Skin Deep

by Sung J. Woo

“This is turning out to be a very fine day,” Craig said.

  46

  We decided on Panera Bread, because it was near the downtown Best Buy. Craig, being a techie, offered his help in finding me a replacement computer that wasn’t going to bankrupt me. But before going on our technological shopping spree, we treated ourselves to a pair of non-GMO, grass-fed, cruelty-free chicken sandwiches. Craig steered me towards the pesto one because even though it had slightly higher calories than some of the others, it was lower in sodium.

  “I gain like two pounds from the water retention,” he said.

  “So what prompted you to lose all that weight?” I asked.

  It was noon on a Friday, the rush hour of rush hours at restaurants everywhere, screaming babies, boisterous teenagers, businessmen barking into their phones between hurried bites of bread and meat. Craig was trying to say something important and I was having trouble hearing him. I leaned forward and pointed to my ear.

  “After my wife died,” he said.

  “Oh,” I said. “Jeez, I’m sorry.”

  We finished the rest of our meal in silence, maybe because he was sad and that made me sad. Or perhaps it was a way to pay respect to her. Whatever the reason, it felt good to get back outside, feel the crisp autumn wind wake me up and make me pay attention to the present.

  We walked from Panera over to Best Buy.

  “What happened to her?” I asked.

  “Multiple myeloma.”

  “I’ve heard of it, but I don’t know what it is.”

  “Cancer. Attacks the blood, then the bones. Usually starts out as back pain, then your bones start to crumble, disintegrate. She went fast, not even six months. I’ll always be grateful for the existence of morphine.

  “You take stock of a lot of things. Martina was always harping on me to lose weight because she didn’t want to be a widow. Never said that to me, of course, but I knew that’s what she was thinking. So after she died, I went on a diet, and I’m still on it. It really isn’t a diet anymore, I guess, once it becomes the norm.”

  Considering the tenor of our conversation, it felt ridiculous to now be standing inside Best Buy, where everything was bright and shiny and beeping and dinging.

  “Maybe we do this another time,” I said.

  “It’s okay. It was eleven years ago. Mostly it feels like eleven years, though sometimes it feels like yesterday.”

  It took about three seconds before we were accosted by a soldier of the cobalt-blue-shirted sales army. Brandon was his name, and he looked way too muscular to be a hawker of computers. Did everybody pump iron nowadays? His biceps were like boulders bolted onto to his arms.

  “Need any help?” he asked.

  “I’m good,” I said, then pointed to Craig. “I’m with smart.”

  “Got it, got it,” Brandon said. He slapped his shovel-sized hands together and made a minor thunderclap. “If you need anything at all, just holler.”

  As Brandon lumbered away, Craig said, “Now he’ll run into a telephone booth and fly off to save the planet.”

  There were a lot of choices for laptops, too many. One laptop allowed me to choose from six different shells. Really?

  “Last time I shopped for a computer, I was still dialing up America Online,” I said.

  “I miss those times,” Craig said. “Not the slow internet, but there was such hope everywhere, misguided as it might have been.”

  Craig narrowed it down to two candidates. None of them had designer covers, which was good.

  “They’re really all the same, CPU, memory, and storage-wise. You’re not doing any heavy graphics work, so the onboard GPU should suffice.”

  “As a professional private investigator, I’m not allowed to utter the phrase eeeny-meeny-miny-moe under any circumstance. Why don’t you do the honors.”

  Craig flipped a coin, and I headed over to the register with the winner, an HP something or another that was surprisingly affordable, a shade over four hundred bucks. Lots of Xes in the name, so I’m sure it was a good one.

  Back in the car with the brand-new computer in tow, I thanked Craig for his help.

  “My pleasure,” he said.

  I kissed him then. I’m not really sure why, but it felt right to cross the gear shift and lean in to meet his mouth with mine. It wasn’t a big kiss. But not a small one, either.

