Scoop to Kill (8 page)

“I know you don’t want to go to school,” Alice said, unfazed by the pilfering feline. “I just need you to keep Reggie occupied for about fifteen, twenty minutes.”

I had gone from suspicious to downright distrustful. “Why?”

“Does it matter?”

“Of course it matters.”

“Oh, all right. I want to look around in his office a bit.”

“For what? Evidence of a girlfriend?” I teased.

She looked flummoxed, but then she laughed. “I guess I’m my mother’s daughter after all, huh?” She sighed. “Yeah, I was in his office every day last week, but he’s always there, too. He has one of those electronic picture frames, where you can keep lots of digital images, but it’s always on a picture of him in a cap and gown. He’s a puzzle, you know? An enigma. I just want to flip through the pictures and try to get a better feel for who he is. Look for pictures of his parents, his friends, his pets.”

“I don’t know, Alice. That’s not a very healthy thing to do.” Not to mention that it was weird that the only picture on the boy’s desk was of himself, alone. That didn’t bode well.

“Relax, Aunt Tally. I’m not turning into a stalker. I was, uh, thinking of asking him out, and I don’t want to put myself out there if he has a girlfriend.”

“Really?”

“Yes.” She cleared her throat, nodded once, and said it again more forcefully. “Yes. I think Reggie Hawking is cute and smart, and I want to ask him to go to the movies.”

She sounded so earnest, like she was planting her flag on virgin ground, and I almost laughed. One small step for Alice, one giant step for girlkind.

“I still don’t think it’s a good idea to snoop.”

“Really? You did a little snooping last year, didn’t you? And I seem to recall helping you with that.” She had a point. I hadn’t even given her a choice, simply impressed her into service as a diversion so I could chat up Crystal Tompkins about the murder of my ex’s girlfriend.

“But how old is this Reggie person?”

“I don’t know, exactly. He’s finishing his fourth year of grad school, so maybe twenty-five? Twenty-six?

“So, eight or nine years older than you? That’s a pretty big age difference.”

Alice sighed impatiently. “Aunt Tally, I spend my whole life hanging around with people who are older than I am. Geez, if I’m stuck dating boys my age, I’m stuck with Kyle.”

She managed to make it sound like dating Kyle was a fate worse than death. Poor Kyle. He looked at Alice like she hung the moon, and there was a time when she was equally fascinated with him. She was the gilded princess, with porcelain skin and pure heart. He was the tarnished knight, with brooding eyes and a gift for getting into trouble.

Where Alice excelled in school, taking honors classes and graduating early, Kyle had long been labeled a troublemaker and shunted off to remedial classes. He could hold his own when he and Alice sparred, so I had to assume his academic woes were a result of his bad attitude rather than some lack of ability. Still, the two would never have met if Kyle hadn’t taken the job at the A-la-mode so he could make restitution for a mailbox-smashing spree from the summer before. But once they entered each other’s orbit, the peculiar physics of attraction took over and they became locked in a tug-of-war as inevitable as gravity.

Then, something over the past year—either a fight they’d managed to keep private, or simply the shifting circumstances of their lives—had changed that dynamic, left it lopsided and sad.

“Besides,” Alice added, “I’m going to do it one way or another, even if I have to pick the lock to get in there. So you may as well stop trying to talk me out of it. If you help me, at least I won’t get caught.”

I took a bite of my bagel and chewed thoughtfully. Baked goods came dear, it seemed.

“Fine,” I said. “What do I have to do?”

 

Dickerson’s student union looked like a boutique shopping mall. The Gish-Tunny Center, named for the two alums whose generous bequests funded its construction, housed student-organization offices and a ballroom on the third floor; a bookstore, copy center, and elegant meeting rooms on the second floor; a large lounge and small eateries on the main floor; and a state-of-the-art performance space in the basement.

Reggie Hawking leaned down so his mouth was close to my ear. “It’s too loud to talk in here. We can get a drink and take it out to the patio.”

