“Yeah,” said McLamb cynically. “We know how it goes.”

They came at him with questions from every angle, but nothing they asked made Eric Holt give up any more information. His whole attitude said that he wanted to help, wished he could help, would certainly help if there were any way in his power to do so, but everything had gone down just as he’d told them.

Lamarr Wrenn was just as helpfully unhelpful. They caught up with him as he was leaving one classroom and heading across campus for another. Dark-skinned with a small chin beard, he was built like a concrete post, tough and solid with big muscular hands that clenched convulsively around his books and looked capable of felling a mule with one blow. He walked with a slight limp that favored his right ankle (“Twisted it playing Hacky Sack yesterday”), but it didn’t seem to slow him down.

“Look, man, you make me late and it’ll go down as a cut. Steve and Eric already told you what happened, didn’t they?”

“You tell us,” said McLamb as they strode along with him.

The walks were crowded with students changing classes and they were forced to walk on the grass to keep up as Wrenn plowed his way through.

But it was clear the young men had their stories well in hand. Lamarr Wrenn had thought the Dozer was rigged, he said. He and Hartley got into it. Accusations were made by Wrenn; slurs were spoken by Hartley.

“So when he called me a dumb-ass jigaboo, I smashed his nose in for him. But that’s all. Anybody says different, he can talk to me.”

McLamb said, “Your friends say you were still steamed when you left them. You sure you didn’t go back and have another go at him?”

“Nope, I went home.”

“Home being?”

The address he gave was in the old Darkside section of Dobbs. The neighborhood was still mostly black, yet, despite some derelict shanties, it wasn’t what you’d call a real ghetto, McLamb thought as he wrote it down. Not when those shanties stood on quarter- to half-acre lots. Not when professional and middle-class African Americans were either remodeling the old clapboard houses of their parents and grandparents or else leveling them to make way for bigger and more modern homes.

“Any witnesses to the time you got there?”

Wrenn shook his head, moving more slowly up the stairs of the building they’d entered, as if it hurt to climb on that ankle.

Nobody lived in the house at the moment, he explained, because it had belonged to his grandfather who died early in the summer. His mother was the old man’s only relative and natural heir, but there was some technicality about the deed. Soon as that was straightened out, the house would be sold. In the meantime, Wrenn used it as a crash pad when he wanted to get away from school.

“Wait a minute, though,” he said as they pulled up at the doorway of his next class. “There’s a nosy old lady lives next door. I think she might’ve still been out on her porch when I got home.”