Code Grey

by Clea Simon

‘I’m not naive, Detective.’ Dulcie had the distinct feeling that the big man was on the verge of laughing at her. ‘I do know there is malfeasance in the university community. But he was – is a gentle soul. He may have gone off track a bit. But he would never do anything actually wrong. And he certainly would never hurt anyone.’

  ‘Ms Schwartz, what are you talking about?’ He was looking at her now, his craggy face serious.

  ‘The alert described another attempted robbery, and said that somebody had been injured. I know that some of the students talk about him, and he can be strange.’ The memory of the thin man’s latest ramblings came to mind. Something about a secret? ‘But he’s harmless.’

  ‘And you know this, how?’ He was leaning toward her. ‘Because if you’ve been spending time with this guy, I need you to think long and hard about your own personal safety choices, Ms Schwartz.’

  ‘I haven’t been spending time with him.’ She shook her head. The detective was making it sound like more than it was. ‘I do see him around. We all do, and I have never had any indication that he was anything more than a lost soul.’ She paused. She was tempted to tell Rogovoy more. To explain that if the former student had been a threat to her in any way, she would have heard about it – not from some alert, but from Mr Grey. She didn’t get the chance.

  ‘Look, Ms Schwartz, it’s not so simple. What happened – it’s probably going to be in the paper anyway – is that we had a distress call. Some passer-by reported sounds of a scuffle, so we put out an alert. One of our top guys was in the area, and he found someone – maybe your guy, maybe not. He had fallen into one of the excavations. He put up quite a fight when the uniforms went to fish him out.’

  ‘But that doesn’t mean—’ She didn’t get a chance to finish.

  ‘No, we do not know the extent of the suspect’s involvement yet,’ said Rogovoy, carefully enunciating every word. ‘Look, Ms Schwartz, I know you have a kind heart, and that’s a good thing. But you can’t take in every stray who comes your way.’

  She tried once more to protest, but that big hand went up again.

  ‘No, don’t say it,’ he said. ‘You and your lost causes and your hunches … Sometimes you’ve got to listen to reason.

  ‘We’ve got a whole task force dealing with these robberies, Ms Schwartz, with Lieutenant Wardley from property theft heading it up, so you know the bigwigs are taking it seriously.’ The burly detective shook his head. ‘My take is it’s all this damned construction. For every rotten pipe the maintenance crew unearth, they’re finding a dozen more that need to go. They’re doing patch-up work on the steam tunnels now, trying to shore up half the buildings in the Yard while they figure out which joists are holding up what floor and what pipes go where. Everything’s topsy-turvy, what with the excavations and all. That’s fertile ground for crimes of opportunity, and we have reason to believe the person we pulled out of the hole is a person of interest. This city is tough on the homeless. I know that. But something happened, and whatever I think of Wardley, he’s got a reputation for handling this sort of thing.’

  ‘But if this Wardley is in uniform …’ Dulcie stopped. ‘Maybe I should be the one to talk to him. Jeremy gets spooked easily.’

  Rogovoy was shaking his head. ‘Not going to happen. I’m not in that loop, but what I hear is that we might not even be getting a statement from him.’

  ‘But why?’ None of this was making sense.

  Rogovoy sat there for a moment, his mouth set like a crack in a boulder. Dulcie waited, unsure of what to add. Finally, with a heave of his shoulders, he continued. ‘Look, Ms Schwartz. I’ll be frank. Odds are, the guy we took in is going to face some charges. But he was the one who was injured, Ms Schwartz. He passed out soon after our guys got him out of the hole, I hear. And, frankly, he’s not in good shape.’

  FOUR

  ‘Dulcie, calm down.’ Chris didn’t seem to understand the gravity of the situation. ‘Please, honey, I’m not following you.’

  Detective Rogovoy had been ushering Dulcie out of his office when the phone rang. And while she wanted to argue – to keep the big detective talking and extract at least a bit more information from him – she had picked up Chris’s call automatically. Now she was out on the sidewalk, breathless from trying to get a few more words in, and trying her best to explain.

  ‘It’s Jeremy, Chris.’ She was yelling, she knew that. It was so frustrating not to have him understand. ‘You know, Mumbles? The cops picked him up. He’s in the hospital.’

