Murder 101 (11 page)

Thirteen

There were only two ways to go on the beach without either getting wet or hitting road—north or south. I chose south and started walking, enjoying the feel of the wet sand between my toes and the occasional splash of chilly ocean water on my legs. I looked at my watch and saw that it was almost three o’clock. I was in no rush to leave, but knew that I had to get home by ten or eleven in order to get ready for work the next day and get enough sleep in order to face my classes with a modicum of composure. I pushed the thought of the two-hour car ride out of my head and the probable traffic that we would face and enjoyed meandering down a deserted beach, destination unknown.

In the distance, I saw a hazy amusement park sticking out into the water, almost a mirage. I remembered from my teenage years that it was the boardwalk and amusement park at Seaside Heights, the after-prom destination of most high schoolers of my generation. I figured it was about five miles from where I was, going south. I wondered how long it would take me to walk that far in sand, barefoot.

I walked for about an hour and didn’t feel any closer to Seaside, but I was so relaxed that I hadn’t even thought about the last few weeks. In the distance, I saw a dune buggy approaching, its giant wheels carving huge tread marks in the damp sand. To my amazement, the driver pulled up next to me and stopped.

A young man wearing a tan police uniform with a badge on the sleeve that said
LAVALLETTE POLICE DEPARTMENT
looked right at me. “Afternoon, ma’am.”

The ma’am thing. I hated that. “Hi.”

“Are you”—he consulted a clipboard hanging from the dashboard—“Alison Bergeron?”

Great. Interrogated in two states. I nodded. Facing west, I had to shade my eyes from the sun, which was now low in the sky.

He picked up a cell phone, dialed a number, and handed it to me. It was Crawford. His voice crackled on the other end. “What is with you and walking? I woke up, and you were gone.”

“I figured you were doing surveillance, and I didn’t want to disturb you.”

“Funny.”

“You didn’t have to call the police.” I looked at the young cop, who was pretending not to listen but was hanging on every word. The side of the dune buggy said
LPD
. “You didn’t have to call the LPD.” How many cops could Lavallette have? Three? And now one was dispatched to look for a wandering English professor. Must have been an exciting day in the station house. “You’ve either greatly overreacted, or you’re too lazy to go out and find me.”

“Just get in the car and ask him to drop you off at the back of the house. I’ll be outside,” he said, and hung up.

“It’s a dune buggy,” I yelled into the phone, but he had hung up. “Would you mind driving me back down? It’s north of here. I’m not exactly sure where the house is, but my friend will be outside.” I hoisted myself into the dune buggy, and he gunned the engine.

A few minutes later, and after a nice conversation with Ted, the cop (who really wanted to teach surfing in Hawaii I learned), I was deposited at the back of the beach house. Crawford was standing on the deck with his arms folded over his chest and gave me a stern look. “You could have left me a note.”

“I left my shoes. That’s the beach equivalent of a note.”

Officer Dune Buggy Ted stayed a moment longer than he should have, waiting to see if fisticuffs would erupt, I guess. When he was sure that all was well, he drove off. I waved at him, and called “Thanks for the ride, Ted!”

“You didn’t have to call the LPD,” I said, giggling. “I was actually going to see how long it would take me to walk to Seaside.”

“A long time.” He had cleared the table of the lunch dishes and lit a citronella candle. I pulled up the same chair that I had been in before and sat down. He sat down next to me. “We shouldn’t leave for a while because the traffic on the Garden State will be horrendous. If you really have to get back, though, we can get started.” He looked at me, it seemed, hoping that I would agree to stay. “Or, you could start walking, which you seem to like to do.”

I didn’t want to leave, truth be told. I told him that I didn’t need to rush home.

“Great,” he said, and jumped up from the chair. He returned a few minutes later with a bottle of chilled chardonnay and two wineglasses. The bottle had already been uncorked, and he put the glasses on the table and poured the wine. “If you want dinner, we still have some food from lunch. Or, we can go out.”

“I promised Ted we’d go out later.”

He looked at me.

“I’m fine,” I said, and took a sip of the wine. It was delicious. I wondered if he had chosen it or if it was the family beach house stash. We sat quietly for a long time, watching the waves crash onto the beach, one after another. We finished the wine during that time and started on a second, even better one. “Do you collect wine?” I asked.

He looked surprised. “Me? No. I have a good friend who owns a restaurant in the city, and he buys my wine. My father and brother drink wine out of a box, so I bring a case down here every once in a while so they don’t get cirrhosis of the liver.”

“Good friend to have,” I said.

“I should take you to his restaurant sometime,” he said.

I took a sip of my wine. “Do you think we should do that?” I asked.

He looked back at me, obviously confused.

