I hung up with Beth, feeling like some guy had just penned me a Dear John. My heart was hollowed out, like I’d missed some subliminal message in our conversation. Did the girls not meet me at the morgue because they were worried I was jeopardizing my job at Holton? Were they afraid I’d get fired from this job because they knew Vince was never letting me back? What if the girls were having a delayed reaction to the Hastings fiasco and had finally realized that I was a legal liability? Maybe they’d heard something and they were backing away from our vow of coconspirator solidarity.
When people started thinking they knew what was best for me, my reaction was to do the opposite. Not much different from a ten-year-old on the verge of puberty.
After leaving strict instructions with Rita not to let Emily off the line if she called, I headed to the courthouse in downtown Providence to surprise Shannon at trial and beg her to have lunch with me. After knocking heads with her a few times, she’d eventually tell it like it was—be brutally honest and then swagger away to let me drown in my tears. Shannon’s lack of empathy wasn’t selfishness. Her way of dealing with emotional distress was nondiscriminatory. Have a problem? Struggling with a difficult ethical issue? Shannon would generously gift you a bottle of Wite-Out or a big felt eraser. With great purpose she ignored the deeper meanings in almost everything except the middle of a turkey club sandwich.
MURDER CASES WERE tried in only a few courtrooms on the fourth floor. Shannon would be easy to find with the army of reporters convening for a juvenile murder trial.
Walking through the front doors, I felt immediately safe, smiling with the guards at the door who greeted me by name. As an unnecessary but courteous gesture, I flashed my ID card at them and, in turn, they directed me around the metal detectors without even glancing at the card. I rode the elevator up and walked out onto the fourth floor as a familiar boxy male shape exited the elevator car next to me. Mike was headed toward my intended destination, so I followed him. His unmistakable gait was wide and determined and a half step speedier than usual. Today, Mike had somewhere important to go. I kept my head low, not wanting anyone to recognize me and call out my name. If Mike found me “spying” on him again, I’d never be able to dig myself out of it. He turned left and again I followed. He stood at the entrance to Courtroom 4C, a large, cavernous tomb of honey-colored veined oak, hundred-year-old built-in pews, worn marble floors, and floor-to-ceiling overhung windows still fitted with the marbled glass panes of a fun house. I stalled until Mike went in. He walked straight to the front and into the pew directly behind the railings separating the viewers from the lawyers and defendant’s tables. I found a seat at the back of the courtroom while Shannon’s strong voice soared across the room like a sharp arrow. Crystal clear and elegant, her diction was smoothed of the tough Boston twang that roughed up her speech when she was in her street-savvy mode. Shannon, like me, wore sedate suits to court, knee-grazing skirts and cropped jackets. She wouldn’t give up her spikes, though. She said she kept the jury’s rapt attention by prancing back and forth on stilted heels like a purebred Clydesdale. This was the role Shannon played only in courtrooms.
Mike sat in the front row and leaned forward with his arms resting on the wood partition, listening to Shannon give her closing argument and watching her body strut back and forth from the defendant to the jury box.
“Fifteen minutes,” she said to them. “You heard the medical examiner say it. It took at least fifteen minutes for Bobby to drown. You heard him describe the way Bobby probably died. You also heard a state witness tell you what drowning feels like. Do you know the pain of drowning?” Shannon moved closer to the jury box, this time walking on the balls of her feet to keep her heels from distracting the jury as they thought about her question. “Do you know what it feels like to drown?” she asked them again when she was in their faces at the box.
