Born Under a Blond Sign

by V. J. Chambers

  I hadn’t even heard her come in. “Good morning!”

  “And why are you so cheery?” She narrowed her eyes suspiciously.

  I held up my notes. “I remembered something.”

  “Okay.”

  “About Gilbert and the case. You remember the stuff we found on his computer about the Tekes?”

  “Oh yeah,” she said. “They were mad at him for turning them in to the campus police for marijuana, right?”

  I nodded. “Yup. Now, I know it’s a long shot, but it’s something to look into. It’s a possibility that the Tekes were so angry that they had Gilbert killed.”

  “Yeah, but why kill five other people at the same time?” said Brigit.

  “Well, maybe that was an accident,” I said. “You know our theory about struggling over the gun and it going off? Maybe that happened, only this time it was with a member of the Tekes. So, maybe after that person saw that they’d shot someone, they just started shooting everyone. To eliminate witnesses.”

  “What about the gun?” said Brigit. “Gilbert had the gun, didn’t he?”

  “Well… I don’t know about that,” I said. “But I think that maybe what happened is that Gilbert was frightened of the Tekes, because they were threatening him. I saw some pretty intense messages on Facebook, and more than one member of the frat says they’re going to kill him.”

  “Yeah, but they can’t be serious.”

  “What if Gilbert thought they were? What if he got the gun for protection?”

  “So, wait. Gilbert was planning to shoot the Tekes—”

  “No, he was just planning to use it as insurance, to scare them,” I said. “But it all went wrong. Now, I looked through my notes, and I found out that there were several members of the fraternity at the party, including the president of the Tekes. People talked about them when we were interviewing them about Bix and the party. So, I think we should check into this, just to be thorough.”

  “Okay,” said Brigit. “But how are we going to find a bunch of Tekes together? You said they were kicked off campus. They don’t even have a frat house.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” I said. “I did some digging, and they do, in fact, have a frat house. It’s just off campus. It used to be a hotel on an old golf course. Thing’s been for sale for years. When the Tekes got kicked off campus, the alumni bought this big place for the fraternity.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The Tekes’ new frat house looked an awful lot like a castle. It was huge and formidable, and it had even been weathered in the years when the golf course had stood empty, so it had that battered look to it. Of course, it wasn’t made of stone, but white brick, so that wasn’t exactly castle-ish. And it didn’t have any turrets. But it still looked like something out of the medieval period.

  Brigit and I banged on the door.

  Someone threw it open. A blond head popped out. The guy’s hair fell down over his eyes. He looked around and then noticed us, even though we were right in front of him. He gave us a half-smile. “Oh, hey.”

  “Hi there,” I said. “Ivy Stern. This is my associate Brigit Johansen. We need to ask you a few questions.”

  “Whoa,” he said. “Are you like cops?”

  “Can we come in?” I said.

  He stepped away from the door. “You can’t kick us off campus, because they already did that. Of course…” He appeared to be thinking really hard. “Marijuana is illegal, so maybe you’re coming to arrest us. Shit.” He put his hand in his pocket. “Um… I need to go and—”

  “We’re not here about drugs.” I shut the door after us.

  “You’re not?” He looked relieved.

  “We’re here, in a roundabout way, to talk about your frat getting kicked off campus, though,” I said. “You know about that?”

  “Oh sure.” He nodded and his hair flopped up and down.

  “Can you tell us what happened?” said Brigit.

  “Well,” he said, “it was this guy Gilbert’s fault, because he turned us in. But then that guy went completely nuts and shot a bunch of people. You might have heard about it? It was on all the news channels and stuff.”

  “That’s partly why we’re here,” I said. “So, it is true that Gilbert got the joint from the Tekes?”

  “I thought you weren’t here about drugs,” he said.

  “I just mean that you were actually guilty of what you got kicked off campus for.”

  “I guess so.” He furrowed his brow. “Whoa, wait, was that a trap? Because there’s a thing called entrapment, and—”

  “And were you angry at Gilbert for getting you kicked off campus?”

