"I don't care enough about the place to like or dislike, Doctor. They're all the same, holding pens for spoiled rich brats and kids who aspire to be spoiled richer brats. A few years ago, the geniuses on Yale's admissions committee rejected thousands of smart, qualified American kids but accepted some Afghan who'd served as the Taliban's spokesman. Want to take odds the guy ever took AP calculus and served as captain of his Model U.N. debate team? Then those same geniuses let in an alleged art student, her idea of creativity is getting knocked up, aborting the fetus, and videotaping the mess. After which she repeated the freak show over and over or maybe she was faking. We're living in Bizarro World, Rembrandt's writhing in his grave."

"No doubt," I said.

"I have nothing against Yale more than any other Ivy League resort. What I can't figure out is why Charlie wants to go there when my wife went to Columbia and Penn law school and I got that ridiculous master's degree at Harvard--two years commuting to Boston every week, my reward was listening to puffed-up fools yakking about nothing. I made the mistake of attending graduation, brought my wife and my mother, Charlie wasn't born yet. They do the ceremony in Harvard Yard, which was fine back in the seventeen hundreds when it was a little divinity school for rich twits. Now there's space for maybe a quarter of the people who show up, they give you a predetermined seat number with preferences for rich assholes who endow buildings. My wife and my eighty-seven-year-old mother stood for two hours in ninety-degree weather, finally they get to their seats and end up not seeing a damn thing because inconsiderate twits stood in front of them the whole time. A bunch of nice black ladies from the Bronx were in the row behind, their niece was the first person in the family to attend college, they had no clue what the hell was going on. My wife turned around and said, 'These are the geniuses who ran the Vietnam War.' They're all the same, Doctor. Arrogant, thoughtless, impractical."

"Ivy League schools."

"Any elite institution. It's like junior high: Insecure assholes can't feel popular unless everyone else is an outcast." Head shake. "My kid's got legacy status at Columbia, Penn, and Harvard, he obsesses on Yale."

"Kids will do that," I said.

"Be stupid and obnoxious?"

"Try to differentiate themselves."

"Psych-talk," he said. "Yeah, yeah, that's what my wife says. Supposedly Charlie's got a tough row to hoe being under the alleged shadow of his father so he needs to find himself as an individual. Which is ridiculous, you see me as intimidating? Not to him, trust me. He's twice as smart as me and plays the fucking cello."

Milo's smile was fleeting but the chief saw it.