Defenseless

by Celeste Marsella

  Ken’s eyes had retreated, so I took advantage of his stone-cold silence to introduce my next topic. “Fine then. Another disciplinary matter. Mila Nazir. She’s physically abusing the professors. I’d like to give her a warning and require her to write a letter of apology. If that’s not too harsh a reprimand?”

  Closed eyes and a deep breath punctuated Ken’s continued silence. I assumed he was mentally counting to ten.

  “Mila . . . Nazir,” he repeated. “Yes, we’ve had some problems with her in the past.” He nodded paternally. “She’s a bit spoiled, to say the least, but I’m not sure her behavior is socially unacceptable in Pakistan due to her social rank. We do have to be sensitive to that fact.”

  “We do? Because I’m not really sure why. I mean, if we wanted to perform clitorectomies on women in America, would it be okay because it’s socially acceptable in Muslim Africa?”

  “A letter of apology sounds minimally painful, Ken,” Mitsy piped up again. “I agree with Mari. The girl really should refrain from that kind of behavior here. I understand she actually kicked her professor in the—”

  “Stop,” Ken said sharply. Then he deigned to look at me. “I want you to merely explain to her—nicely—that she will have to temporarily adjust her attitude as long as she is visiting this country. We don’t want to offend her by letting her think the mores in her own country are . . . less appropriate than those of the United States. Are you understanding me, Marianna?”

  What was beginning to worry me was that I really was beginning to understand him, or at least the way his mind worked: deny and delete. And then I wondered, if I was so easily able to understand Vince Piganno and Ken Carlyle in the same instant, who exactly was I?

  Ken pushed his chair back. “It’s ten forty-five. Is there anything else before we adjourn?” After a mere second or two of silence he stood, said, “My office, Marianna. Ten minutes,” and turned abruptly out of the room.

  Chad and Tripp immediately began conversing in hushed tones. Byron joined forces with them, undoubtedly just to irk me. Mitsy’s routine was to arrive and leave by herself, displaying zero interest in lingering with the group. Today was no different. She was the first to walk out the door after Carlyle.

  I pushed my chair back from the table, rising slowly, stalling. They stalled too. Working with this bunch was like being back in grade school. No sooner was I over the threshold than I heard the laughter and snickers as I headed to the principal’s office.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Censored

  I BEGAN THE SHORT trek down the hall to the warden’s office, and there, at the end of the hall, was Elliot Orenstein with his back to me. I walked briskly past Ken’s office, then pulled Elliot aside.

  “What?” He pivoted, regarding me like we were old friends and he was in a bad mood.

  I looked around like a fleeing felon. “Come with me.”

  Elliot followed, remaining a step behind as I navigated the corridor, down the stairs, to my office.

  I poked my head in at Rita as I passed her door. “If Carlyle calls, tell him I’m on my way.”

  I waved Elliot by me. “Get in it quick.”

  He stalled in my doorway, waiting for me to pass him. “It is a shame you hide yourself in men’s clothes,” he said, looking at my Ralph Lauren two-button pinstripe suit. “You look really good. So many older women get fat.”

  “Come in and shut the door, Elliot.”

  He dutifully followed as I spun into my chair and swiped my desk clean, shoving everything into the top drawer. I wasted no time getting to my point. “Okay. So what do you know about the latest death?”

  He sighed deeply and settled himself into his usual chair facing my desk. He dropped his book bag to the floor and looked up at me. “Miss Melone, I am not Inspector Clouseau. I’m sure I know nothing more than you.”

  “I’m late for an appointment with the dean. So hurry up and answer me.” He eyed me suspiciously. Possibly assessing my emotional stability?

  “Do you want something from me?”

  “Information. Any student buzz about Lisa’s death?”

  “They just found her. What could I possibly know that you don’t?”

  I fixed my stare. As a lawyer I knew how even a facial expression can be culled for incriminating information. I refused to respond, because even in my answer, if he were smart enough, he would detect hints of information I wasn’t sure I wanted to disclose yet.

