The Probability of Murder (11 page)

“So-so. You know it’s always a gamble.”

A gamble. A bolt of intelligence struck as I flashed back to my first interview with Virgil. He’d been the one to bring up gambling. He’d asked if Charlotte had any vices, like gambling. When I mentioned the lottery, almost as a joke, he’d run with it, talking about the system at length, introducing the idea of scams, going on and on about scammers and victims of scams.

If I were a betting sort, I’d have bet that Virgil had known all along that Charlotte had been a victim of a lottery scam. I thought of the bag of money, the layers of US dollars in Charlotte’s duffel bag. Was that the mark of a victim? Or was Charlotte herself a scammer with a load of cash?

“I’m signing off, okay?” Bruce asked.

I hoped he hadn’t said anything important in the last second or two.

We exchanged quiet
Love you
s and I returned to Virgil with new curiosity. I took my place across from him and leaned over my folded hands.

“You’ve known all along that Charlotte was involved in a lottery scam, haven’t you? Since when? Since she was hired two years ago?”

Virgil took a sip of coffee. The mug seemed small in his giant hand. “That’s police business, Sophie.”

Which was nicer than “That’s none of your business, Sophie,” and certainly not a denial.

“She was my friend, and I thought I knew her, Virgil. You knew something was up before she was murdered and you didn’t tell me? We hung around together, and you didn’t warn me that she was about to be murdered.”

I knew I was being extreme, but I wanted to provoke Virgil to action.

It seemed to work. Virgil stood abruptly. If I didn’t know him so well, how much more gentle he was than men half his size, I’d have been worried. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a folded stack of letter-size pages.

“I’m out of here,” he said, and handed me the sheets.

I took the sheaf of papers and unfolded it. The Henley Police Department logo screamed out at me.

“What—”

“Thanks for the coffee,” he said, and was out the door.

An hour later I was in my den, still reading through the papers Virgil had given me. What was the real police term for these documents? I knew it as a
rap sheet
, singular, but this was a multipage record. Maybe originally it was one long piece of paper. I’d also heard
yellow sheet
. Or just
sheet
. “Pull his sheet,” one cop would say to another on television.

The name of the state from which the pages had been sent, maybe faxed, had been drowned out by the thick, black Henley PD header. The contents of the file were clear, however.

My friend, Charlotte Crocker, was a convicted felon. She was a scam artist.

Except she wasn’t even Charlotte Crocker.

On the first page was a mug shot. A different, younger Charlotte Crocker stared straight ahead at the camera and at me, over the name Carla Cooper. She wore a knitted burgundy poncho and long earrings that ended in
rainbow-hued peace signs. Her light brown hair looked thin and straggly, her eyes bloodshot. The date and the outfit were out of whack with each other, as if this were a Halloween costume twenty years after the hippies took to suburbs and switched to business casual.

The string of digits that made up her ID number, on a black card that she held up, reminded me of a lottery number from one of the mega-games I’d just learned about. I wondered if she’d ever thought of placing a bet on the number.

I thought of the irony—my so-called friend had led me to believe she was so upset about that one speeding ticket she’d gotten, and all the while she had a record of violations that would have kept a small town cop in Vermont busy for months.

Everything was wrong about the police photographer’s image of the woman I’d considered a friend. From the arcane hippie look to her snarly expression to the fact that she had a mug shot at all.

I remembered a day we spent together with Ariana just before school started in the fall. A typical girlfriend day for the three of us, with shopping and lunch and nonstop talk of books, movies, men, the problems of the world, and the hint of gray that was sprouting now that we’d left the big four-oh behind.

I tried to recall something unusual about Charlotte that should have given me a clue that the real Charlotte was a felon. I remembered a passing remark she’d made that day, somewhat wistfully.

“I wish I’d known you both twenty years ago,” she’d said, and hugged us.

Apparently she considered us a good influence on her, but two decades too late.

She’d made a similar comment more recently that might have tipped me off about an impending tsunami, but I couldn’t dredge it up.

If I stretched it, I could think of a phone call or two that she took in my presence that left her momentarily upset.
But all that was hindsight. At the time, she seemed as even-tempered and trustworthy as they came.

I focused on the sheet. I could hardly count the list of aliases, all with birth dates within a few years of either side of Charlotte’s real (but who knew?) birth date of 1966. Carolyn Crouse was born in 1963 in Seattle, Christine Coulter in 1970 in Miami, Catherine Chesterfield in 1968 in Cleveland, and so on through several more aliases and dates and places of birth.

I’d read that many people who change their identities keep their initials. I supposed that was handy—any monogrammed luggage or bathroom towels wouldn’t have to be replaced each time a new persona was adopted. Or in case the person forgot and started to sign something, at least the first initial would always be correct. It occurred to me that probably none of these names, including Charlotte Crocker, was her real name.

Another wave of anger came over me as I realized how incredibly naïve I’d been. I heard a low growl and was shocked to realize it had come from me.

How could she, whatever-her-name-was, have faked her pleasant sophistication, her generosity and helpfulness to Henley College’s students? Whoever she was, Charlotte must have had some training in library science to be as good as she was at her job. Clearly, it hadn’t been enough to satisfy her.

But she wasn’t necessarily trained at all, I realized in a moment. I remembered reports I’d hardly believed at the time, about a guy who flew commercial airplanes on a fake license, and another man without a day of medical training who was head of a surgical unit at a hospital. A story came to me that seemed silly at the time, of a man who posed as a government official and sold the Eiffel Tower.

None of these scams seemed silly today.

I was sure there were other examples. Henley’s hiring and firing procedures were no more fail-proof than those of the Federal Aviation Administration or the American Medical Association.

