“What if he wants to do it again?”
“Nah, he had it the first time,” Ned called over his shoulder. “The last two takes were so we know he’s an auteur.”
She locked the bike and swung off. Outside the shed, Brenda rolled down the door and locked it before heading toward the studio. It was a nice July evening, warm, no wind. Big, puffy clouds floated in the night sky. It was winter in Brazil, but Rio would be hot year-round.
She thought again of Sam Towland. How long had she been with him? Late January? No, December. They had met at a studio Christmas party for ad clients. Brandy punch and shrimp. He had come up and said, “You work nights, I work days. We were made for each other.”
She smiled as she walked, remembering. Not a bad line, and there had been some truth to it. In the following weeks, what she came to think of as a separate-but-equal, don’t-ask-don’t-tell arrangement had developed between them. He gave her a key, she gave him one. They sent e-mails and left voicemail. Several times a month, they penciled in half a night to eat in an overpriced restaurant, then make love in whichever apartment was more convenient. She had a feeling the good sex with Sam Towland could be explained mostly in terms of being too busy to waste any opportunity. When Sam told her he was moving to Silicon Valley and promised to call, she’d known he wouldn’t, and felt relieved.
Brenda pulled open one of the double doors and stepped inside the studio. Ned had been right, the corridor was empty. She stepped into her office to get rid of the helmet, and saw the message light blinking on her phone. She pressed the button.
“Hello, Brenda. Gordon Poole again. Elaine and I are looking forward to Friday. You wanted to know white or red. Elaine says it’s going to be Italian, so bring red. See you Friday.”
Ever since Gordon’s call last week inviting her to dinner, Brenda had felt slightly cornered. It had been over a year since she’d seen Gordon, and she knew what had put her in his thoughts.
She stepped out of the office and walked toward Jerry’s door. When she was at Davison Polytechnic, Dr. Gordon Poole had helped save her life. At least the life-of-the-mind part of it.
The door to Jerry’s office was open, and his assistant sat at her desk outside reading the paper. Shaking her head, she turned the page.
“Hi.”
Joyce looked up. “Hi there. Stephen Spielberg wants to see you.” She looked back down at the paper. “I thought they phased it out.”
“What’s that?”
“The Peace Corps,” Joyce said. “Some local guy died on an island ten days ago. In the Pacific.”
“He should’ve come here.” Brenda moved past the desk to the open entry. “He could have caddied for Spielberg.”
The producer’s office was big, paneled, covered with plaques and awards others had won. Perched on his leather couch, Jerry patted the seat next to him with his remote. Just then, the monitor on the wall was filled with the back of her bomber jacket, her butt working hard in tight Levis.
“Absotively knockout,” Jerry said, pointing the remote. Now she was back-pedaling up the corridor. “In Rio I’m thinking Spandex with a satin bomber jacket, no helmet. They have no helmet laws down there.”
Brenda pictured her graying English professor seated in his den, watching her butt in the new opening graphics. Embarrassing. Perhaps Gordon had watched her last night, doing the interview with a rabid pro-life sculptor. The woman’s latest piece had just been installed at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Nine shrink-wrapped fetuses arranged as tick-tack-toe on a gallery wall. Thursday, W-DIG would air the interview with the Greenpeace nut in Ann Arbor. During an argument over harp-seal hunting, he had tried to skin his neighbor with a filet knife.
She handed Ned’s camera to Jerry, and looked again at the monitor. Once more she was racing forward, the anchor Lou Stock waiting to give her a Thumbs Up.
“Well, now, that really makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it? Your neighbor says he thinks people have to earn a living and doesn’t give a bleep about baby seals. You tell him he’s full of bleep, go home and come back with a filet knife—”
Everyone in the Wolverine Bar laughed. “Get him, Brenda, do it!” someone yelled at the TV.
“If you ever saw—”
“Yes, I’ve seen the pictures. Cute little baby seals all bloody out on the ice. But please don’t tell me that justifies trying to turn your neighbor into steak tartar—”
More laughter.
