Cuts Through Bone (9 page)

“How long ago was that?”

“Last semester.” She smiled, and her eyes brightened. “Cammie changed her plans after that. She wasn't prelaw then. She was retaking a mandatory she'd flunked last year, and admin—administration, the deans—was making Greg retake the mandatories because of the time he spent away from school. See, he transferred credits from the University of Wisconsin. That's a good school, but he lacked his senior credits
and
it was years ago that he went there. He wasn't even prelaw at UW. So she was chasing him, and she was way behind. She didn't do summer sessions, except that she was trying to catch up with him.”

“She was more relaxed before she met Olsen?”

“Absolutely. Cammie didn't have anyplace to be anytime soon. Once she started with Greg, that's when she wanted to keep up.”

“The difference in age wasn't a problem? He's a lot older—”

Tompkins rolled her eyes, and Guthrie's question slowed to a halt. “That's true, but it didn't hurt him. He spent some years in the army. That's how he was paying for Columbia. Being older just made him a man in the pool of boys. A few years didn't hurt him a bit.”

“With Bowman, you mean?”

“Her, too.” Tompkins grinned, then eased away from the window. “Let me get you something to drink. You like juice?” She padded barefoot into the kitchen.

One small table filled most of the space on the kitchen's tiled floor, penned between countertops. Above the sink, a small window looked out onto the street. The refrigerator and stove flanked it in a tiny triangle. With tall glasses of orange juice, they crowded around the small table, and their voices dropped to the whispers of conspirators.

“You knew them both pretty well,” Guthrie said, and gave Tompkins a moment to assent. “Where were you on the evening of the twenty-third?”

She frowned, realizing he was asking about the night of Bowman's murder. She tucked a lock of hair behind her round, pale ear and bit her lip. “I was here. I had to give an oral on the twenty-fourth, so I was prepping.”

“What about them? Do you know where they were?”

“I didn't keep track like that.”

“I've heard different from other people, Michelle.”

She reddened. “That's crazy.”

“People wouldn't notice you if you weren't there,” Guthrie said.

“Not that. You can't be saying I killed Cammie.”

The little detective shrugged and finished his glass of orange juice. Vasquez covered her mouth and pretended indifference. Guthrie had warned her he would turn the interview after he let Tompkins talk for a while. As a suspect, Michelle Tompkins seemed unlikely, but he wouldn't walk around it without looking to see if odd numbers added up.

“Maybe,” he said. “I can't see your connection yet. You got some interest here, or this doesn't get pushed in the first place. My imagination is free to supply motives.” Guthrie jabbed at the tabletop with a finger. “They're law students, but you're international studies—nothing there. Undergrads, you're a grad student. You don't match up in age with either one of them. They're Hollywood pretty, you're a step or two above plain—”

“Oh, you are so full of it!” she exclaimed.

“Then what puts you together with them?”

“I had something they both wanted! I know the ropes at Columbia.”

Guthrie frowned and dropped his hat onto the small tabletop. “I'll accept that for a why—but not a how. That's why you had something to do together, not how you came to find out about it. How always comes along in front of why. You meet someone before you discover what use they are to you—”

“Cammie's my cousin. She's from the other side, my
father's
side,” she said. “She's not a Whitney, but she has the curse—a trust, legacy, expectations.…”

Guthrie settled back into his chair, frowning. “Okay, your cousin.”

“My cousin. I didn't meet Greg until after she did.”

The little detective nodded slowly. “I get it. Olsen wasn't in the picture until last semester. Maybe that was around the time Bowman slowed down at the Long Morning After. Did you used to spend time with her there?”

“That doesn't have anything to do with this,” Tompkins said, reddening. “It's illegal to get drunk?”

“Not at your age, but it was at hers. And X don't come from a pharmacy anytime—but that ain't what I'm after here,” Guthrie said. “Bowman was a regular at the Long Morning After. I don't need you to confirm that. I got that. She was snatched right outside that place. Maybe somebody you know, or saw, knew her from there.” Watching her expression, he stopped. “No, that wasn't on the TV, was it? You didn't know that.
Something
got her killed, Michelle.”

