Then I ate the rest of the half-sandwich before turning my key in the ignition.
* * *
"Yes?"
"I'd like to see the records of a former student here?"
Harriet sighed deeply, then stood stiffly, plucking another form from the sheaf on her desk like she was pulling a weed in her garden. At the counter she managed not to slap the thing in front of me.
"Have this completed and signed, then bring it back to us. There'll be a three-dollar charge for copying the transcript."
I looked at the form and frowned. "Gee, I'm really sorry, but the former student typed up his own version of this."
"We insist upon that form, sir."
"Yes, I can certainly understand that, but . . ." I took out the résumé shop letter I'd forged and gave the impression of comparing the two. ". . . but, fortunately it looks as though he got all the magic words right, just left off the stuff at the top."
I turned the form and the letter so Harriet could read them. She took her time, then flinched a little at the end. Looking up at me, Harriet smiled sweetly. "Well, you're certainly right. However, without YEAR OF GRADUATION, it will take me a few minutes."
"I can wait." Patience and deference, the keys to success. "I'd say he's in his early forties, if that helps at all."
"Certainly does. Please," waving toward one of the scoop chairs, "sit down, make yourself comfortable."
Harriet disappeared into the bowels of the office. Five minutes later, the door to the corridor opened and three campus police officers—a big male, a medium female, and a small male—came in, hands on their still-holstered side-arms. Harriet materialized at the counter, as though she'd been hiding behind one of the tile cabinets. She used a manila folder to point in my direction. "That's him."
The medium female said to me, "You want to stand, please? Slowly."
I looked at them. "Let me guess. Poppa Bear, Mama Bear, and Baby Bear, right?"
The small male said, "Just one more word, jerk-off."
I stood, slowly.
=12=
I'd driven by the campus police headquarters on the way in without realizing it, since their operation looked like one of the old, ivy-covered classroom buildings. After the big male officer had frisked me for weapons and the medium female had taken the file folder from Harriet, all three cops walked me out to another yellow Ford Explorer. Momma Bear got behind the wheel, mumbling into a radio mike held too close to her mouth for me to hear what she was saying. I rode in the back seat between Poppa Bear and Baby Bear. Even with the small man to my right, it was a tight enough fit that I was glad no one had decided to cuff me.
The female officer pulled us into the curb, taking a POLICE VEHICLES ONLY slot. She got out first, followed by the big male officer, then me and the small one. We went through the high doors, a blue-on-yellow plaque reading CAMPUS SECURITY.
Inside, the floor was old grooved wood, the walls covered by bulletin boards so covered themselves with notices that you almost had to take the existence of the boards beneath as an article of faith. A woman in civilian clothes behind the counter might have been Harriet's older sister, but we weren't introduced. She just nodded to us, and we all moved through the swinging gate in the counter, past a few unstaffed desks and to a door stenciled DIRECTOR. As the female officer opened the door, I said, "Action, camera . . ." and the big male officer nudged me into the office.
A woman about my age in a maize blouse and the skirt to a suit stood from behind a desk with computer and fax on one corner and an elaborate telephone on the other. She was medium height, with even features, a milkmaid's complexion, and brown hair brushed back the way Primo Zuppone's would look if he kept it dry. The jacket to her suit hung on a multi-pronged brass fixture next to a framed diploma from some company that made parking meters. The woman wore the blouse with the cuffs unbuttoned and the sleeves rolled twice up her forearms. When she smiled, I got the feeling she'd been doing this kind of work a long time.
"I'm Gail Tasker." Both hands flicked out, like the woman was shooing flies. “Sit down, please."
She sounded like a classmate of mine at Holy Cross who'd come from the Bronx. As the female officer handed Tasker the manila file Harriet had given her, the big male officer pushed a chair over for me. It was institutional gray, with black, punctured pads on the seat and back.
I said, "On1y if there's room for everyone."
