Playmates (5 page)

"It's you, Dwayne," I said aloud. "You're shaving points."

I peeked in to see how the potatoes were doing in their pan, and shook the broccoli in its colander to get the last bits of water off.

"And shall I ruin your life by proving it?"

Nobody else said anything. So I added the crabmeat to the simmering pan and stirred it.

THE next morning I went over to my office and typed up my notes from yesterday. I did pretty well with two fingers and some correction fluid, and by 11 A.M. I had a very convincing outline of the games in which Taft didn't make the spread, and what Dwayne Woodcock had done in each one.

It was a grand March day. The sun was bright yellow, the snow was gone, the wind still carried some chill, but around the base of the buildings, in bark mulched beds, crocuses were beginning to appear. Nature's first green is crocus. I had Dwayne's class schedule, and it told me he had an American History class that let out at one. I was at the door waiting when it did, but Dwayne wasn't one of the kids that came out. I strolled over to the cafeteria, where we'd had breakfast, but Dwayne wasn't there either.

I walked from the cafeteria to the President's office and fixed my sensitive blue eyes on the dread Ms. Merriman. I saw no signs of sexual tension when I did so. Odd.

"Good afternoon, Ms. Merriman."

"Mr. Spenser."

"May I call you by your first name, Ms. Merriman. We are, after all, destined to be working closely on this matter."

"Are we really," Ms. Merriman said. "My first name is June."

"June, do you suppose you could get me Dwayne Woodcock's address?"

June did not ask me my first name; probably too shy.

"Mr. Spenser," she said, "I serve this President and this university and President Cort has instructed me to help you as necessary. But I also want you to know that I disapprove personally, and very sincerely, of the degree to which you are invading the privacy of one of our students."

"Ah, June, 'tis a devious job I do. What was that address?"

"I'll call the housing office," she said. There was a little blush of red along her cheekbones. She spent maybe two minutes on the phone and when she hung up she handed me a piece of notepaper with an address on it.

"He lives off campus," June said.

I took the paper. "Thanks, June. You don't have a husband named Ward, do you?"

"I am not married," June said.

"Divorced?"

"Yes."

"Lot of that going around," I said. "Man's a fool."

"I don't believe my private life is part of this investigation, is it?"

"Good point," I said.

Dwayne Woodcock lived in a condominium complex a five-minute walk from the Taft campus. It was a cluster of pseudo-Cape Cod-looking buildings of two or three stories, asymmetrically jumbled at different heights and angles, sided with weathered shingles, with white trim and brightly colored front doors. Dwayne's was cranberry. I rang the bell and in a minute Dwayne opened the door. He was barefoot and wearing gray sweat pants. His massive upper torso was shirtless.

"What do you want, man?"

"Got something to show you, Dwayne. Invite me in."

"What you got?"

"Not on the doorstep, Dwayne, for crissake. Show a little class."

Dwayne jerked his head and stepped away from the door. I went into a small entry hall with a staircase rising right. Straight ahead was the living room. On the coffee table in front of the white couch was a half gallon carton of orange juice. To my right a twenty-five-inch television set was on. Dwayne was watching "Sonya Live in L.A." To my left in an oversized green leather armchair was a black girl with corn rowed hair wearing a large maroon silk man's bathrobe. Her legs were tucked under her. She was drinking coffee from a large mug that had a picture of Opus the penguin on it. She held the mug in both hands and looked at me without expression across the top of it. "Hello," I said.

She nodded behind the mug.

Dwayne didn't introduce us. "What you got to show me," he said.

"My name's Spenser," I said to the black girl.

"Chantel," she said.

"Nice to meet you, Chantel."

"Cut the bullshit, Spenser," Dwayne said. "What you got to show me?"

I handed him my outline. "What's this?" Dwayne said.

"Read it," I said. "Then we'll talk."

Dwayne looked at the paper. I waited. Chantel sipped her coffee. Sonya and her guests chatted on and on. I looked at Dwayne. There was something funny about the way he looked at the paper. Suddenly I realized what it was. He wasn't moving his eyes. There were three sheets stapled together. He was still looking at the top sheet and his eyes weren't moving back and forth across the page as he read.