“They said she wasn't raped,” Tompkins whispered.

He shrugged. “Maybe college boys are smart. Maybe they learn things while they're watching TV instead of going to class, like being satisfied with just making somebody dead. But back to you. When you went to the Long Morning After with her, did you roll with her, or did you watch from a booth? Did you go upstairs? Is that where she really met Olsen?”

“They call it LMA—just LMA. That's
not
where she met Greg,” Tompkins said. “Greg didn't have anything to do with LMA. If—” She drew a deep breath and glanced around the small kitchen as if she wanted an exit.

Guthrie watched her struggle for a moment, then waved a hand to cut her efforts short.

“I don't mind a whitewash, but I still got a problem. Somebody took Bowman outside”—he paused—“LMA. That doesn't look like coincidence. You're looking at it from a seat inside that angle. Who do I look at there? Who wanted her?”

Tompkins laughed, then stopped quickly. “You're kidding, right? Everybody wanted Cammie. You've seen some pictures.” She frowned and studied Guthrie for a moment, sparing a glance for Vasquez. The question was serious because Camille Bowman was dead.

“Nothing's going to make this easy,” she said finally. “You'll be walking out into a minefield. This's Columbia University in New York City. We have the best, the brightest, and the most powerful. If LMA was involved, then maybe it was one of the Greeks. She was a sister, and LMA is a Greek hangout. Outsiders do go to the club, but the Greeks are deep there. She went outside with Greg—he wasn't a Greek. They were scared of him, though. They didn't try any of the usual games with him. After I got to know him, I knew they made the right decision, to leave him alone.”

Tompkins smiled, looking at Vasquez. “It just sounds complicated. They wanted her back with them, and maybe they would've done anything to break them up. Sport fucking, gossip, whatever would work. Greg was too old for games, though. And whatever it was about him, bouncing into him made Cammie grow up in a hurry.”

“Then the Greeks it is,” Guthrie said. He gave Tompkins a searching look as he plucked his fedora from the table.

“Do it,” she said. “Greg didn't kill her. I didn't kill her. But she's dead. Next to that, nothing else matters. But if a Greek did it…”

The little detective nodded. “Maybe it don't matter, but it can stay in the dark.”

The afternoon was even hotter when they went back outside. The air conditioning in Tompkins's building was a spoiler. They had a long walk back to the car. Vasquez was quiet because she was thinking. Michelle Tompkins had shown her a glimpse of college, and it didn't seem so different from the barrio. The muchachos in the neighborhood played games with the
chicas
, clowned their rivals, and tried to tear people apart with drugs and intimidation. That wasn't new to her. Seeing the
blancos
doing the same things behind their closed doors, that was new. Papì had that part wrong. That part of the world wasn't different, or safe. Just like the muchachos crossed the line sometimes, and somebody got killed, that could happen anywhere, to anybody. Guthrie had an angry look on his face. He was going to find out who killed Camille Bowman. Vasquez could see that in the firmness of his step. She understood then why HP Whitridge paid the little man money to sit around and do nothing. He wanted him nearby if something important came up. Money didn't matter next to that. Just like reasons didn't matter when someone was dead.

 

CHAPTER SEVEN

That afternoon, Guthrie's office in the Garment District seemed like a different place to Vasquez. Trucks thundered by with late deliveries and outgoing products; that was the same. Traffic piled up in a screeching battle of horns and shouts when the kids pushed racks of clothes in the street; that was the same. Vasquez sat still while she worked; even that was the same. The difference was that she could see something coming from it. That was enough.

The little man ordered bad pizza, like he always did in the afternoon. He wanted mushroom and sausage—Vasquez could hear him on the phone—and the pizza would come with that and pineapple. She didn't know, but maybe it was some kind of joke. Guthrie ate it and never complained. Tranh, a Vietnamese with a big hat, always brought the pizza. Guthrie would pretend to speak Vietnamese to him and he would laugh and accept an oversized tip. The pizza boxtops were like a portfolio of old record albums in the storage room in the back.

