Final Exam

by Maggie Barbieri

  I thought for a moment. “Never heard of him.” I looked at Crawford, my face telling him exactly what I was thinking.

  “We are not driving to New Jersey,” he said emphatically.

  I put my hands together. “Please, please, please, Crawford. We can get McDonald’s and eat it in the car on the way. It will be like a road trip!” I said, trying to make my enthusiasm contagious.

  He gripped the steering wheel, staring out at the encroaching dusk. It was mealtime on campus and students were starting to head to the cafeteria. He flexed his fingers and looked at me. “Why do you want to go there?”

  He was cracking and I could tell. “I want to see where he lives and maybe figure out who he is.”

  “And then what?”

  I was honest. “I’m not sure.” I leaned in close and gave him a kiss. “How about it? A little road trip? We could be there and back in an hour and a half and still have time for dinner.” I squeezed his thigh. “That’s if you don’t want to have McDonald’s in the car.”

  “An hour and a half? That’s a generous estimate,” he said. He turned toward me, his hands still gripping the wheel. “Listen. There’s no Coco, no Chad, no house hunting. Got it?” He thought of something else. “And no using the bathroom. That’s what got us into this mess.”

  “Got it,” I said solemnly.

  “I could get in big trouble for this.”

  “For what?” I asked. “We haven’t done anything wrong and we’re not going to do anything wrong.” I put on my seat belt. “And not for nothing, there’s no problem with impersonating an Air France flight attendant or a graphic designer.”

  He banged his head on the steering wheel a few times. “There is if you’re a police officer for the City of New York. Have I taught you nothing?” He sat up suddenly. “Oh, and how are we going to find Seventeen Pine Terrace, by the way?”

  I pulled off my seat belt. “Wait here.” I jumped out of the car and ran a few feet to my car, ignoring the stack of tickets on the windshield. I reached into the glove compartment, retrieved my rarely-used GPS system and held it above my head victoriously. His face fell. He knew now that there was no way we weren’t going to New Jersey.

  He rolled down his window. “Where did you get that?” he asked.

  “Max,” I said. “Where do I get any purchases over a hundred bucks?” I asked, handing it to him. “I call her Lola. Make sure you follow her directions. She gets very cranky when you change direction.”

  Crawford made short work of setting Lola up on the dash and plugged in the directions to Costas’s house. Lola told us that the ride was exactly thirty-seven miles and fifty minutes long. No give or take. That’s what it was.

  I looked out the window as we left campus, watching students walking around and enjoying the mild weather. We passed the library, where Amanda was walking down the steps, dressed in her usual uniform: jeans, flip-flops, and Princeton sweatshirt. Her hair hung down her back, a tangle of dark waves. I needed to get Max over here to give that girl a makeover. She would be a knockout with a trim and some decent clothes. She looked up just as we were driving by and raised her hand in a halfhearted wave.

  Crawford slowed down to a crawl over the speed bumps. “Okay, grandma, speed it up,” I said. “We don’t have all night.”

  “I’d like to have some shocks left when I get off campus,” he said, saluting the guard in the booth just as we exited onto the avenue.

  Lola gave us our directions. “Go straight to Broadway.”

  “She’s as bossy as you are,” Crawford said, ignoring her directions.

  “Recalculating,” Lola said, and set about coming up with a different route for us to take.

  Crawford ignored her and continued on his route. “So tell me about your evening with Wayne and Mr. New Jersey, who we can now call Costas or Mr. Grigoriadis.”

  “Wayne is a big, giant, scum-sucking piece of plankton, and I don’t care how much trouble he’s in or not but you don’t go hitting a lady over the head,” I said.

  Crawford was silent for a moment. “But how do you really feel?”

  “That’s how I really feel.” I gave him a quick summary of my break-in at the convent.

  “You broke into the convent.” It was more a statement of fact than a question.

  “I had to, Crawford,” I said. “I just knew he was there and I wanted to prove it, once and for all.”

  “The uniforms went to the convent, searched the place, and came up with nothing,” he reported. “Wayne’s gone from there.”