  Elliot broke into a satisfied smile. “I think your prosecutor antennae are up. I’m guessing you haven’t left your AG job behind you that easily.”

  He continued, “You went to the Cummings murder scene because your instincts directed you there. Humans may be higher up on the evolutionary rung, but we’re all still animals at a base level. You sniffed something out, and you wanted to be there.”

  “It wasn’t voluntary. I was escorted there. And how do you know I was there?”

  “They kept us behind the tape. Bug-eyed students wondering which one of us would be next.”

  “I’m sure only the females were pondering that question. Now, you’ve got one more minute to tell me if you know anything or I’m off to my appointment. And I’ll never talk to you again.”

  “About murder, I don’t know anything. But—and it’s common knowledge around here—Lisa was a drug addict. That’s what I know. But I doubt that had anything to do with her murder, otherwise half the students on this campus would be dead.”

  Employment preservation should have been my prime concern, especially since I was batting 0 for 1 in the job department. I should have ended our conversation posthaste. But my prosecutor’s instinct—yes, I was descending the evolutionary ladder—kept me rapt in Elliot’s words for whatever information I could cull.

  “Are you sure ‘addict’ is the right word? Are we talking needles?”

  He smiled benevolently as if I were asking him the address of Santa’s workshop. “Heroin, you mean? I don’t know exactly. Melinda Hastings and Lisa Cummings—they both would have given up anything for their next line of white powder.”

  I watched the lights blink on my phone.

  “And now they’re both dead.” He pulled his chair closer to my desk and leaned in. “And I think you’re enjoying it. Playing sleuth to murder instead of issuing demerits over stolen bagels—”

  “That’s sick!”

  Rita knocked on my door and cracked it open. “Dean Carlyle awaits.”

  I nodded to her, and then she palmed a pink message slip in front of me. In lovely Rita’s curlicued script it read: Kartabar 12:00, Mike.

  “Be there or be square, as the children say,” giggled hypersexual, lovelorn Rita, who gave Elliot a quick smile, then softly shut the door.

  Elliot spoke again as soon as Rita left. “Maybe these deaths are part of an elaborate drug ring going bad. Maybe Carlyle’s a part of it.”

  “I guess you’re free to make fun of me now, since I invited you here.”

  “It’s more like I was brought in on house arrest.”

  “Yeah, except this office is my jail, not yours, so scoot and thanks for the info.”

  “Sure. Just remember, Carlyle’s smarter than you.”

  He lifted his book bag from the floor while I scurried around in my brain for the obvious argument against Carlyle’s being so smart that he hired me, a prosecutor, to keep campus drug use under wraps, but I couldn’t think of anything clever to say. “If Carlyle knows about student drug use, why did he hire me? That doesn’t seem so smart to me.”

  Elliot squared his jaw and leaned forward again. “Maybe he thought he could turn you against the AG’s office by getting you fired—”

  “How did you know I was fired?”

  He laughed. “Well, I wasn’t sure . . . until now.”

  There was no graceful way out of that blunder, so I remained silent and let him continue.

  “Rumors. Small school, remember? So back to my theory, Carlyle makes sure your boss knows he’s offered you
a job, then your boss fires you and Carlyle takes you into his fold. And I bet he’s paying—he’s probably paying you really big bucks to work here. Am I right? Much more than you were making as a civil servant, I bet.”

  “That’s not quite the timeline of events.”

  “Okay then, second case scenario, Carlyle’s going to get you so inextricably bound in the school’s shady practices that you in effect become a coconspirator and you have to keep quiet. Or, least likely, the trustees forced him to hire you as independent counsel to protect Holton from the legal ramifications of student murders.”

  “What do drugs have to do with the murders? What’s the motive?”

  “Motives are tricky things. You have to get inside people’s heads. But on the more mundane side, maybe the girls needed to be silenced so they wouldn’t expose Carlyle.”

  “Wait, so now Carlyle killed the girls?” I laughed.

