Third Degree (22 page)

Trixie rushed over and licked my face. She was used to seeing me upset, but not like this. I’m usually hopping mad, not sobbing into a polyester-covered pillow. Queen and Kevin were alarmed, but after watching television for a few minutes, they ascertained what had happened. Kevin didn’t know many of the details about the Carter Wilmott murder and Queen didn’t know any. After gathering my wits about me and calming down, I filled them in.

Queen, not Kevin, made the sign of the cross at the news of Ginny’s passing. Kevin let out an “oh, shit” that surprised Queen, but not me. Trixie gave a little woof in horror.

I stood up. “Why did she do it?”

Queen crossed her arms across her chest, ready to make her pronouncement. “Well, as a private investigator, in my professional opinion, I would have to say that that woman poisoned Carter Wilmott to death and jumped to her own death out of feelings of intense guilt.”

Kevin took his glasses off and wiped the lenses between his T-shirt. “No shit, Sherlock,” he said, striking a much more familiar, not to mention off-color, tone with Queen than I would have thought the last twenty-four hours of togetherness would have warranted. But I didn’t have time to deal with that now. I needed to call Crawford.

He sounded groggy when he picked up. I skipped the greeting. “Ginny Miller just threw herself off the Tappan Zee Bridge.”

“Huh?”

“You heard me. She’s dead. She committed suicide. On television. I saw the whole thing.”

“What channel?” he asked, now fully awake.

“News47 Westchester. You don’t get that station. But I’m sure it will be on all of the local news stations shortly.”

“Well, that solves that.”

“Solves what?”

“The issue of the poisoning. She probably poisoned Wilmott and jumped because she felt guilty.”

He’s so smart he could be a Hooters waitress. “Or because she had had an affair with Carter. And maybe George found out. Or maybe because George is going to jail for a crime he didn’t really commit.”

“My head hurts.”

“Mine does, too,” I said. I looked at Queen and Kevin, who I noticed were now chowing down on a pizza at my dining room table, and were also helping themselves to a lovely cabernet that they had found in the wine rack that I had been saving for a special occasion. Heck, I guessed that now was as good a time as any and walked over to pour myself a glass before my freeloading roommates chugged the whole bottle themselves. I told Crawford to go back to bed or to at least stay in a reclining position and sat down at the dining room table. I was still in my work clothes and felt overdressed for this little gathering but proceeded to eat anyway.

Kevin and Queen eyed me as I sipped my wine and nibbled at my first slice of pizza, waiting for some outburst that wasn’t going to come. I tried to put the pieces together in my head but kept coming back to the same conclusion that everyone had beat me to. Ginny had poisoned Carter and had tried to pin it on Lydia. Ginny was the nurse and the one who had the pharmacology background. If anyone had known how to kill someone by poisoning, it was Ginny, not Lydia, who had no discernible skills as far as I could tell besides being able to look gorgeous despite the situation. Had Ginny realized that nobody would believe her? When all was said and done, she felt guilty for killing Carter but only because it would have compromised George’s freedom. She had loved her husband enough to not allow him to go to jail for a crime he didn’t commit, but not enough to have remained faithful. She had found herself in quite a conundrum, it would seem. She had no way out, except for one.

I tried not to think of her hitting the piling and breaking into a million pieces internally. She was a pain in the ass, but a human being nonetheless, and one who had cared enough to see that my mother had had the most comfortable death she could have, under the circumstances. I didn’t know how to feel. I left my pizza on my plate and excused myself from the table, the feelings of nausea returning.

Once in my room and under the covers, I thought about George Miller. Had he found out about Ginny’s affair with Carter and had that been the origin of the fight at Beans, Beans? Ginny’s death left more questions than answers and, like Crawford, my head hurt.

It was early in the evening, but I had been rendered useless by the hum of the window air conditioner combined with my exhaustion from being back at school after a summer break and from the events of the past week. I drifted off to sleep in my soft bed, thinking before I went into a full doze that I hoped I could stay asleep until the following morning.

It was only a few hours later that I felt the familiar shape of Crawford lying next to me, the warmth from his body bringing me comfort after a restless few hours of sleep. I burrowed into him and wrapped my arms around him, wondering if I was dreaming, but not really caring. It felt real enough.

