I looked up at Dean Carlyle and rose from the couch. He walked to me from the window, took my hand and shook it vigorously. “And did I mention the generous salary?” He smiled as his glance at last fell to my shirt, where my cleavage was showing ever so modestly at the second opened button of my blue oxford shirt.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Juicy Fruit
I SPENT A QUIET two days holed up in my bedroom, where old Pooh Bear and I did some heartfelt soul-searching. As much as I wanted to hike my salary into the triple digits, I knew Holton wasn’t the right place for me. I felt safer with my AG cohorts and assorted criminal types. And the truth be known, I felt like I belonged there. I loved being a prosecutor—with my three dearest sisters-in-crime.
We all loved our work, the four of us, and we were the luckiest of friends. Each of us was a separate gear and yet together we meshed like the happy transmission of a bright yellow Miata. I knew what made Shannon race to the finish line. I knew what connected her to Beth, and Laurie, and me, different as we all were. And I knew what ultimately distilled all our differences into that single something that made us similar: the ultimate car chase. That adrenaline rush of catching the bad guys.
No one gets rich nailing criminals for the bureaucracy. You don’t see Harvard Law grads under the employ of the state except as a stepping-stone to their already-mappedout political callings. A career prosecutor is to a lawyer what a secondhand consignment shop is to Sotheby’s. We loved what we did and money was beside the point. Shannon, Beth, Laurie, and I enjoyed locking up criminals. It was rotgut lawyering, but absolutely heady. We were frustrated cowboys killing outlaws without guns. And Shannon’s proclivity was special; she had a touch of evil in her. Beyond Clint Eastwood and his Dirty Harry, Shannon was the dirtiest harry of them all. She was our group’s Arnold Schwarzenegger. The Terminator.
After each of my trials I would wait, wide-eyed and sweaty, while the jury deliberated. “Guilty as charged,” came the foreman’s pronouncement, and it was like drinking an iced Gatorade after a two-day marathon in ninety-degree heat. Forty-eight hours after the sheriffs dragged the defendant away in handcuffs, I’d be champing at the bit for my next case. I needed my work. I craved it like a drug. I had been doing what I loved with three women who were likewise addicted. Even Beth, a paralegal who never made it into a courtroom, got a rush backing us up with her rabid research when an issue of law needed briefing. No one knew her way around a law library like Beth. What chip on her shoulder did Shannon bear that had led her to the AG’s office? And Laurie? And me? I couldn’t pretend to know. But putting criminals behind bars gave us all a purpose and made us feel better about ourselves.
Made me feel better. Until some psychotic murderer ending up killing my beloved AG career—along with the unfortunate Melinda Hastings.
And I knew that accepting a position at Holton would mean forever burning my AG bridge behind me. But two days later, financial reality hit hard and Vince wouldn’t even take my calls, so I sent Secretary of State Laurie Stein to his office to deliver my latest appeal: Take me back after some reasonable period of exile or I was officially resigning and accepting a job elsewhere. I advised Laurie to postpone telling him about Carlyle’s offer. (Telling Vince I was taking a job with his nemesis Carlyle would have sounded too much like blackmail, and, like most powerful men, Vince never responded favorably to threats.)
Within fifteen minutes Laurie called me with his response.
“After I told him, he stared out the window for five extra-long minutes, then he said, ‘Send her my best wishes and tell her to come clean out her office.’ That’s all he said. Without so much as one obscenity.”
“He’s not even mad at me anymore. That’s bad.”
“He was weird, like when he’s really serious, you know, when all the bravado is gone.”
“Right. Okay then. Thanks, Laur. I’ll be in touch.”
Laurie had started to speak, but I hung up on her so she wouldn’t hear the crack in my throat. I dried my eyes and assumed my classiest phone voice to accept Dean Carlyle’s offer of employment pending my formal resignation from the AG’s.
After hanging up with me, Laurie must have hand-delivered her report back to Shannon, who forthwith called a private meeting to discuss my suicidal tendencies and the special talent I had for shooting myself in the foot, jumping the gun, cutting off my nose to spite my face, etc., etc. . . .
