by Linda Barnes
I sat in my chair, leaned back and propped my feet on the desk, remembered the money. I’d need to pay Roz for a useless day’s work.
The putt-putt of an aged motorbike drew me to the front window like a moth to flame. Too late. I couldn’t make out anything beyond the noise, the semi-rhythmic sputter. It turned the corner, faded away.
The bills on my desk weren’t twenties. Four were hundreds, the rest fifties, which, minus Roz’s pay, made it eleven hundred bucks for seventy-two pages of Xeroxing and a Chinese lunch.
Dammit, again. I hate being underpaid. I hate being overpaid. “Overpaid” feels too much like “bought.”
11
I sat at my desk and ran both hands through my hair, searching for knots, tangles, split ends. Examining and yanking the offending strands, a few nonoffenders as well. The medical term is “trichotillomania;” that’s what doctors call the compulsion to pull hair. In extreme form, it leads to total baldness.
I become a trichotillomaniac when I’m frustrated, when my judgment, which I rely on, has proved utterly false. I’d fallen for Mayhew and his missing author. And now I’d lied, refused to return the suspect manuscript.
Good thing I have an overabundance of hair. Unmanageable bushy red hair. I bisected a strand, wound it around my index finger. Maybe I could tie it there, as a reminder not to believe every nutcase who walked in my door.
When the phone rang I almost let the machine handle it. I practice, but I never quite manage the seemingly simple process of call screening. I think it’s because my mom always grabbed the phone first ring, answering in a quavery alto, convinced my cop dad was lying in a gutter bleeding to death. Never happened. He was never injured in the line of duty. Nicotine killed him, not lead.
The hello was pleasant, deep, warm, and female. Gloria’s voice is a gospel-tinged marvel, welcome as fresh air. That’s why she’s the best damn cab dispatcher in Boston. Or was, until they blew the company out from under her.
“Babe,” she said, “you givin’ my phone number to strangers?”
“How are you, Gloria?”
“Fine. Pretty good for the shape I’m in.”
Gloria’s shape is round. Rotund. Fat, to put it bluntly. I thought she’d keep off the pounds she’d shed in the hospital. For a while, after her brother Marvin died, she’d refused her favorite junk food delights. Then one day, potato chips, malted balls, M&M’s, and Reese’s Pieces called to her soul and brought her back to the land of the living. She eats, therefore she is.
She said, “I got a call here from a Mr. Emerson—we’re talkin’ ’bout a man so stiff he sounds like he wears a coat and tie to bed—inquirin’ for a Miss Carlyle. Am I your secretary these days?”
I keep a variety of business cards on my person-Some identify me as a realtor, some an insurance company employee. They’re cheap to print and seem to give people confidence. They feature different phone numbers.
“Sorry,” I said. “I must have played the wrong card. Did you string him along?”
“Of course, babe.”
“What did Mr. Emerson want?”
“Just that you return his call immediately: 555-8330. You got that? Emphasis on fast, as in right now. Hell, I’m scared to keep you on the line.”
“Might as well.” I’d been fired. I had no further interest in the Avon Hill School and their precious alumnae. That’s what half of me was thinking. The other half was busily refusing to accept what Mooney had said, what Mayhew hadn’t denied. I wanted to hang on to this case, hang on to Thea.
Thea Janis, murdered, all her promise laid to rest.
“Heard from Sam?” Gloria asked, way too casually.
My antennae tingled. Gloria has a deep-seated interest in keeping Sam and me together. I don’t know why, but in the depths of her fantasies, Sam and I are Gloria’s dream couple. Maybe it’s because she introduced us, watched as we made the too-quick transition from boss and worker to friends and finally lovers, enjoyed each step vicariously. We couldn’t be more different, Sam and I, more ill-matched. Mix one former cop with the son of a family of robbers: It’s no recipe for bliss.
“Postcard or two,” I said tersely.
“Honey, I been meaning to say this for some time—”
Whenever someone says that to you, take my advice, hang up.