Across the street, a man stood at a pay phone. He was dressed in a gray glen plaid suit, white shirt, repp tie. He watched through the window as the bartender handed a phone to one of the customers and moved back down the bar.
“Bennett Fox? Mr. Fox, my name’s Lindbergh, I’m with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I’d like to talk to you about Vincent Soublik. We understand you were roommates. Correct. No, just Bureau procedure anytime someone dies we’ve done background on. That’s right. State Department, Peace Corps. Anyone we’ve cleared for Foreign Service. Now, if possible. Good, the law quad. Yes, I do. First floor, south wing. Fine, say in ten minutes.”
He hung up and moved along South State. The student was in his second year, living in the law quad. Monday through Thursday, Fox worked from nine to three for a mortgage firm, doing property assessments. Then he hit the books in the law library until six. He ate in the union, hit the books again until ten, and usually ended up in the Wolverine Bar. He drank two Molsons, watched the news, and went home alone. His girl lived in Chicago, but she was working for the summer in Glacier National Park, Montana. She missed Fox and e-mailed every day, messages full of mountain scenery and gossip about co-workers in the resort hotel where she waited tables.
Fox had phoned her about his old roommate’s death. She’d written she was sorry. In the cabinet where he filed his lecture notes, he kept hard copies of her e-mails, along with the snail-mail letters from his former roommate.
Lindbergh reached South University and crossed the road. The law quad was on his right. He passed before the Gothic entrance, and headed to the next cross street. On his left, the dark rear window of a parked Ford Explorer reflected the sidewalk behind him.
Watching the window, Lindbergh waited at the intersection until Fox had turned in at the law quad before following. He walked through the passageway, then moved to the colonnade on his right. Fox’s ground-floor room faced the courtyard.
A minute later, a light came on above Fox’s window air conditioner. Lindbergh moved to the end of the colonnade. Across the courtyard, lights shone in four upper-floor windows. All but Fox’s window were dark on the first level.
He entered. The building formed a rectangle, all rooms accessible from an inner corridor. He followed the dim hall, and at the corner turned left again, completing the square. He stepped to Fox’s door and knocked.
The student opened it, looking nervous.
“Bennett Fox?” Lindbergh took a photo ID from his breast pocket and held it out.
Fox studied it, smiled and looked up. “Charles Lindbergh? Seriously?”
“Afraid so.”
“You must catch a lot of flak.”
He stepped in. “So would you if you joined the Bureau.”
Fox closed the door and motioned to the easy chair at the foot of his bed. “How so?”
“You must be studying too much to watch TV.”
He waited for Fox to roll his swivel chair over from the desk. Both sat. The student crossed his arms and thought about it. “‘The X-Files,’” he said after a moment, smiling. “I’d be Agent Fox Mulder forever.”
“They’d never let it go.”
“What do you do about it?”
“Maybe later,” Lindbergh said. “We’d appreciate anything you can tell us about Vincent Soublik. After leaving the States, did he call you from the islands? Make a phone patch by ham radio, anything like that?”
“Nope, not much phone use there. He said mold screws up a lot of technology. He wrote a few times. I have to tell you, it’s really weird h
e drowned. He was All-State, if anyone—”
“We know he swam in college. You say he wrote. Did you keep the letters?”
The student got up and went to his file drawers, which Lindbergh had searched that morning. It had been easy to do, the dorm all but empty before the start of the fall term. But trust needed to be established. Without trust, people withheld details.
“I reread them after his mother called,” Fox said, leafing through the drawer.
“When was that?”
“Wednesday. They were planning the funeral, but now Peace Corps says there’s no body. She’s really upset.” He closed the drawer and came back with the letters.
Lindbergh took them and counted. Eleven, the right number. He studied the postmarks and opened the last. The contents were familiar, but he pretended to read before looking up. “Headaches?”
“Right. If you read them all, he mentions headaches several times. Bad ones, like migraines.”