I got to the Biltmore Hotel bar at about twelve-thirty. Shannon, Laurie, and Beth were already there. Methinks they had a pre-meeting meeting.
Laurie was staring at me as if I were a puddle of spilled Ebola virus; Beth slowly lifted her bottle of Coors Light to her frosted pink lips, looked at me guiltily, then set the beer back down without taking a sip; and Shannon was clacking her five-inch spiked heel against the side of the bar. Shannon constituted a major flaw in my women-andspike-heels philosophy. She was well over five eight and was about as sexually insecure as Mae West, yet she wore Catwoman heels as often as I did. Only once did I ask her why. “Because I like the way they sound,” she said, “like a horse on pavement. And men are scared shitless of them.”
At the moment, I was a bit afraid of them myself.
Shannon, on the other hand, was afraid of nothing. She had the temperament as well as the haircut of a West Highland terrier: if something moved too fast she’d put her nose to the ground, shake her head, and then promptly rip the unsuspecting thing to shreds before eating it.
“Hey,” I said before any of them had uttered a word. “You should all be happy for me. I can now wear my Jimmy Choos to work without worrying that someone will steal them off my feet for street value.” I looked around for a stifled smile, hoping to fend off poison darts with a fistful of humor. But their chilly silence continued painfully.
The filth at the AG’s office, I considered, could be rubbing off on me. My collegial language had become the patois of the gutter. Ugly obscenities preceded my every noun. What good were my weekly French manicures and Blahnik stilettos when I was rubbing shoulders with drug addicts and cops sporting shag mustaches yellowed with nicotine? With a new job at world-revered Holton, couldn’t I punch my whole life up a level? Couldn’t I, so to speak, shake the gold dust of myself out of the muddy sluice pan of mass humanity and buy passage into society’s elite echelons?
Beth interrupted my lofty ruminations. “Laurie,” she said, “tell Mari she can’t leave. Especially now.”
Now? As in now that we are all coconspirators in an obstruction-of-justice rap?
“Beth,” I answered, “this has nothing to do with that. I needed a job and maybe this could be a big break for me. It’s an impressive position. Assistant dean at a place like Holton. Not to mention the huge salary increase. And maybe, just maybe, I can find out some dirt on the Hastings murder. Who knows? And I would think you’d all be happy for me. At least I landed on my feet.”
Laurie shook her head and looked at me with her super-steady brown eyes. Her hoarse, serrated knife-edge of a voice always made her seem tougher than she really was. “I’d be worrying more about my head than my feet if I were you. If you’re going to work at that country club for educated morons, you’re going to need Paxil, Valium, and a weekly dose of antiseizure meds—”
“What do I think about this new job?” I asked rhetorically. And then I answered myself. “Well, Carlyle is tough. Now that I think of it, he had a tricky way of leaving much about himself and Holton vague, provisional, unsaid, and then he wrapped it all under the protective covering of his privacy speech.”
Shannon was hunched over the bar, her eyes blindly focused on a day-old newspaper. “Jesus,” she said. “You’re already talking like one of them.”
“Yeah,” Laurie said. “You actually do sound disturbed to me. What the hell does that mean?”
Nurse Beth rushed to my rescue. “It means,” Beth explained, “that you have to read between the lines of what he’s saying and you won’t find out the truth about anything that goes
on there until you officially become one of them. Isn’t that what you mean, Mari?”
Shannon punched Beth on the shoulder. “Of course you would support them, you stringy WASP. Mari should take you along as her interpreter. You speak fart like they do.”
“I’m going to miss you terribly,” Beth said. “These two will torture me without you around.”
“Enough of this country music sentiment,” Laurie said. “Is it the money? You let Carlyle pimp you for a pay increase?”
“How much compensation is Holton offering you?” Beth asked. “If you don’t mind my asking.”
“Double what I’m making now.”
“Only part of which is salary.” Laurie snorted. “The rest? Hush money.”
Shannon slid out of her shoes and, swami-like, yanked both feet into her lap, all the while still perched on her bar stool. If she’d had underwear on, it would have been peeking out now between her legs. Suffice it to say, it wasn’t.