We’d left Alice back at Sinclair Hall, setting up a grade book for their American literature class on Reggie’s desktop computer. He led the way to the counter of the Jump and Java, a standard-issue espresso bar with a pastry case bursting with baked goods. He ordered a large coffee. “Make that two,” he said, glancing at me.

“Make that one,” I said, reaching a hand to get the clerk’s attention. Whether I wanted coffee or not, it wasn’t this kid’s place to order for me. “It’s hotter than a whore in a church out there. If we’re taking this outside, I’ll stick with iced tea. And a brownie.” To get through even ten minutes with this guy, I needed chocolate to sustain me.

Reggie paused in the act of rummaging in his pocket, met my eyes, and smiled. For the first time since we’d met, I felt like he didn’t just look at me, but actually saw me. When all that scattershot boy-genius energy focused on me, and his mobile features settled into sensuous lines, I could sorta see why Alice had a crush on him. He was still not my type, but I could at least wrap my brain around his appeal.

“That’s a dollar fifty for the coffee and four dollars for the tea and brownie,” the clerk said.

I laid four bills on the counter. Reggie picked them up and slipped them in his pocket. “I’ll pay for both with my i-Cash,” he said.

He pulled a yellow plastic card from his wallet and swiped it across a small black box with a glowing red eye.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“It’s my student ID,” he said. “Students and faculty can put money in an account and use our ID’s to pay for stuff at the campus stores. We get a discount when we use them.”

Neat. That meant he was paying less than four bucks for my drink and snack, but he sure wasn’t handing me back change.
Oh, well
, I thought,
I guess this makes me a patron of the arts
.

“We can even use them in the vending machines,” he continued. “Of course, some of the wingnuts over in the art department complained that the university is trying to keep tabs on us, tracking us like animals in the wild. But I think it beats the heck out of carrying around change or trying to get a dollar bill flat enough to feed into the machine.”

We found a table out on the student union’s shaded patio. The damp weekend had evolved into a muggy Monday that likely signalled the beginning of the unrelentingly brutal Texas summer. Reggie pursed his lips and blew gently across the surface of his coffee. The thought of drinking hot coffee in the middle of that saunalike weather made my neck prickle with sweat. I took a big gulp of my sweet tea, relishing the tingle of the crushed ice against my upper lip.

We sat in silence for a few minutes, as I tried to think of something clever to say. A thought popped into my head that it might someday be this awkward to converse with Alice.

“It must be interesting working with all these bright young students every day,” I offered.

Reggie shook his head. “College kids are basically sociopaths.”

I laughed.

“No, really,” Reggie insisted. “My first year in grad school, I had a roommate, a doctoral student over in the psych department. One night after we finished grading a stack of finals, we broke out a bottle of tequila and started bitching about our students. He showed me the definition of a sociopath in one of his textbooks. I don’t remember it exactly, but it was something about being completely self-absorbed, lacking empathy, and being willing to lie and cheat to get what you want. Pretty much sums up most college kids.”

It seemed like it came reasonably close to summing up most of the adults I knew, too, but I kept that observation to myself. “That’s a little harsh, don’t you think?”

Now it was Reggie’s turn to laugh. “Not harsh, just realistic. I had a kid last year actually lie about his mother dying to get out of a midterm. That’s some serious bad karma.”

“Sounds like he was desperate,” I said.

He shrugged his wild, spastic shrug. “Maybe,” he conceded, “but when I called him on it, demanded to see a death certificate or an obituary or something, he just smiled. Like ‘Oh, well, I guess you caught me.’ No tears, no apologies, nothing.”

I broke off a corner of the brownie and popped it in my mouth. “Okay, so he was kind of a sleaze. But that’s just one kid. Surely they’re not all that bad.”

Reggie sipped his coffee, slurping noisily. “That was an extreme case,” he admitted, “but I catch them lying all the time about being sick, having their cars broken into . . . and about halfway through the semester, grandparents start dropping like flies. Some of them are good kids, but they just don’t have any perspective, you know?”

Now that was something I understood. It had been less than a year since Brittanie Brinkman had died, and I had had to come to grips with the fact that my ex-husband’s chippie girlfriend was more immature than evil. She just lacked perspective.