  “They did?” I asked, feeling a little queasy all of a sudden. “Sister Mary’s not going to be happy about that.”

  “Which part? The convent search or the missing nephew?” he asked.

  “Both.”

  “The kid—her nephew—assaulted you, Alison. Of course I was going to send someone over to check it out.”

  “I guess I should have expected that,” I said. I told him about my talk with Costas and how weird it was. I finished up with the Sister Mary debacle.

  “And you made a nun cry?” This time he was genuinely surprised. “You made Sister Mary cry?”

  “I know,” I said as we merged onto the Saw Mill River Parkway. “That wasn’t my best work.”

  He sighed. “I’ll say.” He looked into the rearview mirror and adjusted it slightly. “So Wayne was definitely living in the convent—which we already knew; we don’t know why Mr. Grigoriadis keeps turning up; and Sister Mary isn’t an automaton. Good work. We now know less than nothing.” He smiled slightly to show me that he wasn’t criticizing my sleuthing even though it sounded strangely like he was.

  “Well, when you put it like that . . .” I looked out the window and then back at Lola’s screen. “Follow her directions,” I said.

  “I know another way,” he said.

  “But she said to take the George Washington.”

  “Trust me,” he said, and patted my thigh.

  I watched as the various towns in southern Westchester passed by my window. We slowed down at the light that would take me to my house in Dobbs Ferry. I decided that now would not be a good time to mention that Max was embarking on an online dating adventure and wisely kept my mouth shut.

  “What?” he said, seemingly reading my mind.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  He pulled away slowly from the red light. “Liar.”

  I didn’t dispute that and kept my mouth shut until we got onto the Tappan Zee Bridge. “Are you sure this is right?” I was a little nervous about going against Lola’s advice.

  “I go this way when I go down to the shore,” he reminded me. “I know that it’s easier at this time of night to go across the Tap than the GW.”

  I trusted him. Crawford has only given me one reason not to trust him—it involved an estranged wife that he had kept secret from me at the beginning of our relationship—but since that time he had reestablished himself as one of the good guys. I relaxed in my seat, enjoying the number of times Lola had to recalculate.

  Once we had a general sense of where we were headed, I filled him in on what I had witnessed at school that day between Amanda and Brandon.

  “Unhand her?” he asked. “You trying out for Shakespeare in the Park?”

  “It was all that came out of my mouth,” I said. “I was nervous that something was going to happen and I needed to get him to leave her alone.”

  “Unhand her?” he repeated.

  “Yes,” I said, annoyed. “So what do you think is going on?”

  “No idea,” he admitted. “Did it look violent? Abusive?”

  I had to admit that it didn’t. “But he clearly wasn’t happy with her.”

  “If you should see Mr. Princeton Boyfriend put his hands on her again, get one of those senile guards to come down and get him off campus.”

  We were at the Grigoriadis house faster than the fifty minutes that Lola had predicted due solely to Crawford’s sense of direction. He pulled onto Pine Terrace, an upscale stree
t populated by large contemporary homes. He pulled up to one, an architectural marvel of planes and angles with floor-to-ceiling windows, and put the car in park.

  “Swanky,” I said.

  “Mr. Grigoriadis does do well for himself,” he said, leaning over me to get a good look at the house. It wasn’t set too far in from the street, but had an impressive front yard with some extremely expensive landscaping. “So, what now?”

  The house was dark—and with the plethora of windows that allowed you to look into the house, it was easy to tell that there was no one home—and there were no cars in the driveway. Lucky. I looked at the front door and noted that the mailbox was full of mail, either from today or the last few days; I didn’t know how much mail the Grigoriadises usually got, but if this was one day’s mail, they got a lot more than I did on a daily basis. “Wait here,” I said, and opened the car door.

  Although I had promised to be well behaved on this jaunt, my curiosity got the better of me. Crawford barely had time to protest and I didn’t turn when I heard his voice begging me to get back in the car. I headed up to the front door as quickly as possible and pulled the mail out of the box. I riffled through the various bills, finding nothing of interest except that Mrs. Grigoriadis—Victoria, by the way the bills were addressed—had a lot of department store credit cards. Lord and Taylor, Bloomingdale’s, Macy’s . . . and wait . . . Target? I guess even the rich liked a bargain. I put the bills back in the box and pulled out a couple of catalogs and stopped, finding exactly what I was looking for.

