They all saw the guy coming: blue golf shirt, tan slacks, blue sneaks. He was older than they were—late twenties or early thirties, Quill thought—trim and square-jawed in a way that you didn’t see that much. He had blue eyes and a nice smile. He slowed as he came up, and then asked, “Are you Megan Quill? Professor Quill’s daughter?”
Quill stopped licking her cone, staring hard at him. “Yes. Who are you?”
“I’m a grad student over at the U. Jeez, I was sorry to hear about what happened.”
Quill said, “Yeah . . .” She licked a couple of times, self-consciously now, with this good-looking guy watching her. “It was pretty awful.”
“Any signs that they’re going to catch whoever did it?”
“The cops don’t have a fuckin’ clue,” Jerry said. He laughed. “They oughta make them all wear clown shoes so we’ll know what we’re dealing with. Bunch of fuckin’ maroons.”
“Harsh, man,” Brett said. “They’ll catch him. Trane’s smart.”
“Not a chance,” Quill said. She asked the man in the slacks, “Do you work in medicine or something? Did you know my father?”
“No, I was sort of on the other side of the big feud,” he said. “I’m in Anthropology, and I know Dr. Green. Or, at least, I see her around the building. She can be a little . . . out there . . . at times. Lot of people over at the U wonder if somebody in Cultural Science had something to do with it—the murder—but she doesn’t seem worried. I see her laughing with her friends at lunch . . . Are you at the U? Or here?”
St. Thomas was across the street. “I’m here. I kinda wish I was at the U, but my mom thought there’d be better discipline here and that I needed that.”
The man said, “At least you weren’t right there . . . when it happened. I mean, if you’d gone to the library with him . . .”
Megan faked a shudder. “Yeah. Never thought of that.” Lick.
“Actually, that might have been interesting. See a real guy killed,” Jerry said. “I’ve seen about a million people killed in this goddamn game, but never . . .” He was poking at the surface of his cell phone, and Brett said, “Jerry’s a game freak. He can’t even stop to eat a freakin’ ice cream cone.”
“Some people think that shooter games desensitize game freaks and makes it easier for them to kill real people,” Quill said. “What do you think, Jer? You kill my daddy?”
Jerry’s finger poking never slowed. “You know what I think? He wasn’t interesting enough to kill. If I was gonna kill somebody, it’d be somebody with a big payoff. Change the fate of the nation.”
“Then you’d have to change the fate of your underwear. They’d be all brown instead of those white tighty-whities,” Quill said.
“Fuck you.” Jerry did something with his thumb, then looked up from the phone. “Can I look at your pussy when we get back?”
She glanced at the good-looking man, with maybe a little blush high on her cheeks, and said, “Ignore him. He tries to shock . . . older people. He usually fails.”
* * *
—
“You know what?” Brett asked. “I don’t think anybody in the feud had anything to do with it. I think there were people already in the library for something that didn’t have anything to do with Professor Quill. Something illegal. He caught them and they killed him. You know, that’s a big place. If you were up there late in the day, you could hide out, get yourself locked in, sleep there, probably go down in the basement—they’ve got a coffee place down there—get something to eat. A street guy, in there to steal stuff, or even some student who ran out of money . . .”
“What could you steal in the library?” the man asked. “Books? Who wants books?”
Brett shrugged. “There’s all kinds of stuff laying around. You don’t think about it, but people leave stuff in their offices—cameras, office equipment, tools. If you were strong, you could get out of there with a printer, or something, sell it at one of those used-computer places. Good money, if you’re on the street.”
Quill snorted. “You’ve thought about it.”
Brett: “Well, yeah. I had to drop out the first semester of my third year. I went to Spain that summer using my school money, and the folks wouldn’t give me any more. Said I had to make it up.”
“Fascists,” Jerry said. He was back poking at his cell phone.
“Ah, they’re good folks,” Brett said. “Anyway, seeing all the shit people leave around in university buildings, it was sort of tempting to pick some up.”
Quill: “You do it? Go outlaw?”
Brett shook his head. “Nah, I chickened out. Got a job pushing a broom over at the HarMar Mall.” He did a comic head turn, checking the street with narrowed eyes as if a cop might be listening. “I’ll tell you what. There was this storage area over at the mall, stuff they used in the restrooms. Toilet paper, paper towels, cleaning stuff. They’d order like six months’ supply at a time, in these big cardboard boxes. I’d push it a couple feet forward from the back wall—you couldn’t tell—and I’d sleep back there. I had a foam mattress and a sleeping bag. I’d get off at two in the morning, shave and take a sponge bath in the restroom, and bag out. Get up at eleven, brush my teeth, hang out until it was time to go to work. My own little apartment.”
“Cool,” Megan said.
Jerry shook his head. “Pathetic.”
The unknown man said, “I admire that. You gotta do what you gotta do. Did you go back to school?”
Brett flashed his smile. “Yeah. I graduate this winter.”
“Great.” He turned back to Megan as he started to step away. “Like I said, I’m sorry about what happened.”
She said, “Yeah, thanks. It’s all a mystery.”
He ambled away, and Brett, looking after him, said, “That was sort of weird. Guy on the street like that coming up to you.”
The guy got in a car fifty yards away, did an illegal U-turn, went past them, holding up a hand to wave. Megan nodded, and said, “I’d fuck him.”
“Fuck me,” Jerry said.
“No way. Why don’t you fuck Elaine? She’d do it, if you’d tell her where the sniper’s nest is.”
“Fuck that. She’ll never get past it,” Jerry said. “She’s hung up.”
“And you won’t get laid. She’ll probably figure it out, sooner or later, so you might as well make it sooner and get laid.”