A man got out of the car. Midsixties—old enough to remember. I drove across the road, pulled up next to his driver's side, and lowered my window.

His expression wasn't friendly. He was big and powerful looking, dressed in tweeds and a light blue sweater vest despite the heat, and he had very white, very straight hair and knocked-about features. A leather briefcase—an old one with a brass clasp—dangled from one hand. The leather had been freshly oiled—I could smell it. Several pens were clasped to his breast pocket. He looked the Seville over with narrow, dark eyes, then had a go at my face.

“Excuse me,” I said, “was the Corrective School once across the street?”

Scowl. “That's right.” He turned to leave.

“How long has it been gone?”

“Quite a while. Why?”

“I just had a few questions about it.”

He put his briefcase down and peered into the car. “Are you an . . . alumnus?”

“No.”

He looked relieved.

“Do alumni come back frequently?” I said.

“No, not frequently, but . . . you do know what kind of school it was.”

“Troubled children.”

“A bad lot. We were never happy with it—we were here first, you know. My father broke ground thirty years before they came.”

“Really.”

“We were here before most of the houses. This was all agricultural back then.”

“Did the students from the Corrective School cause problems?”

“And what's your interest in that?”

“I'm a psychologist,” I said, and gave him a card. “I'm doing some consulting to the Los Angeles Police Department, and there's some evidence one of the alumni is involved in something unpleasant.”

“Something unpleasant. Well, that's not much of a surprise, is it?” He scowled again. His eyebrows were bushy, low-set, and still dark, giving him a look of perpetual annoyance. “What kind of unpleasantness?”

“I'm sorry but I can't go into detail—is it Mr. Bancroft?”

“It certainly is.” He produced a card of his own, white, heavy stock, a heraldic shield in one corner.

The Bancroft School

Est. 1933 by Col. C. H. Bancroft (Ret.)

“Building Scholarship and Character”

Condon H. Bancroft, Jr., B.A., M.A., Headmaster

“By unpleasant do you mean criminal?” he said.

“It's possible.”

He gave a knowing nod.

I said, “Why did the place close down?”

“He died—the Frenchman—and no one was left to run it. It's an art, education.”

“Didn't he have a daughter?”

His eyebrows arched. “She offered me the place, but I turned her down. Error on my part—I should have done it for the land alone. Now they've come and built those.” He cast a glare at the stone wall.

“They?”

“Some sort of foreign group. Asians, of course. She offered me all of it, lock, stock. But she wanted an outlandish amount of money and refused to negotiate. For them, money's no object.”

“She's still here in town, isn't she?”

“She's in Santa Barbara,” he said.