  The Delia’s catalog? Addressed to Amanda Reese.

  Twenty-One

  While Crawford fumed, I programmed Lola to give us the name of an Italian restaurant in the area; I had a hankering for something parmigiana. I waited while she thought about it or whatever it is that computers do when humans request information.

  “She says to go to Aldo’s on Franklin Avenue.”

  “Franklin Turnpike?”

  “No, Franklin Avenue.”

  “Well, I know Franklin Turnpike but I don’t know Franklin Avenue.”

  Wow, he was pissy. “Well, she says to make a right . . . here!” I called out as the street we were supposed to turn on came up suddenly. “Okay. Stay on this for four point three miles.” I put Lola back up on the dashboard. “I didn’t take the catalog,” I reminded him.

  His face turned red with what I suspected was the effort he was exerting not to throttle me. “Yes, Alison, but tampering with someone’s mail—which includes going through it to see who lives there—is a federal offense.”

  “Yeah, but nobody saw me,” I reminded him.

  “I did!” he said. “I saw you. And I’m in law enforcement.” He continued on the road, going faster than he should, breathing heavily. “You promised me.”

  “I guess telling you you’re gorgeous when you’re angry wouldn’t be appropriate?” I asked. His silence answered my question. “Guess not.”

  We pulled up in front of Aldo’s less than ten minutes later and were seated in a red velvet booth in the corner. “Do you want to sit facing the door in case Michael Corleone comes in?” I joked as I opened the menu. The waiter arrived and I ordered a vodka martini. He looked at Crawford, who was staring out the window and trying to get his breathing back to normal. “He’ll have a glass of Chianti,” I said.

  The waiter, a little man in his fifties who looked like he had been working at this place a long time, scuttled off, terrified of Crawford’s dark mood. “Hey,” I said, leaning over the round table. “Snap out of it.”

  He looked at me. “You have to promise me you won’t do something like that again.”

  I looked back at him, deciding whether or not that was a promise I could keep. “I promise,” I said halfheartedly.

  He studied my face. “You are the worst liar I’ve ever met, and I’ve met a few in my time.”

  “I bet you have,” I said, and returned to the menu. “What looks good? How about the gnocchi?” I was dying to get his impression of this new development but I knew better than to push it. I was on thin ice as it was. Push too far and I would end up in icy waters. And I’m not that good a swimmer.

  The waiter came back, delivered our drinks, and looked at us expectantly.

  Crawford was still in a black place, so I ordered for both of us. “I’ll have the salad mista to begin and the chicken parmigiana. My friend here will have the salad as well and the steak pizzaiola.” I snapped my menu shut and smiled at the waiter.

  “Excellent choices,” he said, and disappeared again, taking a quick look back at our table; I was sure he was going to tell the chef to put a rush on it so he could get the lovely lady and her cranky date out of there as quickly as possible.

  “That’s not what I wanted,” Crawford bellyached.

  “Well, that’s what you’re getting.” I pushed his wine closer to him. “Here. Drink.”

  I started in on my martini and had almost finished the whole thing before he started talking. “What else did you see in the mail?” he asked reluctantly in a low whisper. He didn’t want to admit that we had found something out that was intriguing.

  “Well, Mrs. Grigoriadis has a lot of department store credit cards. And they get a lot of catalogs.”

  “So do you. Doesn’t prove anything.”

  I finished off my drink. I barely had to make eye contact with the waiter to have another one appear magically before me in record time. “I like it here,” I remarked.

  “Anything else?” He looked around as if to see if anyone could take him to task for allowing me to commit mail fraud, or mail tampering or whatever it was that I had done. “In the mail, I mean.”

  I shook my head. I took the spear of olives out of the drink and started on the first one. “So, what do you think? Amanda is a Grigoriadis through her mom’s re-marriage?”

  He nodded. “Seems like it.”

