Tombley's Walk by A. W. Gray

Author:A. W. Gray
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Published: 2014-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

2

Dr. Jack Petty hadn’t expected to like any Yale or Harvard smart-ass, but this Winthrop Reed was a surprise. Pleasant-looking, down-to-earth guy of around forty, clean-shaven with clear gray eyes and dark, brunet hair and brows. The hair was thinning on top, but Reed wasn’t trying to hide it by combing the back forward or any of that nonsense. Reed was square-shouldered, with just the beginning of a belly poking against the front of his red Polo shirt with the horse and rider knitted in blue on the pocket. You’d never spot Reed for a Yalie or a Harvard smug, and as far as Jack Petty was concerned that was a mark in the man’s favor.

“I confess it made me nervous to meet you out here at this junior college,” Reed said in a clipped Massachusetts or Connecticut accent, one New England state or the other. Petty had done enough traveling in the East to spot an accent from Vermont or New Hampshire, but except for the easily identified Boston twang, Massachusetts and Connecticut threw him.

“Why’s that?” Petty said.

“Well, I’m using these facilities based on my Harvard ties,” Reed said, indicating the lab table, the rows of test tubes, the strange iron boxes stacked one on top of the other at the rear of the room. “And as of two weeks ago my Harvard ties don’t exist. I got fired.” He smiled the kind of smile that said getting fired by Harvard didn’t particularly bother him. “If Tyler Junior College were to check me out I’d be a dead duck.”

Petty’s brows knitted. “Well, I don’t know as I like that, myself. Best I remember you told me on the phone you were at Harvard. Or Yale—I get those places confused, tell you the truth. Us country doctors can’t tell fancy college folks apart, ’cept Texas Aggies and S.M.U.’s. Aggies fart a lot, and S.M.U.’s all got a daddy in the oil bidness. But I got to tell you truthfully that don’t set too well, you misrepresentin’ yourself.” He was laying it on just a bit thick and knew it; Petty secretly thought that anybody who got fired from Harvard couldn’t be all bad.

“Now hold, hold on.” Reed lifted a manicured hand, palm outward. “I didn’t misrepresent anything. I told you I’d been doing research at Harvard, and that’s the truth. I just skipped the part about being fired because, well, you might not’ve seen me and I can’t overstress how important this is.”

He was sitting at a ten-foot conference table, directly across from Petty. Both men were drinking coffee: Petty’s was black and Reed had added powdered cream to his own. Visible through the window at Reed’s back were tall, well-kept pines, mowed islands of Bermuda grass, and a red brick, one-story administration building with azaleas growing along the walk. Two summer school coeds were going up the sidewalk toward the ad building, their books held in the crooks of their arms, showing tanned legs in tasteful thigh-length walking shorts.

“Well, hell’s bells,” Petty said.

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