“We really shouldn’t do this.” I looked away from him. “We don’t know what we are, really.”

He shrugged. “We’re friends. Like you and Ted.”

“Really? Because you’re still a cop, and I’m still the ex-wife of a murder suspect and the owner of the murder vehicle, or whatever you would call that. And we’re alone at your beach house. Do you really think we should do this?”

He slumped in his chair. “No,” he admitted. “But the case will end soon and our lives will go on and someone else will get murdered,” he said, his voice trailing off. “Then, it will be all right.” He looked away, almost like a kid caught in the middle of an act of disobedience. “You’re right, though.”

Being right in this case didn’t make me feel any better. “So, nobody will know where I was today or who I was with. Except for Ted, of course.”

“Ted. It’s always Ted with you, isn’t it?”

“You know, you and Ted may be working together if anyone finds out we spent the day here eating lobster and drinking wine. So, try to get along.”

“The dune buggy is so much cooler than the Crown Vic,” he mused, smiling. But I could tell that I had hit a nerve. We weren’t supposed to be anywhere near each other. I returned to my thought that he might be the worst cop I had ever encountered, and the only ones that I had ever encountered were on television. They were usually very handsome, had great clothes, and broke all of the rules in the name of justice. Two out of three was pretty good.

He held his hand out to me. “Come here.” He reached over and took the wine out of my hand, putting it on the edge of the table. I took his hand, thinking we were going to shake on our new friendship and his new career as a beach cop. Instead, I was shocked when he pulled me onto his lap. I thought about the fact that at my height and weight, I could render him a paraplegic if I stayed there for any length of time. Our faces were as close as they could be without touching. “As long as we’ll never see each other again in a social capacity,” he said, putting his massive hands on either side of my face to pull me closer, “I’m going to kiss you just once.” And he did. And I didn’t vomit, as I often did when he was around, but I did almost faint.

Fourteen

Crawford dropped me off around eight that night, having endured a car ride with me in which I never moved and remained completely silent. What he didn’t know was that I was mentally berating myself for not moving and being completely silent. What was wrong with me? After so many years with Ray and having not a shred of self-esteem or self-respect left, I didn’t know how to act around an attractive and obviously,
interested,
man anymore.

Sadly, I had lost my mojo. If indeed I had ever had any.

And, to add insult to injury, I had pissed Max off. After he kissed me, I heard my cell phone start chirping inside the house. When I saw that the number on the screen belonged to Max, any pleasure that I had gotten from having kissed a very attractive man was erased by the sound of her shrill voice screaming about the fact that I was late for dinner. I apologized profusely, hanging up somewhere between “you’ll pay for this!” and “crappy house chardonnay.”

I went to bed filled with a mixture of sexual desire and self-loathing, just like a good Catholic should, and woke up some time around seven in the morning. Despite the fact that I had had one of the most enjoyable days that I could remember in a long time, I had a bit of a headache. Maybe it was a kissing hangover. I hadn’t been kissed like that in a long time; it must have had some kind of profound effect on my equilibrium. I stumbled into the bathroom and found a bottle of Excedrin headache medicine in the cabinet over the toilet. I shook two out of the bottle and put them in my mouth. Unable to find a cup, I put my mouth under the sink and tried to wash them down with the running water. I ended up with a bitter mush of aspirin and water in my mouth that made me gag.

After a shower, I went into the bedroom and sifted through the clothes in my closet. There was a yellow T-shirt and a pair of black pants in the mess that didn’t look too wrinkled, so I shook them out and put them on after unearthing a bra and underpants in my underwear drawer. Today would be “casual day.” My sandals were next to my bed, right where I had left them, and I slipped those on, too. After brushing my wet hair and putting on a bit of makeup, I felt like I could go to school and not look like the wreck of the
Hesperus,
as my mother used to say.

I found my briefcase in the hallway, right by the front door. I checked for my wallet and my phone, grabbed a couple of Devil Dogs and a bottle of coffee from the refrigerator, and left for school.

It was Friday. Two weeks since I had found out about Kathy’s murder, since I had met Crawford. What was it they always said on cop shows? The longer a case goes, the colder the trail gets? Well, if they didn’t step it up and soon, this case would be as dead as that dead young girl. I still had a hard time imagining Ray as a cold-blooded killer, but then again, I had had a hard time imagining him as anything less than my devoted husband. I guess I wasn’t as perceptive as I thought.

I thought about Crawford. It just figured that I met a nice man who seemed to think I was nice, too, and it was in the middle of a murder investigation. I felt incredibly guilty, thinking about what Gianna and Peter and their family had to live with for the rest of their lives. They wanted the case to be over so they could find out who killed their daughter, and I wanted the case to be over so I could go on a date. Maybe I’d track down Kevin when I got to school and figure out how not to feel so guilty about that.

