The Girl Who Ran Off With Daddy (21 page)

“No way. That thing scares me shitless.” She smiled at me, a big smile. “Have a great time in New York, Hoagy. And thanks for everything. I mean it.” And then she turned her attention back to Granny and a man named Jed.

I wasn’t there anymore.

I was dismissed.

It had been a while since I’d been up to Columbia, that fortified stronghold of red brick and so-called free thought up in Morningside Heights, hard on the edge of Harlem. The last time was three years before when the journalism school asked me to participate in a spirited panel discussion on the wonderful world of freelancing. I was the designated ghost. The fifty or so students who attended were keenly interested in what the woman from
Vanity Fair
had to say. None of them were interested in what I had to say, largely because none of them thought that ghosting was anything they’d ever have to do. I didn’t blame them. I never thought I’d have to do it either.

I got there around lunchtime. Students toting backpacks crammed with books and laptops were tromping about in rumpled flannel shirts, khakis and unlaced boots. It was a bright, clear day. Not too cold. Many sat on the steps of Low Library eating their lunches in the sunshine. They seemed carefree and happy. I envied them this. I couldn’t even remember what it felt like.

Tyler Kampmann’s dorm, Furnald Hall, was located just inside the big gate at Broadway and West 116th Street. It was a coed dorm. An amiable old geezer at the counter just inside the door sorted the mail and served as a receptionist. A uniformed security guard backed him up. There was no getting by either of them without a student ID card, not unless you were the guest of one of the residents—and one of them had to sign you in. I got Tyler’s room number, 461, from the old guy and tried phoning up, but Tyler wasn’t in his room. I thanked the man anyway. He seemed surprised. Politeness tends to surprise people these days.

I told the woman at the registrar’s office I was Tyler’s uncle and that there was a family emergency. She gave Lulu a doubtful once-over, but she bought my story. Just one of the many advantages of having an above-average wardrobe. Tyler was in an English lit class from noon until one-thirty. I found the building and waited outside on a bench while Lulu growled at the pigeons. To my surprise, I found I was thinking about how appealing it was to be back on a campus again. I hadn’t particularly enjoyed the academic life when I was a part of it. I believe the phrase
intellectual masturbation
came up a lot, as it were. But now that I’m older I can see the ivory tower’s rewards. It’s a place where you can talk about the way the world ought to be and not get laughed at. It’s a place where you can hide out from the world the way it is and get paid for it. I don’t knock such places anymore.

At one-thirty a couple of dozen kids came trudging slowly out, more than a few of them yawning and rubbing their eyes as if they’d just awakened from a long, deep sleep. I tried to guess which one would be Tyler. Knowing Clethra, I started with the grungiest guy and worked my way down the food chain from there. Struck out three times—until a pale, chubby kid with curly black hair and bloodshot eyes told me Tyler hadn’t come to class today.

“I don’t think he’s feeling too together, man,” he explained, after I told him I was Tyler’s uncle. His name was Ian Gardner and he lived right across the hall from Tyler. “He bailed on all his classes today.”

“Are you sure he’s on campus?” I was thinking maybe he’d run off to a warm beach with a cool blonde, his pockets stuffed with tabloid loot.

“Oh, yeah. He’s here. I pounded on his door this morning to see if he was coming to French with me. He said no way.”

“What time was that?”

“Just before nine. Knowing Ty, he’s probably still in the sack.”

“He’s not,” I said. “Or if he is he’s not answering his phone.”

“Probably just stuck it in his dresser under twelve pairs of shorts.” Ian grinned at me goofily. “We got, like, major trashed on champagne last night. He just came into some righteous family bucks and … Jeez, what am I saying? You’d know all about that, huh?”

“Yes, I would.”

“I’m heading back to Furnald right now. I can tell him you’re here, you want.”

“May I come with you? It’s rather important.”

We walked back to Furnald together. He signed Lulu and me in as his guests and we went upstairs. The fourth-floor hallway was narrow and it was dingy. It smelled of Right Guard, dirty socks and musty bedding.

“Yo, Kampmann!” Ian bellowed, pounding on Tyler’s door with his open palm. “Get your butt outta bed, cuz! Uncle’s here to see you!” When there was no answer he pounded on it louder. “C’mon, Kampmann! You got family here!” He yelled this loud enough for a couple of guys down the hall to poke their heads out of their doors. But still there was no answer.

