Page 49 of What Boys Learn

“Why’d you stop at home?”

“I wanted to drop my bike. I didn’t want to leave it outside Izzy’s house.”

“You were worried about theft outside Izzy’s house? She lives on a pretty posh block. And I’m sure they would have had room in their four-car—six-car?—garage.”

“I didn’t say I was worried about theft. I just didn’t want to be the asshole pulling up on a bike.”

“Fair,” Hernández said.

I was still doubting, though. Why wouldIhave stopped home at his age if someone cute had just asked me over? Probably to change into better clothes, fix my hair. Take a shower. But he was just at the pool. He already took a shower. Body spray? A fresh shave?

“So you go to Izzy’s house,” Hernández reminded him, “hoping to hook up.”

Benjamin nodded. “We started making out, but she kept stopping to check her texts—a bunch from friends who already knew about her party and were coming that night, but she had somewhere to go first. She was going to meet the older guy at the motel.”

“In the middle of the afternoon.”

“Yeah. So?”

“Then what?” Hernández said.

“Then we started talking some more about the guy, and I made a crack about sexual diseases, and how if she and I were ever going to have sex, better now than later, because I didn’t want to sleep with someone after she slept with lots of guys, but especially some older pervert.”

“Go on.”

“She said, ‘He hasn’t had sex in years, I know it for a fact. I’d be his first since he got out.’ And I really thought she was pulling my leg.Got out?As in, prison? The whole thing was a joke. I said, ‘First, I don’t think you’re going. Second, if you did, even your friends would think you were a skank. Sidney will never talk to you again.’ And she said, ‘Sid’s the one who introduced us.’ But I could tell I hit a nerve, that Sid didn’t like him. Not that way.”

“You’re saying the person who met with Isabella Scarlatti also knew Sidney Mayfield.”

“Yes!” Benjamin said, and now he was angry, his face flushed.

“And you think Izzy was willing to have sex with him but Sid wasn’t.”

“Yes.”

“But you’ve got it backward, my friend,” Hernández said. “If the ‘older’ guy even exists. Because someone did have sex with Sidney just before she died.”

Benjamin twitched in surprise. He didn’t know what I knew about Sidney—what Robert had already told me.

“No,” he said.

“No?”

“No,” Benjamin said again. “That’s not what Sidney’s like. She wouldn’t just have sex with some random guy.”

“Medical examiner differs on that point.”

“Then he must have talked her into it, or made her do it.”

For the first time, he looked shaken.

Hernández said, “So, back to you and Izzy in her house. She says she’s not interested in you at this point in your conversation. Or she never was. And then what?”

“I went home.”

“Did you ever wonder why she invited you to her house if she didn’t really want to have sex with you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”