by Jeff Lindsay
“But why would they?” Deborah said.
Keller smiled politely. “I’m sure I don’t know,” he said.
“So what the hell good does any of that do me?” she said, with a tone that suggested it was Keller’s job to come up with an answer.
He gave her a kindly professor smile. “It never hurts to know things,” he said.
“For instance,” I said, “we know that somewhere there must be a big statue of a bull with a furnace inside.”
Deborah snapped her head around so that she faced me.
I leaned close to her and said softly, “Halpern.” She blinked at me and I could see she hadn’t thought of that yet.
“You think it wasn’t a dream?” she demanded.
“I don’t know what to think,” I said. “But if somebody is doing this Moloch thing for real, why wouldn’t he do it with all the proper equipment?”
“Goddamn it,” Deborah said. “But where could you hide something like that?”
Keller coughed with a certain delicacy. “I’m afraid there’s more to it than that,” he said.
“Like what?” Deborah demanded.
“Well, you’d have to hide the smell, too,” he said. “The smell of cooking human bodies. It lingers, and it’s rather unforgettable.” He sounded a little bit embarrassed and he shrugged.
“So we’re looking for a gigantic smelly statue with a furnace inside,” I said cheerfully. “That shouldn’t be too hard to find.”
Deborah glared at me, and once again I had to feel a little disappointed at her heavy-handed approach to life—especially since I would almost certainly join her as a permanent resident in the Land of Gloom if the Dark Passenger refused to behave and come out of hiding.
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“Professor Keller,” she said, turning away from me and completing the abandonment of her poor brother, “is there anything else about this bull shit that might help us?”
It was certainly a clever enough remark to be encouraging, and I almost wished I had said it, but it appeared to have no effect on Keller, nor even on Deborah herself, who looked as though she was unaware that she had said something notable. Keller merely shook his head.
“It’s not really my area, I’m afraid,” he said. “I know just a little background stuff that affects the art history. You might check with somebody in philosophy or comparative religion.”
“Like Professor Halpern,” I whispered again, and Deborah nodded, still glaring.
She turned to go and luckily remembered her manners just in time; she turned back to Keller and said, “You’ve been very helpful, Dr. Keller. Please let me know if you think of anything else.”
“Of course,” he said, and Debs grabbed my arm and propelled me onward.
“Are we going back to the registrar’s office?” I asked politely as my arm went numb.
“Yeah,” she said. “But if there’s a Tammy enrolled in one of Halpern’s classes, I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
I pulled the tattered remnants of my arm from her grip. “And if there isn’t?”
She just shook her head. “Come on,” she said.
But as I passed by the body once more, something clutched at the leg of my pants, and I looked down.
“Ahk,” Vince said to me. He cleared his throat. “Dexter,” he said, and I raised an eyebrow. He flushed and let go of my pants. “I have to talk to you,” he said.
“By all means,” I said. “Can it wait?”
He shook his head. “It’s pretty important,” he said.
“Well, all right then.” I took the three steps back to where he was still squatting beside the body. “What is it?”
He looked away, and as unlikely as it was that he would show real emotion, his face flushed even more. “I talked to Manny,” he said.
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“Wonderful. And yet you still have all your limbs,” I said.
“He, ahm,” Vince said. “He wants to make a few changes. Ahm.
In the menu. Your menu. For the wedding.”
“Aha,” I said, in spite of how corny it sounds to say “Aha”
when you are standing beside a dead body. I just couldn’t help myself. “By any chance, are these expensive changes?”
Vince refused to look up at me. He nodded his head. “Yes,” he said. “He said he’s had an inspiration. Something really new and different.”
“I think that’s terrific,” I said, “but I don’t think I can afford inspiration. We’ll have to tell him no.”
Vince shook his head again. “You don’t understand. He only called because he likes you. He says the contract allows him to do whatever he wants.”
“And he wants to raise the price a wee bit?”
Vince was definitely blushing now. He mumbled a few syllables and tried to look away even further. “What?” I asked him. “What did you say?”
“About double,” he said, very quietly, but at least audible.
“Double,” I said.
“Yes.”
“That’s $500 a plate,” I said.
“I’m sure it will be very nice,” said bright-red Vince.
“For $500 a plate it had better be more than nice. It had better park the cars, mop the floor, and give all the guests a back rub.”
“This is cutting-edge stuff, Dexter. You’ll probably get your wedding in a magazine.”
“Yes, and it will probably be Bankruptcy Today. We have to talk to him, Vince.”
He shook his head and continued to look at the grass. “I can’t,”
he said.
Humans are wonderful combinations of silly, ignorant, and dumb, aren’t they? Even the ones who are pretending most of the time, like Vince. Here he was, a fearless forensic tech, actually within inches of a gruesomely murdered body that had no more DEXTER IN THE DARK
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effect on him than a tree stump, and yet he was paralyzed with terror at the thought of facing a tiny man who sculpted chocolate for a living.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll talk to him myself.”
He looked up at me at last. “Be careful, Dexter,” he said.
