by Ezra Sidran
Katelynn just shot me a look. “One of you is an alcoholic and the other is an enabler,” she said looking at me.
I just looked at Bill and he looked at me. “’Enabler’ is a pretty fancy word, Bill,” I said, “I guess I’ll be the alcoholic,” and I went back into the kitchen for more beer.
Strapped to this gurney, the memory of that porch and that night is all that is keeping me sane. I don’t know how but Bill and I are going to get back there. And right now, I’m ready to kill anybody who stands in my way.
CHAPTER 3.7
Kate and I watched as Duncan, the lone Mount Mary College security guard (limited budget plus small private college equals one security guard for the entire campus) turns the corner around the Nursing Building and wander off into the distance.
“Figure he’s headed back to the security office in Sharp Hall?” I asked Katelynn.
She pulled back the sleeve of her black turtleneck to look at her watch, “Just about 9 o’clock. Time for America’s Funniest Videos. Yup, my guess is he’s good until they announce the $10,000 winner.” Kate was wearing her idea of a secret agent outfit: black turtleneck, black jeans, black wool cap and high-heeled boots. As always, she looked gorgeous. Me, I just had on jeans and a Family Guy T-shirt with Brian the dog saying, “So whose leg do I have to hump around here to get a martini?” and sneakers.
“Do you think we should synchronize watches?” I joked.
Kate shot me a withering look. “Let’s go,” she said and started out the back gate. I followed after her.
We had decided - around the third beer on the porch - that the most likely place that Nick had been was in Morton Hall. It was our old stomping grounds. Maybe he had been using the computer lab or what had been my classroom.
Bill had indeed been napping but he woke up as we were leaving and I had to tell him that he had to stay because he was in charge of the house.
“Okay, that’s it!” The Authoritarian Man yelled at me, “I warned you about joking about the dog.”
“I wasn’t kidding, Jim,” I honestly replied, “I really did leave him in charge. He’s more mature than the kids. And it’s not like he’s going to order a Pay-Per-View on cable or something.”
“Continue,” said the Authoritarian Man.
Kate and I started slithering around the corners of the Nursing Building and headed to Morton Hall staying in the shadows on the edges of the Quad. When we got to Morton Hall the doors were locked. I had turned in my keys in (as per my termination notice) so I started to head back home when Katelynn reached into her pocket, pulled out a set of keys, shot me an ‘Oh, Lord are you stupid’ look and unlocked the door. I forgot that Kate was a weekend work-study and still had a master set.
The halls were dark except the feeble illumination from the emergency Exit signs. I immediately tripped over the first of the steps. Kate grabbed my shoulder with her left hand before I smashed my nose into the linoleum and turned on a small pen light that she held in her right. Again, another ‘Oh, Lord are you stupid’ look from her. She shone the light ahead of us and we surreptitiously made our way up the steps and then turned the corner to what had once been my classroom. The door was unlocked.
I walked in and flipped on the lights.
Immediately Katelynn switched them off and shot me, yet another, ‘Oh, Lord are you stupid’ look.
“Kate,” I said, “there’s nobody here. Old Duncan is watching America’s Funniest Videos two buildings over.”
She immediately shushed me and in a stage whisper hissed, “We don’t know where Duncan or anybody else is. We’re not supposed to be here. Nick was murdered here. Let’s be discreet, okay?”
And then I understood why she kept shooting me those looks because I really was that stupid. We were all in over our heads. Maybe Kate knew it, or at least suspected it, but I was clueless until it was too late.
“What are we looking for, Kate?” I whispered.
“Anything, anything at all out of the ordinary,” she hissed back.
Kate was methodical, hell she had the pen light, I just ran my hands around the tops of the desks, underneath the monitors, opened the drawers and felt around in the dark. After fifteen minutes Kate came over and whispered, “You find anything?”
“Yeah!” I answered cheerfully, “I’d been looking all over for this pen I lost last semester. It was under this monitor.” It was probably good that she held the flashlight and I couldn’t see her face.
