Murder 101 (20 page)

Wyatt bent down and picked up Crawford’s bloody shirt and my slip. He held the slip/tourniquet aloft and looked at me, one eyebrow raised. “What’s this?”

“He was bleeding and I needed something to stop it,” I explained.

“Good thinking, Nurse McSmartypants.” He opened a Ziploc bag and put the shirt in it. He got another bag and put the slip in there, marking both of them as evidence.

I looked at him. I had told Crawford about my alter ego; he must have passed this information on to Fred. I let it go. “She killed Kathy Miceli.”

As if on cue, I heard Fiona’s voice in the stairwell protesting to someone else. “It was an accident!” she screamed.

I pointed to the paper, still a bit caked with train muck.

Wyatt picked the paper up between the tips of his thumb and index fingers of his gloved hand. “You puke on this, too?”

Instead of laughing, I burst into tears. Wyatt muttered, “Oh, jeez,” and took my arm, steering me toward the open door of one of my colleague’s offices, which was on the other side of the office area, and the farthest away from the action.

I fell into the plush office chair in front of the desk and rolled back a few inches. Wyatt pulled up one of the chairs that was used for students visiting during office hours, his immense frame filling it. He leaned in, his hands hanging down between his legs. I think he was waiting for me to stop crying. As a precaution, he took the waste can from under the desk and put it by my feet.

Connie Burns is another English professor and the most meticulous person I have ever met. Her office was neat, orderly, and clean. A full box of tissues sat at the edge of her desk, right next to the picture of her neat, orderly, and clean children. I pulled out six or seven tissues and blew my nose loudly. She would be disinfecting for days.

“You all right?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” I said, pulling more tissues out of the box and wiping my eyes. I balled all of them up until they resembled a wad of papier-mâché and threw them in the spotless waste can.

“Tell me what happened.”

“Where do you want me to start?” I asked.

“Start with why you’re here tonight and end with how my partner ended up stabbed.” There was an edge to his voice that told me that given the chance, he might tear Fiona apart, limb from limb. He took a small notebook from his back pocket and from Connie’s desk grabbed a pen that I knew she would never see again.

I started my story. He stopped me a few times for more details, but I finished a complete retelling in under ten minutes.

“That it?” he asked.

I nodded.

He snapped the notebook shut. “That’s a shame,” he said, and shook his head. The tough veneer crumbled, and he wiped his hands over his face, rubbing his eyes. He stayed silent, composing himself. I looked away, focusing on Connie’s desk—the datebook, the stack of papers on top of a grade book, and her calendar of meaningless aphorisms. Today’s was from Oscar Wilde: “Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.”

Wyatt looked at me. “You’re friends with Father Kevin, right? Call the padre. Tell him to meet me at Mercy Hospital.”

I picked up Connie’s phone; it smelled like disinfectant. I called Kevin and, giving him the shortened version of the horrible story, asked him to meet Wyatt at the hospital. Kevin is used to calls like this; he didn’t ask questions and hung up quickly.

I took a couple of more tissues and blew my nose again. “Can I go, too?”

Wyatt pondered my question for a few minutes. He looked at his watch. “I guess now is as good a time as any.” He stopped himself. “Sure. Let’s go.”

There was a knock at the door, and Wyatt reached back around him and opened it. A young man, whom I vaguely recognized, stood in the doorway, his blue NYPD uniform throwing me off momentarily. When my head cleared, I recognized him as the skateboarder who called me “ma’am” at the Starbucks a few weeks earlier. I did a double take, and he smiled sheepishly at me.

“Ma’am,” he said, and gave me a little salute.

“You’re a cop?”

He gave a little shrug. “Yes, ma’am.”

Wyatt laughed. “Derek was on your tail for a few days. Good undercover work, huh?”

I continued to stare at him. With the uniform on, he looked slightly older than the eighteen years I had given him when we first met, but not much. “Excellent undercover work.”

Derek cleared his throat. “Detective? We need you.”

We left Connie’s office and went back into the main area. Max was standing by Dottie’s desk, her arms folded across her chest, chewing the inside of her mouth nervously. When she saw me, she ran down the length of the office and threw her arms around me. “What the . . . ?” she yelled, at a loss for words. She was so loud that the officers in the room stopped and looked at her. “Are you OK?”

