Flynn said, “There’s not so much difference among centuries as people might think. ‘Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.’”
NINE
“Professor Loveson. Sergeant Whelan.” Flynn acknowledged both men sitting on a bench in the hall outside the Emergency Room at Common Wealth Hospital. “What are you doing here? You look like two sugar cubes awaiting a hot cup of coffee.”
“Coffee.” Grover groaned. “Oouuu.” He had a sizable bump over his left eye. In his lap he cradled his left wrist in his right hand.
“Nice of you to come along, Inspector Flynn.” Loveson had cuts on his right cheekbone and chin. Dried blood remained on his face, shirt, suit coat, and the handkerchief he held in his hand.
“Which of you won?” Flynn asked.
Grover gave Flynn a sour glance. “Not funny, Flynn.”
“Richard saved my life,” Loveson said.
“‘Richard’ is it, now?”
“I was crossing the road. I had no idea Richard was anywhere about. Suddenly I felt this whoosh behind me, a big push against my back. Richard picked me up. He ran a few steps with me in his arms. He tripped on the curb. We both sprawled on the sidewalk. Richard broke his wrist, I’m sure. He was unconscious for a few moments, weren’t you, Richard?”
Richard winced as he nodded his head.
“And why, ‘Richard,’ were you playing football with the Professor?”
“Someone was trying to hit him with a car.”
“Are you sure?”
“Accelerating zero to sixty on that narrow, short road? The car was aimed right at him.”
“I did hear a car accelerating excessively, Inspector.”
“Can either of you describe the car?”
“Small,” Grover said. “Blue.”
“Anything of the license plate?”
“That’s why I tripped over the curb,” Grover moaned. “I was looking.”
“Got nothing of it, eh?”
“If I did, it was knocked out of my head. Oh, my head is killing me.”
Flynn looked around the empty waiting room. “So why are you just sitting here?”
“Insurance,” Loveson said. “Something about Richard’s insurance. They’re having to play with the electronic toy to see if it’s all right for him to be hurt in the City of Cambridge. Is that right, Richard?”
“But he is hurt in the City of Cambridge,” Flynn said.
“I’m an employee of the City of Boston, hurt in the City of Cambridge,” Grover said bitterly. “Was I on duty?”
“What difference does that make?” Flynn asked. “You have a concussion and a broken wrist.”
Jaws tight, Grover said, “I’m in Cambridge!”
“And you, Professor. I should say your face needs a stitch. Where are you supposed to be under the circumstances? The Harvard Barber College?”
“I insist they take care of Richard first. He’s the hero.”
“Yes,” Flynn said. “You’re a hero, Richard. How long have you been waiting?”
“A little over two hours,” Loveson said.
Flynn had had to walk a half mile to find a taxi. The police car was not where he and Grover had left it.
The taxi driver told him he had his Ph.D. in art history and did not know where CommonWealth Hospital was. They had arrived there through much inquiry and analysis.
Now Flynn ambled to the desk.
To a woman with a body compacted by a kidney belt standing behind the desk, Flynn said, “I’m Inspector Flynn, of the Boston Police. Perhaps I can help clarify matters. Sergeant Whelan is my assistant. He needs medical attention. He’s a hero. He’s just saved the life of Professor Louis Loveson.”
The woman’s eyes flashed. “We put him in the computer!”
“Ah, well, then, that’s all right,” Flynn said mildly. “Is he getting any better attention there than he is sitting against the wall with a cracked head and broken wrist?”
She shouted, “My God, a mad Irishman! I was married to one once!”
“Um, yes,” drawled Flynn. “I can see why he was mad. Do you doubt the sergeant has insurance?”
“We need the Insurance Plan! And the Number!”
“You need a plan,” Flynn said, “to set his broken wrist?”
“It’s always the soft-talkin’ Irish who are the worst! Try to wrap me in charm . . .”
“Perhaps I could give you a telephone number you could call, so you can get his Insurance Plan and his Number—”
“I said, we put him in the computer!”
“The contemporary excuse for all things vile and otherwise unreasonable.”
“Right! We need his file! From the computer! Will you go sit down and shut up? Can’t you see we’re busy?”
There were seven women behind the counter. Three worked computer keyboards, one was on the telephone discussing movies, two chatted about spareribs while eating from cartons of yogurt, and the seventh was busily shouting at Flynn.
In the waiting area, there were only two waiting, Grover and Loveson.
“How can you be busy?” asked Flynn. “Clearly you’ve already figured out your Going-Out-of-Business strategy.”
“Sit down and shut up!”
“I’ll do that,” Flynn said. “But in some other hospital.”
“You drove Grover to the hospital in the police car yourself?”
Flynn had taken the car keys from Professor Louis Loveson, found the police car a block away from the hospital, returned, and picked up both men.
“I did.” In the front seat beside Flynn, Loveson smiled boyishly. “Richard was very dizzy. I would have rung the siren if I could have found the switch.”
“It’s not a switch,” Flynn lied as a joke. “It’s a foot pump.”
“Oh.” The professor either believed him or did not care.
Grover groaned in the backseat.
“Richard tells me you were to have lunch with Dean Wincomb,” Loveson said.
“Yes. I did.”
“None of this is his fault, you know.”
“None of what?”
Gingerly, Loveson touched his fingertips to his wounded cheekbone. He sighed. He seemed more to be speaking by rote than lecturing. “The American principle of the separation of church and state led to a banning in 1963 of officially sanctioned prayers of any sort in school. That caused confusion and terror in the minds and hearts of American public school teachers, poor dears, who abandoned teaching all culture years ago. We now have generations who don’t know a pietà from a pizza, sacred from profane, pride from prejudice, Penelope from Prudence. By the time students get to college they are incapable of cultural perception or discernment.”