“Let’s move on,” she said, so we left my old classroom and shut the door behind us.
“Where to now?” I whispered.
“Let’s try the computer lab upstairs,” Kate answered in the dark. I shuffled after her in the gloom towards the stairwell at the end of the hall. I had walked this corridor a thousand times but it’s strange when you are in the dark with your hand brushing up against the painted cinder block walls and you are silently counting the number of steps to yourself. Kate’s flashlight flickered up ahead.
Kate suddenly extinguished the penlight. We were now in complete darkness. “What are you doing?” I hissed.
“Shush, I heard something,” Kate’s voice answered from the darkness.
I stopped my shuffling. I couldn’t hear a thing. I waited; still nothing. I started doing the Fibonacci sequence in my head to pass the time. “Kate, I don’t hear anything,” I whispered back into the darkness.
“Okay, okay,” she whispered back, “follow me,” and she switched her pen light back on.
I was startled to see that I was only about three feet from the first step leading up to the second floor. A couple more shuffling steps and I would have fallen flat on my face. Kate and I started up the stairwell, past the second floor and up to the third. Kate’s flashlight showed the handles on the big fire doors and we pulled them open. In the dark silence they sounded like the bulkhead of a sinking ship tearing apart.
The third floor corridor was also in complete darkness save the Emergency Exit light above the stairwell entrance and its twin at the far end of the hallway. Kate took my hand and swept the flashlight down the hall; nothing. We slowly walked to the computer lab entrance.
For shits and grins I swiped my old Mount Mary ID card in the reader. The red light blinked twice. It hadn’t taken them long to kick me out of the system. Kate swiped her card, the light flashed green, and the lock clicked open. Kate pulled down on the handle and we walked inside the lab.
There were five rows of desks, ten computers to a row, fifty computer stations in all. Kate started methodically at row one, desk one. I stumbled in the dark to the last computer in the back row. From the window behind the last computer I could look down on my little yellow house not even forty yards away. I was sure this is where Nick would have worked.
I didn’t have to look very hard before I found a notebook on the floor. “Kate, over here!” I whispered.
There were a couple of those Bic 0.7 mm pens that Nick liked laying about and as soon as Kate shown her light on the notebook there was no doubt it was Nick’s. The notebook was filled with yellow 10 x 10 mm. engineering ruled filler sheets and the handwriting was obviously his. I had seen it hundreds of times. I flipped to the last pages with writing and there, in neat columns following the engineering grid, were Nick’s notes on the database for the Stanhope simulation.
I picked up the notebook and why, I don’t know, grabbed Nick’s pens, too. “Let’s get out of here,” I whispered to Kate.
Kate took my hand and led the way through the maze of desks and computers to the door. We slipped back out into the hallway and, rather than traverse the dark corridor to the far stairwell from where we came in, descended down the back stairs to the first floor.
Kate pushed open the fire doors (again the tearing bulkhead sound echoing in the dark) and a light turned on in the office across the hall: Gilfoyle’s office. It was good that Kate couldn’t see my face in the dark because it would not have inspired calmness in a crisis. I nearly pissed my pants.
I grabbed Kate’s hand and dragged her around the corner to the little vestibule that led to what had been my old office.
Out of habit I tried the door but it was locked. Kate fumbled in her pocket, brought out her key ring and slipped the master key into the lock. It clicked and the door swung open.
I had vacated the office in a hurry but nothing prepared me for the chaos inside. My chair had been knocked over and the desk drawers were pulled out. The green desk lamp had been smashed and now lay in pieces on the floor.
Kate slowly moved her light across the walls and then the desk. As her light played across the floor she abruptly stopped its movement and a gasp came from deep inside her. There in the small circle of pale yellow light were unmistakable splatters of dried blood on the linoleum.
I’m no forensics expert but it sure looked like there were scuff marks leading from the desk back out to the doorway. Yes, like someone had dragged Nick’s body from the room because, at this point, Kate and I had no doubt that this is where Nick had been murdered.
