Final Exam (20 page)

Twenty-Nine

I wasn’t sure, but I thought I heard Crawford mutter, “I hate you,” while I was thanking the state trooper for his time.

We were in the car and trying to find an exit so that we could go south and head back to St. Thomas. I started to talk.

Crawford held up a hand. “Nope. Not a word. Not yet. Too soon.”

“What are you so mad about? It was your idea to run after him on the shoulder of the highway.” I unwrapped my sandwich and began to eat it again now that things had calmed down.

“It was your idea to go to the Brookwells,” he said, merging into the left lane and hitting eighty miles an hour. It appeared that he couldn’t drop me off fast enough.

“Interesting thing about you, Crawford: you’re always ‘in’ when it comes to these little capers until things go a little bit wrong. Then, it’s all my fault. Then, you’re completely ‘out.’ ”

He waited a beat. “You could have waited to tell me that when your mouth was empty.” He slowed down a bit. “Is that a piece of lettuce on my dashboard?”

I wiped the lettuce off with a napkin and threw the rest of my sandwich in the bag. “I’m not even hungry anymore.”

We drove to school in silence, both ruminating on the chain of events. After Crawford took off after Wayne on the shoulder, the trooper had arrived and I had had some explaining to do. When I told him that we were there to arrest one Wayne Brookwell, the trooper, initially dubious, took off after Crawford and Wayne, coming back with only Crawford. Wayne was in the weeds, a veritable Flash in a T-shirt and jeans. While Crawford discussed the situation with the trooper, I wisely kept my mouth shut, just as I had been instructed. The trooper was going to impound the Prius and put an APB on Wayne.

“What is Wayne so afraid of?” I said, not realizing I said it out loud. Crawford looked over at me. “It can’t just be Costas and Brandon. And if he had explained the situation to Merrimack and Etheridge, I’m sure this whole thing could have been worked out. What is this about?”

Crawford looked at me but I could tell he was thinking. At the same time, the two us said, “They were his drugs after all.”

I looked at my watch as we pulled onto campus and saw that Crawford and I had another two hours before visitation ended. Crawford was still ruminating on our conclusion. “Why don’t you come in and we can talk it through?” I said. He didn’t seem mad anymore and I hoped to entice him into coming in to do more than talk.

“I’ve got an idea,” he said, and got out of the car.

We went into the dorm, which was pretty quiet. I walked to the main area, leaving Crawford in my room, and checked in with the RA on duty: Spencer Williamson.

“Hi, Spence.” I perched on the edge of the desk and looked casually at the logbook. “Anything going on?” I signed Crawford into the logbook.

For a supposed stoner, Spencer’s desk sitting was far superior to any of the other buffoons who supposedly kept track of things in the dorm. He flipped through the logbook. “Not really. A couple of visitors but nothing too earth-shattering.”

I should hope not. “How’s Amanda?”

His pale face grew paler. “She’s having a tough time. She’s really scared.”

“If you see her, tell her that if she needs anything to come see me. Okay?”

He nodded. “Got it.”

I started off down the hall, turning back when I heard Spencer call after me.

“Any sign of Wayne?” he asked.

“Not a one,” I lied.

He made a little sound. “Too bad,” I heard him mutter.

I didn’t know what that meant and didn’t feel like asking. I returned to my room, where Crawford was searching the contents of my medicine cabinet; Trixie was on my bed, a place she wasn’t supposed to be. He didn’t turn around when I came into the bathroom.

“You’ve got a lot of lipstick,” he commented.

“You’ve got a lot of tube socks,” I said. “But, unlike you, I thought it rude to say anything about it.”

He jiggled the medicine cabinet, held to the wall by two flimsy screws. “Got a screwdriver?”

I left the room and opened up the nightstand drawer and went back into the bathroom. “Next best thing: a butter knife.” I handed it to Crawford and watched him pull the medicine cabinet away from the wall. “What are you doing?” It finally occurred to me to ask him what his plan was.

“Looking for drugs.”

“But the police already searched the room. You were here. You saw them,” I said.

“It was the end of the tour,” he said and smirked, implying that a thorough job may not have been their top priority.

“Ahhh,” I said. “Let me help. Where should I start?”

He turned around and pointed to the French doors. “Open them up and go into the parlor. Dig around in the dusty bookcases.” He stuck his hand into the opening where the medicine cabinet had been mounted and dug around, coming up empty. “Nothing in there.”

