Final Exam (4 page)

He leaned over and stretched out, ending up on his right side, his left arm disappearing into the gaping hole of the upended toilet. He came out with a Ziploc bag filled with something that I knew wasn’t Mrs. Brookwell’s famous home-grown tea.

He looked up at me. “Call Fred.”

Five

“I don’t do floaters and I don’t do toilets.”

I hadn’t seen Fred since he and Max split and I saw that his mood hadn’t improved during that time. I knew that he didn’t do floaters; Crawford was quite verbal on that subject every time someone turned up in the river in their jurisdiction. Fred’s mood seemed to have gotten worse in the past couple of weeks, which was completely understandable, given the situation. He stood next to the toilet, his ham-hock legs splayed and his hands on his hips, regarding the toilet with a mixture of revulsion and horror. Crawford still lay on the ground, a flashlight in his hand, peering into the waste hole on which the toilet had previously resided.

Things had escalated since Crawford had made his interesting discovery. As it turned out, had I not been so cranky and preoccupied by my new living situation, I would have seen that there was hardly any water in the toilet, but I had been preoccupied with my full bladder. The heroin was in an airtight bag and had been jammed into the toilet, obstructing the flow of water into the waste pipe, which caused the explosion.

I had called Fred who, in turn, called the U.S. Cavalry, or so it seemed. Two police cars—“cruisers,” as I like to erroneously refer to them—screeched to a halt outside the building, unloading a quartet of uniformed cops, three male and one female, young and old, big and bigger. Two detectives from the narcotics bureau also arrived, looking dazed and bedraggled, not unlike the people with whom they usually dealt. Crawford explained to me that the drug squad liked using guys who had a certain “grittiness” to them; if these two—Marcus and Lattanzi—were any indication, I’d say that the department had succeeded. I would have mistaken the two of them for junkies had I passed them on the street.

I was pushed out of the way and told to sit in my “living room” with my hands in my pockets so that I wouldn’t touch anything. My “living room,” I wanted to clarify, was in Dobbs Ferry, not in this two-hundred-year-old building that smelled like Murphy’s oil soap and sweat.

Lattanzi, compact and swarthy in jeans and a worn pair of cowboy boots, knelt in front of me, his pad resting on his knee. “Start at the beginning.”

The beginning? Like how I was just minding my own business, drinking flat Diet Coke at a faculty mixer, and ended up living in an ancient building with cranky toilets? Or this beginning: I had had too much coffee before I left the house that day which facilitated my having to pee immediately upon entering my new digs? I looked at Lattanzi’s black eyes and decided to go with the short and sweet version.

“I had to pee. I flushed. The toilet exploded.”

“And this Brookwell guy? Ever met him?”

I flashed on Wayne Brookwell’s face, his mouth hanging slightly agape in his official St. Thomas Web site photo. “Nope.”

Lattanzi stood up. “Lucky for you your boyfriend can plumb.”

“He can? He can plumb?” I asked, having no idea what he was talking about.

The detective rocked back on his cowboy boots. “Well, he can stick his hand down a toilet. That’s more than I can say for his partner.”

I heard Fred gag as Crawford came up with something not, shall we say, germane to the case.

I went into the hallway and perched on the desk in the main part of the lobby. From what I was told, we were waiting for the Crime Scene people, who would dust the room and look for any additional evidence.

I thanked the stars above that spring break was still on and that no one would be back to the building until at least lunch-time the next day. Because if Etheridge, Merrimack, or anybody else in the administration saw what was going on, I was toast. I wouldn’t put it past them to enter some trumped-up charge in my file to continue to withhold my tenure and get me off campus
tout de suite
. Even I had to admit: I was becoming a giant pain in the ass, even if the stuff in the toilet had no relation to me whatsoever.

The cops, Marcus and Lattanzi included, were congregated outside of the suite in the hallway, chatting amiably about a variety of topics. I got bored sitting in the empty lobby and came back to the room, not obeying the cops’ command to stay out of the way. I stood on my tiptoes trying to observe what was going on in the bathroom over Fred’s hulking frame.

“Find anything else?” I asked, watching Crawford hand Fred something wet and nasty, which Fred put in a Ziploc bag. He took a permanent marker and wrote something in his chicken scratch along the top. He added the bag to a couple of others that sat on the sink next to the toilet.

