Final Exam (18 page)

Twenty-Five

I woke up in Crawford’s bed, his eyes trained on me. I sat up, startled. “Have you been staring at me the whole night?”

He stretched out. “Not the whole night.”

“Okay, that’s creepy,” I said and sat up. I was really cranky. “You know who stare at people when they sleep? Serial killers, that’s who. Crazy people. Dogs. Dogs stare at people when they sleep.”

“Are you having some kind of breakdown?” he asked, completely serious. He looked at me with concern.

“No, I’m not having a breakdown.” I put my feet on the floor and dropped my head into my hands. “This has been a terrible week.”

“I thought you told me that you were enjoying the whole campus thing.” Crawford is extremely literal and doesn’t shift gears easily.

I stood. “Well, I was until an innocent, lovelorn girl got mixed up in something she has no business being involved in.”

Crawford adjusted his pillows so that he was half sitting up. “I noticed that we didn’t hear any mention of the boyfriend at the hospital last night, but we did hear her ask for Wayne several hundred times.”

“Yeah, and did you notice how the dad got angry every time she brought him up?”

Crawford nodded. “He’s not a big fan of Wayne’s.” He knew he was stating the obvious. “By the way, who was the stoned-looking kid with the blond hair?”

“Spencer Williamson. Methinks that he, too, carries a torch for dear Amanda.”

“Really?”

I yawned. “Really. It’s nice to know that men can see past the outdated glasses and the Princeton sweatshirt to the beauty that resides underneath.” I stretched my arms up and changed the subject. “How mad do you think Max is at me?” I asked.

Crawford’s look said it all.

“Kevin?”

“I think you’re in better stead with Fr. McManus.”

“Fred?”

“I only know when Fred’s hungry or tired. We don’t delve into our emotions very often,” he said.

“But he must have said something to you.”

“The only thing he asked me is if killing Fr. McManus would be considered justifiable homicide.” Crawford rolled out of bed and stretched; if I had to guess, I’d say his arm span was longer than his entire body. “I’m guessing you’ll want to get back to campus soon.”

He guessed wrong. I never wanted to go back there, but I had to at some point, at least to retrieve Trixie from Kevin. I figured it was the least he could do: he could watch my dog while I went to the hospital to see one of my charges. He had looked like he wanted to object to the request, but when he saw the expression on my face, he relented and took the dog up to his apartment on the top floor, my admonition to walk her before bedtime reverberating in the stairwell.

Crawford and I had spent a couple of hours at the hospital, and when it was clear that Amanda was in good hands and that her parents were there, we had left, stopping on the way home to have a drink at a little local bar in his neighborhood to take the edge off the evening. While we sipped our drinks, Crawford had told me what he had learned: Amanda said she had been picked up after her babysitting job by two men in a black car, driven down to a remote spot by the river and questioned about the whereabouts of the heroin. When she professed her ignorance about its origins or where it had gone in the meantime, they roughed her up, but not seriously. It seemed that they were hell-bent on scaring the bejesus out of her and had succeeded. When they determined that she didn’t have anything to contribute, they had bound her, broken into my room, and stuffed her into my closet. Why in my room was anyone’s guess. She had been in there for a few hours, scared out of her wits, vomiting intermittently from shock.

And not one person on campus, a security guard, the person who was supposed to be at the desk—one Michael Columbo—or a passing student had seen anything. That part of it frightened me more than anything. I would have to speak to Merrimack about that because if the last few years were any indication of the level of safety on the beautiful, bucolic campus, enrollments were going to drop dramatically.

“I want to go home,” I said to Crawford. He made a sad face like I had just admitted that I was longing for home. “I need to pick up a few things.” I wasn’t having a Dorothy in Oz moment; I needed to find my black bra just in case I needed it for the week.

“I have to get the girls,” he said.