  “Me personally?” he said.

  “Yes,” said Brigit. “You personally. That’s why we’re asking you.”

  “Uh…” He thought about it. He rubbed his chin. “Maybe at first I was. Because it sucked, you know? But now, we have this sweet huge place out in the middle of nowhere, and I gotta say, it kind of turned out in our favor. We’re, uh… a Cinderella story, you know?” He grinned widely.

  I rolled my eyes. “Well, were there other people who were angry at Gilbert?”

  “Are you kidding? Everyone was mad at him,” he said. “We had like a meeting about how we could get back at him.”

  “Are you serious?” said Brigit. “What did you do to him?”

  “Oh, nothing,” he said. “We ended up voting not to do it, because it’s not the Teke way to seek revenge. At least that’s what the majority of guys decided. But almost half of the people there were all ready to go after the guy. They wanted to beat him up or take baseball bats to his car or some shit. They were really pissed. In fact, Lincoln, I thought he was going to bend that Gilbert guy into a pretzel. If Gilbert hadn’t, you know, already gotten himself dead, Lincoln might have really gotten to him. I even saw Lincoln talking to that Gilbert guy this one time. He was telling him to watch his back.”

  “Really,” I said. Boy, this guy was cooperative. Dumb as a post, but very helpful. I smiled at him. “So, this Lincoln. He have a last name?”

  “Yeah. Doesn’t everyone?”

  I stifled a little laugh, and I could see that Brigit was smiling too.

  “Well, what is it?” I said.

  “Young,” he said. “Lincoln Young. He doesn’t live in the frat house, because—”

  “Hey,” said a voice.

  We looked up to see another guy coming down the hall. “What the hell? Who are you?”

  “They’re like cops, man,” said the first guy.

  “Did they show you a badge?”

  “Well…” The first guy scrunched up his face.

  The second guy smacked the back of his head. “Quincy, you’re such a fucking idiot.” He rounded on us. “Who are you?”

  “Ivy Stern,” I said.

  “Sorry, Duke,” said Quincy. “They seemed really official and stuff. How was I supposed to know that they—”

  “Shut up Quincy,” said Duke. “What are you doing here?”

  “We’re just asking a few questions—”

  “Are you cops?” said Duke. “Because if you don’t have a warrant, then we don’t have to let you into the house.”

  “We’re private detectives,” I said.

  “We’re just trying to get some information,” said Brigit.

  “You don’t have any right to be here at all,” said Duke. “So, get the fuck out.”

  “You don’t even know why we’re here,” I said.

  “And I don’t want to know,” said Duke. “You’re messing up my day, now get gone.”

  * * *

  That afternoon, I had to catch up on the Kent Mercer case, because I had promised Brigit that I would help the guy out. The best place to start seemed to be with the guy who had bought the ring, even though Kent said he couldn’t get in touch with him.

  I’d put some feelers out on the guy’s name, including trying to contact him directly. Kent was right. His phone was disconnected, and his email went unanswer
ed.

  But I’d found a land line listing for the guy’s name, and I’d tried calling that.

  The phone rang and rang and no one picked up. There wasn’t even an answering machine or voicemail or anything. It made me feel like I’d been transferred back in time to childhood. That was seriously the last time I’d heard a phone ring that many times.

  I tried it again this afternoon, just to get warmed up. I didn’t figure I’d get an answer, but I’d knock that out of the way and then I’d get busy trying other ways to shake this person down.

  To my surprise, someone answered on the third ring. “Hello?” It was a woman’s voice.

  “Hi there,” I said. “I’m looking for Frank Parker.”

  “That’s my father, yeah,” she said. “But I’m afraid that he passed away just recently.”

  “Oh,” I said, a different note in my voice. “Well, I’m very sorry.” Crap. How was I supposed to talk to her about this trivial stuff when she was grieving her dead father? This wasn’t going to work at all.

