Student Body

by Susan Rogers Cooper

  Taking a deep breath, Graham knocked on the door. He heard a noise inside, someone moving around, then a voice said, ‘Just a minute! Hold on!’

  The door opened and he saw Dave Wisher standing there, rocking back and forth. Dave always reminded Graham of Shaggy in the ‘Scooby-Doo’ cartoons. He was tall and thin, with scruffy, sandy-colored hair hanging in his face most of the time, and, most importantly, he was usually stoned.

  ‘Shit, Pugh! Why didn’t you say it was you, man? I’ve been dashing around hiding my stash!’ Then he laughed. ‘Ha! I dashed my stash!’ And he laughed again.

  ‘Dave, you straight enough to answer some questions?’ Graham asked.

  Dave shrugged. ‘Well, man, you know, it is like, you know, after five somewhere!’ And he laughed again. ‘That’s what my dad always said when he wanted to get drunk! It’s after five somewhere!’

  ‘Dave, I gotta come in. I gotta ask you some questions.’

  ‘Sure, man!’ Dave said, opening the door wide and stumbling back. ‘Mi casa es su casa!’

  Graham moved inside the sparse one-bedroom apartment. There was a futon for a sofa and beanbags for chairs. TV trays had had their legs sawed down to fit the floor motif. Graham landed on the futon while Dave took a beanbag chair. His first attempt failed and he landed on the floor, laughing, before he picked himself up and nestled his butt into the beanbag.

  ‘You OK?’ Graham asked.

  ‘Oh, yeah, man, I’m fine. Just fine. So what’s up? You want a joint?’

  ‘No, thanks, not right now. I gotta ask you about that party you had a couple of weeks ago.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘The one I came to?’

  ‘Shit, man, I have lots of parties. Don’t know who comes to which one, you know?’ Dave said.

  Graham sighed. Maybe this wasn’t going to work, he thought. ‘Look, I met a girl here and she came back to my dorm room with me but I didn’t get her name—’

  ‘Hey, man, are you the one that broke my cousin’s cherry?’

  ‘Ah—’

  Dave leaned forward and slapped Graham on the knee, almost falling over when he did so. ‘Shit, man, she’s been looking for you! Didn’t know your name, you know? She thought you were hot! But she couldn’t remember where you lived or nothing. Just McMillan. And, man, that’s like saying you live in Texas, you know?’

  She thought he was hot, which must mean he didn’t force her into anything. He wasn’t a rapist. Maybe. ‘What’s her name? Your cousin’s?’

  ‘Miranda! With an “m.”’

  ‘She got a last name?’ Graham asked.

  ‘Sure, man. Just like me. Wisher. Miranda Wisher! You know, if she wasn’t my cousin, I’d do her,’ Dave said, settling his head back against the beanbag chair.

  ‘Where can I find her?’ Graham asked.

  ‘At her place,’ Dave said.

  ‘Where’s her place, man? Where can I find Miranda?’

  ‘Um, she’s like over at the B and B dorm. He parents have big bucks. Her dad and my dad, like they’re brothers, ya know? And her dad, like, he invented something – shit, I can’t remember what. But he like made millions! My dad, he’s a mailman.’ Dave shrugged. ‘You know the place? The B and B?’

  ‘Yeah, I know it,’ Graham said.

  ‘She’s over there, man. If she’s, like, home, you know?’ Dave’s eyes were closed now and his words were little more than mumbles, but Graham had what he needed. He made sure the apartment door locked behind him when he left.

  Detective Nate Champion knocked on the door of Gretchen Morley’s dorm room and waited. And waited. He knocked again. Still no answer. He was turning to leave when his cell phone rang.

  ‘Champion,’ he said into it.

  ‘Nate, hey, it’s Elena Luna, Codderville P.D. We worked together on that task force back in—’

  ‘Elena, sure! Hi, nice to hear from you. What’s up? You in Austin?’

  ‘On my way,’ she said. ‘The thing is, it’s about one of your cases.’

  ‘Yeah? Which one?’

  He could hear Elena rustling papers, then she said, ‘Bishop Alexander.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s my case,’ he said, frowning. ‘How are you involved?’

  ‘Well, his roommate, Graham Pugh, is the son of a friend of mine. Actually, the Pughs are my next-door neighbors. Good people,’ she added.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ Champion said. ‘And she called you because?’

