Third Degree

by Maggie Barbieri

  I wanted to touch base with Jane but didn’t know when she’d be back from the funeral and the afterparty, which is the only way I can think of the gathering that takes place after the ceremony. I waited a few hours before checking in with her to see how things had gone after I had left and had contributed to l’affaire Stop & Shop. I’m sure the bus ride back to Leisure Village had been exciting, with everyone giving their version of what they had seen transpire in the store between me and Ginny Miller.

  I put Trixie on her leash and walked outside, noting that Jane’s car was in the driveway. I knocked on her front door and let Trixie sniff around the boxwood hedges while I waited for her to answer. “Hi!” she said, surprised to see me. She opened the door wide to let us in.

  “I hope I’m not getting you at a bad time.”

  She was still dressed in the outfit she had worn to church: black pants, a black sleeveless top, and kitten-heel pumps. Her blond hair was pulled back into its usual low ponytail and her makeup was expertly applied. As is often the case when I’m with Jane, I felt like a slob, and my jeans, St. Thomas T-shirt, and flip-flops did nothing to counter that feeling.

  “No,” she said. “It’s a good time. Come on in.”

  We walked back toward the kitchen, and settled in at the breakfast bar. Jane grabbed two Diet Cokes from the refrigerator and two glasses from the cabinet. “Soda?”

  I guessed it was too early to ask for a martini, so I accepted the soda. Trixie flung herself into a sunny patch by the back sliding doors and let out a long sigh. Things hadn’t turned out the way she had expected when I had put her leash on. For me, either, I wanted to remind her.

  Jane handed me a cold glass of Diet Coke. “Your eye looks better,” she said.

  “Thanks,” I said. “It was kind of scaring people, so I was hoping that it would start improving.”

  “And the wrist?” she asked, pointing at my Ace bandage.

  I flexed it back and forth. “I fell down, or maybe it was up, the stairs at school and sprained it. It’s better, too, though.”

  “You’re like a walking accident,” she said, smiling.

  “I guess I am.” We moved on to the memorial service. “Lydia seems to be holding up well,” I said.

  “She’s doing better than I would be under the same circumstances.”

  I waited a few seconds before asking the question that I had come to ask. “Do you know Ginny Miller?”

  Jane blanched. “Why do you ask?”

  Interesting reaction. “Well, I’ve run into her a few times over the past few days, so I was wondering if you knew her at all.”

  Jane looked away and toyed with a corner of the newspaper on the counter.

  Oh, good. There’s a story to tell, I thought.

  She looked up, her blue eyes steely. “Let’s just say that Lydia does not have any fond feelings for that woman, nor do I.”

  I waited a few more seconds for the rest of the story to come out, my mind reviewing the horrible pictures of Ginny Miller taking out the garbage in sweatpants and posted on Carter’s blog. “What did she do?”

  Jane laughed but it was not a happy sound. “I don’t know why I’m trying to protect him. He’s gone. And Lydia can move on.”

  “What is it, Jane?”

  “She slept with him.”

  I gagged on the sip of soda that I had drunk. “Ginny Miller? And Carter Wilmott?” The thought of it was too bizarre to consider. I grabbed a napkin from the holder on the counter and blotted the front of my T-shirt.

  “I know. Right?” Jane said. “Hard to believe.”

  “When?” I thought of the unflattering pictures on the Web site; I didn’t know when they had been posted but I remembered thinking that they hadn’t been in the too-distant past.

  “George Miller went to Iraq for an eighteen-month tour about three years ago.” Jane looked up at the ceiling, trying to piece together the time line. “Yes. Three years ago. So that’s when it was.”

  “Wait. George Miller was in Afghanistan?”

  “Yes. He was working for some contractor before he became head of the DPW. Something with munitions.” Her distaste for the Millers was obvious. “You didn’t know?”

  “How would I know?” I asked. “I lived across the street from you for five years before making contact. I have no idea what goes on in this village and wish that I had never heard of the Millers or the Wilmotts.” I grimaced. “Yikes.”