“It burns,” she told them. She drew out the final s until you could actually hear it sizzle on her tongue. “Our witness said water burns when it’s in your lungs. Have you ever gotten water in your nose at the pool? A thousand times worse when you are drowning. When your lungs fill up with water, it feels like a fire inside your chest. You gulp for air but there is none. Eventually water is all around you and the urge to breathe is gone. An elephant is standing on your back, crushing it straight through to your chest. The pain is unbearable. And the terror. But you bear it because you have no choice. Peaceful unconsciousness isn’t yours yet. You beg to die soon so the pain will let up. But your heart wants you alive, so it beats slower. Your body tries to stay alive as long as it can, hoping for a reprieve. Hoping that the defendant”—Shannon turned and pointed to him sitting stone-faced and cocky next to his lawyer—“will take pity and haul you back up to the boat. But he doesn’t. He waits and watches you sink underwater, deeper and deeper, until the pain finally does ebb, and peaceful death is on its way. But you don’t mind anymore because death is preferable to the choking, and burning, and thoughts of those you’re leaving behind. . . .”
When Shannon was finished, the judge excused the jury for lunch and Mike stood, staring only at her, waiting for her to pack her briefcase and come through the wooden gates. When she reached him, he put his arm around her shoulder and rubbed her back as they left the courtroom together, Shannon with her arm resting lightly around his waist.
A few weeks ago Mike didn’t know Shannon from a Roget’s thesaurus. Now they were massaging each other’s body parts.
I waited for the courtroom to empty, then stood on wobbly legs. But like a soldier left behind during combat, I rallied my defenses and dodged the gunfire of debilitating rejection by Shannon and Mike, who, both individually and jointly, were knocking the life out of me. I wasn’t too surprised about Mike. He was the type of guy who was genetically coded to disappoint women. But Shannon? She was the real heartbreak.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Poker Chip Blue
BY THE SIMPLE EXERCISE of placing one foot in front of the other, I left the courthouse and reached my car, turned the key in the ignition, and alternately pressed the accelerator and brakes by rote, until I reached my office and walked straight to Rita, knowing there was something I wanted to ask her but not being able to remember what it was.
Without looking up from her computer screen she said, “Miss Barton has not come by or called. I have a message from Mr. Orenstein and a cell phone number at which he says you must return his call.”
“Right. Thanks, Rita.”
As I walked to my office, life came slowly back into focus. I dialed Elliot. He answered on the second ring.
“Yes?” I said.
“Cory and Mila.”
Elliot was breathless as if he’d been jogging or his brain had run a four-minute mile. Elliot was usually slumped over in ennui. That day he was zooming faster than a speeding bullet.
I told him to slow down and start again.
“Sorry.” He coughed hard a few times and began again. “Cory and Mila Nazir are dealing drugs from school. Cory thinks he’s James-fucking-double-07.”
“Stop swearing, Elliot. You’re still a student—and I’m not.”
“But you’re the first person I’ve met who is both willing and capable of blowing this place apart. I’m sick of this capitalist microcosm, the rewards doled out from the higher-ups for illegal behavior because of its profit margin. You got me started on this. Don’t quit on me now.”
I assumed by “ higher-ups” he meant Carlyle and the administration. But I wasn’t going to let him expound on a Carlyle-as-drug-lord dissertation. So far, despite Byron’s fears, I still hadn’t seen any evidence of rewards granted by Carlyle other than his usual tendency to look the other way when a rich and legacied student misbehaved. If Elliot had a philosophical axe to grind, I wasn’t letting him point it on my gravestone. I prodded Elliot into a different direction, not necessarily a safer one, but one in which I was far more interested.
“Do you know if Lisa and Cory were together the night sh
e died?”
“Why?”
“Because Emily told me something about Lisa meeting a guy that night before Sherman’s party,” I sort of lied. “She said Lisa was supposed to hook up with her later at Sherman’s.”
Okay, so why couldn’t I lie a little to Elliot? It seemed the longer I was enrolled at this school of higher education, the easier it became to break the golden rules. And I was getting the feeling that Elliot was enjoying himself looking down from a perch of intellectual superiority and that he was dropping crumbs of information for me like a path to grandma’s house. Toying, perhaps, with what he considered my “naive gullibility.”
He paused over the phone line. “You said Lisa and Emily were studying.” He snorted. “And by studying, I mean cribbing off the notes Lisa had gotten from me in class. Of course, if Lisa and Emily were together, they’d been doing coke, so what was the point? They weren’t going to learn anything whacked out on cocaine.”