T W E N T Y - T W O
Icaught up with Deborah as she was turning her car around, and happily, she paused long enough for me to climb in for a ride to the registrar’s office. She had nothing to say on the short drive over, and I was too preoccupied with my own problems to care.
A quick search of the records with my new friend at the registrar’s office turned up no Tammy in any of Halpern’s classes. But Deborah, who had been pacing back and forth while she waited, was ready for that. “Try last semester,” she said. I did; again nothing.
“All right,” she said with a frown. “Then try Wilkins’s classes.”
It was a lovely idea, and to prove it, I got an immediate hit: Ms.
Connor was in Wilkins’s seminar on situational ethics.
“Right,” Deborah said. “Get her address.”
Tammy Connor lived in a residential hall that was only moments away, and Deborah wasted no time in getting us over there and parking illegally in front of it. She was out of the car and marching toward the front door before I could even get my door open, but I followed along as quickly as I could.
The room was on the third floor. Deborah chose to vault up the DEXTER IN THE DARK
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stairs two at a time rather than waste time pushing the button for an elevator, and since this left me with not enough breath to complain about it, I didn’t. I got there just in time to see the door to Tammy’s room swing open to reveal a stocky girl with dark hair and glasses. “Yes?” she said, frowning at Deborah.
Debs showed her badge and said, “Tammy Connor?”
The girl gasped and put a hand to her throat. “Oh, God, I knew it,” she said.
Deborah nodded. “Are you Tammy Connor, miss?”
“No. No, of course not,” the girl said. “Allison, her roommate.�
��
“Do you know where Tammy is, Allison?”
The girl inhaled her lower lip and chewed it while shaking her head vigorously. “No,” she said.
“How long has she been gone?” Deborah asked.
“Two days.”
“Two days?” Deborah said, raising her eyebrows. “Is that unusual?”
Allison looked like she was going to chew her lip off, but she kept gnawing on it, pausing only long enough to blurt out, “I’m not supposed to say anything.”
Deborah stared at her for a long moment before finally saying,
“I think you’re going to have to say something, Allison. We think Tammy may be in a lot of trouble.”
That seemed to me a very understated way of saying that we thought she was dead, but I let it go by, since it was obviously having a profound effect on Allison.
“Oh,” she said, and started jiggling up and down. “Oh, oh, I just knew this would happen.”
“What is it that you think happened?” I asked her.
“They got caught,” she said. “I told her.”
“I’m sure you did,” I said. “So why not tell us, too?”
She hopped a little faster for a moment. “Oh,” she said again and then warbled, “she’s having an affair with a professor. Oh, God, she’ll kill me for this!”
Personally, I didn’t think Tammy would be killing anybody, but just to be sure I said, “Did Tammy wear any jewelry?”
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She looked at me like I was crazy. “Jewelry?” she said, as if the word was in some foreign language—Aramaic, perhaps.
“Yes, that’s right,” I said encouragingly. “Rings, bracelets—anything like that?”
“You mean like her platinum anklet?” Allison said, very obligingly, I thought.
“Yes, exactly like that,” I said. “Did it have any markings on it?”
“Uh-huh, her name,” she said. “Oh, God, she’ll be so pissed at me.”
“Do you know which professor she was having an affair with, Allison?” Deborah said.
Allison went back to shaking her head. “I really shouldn’t tell,”
she said.
“Was it Professor Wilkins?” I said, and even though Deborah glared at me, Allison’s reaction was much more gratifying.
“Oh God,” she said. “I swear I never said.”
One call on the cell phone got us the address in Coconut Grove where Dr. Wilkins made his humble home. It was in a section called The Moorings, which meant that either my alma mater was paying professors a great deal more than they used to, or else Professor Wilkins had independent means. As we turned onto the street, the afternoon rain started, blowing across the road in slanted sheets, then slowing to a trickle, then picking up again.
We found the house easily. The number was on the yellow seven-foot wall that surrounded the house. A wrought-iron gate blocked off the driveway. Deborah pulled up in front and parked in the street, and we climbed out and looked through the gate. It was a rather modest home, no more than 4,000 square feet, and situated at least seventy-five yards from the water, so perhaps Wilkins wasn’t really all that wealthy.
As we peeked in, looking for some way to signal the house that we had arrived and wished to enter, the front door swung open and a man came out, wearing a bright yellow rain suit. He headed for the car parked in the drive, a blue Lexus.
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Deborah raised her voice and called out, “Professor? Professor Wilkins?”
The man looked up at us from under the hood of his rain suit.
“Yes?”
“Can we speak to you for a moment, please?” Deborah said.
He walked toward us slowly, head cocked at Deborah on a slight angle. “That depends. Who is us?”
Deborah reached into her pocket for her badge and Professor Wilkins paused cautiously, no doubt worried that she might pull out a hand grenade.
“Us is the police,” I reassured him.
