Murder 101 (3 page)

The paper was folded in half and I shook it open, staring at the main headlines, which depressed me even more; one of them screamed out about a “murder at a small, Catholic university.” I had just returned to staring at myself in the mirror when the door to the bar opened and a man entered. He was of average height, and despite the fact that he looked to be in his early thirties, prematurely gray. He had on a sport jacket and khaki pants. Before the door swung shut, I caught sight of a brown car at the curb, someone in the driver’s seat talking on a cell phone. The door slammed, and the man walked past me, ignoring my presence. He took a seat at the end of the bar and opened the newspaper that had been tucked under his arm.

The bartender emerged from the kitchen and told me that my food would be out in a minute. He then attended to the man, who ordered a club soda. The man focused on his paper, spread out in front of him on the bar, taking a sip of the club soda after the bartender set it down in front of him.

The bartender had returned, leaning over the bar to chat. “Terrible thing about what happened at St. Thomas.”

I took a sip of my martini and tried to look suitably horrified without engaging him in conversation. I was more horrified than he would ever know, but the subject of Kathy Miceli’s murder was the last thing I wanted to talk about. He turned around and looked up at the television just as a picture of my car flashed on the screen followed by a picture of St. Thomas. I sucked down the martini and asked for another one. He grabbed the remote and turned the volume on the television up so that he could hear the report.

A well-coiffed blonde was reporting live from the spot where my car had once sat. According to the caption at the bottom of the screen, she was reporting live. I had gotten out of there just in time. “. . . Dr. Alison Bergeron, a professor at St. Thomas, and a former classmate of Gianna Miceli, mother of the murdered girl . . .” A picture of Gianna flashed on the screen, followed by a shot of me that I had no recollection of ever having posed for. It was an “action shot”: in it, I was walking in the back parking lot of the Administration Building, obviously on my way to my office. And since I was wearing exactly what I currently had on, I figured out that it had been taken when I arrived at school that day. The bartender looked at the television and then back at me, his mouth agape. I looked down at the man at the other end of the bar to see his reaction, but he studied his paper, his eyes never leaving the print.

I looked back at the bartender. “I don’t look as bad as I thought I did today. Your older sister must be a knockout.” I returned to my paper. “Can I have that drink now?”

Assuming I must be some kind of badass or psycho serial killer, he turned around and whipped up a better drink than the first one before scurrying off to the kitchen to get my lunch. He returned and put it in front of me, backing away from the bar as if I was about to pull out a .38 special and blow his head off. His eyes never left me as I put my napkin across my lap and prepared to dive into my salad.

“Could I have some dressing?” I asked.

“What kind?” he asked, his voice cracking.

“Ranch.”

He ran off and came back with a chilled ramekin filled to the brim with dressing. He reached for the remote and turned the television off. “Do you need anything else?” he asked, his tone indicating that he hoped I didn’t.

A good lawyer, maybe? I shoved a forkful of lettuce into my mouth and shook my head. He wandered off toward the end of the bar where the man sat, and tried to engage him in conversation. The man responded to the bartender’s question about a recent baseball game with indifference followed by a grunt, which sent the bartender back to the kitchen. I ate quickly and downed my drink, keeping the guy at the end of the bar in my peripheral vision. Something about him wasn’t right, but I didn’t know what it was.

When I was done, I took a ten and a twenty out of my wallet and left them on the bar. Not seeing the bartender, I calculated in my head that I had left him more than enough for the two drinks, salad, and a tip. I grabbed my briefcase off the floor and started out of the bar.

The brown car was still parked at the curb, but it was empty. I continued down the avenue and when I reached the station road, I made a right and headed down the hill toward the river. The road doesn’t have a sidewalk, so I stayed close to the edge of it even though it wasn’t heavily trafficked at this time of day. I walked gingerly, careful of the clusters of gravel beneath my feet. I reached the train platform and sat on a bench.