Crawford could always join the LPD. And drive the dune buggy. But maybe I was getting ahead of myself. Maybe I was putting the cart before the dune buggy.

I mulled all of this over as I stood on the platform of the train station. I looked northward up the tracks as everyone else did in the morning, willing the train to come so that we could begin our day of rushing and running through the tasks that would put us on another platform, looking for the same train to take home. I saw it, like a mirage down the tracks, moving through the morning mist and hazy sunshine, making its way toward all of the type-A commuters I was sandwiched between.

I sat in my usual seat, with the same pregnant businesswoman next to whom I sat every day. She acknowledged me with a nod. We never spoke, but she had started looking for me in the last two weeks, and I for her. I didn’t know if it was against train etiquette to speak to her—it seemed there were some very ingrained rules regarding commuting, one of them mandating silence as far as I could tell—so we never spoke. I took out my Devil Dogs and began eating. I glanced at her out of the corner of my eye and caught her looking at me. By the way she was looking at me and the way I was stealing glances at her, it seemed that we both wanted what the other had—me, her swollen stomach and she, my Devil Dogs.

When the train arrived at the station, I began my laborious journey up the hill. To say that I literally dragged myself up the hill and down the avenue would not be an exaggeration. I continued my trek until I reached the front entrance of school. I thanked God silently as I saw Joe, in his golf cart, shooting the breeze with Franklin over a box of Dunkin’ Donuts and two giant coffees.

I stumbled up to the guard booth. “Can I get a ride?” I managed to get out, nearly to the point of hyperventilation. “And a donut?”

Franklin held out the box of donuts and I took a chocolate glazed. Joe put his donut down on the guard booth shelf and motioned to the golf cart. “At your service,” he said. I made a vow never to make another crack about Joe and his giant belly, either out loud or in my head.

He drove me to the back entrance of the building and after thanking him profusely and eating my donut, I went down the stairs, through the back door, and around to the door of the floor of offices. Dottie was in her usual spot, talking on the phone in that sotto voce way that you do when you’re at work and you’re talking with someone who really doesn’t have anything to do with your profession. Although calling what Dottie did a “profession” was stretching it. She mumbled something to the person on the phone and hung up.

“Feeling better?” she asked.

“Yes. Thanks for helping out with class assignments.” I turned around and went to the mailboxes behind her. There were various notices, papers, and messages, all of which I scrunched up into a stack and put in the outside pocket of my briefcase.

She swung around in her chair, blocking my exit. “The cute detective called,” she said, and winked at me. Dottie is sixty, looks seventy, and can be coquettish with the best of them.

“Cute detective?” I asked in that ridiculously casual way you do when you know exactly to whom someone is referring but don’t want to let on.

“You know. Crawford,” she said. “The Irish-looking one. Not the one that always looks like he’s in a bad mood. Although he’s kind of handsome, too, in a more rugged . . .”

I looked at her, waiting for the message. “And?”

She looked back at me, her eyes, heavy with mascara, blinking at me. “And what?”

“What did he want?” I enunciated.

“For you to call him,” she enunciated back. She whipped back around in her chair and faced her desk, her back to me. Thank God this conversation was over.

I made my way across the expanse of the office floor, past the long, antique prefect’s table and its mismatched chairs, and the closed doors of the offices belonging to my late-arriving colleagues. I stopped outside of my door, with its frosted glass insert, and saw Father Kevin emerge from the office of the French Department chair, Denis Marchant, whose office was to the right and down a short hallway from mine. Denis was a little younger than the rest of us and quite the bon vivant. Handsome, single, and French, he was a favorite among the female population on campus. French majors had increased by 20 percent when he joined the faculty. A cloud of smoke followed Kevin out of the office, and I knew immediately that the two of them had had their usual morning Gauloise smoke-a-thon, a no-no in a “nonsmoking” building. Kevin had on his black shirt, priest’s collar, well-worn jeans and Birkenstock sandals. It looked like an outfit from the Stoner Priest collection.

“Later, Denis,” Kevin said, and he came down the short hallway to the main area. He saw me and stopped. “Hey! Feeling better?” he asked. “I can do the intercession of St. Blaise thing if you have a sore throat.”

My level of guilt rose with every query of concern I had to answer to. “It was my stomach.” I lowered my eyes. “But thanks, Kevin.” I made the process of looking for my keys into a long, drawn-out affair so I didn’t have to make eye contact. He stood next to me, waiting for me to ask him in. I took the keys out of my briefcase and put the key into the lock, opening the door.

