“And that’s all you can tell me?”
“Look, Lieutenant, this isn’t a Catholic college, and I have a responsibility to my flock. If any of them found out that I spill their secrets to every policeman who asks me to break confidence, I’d be through.”
The two men sat in the silence before Father Veneri stamped out his cigarette and looked over at Worthy. “Why don’t you ask me specific questions? If I can answer them, I will. If I can’t, well—”
“All right, here’s a question,” Worthy said, cutting him off again. “How often did Victor come to see you?”
Father Veneri sighed heavily. “He was a regular at Mass, until November, apparently. But in terms of confession, I’d say more than a few times.”
“Did he come to talk with you regularly or more toward the end of the semester?”
The priest started to speak, but stopped. “I can’t answer that.”
Worthy fired back another question. “Did he ever seem especially troubled when he came?”
The priest’s face reddened. “Students who bother with confession are usually troubled. So yes, you can assume that.”
Hardly letting the priest catch his breath, Worthy pushed ahead. “Did Victor ever say Allgemein had let him down for some reason?”
The priest rubbed his forehead briskly, as if he were the one with the headache, and smoothed the thin strands of hair over the bald spot. Staring down at his hands, he said, “It’s the rare student who admits they’ve let their profs and classes down, and not the other way around.”
“So, I can take that as a yes,” Worthy countered.
Father Veneri paused. An odd smile slowly formed. “Here’s something I can tell you. I made a point of specifically inviting Victor to sign up for my class on Modern Catholicism. It’s not only Catholics who take it, thank God,” he clarified, “but it does give my tribe a chance to rant about God and the old church a bit.”
“Was Victor ranting?” Worthy asked.
The priest laughed. “God, no, but I wish he had. Victor needs to find out that the sky won’t fall if he drops his childish way of looking at the world.”
He’s trying to tell me something, Worthy thought, but he wants to play the hip priest later with students, tell them how he stood up to the “man.”
“I’d put it this way,” Rev. Veneri continued. “As a Catholic, Victor was living in the nineteenth century. No, I’ll revise that. He was living in the Middle Ages.”
Worthy wondered what this college chaplain would make of the monks at St. Mary’s. “Tell me what you mean by ‘childish,’ ” he requested.
Father Veneri dug out another cigarette and lit it. “The boy was loaded with a ton of guilt—the details of which I’m not free to share. But the guilt arose over things a reasonable person would not give a second thought about.” The priest raised both hands as if to indicate that was all he could say.
Worthy ignored the red light and pressed forward. “Are we talking sex, drugs, booze, cheating, what?”
“No, no, nothing as normal as that. God, how can I put this?” He sucked on the cigarette and sent another ribbon of smoke toward the ceiling. “Okay, how’s this? Let’s say someone ran into this office and told us a tornado had just touched down over in East Lansing, killing scores of people. What would you consider to be a normal human reaction at that moment?”
“Shock, I guess, and sadness,” Worthy replied.
“Especially if we knew some of the victims, right? But what if I heard the news and began beating myself up, saying that I should have prevented that tornado? Lieutenant, that was Victor.”
Veneri sat back in the chair and stared at Worthy. “I told Victor to let go of the things he can’t control and focus on his studies.”
“It doesn’t seem like he took your advice,” Worthy replied. He remembered the worried look on Victor’s mother’s face. “Did Victor ever mention being followed?”
Father Veneri picked a bit of tobacco leaf off his lip before consulting his watch. “I need to be going, Lieutenant, but I’ll tell you this. Do you want to know what was chasing Victor? It was his own fear, fueled by a massively distorted sense of guilt. That’s all.”
Worthy stood, certain of one thing. Victor had told this priest about being followed. But by whom, and for what reason?
Chapter Eleven
On the way to his car, Worthy passed a group of guys sporting identical fraternity T-shirts.
“Fuck him if he can’t take a joke,” said the smallest of the three. “Man, I say, fuck him. Giving me an F in an intro class. What do profs think we do all night in the dorm? Study?”