I knew that. That was the Saturday drill: drive to Connecticut, pick up the twins, bring them back to the city, drive them back to Connecticut the next day, go to work on Monday. It was the rare emergency that disrupted the plan.

“Can I get you back into bed for fifteen minutes?” he asked.

“You need fifteen minutes?” I asked, incredulous.

He shook his head and smiled. “No. But you do,” he said, and pulled me back under the comforter.

Fourteen minutes and thirty-eight seconds later, I was out of bed and in the shower. Crawford, exhausted from his week—or from the last fourteen minutes and thirty-eight seconds—was sitting on the bed trying to figure out the best way to handle our travel arrangements, what with me needing to go northwest and him needing to go northeast.

“I’ll drop you off,” he said after a few minutes.

“It’s out of your way,” I protested, even though dropping me off at school was a heck of lot easier than dropping me off at home.

“I’ll drop you off,” he repeated in a way that told me that the discussion was over.

So, he dropped me off. Who was I to argue? My goal was to get into my car and out of there as quickly as possible so that I wouldn’t have to answer any questions about what had happened to Amanda; I needed a day away to get an idea of how I was going to explain to the kids in the dorm what had happened to her. I also didn’t want to have to do due diligence with anyone in the St. Thomas administration just yet. I turned to Crawford and gave him a quick peck, and ran over to my car, which was parked in the space next to where he had pulled in. The coast was clear for the moment and I wanted to make my getaway without being accosted by any nosy students or even nosier administrators. I got into the car and started it, throwing it into reverse. The car didn’t move.

Crawford was still in his car in the parking lot and looked over at me. Although I had my foot on the accelerator and was attempting to back out of the spot, the car was not in motion, instead making a grinding noise accompanied by a whining of the engine. Crawford jumped out of his car and put his hand up, giving me the signal to stop accelerating. I took my foot off the gas. I watched as he walked around the car and looked down at the front passenger side tire. He looked up at me and I knew that there was a problem.

The windows were closed. He mouthed the word “boot.”

“Boot?” I repeated to myself. It took a minute for the realization to dawn on me. “Boot?” I said again, this time much angrier. “Those bastards,” I muttered, and got out of the car to see for myself. Indeed, there was a boot on the front tire of my car that was going to prohibit my going anywhere for a while. I put my hands on my hips and looked at Crawford and told him the whole story of how because I now lived on campus, I was supposed to park a half mile away. I looked at him pleadingly, hoping he would take pity on me and either help me figure out a way to get the boot off or drive me all the way home. I knew neither was an option, given his schedule for the day.

“I’m late,” he said regretfully, knowing that driving me the fifteen miles north to Dobbs Ferry was out of the question. “Can I drop you at the train?” he asked. He took my hand and led me back to his car. Once we were inside and on our way off campus, I let loose with a torrent of curse words I didn’t even know I knew. I gave the finger to Joe, who was sitting the guard booth, but my hand was below the window and he wouldn’t be able to see it. But I knew that I had done it and that was all that mattered.

“Did you just give your stomach the finger?” Crawford asked.

I didn’t answer, still incapable of uttering a sentence that didn’t have at least one or two multihyphenated curses in it.

“I promise you that as soon as I get back to work on Monday, I’ll help you get that boot off the car.” He turned onto the avenue. “A guy in Transit owes me and I’ll give him a call.”

“Those dirty bastards,” I said. I sat in silence all the way to the station, at a loss for words.

Crawford pulled up close to the platform. “What time is the train?”

“I don’t know!” I said, frustrated by the whole situation. Saturday trains ran infrequently so I could be sitting there for the better part of an hour if I had just missed the last local train.

“Do you want me to wait with you?” he asked, hoping against hope that I would say no.

I knew how much his weekly visits with the girls meant for him and wouldn’t cut into his time. I took a deep breath to calm down. “No,” I said. I leaned in and gave him a kiss. “Thanks. Have a good afternoon.”

