“What are you guys, cops?” he asked.

“Do we look like cops?” said Kimberly.

“No, but you don’t look like arm breakers neither.”

“I should hope not.” Kimberly thumbed at me. “He thinks I look like a stewardess.”

“Maybe,” said Jimmy Sullivan.

“I’m a lawyer, Mr. Sullivan,” I said. “From Philadelphia.”

“That explains it then.”

“Explains what?”

“The way my skin crawled when you walked in.”

Kimberly laughed a flirty little laugh and batted her eyes. I was almost embarrassed for her, but Sullivan didn’t seem to react.

“So why are you guys asking about Tommy Greeley?”

“We’re looking into Mr. Greeley’s disappearance,” I said. “Trying to learn what happened to him.”

“A little late, isn’t it?”

“Better late then never. We thought we’d start with his childhood and we learned that you were an important part of it.”

“I knew him, so?”

“When was this?”

“We met in middle school, and then we was friends at Spellman.”

“What was he like?”

“I don’t know. He was just Tommy.”

“Mrs. Greeley seemed to imply you were a bad influence on him.”

His dark eyes darkened at that. “Is that what she said? She’s something, isn’t she, that Mrs. Greedy. How’s she doing, the old bat?”

“Still alive,” I said.

“Pickled, I’d bet. So that’s what this is all about. You want to hear about my bad influence. All right.” He took a deep breath, as if he were about to recite a poem in front of the class. “Tommy was a prince. I was the bad kid he hung around with. All princes have a bad kid they hang around with, don’t they? It’s like a rule. Didn’t Shakespeare write about that? I was the one always getting in trouble between the two of us, so of course I was the bad influence. How’s that? Is that what you wanted?”

“You have me confused with a guidance counselor,” I said.

Sullivan lifted his chin, narrowed his eyes.

“I don’t really care about the sad-sack story of your life, Jimmy boy. All I want to know is what happened to Tommy.”

“When he went off to college, we lost touch. Who did you say you was working for again?”

“I didn’t.”

“Yeah, didn’t think so. Look, what are you really after here? Why don’t you just tell me, get it over with.”

“Did you know he was selling drugs? Did you know he was indicted?”

“I’d heard something,” he said slowly.

“When was the last time you heard from him?”

“I don’t know. Before he disappeared.”

“Do you have any idea what happened to him?”

“None.”

“You weren’t involved in his going missing, were you, Jimmy?”

“Is that what you think?”

“I don’t know, that’s why I’m asking.”

He bit his lip for a moment, glanced at the old woman behind the counter who was giving him the eye. “Look. I might have been a bad influence, like old Mrs. Greeley said. But we was friends, Tommy and me. And like I said, he survived my bad influence. Maybe you should start wondering which of his high-class Ivy League friends he didn’t survive.” Sullivan pushed himself up from the chair. “I got to get back to work before breathless takes a bite out of my ass. Do yourselves a favor and go back to Philadelphia. I got nothing for you, understand? There’s nothing here. Nothing.”

He spread his arms wide and faced his palms to the ceiling, as if to emphasize the nothing, nothing in his hands, nothing up his sleeves. When he turned and made his way back to the counter he limped a bit and I noticed only then that one of his legs was shorter than the other.

When we stepped outside of the sub shop, Kimberly glanced back, through the front window, into the store. “He’s scared of something, isn’t he?” she said.

“Is he?”

“He was, like, all over me with his eyes before you mentioned Tommy Greeley’s name. After that I was buzz kill.”

“Maybe you’re not his type.”

“I’m his type, V. But I gave him my best little head-flick laugh and he barely glanced my way. Even my stewardess line didn’t raise an eyebrow. One thing I learned is, guys, they go crazy at the idea of a stewardess. It’s like genetic or something. Built into the chromosomes. Maybe there’s some zygote in pumps and a smart blue jacket offering headphones and a Coke to the sperm as they freestyle their way up to the egg, maybe that’s what does it. The stew could be a fifty-two-year-old grandma with bunions and still these boneheads are panting at the thought. But not this guy. The topic of Tommy Greeley scared him too much to even think about getting jiggy with me. Whatever it is, it’s got him freaked.”

“You think he was involved somehow in what was going down?” I watched Jimmy Sullivan as he went back to wiping the counter, glancing up now and then, squinting worriedly at us through the plate window.

“I don’t know, but he sure is scared about something,” said Kimberly. “And sad too. This Sullivan, he plays the Boston trash role, but he reads his Shakespeare, doesn’t he? King Henry IV Part One, starring Tommy Greeley as Prince Hal and Jimmy Sullivan as Falstaff.”

“I get all those Henrys confused,” I said, squinting at her. “Wasn’t the eighth guy the fat one with all the wives.”

“Ah, yaah. Read a book, why don’t you?”

I began to think about what she was saying, about how Jimmy had reacted. Mrs. Greeley had said he was a celebrity of sorts, but something had certainly come along to spoil everything. Now he was scared, absolutely, and sad, for some reason, and it seemed just then that Tommy Greeley was the cause of both. How could that be, twenty years gone by?

“Hey, you don’t have to look at me like that,” said Kimberly, misconstruing my thoughts. “I took a course or two in college, you know. I put in my time at the library.”

“That’s good to know, Kimberly, because I’m going to drop you off at the public library before I go visit Mr. Greeley.”

“Why the library?”

“I think we need to do a little research on our dear friend Jimmy Sullivan.”

Chapter 53

A FEW YEARS back, for the first time, they played golf’s U.S. Open at a municipal course, picking a track out on Long Island, Bethpage Black. It’s safe to say that D.W. Field Golf Course, the Brockton, Massachusetts, municipal course, Dee Dubs to the locals, is not next on the list. A flat nondescript layout with an old brown clubhouse and hot dog grill, Dee Dubs sat across from a mini mall sporting a pizza parlor and a kick-boxing joint. To most golfers it might look like a scraggly pasture with some flags stuck in the ground to let the cows know where to pee, but to its denizens it was as good as Pebble Beach, only better, because it was built without Pebble Beach’s large and unsightly water hazard and the greens fees were about four bills cheaper.

I stood on the far side of the eighteenth green, just in front of the clubhouse, and watched the foursomes make their way up the fairway. I was looking for a man in a blue windbreaker, yanking his clubs along in a hand cart, most likely somewhere in the rough by the trees on the right side of the fairway. The way the old men on the practice green put it, Buck Greeley was so conservative he only played the right side of the course. I understood that to mean that Buck Greeley was such a stubborn old man that he refused to admit he had a slice.

I spotted him climbing up the right side, bent, without a hat, jerking the cart angrily behind him as he walked away from his playing partners and made his way toward the trees where his banana tee shot had landed. He grabbed an iron from his bag, looked up, glared at a couple of kids lugging their bags from the parking lot to the clubhouse, along a path that cut smack across the eighteenth fairway.

“Get the hell out of our way,” he called out.

The kids maintained their placid pace. “We see you,” one called back.