I went into the parlor and pulled down the old books that were in the bookcases, looking for secret trapdoors or fake books that might hold more drugs. When I was done with that and had discovered nothing, I sat down on the moldy settee. “Nothing there.”

Crawford came into the parlor and got down on his hands and knees, searching under the settee and the one old chair, getting progressively dirtier in the process. “Hit the closet,” he commanded, crawling around on the floor, feeling floorboards and pushing on the ends of the tongue-and-groove hardwood floor.

I went into the closet and took out all of my clothes, feeling along the back of it for anything out of place. I stepped into a spiderweb that coated my face with a thick mask of silk. I stumbled back out of the closet, pawing at my face and groaning. I fake-spat a few times to get the taste of it out of my mouth. I took the opportunity to wash my face and engage Crawford in conversation. This type of sleuthing was definitely not high on my list of the things I like to do; it produced more than a little dirt and definitely made us both sweaty.

“What’s the word on Fred?” I asked, sitting on the parlor chair, watching Crawford carefully go over floorboards.

“He’s as cranky as ever. Apparently, he and Max have been speaking to each other and are trying to figure out what they’re going to do with their relationship.”

“Very mature. How much of it do you buy?”

“Some of it,” he said.

“You know what I think?”

He grunted in response. He knew he was going to find out regardless of whether or not he wanted to hear it.

“I think the fact that they were never really married is going to send Max straight back to him. Because she loves nothing more than a challenge.”

“How so?”

“When she had him, she didn’t want him. Now that she doesn’t have him legally, she’ll want him.” I wiped my face again, sensing cobweb on the tip of my nose. “You can take that to the bank. Or OTB. Or wherever you take sure bets.”

Crawford ignored me and threw back the faded Oriental rug, revealing clean and unblemished floorboards that had been covered for years. He continued his methodical crawling-pushing-prying reconnaissance, finally hitting on something. I watched as a board gave beneath his hand and came up on the other side, like a seesaw on which someone heavy had just sat. “Eureka,” he said softly. He continued working on the board until it came out loose from the other boards around it and then took off another, and then another, until he had a square big enough to stick his hand into. He reached in and rooted around, his eyes on me the whole time. I could tell he had hit something when he smiled. “Gotcha.”

“Whatcha got, Crawford?” I asked, almost afraid of the answer.

He pulled out a large Ziploc bag, the one that’s advertised on television as big enough to hold soccer equipment, sleeping bags, and the kitchen sink. The mother of all Ziploc bags. And inside of it was a host of smaller Ziploc bags, the ones my mother used to use to bag up a snack of pretzels or carrot sticks for me when I was in school.

But these smaller Ziploc bags didn’t hold pretzels or carrot sticks.

What was inside was grainy, green, and mossy looking.

Crawford had unearthed the biggest bag of little pot bags I had ever seen.

He, however, did not look impressed.

Thirty

Lattanzi and Marcus had already left for the day, so we got Carmen Montoya—an old colleague of Crawford’s from Homicide who had recently gotten promoted to sergeant in Bronx Narcotics—and her sidekick, John Gorman. Gorman was a jovial fellow who didn’t seem to be the least bit intimidated by Carmen and her gun-moll, rapid-fire speech. He looked at the pot and whistled through his teeth.

“Whaddya think, Carmen? A couple of thou in there?” Gorman opened one of the bags and took a deep sniff. “Smells like primo stuff.”

“You think?” Carmen asked, her sizable backside packed into a pair of skinny jeans, the pockets almost on each hip they were spread so far apart. Her leopard-print platform shoes completed the outfit. “Whose stash, handsome?”

Carmen pretends to have a thing for Crawford, if only to make him uncomfortable. She’s got four kids and a deputy inspector husband so I didn’t have any misconceptions that she was after my boyfriend.

Crawford, as usual, blushed deep red. “If I had to make a guess, I’d say this was Wayne’s.” He had already filled them in on the situation, starting with Wayne’s disappearance and my move to campus, and ending with the hundred-meter dash alongside the Hutch. “I’m guessing that you didn’t find anything else?” Carmen asked. “I’m going to get on Lattanzi and Marcus for letting this one get away the first time.” She turned away and coughed the word “morons” into her hand. “You find a big brick of heroin and you don’t find the trap with the pot? What a pair of losers.”

Crawford shook his head. “Nothing else in here. Took the place apart. There’s nothing.”

“Wanna work in my squad?” Carmen asked. She was ticked. I felt sorry for Lattanzi and Marcus when she got through with them.

