Murder 101 (8 page)

We sat and chatted and ate our muffins and drank the coffee. Kevin stood up a half hour later and stretched. “Well, glad I ran, because that muffin was probably two thousand calories.” He gathered up his garbage and threw it into my waste can. “Don’t get up,” he said, and leaned over to kiss me. “I have to go prepare a sermon for twelve o’clock Mass. Something on the ill effects of revenge or something like that. Any ideas?”

“You’re asking me?” I asked, incredulously. “I’m still trying to figure out a way to key Ray’s new BMW without getting caught.”

He laughed. “You’re no help.” He opened the door. “I’ll talk with you soon.” He turned and looked at me with that mixture of sadness and pity that I was beginning to recognize only too well.

The day went fine, as days go when I have to talk about the significance of the three witches in
Macbeth
to a bunch of disinterested young adults. I called it quits around five. I knew that I couldn’t make it to the train station on foot, but didn’t want to waste money on a cab. My aversion to cabs became instilled in me when I was a broke college student here, so I gave in and called Ray’s office. He answered on the first ring.

“It’s me,” I said. “Hey, remember when you said I could get a ride when I needed it? Well, I need a ride. Can you take me to the train?”

He was more enthusiastic than I thought he would be. “Sure. I can even drive you home if you want. Can you meet me over here within a half hour?”

I agreed and began tidying up my office. I slipped my sore feet into my shoes not sure if I was going to make it from my office to Ray’s, but I figured I’d give it a try.

His office was located just a short walk but after only a few steps, the pain in my feet was vibrating throughout my entire body, so I removed my shoes and walked barefoot across campus.

The hall was lit by overhead fluorescent lights that were harsh on the complexion. My skin turned a ghastly green shade, as evidenced by my hands. I put my shoes back on. They echoed as first the toe and then the heel of each foot hit the tile floor. I saw that Ray’s door was closed, but heard his and other male voices talking behind it.

I decided to wait in the hallway. He knew I was coming, so I didn’t feel the need to knock. I stood for a few minutes, but the blood rushing to my feet became more than I could stand as my blisters began to throb.

I bent down to put my briefcase on the floor and as I stood up, the door opened and I came face-to-face (or face-to-neck in our case) with Detective Crawford. He looked as surprised as I was. Wyatt was behind him, and behind Wyatt was a clearly distressed Ray.

Ray motioned me into his office and closed the door. The four of us stood shoulder to shoulder in the small, windowless office. I could almost see the fear rising off Ray like the fog on the street the night before. His starched white shirt had rings of sweat under each arm, and he pulled nervously at his collar when I asked him what was happening. He reached into his pocket and handed me his car keys.

“I’m going to be a while, Alison. Why don’t you take my car and drive yourself home? It’s right behind the building in the parking lot,” he said. He looked at the two cops. “Can she do that? Take the car?”

Crawford looked at Wyatt, and Wyatt gave a slight nod.

“Ray?” I asked, looking at him quizzically. When he didn’t answer, I looked at Crawford, who gave me one of his sad faces.

Wyatt was the only one to speak. “We have to talk with your husband for a few minutes, Professor Bergeron.”

Ray and I answered in unison. “Ex-husband.”

“Why don’t you take the car and drive yourself home, like he suggested?” Wyatt asked. He wasn’t his usual menacing self, and seemed to be trying to get me out of the situation as gracefully as he could.

I reached out and Ray handed me his keys. I took them and looked at the complicated hieroglyphics on the plastic key tag. I knew I was in trouble. I didn’t think I’d be able to get into the car, never mind drive it home.

Wyatt looked at Crawford. “Why don’t you carry the professor’s briefcase to the car, Bobby?”

Crawford took my briefcase from my shoulder and steered me out of the office. He held the door open as I walked out into the parking lot.

Ray’s new BMW sedan sat in a “faculty” spot close to the door. Crawford put his hand out and I handed him the keys. He hit a button and the car made a short beeping noise, but the interior lights came on. That was promising. Crawford opened the driver-side door and put my briefcase in the backseat.

I looked up at him. “Your name is Bobby?”

He smiled. “Yes.”

It occurred to me that I hadn’t known that fact. “What’s going on with Ray? Is he in trouble?”

Sad face again. “I’m not sure yet. We’re taking him in for questioning.” He leaned his elbow on the roof of the car, and there was that damn gun again. “Are you going to be all right driving home?”

“I think I’ll be fine.” I looked at the control panel. Getting an aeronautics degree from NASA would be easier than trying to turn on the air-conditioning. “I’ve never driven a car that didn’t have window cranks, but I should be able to figure it out.” I thought about Ray in a room being questioned, and I started to figure out what was going on. He was a suspect in the murder. I couldn’t think of any other reason why he was going to end up at the police station. I was pretty sure that being a shitty husband wasn’t against the law, even though I had given some thought to calling my local councilman on that one.

