by Mike Markel
“She told you she was gonna do it?”
Brian shook his head. “She didn’t want me to know.”
“How’d you find out?” I said.
“I saw her e-mails, thought she was e-mailing this guy more than necessary. Then I read some of them. I went to her. She explained why she did it.”
“How’d you feel about what she did?”
His brows furrowed, like he was thinking of an answer. “I wouldn’t’ve did it that way.”
“What do you mean?”
“She didn’t need to screw him. She should’ve gone to the teacher, threaten to go to the English Department, tell them he was coming on to her.” He nodded his head, warming to his plan. “She would’ve gotten the B without having to do him.”
“Hmm,” I said. I nodded sympathetically, like that would have been a better plan. “So, how did it get to the disciplinary committee?”
“Asshole gave her a C. Tiffany admitted what she did, and she was willing to take the consequences. She said, it’s not like she was the first girl to use sex to get a better grade.”
Not knowing quite how to respond, I gave him another “Hmm.” He seemed to be interpreting it the way I wanted. “What’s your relationship with Tiffany now?”
“It’s fine. She made a mistake. Everyone makes mistakes.”
“What’s your future? I mean, you and Tiffany.”
“Not sure. Me and Tiff hooked up back in Billings, couple years ago. I can see us together for a long while.”
“Brian, there’s something else we have to tell you.”
His expression looked cloudy. “Yeah?”
“Austin Sulenka is dead.”
Now his expression got mean. “He’s fuckin’ dead?” The tiny gears in his head turned a little bit. “So all this stuff about writing a report to the judge—all that was bullshit?”
“Basically, yeah.” I nodded my head, my sad expression saying I was sorry to have done it.
“You don’t have any right to do that.” He was leaning toward me, half getting out of his chair. His fists were clenching and unclenching.
Ryan noticed it and stood up, slower than he used to but still fast enough. “You want to take it easy, Brian,” Ryan said, leaning on his cane as he stepped toward him. “In fact, we have every right to do exactly that. What you want to do at this point, Brian, is keep your cool. Answer the questions honestly. Help us see you as not involved with killing Sulenka. You think you can do that?”
Brian looked at Ryan, then looked at me. He sank back into his chair, but now we really weren’t friends.
I said, “Can you tell us where you were last night between eleven pm and, say, one?”
He waited a couple of beats. “I was right here. I ordered a pizza, played some games, watched some Netflix, went to bed around midnight.”
“Can anyone vouch for that?”
“Like I fuckin’ told you, Tiffany was home in Billings.”
“So that’s a no?”
He shook his head. Now Ryan and I were assholes, just like Austin. “That’s a no.”
“Austin Sulenka’s apartment is crawling with fingerprints,” I said. “Are we gonna find your prints there?”
He shook his head no. “I know what a restraining order means. If I was gonna kill him, I’d’ve did it that first time.”
I nodded. “All right, Brian, is there anything else?” I stood up. Ryan did, too.
“One thing,” he said. “Him being dead, that mean I don’t have to keep paying him back for the car?”
Chapter 7
Brian Hawser slammed the door pretty hard. Ryan and I walked down the hall, down the stairs, over to the cruiser. We got in.
“So, Ryan, explain this to me. What Austin did wrong is, he gave her a C even though she screwed him?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Guess it’s a breach of contract.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe she was a lousy lay, and that nullified the contract.”
“Now you’re way beyond my area of expertise,” Ryan said.
“You believe him: we’re not gonna find his prints at Austin’s place?”
“Yes, I do. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t do it. It might just mean he knows how to put on a pair of gloves.”
“The way he acted when I told him we really stopped by to talk about the murder, I could see him getting in Austin’s face, trashing the place.”
“Me, too,” Ryan said. “The question is, Is he caveman enough to kill Austin for what he did to Tiff?”
“Brian’s a rough boy. Fully capable of carrying a grudge against the guy who was fucking his girlfriend—”
“Don’t forget, he’s also paying Austin for having trashed his car,” Ryan said.
