Three-Ways: A Detectives Seagate and Miner Mystery

by Mike Markel

  I decided not to mention how this was a shitty reason to tell the truth. “Well, you’re doing the right thing, Tiffany. Being honest with me now.”

  “I was here in Rawlings last night. I wasn’t at home in Billings.”

  “Okay, tell me about last night. Where were you last night?”

  “I was with a girlfriend. I mean, I slept over at this girlfriend’s apartment.”

  “You weren’t with Austin?”

  It took her a little while to answer. “I was with him early in the evening. Around seven, seven-thirty.”

  “Where was that, Tiffany?”

  “At his apartment,” she said. “We were at his apartment.”

  “You had sex with him at his apartment around seven or seven-thirty.”

  “That’s right.” Tiffany’s voice was soft, like she was ashamed. Which surprised me. I didn’t see her as the kind of girl ever felt ashamed.

  “Was there anyone else with you and Austin?”

  “What?” Her tone was halfway between confused and pissed. “What do you mean?”

  “Simple enough question: was there anyone else in the apartment with you and Austin? Another guy? Another girl?”

  “No,” she said. Her tone was clipped. “What do you think I am?”

  I decided to pass on that one. “I’m not here to judge you or anything you did. I’m just trying to figure out who killed Austin Sulenka.”

  “No, there wasn’t anyone else there, and no, I didn’t kill Austin.”

  “Okay, so you were there with Austin for what—a half-hour or so?”

  “That’s right. Then I left.”

  I headed back out to the kitchen and turned the stove back on, low. “Is there anyone who can put you there, anyone who saw you leave?”

  “I don’t think so. Me being there wasn’t something I want everyone to know.”

  “So when you left, Austin was in good health, right?”

  “He was fine.”

  “And tell me about the apartment. What kind of shape was the apartment in?”

  “I don’t understand what you mean.”

  “I mean, was everything the way it always was? You know, the furniture?”

  “He’s not the neatest guy in the world, but yeah, it was normal.”

  “Where did you go then, around seven-thirty?”

  “To my girlfriend’s place.”

  I asked Tiffany for the contact information on the girlfriend. I went over to the counter where I keep a pad and pen. I wrote it down, but there was probably no point in checking it out. If Tiffany was lying to me now, she’d have already worked out the alibi with the girlfriend.

  “Help me understand your relationship with Austin.”

  “It’s kinda complicated,” Tiffany said.

  “I got time.” I heard the key turn in the lock on my front door. I walked out to the hallway and saw Mac come in. He’s good—doesn’t call out or anything. He just walks in and tries to find me. I drifted back to the kitchen and stirred the cheapo fried rice with chicken and pea pods.

  “That thing with the disciplinary committee,” she said, “all that part was real.”

  “You mean you were pissed at him about the English class?” I didn’t want to say she was pissed at him for giving her a C after she fucked him. Words can be so hurtful.

  “Yeah, I didn’t want to see him or hear from him again—ever.”

  “So what changed your mind?”

  I heard her sigh. “Do you know how it is, sometimes you know a relationship is … that it’s not working, it’s wrong, but you can’t really stop thinking about the guy?”

  That question I definitely wasn’t going to answer. But I knew she was telling me the truth. “Go on.”

  “I just missed him.”

  “The sex?”

  “Not the sex,” she said. “Well, yeah, the sex was part of it. But not the biggest part. It was … ever since I’ve been little … I’ve never been the best-looking girl, or the smartest, or anything like that. I’m just … I’m just what you saw when we talked today. I’ve never had a guy like Austin. He was good in bed, and he really looked good, but that’s not what I’m talking about. He was just a cut above the kind of guys I’m usually with.”

  “You mean better educated?”

  “Better educated, sure. That’s part of it. But it wasn’t a status thing. I know what class I’m from, and I know I’m never gonna be, like, a glamorous girl or rich or anything like that. But with Austin … just being with him, having him want to be with me. I don’t know, somehow it made me feel a little better about myself. Do you know what I mean?”

  I could have told her she’s an idiot, that the only possible reason Austin was doing her was he was slumming, or he got his rocks off on dumb girls idolizing him, or he appreciated her two quite substantial tits. But at her age, I would’ve thought just like she did. “Yeah, I do know what you mean.”

  “Are you going to arrest me or something?”

  “No.”

  “Are you going to tell Brian?”

  “Tiffany, you said you went from Austin’s apartment to your girlfriend’s apartment, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So you didn’t go back to your own place—the apartment you share with Brian?”

  “No, I didn’t come here.”

  “You’ve done this before: tell Brian you’re in Billings when you’re really with Austin?”

  “A few times,” she said. “Maybe five or six.”

  “And Sunday night, did you have any contact with Brian after you’d been with Austin? Did you phone him? Just sneak into your own place to get clean clothes? Anything like that?”

  “No, Brian didn’t know I was with Austin. He thought I was in Billings.”

  “But obviously, Brian knows where Austin lives. That’s where he trashed Austin’s car. How do you know he wasn’t across the street, saw you go into Austin’s place, come out a half-hour later?”

  “The way I know is, he’d have come after me with a baseball bat if he saw that.”

