The Falcon and the Snowman Read Online Free PDF Page B

eighteenth-century France who became his heroes.
    When Daulton came home from school one day during his junior year after a session with his counselor, his mother noticed that he seemed unhappy and asked if anything was bothering him; Daulton confessed he was having troubles with his college-prep classes, and said that he had admitted this to his counselor that morning before asking him for advice about a possible career in woodworking. He said the school official had ridiculed the idea:
    â€œYou live in Palos Verdes; you don’t work with your hands, you work with your brain.”
    Years later, Daulton still remembered this confrontation with bitterness:
    â€œHe couldn’t understand why somebody would want to work in a shop with all that sawdust and create a piece of art out of wood. That’s how I looked at it; it was an art. Louis the Fourteenth period pieces are some of the most highly prized furniture in the world.”
    Although his counselors insisted that Daulton was more than intelligent enough to be college material, school simply didn’t interest him. “Maybe I was bored; I knew the information was in the books if I really needed to know it,” Daulton said, looking back on his failed high school career. “I saw all those kids trying to get grades and saw the pressures from their parents; if I’d found a reason to pursue a different course I might have gotten involved with it, but I was just content to move out of high school and get started on something else.”
    As Dr. Lee continued to make more money, the family increasingly could afford to indulge a taste for fine art objects, which began to fill their home. Dr. and Mrs. Lee traveled frequently to Europe and the Far East, and they honed a taste for fine art initially acquired from her parents. Sharing the interest with their four children, they discussed it at meals, went as a family to inspect projected purchases and often took family outings to museums to see new exhibits. None of the children was more interested in the art—or in other material things of life—than Daulton. Listening carefully, he became more knowledgeable about his parents’ collection, and when new friends visited he gave them a tour of the home, explaining proudly the finer points of each item of Oriental art or other objet d’art.
    Daulton was not like the members of his generation who rejected the materialism of their parents. Indeed, he repeatedly told his brother and friends that when he was older he wanted to live exactly like his parents. In fact, Daulton had already found an enterprise that made him believe he could be just as wealthy as his father without having to work as hard.
    It was to bring him not only money, but a kind of power he had never imagined possible.
    Daulton was introduced to marijuana as a high school freshman, and before long, pot had become more than a Saturday-night substitute for a six-pack of beer. He began arriving late for midmorning classes, his eyes glazed—or not showing up at all; he became not only a user of pot but a proselytizer who eagerly solicited friends to drop by his home after school for a joint. After a year or so, he graduated to cocaine. He had discovered that a pinch of coke in a nostril was a marvelous psychic potion; it made him feel euphoric and eased the emptiness he felt about his size, his nagging failure to satisfy his father and a pain that increasingly weighed heavily on him—an inadequacy he felt with girls. Every doubt was exorcised—at least for a few hours—in the euphoria of self-confidence that the drugs yielded. After his first joint, Daulton was never the same again.
    â€œMaybe you could call us the idle rich,” Daulton would recall of those years later. “We weren’t opulent rich, but it was a group where you had all the money for everything you needed. Money wasn’t at the level of scrounging; you had money for cars, concerts, yet you