“Listen. We’re going to find out who did Hastings and then rally to get you back at the AG’s where you belong. Those are our two jobs and the sooner we get to them, the sooner you come home.”
“Vince’ll never hire me back. Especially after I take the Holton job. And I need a job now.” No one said a word until the bartender returned, whereupon we ordered cheeseburgers and fries all around for old times’ sake. Laurie held up her drink to me. “You know we won’t leave you blowing in the wind. Right, girls?”
Laurie and Beth raised their glasses and clicked mine.
Shannon raised her own glass and toasted the air. “To cheeseburgers, hard liquor, and cigarettes, forever.”
“And to lung cancer,” Beth stage-whispered.
“And to fat asses if we all keep eating and drinking like this,” I said.
“Come off it, Mari,” Shannon said. “At least you have fat in the right places. I have the derriere of a juvenile giraffe and most of the guys at the office have bigger tits than I do.”
Shannon was the sole one of us who ate her burger, complete with roll and French fries. Despite never dieting, she was as lean as a panting greyhound.
“Mari, I’m not even going to bother with Shannon, but why are you smoking so much?” Beth said.
“So I won’t eat the burger.”
“It’s a diet,” Laurie explained. “If she’s smoking she can’t chew. I’m on that diet too. Except I do filtered low-tar. But hey, heroin, methadone, all the same thing.”
“Well, has anyone ever heard of gum?” Beth suggested. She picked up her bag and peered inside. “I think I have some fruit gum in here somewhere . . .”
We all watched as Beth searched for the salvation of our lost souls and burnt-out lungs in the bottom of her Vera Bradley bucket tote. “Chewing gum doesn’t cause cancer,” she lectured. “And smoking is out of style.”
I stubbed out my Camel. “So is Juicy Fruit after the age of five.”
Returning to her burger and taking a vociferous bite, Laurie said, “Still. Something in this whole scenario is out of sync. You and Vince together are like a black comedy routine. I can’t believe he’s letting you go.”
“You ask me,” Shannon said, “I think she broke his heart.”
“Does Mr. Piganno have a heart?” asked Beth, quite seriously.
Laurie said, “I think you’d better be careful is all. Carlyle’s need to protect the school against the AG’s firepower seems obvious. And, P.S., Vince knows about the job already.”
“How?” I said. “Besides Carlyle, you three are the only ones who know.”
Beth abandoned her gum quest and hooked her bag to the back of her bar stool. “My guess would be Jeff,” she said. “Don’t forget the alumni connection.”
Shannon jawed an unlit cigarette. “And I’ll tell you what’s really scary. Vince is quiet as hell about it.” She looked at Laurie and Beth for confirmation. “Not screaming like you’d expect, right? What’s up with that?”
“Perhaps, like us, he’s worried about her,” Beth suggested. “Did anyone consider the possibility that if the killer is preying on Holton students, Mari is going into the slaughterhouse without a gun?”
“I have a gun,” I said.
But I didn’t seriously think I’d ever need to use it. And did I think Vince was worried about me? Nah. I understood Vince better than the rest of them due to our similar genetic makeup.
“This Holton job offer kicked Vince over the edge and he’s angry as hell. But screw him. He never should have dumped me by the wayside. I wouldn’t go back now even if he begged me.”
But that was my pride talking. Truthfully, I wasn’t even as tough as little Dorothy lost in Oz. I’d rushed headlong into the throes of Holton—the complete opposite direction of where I really wanted to be, which was on a yellow brick road back home to the AG’s office where I belonged.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Jeepers
HOLTON COLLEGE WAS NESTLED haphazardly among the large stucco and brick houses of wealthy Providence East Siders. Over the years many East Side homes, some of them historic, had been deeded to the college on fund drives or simply purchased on the open market for use as departmental offices, faculty domiciles, and student dorms. Holton’s Ivy League aspirations were a complement to the smallest state in the country, and striving to assume a position alongside colleges like Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design, Holton was helping give Rhode Island a national presence. But the flip side to the shiny coin was the college’s ongoing removal of prime residential property from the Providence tax rolls, which stuck in the craw of the city’s middle class and provided Vince endless hours of scatological material. A variation on one old maxim was a Piganno favorite: “The filthy rich get richer and the shitty poor pay their taxes for them.”