  “So you’re saying Brian is a violent guy, that he could’ve hurt you—or Austin.”

  “No,” she said, her voice a little shrill, “that’s not what I’m saying at all.” She took a moment. “I’m saying if Brian knew I was involved with Austin he couldn’t have played along like everything’s normal. If he wants to say something, no way he can keep from talking. It was hard enough for Brian when he found out that me and Austin were, you know, together last semester. If he’d found out I was still with Austin, he’d’ve went batshit. There’d be all kinds of shit happening.”

  “Like him strangling Austin.”

  Tiffany started crying. “No, you’ve got that all wrong. Brian’s not that kind of guy. He wouldn’t hurt Austin, and he wouldn’t hurt me. He would’ve broke up with me, for sure, but he wouldn’t hurt anyone. I’m sure of that. You have to believe that.”

  “All right, Tiffany, where are you now? You at your place?”

  “I’m in my bedroom.”

  “Where’s Brian?”

  “In the living room, watching TV or something.”

  “Do you think he can hear you, I mean, crying?”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t think so.”

  I glanced up at Mac standing in the kitchen doorway. I nodded to signal that everything was okay. He came over to the stove and picked up the spoon to stir the Chinese food. He waved his hand to tell me he would take over. I squeezed his arm and went back out to the living room.

  “You want me to come over to your place now,” I said to Tiffany, “or send a patrol car?”

  “No,” she said, still crying. “That’d just make it worse. He’d know something’s going on, and he wouldn’t be able to let it go.”

  “Okay, you change your mind, call me right back, okay?” I heard her mumble something but I couldn’t quite make it out. “Tiffany, do you have anything else you want to tell me?”

  “No,” she said. “You pr
omise you won’t tell Brian about me calling you?”

  “I’m not gonna tell Brian. This phone call never happened,” I said. “But you need to understand something. Even if everything you told me now is true, that doesn’t provide an alibi for Brian—”

  “You gotta believe me, Detective. Brian would never do that.”

  “Yeah, you told me that. But that’s not an alibi. You don’t know where he was yesterday around midnight. Because, like you said, he wasn’t with you. So I’m gonna have to treat him just like everybody else: until I can rule him out, he’s in. Do you understand me?”

  Tiffany started crying harder now. “He’s gonna find out I called you, I just know it.”

  “Pull yourself together, Tiffany. The only way he’s gonna find out is if he hears you crying and you tell him you called me. So if my partner and I come to your place sometime to interview you and Brian, you act like we never had this conversation, right?”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “I asked you if you understood me, Tiffany.”

  “Yeah, I understand you.”

  “If you screw that up because you’re trying to protect Brian, that’s gonna make me think he was involved in killing Austin—and maybe you were, too.”

  “I didn’t kill him,” she said. “I’m telling you the truth. I swear.”

  “Yeah, okay,” I said. “Clean yourself up, go watch TV with Brian or he’s gonna wonder what you’re up to.”

  “All right,” she said. The line went silent. She didn’t sound like she thought everything was all right, and I wasn’t at all confident, either. A girl that weak—I didn’t know what it would be, but I had a real strong feeling something bad was going to happen to her.

  Chapter 12

  It was a couple minutes after eight am when I made it to my desk. Back before I was fired, I used to aim for around eight-thirty, quarter-to-nine, because the old chief never pulled in until closer to ten and Ryan always had something productive to do until I pulled in.

  Now I aim for eight sharp. Not because the new chief is going to check on me but because that’s the deal: eight hours at one-hundred percent. I want to see if I can do what I say I’ll do.

  But I lost ten minutes this morning talking with Mac about how this wasn’t a good time to talk. We’re at a delicate point in our relationship. He’s seen me in action for a few months now, so he has some idea of my more-obvious bad habits, and I’ve hinted at some of the less-obvious ones. It’s not that I think it’s important to be honest in a relationship or anything sensible like that. It’s that I like him and therefore want to give him every opportunity to run like hell. Which would of course be easier and probably better for me in the long run. And certainly better for him. I’ve learned to set the bar low.

  I hung up my jacket on the coatrack in the corner of the detectives’ bullpen and made my way over to my desk. “What you got there?”

  Ryan was leaning back in his chair, his calves up on the metal shelf that slid out from above the desk drawers. He was studying some paper. “Same thing you’ve got there,” he said, pointing to my desk.

  I sat down and picked it up. It was six pages, showing the last four months of Austin Sulenka’s phone log. “Anything interesting?”

  “Well, he was a chatty young man.” He flipped through the pages. “Twenty or thirty calls a day.”

  “To anyone interesting?”

  “I think so,” he said. “May Eberlein told us she broke up with him, didn’t she, a month or so ago?”

  “That’s what she said.”

  “And that she didn’t see him socially this weekend, right?”

  “Said she ran into him late last week in the department. She wasn’t involved with him anymore because he was … what was that phrase she used?”

  Ryan winced a little as he lifted his legs off the shelf and sat up straight. He leafed through the skinny notebook on his desk. “She was ‘disappointed’ in him.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Because she figured out mostly he just wanted to bang her.”

