Extracurricular Activities (4 page)

My other best friend—the one who isn't the priest—defies description but I'll give it a shot.

Her name is Max, she's all of five feet two and a hundred pounds, but gorgeous and sexy in a way that many women attempt but few succeed at. She comes off as a total dumbbell, but in reality, she has an IQ of one hundred and sixty, runs a cable television station, and can add, subtract, multiply, and divide numbers in her head with a speed that is frightening. Especially if they pertain to the ratings of one of her shows, like the illustrious twenty-part reality series
Housewives: The True, Untold Story of Their Lives, Loves, and Passions
.

I spent a few nights billeted at her Tribeca apartment in the guest room, which reminded me why I never wanted to live with Max ever again. She keeps weird hours, has strange dietary habits, and engages in loud phone sex. But she's also loving, kind, and was willing to put me up and take me out to dinner until my house was restored to a blood-free state, a time period of about a week.

We didn't really talk about Ray that much; Max hated Ray and I'm sure that his death, while gruesome, wasn't a tragedy to her. For me, there was no handbook on dealing with your ex's death, so I tried to sort out my feelings in private, without her help. I was a bit more upset by Ray's death than I ever could have imagined. I had thought about killing Ray a hundred times, but never did I think he would meet such an untimely and gruesome demise. I found myself welling up at odd moments and realized that if I was going to move past everything—the marriage, our divorce, and his murder—I was going to have to deal with this. It occurred to me that I may not be equipped to deal with it on my own, but the thought of visiting the campus psychologist, Nancy Martin, was not an option. She wore too much patchouli and that made me suspect anything she had to say. I think if I dug deeply enough in her overflowing desk drawers, I would be sure to come up with a picture of her mud covered and half naked at Woodstock. And that was just not something I was prepared to see.

Dealing with the state of my house was much easier than dealing with the state of my emotions: Crawford had called some company that, interestingly enough, specialized in cleaning up crime scenes. I wondered what you had to have on your résumé in order to get a job there (“1989–1991: Responsible for all cleaning and disinfecting of Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment”). Their specialty was getting blood out of carpeting, and although I didn't have any carpeting in my kitchen, Crawford assured me that they would be equally effective on ceramic tile. As a fallback, I always had Magda's grout-cleaning wizardry. I took his word for it. I didn't know if I would ever go back into the kitchen, which wasn't a terrible loss; I don't cook and I mainly use it as a cut-through to the backyard and driveway.

The days after Ray's death were a blur. The murder spun the campus into turmoil again, just like Kathy Miceli's murder had a few short months before. And I was in the eye of the storm, the murder victim being my ex-husband and all. I tried to keep a low profile, going to school, teaching my classes, and returning home at the end of the day. Kevin's and my usual socializing was canceled for the time being. I felt like I was becoming a pariah, having been peripherally involved in two heinous crimes, and really didn't want to spend too much time in public. I knew that public stonings had been outlawed, but didn't want to take any chances.

I took in the tabloid headlines every time I passed the faculty receptionist, Dottie's, desk; they screamed of the blood and gore of Ray's murder. “Out of a Limb!” “Dismember of the Faculty!” And a picture of me, snapped when I had gone out to get my mail: “Dr. Doom!” Seems I was getting a bad reputation what with my close proximity to dead bodies becoming common.

My phone rang as I was finishing up at school. I had just returned to the safety of my office fresh from syllabi reconnaissance. Sister Calista and her wicked coven of English instructors were freezing me out now; when I knocked on their office doors, they pretended that they weren't at their desks, even though I could see the outline of their bonnet-shaped wimples through the glass. Neither Sister Mary nor President Etheridge was any help on that front, either.

When I picked up the phone, it was Max. As usual, she was mid-conversation with me even though I had just joined in. “You have to get a dress.” We had talked about this topic ad nauseam while I had been living with her, yet she was smart enough to sense that I wasn't really going to take an active role in dress shopping unless she held a proverbial gun to my head. I hate shopping.

