Chapter 58 Chapter Twenty-Four

I have now outlined that painful experience in considerable detail.By the time I arrived at Beardsley in that mood, I had formed a complete image in my mind, and had - always risked - culled it down to morbid thinking and dullness. The only concrete source that memory can give it. Apart from the Reverend Regal Mortis (as the girls called him) and an old gentleman who taught the optional German and Latin subjects, there were no formal male teachers at Beardsley School.Only twice has an art teacher at Beardsley College come into school to show female students a slideshow of pictures of French castles and nineteenth-century paintings.I had wanted to go and see the slideshow pictures and hear the explanation, but Lori, as she always did, begged me not to go, that's all.I remember Gaston once referring to this teacher as a gargon of great talent; but that was all.I cannot recall the name of this castle lover.

On the day I decided to take action, I walked across campus in freezing rain to the information desk in Maker Hall, Beardsley College.There I found out the guy's name was Riggs (like the clergyman's), and he was a bachelor, and he was having a class at the "art gallery," and he'd be out of there in ten minutes.In the aisle leading to the auditorium, I grew up in a rough marble!Up and down" This bench was donated by Cecilia Dalrymple Rumble. I felt sick in the piss, drunk and very sleepy, and sat there waiting, with my gun in my raincoat pocket, tight in my hand; and it occurred to me at this moment that I was really mad and about to do something stupid. Assistant Professor Albert "Riggs was going to hide my Lolita in his Beardslip In the house at 24 Richard Street, that possibility was almost nonexistent.He couldn't be the villain.This is ridiculous.Not only was I wasting time, but I was also losing my mind.He and she are in California, not here at all.

Soon I noticed a faint commotion behind some white statues.A door—not the one I'd been staring at—slid open, and a bald head with bright brown eyes loomed forward among a group of schoolgirls. He was a complete stranger to me, yet he insisted that we had met at a Beardsley Middle School open-air reception.How is my lovely daughter who plays tennis?He still has a class and will come to me after class. Another identification effort wasn't resolved so quickly: With an ad in one of Lowe's magazines, I ventured into contact with a private investigator who was a former boxer.I acquainted him a little with the methods of the fiend, and then told him the names and addresses of the sort I had collected.He demanded a handsome deposit for two years—two years, reader! — the idiot is too busy scrutinizing nonsense material.I had long since severed all financial relations with him, but one day he came triumphantly and told me about an eighty-year-old Indian named Bill Brown who lived near Dolores, Colorado.