  ‘Because she’s scared, Nate. Wouldn’t you be? You’ve got a boy yourself.’

  ‘My son didn’t kill his roommate.’

  ‘And neither did Graham. Nate, I know this boy. I’ve known him since he was seven years old. He’s a good kid. A real good kid.’

  ‘Elena, what did you expect your call to accomplish here? Huh? You think I’m going to put aside this line of questioning because you say the Pugh kid is a good boy? Uh-uh. Doesn’t work that way.’

  ‘I know that. Believe me, I know that. But I just want you to keep an open mind. Maybe Graham’s not the only one who might be a suspect, you know?’

  ‘I’m a better cop than that, Luna,’ he said, obviously not happy with her assumptions. ‘Look, check in with me when you get to town but don’t go thinking you’re gonna be working this case. ’Cause you’re not. Got it?’

  ‘Got it,’ Luna said.

  ‘How’s Eduardo?’

  ‘Home now for almost two years and doing great. How’s Margaret?’

  ‘You’d have to ask her new boyfriend,’ Champion said.

  ‘Oops. Sorry about that. Divorce sucks.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ve noticed. Call me when you get in.’

  ‘Right. Bye.’

  Champion hung up his cell phone and frowned. He needed to head over to McMillan Hall, the dorm shared by the vic and the Pugh kid. He wanted to check out that room again. Just to be on the safe side.

  I knew Graham had missed two days of classes, something he couldn’t afford to do. Maybe he should skip this semester? If things kept going the way it was now looking, he might have to. I looked down at my hands and saw they were clenching and unclenching. I didn’t realize that until I saw them. I stretched out my fingers to try to relax. It didn’t work.

  There was a knock on the door and I rushed to it, hoping my son had returned. Instead I found Luna standing there, duffle bag in her hand.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. I’m afraid my disappointment showed.

  ‘Happy to see you, too, Pugh,’ she said, shoving past me into the motel room.

  ‘Sorry, I thought – hoped – you were Graham.’

  ‘He’s still not back?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ I said. No need to dwell further on that subject. ‘Did you talk to Champion?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said and shook her head. ‘Not great. Not horrible but not great. He’s keeping an open mind but he still likes Graham for this. You two come up with any leads?’

  ‘Yes!’ I said, and rushed to the small table by the window of the motel room where my notepad was. ‘Bishop’s ex-girlfriend, Gretchen Morley, and his supposed BFF, Bobby Dunston. Seems Bishop dumped Gretchen and she retaliated by keying his car and baking him Ex-Lax brownies. And the BFF, Bobby Dunston – Bishop was big on putting him down constantly and calling him names, in front of other people.’

  ‘So why didn’t this Bobby guy just call him out and find a new BFF?’ she asked.

  I shrugged. ‘I have no idea. But there’s somebody else, too. Gaylord Fuchs. He was Bishop’s student adviser. Bishop came on to his wife and Fuchs caught him, tried to hit him but missed.’

  ‘So maybe he tried again, but this time with a knife?’ she suggested.

  ‘My thoughts exactly.’

  ‘Have you told Champion about this guy?’ she asked.

  I shook my head. ‘We’re not exactly on speaking terms,’ I said.

  Luna dumped her duffel bag on one of the beds and sank down. I sat on my own and said, ‘Graham didn’t do this.’

  ‘I know,’ she s
aid. ‘But that knowledge doesn’t mean shit.’

  ‘Luna—’ I started, panic beginning to set in.

  She kicked me lightly in the shin. ‘We’ll take care of it, Pugh. We always do.’

  And I thought, From her lips to God’s ears.

  Graham drove to the B&B dorm off Guadalupe. Its actual name was the Baker & Boyle House for Women, but it had been called the B&B since almost its inception in the late sixties. Misters Baker and Boyle were two well-healed attorneys from Dallas who both had daughters graduating high school and entering their freshman year at U.T. Neither Baker nor Boyle thought any of the dorms near the U.T. campus were suitable for their daughters, as some were reportedly going coed, and neither wanted their girls joining a sorority where they might have more freedom than either man would wish. So the B&B was built on a parcel of land near U.T., within chauffeur distance of the campus. It was a large red brick building, rather imposing in a ‘we’re rich and you’re not’ sort of way. Graham knew they had maid service and a cafeteria with an actual chef. He wondered if he could just walk in or if he had to have an invitation. Only one way to find out, he figured.