“Yeah, that might be pissing him off more.”
We were sitting in the Charger, trying to figure out the next move after interviewing Brian. A fat grey cloud passed in front of the early afternoon sun, throwing a shadow across our car. It reminded me we could still have some cold days before our short summer. “And Brian’s fully capable of beating the crap out of him. Or strangling him. Agree?”
“Agree,” Ryan said. “But with Tiffany in Billings, I’m having trouble seeing how Brian gets into Austin’s apartment. And even more trouble figuring out how Austin gets nude and gets strangled.”
We were both silent a minute. “There was no forced entry into Austin’s apartment. No way Austin’s sitting in his shitty apartment, Brian knocks on the door, Austin lets him in. So the only scenario that makes sense is either there’s other people in the apartment—and someone lets him in—”
Ryan was shaking his head. “That means whoever Austin was screwing—or about to screw—just leaves, and Brian strangles him and trashes the place.”
“It isn’t working. With Tiffany in Billings, Brian isn’t killing Austin.”
“So we cross Brian off?” Ryan said.
“No,” I said. “We figure out if Tiffany was in Billings.”
“We phone her parents’ house?”
“That could work,” I said. “But what if the mother’s as creepy as Tiffany? No guarantee she’d be straight with us.”
“Okay. Your turn.”
“It’s Monday afternoon. If you were still in college, where would you be?”
“I’d be in class.”
“That’s right. You were a good boy.”
“Let me get her schedule,” Ryan said.
“She’s here in town,” I said. “I know it.”
Ryan took out his cell and phoned Mary Dawson at the university. She wasn’t in, but he asked the secretary for help. Ryan explained that we needed Tiffany’s class schedule for today and tomorrow. “Okay,” he said as he finished writing down what the secretary said, “thanks a lot for the help.”
It was starting to come into focus for me. “If Tiffany was home in Billings, Brian didn’t kill Austin,” I said. “But if Tiffany was here in Rawlings, couple of ways they could’ve done it. Tiffany gets into Austin’s place, leaves the front door unlocked, starts screwing Austin. Puts a cloth around his neck, Austin’s big dick starts throbbing good. All of a sudden, Brian appears and strangles him. Then Brian and Tiffany trash the place—”
“Because they’re both pissed at him.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Or—you’re gonna like this one. Tiffany tells Brian she’s going home for the weekend, see you Monday. Brian’s eating pizza, playing computer games, scratching his balls. Meanwhile, Tiffany’s scratching Austin’s balls. Fucking him up one side, down the other. She knows he likes strangulation games. She plays along. Then she tightens the knot. Then trashes the living room just because she can.”
“Because he gave her a C in English?”
“Because he fucked her in exchange for the B, then gave her a C. Or she fell in love with him, or she caught him nailing some other shitty student. I can think of a dozen reasons she’d want to kill him. Keep in mind, she’s eighteen, and she’s fucking Brian Hawser.
How smart can she be?”
Ryan nodded, then looked down at his notebook. “Tiffany is supposed to be in Anthropology 215,” he said, looking at his watch, “right about now.”
“Let’s take a drive.”
It took ten minutes to roll over to campus. I was tired. It had been a long day, and I hadn’t sucked in as much caffeine as I normally do, but I was excited. I love thinking through the what-if’s. And this was my kind of case—I don’t know anything about literature, but I do know quite a bit about stupid behavior involving penises.
I parked the Charger in a metered spot outside the Social Sciences Building. I put down my visor to show the Official Police Business card.
“Room 320,” Ryan said. Normally, Ryan would take the stairs in any building in Rawlings. But since he got back from rehab, he was willing to take the elevator if it was three floors or more. We walked down the hall to 320. Ryan looked through the thin rectangular window in the door.
When I caught up with him, he said, “Twenty-five or thirty students in the class.”
“You know what she looks like?”