Crawford hoisted himself up from the floor, wetter and dirtier than he had been when he arrived to help me move. He wiped his hands on his pants. “That’s it.” He looked around the bathroom. “Is there somewhere else where I can clean up?”

I shrugged. “I have no idea. Let’s take a look.”

Crawford exchanged a few words with the cops in the hallway, one of whom was plastering the bathroom door with yellow crime-scene tape. I felt a little sick: the reason I was here was because the administration at the school thought I was trouble. And now? They had all the proof they needed. I had only been on campus in my new capacity for under an hour and already my door was lined with crime-scene tape. I wondered if I could keep this quiet and knew that the answer was a resounding “no.”

Crawford and I wandered up to the second floor of the dormitory and found a communal bathroom for the male residents of that floor. It looked like it had been cleaned and disinfected during the break and that was a relief to both of us. Crawford washed his face and hands thoroughly and dried them with several rough paper towels that he took from a dispenser on the wall. I leaned against one of the sinks, watching him and thinking.

“What are you thinking, Crawford?” I asked.

“I’m thinking that some moo shu pork would go a long way toward making this day disappear,” he said, looking in the mirror and wiping some grime off his temple.

“No, seriously.”

He nodded. “I am serious. I’m done here and you can’t go back in until Crime Scene finishes. I’ll leave Fred. Because if he doesn’t do toilets, he can wait around while they dust for prints. And he can also let the head of security know that he’s got a problem in Siena Hall,” he said rather testily, probably more so than he intended. It occurred to me that he might be losing patience with his partner as quickly as I was with my roommate. He looked pointedly at one of the urinals. “Meet you downstairs?”

I took the hint and straightened up. “Right. Sure.”

“Better yet, meet me at my car.”

We reconnected a few minutes later, after he had finished up with Fred and the uniformed cops. I didn’t know what shape my room would be in when I got back, but from experience, I did know that every square inch of space would be covered with fingerprint powder. Crawford and I went over what we knew about the situation after we were seated at Hop Sing, our favorite Chinese restaurant in the neighborhood.

Crawford ordered a beer and I asked for a Blazing Dragon. He raised an eyebrow at me. “Blazing Dragon? I’ve never seen you order one of those before.”

“It’s rum, cranberry, coconut, lighter fluid, and rubbing alcohol,” I said, dipping a cracker into duck sauce. “It comes in a fancy glass with an umbrella and it’s just what the doctor ordered.” I crammed a few more crackers into my mouth. I didn’t realize how hungry I was until we sat down in the restaurant. Almost every table in the cramped space was filled and the din of hungry eaters made it so we had to yell across the table at each other. “I need you to find out if anyone put in a missing persons on Wayne Brookwell.”

“Whoa!” Crawford called, a little too loudly even for the current noise conditions. A couple of diners looked over at him and he quickly composed himself. “Can you wait until I get my beer before you start hammering me?”

“Sorry.”

He looked around and pulled at his collar; he wasn’t wearing a tie so he didn’t have his usual security blanket to tug on. “And I already did,” he said, smiling slyly when he saw my surprised expression. “No missing persons. No forwarding address. No record of him at DMV, except that he’s got a New York State license. The guy’s gone and it’s going to take a miracle for us to find him.”

I watched as the waiter approached our table carrying a tray with Crawford’s beer and my drink, which was delivered in a bright blue ceramic glass with a dragon’s face protruding from it. I took a long swig; it tasted exactly like what I had described, with a lingering taste of lighter fluid remaining long after my first sip. “What about other Brookwells? Any Mama Brookwells? Daddy Brookwells? Brookwell sibs? Where’s this guy from?”

Crawford drained almost half of his beer before he answered. “Scarsdale.”

“Scarsdale? Like in not-quite-fifteen-miles-from-here Scarsdale?” I was surprised. I didn’t expect the Brookwell family manse to be quite so close. That was convenient.

The waiter returned and we ordered enough food for four people; investigative toilet work apparently makes you hungry. “And another Blazing Dragon!” I called after the waiter, who gave me a knowing smile. The first few sips were deadly, but after that the drink went down rather smoothly. Our waiter seemed to know that.

“Take it easy,” Crawford said. “You don’t want to drink too much before going on a stakeout.”