  “Thanks,” she said. “What’s this about? More bills he didn’t pay? I swear, the guy was behind on everything, and it’s not like he didn’t have the savings to cover it all. I think he just got confused. I tried for years to get him to let me help him set up automatic payments online, but he wouldn’t let me. Said he wanted to be in control of how and when money left his account. But now, it’s this huge mess, and I’m cleaning it up. Just tell me how much he owes you.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s not that. Actually, I’m calling about something that your father purchased on eBay.”

  A beat. “Seriously?”

  “Well, it turns out this particular item—a ring—is of significance to the person who sold it. He sold it out of desperation and now he’s decided he would like it back. We’d be willing to buy it back from you, if you think you could locate it.”

  “That’s the thing. I sold a whole bunch of junk like that to a pawn shop a few days ago,” she said. “There were several rings in there.”

  I described the Cross and Flames ring to her. “One like that?”

  “Yeah, I remember that one. The pawn shop guy gave me good money for it. I didn’t know it was valuable when I brought it to him. It was a nice surprise for me.”

  I sighed. “Well, that’s too bad. I mean, it’s good for you that you got some money for the ring, but it’s too bad that it’s gone. You think you could give me the name of the pawn shop?”

  * * *

  “What are you up to?” said Brigit from my doorway.

  I hung up the phone. “Just doing a little work on the Kent Mercer case.”

  “Oh, you’re still working on that? Really? Because I kind of thought you forgot about it.”

  “Brigit, I said I’d work on it, and I am. I’m hot on the trail of the ring as we speak.” I grinned at her. “But I think I’ve hit a wall for now. We can refocus on the Gilbert case.”

  “If you need time to look for Kent’s ring—”

  “Really, I can’t do anything more with that right now,” I said. “We should figure out how we’re going to find this Lincoln Young guy. We probably can’t get back in the frat house, and Quincy said he didn’t live there anyway. So, I guess we’re going to have to crash a Teke party.”

  Brigit gave me a withering look. “Are you crazy? We’re not going to any more college parties. No more co-eds for you.”

  “I wasn’t saying it for that reason,” I sniffed. “I just think it’s the best way to find this Lincoln guy.”

  “Look, there’s a campus directory with everyone’s phone number who lives on campus,” said Brigit. “And seeing as they still haven’t revoked my login for the computer system at Keene, I can still access it. We’ll look up his number, we’ll call him.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, that sounds practical.”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “I can’t believe people put their phone numbers online.”

  “It’s the dorm phone,” said Brigit. “Every dorm has a phone.”

  Oh, right. I knew that. I furrowed my brow. “You kids actually plug phones into those outlets these days?”

  She glowered at me.

  It was the day of the land lines, apparently. Who knew?

  * * *

  Lincoln Young had forearms the size of Texas. He folded them over his sizeable chest and stared us down just outside his dorm room. “What?”

  “I’m Ivy Stern,” I said. “This is my associate Brigit Johansen.”

  “Yeah, I got that on the phone,” he said. “You wanted to talk to me. So, talk.”

  “You knew Gilbert Pike?” I said.

  “The shooter?” he said. “Everyone knew him. It’s a small campus.”

  “But you knew him better than other people?”

  “Not really.” He glared at us.

  “You had a bit of a disagreement with him,” offered Brigit.

  “No,” said Lincoln. “I just flat out didn’t like the pipsqueak. He was a snitch.”

  “That’s what we wanted to ask you about, actually,” I said. “We know that Gilbert turned the Tekes in for marijuana and got them kicked off campus—”

  “Yeah, that little twerp. I mean, here I am living in this crappy dorm now, because I had to stay on campus. My parents won’t let me go stay in the new off-campus Teke house. So I had to move here. And it’s cramped.” His nostrils flared.

  “We heard that you wanted to teach Gilbert a lesson,” said Brigit. “You told him to watch his back?”