  “Hmm,” he said. Or maybe it was mmm. Either way, I liked it.

  I drove us back to the entrance of our office building.

  “I’ll see you at seven?” he asked.

  “You’ll see me at seven.”

  I watched him walk away from me. His pants were a little too loose around his waist, and it made him look young, vulnerable. The more I got to know him, the more I liked him, but really, this was too simple, him and me. A shoe somewhere, sometime, was gonna drop. Or was I just a jaded forty-year-old killjoy?

  47

  After shopping with Craig, I got back on the road and headed to Llewellyn to deal with a few dangling threads. First on my list was Officer David Girard. It was a little past four by the time I arrived on campus, so I hurried over to Broadhurst to catch him before he cut out early. End of the week, nice and sunny for once, small town cop…I just had a feeling.

  “Hey there!” Russ said. The young cop who helped me get my ID was in the same seat, in the same uniform, in front of the same computer. It was like I’d never left. “How’s that ID holding up?”

  “Haven’t lost it yet. Is your boss still in the office?”

  “I think so. He came back from lunch a little while ago and I don’t remember him saying goodbye. Not that he always does.”

  I nodded and made my way to Girard’s office. I knocked and heard a gruff voice, “Yeah?”

  I opened the door. He looked up from his iPad, scowled, then looked back down.

  “Just have a question or two, if that’s all right,” I said.

  He tossed his iPad aside and rose from his desk.

  “Make an appointment with Russ.”

  He lifted his round brown hat from the hook and put it on.

  He pushed past me to the door. If that was all that he had to get rid of me, he’d have to try harder. I followed him to the elevator and got in his face—as much as I could, considering he almost had a foot on me.

  He mashed the call button again. I stood right next to him and didn’t move. “You think my boss didn’t chew me out for the stunt you pulled at Travers? It all comes back to me, all the dumb shit that goes on around here. I got enough problems with green-haired, lip-pierced dykes. The last thing I need is a busybody like you breaking and entering.”

  The elevator finally came down, and we both got in.

  “I’m sorry you got in trouble for what I did.”

  “Thanks to that fake bomb threat, we got approval from the board for a campus-wide camera system. Install starts on Monday, so it won’t be long until this little revolution is shut down for good.”

  The elevator dinged and we got out. Officer Girard had the most enviable parking space, right behind Broadhurst.

  “It’s all bullshit, what you’re doing,” I said.

  Girard opened the door of his cruiser. “Is that so?”

  “Shared services my ass. The town police lending its security to a college? Please.”

  “I’m just doing my job, and you’re getting in the way of that. I promise you, if I catch you or anybody else opening doors that are supposed to remain locked, I’ll personally make sure you see the inside of a jail cell.”

  He got in his car, slammed the door, and peeled out.

  That went even worse than I’d thought.

  48

  Next on my must-annoy list was Dr. Christine Collins, Assistant Professor of Chemistry. With my luck, she’d probably chuck a rack of test tubes at me. But my luck was so poor that she wasn’t even around. She was supposed to be teaching the final class of the day, but the instructor standing in front o
f the dry-erase board was a substitute, who was super pissed that I interrupted his lecture on oxidation reduction.

  “Do you have any idea where she went?”

  He made a face. Maybe everyone I see today was going to make a face.

  “The sooner you tell me, the sooner I get out of your hair,” I said.

  “Just email her!”

  “Okay!” I said.

  The guy might have been a grouch, but he was right. I guess it was some sort of faculty-wide policy, but one quick email was all it took for the autoresponder to reply.

  I’m currently away at the Krishna Center in Hawthorne for the Anti-Aging Consortium until Monday, so I will get back to you when I return. If you require an immediate response, please email the administrative assistant Karen Knight at kknight@llewellyncollege.edu.

