Defenseless

by Celeste Marsella

  “What’s with the ‘Bollywood’?”

  “Mila Nazir. She’s Pakistani. Did the ME check Melinda’s and Lisa’s blood for drugs? Cocaine? GHB?”

  “Why are you telling me all this now?”

  Byron stalled, running her hand through her bobbed blonde hair.

  My cell phone rang, and when I leaned over to retrieve my bag from the chair next to me, I saw her foot tapping the floor. I looked up at her. She began chewing the inside of her cheek.

  I decided to let the phone ring and placed my bag next to me again. “What’s really on your mind? You’re not telling me all this for my own edification.”

  “Cory Sherman. He needs this degree like he needs another pair of ostrich boots. If he doesn’t graduate, he’ll still be a filthy rich kid from Hollywood whose father will set him up in anything he wants to do. Or his old man will donate another wing to the school and he’ll be back again in the fall. You see what I’m saying? Maybe—just maybe—Ken’s making the wrong decisions this time, and it’s going to come back and bite us all in the ass.”

  “You mean like losing your job?”

  “No, I mean like losing my freedom. Look, Sherman and Lipton are getting out of hand and I don’t want to be doing time with them. This is going beyond ‘look the other way.’ I’m no lawyer, but I’m seeing some trouble brewing. Especially if one of these girls decides to sue the school.”

  My cell rang again. This time I answered it.

  “Hello?”

  “Miss Melone? It’s Emily.”

  “Yes, Emily?” I said into the phone.

  “You said it was okay to call your cell—”

  “Yes, it’s fine. What’s up?”

  “Someone called me here in the hospital,” she said. “Threatened me. I’m afraid of him. Afraid he’ll come here.”

  “When are you getting released?”

  “They want to keep me for another night, I think, but I want to leave. My mom will be here tomorrow.”

  “You’re safer there than out, so stay put. Tomorrow, as soon as they release you, come straight to my office. Don’t go back to your dorm room first. Understand? We’re going to Carlyle together. No one should be threatening you.”

  As soon as I hung up, Byron resumed her conversation as if she had never stopped.

  “See what I’m saying? This is going to blow up in our faces.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “If Ken hired you to keep the AG off our backs, I think he made a crucial error, because I know you still talk to your AG friends. Holton is a sitting duck for a full-blown investigation and I don’t want to be the decoy.”

  “Why aren’t you talking to Carlyle instead of me?”

  “Ken’s not the listening type, in case you haven’t noticed. If he gets one whiff that I’m not on his side one hundred percent, I’m gone. We work too close for it to be any other way.”

  “And is Jeff Kendall your snitch?”

  Almost imperceptibly, Byron swallowed. “Who?”

  “Aw, you know who he is. The Holton alum who told you I was lousy lay. Remember? He’s an AAG. Have you been frisking him for information?”

  “I haven’t seen Kendall since—”

  “I have no idea what you’re up to, Byron, but I’m not sharing my toys with you.”

  Byron kicked her chair back and stood. “You’re wrong, Melone. I think Ken’s making a mistake this time. I think he should throw Sherman out on his pampered ass. Just for the record. I’m not part of it.”

  “Part of what?”

  “That’s what I was trying to find out from you.” She breathed an honest sigh, pushed her chair back under the table, and trudged off.

  ON MY WAY home, I took another detour by Riverside Park Apartments. Knowing it was unlikely I would see anything, I did it anyway, fantasizing that I’d catch Cory Sherman dropping a gum wrapper over the balcony so I could march up to his apartment and shove the litter down his throat.

  Unfortunately, the balcony was dark. I slowed the car down and parked it so I could walk along the river and get closer to the apartments.

  Well . . . all right . . . I’ll be honest. When I was driving by, I spotted Mike’s car parked on the road. Because of our not-so-minor spat outside Emily’s hospital room, I had never answered his love missive about meeting him at Kartabar. Maybe (without sounding as if I was accusing him again) I could nonchalantly bump into him and find out why he was staked out in a secluded area outside Sherman and Lipton’s apartment. Maybe I could nonchalantly ask him if he was there to rendezvous with his redheaded damsel in his mag-wheeled, rear-spoilered 1985 Mustang.