That afternoon, Guthrie showed her how to read the police reports from his contact at Police Plaza. After he explained, the jargon wasn't difficult to understand, and she could see how different things related to reveal a method. NYPD went by a system. Guthrie pointed out that they had blind spots and weaknesses, but in what they did, they were thorough.

Uniformed officers had canvassed heavily along the Harlem River, near the scene of the murder. They had some “shots fired” reports from the night of July 23, but all those interrogated had been noted down as “busybodies.” Guthrie wasn't too interested in those, except for practice, because none of them really agreed on two shots—they claimed from one to five, seemingly at random. He made Vasquez push pins into a wall map of the city to locate the site of each report. A few days later, the uniforms had canvassed again, but in Morningside, in the area around the Long Morning After. They'd found nothing worthwhile but the bartender, Sand Whitten.

Tommy Johnson called while Vasquez was finishing a hardened crust of mushroom and sausage pizza. Guthrie usually put his calls on speaker to keep from handling the phone. The little detective spent the first few minutes saying “Uh-huh” and letting the young man calm down. Tommy was getting kicked around in the ISU lab for bringing Guthrie inside. His next stop would be typist or errand boy, and he didn't know which of those looked better. He wanted to take a bus back to Ohio.

Finally he slowed, and Guthrie said, “Boy, it'll get back better. They can't keep you down. I mean, who else over there can actually take that chromatograph apart and put it back together—”

“I put it back together wrong!”

“Well, you didn't have any leftover parts, like I do when I rebuild a transmission—”

“Guth, they want to
kill
me!”

The little detective made shushing motions at Vasquez. She was using her Yankees cap to smother some laughter. He threw a wad of paper at her, because some of Tommy's distress was her fault, for overreacting during the interview, even though Guthrie had accepted the blame at the time.

“The only good thing that happened that morning was meeting that girl, Rachel,” Tommy said. Vasquez's laughter came to a sudden halt. “Do you think she might've liked me?”

“Boy—”

“She has
blazing
eyes! Green and gold! Maybe it was the light,” he added more softly.

Guthrie glared at the young Puerto Rican, plainly meaning her to keep quiet. “Maybe,” he said. “Who knows? I tell you what, though. I'm going to give you something, and then you can spoon-feed it to your boss. You tell her right where it came from, and you tell her she's got to lay off—”

“I can't say that, Guth! She's not doing anything official.”

“
Listen.
You can tell her that, and then you tell her there's more, but I'm not going to give it to you yet. She'll respect you if you give it to her straight, and she'll respect you for having contacts that reach outside the office.”

The phone was silent for a half minute. “You think so?”

“I ain't gonna bullshit you. The other morning was a disaster. We should've kept quiet better. But you're not gonna fix it by letting on that you'll get pushed around.”

“I'm not getting pushed around!”

Guthrie sighed. “Relax. Everybody does. You pushed your boss into letting us in, because she wanted to keep you happy. She was getting something, or she wouldn't have gone along with you. Once you let her know what the score is, she can get back to where she wants to be—she wants you there, but you did something that she needs to make look good. You do that by giving her something. Get it?”

“You're saying that if I fix making her look bad, it'll go back to the way it was?”

“Maybe better, boy. After this, she'll know she can count on you to get square.”

“I guess you got something big, then, because did I mention that they want to
kill
me?”

The little man laughed. “Come to think of it, I got something big. The uniforms missed an eyewitness to the Bowman murder when they canvassed. He didn't come forward. He don't like cops.”

“He
saw
the murder?”

“That's right. That's why Rachel was gawking when your boss said things that corroborated his story.”

“I wasn't—” Vasquez stopped suddenly when Guthrie gave her a hard look.

Tommy Johnson missed her voice because he was already speaking. “What the hell, Guth? You could've said this then!”