“I’m fine, Max,” I said. Never forgetting my manners, even in times of extreme stress, I turned to Wyatt. “You remember my friend, Max Rayfield?” I forgot that they had spent some time together the night before.

He was back to normal. He peered down at Max from behind his glasses. “Who could forget you, Ms. Rayfield?” he said, rather charmingly and without any sarcasm.

She blushed, something I had never seen Max do. Blushing was my department. “Call me Max.”

He held out his hand. “Call me Fred.”

“Is that your real name or just what you want me to call you?” Max said, smiling.

“Real name.”

I cleared my throat. Apparently, I had become invisible. “I’d like to go to the hospital, Detective.”

Max reminded me that she had her car. “I’ll drive you. I’ve canceled my dinner plans, obviously,” she said. She took a business card out of the wallet inside her pocketbook and jotted down her cell-phone number with a pen that she walked over to Dottie’s desk to get. “If you’re ever in Tribeca, Detective, please give me a call.” She handed him the card, which he accepted, read, and then put in his pants pocket.

Max exchanged a last look with Wyatt, fraught with some kind of meaning lost on me.

Wyatt smiled and called a uniformed officer over. “Get them to their car.” The officer nodded and opened the blood-spattered office door for us with rubber-gloved hands.

The officer walked us to Max’s car, which was parked in the dorm parking lot, behind my building. We got in, and Max locked the doors with a thunk, nearly scaring me half to death. I grabbed my throat. “I’m a little jumpy.”

“I’ll say,” Max replied, and started the car. “What happened in there?”

I told her about going to look for Fiona and our debate over the paper and how she finally revealed to me that she, not Vince or Ray, had killed Kathy.

“Did she threaten you?” Max asked, maneuvering the car up the main drive and off campus.

“No.” I felt my eyes well up again. “But God knows she’s in enough trouble now to ruin her life forever.”

We pulled up to the hospital entrance, and Max told me to get out while she looked for a parking space. I went inside and waited a few minutes; Kevin arrived, holding a small leather bag and wearing his black shirt, collar, black pants, and black shoes. No more Stoner Priest. We stood in the bright lights of the hospital admissions area, his arms around me. When I was done crying, he went up to the nurses’ station and spoke to a woman at the admissions desk. After a brief conversation, he motioned to me, “Come on.”

We walked down the hall and got into the elevator, which was empty. He pushed the button for the fourth floor and turned to me. “You’re covered in blood,” he said.

I looked down and saw that my neck, arms, and dress were covered in dried, russet-colored blood. Kevin touched my jaw. “There, too.”

The door opened on the fourth floor. Several uniformed police officers were clustered together in front of the nurses’ station; they all turned when the doors opened. I recognized Simons from the day before. He came over and took Kevin by the arm, leading him down the hall wordlessly. When they were a safe distance away, Simons told Kevin something, and Kevin nodded like he understood. He returned.

“He’s in surgery and will be for another hour or so. The shoulder wound isn’t too bad, but the other wound was close to the heart and nicked an artery. The doctor is also concerned about infection, so the next twenty-four hours are critical.” He looked at me, his eyes huge behind his Coke-bottle lenses. “They want me to stay. Do you want to stay or go home and get some rest?”

“I’ll stay.”

“You want coffee?” he asked, as we walked to a bank of plastic chairs against the wall.

I shrugged. I didn’t care.

He put his bag down on the chair. “No fooling around with the holy chrism,” he admonished, shaking his finger in my face. When I didn’t laugh, he turned and went to find coffee.

A tall cop, about fifty, in knee-high leather boots, jodhpurs, and a leather bomber jacket approached me and knelt next to me. He held a round helmet with a visor under his arm that had “Motorcycle One” printed on it. “Are you the professor?”

I nodded.

“Jack Panebianco. Motorcycle.” He held out his hand.

“Cannoli rider?” I took his hand, which was rough around mine.

He looked puzzled for a moment and then laughed. “Cannoli rider,” he confirmed.

“We never got to eat them. They’re still in my refrigerator,” I said, and sobbed.

He looked uncomfortable. Of all of the cops I had met in the last several weeks, none could handle tears. Crying Witnesses 101 needed to be added to the cop school curriculum, too. “You can eat them when he gets out.”