  He was alone in the front seat, drinking coffee and reading the paper to pass the time as if he was on a stakeout. Funny how when I was liking Mike, his testosterone-powered car was almost endearing and cute. But now the sight of such an obviously greasy phallic symbol was making me wince. And having watched him scoop the coed into it the night before, the car was starting to sprout some real sinuous muscles.

  Like the good cop he used to be, Mike spotted me in his rearview mirror and threw the newspaper down when I got out of my Jeep and started walking toward him. Whipping open the door, he lifted his legs out of the car and sat sideways half out of the front seat, waiting for me to walk by.

  “Hey, babe. Want to kiss and make up?”

  “What are you staking out in your Batmobile? Waiting for some Sherman spillover? Or are you his private bodyguard?”

  So much for nonchalance.

  “I called you when you didn’t show up at the restaurant. Rita told me you were out.”

  “She’s your little cupid, isn’t she? Telling you that I’m at my desk with one hand on the phone, waiting for you to call, and that I’m just playing hard to get?”

  He looked down at his lap and laughed to himself. “You’re tough. Tougher than I thought.”

  “Shy and retiring isn’t my shade, especially after I start to see red.”

  “Red? I don’t get why you’re so angry, babe.”

  “Drop the ‘babe’ routine.” I looked up at Sherman’s balcony. “Looks pretty quiet up there, Mike, so what are you doing here? Why are you always here, staking their place out?”

  He paused. Grinding his jaw.

  But I wasn’t in a patient mood. “Answer me!”

  “I’m counting to ten so I don’t get out of this car and slug you.”

  “Go ahead, Mike, make my day. I’ll have you arrested so fast you won’t even hear the sirens coming—”

  “I come here to make sure everything stays under control up there. And if it doesn’t, I clean up the mess. Okay? That’s my job. And who’s staking who out? I’m a little tired of finding you on my tail.”

  “And I bet you didn’t like me finding your tail in bed with the redhead last night, did you? In Sherman’s apartment—in the bedroom.”

  “By Jove, I think you’re jealous.” He was actually nodding with a smile plastered across his face. “Yeah, my ex-wife was like that too. She thought I was screwing every skirt on the beat. It must be a woman thing.”

  “You probably were cheating on her. But I thought your wife dumped you for her high school sweetheart.”

  He crinkled his eyes. “Well, yeah, but the two things aren’t exactly mutually exclusive. Are they?”

  “Oh fuck you, Mike. What were you doing in Sherman’s apartment last night?”

  He raised his hands in surrender. “One of the kids from the party called me. Wouldn’t give his name. He said there was a girl passed out up there and he was afraid she OD’d on something. I went up, got her, and brought her home. She was just drunk.”

  Perfect. There was no way I could check that story out.

  “What else, Mike? You know more. Much more than you’re telling me. How deep in this are you?”

  “All right!” he snapped. “Mila Nazir. There’s a Federal drug bust going down involving Mila Nazir and those bozos up there.” He nodded toward Sherman and Lipton’s balcon
y. “And that’s why I’ve been parked here almost every night.”

  “Really? The Feds? And when exactly were you going to tell me this? Or am I some crazy broad who’s good enough to bed but not smart enough to share info with?”

  Mike looked at me straight on. “Funny thing, sweetheart, I been wondering the same thing myself. You’ve got more connections to this inside information than I do. I was a little miffed you haven’t been talking to me.”

  “No, I don’t think so. You’re the one with secrets I’ve got to pry out of you. And who knows if even now you’re telling me the truth. You’re turning out to be a real disappointment, you know that, Mike?”

  “Frankly, I’d like to know where you get off being so self-righteous. Obstruction of justice is a crime, isn’t it, Counselor?”

  He shot me a look that made me shiver. Who the hell was I to be spouting off about behavior above the law when the girls and I had walked away from the scene of a brutal murder without even calling the cops?

  “I assume you’re referring to the night Hastings was murdered.” His silence was my answer. “Who told you?”

  “What difference does it make who told me? The point is that you have a feminist chip on your shoulder that’s bigger than your bra size. Calm down and stop acting like a stupid broad and I won’t treat you like one.”

