“Uh... yes,” Meyer said.
“Well, good night,” Kling said. “Thanks for your time, Mr. Sagel.”
“Good night,” Meyer mumbled.
He was silent all the way down to the street. It was windier outside than it had been when they entered the building. It looked as if it might begin raining anytime now.
“I look pretty shitty in this thing, huh?” Meyer asked.
Kling didn’t answer for a moment.
“Bert?” Meyer said.
“Well... yeah, Meyer, I guess you do,” Kling said.
“Yeah,” Meyer said.
He took the wig off his head, walked to the row of garbage cans outside the building, lifted the lid off one of them, and tossed the wig inside.
“Easy come, easy go,” he said, and sighed.
But his head felt colder without all that hair on it.
He sure hoped it wouldn’t start raining.
Folger Road had taken its name from Folger University, which sat at the bottom end of a wide boulevard that climbed upward to skewer one of the city’s larger business areas. Carella once tried explaining to an out-of-towner who only thought he lived in a real city that you could take someplace like downtown San Diego, for example, and easily lose it in any one of the separate areas that conglomerately formed this city — which was, of course, the only city in the world. Well, Carella had to take that back. He’d never been to London or Paris or Rome or Tokyo or any of those other bustling places that he supposed were real cities, too. But trying to explain to this guy from Muddy Boots, Iowa, that his entire city could disappear overnight in an area like the Quarter, or the Lower Platform, or even Ashley Heights — well, that had been impossible. You had to understand cities. You had to understand that a section like Folger Road, with its bright lights and its stores and its blaring traffic and its teeming humanity was the equivalent of eighteen cities like Mildew, Florida, or Broken Back, Arizona.
The university itself was probably the size of a city like Lost Souls, Montana. Founded by the Catholic Church back in 1892 — a bad year for Lizzie Borden — it then consisted of several massive stone buildings in an area still surrounded by open farmland. The name “Riverhead” was a bastardization of “Ryerhert,” in itself an abbreviation of “Ryerhert’s Farms.” Once upon a time, when the world was young and the Dutch were snugly settled in the city, the land adjacent to Isola was owned by a patroon named Pieter Ryerhert. Ryerhert was a farmer who at the age of sixty-eight grew tired of rising with the chickens and going to bed with the cows. As the metropolis grew, and the need for housing beyond Isola’s limited boundaries increased, Ryerhert sold or donated most of his land to the expanding city, and then moved down to Isola, where he lived the gay life of a fat, rich burgher. Ryerhert’s Farms became simply Ryerhert, but this was not a particularly easy name to pronounce. By the time World War I rolled around, and despite the fact that Ryerhert was Dutch and not German, the name really began to rankle, and petitions were circulated to change it because it sounded too Teutonic, and therefore probably had Huns running around up there cutting off the hands of Belgian babies. It became Riverhead in 1919. It was still Riverhead — but not the Riverhead it had been back then in 1892 when the Catholic Church decided it would be a good idea to start educating the people up here in the hinterlands.
The university now occupied some twelve square acres of valuable land that, if sold at going real estate prices, would have caused the Pope to perform a ceremonial mass and a little dance through the streets of Warsaw. The entire campus was surrounded by a high stone wall that had undoubtedly kept the largely Italian-American masons in Riverhead busy for the better part of a century. Fifteen years ago, the university had begun admitting women — something the Pope had not yet seen fit to do with his clergy. At the administration building, Carella and Ollie spoke to a bleary-eyed clerk manning the Student Directory phone and learned that Luella Scott was indeed one of the women students here, and that she lived on campus in a freshman dorm named Hunnicut.
In the car, driving toward the dorm on the campus’s wide, tree-lined roads, Ollie said, “That sounds dirty, don’t it? For a Catholic school, I mean? Hunnicut? That sounds dirty to me.”
The dorms at Folger University were not coeducational. A freshman with her nose buried in a textbook looked up from a desk in the lobby when the detectives knocked on the locked, glass-paneled entrance door. A sign on the desk read RECEPTION. Ollie indicated that she should unlock the door. The girl shook her head. Ollie took out his wallet and opened it to his blue-and-gold detective’s shield. He held the shield up to one of the glass panels. The girl shook her head again.
“They got better security here than we got at Police Headquarters,” he said to Carella. Then, at the top of his voice, he bellowed, “Police! Open the door!”
The girl got up from behind the desk, and walked to the door.
“What?” she said.
“Police, police!” Ollie shouted. “You see the badge? Open the goddamn door!”
“I’m not allowed to open the door,” the girl said. “And don’t curse.”
They could barely hear her through the glass panels that separated them from the inside.
“You see this?” Ollie shouted, and rapped the shield against the glass. “We’re cops! Open the door! Cops!” he shouted. “Police!”
The girl leaned in close to the glass and studied the shield.
“I’m gonna shoot that little bitch,” Ollie said to Carella. “Open the door!” he yelled.
The girl unlocked the door.
“Only students are allowed in,” she said primly. “We lock the doors at ten o’clock, you have to have your own key to get in after ten.”
“Then why’re you sitting behind a desk says Reception, you’re not letting anybody in?” Ollie asked.
“Reception ends at ten o’clock,” the girl said.
“What is this?” Ollie said. “Saturday Night Live?”
“Saturday nights, we lock the doors at midnight,” the girl said.
“So what’re you doing sitting down here if you ain’t recepting anybody?” Ollie said.
“I was on Reception,” the girl said, “but I went off at ten. I was doing my homework. My roommate keeps the radio on all the time.”
“Pretend for a minute you’re still on Reception,” Ollie said. “You know a girl named Luella Scott?”
“Yes?” the girl said.
“Where is she?”
“Third floor, room sixty-two,” the girl said. “But she isn’t here just now.”
“Where is she?” Carella asked.
“She went to the library.”
“When?”
“She left here at about nine.”
“Where’s the library? On campus here?”
“Yes, of course on campus,” the girl said.
“Where?”
“Two dorms down, past Baxter, cross the quadrangle, two more dorms till you come to a small sort of cloister and the library’s just past that.”
“Was she alone?” Ollie asked.
“What?”
“When she left here. Was she alone?”
“Yes.”
“Come on,” Ollie said.
“Me?” the girl said, but the detectives were already outside and running up the path.
She’d been easy to identify. One of the three black girls on the team. The other two were seniors, he knew what they looked like from newspaper stories he’d researched in the public library. Luella Scott was the new one. Skinny little kid, looked as if she’d be gasping for breath after only a few steps, but oh she was fast, ran like the wind, fast, fast. Smart, too. Entered college this fall when she was only seventeen. He liked that, her being seventeen. The newspapers would really go to town on a seventeen-year-old girl.