I passed the night in a dreamless sleep, not waking until the telephone rang at the ungodly hour of six in the morning. Crawford was next to me and closer to the phone; he mumbled a greeting into the receiver before passing it over to me.

“I wanted you to hear this before anyone else.” I recognized the gravelly voice of my friend Mac, the medical examiner. An apology for the early hour would have been nice, but obviously was not forthcoming.

“What’s that?”

“You were right. Or should I say, ‘she was right.’ ” I heard him take a loud sip of something and mutter, “Jeez, burned my tongue.”

I waited a beat before asking him again why he had called.

“Oh, Ginny Miller. She was right. Wilmott was poisoned.” I could picture him looking at the ceiling, deep in thought. “Cause of death? Poisoning. By arsenic. A rather old method but a quite effective one.”

I sat up straighter. Crawford, a champion sleeper, had already fallen into a coma and was missing the entire conversation, or at least my side of it. “Really?”

“Really.”

“You know Ginny is dead, right?”

Mac chuckled. “Of course I do, Alison. She’s already here. She arrived just after eight o’clock last night,” he said, so casually that it seemed like she had kept a dinner reservation as opposed to a date with the autopsy table. “Okay, now I’m in a heap of trouble, so let me get back to work. Gotta figure out how I’m going to spin this one so I don’t lose my job. Reezie doesn’t have expensive tastes but she does like to eat.”

“Thanks, Mac.” I don’t know why he had heeded my plea to look at Carter’s tissue samples after ignoring Ginny, but I was glad that he did. George Miller was now a widower but at least he wasn’t a guest of the state, as well.

“No problem,” he said, adding before he bid me adieu, “I don’t know why, but I like you. But I have to be honest, you are a giant pain in the ass.”

“Thank you, I guess?”

“You’re welcome.”

I looked over at Crawford. This was an interesting but not unexpected turn of events. I leaned into his warm body again and fell back to sleep wondering if I would at least get a thank-you card from George Miller for all of my trouble.

Kevin had done his usual ridiculously bad job of parallel-parking, and Crawford forgetting, I guess, that he wasn’t responding to a homicide, had parked the wrong way on the wrong side of the street, facing east when he should have been facing west. Neither of them should have been parked on the street overnight but didn’t use the sense God had given them to remember to pull into the driveway. When I reminded the two of them at breakfast that morning that they had broken a long-standing village parking rule, they both proclaimed their ignorance of village ordinance. I responded by throwing the citation, which had been found attached to my full garbage cans, between Kevin’s bowl of oatmeal and Crawford’s toast.

“You two can decide if you want to split this fifty-fifty or some other way.” I grabbed a coffee mug from the cabinet and poured myself a cup. “I don’t care. But I’m not paying it.” I took a sip of coffee and noticed that we were a roommate short. “Where’s Queen?”

Kevin shrugged. “Not sure. I think she’s doing PI stuff. It’s too early for Hooters to be open.”

Crawford leaned into Kevin. “You’ve met her?”

“Of course. She’s a lovely girl.”

Dry spell or not, Crawford’s insistence on meeting Queen was wearing thin. I told him to stick a sock in it.

“You’re kind of mean,” Kevin said, as if this thought had dawned on him for the first time.

“She is, right?” Crawford asked, shoving a piece of toast into his mouth and washing it down with coffee.

“Listen, you two. I’ve seen two people die in the space of a week and I’m not in the mood to listen to your opinions of me.” I looked at Kevin. “Without me, I might remind you, you’re homeless.” I turned to Crawford but couldn’t think of anything to say. Because without me, he would probably have a very calm and serene life.

Crawford got up to pour himself a cup of coffee, stopping on the way to kiss the top of my head. He stood at the coffee-maker and turned to look out the kitchen window. “Hey,” he said, addressing Kevin. “Can you still do weddings?”

I gave him a look that telegraphed my reluctance to talk about the topic in front of Kevin, if at all.

“What?” he asked. “Just an innocent question. Hypothetical, really.”

“We’ll talk about this later,” I said as pleasantly as I could. I thought the big, fake smile on my face should have given him some indication of the tone, but apparently, it didn’t. He went sullen.

“Just wanted to know.”

Kevin watched the two of us discuss whether or not it was appropriate to talk about the topic of our possibly impending nuptials in front of him, his head whipping back and forth depending on who was speaking. Kevin knew about the marriage talk; he had been with us when Crawford had popped the question in his straightforward way. When all was said and done, though, Crawford and I still needed to “close the deal” officially, and Kevin hadn’t let us know if he could perform a Catholic wedding ceremony. My guess was no.

