It was pushing five by the time the train pulled into Harvard Square. The afternoon chill had dipped into an early-evening freeze. Crossing Mass. Avenue at rush hour from the island that houses the “T” station took skill, cunning, and the pretense of not looking. The trick, of course, was not to face a driver who was also pretending not to look.
There was always the alternate course of waiting for the light at the crosswalk, but then, why stand out from the crowd? It would only confuse the drivers.
I walked down Dunster Street, which led to the student houses on the Charles River. I found the door of a relatively modern building that housed the offices of tutors and PhD candidates. Barry Salmon fit the latter category.
I had heard from classmates over the years that after we graduated, Barry had practiced his acquired art of classical philosophy for some years at a private high school. Inevitably he came back to John Harvard for a PhD He was well into his second year at this point.
The plug-in letters on the directory board told me that they had filed Barry in room 412B.
I remembered the first time I met Barry. He was a well-shined, skinny, bow-tied, tweed-sport-coated (still bearing the frays of his older brother’s wearing) freshman at Chambers Academy. He was smiling then, and he was smiling the last time I saw him, which was the day we graduated from Harvard College. As a freshman at Chambers, he smiled out of a deep-rooted good nature. His smiles at Harvard emanated from chemical substances that the chief chemist at Dupont couldn’t have identified.
When Barry came to Harvard, he fell in love with three institutions: classical philosophy, some dredged-up cult of the old sixties’ hippie culture, and Cynthia Wallingford. The only one of the three that ever did him any good was classical philosophy. For all of his daffiness, Barry was probably the brightest individual, strictly in terms of raw intellect, that I have ever known. I would probably score Barry: Intelligence-ten; Common Sense-point three.
The funny thing was that Barry never lived in the sixties. He was born in ‘77. On the other hand, he never outlived the sixties.
Barry was a hippie in the nineties, when our classmates didn’t understand the meaning of the word, and they certainly didn’t understand Barry. We traveled in different circles, I’m happy to say, but there was always something warm in our acquaintanceship that harkened back to Chambers days.
I found room 412B with its door open. I peered inside. The room was about the size of Anthony Bradley’s cell, but it seemed a great deal smaller. There was a tiny footpath that led through mounds of books, papers, lecture notes, fruit, and sneakers. At the end was a wooden desk chair with no one in it. Then there was a desk with Barry on it, semireclined and reading. At least I suspected that what was behind the salt-and-pepper beard and under the Don King hairdo was Barry. I caught the aroma of the sneakers, and I knew it was Barry.
I knocked, but it took a yell to get his attention.
“Barry! Michael Knight. You remember?”
He squinted for a second, then sprang like a cat over the chair to the floor. I was amazed that whatever was cooking his brain cells at that point in his life had done nothing to his athletic prowess.
“Mike! I don’t believe it.”
He just laughed, and I did too. It seemed to cover all the trite, conventional questions and answers that would otherwise have been necessary to bring us up to date. There we were, and the last ten or so years were blown away.
“Barry, I want to ask you a question.”
“Shoot, Mike. Hey, would you like some coffee or something?”
I smiled and declined. Much as I still liked Barry, I wouldn’t drink coffee out of any receptacle in the room, and what “or something” meant I’d have needed a degree in pharmacology to figure out.
“I’m a lawyer, Barry. I have a client who’s on trial for murder. He’s a Harvard student. Anthony Bradley. Sophomore. African American.”
I don’t know why I was looking for recognition. If Plato didn’t report on the event, it was unlikely that it would have taken Barry’s attention. Nonetheless, I pressed on.
“He was a football player his freshman year. He lives in Dunster. His father’s a judge.”
Suddenly the beard parted as if to speak. I wondered which of the facts I had ticked off struck the chord.
“He’s a black kid. Runs that group. What do they call them? ‘The Point,’ right?”
“You lost me, Barry. I never heard of the group. What are they?”
“Yeah, well, it’s a group of students. They do some good volunteer things. Mostly they help freshmen get up to speed with their study habits. They help them make the crossover to college.” He grinned. “They help the kids that never went to Chambers.”
“I didn’t realize he was into that, Barry. How long?”
He ruffled the beard. I looked to see what would fly out, but nothing did.
“I don’t know. I heard it eighth-hand. I don’t know Bradley personally. I think he got heavily involved in the spring term last year. This year I think I heard he was running it.”
“Do they have an office?”
“Are you kidding? They’re showcase. The president moved them into the Yard so they could be close to the freshman. I think they’re in Dunlevy.”
I thanked Barry with a wave instead of a shake and promised to keep in touch.