He promised to call me after dinner and gave me a final wave before driving off. I walked up to the platform and sat on the cement bench, staring out at the river and considering what had occurred over the past week and what, exactly, I knew.

The drugs weren’t Wayne’s.

And they weren’t Amanda’s.

But they were someone’s and that someone was either the two goons or someone who had sent the two goons and who wanted to scare Amanda enough to have her tell them where they went, a fact that she didn’t know.

I thought about the Wayne-Amanda-Brandon love triangle. I could understand why Brandon, her fiancé from Princeton, wanted to kill Wayne, but Costas? What was his stake in this? Did he see Brandon as more of a “catch” because of the Greek thing and the fact that Brandon stood to inherit the family business? Was that enough to try and kill someone? Or was it something else? Next time I saw Amanda, I wanted a little bit more information on Mr. Princeton and what his relation to her father was, if any. That whole part of the story confused me more than anything.

I rubbed my temples, trying to force myself to think more clearly. I thought about Max and realized that I had been very hard on her. One side of my brain screamed, “She always abandons you when the going gets rough and you have every right to be mad!” while the other cautioned, “She’s going through a very difficult time.” Both sides were right but it didn’t excuse my behavior. I had been exceedingly hard on her and I had to make amends. Right after I went home and collected my black bra.

I didn’t have to wait too long for the train; it arrived within fifteen minutes of Crawford dropping me off. I got off at the Dobbs Ferry station—another fifteen minutes down the train line—and began my trek up the hill toward my street. While I was walking, I left Kevin a message to keep Trixie for another couple of hours and to make sure she got water, she got walked, and that he gave her ample love. I was ready to make things better with Max, but when it came to Kevin, I was still incensed. I used to love Kevin’s flouting of church rules—it assuaged some of my lapsed-Catholic guilt—but now that his lack of respect for the rules and regulations was affecting me personally—albeit tangentially—I was ready to flog him. I was glad that he didn’t answer the phone when I left him my message because I was more incensed with him than I think I had ever been at one person and I needed what Crawford referred to as a “cooling-off period.”

Smart man, that Detective Hot Pants.

I approached the house and despite the grass needing to be cut—a chore that I had hired out to the kid across the street—everything looked like it had when I left the weekend before. The block was quiet so I got up the front walk without running into anyone—my neighbor Jane appeared to be out, and she was really the only person I wanted to see. Being a single woman with no children left me out of many personal interactions in my neighborhood.

Max wasn’t home, either, and I was instantly relieved. It seemed like she had left every single window in the house open but even the cool air wafting in and out, rustling the curtains, couldn’t mask the smell of paint that assaulted my nasal passages as I entered the downstairs hallway. I sniffed suspiciously, looking around. The living room looked the same and the dining room, having been painted just a few short weeks earlier, was still the same color. A trip to the kitchen confirmed that it was still the outdated robin’s-egg blue that it had been when I left.

I ran up the stairs to the second floor of the house. The hallway was the same fingerprint-stained beige. Curiously, my bedroom door was closed when I reached the top of the stairs and as I stopped on the landing, trying to catch my breath and prepare myself for what awaited me on the other side, my mind flashed back to the can of paint that had been sitting on my counter the previous weekend.

Million Dollar Red.

I grabbed my stomach and bent in two, breathing deeply, muttering, “Max, what have you done?” to myself.

I opened the bedroom door, my fears confirmed.

My bedroom, once a soothing ecru color with white trim was now Million Dollar Red. Floor to ceiling. With black trim. It was an assault to the senses and I knew at once that I would never be able to sleep in a color so jarring, so bright, so . . . tacky. My room looked like a New Orleans bordello and I wasn’t going to be happy until it was back to the way it was.

Which, obviously, would take two coats of primer followed by three coats of paint.

Any goodwill I had toward Max evaporated. If I had felt guilty about being angry at her before, I now wanted to kill her with my bare hands.