Crawford leaned down and I got a whiff of a light scent that reminded me of clean laundry. He held out the plastic key tag. “Whatever you do, just don’t hit this button. That will set off the alarm. I don’t think you need to set it. Everything else should be straightforward.” He paused for a minute. “I don’t get the sense that the car will be stolen in your neighborhood, but if so, I also don’t get the sense that you’d be really broken up about it.” He raised his eyebrows questioningly.

“You’re absolutely right about both things.” I got in the car but left the door open, one leg out. “He’s an asshole, but he’s harmless.” I said the words but wasn’t sure if I believed them at that moment. I hadn’t believed that he would cheat on me, so what was to say that he wouldn’t kill, too? I felt a sob rising in my throat. “You know, secret vasectomies and all.” I closed the door and quickly backed out of the spot. I looked in the rearview mirror as I drove away, and Crawford was still in the parking lot looking at the car with his sad, handsome face.

Ten

I left campus and merged onto the Saw Mill River Parkway, going north. I had never had a car so responsive and had to keep myself from going eighty miles an hour all the way home. I didn’t know why, but I was crying so hard that I had to blow my nose into the sleeve of my blouse. I guess I still had a soft spot for Ray that would take a long time to harden. He had hurt me worse than anyone I could imagine, but we had been together for a long time. I wondered aloud if he would be so upset if he thought I was going to end up in jail.

Ray had one of those fancy voice-activated cell phone things attached to the console. Since I wasn’t Ray and I was sure he didn’t have Max’s number stored in his phone, I punched in her number as I was driving and hoped that she would be able to hear me. She picked up after four rings.

“Max, it’s me. Listen, Ray needs help. What was the name of that hotshot lawyer you used to date? The one who defended the guy who shot the kid on the subway?”

“Mitch Klein,” she said. “What’s going on? Are you crying?”

I sniffled loudly. “Yes. I went to Ray’s office, and those two cops were there. They’re taking him in for questioning on the Miceli thing. I don’t know why.” I noticed that I was going eighty again and slowed down. I came to the light at Executive Boulevard and stopped. “Call me in a half hour or so and give me the number just in case he needs it. Can you do that?”

“Sure. I’ll call you in a half hour.”

Ten minutes later, I’d managed to pull the car up my driveway, get out, and lock the doors without incident, priding myself on the fine execution. I let myself in through the back door, threw my briefcase on the kitchen table, and took out my remaining can of Foster’s. I opened it and guzzled most of it down, some of it running down either side of my face. I found a crumpled-up paper towel on the counter and ran it over my face to sop up what hadn’t ended up in my mouth. In moments, I had the golden glow that I had not been able to replicate with martinis or red wine.

I went into the powder room off my front hallway and turned on the light. My face was red and blotchy from crying, and my mascara had run down my cheeks. I filled the white porcelain basin with water and washed my face with the antibacterial hand soap that I kept on the sink. Now my face was red, blotchy, dry, and germ-free.

I went up to my bedroom to change my clothes. I grabbed a pair of jeans and a clean T-shirt out of my drawers and shook off the mules. I took everything I had on and threw the pile into the hamper. The phone rang just as I had taken a pair of flip-flops out of the closet and put them on. It was Max.

“Mitch Klein,” she said, and recited the number. “I already spoke with him and told him to expect your call.”

I jotted the number down on a scrap of paper next to the phone. “Thanks, Max.”

“What’s going on?” she asked. “Do the police really think that Ray had something to do with this?”

“I don’t know. It looked serious when I showed up at his office, and being taken in for questioning can’t be good.”

“Let me know what happens. Make sure you tell the police that Ray is an asshole, but relatively harmless.”

I had to laugh. “I already did, Max.” I hung up and put the scrap of paper in my pocket.

The crunch of gravel outside my window, followed by the warning beeps of a commercial truck in reverse, made me go to the window to investigate. As I pulled the shade aside, I saw a tow truck backing up my driveway. I dropped the shade and raced back down the stairs.

I ran out the back door and into the yard. The tow truck was hooking the rear end of Ray’s car to a winch and pulling it up onto the flatbed. Detective Crawford stood to the side of the tow truck, watching impassively, one arm hanging down and the other lazily resting on his gun. An NYPD police car with two uniformed officers inside sat at the bottom of the driveway, flashers revolving; they had been accompanied by a Dobbs Ferry car with two officers in it. Crawford looked up when he heard the back door slam.

“We need the car, Alison,” he said. It was the first time I had heard him use my name.

“For what?” I yelled over the din of the winch.

