Third Degree

by Maggie Barbieri

  I left the house extra early the next morning, wanting to avoid giant breasts and “innocent until proven guilty” priests. I knew that Crawford had pulled a double shift and called him on the off chance that he might meet me for a coffee before he went home. I could tell, even over the phone, that he was dead tired but he agreed anyway, suggesting a Dunkin’ Donuts midway between campus and his precinct. I was on my third Boston cream doughnut and second cup of coffee when he walked in.

  “What’s so important that it couldn’t wait until the weekend?” he asked, settling his lanky frame into a small Dunkin’ Donuts chair.

  “Well, good morning to you, too!” I said. I realized, as I finished the remainder of my coffee, that I should have stopped at one cup; my heart was racing and I felt like I needed to run a marathon. What did they put in this stuff? Rocket fuel?

  “No, seriously,” he said. “I’m exhausted. What’s going on?”

  I filled him in on my new house guest while I had his attention.

  “You’re running out of room,” he said in his usual cut-to-the-chase way.

  “It’s like a home for wayward waitresses and priests.”

  “They can’t stay.”

  “And I can’t throw them out,” I said.

  His look told me that he thought I could. Rather than continue with this train of thought, I decided to go with the real reason I had asked him here.

  “What do you know about poison?”

  He pointed at my cup. “Only that that qualifies.”

  “I’m not kidding. Do you know anything about arsenic?”

  “No. That’s what we’ve got Crime Scene for.”

  “Are they chemists?”

  “Some of them are.” He looked around the store and decided he couldn’t resist, I guess. He got up and ordered a large black coffee and a bagel with cream cheese. He carried both back to the table and started eating. “Where is this going?”

  I told him about the Ginny Miller scenario, and my meeting with McVeigh. “I need to know about arsenic. How it is administered, how long it takes to act, how it kills you. Know anybody I can talk to?”

  He put his head in his hands. “Why do you care?” he asked from underneath his palms.

  I could feel the tears welling up before I even formulated an answer. “She took care of my mother, Crawford.”

  He took his hands off his face. “So what? That’s her job. She’s a nurse.”

  He was uncharacteristically short, not giving me the answer I was looking for. The minute he saw my face, he knew he had spoken too soon. He started to recant, but I closed my eyes and shook my head, attempting to silence him. “No. Don’t say anything.”

  “I know a guy who knows a guy … anyway, I can help you with the arsenic thing.”

  “Forget it.” Passive-aggressiveness is my stock-in-trade.

  “Really. Just let me get six hours of shut-eye and I’ll make a few calls.” He passed a hand over his eyes. “I’m wiped out.”

  “Thanks, Crawford.” This wasn’t exactly how I had wanted our early-morning meeting to go; my decision to call him had been ill-advised at best. I gathered up my stuff, all crammed under my seat. “I’ve gotta go.”

  He grabbed my hand. “Do you think she may be using you? You know, for your connections and everything?”

  “Oh, I know she’s using me,” I said, standing. “It’s just that I remember …” I started and then revised what I was going to say. “I just remember what it was like to be suspected of something I didn’t do.” I decided a joke would make this encounter end better than it had started. “And George Miller is one heck of a DPW head. I wouldn’t want to lose him.”

  Crawford smiled wearily. “Let me walk you out,” he said, getting a bag for his bagel as we passed the crowded counter. Once outside, he put his arms around me. “It won’t do me any good to ask you not to get involved, right?”

  I shook my head. “Right.”

  He gave me a long hug and kissed me solidly on the lips. “Okay. Can I come over and meet the Hooters waitress tonight?”

  “She’s more than a Hooters waitress. Her name is Queen and she’s a criminal justice major at John Jay.”

  “And a Hooters waitress …”

  “And a Hooters waitress.”

  “So, can I?”

  “Sure. As long as you know that you’ll have to sleep with me, with my priest on the couch below us.”

  He looked up at the sky and sighed. “You don’t make it easy.” Crawford’s got a healthy respect—bordering on the obsessive—for church authority.

  “And that’s why you love me,” I said. He walked me to my car and made sure I was buckled in before walking away.

  I didn’t hear from Crawford for the rest of the day and I expected that he had slept longer than he had originally anticipated. He’s a guy who needs his sleep and he doesn’t get that much. He can go for long stretches without food and often does, but miss a night’s sleep? The man turns into a beast. I didn’t bother him and figured he would call me when he got up, got the information I needed, and was in a position to talk.

