A Function of Murder (23 page)

“It will be terrific when this is all a dim memory,” I agreed.

“Are you coming back here?” Fran asked.

I had no reason to go back to campus. Classes were over; I had two weeks to work on
final grades. I’d planned to stop and pick up food, suddenly in the mood for real
bagels and real cream cheese, and go home for a tasty, hassle-free lunch.

I tapped my steering wheel. Or I could go to campus
and spend some time gossiping with Fran; that is, analyzing the situation to death,
as we mathematicians liked to call it.

“I’m on my way,” I said.

“I’m in my office, just tying up some loose ends. I’ll call around and see what else
I can find out before you get here.”

“Me, too.”

“It’s stopped raining. We can meet at the fountain,” Fran said, then everything seemed
to come to a halt. No normal breathing sounds from either of us. No background clearing
of throats. Just low grunts. The fountain’s ledge had been a favorite spot to sit
and chat, especially when the classroom and office walls seemed to close in on us.
Once a popular campus landmark and meeting place, the fountain had suddenly become
forbidden territory.

“Is the coffee shop open today?” I asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“Let’s meet there.”

I heard a long exhale from Fran. “Good idea. Oh, by the way, Courtney did say she
was pretty sure the person the cops led away was female.”

I gulped. “Got it. See you soon.”

Since the food at the Mortarboard Café, the campus coffee shop next to the tennis
courts, was only a half step up from what was served at the Zeeman Academy vending
machines, I knew Fran would forgive me for making a detour. With no Starbucks in sight,
I pulled up to a bagel shop a couple of blocks from campus.

I stood in a short line thinking that I shouldn’t be wasting this time. Whom could
I call to seek more information about the unidentified person who’d been taken into
police custody? Or was at least
with
the police at the moment.

It was useless to call Virgil, who was probably still at
Zeeman. Would he be in communication with whoever escorted a female from the vicinity
of the Henley College Administration Building? If not, wouldn’t he love to hear from
me that the case had been closed? A better question: Where did I get this urge to
do police work?

A sudden collision knocked me out of my mental state, into the physical present. It
was my day to be battered by men, big and little.

“My bad,” said a young boy with low riding shorts who looked anything but apologetic.

He’d been on a direct course to the potato chip rack, and I was a small obstacle in
his way. Nothing hurt and I didn’t see the wisdom of calling attention to the little
mishap. The bagel clerk apparently felt otherwise.

“Hey, buddy, watch where you’re going. And can you give the lady a real apology?”
the clerk said, sounding like this wasn’t the first time she’d addressed this problem.

The boy gave her a confused look, as if no one had challenged him in this way before.
He took his bag of chips to a different clerk at the other end of the counter and
flew out of the store.

“Charter school kids,” the middle-aged woman said to me. “The one down the street?
The Roger Williams School.” She held up her hand, the better to tick off her complaints.
“They don’t have a regular schedule. They’re in here at all hours. They’re rude. They
knock things over and don’t pick them up.” She indicated there were many more points
she could make, but the exercise was exhausting her.

My first impulse was to rush to the defense of charters. Kids at any school could
be rude or not rude. The same for adults. I had no time to get into it with the woman,
however, and I figured my best bet was to change the topic.

I gave the woman a smile she could interpret any way she chose, and pointed to a seven-layer
cookie in the display case.

“Are those new?” I asked. “They look delicious.”

“Jody will help you,” she said, passing me on to a younger woman with retro Goth hair,
lots of silver, but no tats.

It could have been that the middle-ager’s shift was over. Or she could simply have
decided I hadn’t appreciated her wisdom enough to be served.

“What can I get you?” asked the new clerk.

I almost said,
Mayor Graves’s phone records, please
, but caught myself and ordered two bagels, a cinnamon raisin for me and an “everything”
for Fran, both with cream cheese. I hoped to get to the Mortarboard before Fran settled
for one of their not-quite-thawed pastries.

As I waited for the order, I scooted back into my head and thought of my suspect list,
with three men and only one female. Chris Sizemore. I wished I knew whether she was
the female who’d been taken to the HPD station today.

I knew I’d have no relief until I was sure that the police had zeroed in on someone
else before I was forced to contemplate the placement of my star student on my suspect
list. I’d been Kira’s teacher for four years, and her thesis director. It shouldn’t
have been that hard for me to have already figured out what was going on with her.
Maybe I’d have fared better if I’d had access to the mayor’s emails and phone logs.
I comforted myself with the fact that the police did have that access and therefore
might already have enough information to close the case. As far as I was concerned,
Kira was not a candidate for murder suspect. If anything, she was a victim of herself
and her insecure state.

I tapped my phone on my hip. I could call Woody; he seemed to be always available
these days, but I didn’t necessarily want to remind him of the current situation on
campus. I ran down my list of faculty friends from the Music Department, English,
Modern Languages. Most of
them had already skipped town for the Cape beaches or the New Hampshire mountains.
I resolved to make more friends in Admin in case this happened again.

Rring, rring. Rring, rring.

Ah, Bruce. He’d be getting in from the gym, ready to take a nap before his shift.

“Hey, I miss you,” he said.

“Me, too. I think you should retire and we’ll run away together.”