Gloria said, “Why the hell don’t you drop that shrink? You think you need some kinda analysis, go ahead and pay for it. That man’s no good for you.”
“Gloria, what makes you think you know what’s good for me?”
“If Sam was good for you, that headshrinker can’t be. No way.”
“I’ll tell you a secret, Gloria.”
“Yeah.”
“Sam wasn’t that good.”
“Come on.”
“Gloria, let’s change the subject and stay friends.”
“You ain’t gonna marry that doc?”
“Marry? Gloria, I tried it once, I’m not going to try it again. If I ever send you a wedding invitation, call Mooney and have him lock me up. I mean it.”
Her laugh was a gigantic musical bubble. I gave it the raspberry.
She said, “Paolina call you?”
“No.”
“She called me. From a pay phone in town. Paid with her own money.” There was immense satisfaction in her voice. For a corresponding moment, I felt deserted and jealous. Why hadn’t my little sister phoned me?
“That gal is such a sweetie, wanted to know how I was doin’ and all. Maybe being alone up at that camp made her understand a little bit what I been feeling since Marvin died. She’s one darlin’ child.”
I said, “Do you think she’s lonely? Is she making any friends?”
I could almost see Gloria shrug her enormous shoulders. She can move her torso. The auto accident that left her paralyzed at nineteen did its damage from the waist down.
“Did she want anything?” I asked.
“Just asked if she could send me some candy.”
“Look, Gloria, are you busy?”
“Why?”
“I need information on Paolina’s biological father. Do you have access to phones?”
“I’m dispatching for ITOA.”
“I wouldn’t want to get the indies in trouble,” I said. ITOA is the Independent Taxi Owners Association.
“What kind of trouble?”
“The guy with the goods is a nasty Florida drug lawyer. Number one: I’m sure he’s got caller ID, and he’s not going to respond to any calls from my line. Number two: DEA’s got his phone tapped.”
“So you want me to dial him? Mess with the DEA? No thanks.”
“What I was about to say, Glory, is that the ideal situation would be to place calls from folks we don’t particularly like, let the DEA get a fix on them.”
Gloria said, “I do enjoy the way your mind works.”
“I’ve got a little list,” I said. “Operation Rescue. Citizens for Limited Taxation, Mass. Militia.”
Gloria chimed in with, “How ’bout that guy at Harvard, one wrote The Bell Curve? Book saying how blacks are generally just stupider than whites? I think the DEA ought to pay him a visit.”
“You get his number and figure out how to make the calls from his office, you can dial Thurman W. Vandenburg ten times a day.”
“I know somebody who can work pure magic with call forwarding.”
“I knew you were the one to handle this.”
“I’ll need some money for a payoff or two, but I’ll do it. It’s a deal. What should the message be?”
“Ought to be in my voice.”
For a while all I could hear was the whirr of Gloria’s mechanized wheelchair. “I got tape spooling. Go right ahead.”
It took a few tries to get it right.
“Thurman, babe,” I said, like I’d called the shark “Thurman” all my life. “Urgent I know CRG’s status pronto. Call C., in loco parentis.”
“Guess that’s okay,” Gloria said doubtfully. “Can’t we add some stuff abo
ut wanting that shipment of coke fast? So people get in deep shit?”
“Long as it’s not me.”
“Trust me, babe. I got contacts everywhere. Phone company practically has to ask my permission before they install a new line.”
I believed her. Gloria isn’t mobile. She uses phones like weapons. She’s the spider at the center of a communications network that puts the Internet to shame.
I tried again. “Thurman, babe, you want those twenty keys, you gotta tell C. about CRG. Pronto.” I left out the “parentis” bit. The fewer people who had any idea that Carlos Roldan Gonzales had a kid, the better.
“He might ignore it,” Gloria said.
“Not if he gets the call every hour,” I said. “Twenty-four hours a day.”
“Heavy annoyance,” she said.
“That’s what I want, Gloria. Heavy annoyance.”