  “What?” Lincoln considered. “Oh yeah. I was pissed at him, and I might have told him to tread carefully. But I was just messing with him. I wouldn’t really haul off and hit him or anything. I know that some of the guys were talking about it, but in the end, it was just talk. See, people have the wrong idea about us. They think we’re about violence, and we’re not. We’re about peace, actually. And having fun. And we do good stuff for people as an organization. Did you know all the community service that our fraternity does? Anyway, in the end, we were never really serious about hurting that kid. But he sure did have it coming.”

  Huh. That was a very interesting little speech there. I wasn’t entirely sure how to take it. I decided to keep pushing. “So,” I said, “you don’t think that it’s quite a coincidence that after you threatened to hurt Gilbert, he ended up dead?”

  Lincoln uncrossed his arms, looking completely blindsided by that question. “Well… he killed himself, didn’t he?”

  “Or someone made it look that way,” I said.

  “Wait, you don’t think that…” Lincoln was reeling at the possibilities.

  “If Gilbert had been killed by someone, we’d want to check out any enemies that he had. The Tekes seem to be his enemies, and you spoke out against him.”

  “Well, yeah, but I didn’t mean it. I wouldn’t hurt someone. That’s not who I am. Like I said, I’m not about violence.”

  “Were you at the party that Monday afternoon?”

  “No, I was in class,” he said. “You can check with the professor. There was a test that day, and I had to take it. I even have it, I think.” He turned and flung open the door to his dorm room.

  “Mr. Young,” I called after him. “That’s okay, you don’t have to show us—”

  “Here it is.” He reappeared with a stack of stapled-together papers. “See, there’s the date right there, and I got a B-. That’s got to be proof, right? Lots of people saw me there. If you ask anyone else in the class—”

  “That’s all right,” I said. “We can check into that.”

  He shoved the test into my hands. “You gotta believe me, I would never hurt someone. I would never kill someone.”

  I peered down at the test. Well, this little interview was going nowhere fast. “Was there anyone else in the frat who you might have considered an enemy of Gilbert Pike?” Not that I thought this guy was going to sell out his brothers like that.

  “Well, I don’t about enemies, but you kn
ow who really doesn’t like him?”

  “No,” I said. That was why I was asking, after all.

  “The Teke president,” he said. “And it doesn’t have anything to do with the joint and getting kicked off campus, because he’s never liked him. When we found out what Gilbert did to us, he said we shouldn’t have been surprised, because that’s the way the guy was. He hated Gilbert Pike.”

  * * *

  “Well, did you ask him if he would talk to me?” I said, feeling frustrated.

  “Yes, ma’am,” said the guy who was apparently in charge of answering Duke Campbell’s cell phone. Duke was the president of the Tekes, and also the same guy who’d kicked us out of the frat house before. “He says he knows who you are, and he knows why you’re asking questions, and he doesn’t see how it would be in his best interest to talk to you at all.”

  “Tell him he could help me eliminate him from my suspect list,” I said.

  “Hold on,” said the guy.

  I waited.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Yes.”

  “He says that you’re insane to have a suspect list. Gilbert Pike killed himself, end of story. He says that the Tekes had nothing to do with it.”

  Argh. I was going to lose my mind. If this kid had any idea the number of freaking people Brigit and I had to call in the first place just to get Duke’s cell phone, maybe he wouldn’t have been such an ass. On the other hand, the guy didn’t sound like someone who would particularly care.

  “Listen, I need to talk to Duke—”

  “Ain’t going to happen. Sorry, ma’am.”

  “Can you just tell him—”

  “Ma’am, he’s telling me to hang up now. I don’t mean to be rude, but I have to hang up if he wants me to. Sorry about that.”

  The line went dead.

  I slammed the phone down. “Fucking frat boys. Fucking Duke Campbell.”

  “Did you say Duke Campbell?”

  I was startled by the sound of a deep voice in the office. I hurried out to the outer office, where Miles was chatting with Brigit.

  “Miles?” I said. “What are you doing here?”

  “I came by to see you,” he said. “It was my first day back at work today. Finally.”

  “Oh, right,” I said. “How’d it go?”