I clapped my hands together excitedly. “We’re staking out? We’re going on a stakeout?” I asked. I had never been on a stakeout and had been envious that Crawford got to do it on a regular basis. It never occurred to me that they were deadly boring and didn’t come with portable johns.

“I figured we’d take a ride over to Wayne’s family home to see what’s what. I don’t think we’ll stay there all night but we could hang out for a few hours and see if anything comes up.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I said, finishing off my drink.

The waiter delivered a few plates of food and we dug in. Crawford speared a dumpling with his chopstick and pointed it at me. “Listen.”

Whenever he starts a sentence like that, I’m going to get admonished. I made a face. “What?”

“I know you’re going to ask around campus about this guy, but you need to be inconspicuous.”

I nearly spat out my pork fried rice. “Inconspicuous?” I’m five feet ten in stocking feet with a mane of frizzy auburn hair. It’s not like I can
blend
.

“Yes. Inconspicuous.” He ate his dumpling. “You know, make it so you’re not actually poking around when you really are.”

I saluted him. “Got it, chief.” I polished off the rice on my plate and helped myself to more. “What are you going to be doing while I’m inconspicuously poking around?”

“Nothing.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“I’ve already done a little poking, but it’s not our case. Narcotics will take over because of the heroin, obviously, but until we find a dead Wayne Brookwell,” he said, “which I’m hoping we don’t, I’m not involved. I got the address, reached out to DMV, but I’m done. There’s nothing more that I can do.”

“So you’re prepared to lead the life of a celibate?” I asked, thinking ahead to my many months, and possibly years, of servitude as a dry, chaste resident director. Because if we didn’t find Wayne Brookwell—and entice him to come back to his job—I was stuck there for as long as Etheridge and Merrimack drew out the interviewing process. And with their energies focused on the construction of the new dorm across the campus from Siena, finding a new RD to replace me was not a top priority.

He looked at me as if to say, “What do you think?” “I told you that I would help you but I deal with dead bodies, not missing ones.”

“So I’m on my own?”

“Yes and no.”

The rest of our food arrived and I helped myself to some General Tso’s chicken. “What does that mean?”

“You’ll know if you need me. And I’ll help you as long as it’s legal,” he said, giving my arm a little jab with his chopstick. He knew, from experience, that my definition of legal often didn’t jibe with the standard one.

“Hey!” I said, rubbing my arm. “I get it.” I forked some food into my mouth and chewed quickly, washing down the rest with my Blazing Dragon. “Okay,” I said, wiping my mouth, “let’s go to the Brookwells’.”

He was still working on his plate of food and second beer. “I’m not done.”

I was antsy. “I want to start the stakeout.”

“Let me finish eating. Use the restroom before we go because I don’t want you complaining that you have to pee while we’re sitting there.”

“I’ll just do what you do if I have to go.”

“No,” he said, getting up and taking me by the elbow, “you won’t. Trust me.” He pushed me in the direction of the restroom at the back of the restaurant.

I passed the kitchen and saw a group of white-uniformed cooks flinging ingredients around with abandon, some of them ending up in woks, the others on the floor. My cell phone, in my front jeans pocket, simultaneously trilled and vibrated, startling me. I let out a little cry, attracting the attention of some of the other diners. “Hello?”

It was Kevin. One advantage to being assigned to Siena dorm was that one of my dorm mates was also one of my best friends; Kevin lived on the top floor in a real suite with a living room, bedroom, and galley kitchen. “It’s me. What’s going on downstairs? I just got back from Jack’s and saw a bunch of police cars.”

Jack was Kevin’s brother and a former paramour of mine. He was good-looking, smart, and gainfully employed, with the best-looking teeth I had ever seen. But alas, it wasn’t meant to be, despite how hard Kevin had tried to keep the romance alive. “It’s a long story. But suffice it to say, our friend Wayne Brookwell was moonlighting as more than a limousine driver.” I filled Kevin in on the remaining details, such as they were.

He whistled his disbelief. “You’re kidding.”

“I wish, Kevin.” I stood outside of the locked ladies’ room and waited for the occupant to emerge, keeping an eye on the goings-on in the kitchen. I didn’t know what I expected to see, but it was nice to know that one of my favorite restaurants adhered to at least some of the board of health codes. “Crawford and I are out but when I get back we need to talk about what you know about this guy. Maybe we can figure out where he went. And why.”