“You came to the right place.”
“Anybody pisses you off, call from there.”
I gave Gloria Thurman W. Vandenburg’s private number with confidence. We share the same set of pet peeves: rich folks who resent paying for government services, Bible-thumping folks who want everybody to act the way they do, hypocrites, bedroom peepers, privacy invaders.
“Make me a copy of the tape, okay?” I said. “Any place you can’t get access, I’ll turn Roz loose.”
“Fun, fun, fun at the DEA this week,” Gloria said. “Paolina’s daddy up to something?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’d like to find out.”
Gloria said, “I plan to enjoy this.”
“And if I happen to find myself at a creep’s house, I’ll give Vandenburg a ring,” I said.
“You do that, but make sure you use the exact same words as the tape, okay, so we get the DEA going.” Gloria’s voice got soft and sweet. “You might try calling from your shrink’s house.”
I hung up, quickly punched the number she’d given me.
Two rings. Pickup.
“Avon Hill School. Emerson speaking.”
“Hi,” I said. “This is the woman who visited your campus today, Carlotta Carlyle.”
“Miss Carlyle, I’m so glad you rang back. My wife was unaware that several of our prospective students have chosen to attend other—”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I don’t have any Colombian nieces who want to go to Avon Hill.”
“You’re—”
“Not interested. It’s okay, Mr. Emerson. I was hired to find a former student. I found her.”
“You’re some sort of investigator?”
“Private sort.”
Silence. He didn’t end the call. Neither did I.
“May I ask for whom you were looking?”
Confidentiality didn’t seem to matter.
“Thea Janis. Dorothy Cameron. Either name ring a bell? Was she a classmate of yours?”
Silence.
“Would you mind coming over?” he asked very softly.
“Why?”
“It seems odd that Thea should be of such interest after all these years.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’d prefer to discuss the matter in person.”
“I can be there in ten minutes,” I said. Chatting with Anthony Emerson might make me feel as if I’d done something to earn the cash Mayhew’d left behind.
“Come to the school,” he said hurriedly. “Not the house.”
12
More folks than usual strolled the late night streets, seeking relief from the heat, wearing minimal clothing, several—probably on the way home from Steve’s in the Square—licking ice cream cones. Mooney’s warning had made me extraordinarily conscious of passersby. I watched. I listened. I cataloged their attire. No footsteps seemed to dog my own. At a quick march, I made it to Avon Hill in seven minutes.
The porch light was off. I didn’t get a chance to bang the huge brass knocker. The door opened, eerie creak and all, as soon as I lifted my foot to the first step.
“Miss Carlyle?” He’d been waiting.
“Yes.”
“So you have no students to place with us?” he said, his mouth twisting in a rueful grin.
“If I did, they’d need full scholarships.”
He shook his head regretfully while I wondered if the school rested on firm financial ground.
“Have you a license?” he asked, still blocking the doorway. “Any document that would assure me that you really are an investigator?”
I gave a sigh. “Look, you invited me over to talk, Mr. Emerson. I had my exercise. I can make it a quick round-trip.”
He hesitated only briefly.
“Please,” he said. “Come in.”
He was a slender man, hiding inside a well-tailored suit too heavy for the heat. His hair, a sleek blond pelt, was so fine that, despite attempts at a ruler-straight part, strands escaped every which way. His long, beaky nose looked like it might twitch at any moment. I’d expected his eyes to be cool blue, but they were brown, dark and deep, nestled in creased pouches that made him older than he appeared.
He’d be thirty-nine if he’d been Thea’s classmate.
We walked down the ill-lit trophy corridor toward a room I took to be his office. Large, imposing mahogany desk with matching bookshelves. Persian rugs in reds, oranges, and browns, a leather sofa. Walls hung with gilt-framed diplomas. An airy sanctum in which to greet parents willing to drop large sums in exchange for the cachet of saying, “Yes, our daughter is at Avon Hill. Yours?” Knowing Avon Hill could be equaled but not one-upped.