  He parked the Celica and got out, locking it this time. He headed up the long walkway to the front doors of the dorm. The chandelier in the foyer was bigger than his Celica and the well-cared-for leather sofas in the living room made the place look more like a high-end men’s club than a women’s dorm. But there were enough knick-knacks and colorful throw pillows to bring in that feminine touch. The floors were hardwood parquet and the place appeared to have been fairly newly painted. There were girls – or young women, he amended to himself – sitting in the living room chatting; some in the library nook he could see to the left of the entrance, full of leather chairs and books, and some sitting at cafe tables in a dining area, drinking Starbucks coffee from the barista at a small stall in the dining room. A real-life Starbucks stall.

  Graham went up to the nearest young woman and asked, ‘Could you tell me which room Miranda Wisher is in?’

  She looked him up and down and said, ‘Lucky Miranda. Third floor, B, elevators over there.’ She pointed him in the right direction and he took off.

  He took the elevator to Miranda Wisher’s floor, found the room and knocked on the door. He knew all of the rooms were singles and so knew Miranda didn’t have a roommate. The door opened and a girl was standing there. A girl he instantly recognized, and the entire evening came flooding back. She definitely wasn’t medium anything. Lots of curly brown hair cascading down her back, eyes big and brown with black lashes and a body—

  ‘Hi,’ he said, trying to stay on track.

  ‘Oh my God!’ Miranda yelled and threw her arms around him. ‘I’ve been looking all over for you!’

  She took his hand and pulled him into her room. He’d heard the girls who lived at the B&B had to furnish their own rooms and, if so, the room he walked into told him a lot more about Miranda Wisher. To say it was eclectic was an understatement. Dead rock stars adorned the walls, everyone from Kurt Cobain to Buddy Holly, with Jerry Garcia and the ‘dead at 27’s’: Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison. The wall space left was taken up with half of a carousel pink elephant, its trunk pointed to the ceiling. The antique iron bed was covered with an Indian-print throw and the bedside table was an antique sewing table. A large armchair and ottoman took up one corner – a very sedate armchair and ottoman – covered with a very old tapestry of knights and princesses and castles with turrets. An ornately carved desk against one wall was crowded with books that obviously couldn’t fit in the glass-covered barrister cabinets on either side of the desk.

  ‘I finally figured out where we met,’ Graham said, omitting as much as possible. ‘Dave told me where to find you.’

  ‘He couldn’t tell by my description of you who you were. But if you know Dave, you know he’s generally stoned out of his head,’ she said with a grin.

  ‘Yeah, he’s the poster boy for not legalizing weed,’ Graham said, returning the grin.

  ‘God, I was so drunk that night! I usually don’t drink—’ she started, but Graham interrupted.

  ‘I’m sorry. That should never have happened. I was too drunk to realize how drunk you were. If you’d just said, you know, about, well, you know—’

  ‘About being a virgin?’ She shrugged then grinned at him again. ‘Don’t be sorry. I’m not. I’d been looking for the right guy to lose it to. You won.’

  Under any other circumstances, Graham might have laughed at that, but instead he said, with not much sincerity, ‘Lucky me.’

  Miranda cocked her head. ‘Something’s wrong,’ she said. Not a question: a statement.

  ‘Miranda, I’m sorry to dump this on you, but yeah, something’s wrong.’

  She took his hand. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Did you hear about the murder at McMillan?’ he asked.

  She nodded.

  ‘That was my roommate, Bishop Alexander. The police think I did it.’

  To her credit, she didn’t let go of his hand. Graham was thankful for that. ‘Why do they think that?’ she asked.

  ‘For one thing, the blood on my mattress.’

  This time she let go of his hand. ‘Oh. That’s why you’re here. Why you finally started looking for me.’

  She stood up and went to the door, opening it. ‘You can give the police my name and address. I’ll be happy to tell them the blood was mine.’

  ‘Miranda—’ Graham started.

  ‘It was nice to see you again.’ She stopped and cocked her head again. ‘What’s your name anyway?’