  ‘Wait, Dulcie,’ Chris broke in. ‘You don’t even know if it is Mumbles they’ve arrested.’

  ‘Not arrested. Not yet, anyway.’ Dulcie tried to remember if the burly detective had mentioned any specific charges. ‘But it’s Jeremy. I’m sure of it.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Dulcie, but what was he doing that—’

  ‘He wasn’t doing anything!’ A woman in a fur hat turned and stared. Dulcie shot her a look and kept talking. ‘That’s the infuriating part, Chris. Detective Rogovoy wouldn’t tell me exactly what was going on, but he did say that Jeremy may face charges of some sort, which is simply impossible.’

  ‘Impossible?’ Chris even sounded like an echo. ‘Dulcie you don’t know—’

  ‘That’s just what Rogovoy said, too.’ Dulcie’s exasperation was sinking into a dull despair. ‘But I do know, Chris. I do.’

  ‘Dulcie?’ Her boyfriend’s voice had grown softer. ‘I know you like him, but really, honey, it’s not like you’re close to the man.’

  ‘Chris, I’ve known Jeremy for years. He’s gentle. I know he’s not really all there. But there’s still a nice guy under all the craziness. I can tell. Only the police aren’t going to see it. He’s always been nervous around the police.’

  ‘Dulcie …’ He paused, and Dulcie braced herself. Why was it so hard for people to believe in someone else? Granted, Jeremy was odd, but that didn’t make him a criminal.

  As if he could read her mind, Chris started talking again. ‘Maybe whatever it is wasn’t his fault, Dulcie. Maybe he got caught up in something.’

  ‘Yes!’ Dulcie’s voice was rising again, but this time with excitement. ‘That’s it exactly. He must have been in the wrong place, at the wrong time.’

  ‘The weather has been so lousy, even with the thaw …’ Chris seemed to be building her case for her.

  ‘And he was sheltering in the entranceway of the library when I saw him. He was shivering and the wind was foul. He was only there because he wanted to get warm.’

  ‘Well, there you go.’ Chris sounded like he believed her. Better yet, he sounded like he trusted her judgment. ‘That explains everything.’

  ‘So, you think the police are wrong?’

  ‘It’s obvious.’ Chris always said that when he was working out the logic of a problem. Luckily, Dulcie knew by now, this would be followed by an explanation in layman’s terms of what was so clear to him. ‘Mumbles meant no harm,’ Chris began, to Dulcie’s satisfaction. ‘But he’s homeless and it’s cold out. He must have been breaking into buildings to find a place to stay.’

  ‘But, Chris—’ She kept walking, careful to avoid the puddles that were still rimed with ice.

  Her boyfriend wasn’t listening. ‘Dulcie, think about it. What do we know about these break-ins? The cops haven’t been able to determine if anything is being taken, right? So maybe the point of it all has been simply the forced entry, without any theft. Hey, you could say that what he’s been doing makes sense. Why should the university leave all these buildings empty when there are guys like Mumbles out in the cold?’

  ‘Chris, I don’t know.’ He was wearing her down. Besides, she’d reached the Yard. As Chris reiterated his argument, point by point, she passed Memorial Hall, which housed the graduate students’ offices. As she walked by, she looked longingly up at the huge brick edifice. In a week, her tiny office down in the great hall’s basement would be up and running again. Stuart Truckworth, the head of facilities and maintenance, had personally pr
omised the department that none of the student offices had been flooded, and that none of their contents would in any way be compromised. Still, with the ongoing work, the big doors were locked shut, orange hazard signs posted at the entrance and on the stairs. She was effectively homeless, she realized. Well, except for the fact that she had a cozy apartment only about a mile away, with food and a cat to keep her warm. And if she didn’t …?

  ‘Maybe you’re right, Chris.’ She thought of how thin Jeremy had been. How cold he had appeared, hunched in that thin, old tweed. ‘Maybe he did something – just to survive. Maybe it wasn’t even him.’

  ‘There you go, Dulcie.’ Chris sounded happy. Dulcie hoped it was because he had won her over. ‘Now, what are you going to be working on today?’