“Is we?” he said, and he turned toward me with a half smile that froze when he saw me, flickered, and then resumed as a very poor fake smile. Since I am an expert on faking emotions and expressions I was in absolutely no doubt about it—the sight of little old me had startled him somehow, and he was covering it by pretending to smile. But why? If he was guilty, surely the thought of police at the gate would be worse than Dexter at the door. But instead he looked at Deborah and said, “Oh, yes, we met once before, outside my office.”
“That’s right,” said Deborah as she finally fished out her badge.
“I’m sorry, will this take long? I’m kind of in a hurry,” he said.
“We have just a couple of questions, Professor,” Deborah said.
“It will take only a minute.”
“Well,” he said, looking from the badge to my face and then quickly away again. “All right.” He opened the gate and held it wide. “Would you like to come in?”
Even though we were already soaked to the skin, it seemed like a pretty good idea to get out of the rain, and we followed Wilkins through the gate, up the driveway, and into his house.
The interior of the house was done in a style I recognized as classic Coconut Grove Rich Person Casual. I had not seen an example like this since I was a boy, when Miami Vice Modern took over as the area’s dominant decorative pattern. But this was old school, bringing back the memory of when the area was called Nut Grove because of its loose, Bohemian flavor.
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The floors were reddish-brown tile and shiny enough to shave in, and there was a conversation area consisting of a leather couch and two matching chairs off to the right beside a large picture window. Next to the window was a wet bar with a large, glassed-in, temperature-controlled wine cabinet and an abstract painting of a nude on the wall next to it.
Wilkins led us past a pair of potted plants and over to the couch, and hesitated a couple of steps in front of it. “Ah,” he said, pushing back the hood from his rain jacket, “we’re kind of wet for the leather furniture. Can I offer you a barstool?” He gestured toward the bar.
I looked at Deborah, who shrugged. “We can stand,” she said.
“This will only take a minute.”
“All right,” Wilkins said. He folded his arms and smiled at Deborah. “What’s so important that they send someone like you, in this weather?” he said.
Deborah flushed slightly, whether from irritation or something else I couldn’t tell. “How long have you been sleeping with Tammy Connor?” Deborah said.
Wilkins lost his happy expression and for a moment there was a very cold, unpleasant look on his face. “Where did you hear that?”
he said.
I could see that Deborah was trying to push him off-balance just a bit, and since that is one of my specialties I chimed in. “Will you have to sell this place if you don’t get tenure?” I said.
His eyes snapped to mine, and there was nothing at all pleasant about the look he gave me. He kept his tongue in his mouth, too. “I should have known,” he said. “So this was Halpern’s jailhouse confession, was it? Wilkins did it.”
“So you didn’t have an affair with Tammy Connor?” Deborah said.
Wilkins looked back to her again and, with a visible effort, re-gained his relaxed smile. He shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t get used to you as the tough one. I guess that’s a pretty successful technique for you two, hmm?”
“Not so far,” I said. “You haven’t answered any of the questions.”
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He nodded. “All right,” he said. “And did Halpern tell you he broke into my office? I found him hiding under my desk. God knows what he was doing there.”
“Why do you think he broke into your office?” Deborah asked.
Wilkins shrugged. “He said I sabotaged his paper.”
“Did you?”
He looked at her
, and then over to me for an unpleasant mo -
ment, then back to Deborah. “Officer,” he said, “I am trying very hard to cooperate here. But you’ve accused me of so many different things I’m not sure which one I’m supposed to answer.”
“Is that why you haven’t answered any of them?” I asked.
Wilkins ignored me. “If you can tell me how Halpern’s paper and Tammy Connor fit together, I’ll be happy to help any way I can.
But otherwise, I’ve got to get going.”
Deborah looked at me, whether for advice or because she was tired of looking at Wilkins, I couldn’t tell, so I gave her my very best shrug, and she looked back at Wilkins. “Tammy Connor is dead,”
she said.
“Oh, my,” Wilkins said. “How did it happen?”
“The same way as Ariel Goldman,” Debs said.
“And you knew them both,” I added helpfully.
“I imagine that dozens of people knew them both. Including Jerry Halpern,” he said.
“Did Professor Halpern kill Tammy Connor, Professor Wilkins?” Deborah asked him. “From the detention center?”
He shrugged. “I’m only saying that he knew them, too.”
“And did he have an affair with her, too?” I asked.
Wilkins smirked. “Probably not. Not with Tammy, anyway.”
“What does that mean, Professor?” Deborah asked.
Wilkins shrugged. “Just rumors, you know. The kids talk. Some of them think Halpern is gay.”
“Less competition for you,” I said. “Like with Tammy Connor.”
Wilkins scowled at me and I’m sure I would have been intimidated if I was a university sophomore. “You need to make up your mind whether I killed my students or screwed them,” he said.
“Why not both?”
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“Did you go to college?” he demanded.
“Why yes, I did,” I said.
“Then you ought to know that a certain type of girl sexually pursues her professors. Tammy was over eighteen, and I’m not married.”
“Isn’t it a little bit unethical to have sex with a student?” I said.