Baby Bear started to growl something, but Tasker cut him off with a shake of her head. "There are two ways we can do this, my friend. The modern, polite way, and the old-fashioned, hard way. So far, you've been on the fringe of polite, so we try that a little longer. It doesn't work, we regress."
"Maybe if you regress enough, I institute a civil rights suit."
"I'm not worried.”
And she wasn't, either, which meant Tasker thought she had something on what I'd been doing at the registrar's office.
I sat down.
Tasker nodded, once to me, then to the officers behind me. "Dave, if you'd stay. Trish, Garth, you can return to patrol."
Dave was the big male. The other two left, closing the door behind them.
Tasker dropped back into her desk chair, elbows on the blotter, hands joined to prop up her chin. "How about we start with some ID?"
I took out my holder and extended it to her.
She opened it, read a moment, then looked up at me.
"Mr. Cuddy, you have one of these for Vermont too?"
"No."
Tasker picked up a pen, jotted down some information, then closed my holder and tossed it—politely—back to my side of her desk.
As I put it away, she opened Harriet's file folder.
"What's a private investigator from Boston, unlicensed in the Green Mountain State, doing at our registrar's office?"
"Trying to get a copy of that file."
Tasker looked up again, then went back to the folder. "Haven't seen one of these in a long time. Back before we had computers, individually typed courses, handwritten entries for grades. God, it must have taken forever for them to get things done."
I waited patiently while she turned pages, dipping back and forth a few times. "While you're browsing, mind if I ask you a question?"
Tasker looked up a third time. "Go ahead."
I glanced toward the diploma. "You really go to Parking Meter School?"
Officer Dave coughed behind me, but Tasker threw back her head and laughed out loud. My mother would have called it a good, healthy woman's laugh. "Given where we are, Mr. Cuddy, just about everybody on this campus has a car. You have any idea what that means for us?"
"None."
"Well, first you've got faculty members, who think it's their God-given right to have a dedicated space reserved for them personally every day of the week, even if they're in their offices only Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Second, all the students think the tuition they pay ought at least to include a spot for their car, since it sure doesn't guarantee them a job when they graduate. Then you've got administrators, and visiting parents with their teenage kids 'shopping' for colleges, and—"
"I get the picture."
Tasker paused. “So the only way you can possibly manage this mess is by economic self-determination."
"Meaning making them all feed meters."
"Or most of them, at least. The meters are really pretty good, and not just as moneymakers, either. They're very well-made, mechanically speaking. Only problem is, they are mechanical, so they're going to break down, and it costs us twenty-nine ninety-five each time we send one back to the factory. So I took one of my PSA's down—"
"Pee-Ess-Ays?"
Dave shuffled his feet on the floor. Tasker said, “Parking Service Attendants. I took one of them with me to this school the manufacturer runs down in Arkansas. You fly into Springfield, Missouri, home of Bass Pro Shops. You ever been to L.L. Bean in Freeport?"
"Yes."
"Well, this is the same idea, only bigger. Five-story waterfall
, trout stream, aquarium. Two different places to eat, a zoo full of stuffed animals."
"A zoo . . . ?"
"Full of stuffed animals. Then we drove south to the factory. And guess what you pass along the way?"
"Bill Clinton's hometown?"
"No. Branson, Missouri, home to the performance theaters of country stars, has-been sixties' singers, and you name it. Zillions of buses and RVs filled with retired people hitting the theaters and shops and restaurants. And let me tell you, they really pack those theaters."
"To see . . . ?"
"Bobby Vinton, Tony Orlando, Pat Boone-"
"Stop, you're making me giddy."
Officer Dave coughed a little louder, and Tasker paused again. Then, "Mr. Cuddy, Trish said over the radio you were a wiseass. Didn't anybody ever tell you that first impressions were the most important?"
"Sorry."
Tasker flicked her hands again. "The road south from Branson goes through mostly rural areas, with homemade signs advertising quilts and fenced-in yards full of cement lawn ornaments."
"Lawn ornaments?"
"Miniature deer, full-sized swans, even a lawn pig, with colored rocks."