“Guess he went out,” Ian apologized to me. “Want to leave him a note?”

It was an old building and it had settled. There was at least an inch of space between the bottom of the door and the carpet. Lulu was snuffling at it intently, her large black nose aquiver—until she stiffened and let out that forlorn moan I’ve come to know and loathe. Right away she started off down the hallway with her tail between her legs.

I told her to stay put. And told Ian to call campus security.

“What for?” he wondered, baffled. “What’s the problem?”

“We have to get that door open right away.”

“No problem, man,” he said calmly. “Got me a key.” He unlocked the door to his own room, 460, fished it out of his desk and came back and used it to unlock Tyler’s door.

Tyler’s bed was unmade, his books and sneakers and dirty clothes strewn about haphazardly. Typical male dorm room, right down to the pyramid of beer cans next to the closet. Typical except for the corpse on the floor. Tyler Kampmann had been a small, slender boy with blond hair. The eyes that bulged out of his head were baby blue. The welts around his throat were purple.

Ian ran down the hall at once to be sick. I asked the boy next door if I could use his phone, since I didn’t want to touch Tyler’s. He said sure thing. I used it to call Romaine Very.

I
WAITED FOR HIM OUTSIDE
on the steps with Lulu. There was already such a crowd up there in room 461—the campus police, NYPD, EMS people, medical examiner’s people. I didn’t want to get in their way. Or get asked what the hell I’d been doing around campus pretending to be the victim’s uncle. A pair of truly ill-looking university administrators arrived while I sat out there. A murder on campus is their worst nightmare. Expensive Ivy League school, none too choice neighborhood … it doesn’t get any worse. The New York press corps showed up as well, reporters and cameramen crowding the entrance to Furnald Hall in desperate search of somebody to talk to or shoot or both. Everywhere I went these days, it seemed, the press showed up. I was beginning to feel like Princess Di.

Very came strutting out about a half hour later. The press he ignored. Me he made right for. I can’t honestly say Detective Lieutenant Romaine Very and I are friends. I can’t honestly say that because he doesn’t like me. We’d been around the bases twice before, most recently when I ghosted the memoirs of Lyle Hudnut, the top-rated TV comic.

“Wish I could say I was glad to see you again, dude,” Very said, his jaw working on a piece of gum.

“I wish you could as well, Lieutenant.”

He started to say something else, stopped, and stood there a moment with his eyes shut and his lips moving silently as if he were, well, talking to himself. Very was in his late twenties, short and muscular and ultra-street, with soft brown eyes, wavy black hair, an earring and a degree in romance languages from this very college. He had on a hooded blue sweatshirt, matching sweatpants and a pair of black Chuck Taylor high-tops. He could have easily passed for a student except for the bulge under his sweatshirt where his gun was. For as long as I’d known him, Romaine Very had had this serious problem with his intensity, as in he had too much of it. Often, he’d vent it by nodding his head rhythmically, as if he heard his own hip-hop beat. But he wasn’t doing that right now. No, there was something decidedly odd about Romaine Very’s behavior right now.

He was smiling at me. Blissfully.

“My alma mater,” he proclaimed happily as he flopped down on the step next to me. “Spent some of the worst fucking years of my life here.” He reached over and patted Lulu, still smiling at me in this most peculiar way. “How’s fatherhood treating you, dude?”

“Shabbily, if the past two days are any indication.” I peered at him curiously. “How did he die?”

“Strangled, bare hands. No apparent motive. Had a hundred bucks in cash still on him.”

“Any idea when?”

“Not yet.”

“Well, we do know he was alive a few minutes before nine.”

Very chuckled at me, a forced chuckle that went on just a little too long. “And how do we know that?” he asked calmly.

“Ian says so,” I replied, continuing to peer at him. Clearly, this was a new Very, a warmer, fuzzier Very. It was downright creepy. “Ian spoke to him.”

“I see.” Very closed his eyes and clasped his hands together. Now he looked like he was asking Santa to please,
please
bring him a new bicycle. “Would you care to tell me why you were impersonating a member of the victim’s family?”

“He was somewhat connected to a project I’m working on.