I had thought that since Crawford now knew the source of my reluctance, the conversation would have been toned down until at least after Labor Day. But homicide detectives ask the same question over and over and over again until they get the answer they want. Crawford, apparently, thought the same tactic would work in this situation.

“Hey, what’s this?” he asked, picking up the arsenic rock that I had assumed Ginny had taken with her the other night but which was sitting on my kitchen counter. He picked it up and examined it.

“Put that down!” I exclaimed. “It’s poison.”

He dropped it on the counter and stepped back.

“That’s the arsenic,” I said. “I didn’t realize it was still here. I should bring that over to Detective Madden.”

Neither of the men debated me on that point, so it was just a mere forty minutes later that I was sitting in the same room where I had been the week before, toying with the rock—now in a plastic bag—and awaiting her entrance. She walked in a few minutes later, notebook in hand, and regarded me warily.

“You have some information for me?” She was crabbier than usual. It hadn’t occurred to me until this very moment that she, like Mac the Knife, would be none too happy with the idea that the man she had arrested was not guilty of the crime and that she might look a wee bit vulnerable to her colleagues as a result.

I pushed the arsenic rock forward. She raised an eyebrow at me. “It’s arsenic,” I explained.

She picked up the bag. “Great. Thanks.”

“It’s probably the rock that Ginny Miller used to poison Carter Wilmott.”

“Probably.” Her expression was stony.

“Are you mad that it wasn’t George Miller?”

She leaned on the table, her knuckles supporting her weight. “Listen. I’m happy when justice is served. I did not want an innocent man to go to jail, who may or may not be innocent of everything,” she said, reminding me that we still had the issue of the explosive device on the engine to contend with. “But this,” she said, pushing the plastic bag toward me, “is going to cause a whole lot of trouble for the department and the ME’s office. Is that what you intended?”

I sputtered a little, caught off guard by her outburst. “Well, no. But yes. “ I took a deep breath and composed myself. “I hope you’re not insinuating that I should have kept this a secret.”

“I’m not insinuating that at all.”

“And are you completely sure that Ginny Miller was the one who was poisoning Carter Wilmott?”

Her look told me that that was a question I shouldn’t have asked, but I wanted to know how they knew. It was my assumption that Ginny’s suicide implied her guilt, but who knew? Carter’s death had opened a Pandora’s box of suspects from George to any one of the people he had maligned on the blog, including Tony and Lucia, not to mention Coffee Lover, who seemed really incensed that Wilmott didn’t like Beans, Beans. Madden didn’t want to answer but she did anyway. “Yes, I’m sure.” She stood up straight and picked up the bag. “Good day, Ms. Bergeron.” She walked toward the door and put her hand on the knob. “Make that ‘good-bye,’ Ms. Bergeron.”

Sometimes I know when to take a hint and today was one of those times. I hightailed it out of there and made my way to school, sorry that I had any kind of civic or moral compass at all. “Leave the detecting to the detectives,” I muttered to myself as I pulled into my reserved parking spot in the lot behind my building. It was something that I had been told over and over again, yet it had failed to sink into my brain as a reasonable course of action.

Dottie was reading a bodice ripper when I walked in. “Is that Fabio on the cover?” I asked.

She turned the book over and looked at the cover. “Maybe.”

“I always thought he was kind of handsome,” I said. As usual, my friendly attitude toward her made her suspicious and she kept her eyes on me as I collected the mail from my mailbox and shuffled through it while still standing at her desk. “So, how’s Charlie?” I asked.

She slammed the book down on her desk and gave me a hard look. “Okay, so what is this about? Why are you being so nice to me? And why do you keep asking me about Charlie?”

It wasn’t the first time I had misread a situation nor would it be the last. What I thought passed for innocent small talk had apparently raised Dottie’s hackles. “It’s nothing. I’m just curious about your relationship and how you keep it fresh after all these months of dating.”

“Fresh?” She snickered. “What? Are you watching Dr. Phil now?”

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t talk like that. What gives?”

I leaned toward her desk and whispered. “Listen. It’s like this. Crawford wants to get married and I’m not sure.”