Dunlevy is a neomodern, neo-utilitarian, neogrotesque building in the northeast corner of Harvard Yard. Architecturally, Harvard is much like its faculty. By the time an individual has reached the level of scholarship necessary to be invited to join the faculty, there is usually an independence and self-assurance that has evolved in the mix that makes the individual defiantly unique. To say that a Harvard professor doesn’t fit into a pattern falls somewhere between an irrelevancy and a compliment. The same is true of the architecture.
Unlike Barry’s sign at the front door, the permanently lettered sign at Dunlevy proclaimed that The Point was in suite 203. In this case, “suite” meant two adjoining rooms with identical neo-Ikea desks and chairs in each.
The door was open. There were two students, both white, hovering over a sheaf of papers at a desk. I gathered that one was the tutor, the other was the tutee, and the subject was my old nemesis, calculus. I mercifully decided not to break the train of logic and passed through to the second room. Feeling less intrusive there, I got the attention of what looked like two junior-aged students, both African American, one male, one female, both attractive in spite of the oversized collegey garb they were draped in.
The woman smiled and offered a hand.
“Hi. I’m Gail Warden.”
“Michael Knight.” I shook the hand, and also that of the man who offered his, together with the words, “Rasheed Maslin. What can we do for you? You from the college?”
“No. I’m a lawyer. I’m Anthony Bradley’s lawyer. Can I talk to you?”
They exchanged the kind of positive lip and eye signals that meant, “Well, all right.”
They swung a chair around for me and settled down to offer anything they could to help.
“Tell me something about Anthony.”
Gail was the first to speak. “He’s a man, Mr. Knight.”
My look said I didn’t grasp her meaning.
“That’s not slang, Mr. Knight. I mean he’s mature, more than you’d think from his age. He came through a lot of growing up in the last year.”
“How so?”
Gail nodded to Rasheed and gestured at the door next to him leading to the other room. Rasheed closed it.
“You know about his father? I mean being a judge and a football hero and gonna be on the Supreme Judicial Court? All that was a heavy burden for Anthony.”
“Burden?”
“That’s right. Anthony felt he had to be just as good at the same things. He couldn’t do it. Anthony’s got a lot of talents, but they’re different. Like last year, he had to play football. But he couldn’t just play football. He had to be as good as his father, or maybe his father’s legend.”
“Did his father put pressure on him?”
“I don’t know, but he didn’t have to. Anthony put pressure on himself that nobody could live up to. When he knew he wasn’t making it at football, he went into a depression. He couldn’t study, then his grades started going to pieces. Then he got more depressed.”
Rasheed got into the conversation with a quiet voice. “Did he tell you about the attempted suicide?”
Gail caught his eye and his voice clutched. It was apparently not a well-known fact. We needed some ground rules.
“Listen, folks. Anthony’s on trial for murder. Nobody’s going to fight for his side but me and the lawyer I work for. I need to know everything I can about him. I’ll sift out what I need. And all of it’s confidential.”
Rasheed stole a quick look at Gail like a batter getting the sign from the third-base coach. She apparently gave him the green light.
“Last year, about finals time in the spring, we were supposed to have a meeting about setting up finals tutorials for some of the people we were helping. Anthony didn’t show up.”
I jumped in for a quick one. “Was Anthony a helper or being helped?”
Gail took it. “He was a helper from day one. He had a good prep-school education, which is different from a lot of the kids they admit. He got involved with us right away, in spite of the time football was taking.”
I nodded. “Go back to the meeting, Rasheed.”
“When he didn’t show up, we called him, but no answer. A little while later we decided to go check out his room.”
He stopped for a moment. I wasn’t sure why, but it gave me a chance to ask, “Why were you worried about him? I mean, anything could have kept him from one meeting.”
“Not Anthony.” They said it together, and Gail went on. “He took these helping sessions very seriously.”
Rasheed went on. “Besides, he’d been getting more and more into depression. We kind of…” He glanced at Gail. “… kept an eye on him. We tried to talk to him, like build up his confidence. But we weren’t getting anywhere. We wanted him to get some help.”
“So did you find him?”
Rasheed looked down at the bracelet he was fidgeting with.
“Yeah. He was in his room.”
The pause indicated the need for urging. “Was it the suicide attempt?”
Rasheed just nodded. Gail’s eyes watered over, and I thought about dropping it, but I needed to learn all I could.
“How?” Neither one was looking at me, but Rasheed made a gesture across his wrist.
“What did you do?”
“We put pressure on it. Got him to the hospital. He did OK. We got him in time.”
I thought I heard Gail say almost under her breath, “No, we didn’t.”
I looked at her. She was so sincere she had my heart as well as my attention. When our eyes met, maybe it showed.
“How was he afterwards?”
“He was OK.” Rasheed’s version.
“No, he wasn’t.” Gail didn’t need the third-base coach. “He never really recovered from it.”