It was early February, a month after the start of spring semester and twelve days after I had “cleaned out” my old AG office and skulked away with a shoebox full of broken pens, unsharpened pencils, a few used legal pads, and my proverbial toothbrush. I had never been one for trinkets, or long goodbyes.
I pulled up to the high iron gates at the front entrance of Holton’s administrative campus. All was disquietingly quiet as I drove through in my dented ten-year-old Jeep, the one I had paid “one large” for, in crisp twenties, to Mickie DeMedici in the back room of North Providence Auto Body.
Mickie D was a friend of my father’s from the Hill. He said he’d picked the Jeep up at a South Attleboro car auction in “as is” condition from the new husband of an old girlfriend. “Legit,” he said. “All legal.”
“Please, Mickie.” I coughed, stuffing my spent cigarette into an empty Coke can on his desk. “Save your fairy tales for the local cops when they question you.”
Well, for my own peace of mind I did make Mickie swear on his grandchildren’s eternal souls that this particular vehicle was as pure as the driven snow. You should have seen him, his face flushing, begging me in his pidgin English, laced with low-class Italianisms, not to make him utter his grandkids’ names in this godforsaken room where so many questionable deals had gone down. But wouldn’t you know, as soon as I whipped out those fresh twenties, Mickie was saying “Marie, Little Anthony, and Salvatore” faster than a kid reciting his Christmas list, faster than a crack-addict stoolie, faster than—
Whatever.
So, with my possibly purloined Jeep, through Holton’s hallowed gates I drove for my first day of work as an assistant dean. No sooner was I past the wrought-iron portals than a man in formal uniform stepped outside and slowly approached my car. With a twirl of his index finger, he asked me to roll down my window.
“I’m Marianna Melone. It’s my first day here.”
Focusing on his clipboard, he checked something off. When he lifted his head a broad smile had transformed his features and—voilà—I got saluted.
“Oh yes, ma’am. You can park over there today . . .”
Three empty spaces beckoned, each annotated by a small white sign imprinted
with a gentle admonition, Visitors Only.
“But in the future you’ll have to find street parking. And I can tell you this, the cops around here are very generous with their tickets. I’ve seen them, watches at the ready, waiting to tag someone for being thirty seconds past the meter.”
“Thanks for the tip.”
I pulled my Jeep next to an immaculate black Lexus and hurried up the granite steps to a set of heavily carved wooden doors. Massive brass knockers in the form of lion heads stared angrily at me. One of the great doors yielded to a shove and then groaned open, and I proceeded to another modest flight of well-worn marble steps and two more portals, of black enamel this time, fitted on the top half with heavy beveled glass. Before I could reach for the brass push-plate a petite woman with a coal black pixie haircut pulled the double doors wide open from the inside.
“Bonjour, Miss Melone? I am Rita, your secretary.”
Her accent was still unidentifiable. “Are you French?” I asked.
She smiled as she guided me down the hallway toward my office. “Oh no. I’m from Venezuela, but I love to speak different languages. It makes me feel international. Someday I will travel the world.”
“Have you been here long?”
“Hah! I was here when they broke the ribbon, as they say. I don’t look centuries old, no?” Rita stopped and held her hands together as she faced me. “You hear the story about the husband and wife who always were cheating on each other? The wife thinks her maid is on her side and tells her everything. The husband is sleeping with the maid but knows nothing about what the wife is doing. The maid makes both of them think they are so smart for keeping their secrets from the other spouse. I am like the maid. To keep the house in order, I must know everything.”
Rita continued her march toward my office, a quarter the size of Carlyle’s but identically equipped, minus a conference table. A threadbare and presumably antique oriental rug branded my space into the Holton “club.” At the AG’s I’d been accustomed to hiding my expensive accessories in a locked desk drawer, so now, from sheer force of habit, I dropped my small leather bag into an empty bottom drawer and slammed it tightly closed. (Of course, given that Bottega Veneta comes discreetly unblemished by logos or initials, only a fellow fanatic would have been able to identify my bag’s upper-bracket pedigree.)
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