screenprinting T-shirts. But just what he would do was still a cloudy
mystery.
It was a little scary taking off the cap and gown. Like shedding his
youth. He held them both in his hands as he scanned his room. It was
cluttered with clothes, mementos, record albums, and since his mother
had long since given up on cleaning it herself, his cache of Playboys.
There were the letters he'd earned in track and baseball. The letters,
he remembered, that had convinced Rose Anne Markowitz to climb into the
backseat of his secondhand Pinto and do it to the tune of Joe Cocker's
Feeling Alght.
He'd been blessed with a tough athletic body, long legs, and quick
reflexes. Like his father, his mother was fond of saying. He supposed
in some way he took after the old man, though their relationship had had
its share of battles. Over hair length, wardrobe, politics, curfews.
Captain Kesselring was a stickler.
Came from being a cop, Michael supposed. He remembered being careless
enough once to bring a single joint into the house. He'd been grounded
for a month. And a few lousy speeding tickets had cost him just as
dearly.
The law was the law, old Lou was fond of saying, Michael thought now.
Thank God he himself had no intention of being a cop.
He took the tassel from the cap before tossing it and the gown onto his
unmade bed. Maybe it was sentimental to keep it, but nobody had to
know. He routed through his dresser drawers for the old cigar box that
held some of his most valued possessions. The love letter Lori Spiker
had written him in his junior year-before she'd dumped him
for a biker with a Harley and tatoos. The ticket stub from the Rolling
Stones' concert he had, after a lot of blood and sweat, convinced his
parents to let him attend. The pop top from his first illegal beer. He
grinned and, pushing it aside, found the snapshot of himself and Brian
McAvoy.
The little girl had kept her word, Michael thought. The picture had
arrived in the mail only two weeks after the incredible day his dad had
taken him to meet Devastation. The new album had come with it, the
hot-off-the-presses copy. He had been the envy of his contemporaries
for weeks.
Michael thought back to that day, the almost unendurable excitement he'd
felt, the sweaty armpits. He hadn't thought about that day in a long
time. Now, perhaps because of his newly acquired adult status, it
occurred to him that it had been a terrific thing for his father to do.
And uncharacteristic. Not that the old man couldn't come up with
terrific things, but he had gone to the rehearsal hall on police
business. Captain Lou Kesselring never mixed police business and
personal pleasures.
But he had that day, Michael thought.
It was strange, but now that he was remembering it all, he could picture
his father dragging home files, night after night. As far as Michael
could recollect, his father had never brought home work that way before,
or since.
The little boy, Brian McAvoy's little boy, had been murdered. It had