Twenty-Six

I was still seething that evening, safely ensconced in my room and lying on my bed, when Crawford called. I had picked Trixie up from Kevin, neither I nor my once-favorite priest exchanging a word during the handoff.

I was losing best friends faster than someone losing weight on the Atkins diet.

“We picked up one of the guys who roughed up Amanda,” he said. I knew that by “we,” he didn’t mean himself or Fred personally, but rather someone in the extended NYPD family.

I sat up. “You did?” My tale of woe would have to wait.

“Yep. Some two-bit idiot from the Newark area. Amanda, amazingly, got a look at the plate of the car and gave us a partial. The Newark cops got a tip, too. It all went very quickly and smoothly.”

“That’s great,” I said, although it was the kind of good news that comes with strings attached. Good news that they caught one of the guys; bad news because of the nature of his deeds. I was sorry we were having this conversation at all.

Trixie could tell something important was happening and came from her usual sleeping area in the little parlor room to the edge of the bed, resting her head on the mattress near my feet.

“He’s not giving anything up, though,” he said. “But he’ll crack. They always do.”

And not without a little help, I thought. But I didn’t care. They could treat him like a suspected terrorist at Guantánamo Bay, if they wanted. I wanted him to tell the cops what he knew, who was involved, and why they had taken their aggression out on an innocent girl who suffered from the familiar and common problem of having bad taste in men. “Well, let me know if you find out anything,” I said.

“You sound down.”

I thought about going into detail on the whole painted-bedroom story but decided against it. In the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t such a big deal. It just happened to be the icing on the cake for one of the most interesting and annoying weeks of my life. And I still had a healthy dose of guilt from my outburst at Max that was managing to creep in and add to my depression. “No,” I said. “I’m fine.” I attempted to shake off my mood and sound upbeat.

“You want me to come get you?” he asked. “The girls and I need dinner and we could just as easily eat in your neighborhood as mine.”

He was being kind. Coming back up to St. Thomas and having dinner with me in my present mood was not going to be enjoyable for anyone. And it wasn’t as easy as it sounded with the New York City traffic getting started at this hour. “No, Crawford, I’m fine,” I reassured him. “Call me tomorrow.”

I resumed my prone position, staring up at the cracked ceiling, moody and sullen. Finally, I decided that I had had enough and put Trixie on her leash, taking her outside for an early evening walk.

We headed down to the river where I took her off her leash and let her frolic in the sand and the little whitecaps that floated to shore, the foam dripping off her face after a few moments. I sat on a rock and watched her, wiping her chin off with my sleeve when she came over to give me a kiss. Whatever problem I was having, being with my dog made it all go away. I kissed Trixie on the nose and rubbed her belly.

We lasted until the sun had set and dusk had fallen on campus. I put her on the leash and walked back up to the main part of campus, the buildings silhouetted against the darkening sky.

I went to the parking lot of Siena and stood by my car, ruminating on the boot on the passenger’s side tire. The parking lot was quiet and I was surprised when a car pulled up beside me, the Reese/Grigoriadis family revealed to be behind its tinted windows.

Costas got out of the car and came around to open the back door on my side, giving me a curt nod as a greeting. Amanda slid out of the back seat, her face still bruised, but otherwise looking the same as she always did—a little unkempt but adorable nonetheless. She had on what looked to be replacement glasses—these were more fashionable with a small tortoiseshell frame that didn’t dwarf her face. She looked at me and then surprised me by coming over and throwing her arms around me. In the little space of light afforded by the open back door, I could see the back of a perfectly coiffed head, black hair pulled back into a sleek ponytail secured by a jeweled barrette.

“Say good-bye to your mother,” Costas said to Amanda.

Amanda pulled away from me and leaned into the car, putting her hand on her mother’s shoulder. Her mother turned and kissed Amanda’s hand, and I caught a glimpse of her blotchy, tearstained face.