Finally Dwayne handed the typescript to Chantel.

"Here, babe, what you think of this?" he said.

Chantel took the paper with one hand and looked at it as she continued to sip from her coffee mug.

"'Bout you, Dwayne," she said, "'bout some games you played this year and what you did in them."

Dwayne turned his hard look on me again. "How come you writing stuff up about me?"

I had a suspicion. "You read it, Dwayne, it should be pretty clear."

"It pretty clear to you, Chantel?" Dwayne said.

"Dwayne, you know I don't know a lot about basketball."

Chantel was reading more closely. She set her coffee mug down to turn the page, flipping it over its single staple and letting it hang down from the corner. "Say you didn't get a rebound in some game against B.C."

"Hey," Dwayne said, "how come you writing that shit about Dwayne?"

"I love it when you refer to yourself in the third person," I said.

Dwayne frowned. "You gonna answer my question, man?"

"Dwayne," I said. "Can you read?"

"Dwayne Woodcock don't got to answer no bullshit questions from you, man."

"You can't, can you?" I said.

"Fuck off, man."

Dwayne was standing close to me, blocking the sun.

I ignored him and looked at Chantel. "He can't, can he, Chantel," I said.

Chantel said softly, "He can read a little. I'm trying to teach him."

"Shut up, Chantel. Don't tell this honkie motherfucker nothing."

Chantel's gaze was steady on Dwayne for a long moment. She opened her mouth and then decided not to speak and closed it. Dwayne turned toward me.

"You tell anybody 'bout this and I'm going to kill your motherfucking ass," he said.

"I shouldn't have to tell anyone, Dwayne. This is a goddamned college. You've been here four years. They should know."

"You hear what I'm saying?" Dwayne said.

"You and Chantel go over the stuff I gave you, Dwayne. It says when and how I think you shaved some points. When you've got it, and you want to talk about it, give me a call." I gave Chantel a card.

She looked at me with her steady gaze for a moment. "What you going to do?" she said. "You going to tell?"

"Never mind, Chantcl. He ain't gonna do shit, he knows what's good for him." Dwayne put his hand on my shoulder to turn me toward him. I felt the little switch go that always went when people put their hands on me. I went with the direction Dwayne was trying to turn me, but I went much, faster than he had in mind and as I came spinning around I brought my right arm up outside his and gave him a sharp chop with my forearm behind his elbow. With the force of my turning weight behind it, the blow slapped his arm across his chest like a loose tiller. I was right behind it and with my chest pressed against his flattened arm and my face very close to his chin, I said, "Don't make a bad mistake."

I could feel his body get rigid. I kept pressing against him. It pinned his right arm and I could feel what he was going to do before he did it.

"Hey, man," Dwayne said, "what's wrong with you?"

I looked up the nearly nine inches between my eyes and his. His eyes were soft. They weren't scared. They were hurt. I stepped away, keeping my right foot back of my left, and my left shoulder turned slightly toward Dwayne. I could feel the air going in and out of my chest in big slow breaths.

"You crazy, man," Dwayne said, "fucking with Dwayne Woodcock? You crazy?" The voice was angry, street tough, Bed-Sty tough.

But the eyes were hurt. The eyes were a kid who'd been startled and felt bad.

"No touching," I said. "You and Chantel talk and let me know." I stepped past Dwayne carefully and went out the front door and closed it softly behind me.

"THE kid can't read," I said to Susan. "He's a senior in college, carrying a C + average, and he can't read."

We were having dinner in Rocco's in the Transportation Building and I was halfway through a vodka martini on the rocks with a twist.

"You mentioned that," Susan said. "Twice on the ride over."

"It is outrageous," I said. "Nobody ever noticed?"

"Nobody ever cared," Susan said.

The waiter came to take our order. Susan decided on sweet and sour Thai soup and roast pheasant. I ordered black bean cake and Peking Duck.

"Isn't this the most spectacular room you've seen?" Susan said.

I nodded. "There's an academic adviser. Just for the team. Lot of major college teams have them. Try to keep the kids on time to graduate and such."

Susan nodded encouragingly as she gazed around the high-ceilinged trompe l'oeil faux art decor.