The student cringed when he saw Worthy suddenly turn and stare at him. But Worthy would have only thanked him. He felt his headache lift slightly. Maybe he’d been asking the wrong people about Victor Martinez. It wouldn’t be professors or even a chaplain who would know him best, but the guys in his dorm.
A half hour later, after checking at the Dean of Students office, Worthy was knocking on the door of the resident assistant of Shirk Hall. A bleary-eyed, skinny student in a Pistons jersey opened the door. When the resident assistant realized that Worthy wasn’t conducting a drug search of the floor, he calmed down and answered his questions.
“Yeah, Victor lived here first semester, but I never heard why he dropped out.”
Worthy looked down the hallway at the pizza boxes on the floor and the blinking fluorescent ceiling light, its cover cracked in half. “Tell me how Victor got along on the floor. Someone told me he had a single room.”
The supervisor wouldn’t look Worthy in the eye. “His roommate moved in with another guy after the first week. It happens.”
“Any particular reason?”
The R.A. shook his head and looked down the hallway in the other direction.
“Was Victor the only minority student on this floor?” Worthy asked.
“Probably,” the R.A. admitted. “Something happen to him?”
“We’d just like to ask him a few questions,” Worthy hedged. He could make out a message in spray paint at the end of the hall that hadn’t quite been masked by a coat of new paint. Fuck Allgemein. They fuck us.
Nice neighbors for a padrelito, Worthy thought.
“My college dorm was a lot like this,” Worthy said. “We used to pull a lot of pranks. You know, against the dorks on the floor. That ever happen to Victor?”
The student nodded toward one wing of the hallway. “Cravitz can be pretty rough on some of the guys,” he whispered.
“Rough? How so?” Worthy asked.
“Jesus, it’s not my fault, okay? Allgemein expects too much from RAs,” he whined. “What’s Cravitz, a second-year jock, doing in a fucking freshman dorm anyway?”
“So this Cravitz is a bully. How about some specifics?”
“He’s got something on everybody,” the RA explained, folding his arms tightly in front of him, his shoulders hunched. “You know the type?”
“Sure. What did he have on Victor?”
“It was the gay thing.”
“Gay?” Worthy asked.
The RA leaned against his door frame and ran a hand through his disheveled hair. “It was just a stupid joke,” he said, his eyes pleading as if Worthy could arrest him for complicity.
Worthy waited silently.
“There was this younger kid, another Indian, who came to see Victor in the afternoons sometimes. Cravitz started calling Victor ‘Gayronimo’ and the other kid ‘Chief Feather Fuck.’ Everything’s a joke to Cravitz,” the RA repeated.
“How did Victor take it?” Worthy asked.
The RA shrugged. “It was weird. When it first started, Victor seemed to look right through Cravitz, like he didn’t see him. Kind of spooky.”
“And later?”
“Cravitz finally got to him. He jacked off in a condom and tacked it up on Victor’s door. With a note, of course, saying it was from Chief Feather Fuck.”
“What did Victor do?”
&nb
sp; “Well, hell, we were all there when he came back to the room. He didn’t say a word. He just went into Cravitz’s room, and we could hear Cravitz call him a ‘fudgepacker.’ Shit, before you knew it, here’s Victor flying at him with a knife. I mean a big knife, and he goes right for Cravitz’s balls. That’s right, his balls. Thank God, somebody grabbed his arm. But I can tell you, it freaked the hell out of me.”
“Did you report it?”
“I was going to, but then he left school. Sort of settled things, you know?”
“So that happened in November, then?”
“Yeah, right before he left.”
“And this other Indian student, what happened to him?”
“I don’t know. He’d already stopped coming around, though. Maybe Victor did have something going with him. Maybe that’s why he freaked. Gay lovers’ quarrel, you know?”
Worthy knew he couldn’t put it off any longer. Every hour that he didn’t report in to his precinct would mean a bump in his captain’s blood pressure. Spicer knew he was back, which meant the VanBruskmans did as well. They’d expect a report, and he would hear about the “new evidence.”