I moved over to the computer on the desk. The screen was black but I could tell from the small green light that the monitor was on but in ‘sleep mode’. I wiggled the mouse around on the desktop to wake it up. With the curious wrinkling sound (automatic screen degaussing) the monitor winked to life bathing the room in a pale bluish light.
What appeared on the screen was a hunk of source code that I had written many years before:
typedef struct UnitStruct{
POINT Location;
POINT Destination;
POINT ScreenLoc;
int direction;
int Type;
BOOL selected;
struct UnitStruct *next;
char *name;
int strength;
long RadioFrequency;
} UnitStruct, *UnitStructPtr;
A voice boomed from out in the hallway, “Who’s there? Who’s out there?” It was unmistakably Gilfoyle. Kate and I looked at each other. “Let’s get the fuck out of here, now!” she hissed.
Kate grabbed my hand and we dashed through the doorway, through the vestibule, took a quick left where we leapt down the stairs in one bound, smashed through doors and hauled ass back to the little yellow house where Bill was waiting for us at the gate.
“Do you think he saw us?” Kate gasped.
“I have no fucking idea,” I answered.
CHAPTER 3.8
Kate, Bill and I were huddled together in my little office just off the kitchen. “Now what do we do?” I asked.
“Please do not tell me that the dog answered,” the Authoritarian Man said, “because if you do I will shoot your ass full of benzo and strap your arm back to the gurney.”
“Jim,” I said using the nickname I had given the Authoritarian Man, “Bill doesn’t talk. I never said he was a talking dog. I’m cooperating, okay? But, I’ll tell you this. If Bill could talk he would have said, ‘let’s go back over there and chomp some ass!’ okay?”
“Okay,” the Authoritarian Man replied, “please continue.”
So, I finally answered my own question, “We’ve got to call the cops.”
Kate said, “I think that’s a bad idea.”
“Why would you say that? We’ve got to call the cops.”
“They weren’t too receptive to anything I had to say to them in Nick’s apartment. In fact, they pretty much refused to listen to me at all,” Kate said.
“But we’ve got evidence, now,” I held up Nick’s notebook and pens, “we know where it happened, we’ve got proof.”
“Okay, go ahead,” Kate resigned to my argument, “but I still think this is mistake.”
So I picked up the phone and then wondered out loud, “what number do I call? It’s not a 911 call, what’s the freaking number for the cops?”
Kate gave me the look again and then picked up a phone book, leafed through the blue ribbed pages in the front and pointed out the ‘non-Emergency’ number. I dialed it.
Five rings, six rings, seven rings… I double-checked the number in the book… nine rings, ten rings… the book said it was ‘non-Emergency’ not ‘never-freaking-answered’… fifteen rings, sixteen rings… finally a female voice, “Metro Police.”
“Ahhh, yes,” I stammered, you would have thought I could have figured out what I was going to say during all the time it took before they answered but you would have been wrong, “this is Jakob Grant, I have some important evidence in the murder of Nicholas Constantine. I need to speak with the detective in charge immediately.”
“You mean the Constantine suicide?” the woman asked.
“No, I mean the Constantine murder. May I please speak to the detective in charge?”
A very bored voice said, “Please hold,” and then a click and then silence.
“What’s going on?” Kate asked.
“They put me on hold.”
Kate looked at me and slowly shook her head from side to side. This is a bad idea she was saying.
“Lieutenant Reardon,” a voice answered.
“Yes!” finally, “This is Jakob Grant; I have some important information about Nick Constantine’s murder.”
“You’re the college professor, right?” Reardon asked.
How do you answer that question? I was never a professor and I’m even less of one now. Best to just go ahead with what they want to hear, I guess, “Yes, that’s me.”