  As she turned her back on her empty offices, Dulcie tried to tell him. It was hard to concentrate on work with everything else that had happened that morning. But by the time she got to the library – to the grand front entrance with its vast portico – she was talking excitedly about her current chapter.

  ‘I don’t have all my notes,’ she was saying as she climbed the marble stairs. ‘I didn’t think to write up the citations, but I know exactly where in my office they are. And so I’m writing with a couple of TKs as place holders. You know, for “to come”?’ He grunted assent. Chris’s discipline – applied mathematics – might be more rigid than hers, but they’d been together long enough for him to understand the gist of her process.

  ‘Anyway, I’m pretty sure I can get through this chapter by the time you come back. I mean, there’s nothing going on to distract me.’ She thought she heard a cough and stopped. ‘Chris, are you OK?’

  ‘I’m fine, Dulce, really. Go on.’

  ‘Anyway, if I keep up this pace, I really will have my dissertation done by spring. By real spring, I mean.’

  ‘Well, I really hope you can keep your focus then, Dulcie.’ There was a note of something – amusement? – in his voice. She decided to ignore it. ‘And Dulcie? I miss you.’

  ‘I miss you too, Chris.’ His timing was perfect. She had reached the big glass doors, beyond which cell conversations were forbidden, and so with a kiss and a promise of another call later, she hung up and powered down to get ready to work.

  ‘A close examination of the antecedents of this work reveal numerous markers, indications of authorship in both the source material and in the textural analysis.’

  She stopped and shook her head. Two hours in her carrel, three levels below that grand marble entrance, and even her own writing was beginning to sound foreign to her. After five years, the language of academia was almost a second tongue to Dulcie. Only sometimes, she thought as she sat back in the molded plastic seat and rubbed her eyes, she wished she could use her first language. What was wrong with her chosen profession that she couldn’t simply say what she meant?

  ‘I’ve found lots of indications that my author wrote this book, too.’ She smiled as she imagined typing something so prosaic into her laptop. ‘She refers to the same stories. She uses a lot of the same phrases. It’s all there. All you have to do is follow the clues.’

  No, that would never do. She could almost imagine the way Martin Thorpe, her adviser, would blanch, his eyebrows arching up toward his receding hairline. Dulcie had grown used to Thorpe. He hadn’t been her first choice for a thesis adviser, and they had certainly had disagreements over the years. But he wasn’t a bad soul. Only timid. And since his career was inextricably linked to hers, he had every reason to want her to succeed. If only he wasn’t quite so hidebound. Why couldn’t a scholar write in plain English? After all, she had found lots of indications. And she did consider them clues. Clues that the author of the great, forgotten Gothic novel, The Ravages of Umbria, had written another book, one that Dulcie was piecing together now.

  Clues. Closing her eyes to rest them, Dulcie let her thoughts wander as well. Between Chris’s phone call and Detective Rogovoy’s morning grumpiness, she had let herself be shown out way too fast this morning. She had gone into the police station with the intention of giving them information. She’d seen herself as a resource, a responsible member of the university community. But now that she had time to think about it, she realized that she had her own questions that she’d wanted answered. First and foremost – assuming that it was Jeremy the police had picked up – what did they assume the poor man had done?

  Maybe she should reach out to that task force – the one Rogovoy had mentioned. If they had any evidence, surely as a member of the university community she had a right to hear it. It was pretty obvious they didn’t have answers, only clues – and clues, Dulcie well knew, were as easy to misread as people.

  Jeremy Mumbleigh was a wreck. She couldn’t deny that. But that didn’t mean he was a criminal. Not even an unintentional one, as Chris had implied. After all, when she had seen him, he’d been sheltering in a perfectly legal doorway. He hadn’t even been trespassing.

  Maybe he had wandered by a break-in as it was taking place. Maybe he had heard a noise and gone to investigate, and that was when he had fallen. Maybe, she thought, and the idea made her sit up straight, Jeremy Mumbleigh had tried to stop a crime and been thrown into the hole. After all, the university was Jeremy’s home. Maybe he’d wanted to defend it.

  She knew what Chris would say. She could almost hear the words. He would smile and credit her active imagination. ‘You always do want to think the best of everyone,’ he would say. But he was a computer person. He lived in a world of black and white, or ones and zeros. He didn’t understand how someone could get caught up in something. Especially someone essentially vulnerable, like Jeremy.

