Regina’s Song

“He was a small-timer,” Charlie added. “He might have sold a bag of crack once in a while, but he bought more than he sold. It looks to me as if he was one of those poor bastards who never did anything right. If he tried to steal a car, the tires would all go flat. If he thought some chickie had the hots for him, he’d get busted for attempted rape. If he planned a burglary, he’d pick the one house on the block with an alarm system. He was the sort of guy who gives crime a bad name. He definitely wasn’t in the same class with Muñoz—which pretty much shoots old Lieutenant Burpee’s theory full of holes. Cheetah doesn’t dirty his hands on small-timers. He goes after the big boys.”

Trish glanced over at the kitchen clock. “Oops,” she said, “we’re starting to run behind, girls. We’d better whip up some breakfast, or our boys will start wasting away.”

The three of them bustled around, getting things ready. “Go watch the set in the living room,” Erika commanded, pointing toward the front of the house. “Get out from underfoot while we’re working.”

“Yes, ma’am,” James rumbled. “Shall we adjourn to the parlor, gentlemen?”

The three of us went through the dining room to the silent front of the house. James turned on the smeary old television set, and we all sat down to watch.

“—murders are only the latest in a long string of serial killings here in the Northwest,” a reporter was sententiously reminding us. “The authorities are still searching for clues to the identity of the Green River killer, and this region was Ted Bundy’s starting place. The Seattle Slasher, however, appears to be seeking male victims—at least so far.”

“We might want to keep waving that in front of the ladies,” James suggested. “They’re a little nervous about murders in our own backyard—understandably, since there’s somebody out there with a sharp knife.”

“We might want to give some thought to the convoy principle,” I added. “Maybe tack on a new house rule: ‘Nobody goes out alone after dark,’ or something along those lines—at least until this quiets down, or the Slasher wastes somebody in Olympia or Bellingham.”

“Makes sense,” Charlie agreed. “I don’t think they’re in any real danger—those two killings seem to be gang stuff—but maybe we ought to get real protective until the TV guys find something else to babble about. Maybe they can go back to blubbering over Princess Diana. ‘Pavane for a Dead Princess’ is a nice piece of music, but it gets old after you’ve heard it forty or fifty times. The funny thing about that story is that the ‘media’ keeps trying to gloss over its own responsibility for that car crash. If they hadn’t declared open season on Princess Di, the vultures with cheap cameras wouldn’t have been chasing her.”

“How did your emergency meeting turn out last night, Charlie?” I asked him. “James told us some half-wit got inches and centimeters mixed up?”

“He sure did. Engineering’s in the clear, though. The drawings clearly specified centimeters. It was a buyer who dropped the ball, not us. Dear old Boing-Boing just spent a million bucks of taxpayer money on a component that won’t fit because some lamebrain in purchasing never heard of the metric system. We’ll hand it off to accounting, and they’ll juggle the books for us and smooth it over. Their jaws were a little tight about it, though. The balanced budget crowd’s tightening the screws on the Defense Department, so we don’t have the keys to Fort Knox the way we used to.”

“Aw,” I said in mock sympathy, “poor babies.”

“Come on, Mark. Look at all the wonderful things the defense industry’s given us—the H-bomb, the neutron bomb, nerve gas, smart bombs, laser sights, and all those cute little bacteria that give people diseases nobody’s ever heard of before—’bubonic leprosy,’ ‘tuberculanthrax,’ and ‘the seven-century itch.’ How could we possibly get along without stuff like that?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. “It might be nice to try it and find out, though.”

After breakfast, we scattered to the winds again. We hadn’t yet encountered each other down on the campus, since the various disciplines were pretty well segregated. I don’t think an antisegregation policy would ever float on a university campus. The races and sexes may be desegregated, but the disciplines? Never happen.

I fought with Milton all morning, concentrating on his “Areopagitica.” Milton was a Puritan down to his toenails, and censorship lies at the soul of the Puritan ethic. So why does Johnny Milton tell us to print any damn thing we want to, and let it stand or fall all by itself?

Then Twink didn’t show up for my one-thirty class, and I got concerned. Maybe she was having second thoughts about all her blustering and show-offery following the Monday class. That promise to blow me away had been a bit on the arrogant side; maybe now she was too embarrassed to look me in the face.

That option wasn’t really open to her, though. Whether she liked it or not, Twink and I were going to spend this quarter in lockstep. I’d made promises, and I was going to keep them. When it became obvious that she wasn’t just late for class, I decided that I’d thrash this out with her. If she didn’t like it, well, tough noogies.

My class of freshmen was seriously diminished now. My canned speech on opening day had significantly thinned out the herd. Now it was time for the second canned speech, which had to do with reading critically, rather than accepting everything that shows up in print as if Moses had handed it down from Mount Sinai. I dove into my variation of “It ain’t necessarily so,” which might have gone over a little better if anybody in the class had ever heard of Porgy and Bess.