I leaned back against the concrete headrest and fixed my eyes on a sun-dappled wave on the river. It was a beautiful spring day, and the river was calm and placid. When I thought about it, it always looked that way, rolling up toward Albany and back down again toward the Battery and the tip of Manhattan. Constantly flowing, yet static at the same time. I closed my eyes and listened for the rumble of the train coming down the tracks.

I didn’t have a schedule with me, so I didn’t know when a train would come. I was grateful when I heard the familiar grinding of brakes and muffled voice of the conductor calling out the window that the train would stop at Riverdale. I got up and smoothed my skirt, turning slightly to face the train. The doors opened and when I was sure that no one was getting off the train, I entered and stood in the space right inside the door. The doors closed, and I looked out the window of the train door as the train slowly started out of the station.

The train was nearly out of the station when I saw the brown car that had been outside the bar. It was parked at the edge of the parking lot, two shapes visible behind the windshield, their identities obscured by the bright sun reflecting off the glass.

The train built up speed, and I ran the length of the train car to get one more look at the car. I leaned in over an old woman who was sleeping in a two-seater; she opened her eyes and held her ticket up to my face, convinced that I was the conductor. I put my nose up to the glass and watched as the passenger-side door of the car opened and a man got out. He watched the train pull completely out of the station and continue down the tracks, his hand shielding his eyes from the sun. His jacket fluttered open, and I saw a gun on his hip.

His young face was in stark contrast to his full head of gray hair.

Three

I leaned over and adjusted the strap on my black slingbacks. Today was Katherine Miceli’s funeral—a full week after the detectives had come to my office—and her parents had decided to hold it at the chapel at school. Classes had been canceled for the day out of respect for the girl and in anticipation of the media frenzy that would surround this tragic event.

Dottie Cruz was the receptionist for all of the professors who shared that floor of the Administration Building. She had agreed to stay behind and answer the phones while most of the professors attended the funeral. She had been at the school for thirty years and was a world-class busybody. She was at her desk doing the
New York Post
jumble when I walked by. “See you later?” she asked, looking sad and forlorn. “Horrible thing, this is.”

I nodded, but kept going. I didn’t want to discuss much of anything with Dottie, let alone this.

The chapel was on the same floor as my office, down a long hallway. The floors went from a worn oak plank to a highly polished marble as you approached the doors of the chapel. For a school that at its peak only had eleven hundred students, the chapel was designed to hold at least that many, including the seating in the balcony. Since the school still had a convent attached to it, the sisters used the chapel as their regular place of worship, but there were only thirty or so of them left, so the chapel was often mostly empty. The heavy wooden doors, etched with pictures of Mary and Jesus, were open to the marble foyer, and I could hear a faint buzz in the chapel.

The smell of the chapel always brought me back to my days as a student here. It was a combination of incense, burning candles, melted wax, and floor polish. When I was an undergrad, there were about sixty nuns on campus, and the holy order to which they belonged wore a habit that included a bonnet that was not unlike the one that was stamped on the plastic container of Blue Bonnet margarine. Max, in her way, called them the “bonnet heads.” When she and I felt guilty about not going to Mass and showed up at the Sunday 9:15 service (about once every two months), we would always sit in the back: the first several pews would be filled with old, wizened “bonnet heads,” dutifully worshipping. At the time, I didn’t appreciate their devotion and was puzzled by their insular world and ways. Things hadn’t changed much in that regard; I was still puzzled.

The chapel was filled with about two hundred students, several hundred family members and friends from Kathy’s Staten Island neighborhood, and faculty. Everyone was situated mostly near the front, but I felt more comfortable in the third pew from the back, alone in the row.

Besides the humiliating moment outside of Etheridge’s office (which I didn’t count as anything, trying desperately to wipe it from my mind), I hadn’t seen Detective Crawford since our time together in the emergency room; but I looked up from the prayer missile that I had taken out of the holder in front of the pew and saw him sitting directly across from me with Detective Wyatt. Wyatt was thumbing through the hymnal. Crawford turned and caught my eye, giving me a faint smile.

