Tuesday morning, 10:20 A.M.
AS HE WALKED DOWN BROADWAY, HIS MOTHER STRUGGLING TO KEEP UP with his much longer strides, Nate kept thinking, Mr. Tutwiler—his favorite person at Chaps—dead?
In kindergarten, Tut would come and read to their class. Right before leaving, he’d always pass around a little tin of lemon balls that were kept in his blazer pocket. Had Tut looked any different back then, any younger? You expected Tut to just keep on getting older; you didn’t expect him to die.
At 103rd Street they cut over one more block to West End, his mom babbling about how all this questioning by the police seemed strange…first Olivia…now him. Didn’t it strike him as a little strange?
“Ma. How should I know? You sound like you want there to be something strange. I wish you’d go home. I’m gonna look like a dick coming in with my mother.”
They proceeded the rest of the way to Chaps in stony silence.
Chaps. On cruddy days it looked even uglier than usual, old and creepy, like a prison. Thirteen years at a place where everybody knew your fucking business. His mom thought he was so fired up about Stanford because he’d get to see more of his dad. And sure, that’d be nice although Nate knew by now that plans with his dad—already there was talk of taking Nate to Hawaii over Thanksgiving—had a way of falling through.
Stanford’s biggest attraction was that nobody else was applying this year. Nate would get there and be the only one who knew that he used to get carsick on every Lower School class trip or that he was practically a midget until eighth grade. He could buy a bad-ass leather jacket and wear black jeans all the time, and people would figure he’d always dressed that way. Kids would say, “Nate Lorimer? Yeah, you know him…. He plays drums. A real tall kid, always in black.”
Mr. Tut understood. He once told Nate that college was the perfect place to reinvent yourself; in fact, his freshman year at Yale, the first thing Tut did was drop his name—Angus or Augustus, something like that—and go by his middle name.
Nate followed his mother through the black iron gates just as a bunch of seniors were heading out. Olivia wasn’t among them.
He couldn’t get over his mom spending a whole half-hour in Starbucks with her. Nate pictured himself there, leaning over the table and gently wiping a tear from her eye. “Death sucks,” he would have said in a comforting voice. No, no, not something retarded like “Death sucks,” but something wise and insightful that would cause Olivia to press her lips together and nod slowly. Afterward, they’d take a walk in Riverside Park. Then all of a sudden Olivia would stop and look up at him with those amazing eyes, the exact same color as Sam Adams beer. “Nate, want to blow off school and come over my house and—”
Elliot Ross muscled by him, his piggy eyes narrowing, arms mashed across the chest of his lifer jacket, thumbs hooked under his armpits.
Okay, Elliot, we all see the brand-new biceps. But guess what. You still got man-breasts.
The first week of school Nate caught Elliot showing off for the Lilys by stuffing some sorry-ass little freshman into the equipment bin on the playing field. Nate grabbed Elliot from behind, told the freshman kid to beat it, and pushed Elliot in, sliding the bolt across the door. It took twenty minutes before a phys ed teacher finally heard Elliot and let him out. So now it was official: They were enemies, Elliot vowing to get him back.
In the Great Hall, a short chunky woman who looked like Rosie O’Donnell in a police uniform spotted them and walked over.
“Officer Noreen Heffernan.” She flipped open her I.D., then shook hands with his mother and him. “I know you’ve got classes, Nate, so I’ll try to make this quick.” She motioned towards one of the benches and opened a spiral notepad. “So Nate—okay to call you Nate?—Mr. Tutwiler’s calendar had you down for five-thirty.”
“Yes, but I was a little late. I had practice.”
“Football?”
“No. I’m in a band. I got over to the Annex, maybe,” Nate paused. “Maybe ten minutes later.”
“And Mr. Tutwiler was waiting for you?”
“No. Another kid in my class was still with Tut.”
She licked her finger and flicked back a few pages in her notepad. “Elliot Ross? David Ross’s son?”
“Yeah, that’s right.” Typical of Elliot to let her know right away who his father was. The Ross name was plunked on hotels and high-rises all over the city. According to Elliot, his dad was going to get him into Harvard, no problemo, just by handing over a wad of money for a new gym or something. Yesterday, Nate heard Elliot telling Tut, “I told you before what my father’s gonna do.” Tut had been unimpressed, saying only, “Let him do whatever he wants. You still don’t have the record for Harvard.”
“So anyway, when Elliot left, I told Mr. Tut about my interview yesterday at Columbia…. That was basically it.” Nate shrugged. “I was out of there in…like five minutes tops.” What Nate hadn’t bothered mentioning to Tut was spotting Grant Werner, Olivia’s brother, coming out of the West End by the Columbia campus. Supposedly Grant had cleaned up his act. If so, a bar didn’t seem the smartest place to be hanging out.
