Defenseless

by Celeste Marsella

  “That blanket Hastings was wrapped in—from the health services over there? We got a court order to unseal the health records. And get this one. Holton is claiming they don’t keep written records. What kind of bullshit is that?”

  “Keep me posted.”

  I replaced the receiver in its cradle gently so as not to further break my cracked emotional state, but I almost fell apart when I looked up to see Elliot Orenstein standing in my open doorway again and watching me.

  “Eavesdrop much?”

  “Your door was open.”

  “Shucks, and no bug screen either.”

  He smiled sourly. “Touché, Miss Melone.”

  “What can I do for you, Elliot?”

  “I’m back for my interview. Ready to vent yet?”

  “No, and you shouldn’t be hanging around my office. I told you, confidential stuff going on here.”

  “I know. I just saw Lisa Cummings leave here. She’s flunking out of a class we’re in. Absent half the time and cruising for a crash.”

  “Close my door.”

  He spoke while turning and pushing my door shut with his unlaced sneaker. “I scored a perfect 2400 on my SATs. I was hoping to get an education, but there’s nothing here worth learning. So I end up tutoring rich brats whose last honest educational effort was their sixth-grade spelling bee. No one gives a crap about grades here.”

  “Stop whining. That means less competition for you. So you’ll graduate with a 4.0 and go on to a Harvard Ph.D. without even refilling your Mont Blanc.”

  He tilted his head. “Good point,” he said, then flopped into the chair Lisa had just vacated. “But I use Bics. You gonna spill, or what?”

  “Okay, Elliot, rule number one if we’re going to be pen pals. No names. I can’t be talking personal about the students with you.”

  “Works for me. Anyway, it’s you I want to talk about.”

  “I don’t think I like you.”

  His head jerked the slightest inch, but his comeback belied hurt feelings. “Get in line, Miss Melone. What makes you think I care who likes me and who doesn’t?”

  “No one lives in a social vacuum.” The kid swung his messenger bag over his shoulder and got up to leave. “Well, just for the record, I don’t think I like you either.”

  “You little brat—”

  He broke out into a raucous laugh like I was Jackie Mason in the Catskills. “I knew I’d eventually get a rise out of you. Want to talk now?”

  “Yeah, I want to talk. I want to talk about GHB and who’s using on campus.”

  “GHB, huh?” He sat and dropped the bag to the floor. “What’s in it for me if I tell you?”

  “Um . . . let me think . . . An interview?”

  He nodded, smiling, and took his pad and pen back out. “Riverside Park Apartments. Cory Sherman and his gang.”

  “That was easy.”

  “Have you met Cory? He’s something of Carlyle’s pet.”

  “I met him.”

  “If you’re like most women, you found him irresistible. Him and his sidekicks.”

  “Rod Lipton?”

  “He’s one of them. It’s not much of a mystery why this administration puts up with their depraved behavior. Money is the school mascot. Sherman’s uncle is—”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “You’ll find a drugstore in their apartment on the river. But Carlyle just looks the other way.”

  “Does the head of security know?” I asked, referring, of course, to Mike McCoy.

  “McCoy gets his orders from Carlyle. He’s the one who always bails them out.”

  “Are you sure you aren’t just averse to authority figures?”

  “You’re an authority figure and you’re affable—but maybe that’s because you’re amazingly naive for a seasoned trial lawyer.”

  “Naive? Watch out, Elliot, or I’ll break your Bics.”

  He sighed like I was some thickheaded child. “Mike McCoy is a puppet.”

  “He seems like a straight shooter to me. Of course I’m on tenure-track to unemployment by discussing any of this with you.”

  “Carlyle won’t fire you. You’re his façade of morality—his Swiss bank account. As soon as he finds your strings you’ll be dancing like a marionette, just like the others.”

  “Your cynicism matches my naiveté point for point, I’d say.”