  Was it fate? It sure smelled like it. Not only was Penny over there at Krishna, but now Collins would be there. From what I’d overheard in Travers Hall, that meant Wheeler would be there, too. Anti-Aging Consortium—this must’ve been what those two professors had argued about, Val and Roberto, complaining about how Collins was going to present something that was perhaps scientifically unsound. I’d looked them up in the directory: Drs. Valaria and Roberto D’Onofrio, also professors of chemistry. According to their faculty profiles, Roberto was the head of the department while Valaria was an associate professor. That meant Collins was the lowest on the tenure-track totem pole, since she was an assistant, yet she was the one who was going to Krishna with the president.

  The D’Onofrios shared an office in Parker Hall that looked well lived-in. You could just feel it: the coffee pot with its permanent brown ring, the fern whose branches were twined into an opening in the bookshelf, the bag of Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies that probably got replaced weekly. The one who won the sweepstakes to talk to me was Valaria.

  “My husband and I share this office, yes,” she said, “but never at the same time. It was one of the rules we had, so we don’t spend every waking moment together. Have a seat, Ms. O’Brien. So, you’re a private detective? That sounds like an exciting profession. Way more exciting than teaching kids about organic molecules.”

  As I recalled from my eavesdropping session at Travers, Valaria was the level-headed one, and that assessment was further promoted as we discussed the changing landscape of the Llewellyn campus. I told her about my current case; she couldn’t remember Penny being in any of her classes. I wanted to know more about what was going on in Travers and what Collins was doing over there at Krishna, and since Valaria seemed a reasonable person, I thought I’d approach this from that point of view.

  “I had a couple of questions about you and your husband’s work in Travers,” I asked.

  “Travers, yes, so what do you know about Travers?”

  She was trying to play it cool, a little too cool.

  “I spoke to Professor Christine Collins before she left,” I lied. Then I lied more, because Valaria wasn’t buying what I was selling. “She told me about the boxes there, the false eyelashes, the wigs.”

  Valaria nodded to herself as a slash of a bitter smile lined her lips.

  “We all signed nondisclosure agreements, but I guess since Christine is the chosen one, she can do whatever the hell she wants.”

  “She told me your talents were being wasted,” I said. Too much? Possibly. But it felt like the right thing to say.

  “Oh really? How magnanimous of her. You know, if not for her glomming onto this entire ridiculous shtick of Wheeler’s, she would’ve been fired. That’s how inept she is. She’s a terrible teacher, you should see her students’ evaluations for the last four semesters. Her research, astonishingly, is even worse than her ability to instruct.”

  “But she’s got Wheeler’s ear,” I said.

  “The joke will be on her, in the end. That paper she’s presenting is a fraud. The peer review was done by some pretend-doctors in the Ukraine, and her data analysis is too uniform to be real. It’s the very definition of academic corruption. But you know what all this is for, don’t you?”

  I shook my head dumbly, riding the wave.

  “It’s for that vacuous Barbie doll Cleopatra Park.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Valaria picked up her bottle of Evian and took a nice, long drink.

  “I thought you came to talk to me about Penny Sykes.”

  Oh well. It was good while it lasted.

  “My job as a PI is to gather information. Information doesn’t come with a label. I have no idea what will or will not be useful, so I try to accrue as much as I can.”

  Valaria took another sip of her water, then cleared her throat. “What color is Christine’s hair?”

  On the faculty page, all the photos were in black and white. I said nothing.

  “You never talked to Christine.”

  “No.”

  “Don’t I feel stupid.”

  “Smart enough to stop.”

  “But now you know things you aren’t supposed to know.”

  “What is going on in Travers, Valaria? I give you my word that whatever you tell me will not go beyond my case. I have a strong hunch that what’s happening here in Llewellyn is tied together with Penny’s disappearance. Will you help me?”

  Valaria pressed the speaker button on her phone and tapped four tones on the keypad.

  “Public Safety.” It was a familiar voice, Russ.

  “This is Dr. Valaria D’Onofrio. Can you please send someone to escort Ms. Siobhan O’Brien off our campus?”