“Not yet,” he said.
“You know how to get her picture?”
He smiled. “I know how to get anyone’s picture.” He walked over to a small student desk in the hall and pulled his tablet from his briefcase. It took him fifteen seconds to get on Facebook. He held up the tablet for me to see the picture. Tiffany was a round-faced girl, plain, still packing a little baby fat. She had dark hair, straight, parted down the middle, and thick black plastic-framed eyeglasses.
Ryan stood up, walked over to the door, and looked in. “She’s in the second row, off to the side. I say we get her now.”
“Before she gets a chance to talk to Brian?”
He nodded. “I got it,” he said, and walked into the classroom. I watched him go over to the instructor, a forty-something woman in blue jeans and a bone-colored cable-knit sweater that came about halfway down her thighs. The professor pointed to Tiffany, who got out of her chair and walked up to the front. She looked a little confused but not scared. Ryan led her out of the classroom.
“Tiffany, I’m Detective Ryan Miner, Rawlings Police Department. This is my partner, Detective Karen Seagate. We need to talk with you a couple minutes about a case we’re working on.”
I’d grabbed Ryan’s briefcase. I gestured to a small round table in the hall about thirty feet away from the classroom. “Let’s go sit over there, Tiffany,” I said. “We’ll only be a few minutes, then you can get back to your class.”
She nodded. I watched her follow Ryan toward the table. She was wearing flip-flops, jeans with rhinestone designs on the back pockets. She was about five-seven, with a soft, rounded body twenty pounds over her ideal fighting weight.
“You got your phone with you?” I said to her after we got settled at the table. She opened her backpack, pulled it out, and waved it at me. She had on a V-necked tee shirt with a pretty deep V. “Is it on?”
She shook her head. “The professor’s real anal about that. We can’t just put it on vibrate. Have to turn it off. ‘I want your undivided attention for fifty minutes,’ it says on the syllabus. What might help is saying something interesting every once in a while.” Tiffany shook her head to show her disdain.
“Okay, Tiffany.” I didn’t feel any pressure to say something interesting. “Your name’s come up in an investigation. We just need you to answer a few questions, then, like I say, we’ll let you get back to your life, okay?”
She shrugged.
“Can you tell us where you were last night, late, after nine?”
She didn’t answer right away. “Last night?” Her eyes fluttered upward. She was thinking. “I was at home.”
“Here in Rawlings?”
“No, my parents’ home. In Billings.”
“When did you drive back?”
“This morning. I wanted to make this class.”
She didn’t look like she was that into anthropology. “This an important class?”
“No, it sucks, but the professor’s strict about attendance. Miss four classes, you lose points. I’ve missed my three.”
I nodded and smiled at her. “I remember those days.”
Tiffany looked impatient. “What’s this about, anyway?”
I nodded and put on my serious expression. “The case we’re working on involves Austin Sulenka.”
Tiffany Rhodes shifted in her chair. “He find another student to screw?”
“No,” I said. “He’s done screwing. He died earlier today.”
She pulled back, stunned. “Shit,” she said. “What happened to him?”
“We’re not sure, but we think he was murdered.”
“Shit. I can’t believe what I’m hearing.”
“Why is that, Tiffany? You got into a pretty nasty situation with him. Like you just said, there could’ve been another girl.”
Her expression turned defensive. “I got into it with him because what he did to me was wrong. But I never thought of hurting him. I mean, physically.”
“Sometimes there are boyfriends.”
She shook her head. “If you’re talking about Brian, I know what he did was wrong, and he’s paying off the damage to Austin’s car. But he never laid a hand on him, and he never would.”
“What was your relationship with Austin Sulenka? I mean, since the disciplinary hearing and the restraining order on Brian.”
“After that?” she said. “No relationship. I’m taking the next English course right now—it’s a requirement. But I don’t hang out in the English Department. I haven’t even spoken to him. Saw him a couple times on campus, you know, in the distance. One time, coming out of the library. But he didn’t see me, I didn’t acknowledge him. Like I said, no relationship.”