  “You’ll see I’m right. But I like you anyway. You’re guileless but you’re not stupid. You’ll learn the ropes around here pretty fast, I think.” And with that, he whipped his black bag across his shoulders and stood. “You see? I’m getting an interview out of you and you haven’t even consented to it yet.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Life and Its Alternative

  I WAS FINALLY BEGINNING to accept the fact that I was never again going to see the inside of 150 South Main Street unless I committed murder myself. But daily routine, like emotional balance, kept my soul grounded, as the New Age flunkies would say.

  I’d finally nailed the trick of finding the same parking space near Langley Hall every morning, getting my coffee and raisin-bran muffin down at the student bistro with Elliot, who was, in his own arrogant yet endearing way, becoming a loyal sidekick, and then heading to my minuscule office to open the hottest, latest, fresh-from-the-oven files on spoiled little ne’er-do-wells. Elliot was actually more helpful to me than any of the administration in wading through the sterile waters of Holton. He was smarter than most of them, and enjoyed making sure I knew it.

  Most of my cases were easily resolved via negotiations so simple I could have done them in my sleep. The process was pretty much analogous to plea-bargaining with criminal defendants. When there was hard-core proof of cheating, I made the student agree to retake an exam. If a student whined about an unfair teacher, I’d schmooze with the partisan professor and then mollify the young scholar with optimistic promises of change. Sometimes these things just required an intermediary to improve diplomatic relations between professor and student, and I’d play the obliging middleman, preferring to douse as many fires as I could. Many cases boiled down to personality conflicts and students who expected teachers to be extensions of their parents—parents who had spoiled them silly and let them get away with murder at home as long as it was kept in the family. I was surprisingly good at the job. On some days I actually felt like an ace.

  More surprising, though, was that Ken Carlyle didn’t want to know much about what went on in my office unless a “special student” was involved. In the twisted lingo of Holton’s administrative insiders, “special student” denoted not a kid in need of remedial help, physical concessions to disabilities, or financial aid, but one whose parents’ summary annual donations to the school exceeded a certain amount of money (which figure was kept as closely guarded as the formula for Classic Coke). When a “special” student’s name arose at a staff meeting, Carlyle would dramatically slow down the conversation, signaling to one and all that our staff meeting had, temporarily, segued onto hallowed ground.

  All in all, I thought I was actually cooking with fire, until one Monday morning, the beginning of my fourth week at Holton, when living hell broke loose.

  Early to the office at seven-thirty, I was in an upbeat mood, and as I jaunted briskly to the front gates of Langley I took an emotional inventory of my petty existence at that sparkling moment in space and time: The Hastings murder investigation had lost some wind and Carlyle seemed to have retreated from the warpath; Mike and I were in an exciting flirtation stage still free of any messy physical componentry; Vince had not yet sent a hit man after me; and, once again, I had scored my excellent parking space. Life was good.

  The icy air burned my cheeks, making me tuck my face into my coat lapels, so I didn’t see Mike McCoy’s grim face until he was close enough to grab me by my sleeve. “Where’s your car?”

  “Oh, hey. My car? I just found a museum-quality parking space and no way I’m losing it for a make-out session.” I smiled at him, but he obvious
ly wasn’t in the mood for coquetry.

  “Let’s go.”

  He was pushing me out of the gates toward the street. “Are you crazy? I’m still in the probationary period and there’s a staff meeting this morning.” I pulled his arm off my sleeve. “Stop it. What’s wrong?”

  As if distracted by something, he looked away from me.

  “The staff meeting is canceled. Let’s go get your car.” He wouldn’t look at me.

  “All right, but if I get a ticket, you’re going to have those buddies of yours at the station pull it out of the system.”

  I couldn’t seem to get a smile out of him.

  “Mike? What is going on?”

  “I’ll tell you in the car,” he said, and arm in arm we hustled through the cold toward my Jeep, where he jumped into the driver’s seat and inched out of my tight parking space.

  “Is this a date?” I joked.

  He blew air out of his pursed lips in a faint whistle. “There’s been another murder. Another student.”

  I kept my eyes on the road, a childish and eternally hopeful part of me waiting for Mike’s low barreling laughter: Just kidding, babe, or something like that. But I knew, there in that car with him, that something serious was going down. But I didn’t really know he wasn’t joking until he said, “Same MO.”