She leaned back and crossed her arms, happy to be in the role of relationship therapist. “Well, you were married to that cheating, lying asshole. I could see where you would have some issues.”

Lady, I own the market on issues, I wanted to say, but I didn’t. I was struck dumb by her perceptiveness. “Right! Issues!”

“After what you’ve been through, it would be hard to trust anyone.”

“You’re right again!”

“I understand what you’re going through.” Satisfied that she had correctly assessed the situation, she picked up her book.

“Wait!” I said. “What should I do?”

She gave me the same look I give my most challenged students. “You should marry him. What are you? A moron?”

Though shocked that she had decided to impugn my character while giving me advice, I decided that she was right, as was Crawford. He wasn’t Ray and I wasn’t making a mistake, and getting married again was a blessing, not the blind cliff jump that I was making it out to be. I knew Crawford whereas I hadn’t really known Ray. Dottie was right. I was a moron.

It all came down to one thing: I missed my mother. I had already gone through one wedding without her and the thought of going through another one gave me a palpable pain in my heart. Her advice the first time had been off the mark and borderline devastating. By telling me to marry a man I was ambivalent about at best, I know that she was just trying to protect me from a life of loneliness without my parents and without any siblings on whom to rely. It took me a few seconds to imagine what she would think of Crawford and decided that she would probably have been as much in love with him as I was. When I thought about it that way, it all made sense.

Mentally, at least, I had “closed the deal.” When school was over for the day, I needed to make it official.

I started for my office, my head in a completely different place than it had been for the last several weeks. Although the pain of my mother’s loss was still there, I felt lighter in spirit. My head did seem like it was in the clouds, which could be the only explanation I had for nearly colliding with Father Dwyer, also on his way to my office. Any feelings of bonhomie that I had based on finally making up my mind were quickly squelched by the sight of our new chubby chaplain. He was dressed in full blacks—jacket, pants, clergy shirt, and black shoes. I rarely saw Kevin dressed like this so it was jarring to see Dwyer in full regalia.

“Hello, Father. Are you on your way to see me?” I asked. I opened the office door and motioned for him to go in before me.

“Age before beauty,” he said, chuckling while waiting for me to precede him.

Okay, what does that mean? “Ladies first” might have been more appropriate under the circumstances, but from the little I knew about this guy, I wasn’t surprised that he found himself more attractive than he found me. He settled into one of my guest chairs and took in the titles of some of the books on the shelves in my office.

“Lots of Joyce,” he remarked.

“I’m a Joyce scholar,” I said, resisting the urge to add “you idiot.” But I was feeling generous and figured that the hundreds of volumes related to the Irish author were not a dead giveaway.

Dwyer surveyed my office, his eyes landing on a bumper sticker that was taped to the side of my filing cabinet: “If God was a woman, the world would have been created in two days and everything would have matched.” The expression on his face told me that he didn’t think it was funny. I decided not to tell him that it had been given to me by his predecessor, Kevin. He brought his eyes back to me, looking at me as if I had a huge piece of spinach in my teeth.

Just to be sure, I ran my tongue across my teeth. All good there. “What can I do for you, Father?”

“Nothing, really. I just wanted to meet with you and get to know you a little bit. I’m meeting with all the faculty members individually to see what role, if any, they can play in the liturgical events here at St. Thomas.”

I held my hands up. “Whoa, there. Count me out. I’m not that good a Catholic to be involved in ‘liturgical events,’ ” I said, giving him the old air quotes. I wasn’t even sure what a liturgical event was. Did he mean Mass? If so, why didn’t he just say that? Oh, right. He was a tool. I was meeting a lot of them lately.

He didn’t look surprised. “That’s another reason for my visit.” I didn’t respond. I already knew that I’d be in trouble for
(a)
not going to church and
(b)
admitting it in front of the overzealous school chaplain. With Kevin, it was a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. With Dwyer, obviously, it was going to be much different. “It would be in the best interest of our students if they could witness, firsthand, the reevangelization of our faculty.”

Since many of the faculty members were already nuns, I could only surmise that he was talking about me. And Dorothy Koppell, biology teacher and my next-door office neighbor and a devoted practitioner of Wicca. Oh, and of course, Rabbi Schneckstein, who was a part-time faculty member in the religious studies department. But he wasn’t going to get Koppell and Schneckstein, so I was a reasonable target. I held his gaze. “What exactly are you asking me to do, Father?”