Death of the Black-Haired Girl by Robert Stone

Author:Robert Stone [Stone, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2013-11-04T18:30:00+00:00

20

SALMONE HAD NO SUCCESS contacting Stack during the rest of the day. In between his attempts to call, he read the article in the Gazette that had caused all the trouble. It was insulting, insulting in a particularly smart-ass way, more than the simpleminded badmouthing shit a perpetrator might say and get his sentence enhanced. Why should a kid use all that education just to belittle someone’s religion when it might be all they got? Sometimes the college could be an incredibly mean place; when the kids reflected it they had the sharp language and the intelligence but no sense and no mercy.

But the grossest thing was not the mocking tone of the article. The grossest part was the color photographs of abnormal births that abortions, Maud Stack believed, were meant to prevent. The pictures weren’t in the paper, but apparently she had meant them to be and they’d gone out online. The worst one Salmone saw was the baby with Meckel-Gruber syndrome. The big-headed one. It was really fucking ridiculous: church people, anti-church people, marching around with monster pictures to make each other sick.

At ten o’clock the next morning, he got a call from Polhemus telling him that Dean Spofford would appreciate his stopping by College Hall.

“I always have time for the dean,” Salmone told him.

It was a nasty, sleety day, the kind of day that aroused in Salmone vague fantasies of retirement in Puerto Rico, a place he had visited once with some gambling friends who liked to stay at places like the Isla Verde Sands and the El San Juan and lose their money. It was all very sleek and brassy and sunsplashed, quite unlike coastal New England, where, he was fairly certain, he was going to spend his remaining years.

Polhemus was waiting for him under the white-painted arch at the College Hall steps. The dean’s office, on the third floor, could be reached by a winding stairway lined with the portraits of collegiate notables past or, more practically, by the mandatory elevator, which was said to have entrapped a few of those notables. The former park policeman headed for the stairs but checked himself and rode up with Salmone.

“It’s a tragic thing when a young person dies,” Salmone said.

“Family to us,” said Dean Spofford, which was what he’d said the last time.

John Spofford was slight and actor handsome, though not in the least epicene. His physically unruffled appearance was a concession to his job; he would actually have been more at ease with his hair less barbered and combed, in a less well-measured and expensive suit. He would not have insisted on looking younger than fifty-one, which was his age.

“Yes sir,” said Salmone.

Everyone shook hands on it. The dean offered them chairs and said nothing, then, about the street that was supposed to have been closed.

“I understand that Maud was leaving the Brookman house,” Spofford said.

Polhemus let Salmone answer.

“She never went in the house, Mr. Spofford. They stood outside and allegedly caused a disturbance. That’s our understanding.

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