“You have any ideas about who might want to hurt him?”
“I’d be surprised if there wasn’t all kinds of people who’d want to hurt him. But I don’t know any. And I know I didn’t hurt him.”
A young guy walked by, staring at the three of us. I couldn’t tell whether it was that Ryan and I looked out of place or that Tiffany was displaying some serious cleavage.
“All right, Tiffany,” I said as my partner and I stood up. “This is my card. You get in touch with us if you think of anything can help us understand who might’ve done this.”
She looked at me as she took the card. I thought I saw her eyes a little shiny. “Listen, I know me and Austin got into this big thing with the disciplinary bullshit and all. I thought what he did to me was wrong, and I wanted the university to make it right—which they didn’t.” She held up her palms, the gesture saying justice doesn’t always win. “But I never had anything against him personally. And I never would’ve hurt him. I mean that.”
I nodded. “You can go back to your class, Tiffany.”
She slung her backpack over her shoulder and started walking back toward the classroom. She put her hand on the doorknob but stood there, motionless, a long while, her head down, her back to us. Finally, she opened the classroom door and walked in.
Ryan and I sat back down.
“She’s lying,” I said.
“About what?”
“Not quite sure about all the details, but she’s lying about her relationship with Austin.”
“How do you know?” Ryan said.
“She called him ‘Austin.’ Not ‘Sulenka,’ not ‘the teacher,’ not ‘the professor.’ Not ‘that asshole.’ He was ‘Austin.’”
“I hadn’t caught that,” Ryan said. “But now that you point it out …” He paused. “There’s a bunch of ways to check her story. Let me start by finding out if she was in Billings this morning.” He pulled out his notebook and jotted a few words. “I’ll get her Billings phone and call Mom and Dad about that.”
“We could check out the rest of her Monday classes. See if she just got here for the anthropology course. Do you mind if we head downstairs to that coffee place in the lobby? I’m running
on fumes.”
“Sure.” We stood up and headed down the hall to the stairs. Ryan found a booth near the back of the Coffee Hut. It had half-a-dozen palm fronds hanging on the walls, and two unlit tiki torches up at the entrance, like it was decorated by a couple of eighth-graders with a half hour and a budget of twenty bucks. As Ryan put his stuff down and took out his phone, I peeled off toward the counter.
Couple minutes later, I came back with a large coffee and a bottle of water for Ryan. Him being a Mormon, I know what he drinks: basically nothing. I put the two drinks down and went off to get some cream and sugar. When I got back, he was thanking someone on the phone.
“That was easy,” he said as he ended the call. “I couldn’t get the teacher from her ten o’clock biology class, but her economics teacher from nine o’clock said Tiffany’s participation in this morning’s class shows she’s making some real progress.”
“Is that so?” I stirred the second creamer into my coffee. I’d already put in the three sugars.
“So, with Billings two-and-a-half hours down the road, either Tiffany got up around four this morning—”
“Or she was here last night,” I said.
“I don’t think we need to phone her parents.”
I lie all the time. Always have. But even when I was Tiffany’s age, I think I knew it was dumb to lie about shit that was so easy to check. I shook my head and took a sip of the coffee. “No, I don’t think we need to do that.”
Chapter 8
“Margaret, do you know if we’ve got the phone logs yet from Austin Sulenka? The grad student?” I waited while the chief’s assistant checked. She told me no, they wouldn’t be available until tomorrow morning. “Okay, thanks,” I said and ended the call.
Ryan looked at his watch. “It’s about three. Long as we’re on campus, want to try to track down Suzannah Montgomery?”
I nodded. We walked over to the Humanities Building, about a hundred yards across the quad. I pulled my jacket close as the wind picked up. It was still in the fifties, but a lot of the students were trying out their summer looks, with shorts showing off their pasty white legs, and goose bumps up and down their arms.