  “Where are we going, Mike?”

  “Lisa Cummings is dead.”

  Something deep down in my throat constricted with a squeak and I groaned out loud, grabbing the wheel from him in a stranglehold. Mike fought the wheel away from me as the Jeep began swerving toward the curb. “Stop it!” he ordered. “Let go. Now!” He pulled the wheel to the right and slowed to a stop as he guided my car off the roadway.

  “I saw her at the gym. She was doing cocaine. I should have called Mitsy. Maybe they could have hospitalized her. I’m a lawyer, not a fucking psychiatrist!”

  “Get a hold of yourself. This has nothing to do with her cocaine use,” he said.

  “How do you know? Melinda Hastings had drugs in her too. Maybe this all has something to do with drugs.”

  “Cocaine and date-rape drugs are two entirely different substances. I don’t think Hastings or Cummings voluntarily ingested GHB to get high.”

  “What happened exactly, and when?”

  “Last night. Lisa’s body was found at a private boathouse at the foot of Grotto Ave. The owner noticed the door half open from his upstairs window and went down to investigate. She was lying in a dinghy next to the guy’s twenty-foot sailboat.”

  “The owner?”

  Mike pushed the gear in drive and pulled away from the curb.

  “The poor schmuck threw up outside before he went back to the main house and called the cops. He lives there alone with his wife. Their only daughter left for college in the fall.”

  We drove across Blackstone Boulevard into the East Side’s hidden enclave of ten-thousand-square-foot McMansions. Mike pulled up to a multitiered redbrick chateau looming on a hill and overlooking the Providence River, the inlet separating the East Side of Providence from East Providence, the town.

  We walked to the back of the property and saw, about a hundred yards down the lawn near the river, a lone boathouse, toward which Mike began to descend and I followed. I was reminded of an old and crucial lesson that day: Never get cocky, because even for an old pro like me, death always had encores.

  A forensic team had already removed the small rowboat from the boathouse and laid it out on the lawn. We stopped and watched from a safe distance as the medics lifted Lisa’s sodden body out and onto a white sheet in which she was then mummy-wrapped. The limp thing was hoisted by its ends into a black body bag and zipped shut. As I crept closer, Mike slowed up and hung back, his eyes closed to a squint. Either he was giving me some private space to react to the human gore I was approaching, or he wasn’t the big tough guy he pretended to be.

  Globs of curdled red matter floated in a red puddle in the boat’s hull. One of the medics stooped over the small mess with a hand shovel in one hand and an evidence bag in another, looking for anything that might belong to the killer, like a fleck of lint or a strand of hair. He shook his head and a couple of the other ME investigators covered the boat over in clear plastic while they waited for the tow truck that would remove it for more extensive testing.

  Mike stepped up and tapped my shoulder in temporary farewell and then walked over to a couple of cops hanging back by their curbed cruisers at the street. Two techs lifted the body bag onto a stretcher and began rolling it toward the ME retrieval truck parked on the road above.

  I recognized Lucky Dack as he exited the small boathouse structure. Lucky was so coal black he looked purple in certain lights, and was six four and impossible to miss. They called him Lucky because he’d won a state lottery, netting himself a yearly hundred grand for the next two and a half decades. Despite the windfall Lucky hadn’t quit his job at the morgue, and never would. To say he loved his work would have been a keenly accurate statement.

  He walked over to me. It had rained the night before and a brackish wind was slapping my hair around my face. “Lucky,” I said softly.

  “Hey, Miz Melone. Didn’t think I was gonna have the pleasure of seeing you again so soon.” He stepped back and nodded his head. “Another one of those college kids, huh?” He looked me sharp in the eye, making his own eyes sparkle, and held his hand over his chest. “I was heartbroken, you know, when they told me you . . . left the AG’s. I must admit I was shocked.”

  My simple shrug communicated volumes.

  “Sure, sure,” he said. “You can explain another time.” He glanced down at the ground, pursing his thick lips.