"Colored rocks too."
"Painted, to serve as border markers. And we saw, I forget exactly where, this sign for maintaining the highways. You know, volunteer your group to do roadside cleanup?"
"We have those in New England too."
"Yeah, only down there, the sign said, 'Adopt a Highway. This Mile Maintained by the Ku Klux Klan.' " Tasker shook her head. I checked my watch.
She said, "You have an appointment somewhere?"
"No. I was just wondering how long we were going to kick around the Wonders of the Ozarks before whoever it is you're stalling for gets here."
A very slow nod. "I must be slipping."
"Not by much. I brought up the diploma, remember? All you did was build on it."
Another nod.
I said, "You want to tell me why I'm being held at all?"
The nodding stopped. "You don't know."
Tasker hadn't spoken it as a question. "No, I don't."
"Somebody—I'm guessing you—forged a signature on a letter to fraudulently obtain a former student's records, seemingly with his permission?
"How about if I promise not to do it again?"
"You've probably violated a federal student privacy act."
"Can you give me chapter and verse?"
Tasker said, "No."
"Then who are we waiting for, the FBI?"
"No. Our locals."
I leaned forward in my chair slowly, so as not to excite Officer Dave. "Ms. Tasker, don't you think this is a little excessive, given the circumstances?"
"Maybe you don't know all the circumstances?
"Like for instance?"
Tasker tapped the folder in front of her. "This file belongs to Andrew Dees, class of 1973. Harriet's been in the registrar's forever and remembered his name. He was killed in a car accident two days after graduation. My first 'for instance' would be why you're forging the signature of a boy dead twenty-odd years."
I sat back in my chair, thinking Gail Tasker had a pretty good question there.
* * *
"Gail, what's up?"
We'd sat—Tasker and I, anyway, Officer Dave still standing behind me—silently for another ten minutes, her studying the tile like she had a final exam coming up on it. Dave shifted position just enough to open the door when we heard a knock. The man entering the room was around fifty, with a beer belly over brown pants cinched with a cracked leather belt. His broad shoulders had outgrown the green sports jacket two sizes ago, and he was the first male I'd seen wearing a porkpie hat in probably a decade. What hair the hat didn't hide had stayed black, and his walk was more a waddle as he took up space against the wall near Tasker's diploma.
She said, "This is John Cuddy. Cuddy, Pete Braverman."
"Detective Braverman?"
The man smiled, cruel and somehow familiar. "Chief Braverman, if it matters to you."
I looked from one to the other. "Director of Campus Security, Chief of Police. All the big guns, rolled out just for me."
Braverman crossed his arms in front of his chest, seriously threatening the seams of the jacket. "And just what did you do, Mr. Cuddy'?"
"Maybe you'd best ask the director here."
Braverman kept his eyes in my direction long enough to let me know he didn't like his questions answered that way, then glanced toward Tasker.
She summed up what had happened so far.
When Tasker got to the part about Andrew Dees being the student I was after, Braverman didn't look at all happy. Then he came back to me.
"You got anything to add?"
"No."
"Why are you checking into things at the university?"
"Confidential."
"That doesn't count for shit here, Cuddy," said Braverman. "You're not licensed in Vermont."
"All I did was try to get a record. I don't need a license for that."
"Then you don't need to keep it confidential, either."
"I'm not. I told you what I was doing, just not why I was doing it."
"That doesn't explain you trying to beat the registrar out of a record with a forged 1etter."
“I wasn't trying to beat anything. I'd have been happy to pay a reasonable copy charge."
The cruel smile. "Pity this isn't thirty years ago. We'd save ourselves a lot of time."
I said, "Chief, Ms. Tasker already mentioned the old-fashioned way. Living in the past wouldn't be good tactics for either of you."
The smile died a little. Braverman brought one hand up to rub his chin. He blinked twice, then turned to the desk.
"Gail, I got a bad feeling about this gentleman, but I don't see what all we can do about it."
Tasker reddened a bit. "Pete, he forged a request on a dead man."