With a sense of dread, he started toward the precinct, then on impulse turned around and headed in the opposite direction. If he had to face the lot of them, why not surprise them a bit, face them on his own terms?
The rain was slanting off the lake as Worthy headed through early rush-hour traffic toward Grosse Pointe and the VanBruskman home. He exited the freeway and drove up Jefferson Avenue, struck by the scarcity of neighborhood businesses. In Grosse Pointe, it seemed the affluent lived above the ordinary human needs of food and clothing, requiring only tree-lined boulevards. Even the lone filling station that was nestled by the freeway, with its small pharmacy and dry cleaners alongside, was hidden behind a colonial façade. So where did a kid like Ellie VanBruskman hang out around here?
He drove down brick-paved streets until he came to a massive French Provincial with VanBruskman on a brass plate out by the street. Driving up the circular driveway, Worthy parked as close as he could to the house, but even so, he still had to sprint thirty yards through heavy rain to reach the front entrance.
Mrs. VanBruskman opened the door almost immediately. She clutched the neck of her silk robe and pearls as she stared at the policeman. “Lieutenant Worthy?” She reached for her hair, which looked as if it hadn’t yet been combed.
“May I come in?”
Without speaking, the woman led him through the open foyer to a room off to the left, a dark-paneled study that was clearly a man’s room. A brace of antique shotguns hung above the stone fireplace. On either side were lit bookcases full of trophies, semi-deflated basketballs, and footballs. One basketball’s lettering boasted of a championship thirty years before.
Mrs. VanBruskman chose the leather couch, where a brimming ashtray balanced precariously on one arm.
“Well, Lieutenant Worthy, you’ve taken us by surprise,” she said, pulling her robe over a tanned knee. Her slippered feet, tiny like a child’s, peeked out from below. “I don’t remember that we were to meet you here. Should I phone my husband?”
Worthy remained standing. “Before you do that, Mrs. VanBruskman, could we talk for a few minutes?”
“No, I think I’d better call him first,” she said, a tight smile trailing her as she left the room. “You know, Arrol is most anxious to see you,” she called from the hallway. “Sit, sit, Lieutenant. I’ll be right back.”
Worthy removed his raincoat, setting it down on the carpet next to the chair. On the opposite wall was a collection of seascapes. In one, several old sailing vessels were struggling through storms, while in the other, two ships, their cannons blasting, were fighting at close quarters.
Mrs. VanBruskman tiptoed back into the room and reclaimed her seat on the couch. She lit another cigarette and re-crossed her legs. Worthy noticed that she’d combed her hair.
“Arrol will be here soon, but he has to pick up something on his way home. Now, what is it you wanted to ask me?”
“First of all, I suppose I want to thank you. It’s seems you were right. Your daughter might have run off to find Victor Martinez.”
“Did you find him?”
“Not yet, but we did find some letters Ellie sent to him beginning last December. Do you know if she ever received any mail from him?”
Mrs. VanBruskman inhaled deeply. “Well, of course, I’d know. And I know that she didn’t. Ellie received little mail, Lieutenant. An occasional notice of something at the college and a birthday card from her cousins, but no, nothing from that boy.” She glanced at her watch before flicking the ash into the ashtray.
“A diary, perhaps? Lots of girls keep them,” he said, even as he remembered that Allyson hadn’t.
“No, Lieutenant, Ellie’s never been much of a writer. She always got so nervous about book reports. But she did like to draw little pictures—cartoons really, nothing serious.”
Nothing serious? So Ellie had hidden her sketches from her own mother.
“Can you tell me how Ellie and Victor became study partners?” he asked.
“Now that’s all my husband’s doing, Lieutenant,” she answered abruptly. “When we got Ellie into Allgemein this fall, Arrol met with one of the deans over there. After her troubles, we wanted her to succeed, you see, to get a good start. Victor came highly recommended, a bright boy on scholarship.”
“What exactly did his help entail?”
“I believe Arrol paid him for six hours of tutoring a week, always here at the house. That was our rule. Usually they worked here in Arrol’s study, but sometimes they were in Ellie’s room. The boy would occasionally stay for dinner. He had good manners, which makes things very pleasant, I always think.”