I said, “He seemed to be healthy when I saw him recently.”
“You mean physically. Yes, the stitches healed, and he got his energy back. But there was something missing.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. You know how sometimes there’s something about a person that almost defines them. You can’t put your finger on it, but when it’s not there, it’s like emptiness.”
I wondered if Gail could have had more than a passing affection for whatever that something was. Rasheed looked at her gently with what could have been either agreement or empathy, or maybe more.
There was a jolt that brought us all out of it when the door to the other room swung open. A string of high-pitched jive rolled like a babbling stream off the lips of a six-foot, rail-thin dude who came through the door in full swing. He had a walk that had arms, feet, hips, and head syncopating with each other to a beat somewhere in his own universe.
The gist of the jive, as nearly as I could put it together, was the registration of a complaint that the local rap station had been put to rest. It flowed until he spotted the unexpected visitor. Then I saw “the freeze.”
It took me back through the past, and it’s like bike riding. You never forget. I learned it when I spent some time with kids in a Puerto Rican settlement house. I was seriously Puerto Rican at that time and looking for cultural identity, not the well-adjusted biracial of current times. That was when I learned about “the freeze.”
It’s like a babbling brook, where all of the happy molecules are monolithic and bouncing in easy rhythm with each other. Then a molecule from another kind of brook is introduced, and in a sort of instant chemical reaction, the brook freezes solid, but only under the top layer. On the surface, to the untrained eye, the brook babbles on.
My white face was the molecule from another brook. I was tuned to the snap freeze, as I’m sure Gail and Rasheed were. I was equally sure that none of the three gave me credit for being in on the phenomenon.
I didn’t sense it at all when I walked in on Gail and Rasheed, but the meter was pinning with our new arrival. What it meant was that the surface bopping would go on, but any information I would get from then on would be carefully screened for white ears. With him present, I’d probably had the best of the harvest from the others as well.
Gail took the lead. “Abdul, this is Mr. Knight. He’s Anthony’s lawyer. This is Abdul Shabaz.”
I pegged him at about the junior year, but somehow the Harvard accent had not adulterated his singy-swingy dialect.
“Hey, Anthony’s ma man. Please to make your acquaintance, Mr. Knight.”
I couldn’t tell if he wanted to shake or high-five, so I just nodded. “Nice to meet you, Abdul.”
“How’s ma man doin’?”
I suddenly realized that I didn’t really know. I mentally filled that in as my next appointment.
“He’s all right, considering.”
“Whachu want us to do? You name it. You got it.”
“Give me six Phi Beta Kappa divinity students who’ll swear they were with Anthony all day Sunday.”
I thought it, but I didn’t say it. If I had, I had a feeling that Abdul would have had them at my doorstep in the morning.
“I need to find a friend of Anthony’s by the name of Terry Blocher. Do you know him?”
“Terry’s a member. You just cool it. I’ll get him up here.”
I cooled it, while Abdul walked the walk into the next room. I could hear phone sounds and a pause. Then I heard Abdul in a semimuffled tone that only carried through both rooms. Abdul was not cut out for espionage.
“Terry, ma man. Git yourself over here. We got Anthony’s mouthpiece. He wants to see you.”
With my eyebrows up and a restrained smile, I looked at Gail. “‘ Mouthpiece ’? Are they running a forties’ film festival? I haven’t heard that since Little Caesar on AMC.”
Her eyes went to the ceiling, and she just shook her head.
In about five minutes, a white student of about nineteen, shorter and heftier than Abdul, walked in. He had a roundish face crowned with the kind of dull blond curls that never seem to need a comb.
Introductions were made, and I got down to it.
“Terry, Anthony tells me that you went with him to Chinatown on Sunday. He said you suggested having dinner there.”
“It was his idea, but that’s right. I went with him.”
I was slightly jangled by the correction, but it was a minor point.
“Tell me about it.”
“Well, we went in on the train about two. We went to a place called the Ming Tree.”
“Did you pick the restaurant or did Anthony?”
“No, he did. I’d never been there before.”
“Had he?”
“I don’t know. He just picked it.”
“OK. Then what?”
“We had dinner. Then we went down to the street. It was like… pandemonium. I had to get out of there.”
“So you left him where?”
“Outside the restaurant. I walked to Park Street.”
“Did Anthony have a gun?”
He gave me one of those whose-side-are-you-on looks and silence.
“I’d be happy to hear, ‘no.’”
“OK, no.”
“Did you see anyone there with a gun?”
“No.”
I racked my brain for any nugget of gold that I should dig while I was still at the mine. None occurred at the moment, but now I knew where I could find him.
I turned my mind to surviving the recrossing of Mass. Avenue. If I made it, I was going to take the train to the Suffolk County prison.