Had Henley’s students—or I—been in danger all the while? Was Charlotte about to work her scams on us? Was her killer after us, too?

I got up quickly and made a tour of my house, checking all the windows and doors. Fresh autumn air would have to be sacrificed until further notice.

I plopped back onto the couch that had served as my bed last night and took up the police documents again.

There were two more pages in the set, each listing charges and convictions of one or another of the CCs. I read the details of the statutes violated, the class of the crimes, bond information, sentencing, where time was served. The words swam in front of me.
Fraud. Theft. Malicious destruction of property. Misdemeanor. Felony. Assault. Willard County. Shaw County. Plummet County.
I counted the stamps:
TIME SERVED. PAROLED. DID NOT APPEAR.

A glossary of criminal justice terms. All related to my friend.

I folded the package and stuffed it into a cabinet under my counter with my never-used pie plates.

Even with the new information at my disposal, I had more questions than answers: Why had Virgil given it to me? Was he trying to scare me off? How long had he been investigating CC? Or, I thought snarkily, C-squared, to depersonalize her even further. Was CC on the run, a real fugitive, or was she legitimately out of prison with a legitimate bag of money and fleeing a bad guy who was after her?

I needed a spreadsheet to map the possibilities.

It was scary enough to think that CC’s murderer was out there and may have been targeting someone else right then. Maybe our treasurer, Martin Melrose, also a member of CC’s lottery group, was at risk.

And that wasn’t all. I reeled at the extent of her criminal enterprises, cataloged on the rap sheet, which went far beyond the lottery.

All unsuspecting students were at risk. I was at risk.

Until I knew exactly why Charlotte was killed and by whom, no one who knew her was completely safe. I didn’t
want to know what Virgil, or anyone else, would think of my reasoning.

I wandered around my little cottage, straightening scarves and doilies, picking up a stray glass or mug here and there, sharpening my pencils. Normal things. I sat down to check for messages on my office phone, something I didn’t ordinarily do on weekends, but this was no ordinary Saturday.

I had messages from freshman Daryl Farmer; Dean of Women Paula Rogers; Charlotte’s assistant, Hannah Stephens; my favorite Möbius stripper, Chelsea Derbin; and several of my student majors, all wanting to help in different ways, as if I were the go-to person for all things related to the murder on campus.

Daryl offered that he was a pretty good hacker and might be able to get into Charlotte’s files for clues to her murder. Paula’s contribution was a dinner invitation to a fine restaurant “where you can be pampered.”
And grilled for information
, I added to myself. Hannah missed her boss and wanted to talk to me and grieve together. Chelsea thought I needed “a gift basket with chocolate and nice-smelling soap” that she put together and could deliver whenever it was convenient for me.

The last message was from none other than Henley College’s president, Olivia Aldridge. The president wanted to know if I’d be willing to help with a memorial service to be held on campus in a week or so. I’d be the perfect person, since Charlotte and I were so close and I’d know what she would have wanted. In fact, Olivia ended, why didn’t I go ahead and take charge of it. She’d be happy to go along with whatever I came up with. And while I was at it, would it be all right if she referred reporters to me? She really didn’t have time to deal with the members of the media.

It was more widely held than I’d thought that I was Charlotte’s best friend on campus and the one most appropriate to speak on her behalf. I wondered what lies Charlotte had told those she didn’t consider her friends.

I left all the messages on the machine to deal with later. Or not at all.

What to do next? Heed Virgil’s warning?

But what if Virgil had dropped the information in my lap as a subtle way of asking for my help? I smiled. My mother always told me that even as a little girl I had a sneaky way of twisting things my way while sounding perfectly reasonable.

Did Virgil want me to do a search on the names on Charlotte’s rap sheet and put the whole picture together for myself? Not knowing which crime went with which name and which city, I’d be flailing around for a long time. It was a job for a supercomputer, not a math teacher.

Aha! Virgil was giving me busywork.

Even to myself, I was beginning to sound like a mad-woman.

I’d gone from feelings of grief for Charlotte Crocker to outrage that I’d spent so much time with a woman who was a professional criminal to a commitment to find the person responsible for her death.

I decided not to call Ariana. I needed a long, solo drive.

It might as well be to a convenience store in Bailey’s Landing.

My car CD player was set up with the music of my college days. New Order, Tears for Fears, Duran Duran, U2, Howard Jones, plus a late eighties mix Bruce had put together for me. Comfort music. I thought it fitting that the first cut I heard, an oddball choice of Bruce’s, was “Don’t Look Back” by the Fine Young Cannibals.

One of my father’s favorite quotes came into my head at the same time, from Gottfried Leibniz, who some thought invented calculus. “Music is the pleasure the human soul experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.”

I doubted either Leibniz or my father had in mind the three-man British band, but music was music.

I drove Route 95, then Route 1 through the towns of Sharon, Canton, Randolph, and Braintree. Winter had set in for the trees along the highway, offering a dull, brown landscape, except for the occasional pumpkin patch or colorful billboard with a reminder that a special meal would be served on Thanksgiving at your favorite fast-food restaurant. I’d been looking forward to spending the holiday weekend in New Haven with Bruce’s cousins. I hoped my festive mood would return by then.

It would have been nice if I’d constructed a plan for when I arrived in Bailey’s Landing, but it was only now that one was taking shape.

With the five other people the police had to track down from Charlotte’s notes, the odds were in my favor that I’d get to Garrett first. I figured the Henley PD couldn’t spare a detective to immediately drive to Bailey’s Landing as I could. I’d meet Garrett and pick up some juicy tidbit of information that would lead to Charlotte’s killer. Then I’d go directly to Virgil with it and make a deal.