“Now that particular response doesn’t surprise me,” he conceded. “But I don’t recall reading nothing about it. Usually do.”

“I’m on this one unofficially. Strictly as a favor for a friend. Make that former friend.”

“Not a friend anymore?”

“Not among the living anymore.”

Very took a deep breath and held it in for several seconds, then let it out. He did this three times, in and out, as if he were trying to blow up a life raft. Possibly his own. “Okay, sure. We’re talking Thor Gibbs, am I right? That’s why his body was found at your ex-wife’s farm yesterday.”

“That’s correct.”

“And you’re helping out sweet little Clethra. She’s your celebrity.”

“That’s correct.”

“I never knew you were friends with Thor Gibbs.”

“There’s a lot about me you don’t know, Lieutenant.”

“So true,” he admitted. “I gotta try harder, on account of you’re a bright, sensitive guy. I should make more of an effort to relate to you.”

Lulu and I exchanged a look. “Stop this, Lieutenant. You’re starting to frighten me.”

“I’m serious, dude.”

“I know you are. That’s what’s frightening me.”

“Wanna tell me about it?” he asked. “What’s going down?”

“A whole lot of crosstown traffic, Lieutenant. I seem to be stuck in it.”

“Let’s start with Tyler, okay?” Very suggested patiently. This from a man who’d given himself an ulcer before he was twenty-six. “How did he fit into this?”

I told him how. I told him how he was Clethra’s ex-honey and that she believed he was the one who’d peddled the striptease video to
Hard Copy.

“That plays,” Very said. “We just found a two-day-old bank deposit slip in his desk like you wouldn’t believe.”

“Oh, I’d believe it,” I said. “I also believe he knew something, Lieutenant. Something about Clethra and Thor’s love affair. I don’t know what—she got most evasive when I pressed her on it. That’s why I came here. Only I was too late. Whatever Tyler knew died with him. Possibly, that’s why he was killed.”

“Or possibly,” Very countered, “somebody was just paying him back for peddling that tape.”

“Possibly.”

“Like who, dude? Who we looking at in the way of suspects?”

I gave him the big three—Ruth, Barry and Marco—and how they figured in. “All three of them were in Connecticut yesterday when Thor was killed. All three of them are here in the city today. They have to be considered our prime candidates. Except for …” I stopped short, remembering what had—or I should say had not—occurred yesterday when we were out in Barry’s yard.

“Except for what, dude?”

“Nothing, Lieutenant.”

“Who’s handling the investigation out there?”

“Fellow called Chick Munger. He’s a lieutenant with the Major Crime Squad, Central District. But you’ll want to deal with Resident Trooper Slawski.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“Because we don’t like Munger.”

Very squeezed out that strange chuckle again. “You never learn, do you, dude?”

“I try to, Lieutenant. I just never seem to get anywhere.”

“Check, lemme explain it to you then, okay?” Now he sounded like he was addressing a kindergarten class on the subject of what Mr. Policeman does. “I ain’t interested in getting mixed up in some other department’s political bullshit. And I really, really ain’t interested in playing any of your head games.”

“I’m not playing games, Lieutenant. Head or otherwise.”

“All I want,” he went on, “is a nice, orderly joint investigation. Two departments working hand in hand in a cooperative and professional manner. Because if we don’t then the FBI will swoop in and take a big dump all over us, which they may do anyway with all of the pub this is generating. They sure as hell won’t give us much time, bet on it.”

The university administrators came back outside now to face the press. They looked even sicker than they had before.

“Tell me, Lieutenant,” I said. “Did any of Tyler’s neighbors on the fourth floor hear anything?”

“We’re checking on that. Some of ’em are still in class.”

“What about the security guard down in the lobby?”

“According to him, the victim had no guests this morning. And he don’t remember anybody asking about him—except for you, of course.”

“Was someone on duty all night?”

“All night,” he affirmed. “Same story. No one came to see him.”

I pondered this, frowning. “But how is that possible?”

“Dunno how it’s possible, dude,” he responded cheerfully. “We’re checking on that, too.”

I stared at him. “You know, you’re acting really, really unusual, Lieutenant.”

He showed me that same tranquil, creepy smile. “You noticed, huh?”

“Hard not to.”

“I’ve made a major change in my life since the last time I saw you, dude.”