  “That won’t be necessary,” I said to the air between us. “I’ll leave now, Russ.”

  “Is that acceptable, Dr. D’Onofrio?” Russ asked.

  “Yes,” Valaria said. “That will do.”

  I walked back to my car. I drove away. I guess you could say my academic career at Llewellyn had come to an end.

  49

  On the drive back from Llewellyn to Athena, I got two calls. The first one was from the Athena Police Station.

  “That test tube you dropped off?” Keeler said.

  That was the test tube I’d found in Christopher’s room.

  “Yes, anything?” I asked.

  “There wasn’t much left in there because whoever used it rinsed it out good, but not quite good enough. Male ejaculate.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Spunk. Jizz. Cum.”

  “I know what semen is, Keeler.”

  He chortled. “Just wanted to say some of that urban lingo you street-savvy private eyes are used to.”

  “Is it worth running through the database?”

  “Already did. No matches.”

  Then it was Craig’s turn to ring me on my cell. He asked if I liked linguine in clam sauce for dinner.

  “I do,” I said.

  “Would you still like it if I were to make it for you at my place?”

  Hold your horses, I almost said, but then I thought there was no faster way to get to know a person than to see his home.

  “Sounds lovely,” I said.

  He told me his address.

  “I know exactly where that is. On the corner of Geneva and Stewart, two blocks from the county library.”

  “Then you’ve known where I’ve lived for the last twenty years,” he said.

  I pulled up to a beige house with green shutters, a duplex with a slate gray roof. It was a well-maintained home, the lawn clear of fallen leaves, the water hose neatly looped by the bushes. I stepped out of my car and saw the front door open.

  Craig was wearing an apron in the shape of Bugs Bunny’s head, with the slogan, “What’s Cookin’, Doc?” He waved, and I waved back. He watched me walk up the stone path, and my stomach tightened. Was it just nerves or something else?

  “Welcome,” he said. He opened his arms and I embraced him as unreservedly as possible.

  “You smell like home,” I said. He did: pasta, tomato sauce, garlic. Even though
my dad was Irish and my mom Norwegian, Italian cuisine was what I grew up with.

  Something beeped between us, the black timer that hung from his neck like a charm.

  “That’s the garlic bread. Come with me,” he said, and took my hand and led me to the kitchen.

  It was a kind of a mess. There was no can or jar of tomato sauce, Craig making his own from scratch. Ditto with the noodles, as attested by the straggler squiggles from the mouth of the pasta machine mounted on the counter. The center island was where everything was happening, and the butcher block looked like a Jackson Pollock painting, streaked with the red tomato juice, smudged with fingerprints of white flour, black dribbles of balsamic vinaigrette around the edges.

  “Holy shit,” I said, overwhelmed. No man—no woman, not even my own mother—had ever gone to this kind of trouble to make dinner. “What I meant to say is: wow.”

  A second buzzer, magnetically attached to the fridge, buzzed a similar tune. Craig brought out a large white bowl and picked up a handheld blender.

  “I hope you like gazpacho,” he said. He plunged the silver spinners into the mash and proceeded to create a liquid tornado. “My little immersion blender. You can just stick it anywhere, and it blends.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  He switched it off, and the kitchen was plunged into silence. Without meeting my eyes, he said, “This is all too much, isn’t it? Way overboard.”

  “No, no, it’s fine,” I said. “Maybe we’re just both a little nervous, because even though…”

  “I ate an entire box of cupcakes an hour ago,” Craig said. “I haven’t done that in…oh jeez, excuse me.” He clutched at his stomach and ran, I presume, for the bathroom, except his foot caught the blender cord. Not tragic for a small appliance to go flying, except the blender was still in the bowl and the bowl got caught up with the blender and I wasn’t fast enough to move out of the way of the cold soup as the reddish slop went airborne and splattered against my blouse and pants, as completely as if someone took a bucket and had aimed its contents right at me.