Our chaplain, Father Kevin McManus, two female altar servers, and a priest I didn’t recognize made their way down the center aisle and met the casket, which was flanked by dark-suited pallbearers, at the back of the chapel. Kathy’s family stood behind the casket. Her mother, Gianna, had not changed since we had been in school together. She still had a pile of blond curls, was bone thin, and wore beautifully tailored clothes and designer shoes. She was gorgeous and always had been. She caught my eye and quickly looked away. Her husband, next to her, was the same man she dated when we were in school, but the years had not been as kind to him. Peter Miceli was short, bald, and had a paunch, despite a somewhat youthful face. He had on a black suit and shiny black lace-up shoes and was holding Gianna’s arm in a death grip. My heart ached to see them following the casket of their oldest.

Max and I had been somewhat friendly with Gianna when we were freshmen and she was a junior, but the specter of her family’s “business” always hung over her, making her seem a little unapproachable. When her father, a dead ringer for Michael Corleone, picked her up one Friday afternoon, Max and I shook with terror—we had seen
The Godfather
and knew what happened to people who hung out with the Mob; they either ended up married to an abusive husband or with a horse head in their bed. Then, there was the rumor of her boyfriend—the one who had a bad reputation, even by Mob standards—who went missing. That was enough for us. We didn’t want to go missing because we forgot to give her our biology lab notes. We kept our distance after that.

Today Gianna’s father, Tommy Capelli, stood behind her. He didn’t look much like Michael Corleone anymore but more like Don Corleone: heavy with white hair. He had on a gray suit, a starched white shirt with a big collar, and a black tie. He put his hand on Peter’s shoulder and whispered something in his ear, and Peter nodded.

Gianna had gotten pregnant in her senior year, so was relatively young to have a nineteen-year-old daughter. Her two other children, a boy and a girl, were much younger—closer to being pre-teens than anything else. Kathy’s brother and sister looked like they were in a daze as they stood to the side of their mother, holding on to a very small old woman with a black-lace mantilla on her head.

Vince Paccione, Kathy’s boyfriend, was with the family, but at the back of the crowd. He had the usual snarl on his face, and his body was tensed as if ready to spring onto someone or something. I had encountered Vince once or twice when he waited for Kathy outside of class and didn’t get his rebel without a clue act. He was handsome, got good grades (I had done a little snooping on that end), and seemed to have a few friends. But there was also a rumor that he was the Ecstasy connection at Joliet—St. Thomas’s “brother” school from long ago—and that bothered me because from what I had witnessed, Kathy was a very nice girl and shouldn’t have had a drug-dealer boyfriend. As girlfriends go, she seemed to have had that blind devotion and dedication to him that I recognized from a seven-year marriage that was dysfunctional from the beginning. I looked over at the cops in the pew and noticed Wyatt giving Vince the once-over, as if he thought something might happen.

Vince must have sensed my gaze at him because he caught my eye and held my stare. The organ sounded, and everyone focused on the procession down the aisle, and I finally looked away, a chill going through me as I saw Vince shoot me one last look over his shoulder.

Father Kevin and the other priest said a few prayers over the casket and turned to lead it and Kathy’s family up the aisle. As they processed, Father Kevin swung an urn of incense back and forth, filling the church with its pungent odor. The organist started playing, and I picked up my hymnal. Since I was raised Catholic, taught in a Catholic school, and went to church semiregularly, I knew most of what the organist played, but holding the hymnal and reading the words gave me something to do. I looked over at the detectives. Wyatt was looking around, seemingly at every face in the crowd, while Crawford was singing softly, his hands clasped in front of him. He apparently knew all of the words by heart.

I didn’t know how Father Kevin was going to be able to find anything to say that would bring the family comfort; but his sermon was beautiful, invoking the idea of resting with God for all eternity. I didn’t know if I believed it, but it sounded good.