  I thought back to my first conversation with Ginny and when I had asked her if George had ever been to war. She had said no, which technically was true. But he had been in Afghanistan, a war-torn country, and was obviously familiar with explosives. She was asking me to lie while at the same time lying to me. That was even more curious to me than the fact that Ginny had slept with Carter. And that was an extremely odd pairing. The spandex-wearing gym rat and the hoity-toity yellow blog journalist. Takes all kinds.

  It seemed to me that George Miller had been planning to kill Carter all along. He certainly had the means; he had explosives experience presumably if he worked for a munitions company who outfitted American soldiers and their Iraqi counterparts. He certainly had motive. His wife had slept with Wilmott. And he had opportunity. One needn’t look any farther than Beans, Beans and what had probably been a chance encounter. The fight was just a sideshow diversion that ended tragically before Carter would have blown up in a bomb-rigged car.

  I downed the rest of my soda and grabbed Trixie’s leash. “I’ve got to go, Jane. Thanks for the soda.”

  * * *

  We left Jane’s and took a side trip to the next block, Trixie’s favorite watering hole, so to speak. Rather than return home immediately after Trixie’s business was done and her mind on chasing squirrels, I decided to take advantage of this day off and meander around the neighborhood and spend some time outdoors. God knows, once school really got under way, I would be inside a lot.

  I thought about Kevin, still puzzled about what had made him leave without warning. I could only guess that he had gotten on the wrong side of Etheridge once again and that had led to his departure. Kevin and I are always on the wrong side of Etheridge; it was starting to seem as if pissing off the president of the college was our collective goal in life, when in actuality we were pretty hapless. We weren’t determined to make him hate us; circumstances sometimes conspired against us. I got a little worried even going there in my mind. Was I next? Would my next unintended gaffe be his reason for letting me go?

  Even though the day was gorgeous and I should have been in good spirits, a lot of things weighed heavily on my mind. I thought things couldn’t get any worse. I was wrong.

  For when I arrived home, there was another note tacked to my front door, this one more urgent than the last.

  YOU WILL DIE IF YOU KEEP THIS UP.

  If I kept what up? Harrassing unsuspecting shoppers in the grocery store? Asking questions about Ginny Miller and Carter Wilmott? Who knew? For some reason, and with everything else going on in my life, getting these notes amounted to a giant annoyance and nothing else. The Catholic-school, Palmer-method handwriting probably contributed to that. If someone had truly wanted to scare me, wouldn’t they have cut out individual letters from magazines, like the serial killers on television did? People who wanted to scare other people into submission didn’t do so with lavender-scented note cards. I suspected that was a general rule in the art of written intimidation.

  My guess was that they were coming from Ginny Miller and I really wasn’t afraid of her. I don’t know how far she would go to protect her husband but I didn’t think whatever she chose to do would involve me. After all, I was just a nuisance. With a black eye and a taped-up wrist. I couldn’t help her because of my strict “no lying” policy, and I couldn’t hurt her any more than I had. Unless she found out that I knew what everyone else seemed to know and not care about: that she had had an affair with Carter Wilmott, an interesting little tidbit that I hadn’t seen turn up in any of the newspaper reporting on th
e case. Maybe only those closest to all of the players knew about it and nobody else. Because surely that would give George Miller ample cause and motive to beat the heck out of Carter Wilmott.

  I was taking that information to my grave along with a few other items.

  I called the number on the note again and listened to the phone ring and ring again. What kind of organization and/or psychopathic killer puts a phone number on its intimidating notes only to let the phone ring? I fingered the note, taking a deep whiff of the lavender, which had the opposite effect of the note’s intent: it made me relax. I didn’t know who sent the note or what they were referring to. The only thing I did know for sure was that if I spent any more time away from Crawford, I certainly would die. I stuffed the note into my jeans pocket, deposited Trixie in the house with an admonishment against eating anything that wasn’t actually a food product, and got into my car.