Perhaps the headmaster kept a more casual workroom elsewhere. This office would do nicely for cadging checks from parents. And for discipline. Scare a kid to death in here. Afraid he’d knock over a vase.
One book sat on the desktop. A yearbook, an elaborate endeavor in a tooled leather binding. A gold satin ribbon marked one of the middle pages.
I showed Emerson my investigator’s license. As if offering an even exchange, he asked if I’d like to see Thea’s picture.
“Sure.”
He waved me toward a plush armchair. “She wasn’t the sort who did clubs and sports and rah-rah events. But someone shot a candid. Here. You can see her profile.”
The gold ribbon marked the yearbook page. The snap showed little in the way of facial delineation. Thea’s breasts jutted assertively. At fourteen, fifteen, she’d had a woman’s body, a woman’s stance.
“Is this the only photo of her in the whole yearbook?”
“Yes,” he said, a bit defensively. “Like I said, she wasn’t into clubs, and she never showed for her homeroom picture. It’s not as though she were a senior.”
Thea’d never made it that far in life, I thought. Never gotten to be a lousy high school senior.
“You were her classmate?”
“As much as anyone,” he said.
I wished he’d been home earlier in the day. I’d have preferred questioning him while I believed that Thea might be alive.
“We would have graduated the same year,” he continued, “if she hadn’t—run off.”
“Why do you say ‘run off’? Why not ‘if she hadn’t been murdered’?”
His disapproval showed in the tight line of his lips. “I suppose because early speculation centered on with whom she had, uh, eloped.”
“Was there a clear favorite?”
Seated in his towering leather chair, behind his wide mahogany desk, he steepled his hands and looked pensive. I wondered if his feet touched the ground. I also wondered how he’d come to rule at his former prep school. Had it been a lifelong ambition?
He said, “At the very beginning, every boy in school probably whispered to his best friend—you know, in complete confidence—that Thea was waiting for him at his parents’ summerhouse. That kind of talk stopped quickly.”
“What about the teachers?”
“We called them ‘masters,’ then, because Avon Hill was fighting hard to keep up the old traditions, to ignore the rebellious times.
The campus was seething underneath, but on the surface, all was extremely proper.”
His pronunciation was faintly British, as though he’d taken classes in the U.K. The accent could have been pure pretension served up for the bill-paying parents, but I didn’t think so.
“The ‘masters,’ then,” I said. “Was there talk that Thea’d ‘eloped’ with one of them?”
He shrugged. “I shared a single class with her. The teacher was a woman.”
“Rumors? Speculation?”
“There were rumors about Thea and every man or boy in the entire school.”
“Why?”
“She was … unusual,” he said, fiddling with a shiny fountain pen as he spoke. “For her age. For any age. For this extraordinarily conservative school. My God, the simple fact that her parents sent her here is beyond belief. She was so out of place she could have come from another planet.”
“But she managed to communicate with the natives.”
“Her disgust, mainly.”
“How?”
“By refusing to do whatever anyone in authority told her to do. She was our rebellion poster girl. The rest of us didn’t have a clue. We were all so terrified we might be expelled, shame our families forever. And that’s what she seemed to want most. She courted expulsion. She was so free …”
“Free,” I repeated.
“Gloriously free,” he said. “In many ways.” He fidgeted in his chair and refused to meet my eyes. He seemed caught between wanting to tell me something and wanting to keep it to himself. I wondered how many of his students responded to questioning in the same shifty way, torn between the mingled joys of confession and secret sin.
“Why did you want to talk to me?” I asked, trying to keep anger and impatience out of my voice.
The anger and impatience weren’t aimed at him. I was my own target. I shouldn’t have come. Why was I there, making inquiries about a dead woman? What did I hope to learn? There was no case, no cause. Just curiosity. Because of a single chapter, some poetry.
“We had rather strange visitors the other day,” he said, his manner abruptly casual. The business with the visitors wasn’t what he’d been tempted to confess.
“We?” I said.