“Look, you probably don’t remember me from the crime scene,” Reardon continued, “you were pretty out of it. I was the one that took your girlfriend’s statement. What’s her name?” I could hear Reardon shuffling some papers, “Katelynn O’Brian. Look I’m going to tell you what I told her: the evidence is overwhelming. I’ve seen this before. It’s not pretty, but there it is. The coroner has already made his ruling, your friend is buried in his grave and this case is completely and totally closed. Okay?”
“Won’t you even look at the evidence? We can show you the exact spot where he was murdered,” I pled my case to the cop.
“You’re saying that Mr. Constantine did not commit suicide in his home?”
“No, he was murdered in my office at Mount Mary College.” Even as the words were leaving my mouth I realized how stupid this was: murdered in my office. Katelynn looked at me and put a hand on her forehead and began to shake her head slowly from side to side. Oh, Lord, I can’t believe how stupid he is.
“Mr. Grant,” Lieutenant Reardon’s voice changed ominously, “I will see you on the Mount Mary campus in fifteen minutes and, just a suggestion, you better get yourself an attorney, immediately.” Reardon hung up the phone.
I replaced the phone in the cradle and looked up sheepishly at Kate. “Good news, Kate,” I told her, “He wants to meet us on campus in fifteen minutes.”
“Did he tell you to get an attorney?” Kate presciently asked.
“Uh, yeah, actually, he did suggest that, Kate.”
“Okay we don’t have much time,” Kate being good in a crisis, “we’ve got to show them Nick’s notebook and when we do they’re going to take it as evidence. Before we lose it let’s scan it.” Kate grabbed the notebook, flipped the lid on the scanner, ran the scanning program and methodically started copying every page of Nick’s notes onto the computer’s hard drive.
Before she had finished we could already see the flashing blue mars lights pulling up behind the back gate. Bill began barking and the hair on the back of his neck stood up. Bill does not like flashing blue lights.
“Get out there and stall them,” Kate commanded.
“Stall them? How am I supposed to do that?” I stammered.
Kate shot me the look again, ran over to the back door and threw it open. Bill dashed out snarling, “Don’t worry, Bill just took care of it,” she said and went back to her scanning.
“Christ! The cops’ll fucking shoot Bill!” I yelled and tore off after him.
I flew out the door but Bill had already leapt the back fence and was snapping at Lieutenant Reardo
n who had, indeed, drawn his gun and retreated back into his squad car. Reardon had rolled down the window a crack so he could point the barrel of a slate gray automatic directly at Bill who was not backing down an inch.
“Don’t shoot! For chrissakes don’t shoot!” I screamed but Reardon wasn’t listening to me; he was completely focused on Bill’s teeth which were snapping just inches from the business end of Reardon’s gun. “Don’t fucking shoot!” I yelled again. Scared shitless I started pounding on the trunk of the squad car. For a second the cop turned his eyes – and his gun – from Bill to me. I pounded like a madman on the trunk, “Don’t fucking shoot!” I screamed until I realized that I had Reardon’s attention. The gun was now pointing at me through the back window.
I slowly raised my hands up in the air - the international don’t shoot me I’m harmless sign - and tried not to look at all like a dangerous lunatic who had been pounding on the squad car’s trunk only seconds ago.
Reardon now had the gun pointing at me but he kept rotating his head 90 degrees every couple of seconds to look at Bill’s snarling face and then he would switch his aim to Bill and his gaze back to me. The only thing that was keeping us alive for now was that Reardon couldn’t decide which of us to shoot first. The dog or the crazy guy? Crazy guy or the dog?
“Yoo-hoo! Officer Reardon,” Kate sweetly called from the back porch waving Nick’s notebook. She walked down the steps and out the back gate and approached the passenger side of the squad car. She gently wrapped on the window and made the universal ‘roll down the window sign’ with her hand.
Bill stopped snarling and came over to me; I quickly hustled him back in the house and shut the back door while Reardon was distracted by Kate’s charm. By the time I got back, Reardon and Kate were amicably chatting away like old friends. I sheepishly shuffled up to them.