  If you’re trying to win your boyfriend-slash-fiancé back, it is probably a good idea to look a little bit better than I currently did. But what the hell? He already loved me, warts and all, despite the fact that he was a bit perturbed with me at the moment. I knew it was a long shot that he would even be in the precinct but I figured it was worth taking a drive.

  I rehearsed what I was going to say to him once I got to the precinct. I didn’t think that blurting out “I love you!” in the middle of the detectives’ squad room was the right course of action, but it was approaching dinnertime and I was hoping that we could sneak away for a drink or even something to eat so I could explain to him why I was the way I was. I went over all of my concerns in my head ranging from “how will your daughters feel about this?” to “my closet isn’t big enough for your giant clothes,” realizing how inane all of these objections sounded. I didn’t want to go to the lying, cheating husband well again—Crawford was right, he wasn’t Ray—but I had to get it all out.

  And then, answer his question once and for all.

  The precinct was its usual beehive of activity or den of iniquity, depending on how you looked at it. I had found a parking spot that seemed like three miles from the building, so by the time I jogged through the front doors, I was sweating, disheveled, and more than a little ripe. Any of the makeup that I had put on earlier in the day had melted off. It wasn’t exactly the way I wanted to begin my “Please Forgive Me” tour but it would have to do. I walked up to the front desk and spoke to the sergeant on duty.

  I tried to catch my breath. “Um, hi,” I said, realizing, too late, that I was more out of breath than I originally thought. “Is Detective Crawford here?”

  The desk sergeant, one Sergeant Tierney, a florid fellow reaching retirement age, stared down at me. “Um, hi,” he repeated, obviously getting a kick out of my attempt at a greeting. He looked sideways at another police officer who was pretending, unsuccessfully, to be engaged in typing a form on a computer.

  I took in a stale gulp of police station air. “Let me start over.” I smiled. “Is Detective Crawford available?”

  “Are you here to report a homicide?” he asked.

  If you call murdering a relationship a “homicide,” well, then, yes. “Uh, no.”

  Sergeant Tierney looked at me expectantly. “Then who should I tell him is looking for him?” he asked, taking in my sweaty St. Thomas T-shirt and wrinkled jeans. “The flip-flops are a nice touch,” he said.

  I ignored that. I already knew that I looked a mess. “Tell him it’s Alison Bergeron. “ I smoothed down the front of my T-shirt. “Is he even here?”

  “Well, we’ll just see,” he said. He snickered a bit with his cohort at the computer but I wasn’t in on the joke. He picked up a phone and turned his back as if he were privy to the Pentagon’s secrets. After a few seconds, he turned back around. “You’re in luck! He’s here,” he said, and waved his arm toward the flight of stairs that I knew would take me up to the detectives’ squad room. “Right this way.”

  I left the main area and trotted up the stairs wondering if the job made you crazy or Sergeant Tierney was just somewhere on the manic spectrum. I stepped behind the flimsy partition that separated the hallway from the squad room and looked toward Crawford’s desk, trying to judge his mood from twenty feet.

  When he saw me, he smiled. That was a good sign.

  And he held up a sheet of paper with both hands and proclaimed, “I know where Kevin is.”

  Seventeen

  We were in Crawford’s “personal vehicle,” otherwise known as his Volkswagen Passat. He had logged out of work with the lovely and talented Sergeant Tierney and we were headed down the Henry Hudson Parkway at an alarming speed, me hanging on to the door handle for dear life.

  “So what’s Sergeant Tierney’s issue?” I asked after we took a hairpin turn on the parkway.

  “He’s a tool.” Crawford is a man of few words but the ones he uses are usually right on the mark.

  “I’ll say.”

  “Did he give you a hard time?” he asked.

  “I wouldn’t say that. I would just characterize him as exceptionally sarcastic.”

  Crawford gave a little harrumph. “Well, charm isn’t really a prerequisite for a desk sergeant but he’s just a—”

  “Tool?” I offered helpfully.

  “A tool.” Crawford slowed down to pay the toll at the E-Z Pass machine and waited for the mechanical arm to rise. It didn’t. The cars behind us, stacked up during rush hour, began honking noisily. Crawford reached into his pants pocket, pulled out his badge, and held it aloft outside the car window in full view of most of the honkers. And a great silence befell the earth.