“Ray is a suspect. We’re impounding the car and its contents so that we can do a thorough investigation. We have reason to believe that Ray knew Kathy Miceli.”

“Of course he knew her. She was in his intro biology class,” I yelled. He looked at me. “Don’t look at me with the sad face,” I said, putting my head in my hands. I knew what that meant. She was in his class but “knew” was the operative word.

He looked confused. “Let’s go inside.” He walked over to the tow-truck driver and motioned to the officers in the police car. After exchanging a few words, he turned back to me. “Did you leave anything in the car?”

I thought for a moment and remembered my briefcase on the kitchen table. I shook my head.

“Can you get me the keys?”

He held open the back door and waited for me to enter. I handed him the keys, and he went back outside. After a few minutes, the noise died down as the police car, the tow truck, and Ray’s car left my driveway. Crawford came back in and sat down across from me. We sat at the kitchen table, me with the can of Foster’s in front of me. A happy beer commercial with swinging singles it was not.

I felt drained. “Can I get you something?” I asked, trying not to forget my manners.

“Can I have some water?” he asked.

I pulled myself up from the chair and opened the refrigerator. There were several bottles of water on the top shelf and not much else. I handed him one and sat down. “I hope you don’t want a glass,” I said, and slumped back into the chair.

He opened the water and took a long drink. “I need to ask you a few questions.”

“You have got to get a better opening line,” I said wearily.

“You’re upset.”

“You think?” I rubbed my hands over my eyes.

“We have to investigate every single angle,” he said, trying to justify Ray’s being questioned.

“I know. Why Ray?”

He didn’t answer. “Did Ray have a set of keys for the Volvo?”

I thought for a minute. “Yes. He told me that he lost them a few weeks ago.”

“When did he move out?”

“Six months ago.”

He took out his notebook again and flipped to a clean page. “And when was your divorce finalized?”

“The same week that my car was stolen.”

His pen stopped moving in the notebook but he didn’t look up and I was glad. That revelation would certainly have brought out the sad face. I was already crying; the sad face would have put me over the edge. “We’re going to search the house tonight.” I got the sense that he wasn’t supposed to tell me that by how softly he spoke. I think the police usually like the element of surprise when it comes to searches. “Wyatt’s getting a search warrant now. We don’t like to break and enter if we don’t have to.” He gave me a knowing look, and I flashed back to the dorm break-in.

I tried to remain calm, but tears were streaming down my face. “What do you think you’re going to find?”

“We’re not sure, but anything that Ray left behind, anything that ties him to other women, to Kathy, in particular, is what we’re after.”

I took a napkin out of the holder on the table and snorted loudly into it. “Are you a really shitty cop or do you just feel sorry for me? Why are you telling me this?”

He pulled on his tie. “Because you asked. And I don’t know how you got mixed up in this, so yes, I guess I feel a little sorry for you.” He looked like he was going to say something else, but he pressed his lips together instead.

I wiped my eyes with the soggy napkin. Crawford handed me a clean one from the holder. “Listen, call Wyatt and tell him he doesn’t need a warrant. You can look through the whole house if you want. There’s nothing here,” I said.

He took out his cell phone and punched in a number. He got up and walked into the hallway, his back turned to me. When he was done, he turned back around and sat down at the table. “They’ll be here in an hour or so.”

I nodded. “Will it be all right if I leave while you’re looking through my things?”

“Only if it’s all right for us to be here without you,” he said. “Where are you going to go?”

“I can’t go far. I don’t have a car, remember?” I laughed because I was done crying, and I was in that crazy-hysterical place where laughing turns to crying and vice versa. A big blast of snot flew out of my nose, and I caught it in the napkin, but not before he caught sight of it. I got up. “I think I’ve demeaned myself enough for the short time we’ve known each other, so I’ll take my leave.” I put my hand on the door handle. “Will you still be here when I get back?”

“I’ll call you when we’re done. Take your phone.”

I reached into my briefcase and got my phone. He stood up, took off his blazer, and hung it neatly on the back of the kitchen chair. The big gun looked even bigger than it normally did, strapped in a leather holster that ran under his arm and across his back. I could see the outline of his badge under his shirt pocket.

“If you don’t want me in the house until Wyatt and the other officers get here, I’ll wait outside.” He rolled up his left sleeve to just below his elbows. I guess searching through my underwear drawer for evidence was dirty business, and he wanted to be prepared.

I waved my hand dismissively. “You? You’re about the only person I trust anymore, and I didn’t even know your first name until two hours ago.”

“It’s Robert Edward.” He held out his hand.

I took it. “Nice to meet you, Robert Edward,” I said. I walked out into the backyard, down the driveway, and into the street, not sure where I was going.