“So here, Sully, we have you again — the one who beat up Laura Thornton for a reason not yet adduced, and the one who with your coed girlfriend was blackmailing Dean Gunther. That would obviously be Patricia Reed. Pat Reed stripped to the buff and seduced the poor sucker in her busy bed, and you were right there hidden behind something clicking away, and eventually — maybe because Gunther couldn’t take the pressure any more and was threatening to expose both of you even if it meant his own ruin — Pat, at your instigation, lured Gunther behind the Bell Tower where you stabbed him to death in another one of your drug-induced frenzies. And later, when it all apparently became too much for the girlfriend and she threatened to spill the whole thing, you got Pat to meet you in the Bell Tower and you throttled and hanged her there. You’re quite a lad, Sully. Tell me: what part did Laura Thornton play in all this, and what were you trying to squeeze out of Dean Gunther?”
McCall almost did not reach the Beretta. As it was, their hands collided and the pistol smashed to the floor. Their chairs overturned, the table went crashing, and they were facing each other with no more than a yard between them. Then both fell on the gun. Incredibly, Dennis Sullivan got to it first.
McCall jumped in under Sullivan’s arms. He caught the boy’s wrist and twisted. The gun exploded into the floor; again. McCall kept applying pressure. Sullivan gasped and the pistol dropped from his hand. McCall immediately came up with his fist and caught Sullivan’s underjaw. The head rocked back and for an instant he thought it was over. But Sullivan howled and came back fighting like a wounded wolf. He was raging, spitting fire, mouthing obscene threats, and all the time his eyes remained faraway, as if they belonged to another place and time.
McCall, who had no desire to harm the boy, began to wonder if he might not have to kill him.
Sullivan dived at his knees. McCall caught him under the ears, using the boy’s own momentum, and sent him crashing to the floor. He slid on his knees, sprang erect and about in a display of agility that widened McCall’s eyes, and came back to the attack. But it was a feint this time. At the last instant he swerved and lunged for the weapon on the floor.
McCall kicked at it and in the same maneuver chopped at the student’s neck. Sullivan went down again.
“You dumb ox,” McCall panted, not without admiration, “don’t you ever give up?”
But the boy popped back like a jack-in-the-box. McCall decided that he had had enough exercise for one day. He chopped down across the nose and followed up with a stiff jab to the midsection and a chop to the throat. Sullivan reeled, his mouth wide, nose bleeding. And still he tried to come at McCall. It was almost frightening. McCall’s hand flashed up and he caught hold of the gold earring in the boy’s pierced ear and stepped behind him, circling his throat with his forearm and exerting a steady pressure on the earring, down and backwards.
Sullivan screamed and his body stilled.
But he had one more shot in his locker. He wriggled like a seal and came up and at McCall’s eyes. The unexpected movement tore the earring from his ear, and he screamed like a pig in a slaughterhouse, clapping his hand to his lobe. McCall brought the heel of his hand up and Sullivan sat down on the floor with a thump and began to cry.
“You know something, Sully?” McCall said. “You’re your own worst enemy. Don’t you know when you’ve had enough? Or is it that damned drug? You all right?” He stooped and retrieved the Beretta and dropped it into his pocket.
“You tore my ear half off, goddam you,” Sullivan cried.
“Don’t keep blaming other people for your mistakes,” McCall said. He hauled Dennis Sullivan to his feet and dropped him into the chair. The student produced a handkerchief and began to minister to his nose. His eyes were not as glazed as before; the drug seemed to be wearing off.
“All right, Sully.” McCall stood over the boy alertly. “Why were you blackmailing Dean Gunther?”
“I had to graduate,” Sullivan whispered.
“Graduate?” McCall was utterly confounded.
“You wouldn’t understand, you cop-fink.”
“I’d like to, Dennis.” I’m dreaming this, he thought.
“My old man’s a demon on failure. He’s a self-made man and I’m his only son and he wants me — he expects me — to do even better than he’s done. He’s got a million-dollar business and I’m the heir apparent. He wanted me to go to Harvard or Yale but I couldn’t make it scholastically, wound up at Tisquanto and the old man swore if they zapped me from here he’d beat me the way he used to when I was a kid. He’d beat me once, twice a week till I was black and blue. I still get nightmares remembering. He broke my ribs twice. He’s a big man — six-six and two-forty-five, and he keeps in shape. He could kill me with one hand tied behind his back.”
McCall could hardly credit his ears.
“So I had to graduate,” the boy said. “I had to.”
“All right,” McCall said softly. “You had to graduate. What did that have to do with Dean Gunther?”
“He was going to expel me. I couldn’t let him do that. Because I’d have to face my father, and I couldn’t do that.”
“Why did the dean want to expel you, Sully?”
“I was goofing off. Marks way down. And then when I hit that creep Snyder... that tied it for Gunther. My campus activities didn’t help, either. Anyway, he called me in and said I’d have to leave ’Squanto. I begged him not to kick me out. I practically sucked. I even apologized to Snyder. I’d have got down on my knees if I’d thought it would help... you’d have to know my old man. One big muscle, up to and including his head. A jerk, the King Kong of jerks. With fists like jackhammers.”
The boy’s fingers unconsciously explored his jaw.
A wave washed over McCall. He was no sentimentalist, but there was something in the story, the little-boy tone, the way the fingers kept feeling the jaw, that made McCall want to grip the boy with paternal warmth and tell him everything was going to be all right. When it obviously was not going to be anything of the sort.
“So when you couldn’t talk Gunther out of it you decided to frame him with Pat Reed’s help?”
“It wasn’t hard,” young Sullivan said with a whining laugh. “I had this chick, Pat Reed, eating out of my hand — she had a real thing for me, she dug me. And a nympho besides. I explained to her what I wanted and she went for it right off, thought it was a gas. The idea of getting old Deanie Gunther to take his pants off in her room and get all hot and bothered while I snapped pictures from a hidden vantage point really grabbed Pat. So she gave him a cock-and-bull story about how my parents wanted to meet him in private — in her place as neutral territory — to discuss my ‘case,’ and don’t you know the fathead fell for it? I was all set up behind my blind, and the minute he shows up she locks the door and starts stripping, and there’s Gunther standing there with his mouth open and his eyes bugging out like he can’t see enough — getting hotter by the second and at the same time afraid — and when she’s all naked—”
“All right, I can imagine the rest,” McCall said. Sullivan brooded at his bloody handkerchief. After a while McCall said, “How did Laura Thornton get into the act?”
“That happened before I had to kill Gunther, I mean while we still had him under our thumb. Damon Wilde was Laura’s steady, and she got jealous because he was playing around. Damon started out for here one day, probably to get some joints, we’ve got a cache of grass here at the shack for the in group. Laura followed him, thinking he was meeting some other chick. When Damon saw Pat and me here, he took off. Laura, thinking he was here, sneaked up and overheard Pat and me talking about the Gunther situation. She heard everything and beat it, scared as a rabbit. But when she had time to think it over she came and told me what she’d heard. Man, was she shaking. Kept saying, ‘It was a put-on, Dennis, wasn’t it? Tell me it was a put-on.’ I told her yes, it was, but I knew she didn’t believe me. I knew when she’d had time to think it over she’d go running to Wade.”