  ‘It’s a secret.’ She heard his voice like a whisper in the air. ‘You can’t tell anyone.’

  FIVE

  It wasn’t simply curiosity, Dulcie reassured herself. It was common courtesy. One visited people when they were hospitalized. It was what one did.

  Lucy, Dulcie’s mother, may have thrown over her Philadelphia Main Line upbringing for a bohemian lifestyle – there was certainly little trace of it in Dulcie’s counterculture childhood deep in the woods of the Pacific North West – but some things did remain. Lucy might have evoked the goddess when teaching her daughter manners. It didn’t matter – the basic rules were the same, whether because actions returned thrice-fold on the do-er or because Emily Post said so.

  With that in mind, Dulcie tucked away her laptop and notes and left her carrel behind. Despite Detective Rogovoy’s evasiveness – and Chris’s skepticism – Dulcie felt sure that the person involved was Jeremy – and if he had been both hurt and unfairly maligned it was up to her to do what she could to right the situation. The only question, really, was whether to stop by Lala’s first. A bowl of split pea soup could be so nourishing, and certainly better than whatever the infirmary dished up. But, no. Dulcie caught herself. She had no idea whether Jeremy would be ready for such hearty fare, and she really should put his welfare first. A visit, and maybe a bit of conversation to clarify the events of the previous evening. Then she would treat herself.

  Quite warmed by her sense of decency, Dulcie barely felt the cold that had once again descended, freezing the previous day’s puddles into sheets of ice. The midday sun reflected off the glazed brick, making Dulcie squint.

  ‘Watch it!’ A large backpack, riding on an equally large person, nearly knocked Dulcie off the sidewalk. She staggered back as the pack bearer scowled.

  ‘But I didn’t …’ She didn’t get a chance to finish. He had already moved along, that big pack bobbing above the crowd, and as she turned to continue on her way, she felt herself slipping, her boots not getting any traction on the icy brick.

  ‘Whoa!’ She let out an involuntary whoop as her feet slid out from under her.

  ‘Be careful.’ The voice was as comforting as the strong, firm hands that caught her, righting her to her feet. But when she turned to thank her rescuer, she was unable to figure out who had helped her.

  ‘Thank
you!’ She called at the backs of the crowd, waving madly.

  ‘You must pay attention!’ The voice, like a whisper in her ear, almost caused her to whirl around again – even as her waving threatened to once again send her flying. ‘Dulcie, please.’

  ‘Mr Grey?’ Dulcie caught herself. It wasn’t only the ice: her beloved cat never seemed to be visible when she could hear him. Turning to look for him might only make his voice disappear. ‘Was that you?’

  A low purr, almost like a chuckle, rumbled somewhere close.

  ‘Well, someone helped me out there.’ Dulcie smiled. Maybe Lucy was right. Maybe the universe was fundamentally benevolent. ‘And it’s nice to hear your voice again.’

  ‘Dulcie, you’re not listening . . .’ The voice was beginning to fade in the lunchtime hubbub. ‘There was a warning … ’

  ‘I will be more careful, Mr Grey.’ Dulcie could barely resist the urge to turn around. To search for the source of that voice. That comfort. ‘I promise.’

  ‘You promise what?’ A tall woman with dyed red hair was eyeing her curiously.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Dulcie, turning slowly away. She would be more careful. She would. But for now, Mr Grey was gone.

  ‘I’m sorry. Are you family?’ The soft-spoken orderly looked like he’d been up all night. Still, Dulcie was warmed to see him be so attentive.

  ‘No, I’m a friend.’ She had asked to see Jeremy Mumbleigh as soon as she’d gotten to the health services and been told that, yes, the infirmary did have a patient by that name. But although she’d been directed to the third floor of the Holyoke Center complex, she’d been stopped at the nurse’s station there.

  ‘Oh.’ The orderly looked down at a computer screen, perhaps looking up a bed number or a room. ‘Bother,’ he said. ‘I was hoping to fill in some information about the patient’s family.’

  ‘Oh.’ That gave Dulcie pause. She had never thought about Jeremy’s background. The university was his family.