"Academic adviser says Dwayne's intellectually gifted despite an impoverished childhood."

"Could be," Susan said.

"Sure, but the kid can't goddamn read. Don't you think someone might someplace make mention of that? He's twenty-one years old and in his senior year in college and he can't read."

"You mentioned that. Who are you mad at?" I took a pleasing swallow of my martini. More than two and I got a headache, but one before dinner was just right, sometimes.

"I'm mad at his teachers, his academic counselor, him."

"Yes," Susan said. "Him too. He knows he can't read and hasn't corrected it."

"Hard for a kid like Dwayne to admit," I said.

"Yes," Susan said. "Maybe too hard. He needs help."

"There's a girlfriend, Chantel."

"Excuse me?"

"Chantel, she says she's trying to teach him."

Susan said, "Way back, first grade, second grade, when he was trying to learn to read, he got passed over. He never broke the code."

"Meaning? "

The waiter brought the first course. "Meaning that most of us learned to read phonetically. You can probably remember a teacher telling you to sound it out."

I nodded. The black bean cake had a slice of cob smoked ham on it, and a fried egg.

"For whatever reason, people who never learned to read never quite got the sound it out part. They know letters have sounds. Most can read a little. Words like men, stop, rest room, beer, words that they've seen so often they have become kind of pictographs. But they come to a word like, oh, transportation, and they are stuck. They try to make sense of the sounds a little," Susan did a halting imitation, "and then give up. They never learned the code and they never learned the rules. There are lots of rules, many of which we don't even think of."

"Like two vowels, separated by a consonant the first vowel is usually long ... sale, gale, pale," I said.

"Very good," Susan said. "Or the business that ph is normally pronounced like f. If you didn't know that you'd have an awful time. Of course he could be dyslexic."

"Can you be dyslexic and be the best basketball player in the country?" I said.

"Probably not," Susan said. "Frequently, though not always, dyslexia affects your balance. A standard dyslexia diagnostic test for kids is to ask them to walk a balance beam."

"Soup good?" I said.

"Yes, taste it," Susan said. She held out a spoonful and I slurped it in. I gestured at my bean cake. Susan smiled and shook her head.

"I haven't the heart," she said.

"No wonder I love you."

The waiter came by to ask if I wished another martini. I said no.

"So," Susan said, "what are you going to do, sweet cakes?"

"Eat all my Peking Duck as soon as it arrives," I said.

"What are you going to do about Dwayne and the point stuff and the fact that he can't read?"

"I was planning on consulting you for advice," I said.

The waiter took away our plates and brought the entrees.

"What's the girlfriend like?" Susan said. "Chanteuse."

"Chantel," I said. "Hard to say. I only saw her that once and most of the time I was seeing her, Dwayne was breathing fire on my neck."

"He is, I understand, six feet nine inches tall?"

"Yes."

"And he weighs in excess of two hundred and fifty pounds?"

I nodded.

"How's your neck?" Susan said.

"I was wearing my collar stylishly up, at the time, " I said.

"Fashionable," Susan murmured, "yet practical."

I put a slice of duck on a pancake, brushed on the hoisin sauce with the scallion brush, put the scallion on top of the duck, folded the pancake over and took a bite. Not too big a bite. If I ate normally I always had my plate cleaned while Susan was still getting her knife and fork in position. Susan carefully cut a small piece of pheasant and moved it to her mouth and chewed slowly. She swallowed. I started a second pancake.

"I don't know what you should do about Dwayne," Susan said. "One option would be to do what you were hired to do."

"Report to the President that a viewing of the game films tells me that he shaved points in the following games?"

Susan nodded.

"Won't help the kid much."

"You weren't hired to help the kid."

"Kid grew up in one of the meanest ghettos in the world. He's gotten through almost four years at a major eastern university. He's going to have a pro career, unless he gets hurt, that will make him maybe a million dollars a year. Along the way he's acquired a nice girlfriend."

"And if you do what you're hired to do that all goes to hell," Susan said.

"Except maybe the girlfriend."

Susan smiled at me slowly. "That's what it really is, isn't it?" she said. "You are one of the three or four most romantic diddles in the world, and because this guy has a young woman who you think will stand by her man, you want to adopt them both."