Trixie sat dutifully at my side, knowing something important was taking place. I leaned down and petted her head.

“Nice dog, Alison,” Carmen said. “I’m surprised they let you bring her on campus.”

“It wasn’t even a discussion,” I said.

“What would they say if you took two of my kids? They’re not as well behaved as the dog, but I sure could use a break from them,” she said.

“That might be a problem,” I said, smiling. I had had several encounters with Carmen over the past few months and while I had originally found her intimidating, I had grown to like her. I was still a little scared of her, but not as much as before.

“That’s why we go to work. Gotta get away from the kids,” Gorman said. He hefted the marijuana bag and started for the door. “Ready, Carm?”

“Whatever you say,” she said. She looked at me. “Men. So bossy.” She reached up and pinched Crawford’s cheek. “I’ll see
you
later.”

Crawford bid them good-bye and went into the bathroom to put the medicine cabinet back. When he was done, he washed up in the sink. “I think those are Wayne’s drugs.”

“Me, too.” I sat down on the toilet seat. “Who’s going to break the news to Mary that her charming nephew was a dealer?”

Crawford blanched at the thought of Mary; she, and every other nun I worked with, really wigged him out. “Not me.”

“No, seriously. How’s this going to play out?”

He wiped his hands on the towel hanging next to the sink. “First, we find Wayne. Or Gorman does. If anyone can sniff him out, he can. He’s relentless like that. Then, we question the heck out of him. Then, we probably arrest him for running a smalltime drug ring out of his dorm room.”

That didn’t sound good. For the first time, instead of being angry at Wayne, I was scared for him. He didn’t seem like the kind of kid who could handle hard time, what with his upper-class background and his seeming lack of any kind of street smarts. I then reflected on the fact that he had had more heroin in the toilet than most big-time drug dealers had at their disposal at one time and that he had been keeping most of the campus high, or so it seemed. That was a crapload of pot.

“You’ll let Pinto know?” I asked. Crawford nodded, looking more tired than I had ever seen him look. The bags under his eyes seemed to have increased in size since he had picked me up and he looked like he was about to collapse. I wrapped my arms around him. “Go home.”

“I wish I could lie down here and go to sleep for two days.”

“If you lie down here, I’d never let you sleep. You know that,” I said, gently pushing him toward the door. I looked at the clock next to my bed. “And it’s a few minutes until visitation ends. Not even enough time for you to take a catnap.”

I walked him down the hall and out through the main entrance so that Spencer Williamson could log him out. I gave him a chaste kiss on the lips before sending him on his way. “Talk to you tomorrow,” I said and waved as he walked across the parking lot to his car. I turned and went back to Spencer. “You okay here if I call it a night?”

Spencer looked up from his biology homework and gave me a nod. “What’s going on?” he asked, hooking a thumb toward my room.

“Oh, that,” I said nonchalantly. Montoya and Gorman had sneaked in through the side entrance and had been very stealthy about leaving, pot in hand, without being seen. But apparently Spencer had seen something. “Just a couple of friends who dropped by.” I picked up the logbook and flipped through it casually. “I should really sign them in.” I jotted down two names: Giselle St. Louis, my mother’s name, and Frank Martin, the name of my first boyfriend. Nobody would be the wiser.

Before I put the logbook down, curiosity got the best of me, and as I flipped through it, I looked at it a little more closely. I saw that Mary Catherine Donnery had logged in at seven and was three minutes away from breaking visitation. I also saw that Amanda had a visitor named Brandon Tsagarakis and he, too, would be in big trouble if he didn’t get his butt down the stairs and out the door before eleven. They were the only two visitors left in the building

I had a thought. I wanted to get a good look at Mr. Tsagarakis before he left the building and I wanted to make sure Mary Catherine hightailed it out of there, too. “Hey, Spencer, why don’t you go ahead and take off.”

He gave me a surprised look. “Really?”

“Really. I’ll lock up,” I said.

He gathered up his books quickly, as though if I had time to think, I would change my mind. “Good night then,” he said.

I watched him go up the stairs and I walked down the hallway to turn off the lights in the TV room and the parlor room across from it. I locked the door to the patio, which Spencer had left open. I put out the overhead lights and read the paper that Spencer had left, the lamp on the desk giving off a soft glow.

Mary Catherine was the first one to descend into the lobby, giving me an overly enthusiastic “Hi!”

“Hi, Mary Catherine,” I said, and pointed at my watch. “Just made it.”