  “So how come they had five calls last weekend, one longer than fourteen minutes?”

  “Because it took a long time to explain how much he disappointed her?” I said.

  “Even if they were in a course together and working on some project, they wouldn’t be talking like that,” Ryan said.

  “What else you see?”

  “I see him calling Suzannah Montgomery, his thesis adviser, every week or so. Which makes sense,” he said. “He was probably in some kind of rhythm, giving her chapters of his thesis every so often.”

  “What else?”

  “I see him calling Tiffany Rhodes, the skanky freshman. Couple of times a week, including the day he died. What’s with that?”

  “She called me last night.” I sat down and pulled the phone records out of the envelope.

  “She called you,” Ryan said, putting down his copy. “What for?”

  “To tell me she’d lied to us earlier. She was still doing Austin.”

  “In God’s name, why?”

  I smiled. “Because he made her feel good about herself.”

  He just shook his head. “What do you mean: by comparison? Because Austin was even skankier than she is?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “It’s kind of a class thing. She’s always been with guys like the moron Brian. She knows that’s the kind of guy she’s gonna end up with, but she saw Austin as, you know, an intellectual.”

  “So she’s living with Brian and carrying on with Austin behind his back? For months?”

  “Hey, I’m not her life coach. I’m just telling you what she told me.”

  “And the night Austin died?”

  “The night he died, they screwed. Not that much. Maybe a half-hour, around seven o’clock. At his apartment.”

  “Any witnesses put her there?”

  “She was offended when I asked her that. No, it was an intimate encounter. Just the two of them.”

  “And Brian didn’t know about that?”

  “She swears no. She’s nailed Austin at his place five or six times.”

  “So she’s got no alibi for Austin’s murder,” Ryan said.

  “Neither does Brian.”

  “You buy her story that she was cheating on Brian,” Ryan said, “or you see the two of them working together and killing Austin?”

  “Actually, there’s two ways that could’ve happened. Tiff and Brian put their pointy heads together, she gets Austin nude, Brian strangles him—”

  “What’s the motive there?” Ryan said.

  “Austin broke up their happy relationship. It’s revenge. And it takes him out of the picture. Or, they’re making it up as they go along. Brian finds out Tiff’s doing Austin, goes over to his place, catches them together, throttles him, trashes the place. Then they get together, work out their stories. Neither one rats out the other.”

  “And that makes sense how?” Ryan said.

  He’s usually much brighter than me, but I have a more sophisticated understanding of skeevy losers. “Easy: Austin’s swinging dick is too big for Tiff to resist. That’s why she’s still screwing him, even after he reneged on the B in the class. So the only solution is to take him out so she and Brian can live happily ever after.”

  “You like either of those motives?”

  “Nope. I think Tiffany was telling me the truth last night. She was just all squishy about Austin. He was her dream vacation from Brian.”

  “How can she be romantic about a pathetic guy like Austin?”

  “Ryan, you ever been a dumpy eighteen-year-old girl with a one-hundred IQ?”

  He tilted his head, considering my question. “Not to my knowledge,” he said.

  “Well, I’m just telling you how I read her last night.”

  We were both silent for a minute. Ryan said, “I’m not seeing a good way to work on these two.”

  I shook my head. “Me neither.” Then I remembered Ryan was going to look
at Austin’s computer. “Hey, did you get a chance to go over the drive Jorge gave you?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “It’s consistent with what the English chair told us: he’s not that sharp a student.”

  “How do you get that?”

  “He tried. Proposed papers to deliver at conferences, sent in articles to journals. Every one of them was rejected.”

  “Can you tell if that makes him a dunce? Maybe he’s competing against professors?”

  “Some of the conferences and journals were for the professors. The big deal is the annual conference for the American Literature Association. There are some grad students there, but mostly PhD students, not MA students like Austin. But he was shut out of some smaller conferences, and even some journals on the Web that are made for grad students. So I’m not sure I’d call him a dunce. I’d say he didn’t get a chance to fulfill his scholarly potential.”

  “That’s sweet,” I said. “Okay, he was a dunce. Why don’t we go brief the chief? He might have an idea how to proceed.”

  The bullpen was starting to come to life. One of the other day-shift detectives, Hanson, had just come in. He was off to get some coffee. His partner, Gupta, was already talking with a sergeant about a case. Staff people slalomed around the desks, picking up and delivering documents. The phones started to jangle.

  When we got to the chief’s office, Margaret looked at the lights on her phone and told us he was on a call. “It’ll just be a minute,” she said, motioning for us to sit on the couch. Her eyes snapped back to her screen.

  Thirty seconds later, she said, “Detectives, the chief can see you now.” We got up and walked over to his office. I knocked.

  “Come,” his voice said.

  I opened the door. Chief Murtaugh was seated at his desk. “You got a minute on the grad student?

  He waved us in and invited us to sit.

  We got settled. “We’re looking hard at this couple of undergrads: Tiffany Rhodes and Brian Hawser. They live together—”

  “I remember.” The chief nodded.

  “She had the affair with the vic, which went to a disciplinary hearing at the university. The boyfriend bashed-up the vic’s car, earned himself an RO.”