My office had been vandalized, ransacked, burgled, and turned upside down, basically. My file cabinet had been upended, and all of the files and papers were scattered all over the room. Books had been pulled out of the two large built-ins, and were strewn across my desk, the radiator, the floor, and every other clean spot. A large “X” had been carved into my desk, and my phone cord cut. Kevin came up behind me and none too delicately, shouted, “Holy crap!”

Dottie wheeled out from behind her desk and into the main area of the office area to get a better look. She called out to me. “Everything OK back there?”

I stood for a moment, taking in the destruction. Finally, having gleaned a bit about securing a crime scene from watching shows on Max’s cable station, I slammed my door shut and locked it, running past the large table to Dottie’s desk. “Give me the phone,” I commanded, holding out my hand. Without a word, she handed it to me, and I rested it on the edge of the glass partition that separated her from the rest of the floor. I had memorized Crawford’s cell number and punched it into the phone. He answered after three rings. The din in the background suggested to me that he was at work. “It’s me,” I said. Kevin came up beside me and stood there. “My office has been broken into.”

He sighed. “I’ll get some uniforms over. Don’t go in, and don’t let anyone in. Even campus security. Especially campus security.”

We hung up, and I handed the phone back to Dottie. “Thanks, Dottie.” She looked at me expectedly, like I was going to let her in on something. “My office was broken into.”

She whistled through her teeth. “The cops coming?” she asked, hopefully.

I nodded. “Let’s keep this as quiet as we can,” I said. “As a matter of fact, Kevin, stand outside and run interference with the students coming in for office hours, if you would. I’ll go outside and meet the police so I can bring them right in.”

I left the building through the back way and trotted up the steps to the front entrance of the dorm behind my building. I turned around and saw that if I had paid any attention while entering the building, I would have noticed the destruction as I had descended the steps. But I hadn’t, too busy eating my donut and making deals with God about Joe’s belly.

As I reached the top of the steps and went into the dorm parking lot, a police car screeched to a stop almost at my feet. Two officers—a young black man named Simons and an older, ruddy-faced man with a flat top whom I immediately renamed “Officer Jarhead”—jumped out. The older one, whose real name was Moriarty, spoke. “Alison Bergeron?” he asked.

I nodded. “Follow me.” A few students had gathered in the parking lot and begun to mumble among themselves.

Once inside, I sat down at the long table to wait for Crawford. Simons stayed with Kevin on the landing outside of the main office area and kept the door shut. Dottie, Moriarty, and I sat in silence, looking at each other occasionally.

Crawford showed up within a half hour. Although his hair was damp, and he was clean-shaven, he was still wearing the jeans and Teva sandals that he had on the day before. His shirt was new, though: a blue T-shirt, with big, white NYPD letters stamped across the front and back. The gold shield was on its silver chain and hanging to the middle of his chest. He had the big gun on, and it was in the leather shoulder holster over the T-shirt. I looked over at Dottie, who was staring at him and fanning herself with a college catalog.

Simons entered behind him, followed by Kevin. They closed the door to the office area and walked toward my office, where Moriarty was standing guard. Crawford asked Kevin to sit with me at the table. “Anyone else here?” he asked.

“Just Denis Marchant, the French chair,” I said, pointing to the alcove where Denis’s office was.

Crawford took a pair of rubber gloves out of his pants pocket and put them on. He asked for my keys and opened the door to my office and stepped in, careful to avoid the debris. When he saw the deeply etched “X” in the middle of the desk, he turned to Moriarty, and said, “Call Crime Scene.”

Moriarty, a little over five feet five and quite rotund, lumbered down toward Dottie’s desk and asked for her phone. Before handing it to him, she murmured, “I’m Dottie.”

I couldn’t hear his response clearly, but it sounded like “I’m good,” or “I’m food,” or “I’m Mook.” Whatever it was, these two were made for each other. They were the same size, same age, and had the same haircut.

Crawford looked at me. “I’m going to need a complete list of what was in here.” He saw the alarmed look on my face, and said, “To the best of your knowledge.”

“I’ve been here nine years. What wasn’t in there?” I asked, out of patience, a little hysterical, and into full-blown snotty mode.

He remained impassive, either used to crime victims or the moods of women; he did have teenage daughters. “Why don’t you start now? Do you have paper?” He turned his attention from me to Simons. “Simons, do you have a camera in the car?”

Simons nodded and left the floor to get it.

His monotone was annoying. Was this our first fight? If it was, he didn’t seem to know it. I sat down and pulled a blue exam book from the pile on the center of the table. I started jotting down what I thought might be the contents of my office. “Year one,” I said aloud. “Midterms, essays, research papers . . .”

He looked over at me and gave me a pained smile. “That’s not necessary.” He looked up and saw Moriarty, deep in conversation with Dottie, leaning against her desk. “How we doing on Crime Scene, Charlie?” he called out.