  Elliot considered me. He let me laugh at him. And if I expected a scathing retort from him, I was disappointed. “You know what, Miss Melone? I like you. There’s a gullibility about you that makes you attractive even though you’re a blood-sucking lawyer and part of this warped administration. So I’m going to help you out.” He sat silently a couple of seconds while I allowed him his patronizing moment of self-aggrandizement. “Does Carlyle want you to find out who’s responsible? Think about that.”

  Frankly, I didn’t think Carlyle cared about the murders except for their obvious financial repercussions to the school. He just wanted it all to stop. But I wasn’t going to admit that to a student—even one as smart as Elliot, who’d probably come to the same conclusion long before me.

  “I’m sure Dean Carlyle would like to know who’s murdering Holton students. I think he hopes it’s not one of the student body. Bad press and all that, right? And just for your information, I was not hired as independent counsel. I am who I am, and that’s all that I am, I’m—”

  “Popeye the sailor man,” he finished. “I was weaned on old cartoons.” He stood to leave. “I think we make a good team.”

  I must have been seeing Elliot and thinking Mike McCoy, because I let a wink slip from my right eye.

  As Elliot trailed off down the hall, I grabbed my bag and headed upstairs to the wastelands of Dean Carlyle’s office, where I found him emptying his crystal ashtray into the trash under his desk. The office was musty with fresh cigar smoke. He banished the bowl to a small table by the door and, after returning to his desk and sitting, looked directly into my eyes and spoke.

  “Mila Nazir will be dealt with, for now, as I instructed at the staff meeting.” “I’m pretty good with English, so I understood that order the first time, sir.”

  He placed his open palms softly down on his desk. Looking at his fingers, he said, “I don’t know why you insist on being ornery, Marianna. You have a good future here. Why are you sabotaging it?”

  “I’m used to the simple tenets of right and wrong. Holton, I guess, is big business. I would have had a hard time working for Enron too.”

  He took a deep breath and looked me in the eyes again. “Holton is not Enron. We do not steal money or cook books. But in some regards, you are correct. Without endowments we would not survive. And some of us, who have made Holton our lives, feel that this school is performing an important educational function. Under my helm, Holton is becoming a top college contender—”

  I noted he gave President Hatchett no credit for Holton’s steady rise into the major leagues of secondary educational institutions.

  “—survival and growth is our prime concern. Obviously, if one cannot breathe, hunger is secondary. Donations are Holton’s oxygen. So try to overcome your hunger for simple morality. Remember, Marianna, real life doesn’t come in black and white.”

  “At the AG’s it does.”

  “Can you adapt?”

  I pondered that question while Carlyle remained at his desk, maintaining his position of authority. Today we weren’t equals. He continued his lecture.

  “I told you I needed someone who knew the law, who could forestall potential brushes with the police on campus. Now, what do I mean by that? Do I mean that you should cover up murders? Of course not. On the other hand, if there’s a rowdy party, students drink too much and disturb East Side residents with something like public urination, should there be an arrest? Should it be front-page news? In short, Marianna, is something like public urination black or is it white in your personal penal code?”

  I nodded my head. “You want me to philosophically switch teams.”

  “Exactly. From an AG’s point of view, public urination and murder are both criminal offenses. Both black. But from your new perspective—as a Holton employee—public drinking, loud parties, and the mild criminal sequelae should be gray.”

  “That’s a defense perspective.”

  Ken tilted his head. “Right again.”

  “Why me? You already had McCoy in place.”

  “Not for the most recent events. Murder is black in any penal code. I need you and the wisdom of a seasoned prosecutor to make the distinctions between murder and all else that goes on here that appears in shades of gray.”

  The word “whitewash” came immediately to mind, but I stifled the word before it burped indecorously from my mouth.

  Carlyle tucked his chin tightly to his chest. “Now, the next question is, are you able to do the job I hired you for?”