“His medical evaluation says he checked out fine before leaving.”
“They started after he got there. Not in training—he trained in Hawaii. They started once he got to Pirim.”
“He never mentioned anything to Peace Corps.”
“It’s in the letters. Vince said he didn’t want them taking him off the island. If he called in, he was sure they’d come take him off. He had a girl there.”
A good segue. “Another Volunteer?”
“No, Pirimese. Vince was the only outsider on the island.”
Lindbergh refolded the letter and slotted it in the envelope. “We’d like to make copies. You’ll get the originals back.”
“Sure.”
“What do you think, Mr. Fox? You were roommates for two years. Close friends. Is there anything here, between the lines, that raises doubts for you?”
The student crossed his arms again and looked at the ceiling. Lindbergh noticed Fox had taken off his shoes.
“Correction,” Fox said, looking at him. “I said he was the only outsider. He wasn’t. There was someone running a study out there on bugs. A researcher of some kind.”
“Calvin Moser.”
“That’s the guy. If there’s more to what happened, Moser must know it.”
Lindbergh put the letters in his coat pocket and coughed. Time to get down to business. He leaned forward and folded his hands. “You say he had a girl. An islander.”
“Right.”
“Was he concerned about anything back home? Any chance he was depressed?”
Fox looked at him. After several seconds, he nodded. “Now I see where this is going,” he said. “You have background on him, so you know about Caprice. You mean was he depressed because of her and killed himself. No way, not a chance. For a while last year, yeah, after she dumped him. Maybe that’s why he went out there, to get away. But Vince had it together.”
Very good, something new. “We don’t know about Caprice. Is she a student here?”
“Was. She’s from Louisiana. Baton Rouge.”
“Last name.”
“Thibodeau.” He spelled it as Lindbergh wrote. “She’s black,” Fox added. “Her father owns some car dealership, they have a lot of money. He didn’t like Caprice being with a white guy. He made her break it off and come home.”
“Do you know if Vince wrote to her?”
“Yeah, the first year. She called this spring. She said she hadn’t heard from him, did I know anything. I told her he had a girl.”
“When you talked to her, did Caprice make any mention of the research project?”
“Could be, I don’t remember. Why don’t you ask her?” Fox’s tone sounded wary. “I suppose it looks bad when someone you cleared for service dies out there,” he said. “Probably, it looks better if you can say he killed himself.”
“No one’s trying to make it look like anything.”
“Right.”
Fox was definitely hostile now. “Anyone else Vince might have talked or written to?”
“No idea. How’d you know I was at The Wolverine?”
Lindbergh turned the page in his pocket notebook and sneezed. “We’ll be done here pretty soon. I’d appreciate a glass of water.”
The student stepped to the sink next to his closet, turned on the water, rinsed his glass and filled it. Looking sullen, he stepped back and handed it over.
“Chilly in here. Mind turning down the air conditioner?”
Fox frowned, but turned to the window, reaching for the unit’s control panel. Lindbergh counted a beat. Sparks flew. From behind, the student seemed to jump. Thrown back with great force, his feet left the ground before his head and back struck the cement floor.
Lindbergh stood as Fox’s body shuddered. Possibly, the student was already dying from the shock caused by faulty wiring in his window unit. The wiring was a dedicated line, two hundred and twenty volts. But he was young.
The building was old, with ungrounded sockets. This particular room might once have been a shower, or janitor’s closet. The student had landed on a drain hole that would serve as an earth ground.
Lindbergh stepped to him and emptied the water on Fox’s stocking feet. He took out a handkerchief and wiped the glass clean before positioning it on the edge of the desk. He reached down carefully, raised the wire and dropped the hot end on Fox’s wet foot.
As the body jumped, he tipped the empty water glass off the edge of the desk. It shattered next to the student’s convulsing thigh.
Soon the body stopped moving. After a full minute, Lindbergh toed the hot wire off the student’s leg. As the Bureau had trained him, in covert situations it was best to work with available resources. Where possible, never introduce foreign elements into the environment. Fox didn’t work Fridays or weekends. The mother or girlfriend might call, but they would not suspect anything before Monday.