I was still feeling a pang of guilt over not doing more to help Lisa. I felt a need to defend myself. I wanted to tell him about Lisa’s counseling with Mitsy and with her private MD in New York, but I was strapped to silence by damn confidentiality issues.
“Lisa was on top of her cocaine problem,” I finally said.
“Oh sure, with Mitsy Becker, who puts Band-Aids on gaping wounds and then sends you back to the front. I warned you about Lisa the day I saw her in your office, and you didn’t do anything either.”
“It’s the murderer’s fault she’s dead, Elliot, not mine.”
“Okay, are you listening to me?” Elliot said. “That date-rape stuff—the GHB? That’s the direction you should be heading. I found out the other night at the party that Cory and Rod are getting it from Mila—along with the cocaine they are making tons of cash from. I think there’s a connection there.”
“They’re making money from the drugs?”
“That’s what I hear from campus chatter.”
“Does the name Jeff Kendall mean anything to you?”
“A student?”
“No, never mind. The GHB that Cory and Rod are getting, is it in pill form?”
“What’s the difference?”
“It’s homemade stuff on the dead girls, not pharmaceutical. It’s not coming from LA or Pakistan. Someone’s brewing it in his kitchen.”
“Oh . . .” After a long pause, Elliot said, “That’s a bump then. I don’t think Sherman’s got the brains for that.”
Elliot wheezed a few more times—he sounded as if he were having an asthma attack. Why did nerdy people always have breathing problems? Did their brains work so fast that they simply forgot to inhale? Maybe asthma is an autoimmune disease responding to uncontrolled gray-matter growth spurts. Maybe Elliot’s body had begun to see his big brain as a foreign object growing out of proportion to his body: the runaway cerebrum; the brain as blob, snowballing out of control . . .
Or in Elliot’s case it was probably just an allergic reaction to musty books.
I hung up with Elliot, sending him on his way while I chewed on his tidbits of new information and strutted into Rita’s office, bumping into her on her way out. She gave me a verbal rundown of my calls, none of which was Emily Barton. Rita asked me if she could go to Miko to do some shopping. Miko was Rhode Island’s homegrown answer to Victoria’s Secret and Frederick’s of Hollywood.
“Do you need anything?” she asked, holding a large envelope demurely over her breasts. “Because I just saw Monsieur McCoy and he left this package for you.”
I sprinted back to my office and closed the door. Like a torrid scene from a drugstore romance novel, I ripped open the envelope. I swear I could feel beads of sweat tickling the crevice between my breasts. Had Mike created a new type of love letter, discreetly hidden in a yellow bubble-wrap mailer? And in this covert letter would he offer proof beyond a reasonable doubt that his presence at Sherman’s party was indeed only a search-and-rescue mission of a damsel in distress? And while promising to forsake all his coed cuties (and that still unresolved underground friendship with Shannon), would he then profess his abiding love for me, whereupon I would exhale a sigh of relief and we would run off to the Dial-up Modem Diner together to live happily ever after over corned beef hash and sunny-side-up eggs. . . .
But alas, no dashing love letter. Not even the smell of his cheap aftershave wafted from the sheet. The only thing belonging to Mike inside the envelope was his ratty signature on the bottom of a bland incident report about a Holton student who’d been stopped by the local cops and charged with driving under the influence of alcohol. The kid was released on his own recognizance after his promise to reappear for arraignment in a week. I read the file and imagined my disciplinary strategy. I’d begun to think of it as my “Mitsy Strategy.” Read the file, talk to the student, determine what should be done, tell Ken what you think should be done, and then do whatever the hell Ken tells you to do. Piece of cake. Unless you had a conscience.
I was placing the file in the back burner of my bottom desk drawer when I heard Mike’s walkie-talkie cackling away in Rita’s office. I made out nothing except “coming down” and then heard Mike say he was on his way to see Carlyle as he walked out of Rita’s office. He grunted as he came toward my door and poked his head in.