“And Mr. Tutwiler, did he appear all right to you?” the cop asked. It bothered him that she kept pronouncing Tut’s name wrong, Tut-will-er instead of Tut-while-er. Somehow it made Tut being dead seem realer.
Nate stretched out his legs and thought for a moment. “He seemed, I don’t know, a little distracted.” A couple of times Tut had glanced at the door as if expecting someone. Often Nate would stay, talking to Tut about tennis or whatever, but yesterday he could tell Tut didn’t want him hanging around.
“Do you remember what time you left?”
“Mmm. Maybe a little before six, right after one of the teachers stuck her head in to say good night.”
“What teacher?”
“Ms. Hollins, my English teacher.”
The cop nodded. “Thanks, Nate. Tell me. Would you mind taking a look at Mr. Tutwiler’s office?”
“You okay with that, honey?” his mom asked in a concerned voice. “I’ll come too.”
“Ma! It’s okay! Really!” The words came spitting out too loud. But he hated how she acted like he was some hyper-sensitive nerd who needed his mommy.
“Nate, no need to get upset. It’s all right if your mother comes.”
Great, now the cop thought he was a mental case too.
“We just need to check a few things out. Purely routine,” she said as they went to the Annex. Nate caught his mother’s look. It was clear she wasn’t buying what the cop said. But that was her. He could tell that already she was worrying he’d be leaving school in handcuffs.
On the second floor, the cop pointed with her pen to the only other office on the floor besides Tut’s. It belonged to Mr. Marshall.
“Anybody in there when you were waiting around yesterday?”
“No. Mr. Marshall was locking up while I was out here in the hall.”
“And nobody was upstairs, that you know of?”
Nate shook his head, explaining Ms. Hollins had left already and Mrs. Lewis was on maternity leave. They had the only two offices on the third floor.
“Because of the S.W.A.K. murders, everybody’s usually gone by six when the guard goes off duty,” his mother chimed in. “I work here part-time. That’s how I know.”
“The school’s locked after that?”
His mother nodded. “Security cameras go on. They were just installed. One’s inside the main entrance; we passed the other one coming from the other building.”
The cop stood, the hand with the notepad resting on her holster, and said, “So Nate. Look around. Take your time.”
Everything looked pretty much the same to Nate. A mess. A frayed Oriental rug with most of the fringes gone covered the floor. Against one wall was a mustard-colored couch, and in the middle of the office was Tut’s desk, strewn with college brochures and folders. Behind the desk was a curvy window and window seat with a flattened-out cushion and more piles of stuff. Tut’s diplomas from Chaps and from Yale hung on either side of the big window, along with photos of old Chaps tennis teams from when Tut was the coach. Another lefty with a dynamite serve.
Nate moved closer to the desk, the cop warning him not to touch anything. He let his eyes travel, more slowly this time, over the surface of the desk—besides the videos, catalogues, and mail, a glass lay on its side. Something must have spilled from it because ink on the message slips next to it had run. “I don’t remember any glass being on the desk. But if there was, it wasn’t knocked over.”
“Um, maybe it’s nothing. But one of those glasses is gone. There should be four.” His mother was motioning to a round tray on the window seat. Two other glasses with the Chaps crest stood upside down on it. “I happened to be here about a week ago, chatting with Mr. Tut and he offered me a drink. The tray had four glasses.”
What? Nate chewed at his lower lip, permanently chapped from the Accutane he was taking. Everyone knew Tut kept a bottle of booze stashed in his desk. But his mom said they talked about him and college, nothing about having a drink with Tut.
The detective nodded. “Before we go, anything else, Nate?”
Nate’s glance returned to the desktop. His folder was still out. Elliot’s too. Yesterday, Elliot had come out of Tut’s office steaming mad, all red in the face, like some pumped-up Porky Pig. As he stormed by Nate, he said, loud enough for Tut to hear, “That sorry old shit better hurry up and die.”
“Did you remember something else just now?”
Nate shook his head. It was a crappy remark some asshole made. It didn’t mean anything.
The cop waited a beat. “Well, if that’s it, we’re done.” She handed him a card. One to his mom, too. “Thanks for your time. You think of anything else, give a call.”
The cop remained in Tut’s office and Nate took off. On the stairs, his mom tried to grab the back of his jacket. Without turning he said, “Lookit, Ma. I don’t want to discuss what you think that cop maybe meant with her questions.”
Tut was dead. Nate felt really bad about it. But for now, all he wanted was to spend the rest of the day at school doing stupid normal stuff.