He checked what he’d written and pocketed the notebook. Using the handkerchief, he rolled the swivel chair back under the desk, then moved to the door, listened, stepped out and closed it.
Walking quickly down the empty hall, Lindbergh retraced his steps and went out the emergency exit into the parking lot behind the quad. He pocketed the handkerchief and moved outside the perimeter of light cast by security lamps. Once back on South State, he slowed and walked to his rental car.
Wearing what looked like a Sony Walkman, Freddy Song jogged around the boulevard median and started back up the street.
A nice Friday evening, nice neighborhood. Pleasant Ridge residents were still coming home from work in mini vans and SUVs. Most of them waved as they passed, seeing Song’s Michigan State sweatshirt. He always returned the waves, enjoying the air full of summer smells of cut grass and backyard barbecues. For someone who had grown up in the humid heat of Corpus Christi, Texas, Pleasant Ridge in late summer had a lot of appeal.
He neared the Soublik house and adjusted his headset. Mrs. Soublik was on the phone again, this time with Elaine Poole, the next-door neighbor.
“Yes, we’re all right, we’ll get through this. I haven’t shopped all week and need tomatoes…No, I’ll come over, I need to get out for a minute—”
A bad time for them. Six days into his assignment, Song felt he knew Vince Soublik’s family. First the news of their son’s death, then having to cancel funeral arrangements. Friends and relatives had dropped in all week, called. The Soubliks knew a lot of people.
Passing by, he glanced at their big center-entrance colonial shaded by trees.
Things had gone wrong in the Pacific. A glitch, problems no one could predict. There are risks, they had told him in Phoenix. It’s part of the price, Freddy. You can’t help millions without taking chances. Calculated cost-benefit risks. We take every precaution at test sites, but sometimes bad things happen to nice people. That’s why we need you to go up to Michigan and keep us informed. We want to help the Soubliks, but we need information. You understand.
He did. Perfectly.
And Freddy Song also knew what it meant when they asked him
to drive up to Michigan in a specially equipped van. It meant he’d fully arrived. Been accepted. Others might think what he was doing was wrong, but GENE 2 was also a family. The only one he had. They’d given him scholarships, enrolled him in the corporation’s mentoring program. When your family needed help, you gave it, like friends and relatives were doing with the Soubliks.
“Go Spartans!” yelled a dog-walker, waving.
Song waved back. A nice suburb, solid citizens. It was how he thought of himself.
◆◆◆◆◆
Gordon Poole had said to bring red wine, and Brenda gave herself enough time to stop at Buy Rite Liquor. She found the red wines and studied labels, aware the clerk was watching her. She chose a Chianti and crossed to the Plexiglas window with its lazy-susan opening. The clerk was smiling at her as he turned the wheel and took out the bottle.
“The Lightning Rod,” he said, still smiling.
“Go to the head of the class,” she said and smiled back.
“I knew you before,” he said. “At Davison.” His smile now changed to something intimate, meant to trigger recognition. “You were dy-no-mite,” he said. “But after, you never returned my calls.”
She looked straight at him, still smiling. “How were you?”
“What?”
“You say I was dy-no-mite. How were you?”
The smile slipped some as he bagged the wine. He took her credit card and ran it through the card reader. He waited, watching it instead of her, until it printed the receipt. He tore it, then sent it with the card and wine through the lazy susan.
“Well?” She signed the receipt, tore off her copy and sent the other back to him. “How were you?”
His smile was back in place. “I guess that’s for you to say.”
Brenda studied him a long moment, then slowly shook her head. “Nope,” she said, “not a clue. Give me a hint.”
Still smiling but lost now behind his bullet-proof shield, he said nothing.
“I didn’t return your calls?”
He shook his head.
“There you go, that’s your answer.”
The Anything Goes Girl (A Brenda Contay Novel Of Suspense Book 1) Page 2