  Rather than answer him and expose any more fleshy female emotions, I left him sitting in his collagen-injected Batmobile, where suddenly he looked like sun-damaged cleavage in a push-up bra.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  A Hole in the Bucket

  MONDAY MORNING I WAS still in my AG rumble mode. I called Shannon and told her to get Laurie and meet me at the ME’s before work. Surprisingly without argument, she agreed. So bright and early, I drove to the medical examiner’s office and pulled directly to the back of the building, where the bodies were unloaded. I walked up in time to see one of the drivers jack open the rear door of a truck that had just rolled in with the early morning catch. Two cadavers in gray metallic bags were being unloaded like ponderous silverfish onto waiting gurneys. I followed them through a set of double doors into a wide hallway. Lucky spotted me from a few feet away and broke into a smile so broad that a gold-capped wisdom tooth shone in the back of his mouth.

  “Oh, Miz M, be still my heart.” He put his hand to his chest and made a fluttering motion.

  Lucky reigned supreme in this place. He had seniority over every other technician. The only deference he ever paid was to the doctors, and even then it was halfhearted.

  “Come on with me. I got a live guest waiting for you.”

  I assumed it was Shannon who had come alone without Laurie. “Lead the way, old pal.”

  I followed him to a refrigerated room where stretchers holding bodies covered in plastic sheeting were lined up against the walls. Some had feet exposed or a few toes. Another was blood red where the head should have been. It was missing.

  “Lucky?” I said, still mesmerized by the headless body.

  “See those buckets lined up in a row on them shelves? The head’s up there. It’ll go out with the body to the funeral home for burial. But, hey, I got a baby in another pail. They tell me I got to throw the baby away. They claim it’s just a bunch of cells, but man, I can’t get myself to toss it.”

  “A whole baby?”

  He nodded slowly. “Well, long story short, the girl is raped by her father and she comes in dead and real pregnant. The baby inside . . . well . . . it sure does look like a real baby. But it wasn’t born yet so we put it in a bucket during autopsy, and now the old man’s lawyer goes to court and they say we got to toss the baby with the garbage. Viability or some legal talk. I tell the lawyer, Hey, you come take this bucket to the judge and put it on the bench under his nose while he’s making his ruling. You’d have a funeral and a rightful burial faster than you can say ‘bullshit.’ Excuse me, Miz Melone, but it gets me riled when people start judging life and death from a golf cart.”

  There was something he wanted me to say. I was a lawyer; he wanted the opposing legal argument as to why the baby in the bucket should be buried instead of tossed with this morning’s stale donuts and coffee. I couldn’t give it to him. “Viability” had a legal meaning measured in time, and unfortunately, the thing in the bucket had missed it by a few weeks.

  “The baby must not have been viable, Lucky. The parents are the girl’s legal guardians. Nothing you can do.”

  “Yeah, that’s what Mr. Kendall said too.”

  “Jeff?”

  He led me into Examining Room 2, specially out-fitted for bodies that needed to be quarantined either because of contagious illness like HIV, or because the body was so decomposed it harbored dangerous parasites and bacteria. There at the foot of an empty stainless steel table stood noxious Jeff Kendall with his head proudly erect like an unwavering sail in a brisk wind. My traitorous girlfriends were nowhere in sight.

  “Raping the dead ones now?” I said.

  “I hear you’ve got forensics doing specialized testing on the blood samples. They found something interesting and what I want to know is how you knew they would.”

  “Where are Shannon and Laurie?”

  “At work where they belong.”

  “They told you I’d be here?”

  Jeff in his typically succinct fashion shot an arrow through my chest. “Melone, their first allegiance is to Vince and their jobs, not you. Don’t ever forget that.”

  I was too busy trying to stanch the flow of blood from my heart to answer him.

  Lucky shook his head. “Ah . . . excuse me, folks. Am I done here?”

  “Go,” Jeff said with a nod, and Lucky quietly padded out the door.

  And then I realized I wasn’t an AG anymore and Jeff Kendall wasn’t my colleague. What were we doing together swapping theories at the morgue? Why wasn’t I spitting at him and walking out the door with Lucky?