Mrs. VanBruskman spoke deliberately, as if she were pacing herself. After a moment, she twisted on the sofa and tapped her cigarette again on the ashtray. “I should tell you that Arrol found the boy a bit proud, although my husband would put it more strongly. You see, Victor would never let him call a cab. The boy insisted on walking the six blocks to catch the bus back to the college. The bus, for God’s sake. A bit odd, don’t you think?”
Worthy put the pieces together. In such a mansion, Victor must have felt that he was indeed the “boy” hired to help their struggling daughter. His grandmother’s entire house on Acoma could fit within this one room. But he had his pride, something that undoubtedly bothered the rich car dealer.
“How long did the study arrangement last?” he asked, as if he didn’t already know the answer.
“As I remember, Victor didn’t come around much at the end of the semester. Ellie’s grades were good—surprisingly so, I thought—so it didn’t seem to matter.”
Worthy felt a wariness in the woman whenever her daughter’s name came back into the conversation.
“We think something happened in late November, Mrs. VanBruskman, something that brought a big change in Victor. We think your daughter knew some secret—”
He paused when he saw the look of alarm on the woman’s face.
“No, I’m sure there was no secret between them,” she said, studying her cigarette. “You see, I would have known something like that. We’re very close.”
So close she ran away, Worthy thought.
“Before your husband arrives, I was wondering if I could take a look at Ellie’s room.”
Mrs. VanBruskman hesitated, but then rose, steadying herself before leading him down a carpeted hallway. To his surprise, she opened a white door, but then walked slowly back toward the front of the house.
As he entered the bedroom, he heard her voice from down the hall. “Can I get you something to drink, Lieutenant? Or is it like in the movies. You’re ‘on duty.’ ”
“Something like that. So, no thanks.”
Worthy entered what could have passed for a motel room. The desktop was bare except for a small vase of blue plastic flowers, the single bed neatly made with a stuffed poodle posed on top. On
a small white table against the wall sat a flat-screen TV. It was only when he moved to the desk that he saw the half-empty glass next to the bed. He picked it up, smelled the scotch, and recognized the color of the lipstick on the rim.
He sat and opened the desk drawers. Instead of makeup and pictures of friends, Worthy found neatly stacked paper and pens, some still in their packaging. The second drawer held plastic unicorns, pink and blue, crowded together as if in a corral. A nineteen-year-old girl cherished these toys? Maybe she used them for babysitting, he thought. He remembered from Ellie’s files that before being hospitalized, she’d babysat in the neighborhood. Children loved her because she would sit and play with them for hours.
In the third drawer, hidden beneath several Allgemein notebooks, was what he had hoped to find. Eagerly, he lifted the stack of sketchpads out before noticing that the top one was unused. He opened the second and saw more unicorns, some romping through woods while others were jumping fences. The last drawing—signed by Ellie in 2008, when she would have been twelve—was of a unicorn on a drawbridge, scampering away from a dark castle. Unicorns, then hospitalization for depression, he thought.
He opened the last sketchpad, wondering if his instincts had been wrong. After several more pages of unicorns, he turned a page to see a credible rendering of Victor Martinez. The boy was standing at attention, like a soldier, holding something in his hand. Worthy looked more closely and recognized a crucifix, drawn in great detail. The drawing seemed years beyond the unicorns. Victor held the cross out solemnly toward the viewer. Below it, someone had written the words ENTER BY THE NARROW GATE, accompanied by the date of November seventh.
On the following page was another crucifix, drawn with rays of light radiating from it. The crucifix looked vaguely familiar to Worthy, the arms and shoulders of the dead Christ making a perfect V as the head slumped lifelessly on the chest. Drops of blood fell to the ground from the head, hands, feet, and side. Below it were the similar words THE NARROW GATE.
Worthy flipped quickly through the rest of the pages, all blank, until he came to the last page. Here, in a far more amateurish hand, was a drawing of Chimayó, its unmistakable garden wall, old doors, and squat towers.
Enter by the Narrow Gate Page 11