“Any news on Wayne?” she asked, doing a deliberate subject change.

I shook my head. “I wish I could say there was but there’s nothing.” I looked at her closely and could tell she knew more than she was telling. “Have you heard anything?”

She pulled a chair up to my desk and leaned across it, whispering conspiratorially. “Well, I heard that he was living in the convent. Can you believe that?”

“Really?” I said. “What else?”

“Just that he’s been seen around campus.”

“By whom?”

She smirked. “Professor Bergeron, I think it’s ‘by who.’ ”

Well, she had me on that one. Or so she thought. I decided not to pursue it. “By who?” I asked, cringing.

“By a lot of people. Spencer Williamson, for one.”

“Yes, Spencer told me that he saw Wayne leaving before spring break. In his Prius.”

“No, after that.”

“Really? When?” I asked.

“He ‘saw’ him a few times,” she said using finger quotes.

What does that even mean? Did he see him or not? “What does that mean, Mary Catherine?”

She squirmed around in her chair. “
Saw
him saw him.” When it was clear I didn’t understand, she put her index finger and thumb together and brought them to her lips, pretending to inhale. “Got it?”

Oh, Spencer. And I was defending you against the pothead accusations. You let me down, you crazy, anime-drawing stoner. “So Wayne was his dealer?”

“Big-time,” she said. She sat back in her chair and crossed her arms, staring at me defiantly. “So what do I get?”

“What do you
get
?” I repeated.

“Yeah, do I get an A the next time I take a class with you or extra visitation?”

She was serious. “Well, I could arrange to get you a merit badge or a special mention at graduation for giving up a campus drug dealer, but that’s about it. Or I could tell the cops where I got this information and they could come to your dorm room and question you further.” I smiled, folding my hands on the desk. “What will it be?”

She went pale. “Forget it.” She jumped up and ran out the front door, adequately spooked.

As the front door slammed, I called out, “Good night!”

Once she was gone, I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and gave Crawford a quick call, letting him know what Mary Catherine had told me. After I hung up from him, I checked to see if I had any messages, particularly from Max. A face in silhouette greeted me on the screen, the mouth open, telling me that I had three messages. That face always reminded me of Max, screaming at me for one thing or another. I prayed that one of the messages was from Max and my prayer was answered.

“I’m not mad at you, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

I listened, not believing what I was hearing.

“I forgive you,” she continued dramatically. “You were very, very mean to me but I have chosen to take the high road and forgive you for everything you said to me the other night.”

I felt my face turn bright red, the heat probably visible coming out of the top of my head.

“And being not married is the best thing that ever happened to me! I’m moving back home this weekend.”

“I knew it!” I screamed in the empty lobby, my voice reverberating off the tile and marble and probably traveling all the way up to Kevin’s sixth-floor lair. I got up and paced around the lobby muttering, “I knew it, I knew it, I knew it . . .” until I realized that I wasn’t alone. I turned around and came face-to-face with Amanda and her boyfriend, Brandon, who upon closer inspection was extremely handsome, all dark, wavy hair and brown eyes that were almost black.

“Professor Bergeron, this is my boyfriend, Brandon,” Amanda said, pointing at the young man.

“Fiancé,” he corrected her. He held his hand out. “Nice to meet you.”

“You, too,” I said. I didn’t want to remind him that we had sort of met once before. The whole “Unhand her!” debacle. He didn’t seem to remember so I wasn’t going to bring it up. “Hey, you’re a little late. Could I get you to sign out?” I asked.

Brandon walked over to the desk and signed his name in the logbook. “Sorry about that. I was worried about Amanda so I drove up here to check on her.” He grabbed both of my hands in a really old-school gesture and held them tight. “Take care of her, Professor Bergeron. She means everything to me.”

Oh, please, I thought. That was a little dramatic, no? But I played the part of the dutiful resident director and assured him that nothing bad would happen to her on my watch. After I got lost in his dreamy brown eyes for a few seconds. “I promise,” I said, and shepherded him to the front door. Amanda followed and the two shared a cautious embrace probably because she was still tender from her beating at the hands of the two thugs. I opened the door and ushered him out. “Nice to meet you,” I called after him.

“My pleasure,” he said, and walked over to the same black Lincoln Town Car that I had seen him in a few days prior. Interesting car choice for a hip young guy, I thought.

Because you usually only see those kinds of cars in limousine-company fleets.

Limousine companies like the one Wayne Brookwell used to drive for before he went missing.