Braverman said, "Yeah, but that just means Cuddy here didn't know the boy—shit, he'd be what, in his forties now?—was dead. That doesn't sound like much ground for prosecution to me."
Tasker reddened a bit more. "So, what, we just let him walk?"
"It's either that, or we're up to our mutual asses in paperwork only to see him get less of a slap on the wrist than a jaywalker down on Main."
Tasker didn't seem to like the way Braverman was handling the situation. Frankly, I didn't blame her. In his shoes, I'd have put me someplace while they had this talk, then come back to me with a united front. Maybe the "don't-you-ever-again-on-my-beat" sort of warning from both of them, even if they'd decided to cut me loose. Tasker heard him out, though, before saying evenly, "It's your call, Pete."
Braverman turned back to me with a cruel smile. "Well, now, since I've got my car out front, why don't I save Gail and Dave here the trouble of giving you a lift back to yours?"
* * *
"Major reason I'm the chief here, nobody could stand to partner up with me. Can you guess why?"
As soon as we'd gotten in his older, unmarked sedan, I nearly gagged. The stale cigar smoke was as much a part of the car as the upholstery it'd invaded. The sensation was like Mo Katzen's office being reduced to a five-foot cube of tainted air.
Braverman took a thick, half-gone one about three inches long from the ashtray and used a Bic lighter to coax it back to life, the smoke puffs almost covering his face. Then he turned the ignition key and started off.
"Major reason I keep this junker is the headroom for my hat. Only one I've—"
"There a 'major reason' you let me watch back there too?"
Braverman seemed to bite down hard on the cigar. "Let you watch what?"
"You pulling rank on Tasker. She thought she smelled a skunk, and you made a show of kicking the woodpile, but it seemed to me you didn't really want to find out what might be in with the logs."
A heavy drag this time, and a cloud of smoke as we turned. "Gail called me, only told me her people were bringing over some wiseass—her expression�
�who was making a fuss at the registrar's and would I swing by, have a look. After she explained the problem back in her office just now, it doesn't seem exactly like capital murder, somehow."
When Braverman didn't continue, I said, "And so I'm free to go,"
A variation on the cruel smile, lip winching over the cigar. "Unless you'd rather be booked. I could still arrange it."
"I don't think so."
"Good."
“I mean, I don't think you'd book me."
Braverman made another turn, wagging his head. "And you seemed so smart earlier."
"I get the feeling, Chief, that you want me the hell out of Dodge instead of in it, defending myself on Tasker's idea of charges."
"And why would I want that, Cuddy?"
"I honestly don't know."
We arrived at the Administration Building. "Which one's yours?"
"The silver Prelude."
Braverman came to a stop behind my rear bumper.
"You like the older ones, too, eh?"
I just looked at him.
"Cuddy, there something still eating you?"
"Curiosity."
"Bad emotion, curiosity. Remember what it did for the cat."
"You see lots of us cats around, Chief."
Braverman drew heavily on the cigar again. "Just the live ones. Could be like icebergs, you know? Ten percent you can see, the other ninety percent under the surface."
I got out of the car. As I closed the door, Chief Pete Braverman said, "Deep under," before motoring slowly away.
=13=
From the lot of the Administration Building, I drove back through the gates, searching for a pay phone. I found one near the Towne Restaurant and started dialing. I tried my office answering service first. No message from Nancy, but a Mr. Zuppone had called three times. Next my home telephone tape, tapping in the remote code and getting three additional messages from Primo, each a little more desperate, telling me to meet him at "the condo," which I took to be my place. Still nothing from Nancy.
I thought Primo was better dealt with face-to-face in Boston, after I knew a little more about "Andrew Dees," but I tried the DA's office, a secretary saying Ms. Meagher was back on trial. I left what I hoped sounded like a calm message: "Call me at home tonight." Given the way the secretary asked if there was anything else, I'm not so sure I pulled off the "calm" part.
Invasion of Privacy - Jeremiah Healy Page 12