  “What happened here, Lucky?”

  While Mike helped two cops unwind yellow tape to cordon off the sidewalk and street, Lucky walked me to the medical examiner’s wagon as we talked.

  “I’m thinking she was killed or drugged somewhere else. Not enough struggle here. But he cut her up while she was in that boat.” He shook his head. “She was a pretty girl.” He raised his eyebrows. “Poor sweet thing. Her face was sliced up like a breakfast melon.” Then he leaned over and whispered to me. “And she was wearing a pretty little dress and panties. Brassiere. Kind with lots of hooks and straps. You know how I love that stuff.”

  Word around the medical examiner’s office was that Lucky liked his women cold.

  Lucky had a way of laughing with his head. It was a soundless laugh refined over the course of his twenty-year employment at the city morgue, where so much of what Lucky found amusing didn’t deserve raucous laughter. In his line of work he understood that there is no conversational etiquette in death. He managed completely one-sided conversations in which he did all the talking to an unwilling audience of the deceased’s relatives. Lucky fully expected these semiparalyzed silences while the concept of death congealed in the hearts of the survivors and became a thing able to be stacked in their mental attics like a box full of memories.

  The back doors of the ME wagon slammed shut.

  The press was now all over the place. A lone plainclothes detective was conversing with Mike and the cops, and for a brief moment Mike caught my eye as I finished up with Lucky and said my goodbyes. As soon as we parted company, Mike rushed over, though he said nothing. We walked back to my car in silence and he opened the passenger’s side door for me. “Wait. Let me sign off with these guys”—he nodded in the direction of the police cars—“and then I’ll drive you back.”

  He slammed the Jeep’s door shut and sprinted back to the police, who had left the vicinity of their cruisers and, apparently feeling freer now, were lounging around the scene proper. The truck carrying Lisa’s body was backing out of the driveway. Reporters were venturing toward the cops. Though the latter were no longer needed on the scene, they lingered. Cops are press-hounds and another Holton student death was a tremendous story.

  Feeling a bit light-headed, I rolled down the car windows and breathed in the sharp iodinated air. I wa
tched from the chilly silence of my front windshield as the various players renewed old friendships around the bloody grounds, chumming it up while the camera crews shot the entire incongruous scene through their wide-angle lenses.

  “Marianna.”

  I turned sharply to my side window to see Ken Carlyle’s face staring at me.

  “Dean Carlyle.”

  Mike was suddenly behind him. “Hey, Ken, what’s going down?”

  Carlyle did a half turn in his direction. “Holton’s reputation, I assume, if these murders continue. I hope you’re on top of damage control.” Then Carlyle spoke to Mike as if I weren’t present. “And why is Marianna here?”

  “I wanted her to see it. She should know what she’s dealing with.”

  I stuck my head partially out the window. “Um, excuse me.” They both turned to me. “I understand why you might be concerned for my welfare—from what I’m seeing, women aren’t safe on their own campus—but I can take care of myself. Thanks.”

  Mike gave me a nod and then abruptly walked around the front of the car, got in the driver’s seat, and turned the engine. I rolled up my window as Carlyle backed onto the lawn to watch us drive away.

  “What was that all about?” I asked.

  “Two bulls locking horns. He wants me to use my magic wand to stop the psychopath who’s goring coeds and strewing their entrails in a path to Holton’s door.”

  And with that the wind seemed to go out of my sails. The color of the morning light seemed to subtly change, as if the whole universe were infused with doom. I opened the window. “I think I’m going to be sick, Mike.”

  He pulled over and stopped. “Lower your head between your knees.”

  I didn’t move, so he pushed my head down and held it there. “Take a few slow, long breaths.”

  As I inhaled and exhaled, dizzy with nausea, Mike’s fingers massaged my skull as if he were a mentalist or a chiropractor. Or a shampoo girl. Then, as if reading my mind, he suddenly pulled his hand away. “You feel better?”

  I lifted my head slowly and turned to him. His big, wolflike eyes frightened me. Their pupils seemed pinned open.