I shrugged. “I guess.”

“He’s tough.”

“I know.”

He looked around. “I just wanted to say hello. I wouldn’t cart cannolis around on a motorcycle for just anyone.” He walked back to the nurses’ station and leaned against it, turning to talk to one of the nurses.

Kevin came back with two cups of coffee and handed one to me and the other to Max, whom he had met up with in the elevator. “I spoke with one of the nurses, and she said that you could clean up in the bathroom behind the nurses’ station if you want,” he said.

I didn’t answer.

“Do you want to?”

I shook my head. “I’ll do it when I get home.” The three of us sat in silence for two hours, Max and I sipping coffee that tasted like battery acid. I decided that whatever they taught Kevin about silence in the seminary was well learned; he didn’t feel the need to fill the space with chatter. Even Max had adopted the code of silence and sat quietly, just holding my hand.

Well into our second hour of silence, I spoke. “He has kids. Twin daughters.”

Kevin nodded. He knew.

Wyatt showed up an hour later, looking drained. He fell into the plastic chair next to Kevin. “How we doing?” he asked.

Kevin answered. “Don’t know. We’re waiting for him to get out of surgery.”

Wyatt nodded. “When he gets out, go in and do whatever it is you Catholics do to sick people. It’ll make him feel better even if he doesn’t know.”

Kevin smiled. “You’re not Catholic, Detective?” he asked.

“I’m half-Samoan. We send our dead out on surfboards to the great beyond,” he said, almost serious. “My grandmother is probably in Antarctica by now.”

I shot Max a look and whispered in her ear, “Your kids will be a quarter Samoan.”

The four of us sat in the plastic chairs, an odd quartet: a blood-covered woman, a priest, a sexy sprite, and a half-Samoan, half-something-else detective. Every time the elevator opened, we tensed, looking for the stretcher that would hold Crawford’s body. Finally, after fourteen or fifteen false alarms, the doors opened and he was back from surgery.

I started to get up, but Wyatt took my arm. “Sit down,” he commanded, and for some reason, I did. “Wait until they get him settled. I’ll ask the doctor if we can go in.”

I sat back down.

“Besides, the nurses here eat college professors for breakfast. If you break the rules, they’ll toss you out and you won’t be coming back.”

“I get it,” I said impatiently.

Wyatt got up and loped down the hall slowly, his long arms swinging back and forth. He stopped outside the door to Crawford’s room and turned back, giving me his version of the sad face.

The doctor came out, a short Asian woman with waist-long black hair. She had on blue scrubs and plastic baggies covering her clogs. She looked up at Wyatt, her head bent back at an uncomfortable angle. I saw her hold up one finger and give directions, and then all five fingers. She walked away a minute later, leaving Wyatt standing in front of Crawford’s room.

Wyatt whistled. “Padre!” he called to Kevin.

Kevin leapt up and flew down the hallway, the leather bag clasped in his hand. He entered the room while Wyatt waited outside.

I got up and joined Wyatt in front of the window outside the room. Kevin was standing over Crawford, who was shirtless and had oxygen tubes up his nose and a jumble of tubes going into his right arm. A thin white sheet was pulled up to his waist, and the wound was covered in a thick pad of gauze that was taped down. He was unconscious. Kevin leaned over, his lips moving, and put his thumb into a small, open canister of holy chrism. He put his thumb to Crawford’s forehead and drew a small cross as he performed the anointing of the sick.

Wyatt turned to me. “She said you can go in. For five minutes. That’s it. Got it?”

“I get it.”

“No lap dances.”

“You’re an asshole, you know that?” I asked him. It figured he would pick today to be funny and personable, but I wasn’t in the mood.

He smiled. “I know. I work really hard at it.”

Kevin finished up and put everything back into his leather bag. “I’m done, Detective. If you need me, please call me.” He looked at me. “Same for you.” He put his arms around me and kissed me on the forehead.

Wyatt held his hand out, showing me the way to the door. “Five minutes.”

“He’s unconscious, Detective. I don’t think I need that long.”

“You’re welcome, Your Pissiness.”

I went into the room and stood at the foot of the bed. A nurse tucked the sheet in tight around his body and picked up his limp wrist, holding her finger against it while looking at her watch. “Wife?” she asked.