“Okay.” I picked my briefcase up and put it on top of my desk, balancing the phone in the crook of my neck. “When?”

“When's the first day you can go?” she asked, screaming to someone to get her a latte. “No sugar!”

I reached into my briefcase and pulled out my planner. Every day was blank, with the exception of the notation regarding a meeting with the department heads a week in the future. “Anytime.” Loser.

“Go to Nordstrom
as soon as possible,
” she said, “and pick something out. No black.”

Black was my fallback color. “Black is the new…black,” I said, striving for a little humor.

“Black is
blech,
” she said. “I like black just as much as the next washed-out New York beatnik, but not for my wedding. Find something sexy. Fun.”

Sexy. Fun. Who did she think was buying this dress? Certainly not me. Right now I was dour and morose, but I didn't think Nordstrom had a section devoted to those adjectives. I could see the tagline now: “Dour. Morose. The latest in wedding glamour.” “I'll give it my best shot, Max,” I said, but she had hung up.

I took my car keys from my pocketbook and started to walk to my car, parked in the lot right behind my office. I heard my name being called and I stopped, turning to look around the dark lot. The person in the shadows was a few feet away and small, thin, and dressed in black. I squinted in the hazy charcoal of dusk, trying to discern who it was and my breath caught in my throat when I made out the outline of Gianna Miceli.

“Gianna?”

She approached me tentatively, one hand outstretched. “Alison.”

Gianna Miceli and I had a complicated history. We had attended St. Thomas at the same time, and although she was two years older than I was and we shouldn't have had anything to do with each other, we found ourselves linked together by tragedy. Gianna's daughter, Kathy, had been murdered earlier this year, an event that had rocked the campus and my own world. A couple of sordid things come to mind when I think of her death: one, that she had been found in the trunk of my car, and two, that she had had a relationship with my ex-husband. I hesitate to call it an “affair” because what nineteen-year-old girl sets out to have an affair, a word that has serious and somewhat tawdry connotations? I preferred to think of it as a relationship because I was sure that Kathy thought that's what it was.

I walked toward her and embraced her, at the time the obvious thing to do. The dark circles under her eyes highlighted the grief etched on her face and it was apparent to me that she was still in the depths of a fathomless despair. I held her at arm's length. “What are you doing here?”

She motioned to a dorm across campus. “I came to clean out Kathy's room. This is the first day I've been able to face it.”

Students had been in the dorms for a couple of weeks already, so Gianna was a little late to the task. I guessed that the Housing Office had decided against opening the room to new students and would leave it unoccupied for at least the year, if not longer. I looked down at her, her face illuminated by a spotlight hanging off the dorm behind us.

“How is the rest of your family?”

She shrugged. “Fine.”

“Max is getting married,” I said, for want of something else to say.

“Who's Max?” she asked.

I started to explain that she had known Max at St. Thomas but gave up. It didn't seem to matter if she remembered Max or not. I decided to shut up.

Clearly, we had nothing to say to each other. Despite the history we had we were nothing more than acquaintances bonded in death and tragedy. I thought back on our shared time at St. Thomas—she was the rich golden girl whose father had a dubious occupation; on the surface, he owned a restaurant but talk ran to his now-confirmed Mob connections. When she took up with Peter Miceli in her junior year, a fat, prematurely balding guy with absolutely no game or brains to speak of, we were all very surprised. What I remember about Peter was that he was always trying to get me to ride in his Trans Am and that I always declined. Even then, when I should have been throwing caution to the wind and living the life of a carefree coed, my common sense ruled. I had been right about him all along but it still didn't explain to me why this seemingly bright, attractive woman had ended up with him. It only explained why I hadn't.

I remember Gianna pouring her heart out to me and Max one night at Maloney's, our favorite bar back in the day. Sal Paccione was her boyfriend and the bartender at Maloney's. His reputation was one of a nice guy who was basically a gigolo; although Gianna seemed to overlook his wandering ways, they were obvious to any girl who had ever bought a beer from him at the bar. Except for me, of course; I thought he was just an inordinately friendly guy. A lingering glance, an extra hand squeeze when change was returned, a wink in your direction—I always thought it was his way of drumming up more tips, but Max assured me that he was a cad, plain and simple. The night that Max and Gianna and I had spent at the bar, it was clear to us that she had had enough but she wasn't prepared to do anything about it. Until she caught him kissing one of the other bartenders in the alley behind the bar.

