None of them appeared to bathe much. This would have been a problem for me, but it didn’t seem to bother Jason. He didn’t bathe much, either. I’ve never been particularly conservative when it comes to my taste in women, but I do have one rule about bathing and one rule about clitoral rings and I’m pretty unyielding about both of them. Makes me a killjoy with the grunge set, I guess.
Jason made up for the slack, though. Jason, from what we’d seen, was the male campus pump. Wednesday, he climbed out of Jade’s bed and they both went to a bar called Harper’s Ferry, where they met Gabrielle. Jade stayed in the bar, but Jason and Gabrielle retired to Gabrielle’s BMW. There they had oral-genital contact, which I had the misfortune to observe. When they returned, Gabrielle and Jade went into the ladies’ room where, according to Angie, they gleefully compared notes.
“Thick as a python allegedly,” Angie said.
“It’s not the size of the wand—”
“Keep telling yourself that, Patrick—maybe one day you’ll believe it.”
The two women and their boy-toy then moved on to TT the Bear’s Place in Central Square, where Lauren and her band played like tone-deaf Hole wannabes. After the show, Jason took a ride home with Lauren. They went into her room, lit incense, and fucked like sea otters to old Patty Smith CDs until shortly before dawn.
On the second night, in a bar on North Harvard, I bumped into him as I was coming out of the bathroom. I had my eyes on the crowd, trying to spot Angie, and I didn’t even notice Jason until my chest hit his shoulder.
“Looking for someone?”
“What?” I said.
His eyes were full of mischief, but without malice, and shone a bright green in the light shafting from the stage.
“I said, ‘Are you looking for someone?’” He lit a cigarette, drew it from his mouth with the same fingers that held his scotch glass.
“My girlfriend,” I said. “Sorry I bumped you.”
“No problem,” he said, shouting a bit over the band’s tepid guitar riffs. “You looked a little lost is all. Good luck.”
“What’s that?”
“Good luck,” he shouted into my ear. “Finding your girl or whatever.”
“Thanks.”
I cut into the crowd as he turned back to Jade, said something in her ear that made her laugh.
“At first it was fun,” Angie said on our fourth day.
“Which?”
“The voyeurism.”
“Don’t knock voyeurism. American culture wouldn’t exist without it.”
“I’m not,” she said. “But it’s getting kind of, well, sodden watching this kid fuck everything that isn’t nailed down. You know?”
I nodded.
“They seem lonely.”
“Who?” I said.
“All of them. Jason, Gabrielle, Jade, Lauren.”
“Lonely. Hmm. Well, they seem to be doing a good job hiding it from the rest of the world.”
“So did you for a long time, Patrick. So did you.”
“Ouch,” I said.
The end of the fourth day, we split the duties. For a kid who packed so many women and so many bars into his day, Jason was very structured. You could predict, almost to the minute, where he’d be at any given moment. That night, I went home, and Angie watched his dorm room.
She called while I was cooking dinner to tell me that Jason seemed to have settled in for the night with Gabrielle in his own room. Angie was going to grab a cat-nap and walk him to class in the morning.
After dinner, I sat on my porch and looked out the avenue as night deepened and chilled. It wasn’t minor lessening in warmth, either. It was a total plummet. The moon burned like a slice of dry ice and the air smelled the way it does after an evening high-school football game. A stiff breeze swept the avenue, bit its way through the trees, nibbled at the dry edges of leaves.
I came off the porch when Devin telephoned.
“What’s up?” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t call to chat, Dev. It’s not your style.”
“Maybe this is the new me.”
“Nope.”
He grumbled. “Fine. We have to talk.”
“¿ Porque?”
“Because someone just smoked a girl on Meeting House Hill and she has no ID and I’d like to know who she is.”
“Which has what, exactly, to do with me?”
“Maybe nothing. But she did have your card in her hand when she died.”
“My card?”
“Yours,” he said. “Meeting House Hill. See you in ten minutes.”
He hung up and I sat with the phone in my ear, listening
until the dial tone returned. I sat there longer still, hearing the tone, waiting for it to tell me that the dead girl on Meeting House Hill wasn’t Kara Rider, waiting for it to tell me something. Anything.
9
By the time I reached Meeting House Hill, the temperature had dropped into the low thirties. It was a barren cold, one without wind or spirit, the kind that sinks into your bone marrow and fills your blood with shards of ice.
Meeting House Hill is the dividing line where my neighborhood ends and Field’s Corner begins. The hill starts below the pavement, sloping the streets into a steep upgrade that turns a car’s third gear into reverse on icy nights. Where several streets converge at an apex, the tip of Meeting House Hill rises through the grid of cement and tar to form a pauper’s field in the middle of a neighborhood so blighted you could fire a missile through its center and no one would notice unless you hit a bar or a food stamp office.
The bell of St. Peter’s tolled once as Devin met me at my car and we trudged up the hill. The sound of the bell was hollow, ringing blithely on a cold night in an area some god had clearly forgotten. The ground was beginning to harden and patches of dead grass crunched under our feet.
I could see only a few figures silhouetted under the streetlight atop the hill, and I turned to Devin. “You bring the entire force out tonight, Dev?”
He looked at me, his head shrunk low in his jacket. “You’d prefer we made a media event out of it? Have a bunch of reporters and townies and rookies trampling evidence?” He glanced at the rows of three-deckers overlooking the hill. “Great thing about homicides in shitty
neighborhoods, nobody gives a fuck, so nobody gets in the way.”
“Nobody gives a fuck, Devin, then nobody’s going to tell you anything.”
“That’s the downside, sure.”