voice said, ‘Yeah?’
‘Mr Osway?’
‘Barry Osway’s been dead six years. I’m Gary Denkinger.’
‘Are you Chip Osway’s stepfather?’
‘What’d he do?’ ‘Pardon?’
‘He’s run off. I want to know what he did.’
‘So far as I know, nothing. I just wanted to talk with him. Do you have any idea where he might be?’
‘Naw, I work nights. I don’t know none of his friends.’
‘Any idea at a-’
‘Nope. He took the old suitcase and fifty bucks he saved up from stealin’ car parts or sellin’ dope or whatever these kids do for money. Gone to San Francisco to be a hippie for all I know.’
‘If you hear from him, will you call me at school? Jim Norman, English wing.’
‘Sure will.’
Jim put the phone down. The registration secretary looked up and offered a quick meaningless smile. Jim didn’t smile back.
Two days later, the words ‘left school’ appeared after Chip Osway’s name on the morning attendance slip. Jim began to yvait for Simmons to show up with a new folder. A week later he did.
He looked dully down at the picture. No question about this one. The crew cut had been replaced by long hair, but it was still blond. And the face was the same, Vincent Corey. Vinnie, to his friends and intimates. He stared up at Jim from the picture, an insolent grin on his lips.
When he approached his period-seven class, his heart was thudding gravely in his chest. Lawson and Garcia and Vinnie Corey were standing by the bulletin board outside the door – they all straightened when he came towards them.
Vinnie smiled his insolent smile, but his eyes were as cold and dead as ice floes. ‘You must be Mr Norman. Hi, Norm.’
Lawson and Garcia tittered.
‘I’m Mr Norman,’ Jim said, ignoring the hand that Vinnie had put out. ‘You’ll remember that?’
‘Sure, I’ll remember it. How’s your brother?’
Jim froze. He felt his bladder loosen, and as if from far away, from down a long corridor somewhere in his cranium, he heard a ghostly voice: Look, Vinnie, he wet himself’
‘What do you know about my brother?’ he asked thickly. ‘Nothin’,’ Vinnie said.
‘Nothin’ much.’ They smiled at him with their empty dangerous smiles.
The bell rang and they sauntered inside.
Drugstore phone booth, ten o’clock that night.
‘Operator, I want to call the police station in Stratford, Connecticut. No I don’t know the number.’
Clickings on the line. Conferences.
The policeman had been Mr Nell. In those days he had been white-haired, perhaps in his mid-fifties. Hard to tell when you were just a kid. Their father was dead, and somehow Mr Nell had known that.
Call me Mr Nell, boys.
Jim and his brother met at lunchtime every day and they went into the Stratford Diner to eat their bag lunches. Mom gave them each a nickel to buy milk – that was before school milk programmes started. And sometimes Mr Nell would come in, his leather belt creaking with the weight of his belly and his .38 revolver, and buy them each a pie ~ Ia mode.
Where were you when they stabbed my brother, Mr Nell?
A connection was made. The phone rang once.
‘Stratford Police.’
‘Hello, My name is James Norman, Officer. I’m calling long-distance.’ He named the city. ‘I want to know if you can give me a line on a man who would have been on the force around 1957.’
‘Hold the line a moment, Mr Norman.’
A pause, then a new voice.
‘I’m Sergeant Morton Livingston, Mr Norman. Who are you trying to locate?’
‘Well,’ Jim said, ‘us kids just called him Mr Nell. Does that -’