Then, all hell broke loose.

Gianna, unbeknownst to me and Max, was a woman with a temper. A tiny, hundred-and-ten-pound spitfire, who turned that bar into the eye of a hurricane in about ten seconds flat. Rumor had it that her father had paid for all of the damage and then some so that Billy Maloney wouldn't press charges, something that I'm sure wasn't really on his mind, given her father's
alleged
occupation of whacking people.

Sal didn't fare as well as Billy Maloney. He was gone the next week and never seen again.

I hugged her again. “I have to go,” I said, knowing that this was probably the last time I would ever see her. I turned to walk away.

“Peter sends his regards,” she called after me, something in her tone causing me to stop.

I turned slowly. “What?” A chill crawled slowly from the base of my spine to my neck.

“Peter sends his regards,” she repeated, a small, cruel smile playing on her lips.

Her husband was a gangster, a murderer, and involved in more illicit activities than I could keep track of. I had more than a sneaking suspicion that he was responsible for Ray's death, too. He had kidnapped me a few months earlier, threatening to kill Max and Ray if I didn't provide him the details of Kathy's murder investigation. He had lost interest in me once the murder had been solved but had professed to “owe” me for treating Kathy with kindness when she was alive. I hated and feared him and to hear Gianna speak of him in relation to me was frightening and a little nauseating. I continued looking at her, unable to fashion a reply.

“Just wanted to let you know,” she said coldly. She started to walk away and I resisted the urge to scream at her to tell Peter to leave me alone but I stood in the growing darkness in silence.

 

Fred Wyatt was the perfect partner in every way. He was the first guy in and the last guy out. He was the one Crawford wanted beside him when shots were fired. But his singing drove Crawford to the edge of insanity. He sang love songs, Motown songs, heavy metal songs, show tunes…anything to hear the sound of his own voice. And, Crawford expected, to drive him completely insane.

Fred's MO was simple: if he sang to Crawford, he wouldn't have to talk to him about anything more complicated or intense than what they were having for lunch. At that moment, he was in the middle of his homage to Def Leppard with a rendition of “Pour Some Sugar on Me.”

Crawford and Wyatt had been pulled out of Homicide temporarily and put in the Robbery Division to track a mugger who was preying on wealthy women in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. The deputy mayor's great-aunt had been mugged and taken for a thousand dollars, and therefore, every available cop in the Fiftieth Precinct was now looking for this asshole. Champy, because of his high clearing rates for homicides, had been left on the case of the hands and feet, as Crawford had dubbed it in an effort to distance himself from the troubling detail that the victim was Alison's ex, something that put him in a foul mood.

Despite the fact that Crawford and Champy were only in possession of Ray's hands and feet and Dobbs Ferry had most of the body, NYPD had taken on the case. It could have been a jurisdictional thing, but Dobbs Ferry had been more than gracious about giving up control.

“That's because it's a bag of shit,” Fred had said in his usual delicate manner. A “bag of shit” was a case nobody wanted, and Crawford supposed that Hardin and Madden had their own, Westchester version of the phrase to describe the Ray Stark case. Probably had something to do with old foie gras or something equally highfalutin.

For the past six hours, Fred and Crawford had been watching a female police officer in a borrowed diamond necklace walk up and down the avenue, checking her police-issue Rolex now and again and flashing wads of cash as she purchased items of a variety of name brands from the vendors on the avenue of a variety. They were across the street, idly examining newspapers, walking up and down the avenue, trying to remain as inconspicuous as two men over six feet three can remain on a fairly crowded street. Crawford and Wyatt were the “catch team”—the cops that watched decoys as they put themselves in harm's way to catch the people who preyed upon the innocent.