  A uniformed cop rushed over and swiped something through the machine and the arm rose. “Sorry, Detective.”

  I eyed Crawford as he sped through the lane. “Wow, that’s impressive. Where can I get one of those?”

  “One of what?”

  “One of those,” I said. “A gold shield. They’re like the keys to the city.”

  “Well, I can’t get you one, but I can get you access to one,” he said. “You know, close enough, if you get my drift.”

  I took a deep breath. “That’s why I came to see you.”

  He remained silent. His expression told me that he already knew that.

  “Listen, Crawford—”

  “ ‘Listen, Crawford’ doesn’t exactly sound like a promising start to this conversation. Or any conversation, for that matter.”

  He had a point.

  We merged onto the West Side Highway. Once we passed the huge Fairway grocery store and its glaring neon sign advertising FRESH-KILLED POULTRY, he spoke again. “Let’s focus on one thing at a time.”

  “One thing at a time?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Let’s find Kevin first.” He took one hand off the wheel and put it over mine. “Let’s get through this month,” he said, his perception about my emotional state astounding me. I looked out the window. “Let’s find Kevin first,” he repeated.

  “Thanks, Crawford,” I whispered, watching the scenery speed by, a blur of blue river and green trees.

  He chuckled. “If we can’t find him, who’s going to marry us?”

  Under normal circumstances, a line like that would bring on gastrointestinal distress, but the twinkle in Crawford’s eye, accompanied by his hand squeezing mine, made me think that the eventual conversation we would have to have might turn out better than I hoped. He knew. He had probably known all along. It was obvious to me that he knew the problem was not with him or my feelings for him, but with me and my complicated past, my emotional baggage, and a host of other things that he probably knew he’d have to put up with if—sorry, when—this marriage took place.

  I knew I was lucky. The question was, why? The guy was a gem, but even guys like Crawford are likely to run out of patience. I decided to focus on his current good humor as well as the task at hand.

  I pulled out the piece of paper that Crawford had handed me. Kevin had gotten two parking tickets—a day apart—in a trendy West Village neighb
orhood, leading Crawford to believe that our prodigal priest was staying somewhere in the vicinity of the poorly parked car. I had driven with Kevin long enough to know that (a) he’s a crappy driver and (b) an even crappier parker. He can’t parallel-park to save his life so once he got his car into a spot, he was probably going to leave it there. He can turn water into wine and bread into body, but get into a spot with his Honda Fit that would normally fit a Hummer? Not on your life.

  And the West Village? Another curious clue in the story. Kevin only goes two places: the Food Emporium by St. Thomas and his mother’s house in the Throgs Neck section of the Bronx. There was nowhere else, in his world. So to think that we had to track him down in lower Manhattan was completely unbelievable to me. Crawford slid into a parking spot behind Kevin’s Fit that was semilegal and put his police credentials in the window. He turned to me and told me that we would just have to wait.

  My growling stomach told me that this was not going to be easy, and given our environs—a bustling West Village street filled with bistros and trattorias—I mentioned to Crawford that it might be using our time more wisely if we got a snack while waiting. Or an appetizer. Or dinner.

  He didn’t need much convincing. We were happily ensconced at a table at the Riviera Café and Sports Bar in seconds, across the street from his and Kevin’s parked cars. An extra five to the hostess got a seat at one of the tables that sat along a bank of almost floor-to-ceiling windows, affording us a perfect view of Kevin’s car and the apartment buildings near it. We decided that Crawford would sit facing the window and I would have my back to it, because as we all know, I’m easily distracted. But even better than our seats was that just two minutes after we had sat down I had a giant Ketel One martini in front of me with my requisite three olives. I decided that the Riviera Café was my new favorite restaurant. Things were back to the way I liked them, the Damoclean sword of the proposal not swinging over my head and threatening to impale me at every turn. I stuck my hand into my jeans pocket and pulled out the lavender-scented note card. “What do you make of this?” I asked.