When it was time for communion, Father Kevin brought the hosts down to the pews and had Kathy’s family receive communion from where they were sitting. Everyone else formed two lines, side by side, and made their way up the center aisle. I found myself elbow to elbow with Detective Crawford. He leaned over and asked how I was feeling.

“I’m better,” I whispered. I think the close proximity of the two lines had him thinking that he might have to duck for cover if the body of Christ made me nauseous.

He nodded and looked straight ahead, preparing to receive communion. I looked back, but Wyatt was still in the pew, sprawled out with elbows resting on the back of the pew and his right hand resting on his gun. He stifled a yawn as he watched everyone first proceed up the aisle and then back down.

I returned to my pew at the back of the church and knelt to pray. I didn’t know quite what to pray for: happiness in heaven? A swift resolution to this mystery of the murder? Retribution? So, in the end, I said good-bye to this young girl who never did understand what constituted plagiarism or the correct form of the bibliography. And when I thought about her that way, in the only way I really knew her, I was overcome by profound sadness. Tears leaked from the corners of my eyes and dropped onto the pew in front of me. I put my face in my hands and rested my elbows on the top of the pew.

The Mass ended, and the sound of sobbing girls—Kathy’s friends—was loud and echoed throughout the building. I recognized a couple of the girls from my classes—Fiona Martin, Mercedes Rivas, and Jennifer Garrison. As her family followed the casket out of the chapel, her grandfather, Tommy, began to wail—a low, pitiful moan that filled the chapel and reverberated around us. I saw Crawford fold his hands in front of him and look down, his discomfort with the loud displays of grief obvious to me. Wyatt looked over at Capelli in disbelief. I sat in my pew and waited until everyone had left. Outside the chapel there was a buzz of activity as every major media outlet was covering the funeral. I wasn’t sure if it was Kathy’s family that generated the interest, the circumstances of her death, or a combination of those two things, but the campus had been crawling with vans filled with crews and reporters since the beginning of the week. President Etheridge, hoping to maintain some kind of normalcy for the students, arranged for uniformed officers from the local precinct to patrol and monitor traffic coming into the school. The president’s affiliation with the mayor and his latest campaign seemed to ensure that there were at least fifteen officers on campus at all times. Too bad that hadn’t been the case when someone was stealing my car, murdering a young girl, and dumping both alongside a parkway on the border of the City and Westchester County.

As soon as I was sure that the hearse and the limousines had left the front of the building, I left the chapel and stepped onto the cool marble floor of the foyer. The foyer was circular, with benches on either side, and a balcony that overlooked the main floor. Ray sat on a bench looking out of the circular rose window that overlooked the river. When he heard my footsteps, he turned to face me.

He held his arms out to me and by habit, I went to step into them before I remembered that I didn’t have to and didn’t want to. I would have liked a hug but I couldn’t do it and his arms hung awkwardly in the air before he dropped them to his sides. “Are you OK?” he asked.

“Yes.” I took a step toward him. “Were you at the funeral?”

“I was,” he said. “I had Kathy in class.”

“Me, too,” I said, and studied his face. Funny . . . I didn’t remember ever having seen him cry when we were married or even when we were in the throes of divorce, but now, tears were coursing down his cheeks.

“I heard that they found her in your car.”

“Apparently.”

“How are you getting to school then?” he asked, running his hands across his wet eyes.

“I’m taking the train and walking from the station.”

“If you ever need a ride, just call me on my cell, and I’ll pick you up,” he said. Even I had to admit it was a nice offer. “You know I’m still here for you.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. He was never there for me during our marriage, but now that we were apart, we were best friends? The man lived in an alternate universe where his logic actually made sense, but only to him.

When I didn’t respond, he shrugged, resigned. He started for the stairs on the right side of the chapel. “Do you need a ride today?”

“No, I don’t. But thanks for thinking of me,” I managed to say, and started down the stairs on the left side, picking up my pace as I descended each creaky riser. Because as hard as I had tried to hold on to him for all those years, now I couldn’t get away from him fast enough.