“You’d better take care of my daughter.” Amanda’s father shook his finger in my direction. “If it were up to me, I’d pack up her room and get her out of this place.” He looked over at the Siena dorm in disgust. “Her mother is beside herself.”

I looked at Amanda who was studying the pavement during her father’s minitirade.

“I’ll do my best, Mr. Grigoriadis.” I put my arm around Amanda’s shoulder and led her toward the side door.

“You’d better do better than your best,” he sputtered, and went back around to the front of the car.

I wasn’t sure that was possible but I didn’t want to get into a semantics discussion with him. Amanda and I went in through the side door and stood in front of the door to my room. “Amanda, what can I do to help you?”

She burst out crying. “I’m not sure. I’m so confused!” she wailed.

I leaned against the doorjamb. “Do you want to come in?”

“I just want to go back to my room and go to sleep and forget this ever happened,” she said. She closed her eyes and shuddered.

“Detective Crawford told me that they got one of the suspects,” I said, thinking that I probably shouldn’t have shared that after I blurted it out.

“Really?”

“Yes. Hopefully, he’ll point them in the right direction.” I opened the door to my room. “Sure you don’t want to come in?”

She shook her head. “No. I’m just going to go back to my room. Brandon wanted me to call him the minute I got back.”

Something about that statement riled me a bit. The minute she got back? Was it a trust issue or was he that concerned? After seeing his behavior in the parking lot a few days back and knowing that Costas preferred him to Wayne, I got to thinking that young Princetonian Brandon may have had the Costas possessiveness gene. I thought about giving Amanda some advice along the lines of “ditch the guy,” but I decided to keep my mouth shut. For one thing, I knew nothing about Brandon—or Costas, for that matter.

And for another, she was no longer standing in front of me in the hallway, having started down the hall, stopping briefly to chat with Spencer Williamson.

“Thanks for coming to the hospital last night,” I heard her say.

I watched his cheeks flush red and thought, There’s a boy with a serious crush. Miss Amanda Reese certainly attracted all kinds: Princeton boy, slack-jawed Wayne, and now, anime-producing Spencer Williamson. Looked to me like she had herself a nice love quadrangle in the works.

I went into my room and returned to my prone position on the bed after retrieving my cell phone from my messenger bag. I dialed Max’s number; instead of hearing her greeting, I was put straight to voice mail. I didn’t bother leaving a message because, wisely, I realized that that would just exacerbate things. Oh, so that’s how we’re going to play it, I thought. You think
you’re
mad? I only called you selfish. I didn’t paint your bedroom bordello red.

I decided to make one more call. The phone was picked up on the sixth ring, just as I was about to give up. The voice had its usual terse timbre.

“Hi, Mary. Listen, you’re either with me or against me on this one, so what’s it going to be?” I was emboldened by crankiness and nothing more.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, dear.”

“I think you do. Do you want to help me find who put that nephew of yours in this precarious situation or not? Because, frankly, I’m getting sick of living in this hellhole, in spite of its proximity to my office.” I took a deep breath. “So what’s it going to be?”

“It’s not going to be anything, dear.”

I sat and stared at the ceiling, waiting for her to continue. When she did, she stated something that I already knew.

“I’m afraid Wayne has left campus and I don’t know where he’s gone.”

“That’s obvious, Mary. Where did he go?”

“If I knew, would I be this upset?” she asked, a catch in her throat.

Probably not. “Where did he go?” I asked, not responding to her question. “His parents’ house? Somewhere else?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “And I’ve been keeping the fact that he’s in trouble from my sister and her husband.”

“They still don’t know what’s going on?”

She got defensive. “Wayne asked me not to tell them and I’m going to respect his wishes.”

I decided not to go any further with the conversation because Mary was stonewalling and I didn’t have the energy. I bid her a good night and hung up, thinking about how I was going to spin this whole thing to Etheridge and Merrimack, who I was convinced had a dart board with my picture on it.