“That bad, is it?”
“A classic, for instance, is anything, probably originating from popular culture, which has satisfied the needs of many generations. A fad, however big and momentarily indicative, is not its equal. At least, not yet.”
“You don’t seem much damaged from having been drop-kicked by Grover.”
Flynn was driving toward Boston sedately, in consideration for Grover’s damaged head.
“Am I dithering?”
“Not the sort of thing usually talked about in police cars.”
“What do people usually talk about in police cars?”
“Food. Sex. As elsewhere. Police talk quite a lot about the stupidity of criminals.”
“Yes,” Loveson said. “Criminal stupidity. And are police compassionate toward the criminally stupid?”
“More than you might think.”
“You see? There’s not much difference. That woman at the hospital . . .”
“Yes?”
“. . . is typical. She perceives the reality of what she is doing, plans and numbers, in the computer rather than what is sitting right in front of her, two men hurting and bleeding. She has given over her human function to an electronic toy, as if to some God.”
“The computer as a religious icon?”
“Everywhere you see people bent over it, prayerfully, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“We are depositing all our knowledge—at least, our information—in it. Thus we think it omniscient. Even infallible. That woman at the hospital relegated both her perception and thinking abilities to a machine. And don’t you find the computer literate suffer from something akin to religious self-righteousness? That they know the truth of how the world works and the computer illiterate do not?”
“Some do.”
“Do you believe computers can think, Mr. Flynn?”
“They have no will to survive.”
“No self-preservation instinct,” Loveson said. “No essentential reason to learn from their experiences. No will at all.”
“You should have turned right there,” Grover groaned from the backseat.
“Oh. Sorry,” Flynn said.
“Speaking of survival.” Loveson did not lower his voice. “Not making less of what Richard did—undoubtedly he did save my life—I really believe that that car that came close to me was driven by someone who simply had had too much wine at lunch, or something. Don’t you agree, Richard?”
“No. Someone was trying to kill you, Professor.”
“Oh, dear.” Loveson watched Flynn slide the car into a Police Only parking slot outside the Emergency Room of Boston Barabbas Hospital. “The world will become a very dangerous place indeed if my younger colleagues are right, and the computer leaves us with nothing but our feelings to contend with.”
“Speaking of self-preservation,” Flynn nearly growled, “you’d better think of exercising a little of it yourself.”
Wide-eyed, Loveson stared at Flynn. “Beg pardon?” “Very soon you need to put on a pretty good Show and Tell, Professor, or, very clearly, you will flunk the grade.”
T E N
All school buildings smell of sweaty sneakers. Flynn had learned that. He wasn’t sure anyone else knew.
The smell increases as one nears the Physical Education area.
After telling Todd he was there, and that he, Jenny, and Winny should wait for him in the police car after they had showered from sports, Flynn headed for the office of the Cartwright School wrestling coach.
At the hospital, Flynn had waited while Professor Loveson had the skin over his cheekbone stitched and his chin adorned by a butterfly bandage. Grover had his wrist X-RAYED and set in a cast. Flynn mocked disappointment when Grover was declared not to need a brain scan. “That picture would be worth few words!” Flynn said.
Then he drove them to their respective homes. He lectured the professor on safety precautions: not to open packages delivered to his home or office; vary his routines, routes, and hours, going between home and office; look both ways before crossing the road . . .
He was having another easy workday.
“Ah, Mr. Flynn!” The Cartwright School wrestling coach, Mr. McLaughlin, was five feet four and weighed a wiry one hundred and thirty-five pounds. “Here for parental reasons, I hope, not police?”
“Betwixt and between.” Flynn shook the coach’s hand. There was only the one chair in the tiny office, that behind the desk. Both men remained standing. “What do you know of a boy named Billy Capriano?”
“He goes to public school.”
“I know.”
“I wish he attended Cartwright. I sure could use him on the team. If he keeps on, with proper training, he should have a good crack at State’s Championship.” The coach smiled broadly. “An A student, too!”
“I understand he quit the wrestling team yesterday.”
“He did?” The coach looked disbelieving. “Well, he shouldn’t have. Has he an injury?”
“He had a small, you might say, surgical problem over the weekend, resulting in a hole in one earflap, but nothing that should impede his wrestling ability.”
Now the coach looked horrified. “No one bit him? I mean, in a wrestling match?”
“No. No one bit him. Someone nailed his ear to a tree.”
“‘Nailed his ear to a tree’! Good God!”
“Really pinned him, to use wrestling parlance. Have you ever heard of such a thing happening before?”
“Never. Where did this happen?”
“In the cemetery. After dark. Sunday night.”
“How did you find him?”
“My daughter, Jenny, happened across him.”
“What was Jenny doing in the cemetery after dark Sunday night?”
“Happening across him. Yesterday, he quit his wrestling team. I’m wondering if there is a connection.”
“Billy must know who nailed his ear to a tree.”
“He won’t say.”
“Is he afraid of retribution if he tells you?”
“Good guess. I want to know if members of sports teams are apt to intimidate each other in any such manner these days?”
“You mean, to scare him off the team?”
“Something of the sort.”
“Unthinkable.”
“Not unthinkable,” Flynn said. “We’re thinking it.”
“I’ve never heard of any such thing. Sure. Boys on the football teams, especially, are apt to hoot at each other when they meet each other with their dates on Friday nights, or something. Grudge fistfights after a game have been known to happen. But intimidate a kid to get off a team because he’s excellent? That would be against every rule of good sportsmanship!”