“Especially these days,” Reggie continued. “Kids today have so much structure in their lives: every minute of their day is some scheduled event or activity; they’re told exactly what they have to learn for every test; and they all know they’re going to college when they graduate high school. At least the kids who end up at Dickerson know they’re going to college. They never have to make decisions for themselves, so they never have to make
good
decisions, you know?”

I fought a smile at the notion of this boy in his midtwenties complaining about “kids today.”

“So that’s what you do? Teach them to make good decisions?”

“Me?” Reggie leaned back in his chair. His gaze grew distant, and one corner of his mouth quirked up in something like a smile. “Hardly. At best, I teach them to write.” He made some inarticulate sound in the back of his throat.

“So if you don’t like teaching, why are you studying to be a professor?”

It seemed like a reasonable question to me, but Reggie snorted.

“I’m not studying to be a professor; I’m studying to be a scholar.”

“Oh.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to understand. Most people don’t.”

Well, la-di-freakin’-da.

“Most civilians,” he said with a small smile, amused at his own joke, “don’t realize that college professors teach, but that’s only a small part of the job. Most of the job involves doing research in our field, publishing in scholarly journals and writing books.”

To be honest, I didn’t understand the world in which Reggie and Emily lived, the world into which Alice was plunging headlong, but I did know that I had no patience for this sort of pompous BS. I was itching to show this kid that I wasn’t a total bumpkin.

“It must be tough to do all that without grant money,” I said, and smothered my smile of triumph over the look of surprise on his face.

“How did you . . . ?”

“I guess I pay attention pretty well for a civilian,” I said. “You said at Bryan’s funeral that there wasn’t much grant money for the humanities.”

“Oh, right. I guess I did.”

I glanced at my watch. I’d promised Alice I’d keep Reggie out of Sinclair Hall for twenty minutes, but time was dragging. I needed to keep him talking. Alice had suggested asking questions about being a nontraditional student, but I hadn’t prepared any questions and none were coming to mind. In the end, it didn’t matter what we talked about, as long as I kept him occupied a bit longer. So I decided to keep him on the subject of grant money.

“So if there isn’t any grant money for the humanities, why does Professor Gunderson run that office?”

“I have no idea,” Reggie said with a shrug. “At first, he got assigned to the office as an interim director, because the last guy left without any notice. He wailed about what a sacrifice he was making for the university, but then a month later he actually applied for the position on a permanent basis. No one else wanted to deal with the bureaucratic headaches, so he got the position.”

“And took Bryan with him,” I mused.

“Oh, no,” Reggie said. “Bryan only started working there this spring, after he failed his comps. Bryan couldn’t teach when his status in the department was up in the air. Of course, he wanted to go back to doing research with Dr. Landry, because Landry’s about to hit the big time with his new book. But even though Bryan worked for Landry last summer and so he was already familiar with Landry’s work, Landry said no.”

“Why?”

Reggie shrugged. “The official story was that it wouldn’t be appropriate for Landry, as chair, to work with a student with a complaint against the department. But that’s BS. I think Bryan did a half-assed job last summer, and Landry wanted someone who could pull his weight.”

“What makes you think that?”

Reggie smirked. “I heard Landry bitching about Bryan just before fall semester ended. He said something about how Bryan spent too much time on the effing Internet reading effing blogs.”

His smirk faded and he looked a little abashed. “It’s not like I was eavesdropping or anything.”

Which meant, of course, that he had been eavesdropping.

“It’s just that Landry was talking on his cell phone as he left Sinclair Hall, and I was sitting outside grading papers. It was right after Thanksgiving, when we had that weird heat wave, remember?” I nodded. “Usually Landry is laid back—trying to be the cool cat, you know?—but he was on a tear that day. I couldn’t help but overhear what he was saying.”

Reggie took a sip of his coffee. “Anyway, the bottom line is the department didn’t know what to do with Bryan, but Dickerson doesn’t pay anyone unless they work. Sticking him over in the research office was an easy fix. But I don’t think Gunderson particularly liked Bryan either. He just took one for the team, as they say.”