  “Why are you here, Jeff? Where are the girls? What’s going on?”

  Jeff leaned against the autopsy table and reached deeper into his front pockets. He looked up at the ventilation system and said, “You heard of a student at Holton named Mila Nazir?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “She’s Pakistani. She’s bringing drugs into the school. Does that ring any chimes with you?”

  “Maybe. What do you know about her? And how?”

  “Mari, dear, from the grapevine. I’m an alum, remember.”

  “And does Vince know how close you are to your alumni brethren over there? And speaking of alumni brothers, you mean Byron Eckert?”

  “Vince Piganno isn’t stupid. He’ll take information from any source willing to give it.”

  “Okay, then this is for Vince. Tell him Cory Sherman was fighting real rough with Mila Nazir the night I went to one of their parties—”

  “You’re going to student parties? You’re a hothead, Melone. You’re screwing up this job too.”

  “I went to keep tabs on what’s going on there. No other reason. But I’m sure you’ll rat me out to Carlyle before the clock strikes three. Just like you did with Vince.”

  “You’re lucky all Vince did was fire you. You should be in jail for obstruction.”

  “Why are you suddenly talking to me? And who told you I’d be here? What’s the matter, Jeff? You got me fired and it bit you in the ass because I aced a great job at your old alma mater and now I might know more about these murders than you do.”

  “What do you know?”

  “I know you’re scared, Jeff. I can tell by the wet spot between your legs.”

  He glanced at his crotch and when his head rose to me he looked like a snake ready to lunge.

  “You bitch. You’ll never know more than I do. That’s going to be your final downfall, Melone. You think you’re smarter than you actually are.”

  He walked out without waiting for an argument he knew I didn’t have. Because, after all, if I thought I was smart but actually wasn’t, then I’d be too cocky, and no
t smart enough, to realize just how off-track I was.

  BACK IN MY office, I called Shannon to find out why she’d left me high and dry with Jeff Kendall at the morgue, and because I wanted to give her the heads-up on the off-chance I could persuade Emily Barton to go public against Sherman and file a criminal complaint.

  And I missed the girls desperately. It just didn’t feel the same without them by my side. Could women cut from such colorfast cloth as ours ever lose our diehard loyalty to each other? Maybe we could all have lunch. Breathe a little. Blow the afternoon breeze at a nail salon. Knock down a few beers at the Fez.

  I got Beth on the line, who told me Shannon was on trial prosecuting a sixteen-year-old as an adult. The boy was accused of pushing his friend off a boat and watching him drown.

  “Pretty heartless, huh, Mari?”

  “ Cold-blooded, I’d say. Must be a distant relative of Jeff Kendall’s, who, by the way, knew I was supposed to meet Shannon and Laurie at the ME’s. How did he know, Beth?”

  “Mari, I don’t know.”

  “Well, if you ask me, which you shouldn’t because I’m horribly biased, I think Jeff Kendall is playing both sides of the Carlyle/Vince fence. He’s a true-to-form, honestto-goodness, dyed-in-the-wool, hypocritical Holton alumnus. As is Byron Eckert. They must grow them that way in this place.”

  “But Jeff ’s probably guilty of nothing more than hating you, Mari. He heard Shannon talking to you, and he told Vince. Vince stopped them from coming to meet you.”

  “Damn. Did Shannon and Laurie get the third degree from Vince?”

  “Not that I know of. But I know they want to talk to you. Something about the GHB . . . They got the blood work back from Lucky on the Barton girl. The GHB was pharmaceutical-grade. The pH in the dead girls was adjusted with store-bought vinegar—Heinz Distilled White to be exact.”

  I took a long, deep breath and felt my strength returning. “They can trace it to a brand?”

  “All vinegar has slightly different pH and different ingredients. And pharmaceutical GHB isn’t adjusted with vinegar. Ergo the GHB used on Barton as a date-rape drug was not the same GHB that was used on the dead girls. . . . But, Mari, I hope you’re not messing up your job there . . . I mean, until Laurie and Shannon can get you back here, maybe you should just stick with the program and not try to do the AG’s work. Let us take care of it from here.”