  ‘Graham. Graham Pugh.’

  ‘Well, Graham Pugh, see you around campus.’ And she stood there with the door open until he got the message and left.

  The room looked exactly like it had the last time Champion had been in it, except for the crime-scene seal on the door. He had another one in his car and he thought he’d go get it after he’d had a look around. The look around didn’t take long. The blood was still on the bed and the floor on the vic’s side of the room. The ceiling above still had cast-off. The roommate’s bed was still stripped, with only a faint outline of the blood that had been found on it. If he hadn’t seen it under luminol, he probably wouldn’t realize it was there. If nothing else, the kid could clean, Champion thought. He began to poke around. He knew the crime-scene guys had gone over everything – the dresser drawers and the desk drawers – but he did so again, just in case something jumped out at him that the crime-scene guys hadn’t recognized as important.

  The Pugh kid’s dresser top revealed a picture of his family and one of a Latina about the kid’s age. He wondered if this was the one who left the blood on the kid’s mattress. Checking the first drawer, he found underwear, socks, a jockstrap and a packet of condoms. The second drawer showed unfolded T-shirts and boxer briefs crushed in on top of workout clothes and some pants he didn’t bother to hang up. Champion wondered if the fact that he was a slob with his clothes and so meticulous about cleaning his mattress meant anything. The last drawer held electronics – an iPad, a PlayStation III with a plastic tub full of games – and miscellany: books, hardback and paperback, used spiral notebooks, a catcher’s mitt and a football.

  The vic’s dresser was much the same, except his electronics were more high-end and his miscellany was more in the form of expensive watches – three of them. Moving on to the vic’s desk, he noted there was absolutely nothing on the top. He wondered if the crime-scene techs had taken anything and thought he better check that out. Opening the one drawer, he found a snapshot of the victim’s parents during a loving moment, but not framed, a laptop, a spiral notebook and a Mont Blanc pen set. Not a Bic in sight.

  On the Pugh kid’s desk there was a coffee cup filled with pens, pencils, highlighters and a mean-looking letter opener. They had luminoled that, he knew. The desktop held several books on subjects Champion would rather not think about, stacked on one side. There was also a small collage of snapshots of the kid and his s
isters and the kid and some male friends. Everybody was smiling. Nothing sinister at all. The drawer held newer spiral notebooks, several class syllabuses and a schedule of classes. Champion had to wonder if the kid was missing school.

  There was a wall of closets and he opened the doors on both. In the vic’s closet half the shirts and pants still had the tags on them with prices that boggled the mind. The other half – the ones hanging up, not the couple thrown carelessly on the floor of the closet – looked expensive. He figured the ones on the floor probably were too, but decided not to check out his suspicions. He could see the tips of several pairs of shoes sticking out beneath the pile of dirty clothes – three pair of expensive-looking running shoes and what looked like four pairs of leather dress shoes in different shades of brown.

  The Pugh kid’s closet held two cotton button-downs, one blue, the other yellow, one pair of blue jeans and two pairs of khakis. There was a tennis racket on the floor and one pair of shoes – the kind a kid his age would only wear to a job interview or church.

  He shut the closet doors and made a one-eighty circle around the room. Nothing. It told him absolutely nothing. He decided to go down to his car, get that seal for the door, secure the letter opener in the glovebox then try old Gretchen Morley one more time.

  I heard a noise coming from the room next door. Luna heard it too. We both turned toward Graham’s room then looked back at each other. ‘You go,’ I said.

  ‘No, you go,’ she said. ‘He’s your son.’

  ‘But he doesn’t hate you,’ I explained.

  ‘Well, there is that,’ Luna said and stood. ‘If I’m not back in fifteen minutes, send food.’

  I didn’t laugh. Nothing about this was funny. She shrugged and headed out the door.

  I heard her rap on Graham’s door. Heard the door open and the sound of voices, no words distinguishable, then heard the door shut. Since Luna didn’t come back, I had to assume she had been invited into his room. I moved closer to the wall that separated the two motel units and could make out the sounds of conversation. I could barely tell which one was talking and I definitely couldn’t hear what they were saying. I thought about getting one of the glasses from the bathroom and pressing it against the wall, but having tried that before I knew it didn’t really work. All I could do was wait.