The Old Boys Read Free Page A

lamplight—workaholics getting an early start for the office. Out of the corner of my eye I caught an incandescent flash and saw that a light had come on upstairs in Paul’s house—not the master bedroom but a smaller bedroom across the hall. I knew the floor plan well, having lived in the house during one of Paul’s protracted absences. I walked around the block to kill time. When I came back the kitchen light was on. I rang the bell.
    The doorbell is not a sound one expects to hear in the hour before dawn, but as soon as it chimed footsteps approached, quick and confident. The light above the door came on. Paul’s house was equipped with surveillance cameras installed by myself. I wasdressed like a ninja in navy blue sweats and sneakers and a watch cap. I took off the cap, scrooched down, and looked directly at the tiny lens imbedded in the door knocker. A brief pause, then the click of deadbolts. The door opened a crack, chain lock still in place.
    “Horace?”
    It was Paul’s ex-wife Stephanie, also dressed in running clothes, battered Nikes on her small feet, a cell phone in her hand, her thumb on the SEND button, 911 already dialed, no doubt. Stephanie was a well-organized woman.
    She said nothing. Stephanie had never liked me; I was too close to Paul, knew too many things about him that she imagined she had not been told. But she let me in, after first stepping out to look up and down the street to make sure I hadn’t brought along a squad of street people. She wore a faded red varsity baseball cap, vintage 1950, embroidered with the Harvard
H
, an odd affectation in this day and age for someone who had actually gone to Harvard (Ph.D. in psychology). It was a man’s cap, one of Paul’s no doubt (he played second base in college), too large for her small round head, the beak too long for her face. She had made it smaller with a safety pin at the back.
    Neither smiling nor cold, she looked me full in the face. Stephanie was not a pretty woman, but she was an interesting one, determinedly unfeminine for political reasons in manner, dress and conviction, but intensely female just the same.
    “I gather you’ve heard the news,” she said.
    “I’ve heard what they’re saying in Beijing.”
    “And?” Stephanie was looking at me as if I were a Jehovah’s Witness who had knocked on her door at the crack of dawn— harmless, perhaps, but having nothing sensible to say and far from welcome.
    I said, “I find it troubling.”
    “Troubling in what sense?”
    “I’m not sure I believe he’s dead.”
    “So you came over to commune with the family spirits by the light of the moon?”
    “No,I came over to open Paul’s safe and get whatever he left in it addressed to me.”
    “His
safe
?” Stephanie said, genuinely surprised. “Paul doesn’t have a safe.”
    “Then he misinformed me.”
    “Paul told you he had a safe?” Her tone suggested that I must be lying. She continued to stare, expressionless, annoyed by my every word but in perfect control. “Why come at this hour?”
    What to say at this stage of the conversation that would not lead to misunderstanding, quite possibly to the end of what was left of our brittle friendship? With a kidder’s grin I said, “Frankly, Stephanie, I came at this hour because I hoped to avoid bumping into you.”
    She did not see the joke, or refused to see it. “Why?” she said. “I don’t live here. How did you plan to get in?”
    “Paul gave me a key. It didn’t fit.”
    “No, I changed the locks. One of the paintings was missing and I didn’t know if Paul had taken it with him or what.”
    “Which painting?”
    “The Hicks. The one with the dopey cows.”
    Not a picture that would be missed, I thought, though it must be worth a lot of money.
    “I heard you fiddling with the key,” Stephanie said. “That’s why I got up.…”
    Her voice broke slightly—a tightening of the throat, nothing so spontaneous as a sob. But something changed in her eyes; she