Our stare was brief. No smile on his face. Certainly none on mine. I still had not committed his face to memory, because it struck me anew. The strong features, black hair with strands of gray at the temple, freshly cut but still unfashionably an inch over the collar of his button-down blue shirt. Poker chip blue eyes. The broad mouth and soft lips that I could only remember as a sensation over my skin and against my own mouth.
While we were staring at each other, my phone rang. I hit the line button.
“Hi, Shannon,” I said.
Mike turned his head quickly away and was gone without so much as a wink.
Shannon’s voice was chipper. “Hey. Why didn’t you come by?”
“When?”
“This morning, you paranoid schizophrenic. Weren’t you in court? The guards told me they saw you.”
“Oh yeah.”
“Hey, buddy, you haven’t been drinking, have you?”
“No, but the day is young.”
“So why didn’t you say hello?”
“Shannon, you didn’t tell me you knew Mike McCoy—”
“Christ, Mari, I’ve been so busy with this murder trial and this drug thing going down at Holton—”
“ ‘This drug thing’?”
“Is this line safe?”
So now both Mike and the girls had failed to fill me in on the drug sting as soon as they knew. I still didn’t believe Mike thought I knew first and hadn’t told him. And why hadn’t the girls told me as soon as they found out? What about that die-hard loyalty I thought we had to each other? Was I still operating on some infantile notions of a blood-sisterhood? Had Vince and/or Jeff convinced everyone I was a traitor and couldn’t be trusted? Was I getting paranoid again? Christ, now that I thought about it, the only person who trusted me implicitly was the braincase loser, Elliot Orenstein, and now I was even beginning to suspect his motives for currying favor with me. He’d latched on to me like a love-smitten kid to his first-grade teacher. It was probably one of the first times in Elliot’s life that he’d gotten positive reinforcement from anything other than a numerical grade report.
Shannon was still talking when I came out of my self-induced, post-traumatic stress coma.
“. . . so Mila Nazir and the Sherman/Lipton dynamic duo, you know, like Spider-Woman, Batman, and Robin, they’re all importing drugs and selling them from their freaking apartment on campus. McCoy didn’t tell you any of this?”
“Speaking of whom . . . why didn’t you tell me you knew McCoy?” “Mari, after what I just told you, all you can think of is me netting a dumb cop?”
Why was she sounding so incredulous? Shannon liked nothing better than collecting airhead men she could order around—and under, and up and
down, and every which way. The dumber the better. At face value Mike McCoy seemed her perfect specimen for mounting.
“Mari, stop acting like a goddamn lightweight. I just haven’t been free to talk to you. This morning, after you asked us to meet you at the chiller, shithead Jeff ratted us to Vince and he stopped us from coming. And McCoy’s okay, but not hot enough to screw you over for. We were also ordered to stay zip-mouthed by the Feds on the drug thing, but you know that wouldn’t have stopped me. I just assumed you and McCoy were discussing everything over pillow talk. I thought he was filling you in. I mean information-wise, of course. Hah!”
“Yeah, sure, okay. But when did you meet McCoy? I mean, how?”
“Yesterday morning, after that Barton girl ended up in the hospital. He was here at the office with us at a meeting on the drug bust. And then he met me in court this morning about fixing some DWI over there. That’s it. I swear on my mother’s breast implants!”
“I just got a DWI case from him. Are you saying he came to you with it before he even gave me the file?”
“Maybe that’s because he doesn’t need to bother you with the small stuff. Maybe Carlyle told him to fix something up before it even got to you. I mean, I don’t know how things are done over there, sweetie, but I didn’t go looking for him. He came here on his own.”
“Okay, okay, you’re right. The DWI thing is bullshit. But, Christ, I saw him rubbing your back when you walked out of the courtroom.”
“Yeah, I’d just told him his zipper was open and to save it until we got into the backseat.”
When I didn’t laugh, Shannon continued her defense, such as it was.
“I’m kidding, Mari. I’m kidding. Hey, look, I like giving guys a hard thing—I mean a hard time—and McCoy’s a tough nut to crack. I like that.”
Defenseless Page 24