“One more year and I’ll be able to buy us an island.”

“Here you go,” said the clerk, handing over my bag of bagels.

I reached for our lunches and headed out of the shop, still kibitzing with Bruce around
our island dream. A strange theme since we were both city people and more likely to
retire to the heart of Boston, or to Philadelphia, where some of Bruce’s family still
lived.

Things changed when Bruce said, casually, “I just talked to Virgil. I’m surprised
you didn’t bring it up right away.”

“I wanted to talk to you first, my love,” I said, champing at the bit for whatever
information was circling the MAstar helipad.

He laughed. “What a surprise, huh? I’d never have guessed. She doesn’t look the type
at all, does she?”

“No, I heard about the pickup, but I’d never have guessed who,” I said. In my heightened
state of anticipation, I squeezed the warm bagels until I felt the cream cheese go
to mush against the side of the bag.

A long pause. I could hardly stand it. Finally, Bruce said, “You don’t know who they
picked up, do you?”

I laughed in a “don’t be silly” kind of way.

“Okay, bye.”

“Bruce!”

“Chris Sizemore,” he said.

I felt my shoulders relax. “Bye,” I said.

Another laugh from Bruce, who, fortunately for our relationship, enjoyed games as
much as I did.

“Go call Fran,” he said.

Which is just what I did.

It was hard to say which of my offerings Fran was more grateful for—the fresh, odoriferous
bagel with light and dark seeds of everything on it, or the ID of the person of interest
to the Henley PD.

It seemed to be a tie.

“I was starving, in more ways than one,” Fran said, working on her second squirt of
cream cheese.

“I can see that.”

“After we hung up, I kept on with my telethon trying to find out who was taken away.
I limited myself to faculty and staff I thought would have a good view of that part
of campus. Even though the police car was outside the dorms…” Fran completed the sentence
with a shrug and a knowing look.

I smiled, understanding her reasoning. “We don’t want the students to think we’re
rumormongers,” I said.

“No, no.” Fran smiled back and wagged her finger at me. “That wouldn’t be good at
all. And there’s nothing left
to munch on in the Franklin Hall lounge”—she held up her bagel—“so thanks for this.”

“I couldn’t have you trudging all the way over here for last Friday’s coffee and rolls,”
I said.

We both took a minute for bites of real food, followed by soft and contented “Mmms.”

We sat across from each other in the Mortarboard Café, having bought bottled waters
and packaged cookies as the price of admission to sit at a table with food from the
outside. A cleaning crew hired by Buzz, the new owner, was hard at work on heavy-duty
scraping and scrubbing, starting in the back corner. I hoped the sticky floor was
on their list, as well as the interior brick walls, which needed a good week of sandblasting
just to remove the ketchup. And if they could do something about the cooking odors
from the last century, that would also be nice.

Other than Buzz, the three young women scouring tables and chairs, and two guys washing
the windows facing the parking lot, Fran and I were the only ones in the place. The
background music was the Mortarboard’s standard pounding, backbeat fare, more suited
to grunt work than to conversation.

“We should be at the beach,” Fran said. “Like every sane teacher and student the world
over on the Monday after graduation.”

Except Chris Sizemore
, I thought. I pushed my bagel aside and made a move to leave. “You’re right. Let’s
go to the beach.”

Fran laughed. “Ha. There’s too much going on here.”

Fran was still as excited as when she’d called me with the breaking news. “I phoned
Courtney after you gave me the scoop. She called Monty right away, using a cover story
that she wanted to be sure his sister was okay, but really to confirm that Chris was
the one who’d been arrested. Sort of arrested. Monty didn’t tell her much, as you
can
imagine, except that the police were simply doing routine questioning and would probably
be back for another round with all of us.”

“Do you think that’s why they drove off with her? For routine questioning? Bruce couldn’t
help me with that. Maybe Monty’s right and we are next. You up for a ride in a patrol
car?” I asked.

Fran shook her head. Her short, silky bob showed signs of graying, but was as neatly
and attractively arranged as if she’d been on her way to present a paper in Boston.
“I wouldn’t mind the ride, though. My grandkids would get a kick out of it. But Courtney
doesn’t think there was anything routine about the pickup. She said the police car
pulled up right to the exterior steps of Admin on the Paul Revere dorm side, not bothering
to park. She swears the car was running the whole time, though not with lights or
anything, and then the two guys, one in uniform and one in plain clothes, came out
with Chris, and she got in the back.”

“That doesn’t sound routine to me,” I said.

“Anything but.”

I forced myself not to be happy about Chris Sizemore’s plight, but was unable to suppress
relief that the female Courtney had first reported on wasn’t Kira.

“Why do you think Chris would kill the mayor?” Fran asked. “Did they even know each
other that well?”

“Meaning, once you get to know a person, you want to kill him?” I asked.

“That’s what the homicide stats would lead us to believe,” Fran said.

“When you put it that way, I have to agree.”

Virgil often quoted that nearly 40 percent of murders are in a category called “homicides
by intimates,” adding that girlfriends were more likely to kill their men by stabbing
them than by other means.

I remembered Bruce’s “Good to know” when Virgil reported on this over pizza one Friday
night. The two of them had shifted their chairs away from me.