  It was about the same time I began questioning the existence of God and Santa Claus that I realized life is merely a series of events related only by their chronology. This moment in Carlyle’s office was just such an event: a blip in time wherein I was unemployed from the AG’s office and insolvent. So I had no choice. I either played Carlyle’s shady game of black and white or I was out in the dark with no flashlight.

  I looked at my watch. It was ten past noon. McCoy would be waiting for me at Kartabar, a cold beer pressed to his warm lips.

  “I’ll do my best, Ken.”

  I left Carlyle and went straight to my Jeep, puckered up in the rearview mirror, and prepared to pry some information from typically tight-lipped Mike McCoy.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Santorini

  MIKE’S SHOULDER WAS BRUSHING mine as we sat in a semicircular leather banquette at an eclectic cozy restaurant named Kartabar that was warmed in dark woods, hides, and rust-colored walls. I inhaled Mike’s half-dreamy, half-comical smell—citrus and musk—and let his odor mingle in my head with the cooking aromas of cardamom and almonds. He had chosen a dark table in the back, well away from the windows, where he sat with a beer in his hand. Pulsating Greek music was playing at a perfect midrange level in the background, just loud enough to summon up a white-sanded isle in a turquoise blue sea but not so loud that we couldn’t luxuriate in the prettier lagoon of our own hushed voices. Mike’s lame excuse for sitting next to me on the banquette instead of the chair across was so that we could talk without screaming across the table, but the tiny table was barely two feet in diameter, the music was lilting softly in the background, there was no one sitting on either side of us, and Mike was full of lovely crap.

  Despite my urge to sail into a stuporous pipe-dream fantasy and embark on a hallucinogenic vacation to Santorini with Mike McCoy in tow, I tied a safe slipknot to reality and tried to reel in some new information about the Hastings-Cummings murders via general carping about Holton.

  “Emily Barton was date-raped by another student and this morning Carlyle said we should wait and see what happens. Does everything get swept under the shags in that place, or what?”

  Mike let me vent. He smiled during my rampage, then followed with his devil’s-advocate routine, mollifying me while trying to make me see the potential other side of the story. A shortcoming of my legal background, I held my position like a dog with its bone. During the eight or so years he’d been at Holton, Mike had molted some of his rigid cop skin and had softened into more of a team player.

  “You’d be surprised what some of
these kids will do to stay in school and graduate. When I brought Melinda Hastings in on an exam-cheating scam, she threatened to accuse me of sexual harassment if I didn’t bottom-drawer the complaint. You know, babe, it’s possible the Barton girl might be lying just to cover up her bad grades.”

  Mike was calling me “babe” all the time now. Was the name reserved only for me? I reluctantly admit I had begun to like it. I always wanted to be a babe, and in this little college-town restaurant, I could be a closet blonde without the AG girls ever knowing. Letting a man call me “babe” would weaken our united front and be a betrayal of our code of female superiority—a creed we held on to despite all prevailing evidence to the contrary. We all firmly believed that, in general, women were smarter than men, but so what? A damn lot of good a brain is when the quickest way to a man’s heart is through his pants. When’s the last time a man tried to guess my IQ while I was leaning over in a scoop-necked T-shirt?

  Mike broke my reverie. “These kids can be a hoot. One girl pretended her mother was dying of cancer to explain her bad grades. The girl was going to weekly counseling with Becker and fabricated the surgery, chemotherapy, and finally some new alternative treatments they were trying on her dying mom as the last-ditch effort to save her life. Turns out mommy was at their winter home in Palm Beach. Unbelievable, huh?”

  “How did you find her out?”

  “Oh, Jesus, best part of the story! It’s the kid’s birthday, and the mother comes up for a surprise visit.”

  “No way!”

  “Yup. Tanned, blonde, and healthy as a young mare. The closest she’d been to a doctor was her plastic surgeon. You having another one of those salads or you going to eat some real food today?” He motioned for the waitress.

  “I’ll have the chicken salad in grape leaves,” I said to the waitress, who appeared to be barely past the age of majority.