Chapter 22

      “I didn’t go to the rave,” Dale McFetters said, stroking an emaciated mustache. “Working that night. Pizza Junction.” McFetters had a shaved head, a recent defoliation judging by the way he kept reaching to twist invisible locks. He paced the living room, working his absent hair and tugging a silver ear loop. His jeans appeared to be entering a second decade without laundering. He was shirtless and skinny, ribs countable to anyone so inclined. A blue tattoo resembling barbed wire circled one broomstick bicep. “It could have been me, y’know. I’d have gone if I hadn’t had to work.” McFetters and Jimmy Farrier shared a shotgun duplex near the university. Furnished with twenty bucks and a blue-light special on yellow paint, the place was like walking through the interior of a lemon.

      “It wasn’t you,” I said, leaning against a bright wall. “It was Jimmy. I need to know why.”

      McFetters threw his hands up in the air. They were grubby hands and I hoped he’d never made a pizza I’d eaten. “I told all this to the state police,” he protested.

      “Now you get to tell me. Merry Christmas.”

      He flopped into a battered recliner, probably rescued from a Dumpster. “I don’t know nothing else.” A computer-science major.

      I crossed the room to a corkboard beside the phone, carry-out menus thumbtacked to it. There were some photos. One showed Farrier and McFetters sunning in a lawn chair in the small front yard of the duplex. I leaned close and studied it. The boys were shirtless, squinting from the bright sunlight. Jimmy looked bemused while McFetters affected a “white-boy-as-gangsta-rapper” pose. McFetters’s body was pasty and anorexic, Jimmy Farrier’s tan and toned. His face looked soft, closer to child than adult—beardless, a vulnerability in the eyes, acne on his cheeks and forehead. It was obvious he worked out. His biceps and triceps were firm and expanded, his shoulders thick, his pecs blocking out. Washboard lats above his denim cutoffs. A small bright swordfish leapt above his nipple. The dated photo was almost a year old.

      I turned back to McFetters. “Was Jimmy going to the rave to meet someone, Dale?”

      He shrugged. “Never said. Maybe.”

      “No regular girlfriend, female acquaintance?”

      McFetters studied the citrine ceiling and stroked his lip-cirrus. “Chicks? He had, like, a lot more hope than luck.”

      “Not a pick-up artist.”

      His laugh resembled a seal’s arwk. If he’d slapped his hands together I’d have tossed him a fish. I said, “He ever try and meet girls through the personal ads?”

      McFetters gave me an odd look, then slid out of the chair and went to Farrier’s bedroom. He returned with an old copy of the NewsBeat bent open to the personal ads.

      “By his bed,” McFetters said. “He was always scoping ’em out. Sending letters, but—” McFetters twitched his bony shoulders.

      I said, “You don’t know about responses?”

      “Huh-uh.”

      I said, “His stuff still in his room?”

      “His mom said they was gonna come over and get it, but they haven’t.”

      I stood. “Mind if I take a look?”

      He waved toward Jimmy’s door. “Knock yourself out.”

      A typical student’s room. Posters for some band I’d never heard of, skinny androgynes wearing black clothes and mascara-enhanced sulks, nihilism with a beer sponsor. The bed was made. A desk in the corner had a computer atop it. A shelf held textbooks, papers jammed between pages. Free weights sprawled around a lifting bench. The standard clothes in the closet, plus a skimboard and some snorkeling gear, decent stuff.

      I opened the top desk drawer. Pencils and pens and paperclips, Post-its. Class schedule. A small framed photograph of Farrier with Mom and Dad and Little Sister. Mountains in the background, everyone smiling, arms clasping one another’s shoulders. There was genuine warmth in the faces, a closeness. Beneath that was a loose photo—Farrier and his mother on high school graduation day, the kid in his black gown, mama beside him with her head on his shoulder. Proud smiles. They looked comfortable together, happy. I noted the photographs weren’t atop the desk where his roommate or visitors might see them, but not upside-down in the bottom of the closet, either. I tried the side drawers. The top one held notebooks from various classes, the bottom a six-pack of Coors Light and a twelve-pack of Ramses condoms, unopened.

      Party on, Jimmy, wherever you are.

      I fired up the computer and did a name search of files: Personals, ads, NewsBeat…nothing. I shifted to a file-by-file scan and under Misc. discovered a sub-file, PerLets. It turned out to be short for Personal Letters and held responses to ads in the NewsBeat, seven in the eight months since the NewsBeat’s redux.

      Jimmy’s response to each was a variation on a basic theme:

      Dear (ad number)

      I saw your ad in the NewsBeat and would love to meet you. My name is JIMMY and I’m a student at USA studying Computer Science. I LOVE the beach and would be there every day if I wasn’t in school or studying. I’m kind of quiet but I can also be wild if I’m with the right person. I have dark brown hair and blue-green eyes and like to work out with weights. I’d LOVE to meet you and maybe we could meet soon. There’s a place near USA called THE CUPPA where they have coffee and live music on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. Maybe we could get together there or anywhere else you want. I hope to hear from you.

      Jimmy

      I printed the letters and Jimmy’s list of response dates, and left Dale McFetters sitting in his lemon world.