  She didn’t bear any resemblance to the man who kept visiting campus but that didn’t necessarily mean anything; not too many young girls, fortunately, looked like Neil Diamond. Something occurred to me. “Did you say anything to Lattanzi and Marcus about my seeing Wayne on campus?”

  He looked at me as if to say, “what do you think?”

  “Sorry I asked.” A delicious smell wafted over to our table and I leaned out of the booth to see what it was. The couple next to me dug into a deep dish of clams with Italian bread and I immediately had order envy. “What are they going to do?”

  “Lattanzi and Marcus have much bigger fish to fry,” he said. “They’re leaving it to the uniformed cops. And the one time they did go the convent, they got the old freeze-out from the nuns.” He chuckled, thinking back. “Lattanzi swears that some old nun gave him the evil eye and that he’s cursed now.”

  He had already been cursed, barely breaking five foot four in his high-heeled cowboy boots, but I didn’t acknowledge that. “And that’s going to keep him from going back to find Wayne?” I asked, incredulous.

  Crawford smirked. “Probably. But Marcus is an atheist, so he’ll do follow-up, even with nuns, if he has to. Right now, they’re working a big case and one bag of heroin isn’t really going to occupy too much of their time.”

  Interesting. I wondered what it would feel like to be technically missing—on the run, even—and have nobody give a whit about where you were or why your toilet was filled with drugs. For one brief moment, I actually felt sorry for Wayne, and then I thought about my lumpy mattress, the bruise on my head, and the fact that I had almost been impaled by a beer bottle, and snapped back to reality. The waiter dropped off our salads and we ate them in silence.

  Crawford finally spoke, his fork pointed at my face. “I can only do this with you if you follow the rules.”

  I shrugged. “Okay.”

  “I mean it.”

  “Me, too.”

  “I’m getting a little cranky,” he admitted. “I want you back home.” Even though our relationship was rock solid, he still wasn’t so good at the heartfelt
admissions; he blushed slightly.

  That was interesting. He was the one who had been telling me it wasn’t going to be too bad. Now he was cranky? “It’s been less than a week, Crawford.” I didn’t want to tell him that I was actually starting to enjoy my new life. I was on campus and not commuting, I was away from Max, and someone came in and cleaned my room and changed my sheets every three days. Except for the expensive bra that had disappeared from the laundry room—and no, I didn’t want to know where it had gone—and the fact that I was eating pretty poorly, I was relatively happy with the situation. Nothing a couple of Lean Cuisines and a daily delicate handwash couldn’t cure.

  I must have been staring at him because he snapped his fingers in front of my face. “You want to go home, too, right?”

  I paused.

  “You like it there, don’t you?”

  “I like not having to commute,” I admitted. I filled my mouth with salad, hoping we didn’t have to continue the conversation. I also liked getting up just a half hour before my first class, getting to take in the Hudson River views whenever I wanted, eating gigantic breakfasts in the commuter cafeteria, and having someone else clean my “suite” for me.

  He continued looking at me. “You’re not thinking of staying?”

  I hadn’t really thought about it very much but I had to admit that in the last few days, I had made a home for me and Trixie. It had gotten me out of my regular life, which these days consisted of miles logged on the Saw Mill River Parkway, Max, and Max’s divorce. Crawford’s work schedule was hectic and my being closer to the precinct had afforded us more time together. What could be bad about that? “No,” I said in answer to his question, not entirely convinced.

  “You are, aren’t you?” he asked, amazed. He dropped his fork onto his salad plate and looked at a spot above my head.

  I put my hand over his. “No,” I said more definitively. I explained how I liked seeing him more, how being away from Max had been a good thing for me, and how I didn’t want to go back to her any time soon. “Is that bad?” I asked, almost rhetorically. It didn’t deserve an answer; I wanted to be away from my best friend in her time of need and that was just plain selfish. There was no other way around it. But two things were at work: one, she had split up with her husband for the flimsiest of reasons. And two, well, she wasn’t really married. It was a mess and I didn’t have the strength to sort it out right now. My chicken parmigiana arrived, a sweet respite from mental gymnastics, looking like heaven on a plate. I took a deep breath and inhaled the delicious garlic aroma.