  I wasn’t looking forward to going home. My home was my haven. Just me, Trixie, and sometimes Crawford. Now I had Queen and Kevin and they were taking up a lot of space. Talk about your personal space being violated. Did I have to start cooking dinner every night? Do their laundry? What role, exactly, was I going to be playing in their lives besides providing a roof over their heads? I thought a house meeting might be in order to clarify our different roles.

  But to my surprise, nobody was home. No Queen, no Kevin, and no Trixie. A note on the kitchen table written in Kevin’s chicken scratch informed me that the trio had gone for a run down by the river and would return in about an hour with a pizza.

  Maybe this roommate thing wouldn’t be so bad after all.

  I poured myself a glass of wine, kicked off my pumps, and settled in to watch television, relishing the quiet. I flicked through the channels, settling on the local news station, News47 Westchester, knowing that the weather report would be coming up. I don’t know why but I’m obsessed with the following day’s weather. Generally, News47 Westchester’s meteorologist is wrong, and I’m usually not dressed appropriately as a result, but I always check. Someday, he’ll get it right and I won’t be wearing suede boots when the next monsoon hits.

  With the exception of DPW chiefs who kill local bloggers, not too much goes on in the county. You have your usual drug busts, DUIs, and shady politicians, but as counties around New York go, it’s generally a pretty safe place to live. That’s why when something exciting happens, all hell breaks loose.

  And hell was busting out all over.

  I sat up when the “Breaking News” banner blasted onto the screen. Although overused as a notice, sometimes it represented really good, juicy, happening news. And today’s interruption didn’t disappoint. For when the banner rolled off the screen in a haze of red and purple, the News47 Westchester station colors, there was a woman, standing on the ledge of the highest part of the Tappan Zee Bridge, her hand gripping one of the iron beams that held the bridge together and aloft. I leaned in closer. Traffic was stopped in both directions and everyone from the bridge crew to the state police was gathered on both the north- and southbound lanes. The woman stayed on the ledge, her balance surprisingly good, as the wind whipped around her on her lofty perch.

  The commentator was giving us viewers a blow-by-blow account of what had happened up until this moment. The woman had been driving in the northbound lane until she had suddenly pulled her car over in the right lane, causing a twelve-car accident, and climbed to the railing of the bridge where she had stood for the past hour, apparently contemplating her next move. Her next move seemed obvious to me: she was going to jump as soon as she got the courage. As usual with stories like this, I wondered what had her so distraught that she felt this was her only way out. I had been in many dark emotional places in my life but ending it all had never occurred to me.

&nb
sp; The commentator was just about to throw the report back to the studio when the woman did just what I expected she would: she threw her arms out wide and executed a perfect swan dive, a beautiful sight if only the ending hadn’t been preordained tragic. I grabbed my chest, horrified, and let out a strangled sound because as I watched this surreal and heartbreaking event unfold, I realized that I knew the woman.

  And I knew why she had jumped.

  Twenty-Seven

  I was still staring at the television set when Queen, Kevin, and Trixie returned. I don’t know why I was so upset; I hadn’t known Ginny Miller well, but the shock of seeing her plunge to her death from the Tappan Zee Bridge was one of the more terrible things I had seen in my lifetime. News47 Westchester was going to have a lot of angry viewers; their viewership, for the most part, didn’t tune in to see women fly off the railing of the bridge and into the choppy Hudson River. They tuned in to see crappy meteorologists give incorrect weather reports.

  I had left the television on so I knew that although the state police had sent a police boat to the scene when Ginny was discovered on the bridge to hopefully fish her from the drink if she did jump, it had been an unnecessary measure. Because Ginny, she with all of her bad luck, had missed the river completely and jumped directly onto an old piling sticking out of the water, essentially breaking every bone in her body upon impact. She was dead instantly. Or so said the trembling News47 Westchester commentator, a young Hispanic woman who looked like she was suddenly considering a career change.

  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.

  Twenty-Eight

  I didn’t get a thank-you note for my trouble. What I did get was a citation from the police department for having cars parked in front of my house overnight and having obstructed the DPW’s pickup on garbage day.

  No good deed goes unpunished.

  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.