Defenseless

by Celeste Marsella

  Sherman tried to laugh it off. Two other students who apparently were sharing whatever he was inhaling moved quickly toward the door and hustled back inside the apartment. Sherman’s expression lightened up. “Miss Melone, did we get you a refreshment yet?”

  Rod was in the doorway.

  Cory spoke to him like his private valet. “Why don’t you get Miss Melone a drink? What will you have?” he asked me.

  “I’ll have what you’re having.” I nodded toward the glass table.

  “Sure,” Cory said as he brought me his half-empty beer bottle. “You want my beer? I can share.”

  “Thanks, but I meant the cocaine. It is cocaine, isn’t it?”

  Sherman’s face crunched into another scowl. Pumped up on coke, he was switching emotional gears like channels on a rotary dial. He dismissively plopped into a patio chair.

  “Can I talk to you inside a minute?” Rod said to me.

  Rod was being too civil, so I ignored him. The best information is gotten from someone who’s pissed off and ready to blow, so I stayed with Cory. I needed to make a quick decision about how much information I would share in order to secure their trust.

  I sat opposite Cory on another chair, and knowing that Cory was too smart to be duped, I went right for the gold. “Can you tell me anything about Lisa and Melinda? I know they were friends of yours.”

  He shook his head. “Slicing up those pretty faces and then letting them bleed to death. Fucking brutal stuff, huh?”

  I hated to let him swear in my presence but I was on his turf now and had to play by his rules. “I didn’t think that was common knowledge. How’d you know?”

  “Talk,” he said. “There are very few secrets in this place.”

  Rod came out with an opened bottle for me. I sat back and pretended to take a swig as a peace offering. The last thing I needed was to get slogged at a student party by beer—and their house specialty, GHB.

  “What are you doing here anyway? You think I’m going to break down and tell you I killed two girls?” Cory laughed. “I’m stoned, not stupid. That’s not my idea of fun anyway.”

  “Maybe the fun got out of hand and it was your way of keeping things quiet.”

  “Good theory, but what’s your proof that anything got out of hand?”

  “Emily Barton—”

  “I don’t even know that girl.”

  “Ah, but she seems to know you . . . intimately. And not just once.”

  Cory Sherman chilled fast. He didn’t flinch. Coked up and all, he barely even reacted to my accusation.

  “You got a pencil, Miss Melone? Let’s make a list of the girls I’ve fucked on this campus. Two end up dead. Why them and not the others?”

  “Who was that girl on the balcony before I got here? The one you hit?”

  Rod had been standing in the doorway. He inched closer to us.

  “Miss Melone?” Rod suddenly said. “About Mila. Believe me, no one hit her. I don’t know what you think you saw from the street, but she wasn’t injured in any way. She actually started the fight.”

  “Shut up, Rod,” Sherman said.

  Rod came closer to me and at over six feet tall he bowed his head to my eye level. “We’re just regular college students having some fun. Believe me. If we knew anything about Lisa’s death—or Melinda’s—we’d be the first to help the police. They were our friends but they were never here at our parties.”

  Cory had lit up a cigarette. “Don’t bother lying to her, Rod.” He looked at me. “So they were here. Maybe we even screwed them. But we didn’t kill them.”

  “What about Barton? Rape might not be murder, but it’s in really bad taste.”

  Cory rose from his chair. “The only bad taste I worry about is a turned bottle of ’61 Chateau Margaux.”

  “And are you lacing that Margaux with a sprinkle of GHB?”

  Rod was watching us from a distance as if he were judging a crucial audition. But Sherman had apparently forgotten his lines. He stood speechless, looking out into the dark river over the balcony railing.

  I looked from one to the other. “All righty then, this party’s over for me. If either of you so much as blows on the hair of another student, I’ll force Emily Barton to go to the police. So even if you’re both innocent of murder, one of you, at least, will be doing time for rape, a.k.a. first-degree sexual assault.”

  Rod stiffened. Cory, however, laughed at me.

  “No one raped that Barton girl,” he said. “And if she says anything about my parties, she’s got to admit she was here imbibing all the booze and illegal drugs!” He laughed again.

  “Where are you getting the GHB, Sherman? Are you cooking it up here?”

  He laughed out loud. “Yeah, I’m a real Emeril Lagasse. Can’t you just see me in a white chef ’s coat?”

  “And stay away from my sister.” I walked out as Hendrix was belting out “Purple Haze,” but I was seeing only red. Elliot was gone.

  On the way to my car I dialed the police at the private number I always used from the AG’s office. A young detective answered the phone. I gave him Cory’s address and told him I’d just left a party where cocaine was snowing like a Bing Crosby Christmas. The putz cop was in his twenties and didn’t know who Bing Crosby was, and consequently assumed I was a crank caller. Not that it mattered. Whatever cocaine was in Sherman’s apartment, I’m sure, was long gone minutes after I walked out the door. But I’d get him sooner or later. Maybe not that night, but I was going to get the hoodlum princes if it was the last thing I did.

  I slammed my shift into drive and heard the sudden whirl of a high-pitched engine. From out of nowhere appeared a red sports car of such elite origin that I myself was ignorant of its pedigree. The car slowed to a screeching halt next to mine and Mila Nazir emerged from the driver’s side door. With the car’s engine still screaming, she shouted something at me. Her black hair billowed in the wind behind her, and her eyes were dark and wild. Red lipstick was smeared across her lips as if she had been eating pomegranates with abandon. I exited my car to approach her. Her eyes followed mine until I was close enough that she could spit at me.

  “Does Dean Carlyle know you’re bothering us?” she said. “If you continue to harass me, I will have you sued. I will have you fired.”

  What drugs she was operating under I didn’t know, but I backed away, realizing that she was out of control and at least temporarily out of her mind.

  As if the demon had been exorcised, she became still and quiet. Blinking a few times, she slowly reentered her car and sat still behind the wheel. I waited for a safe second or two of silence and then walked to her.

  “You shouldn’t be driving,” I said. “Pull over and park the car.”

  She looked at me and studied my face before she spoke. “Dean Carlyle made a mistake with you. A mistake.”

  She shook her head slowly, pulled her door closed, and drove away.

  Back in my car, I revved up my engine as two people exited Rod and Cory’s building. Walking in my direction was a man with a woman hanging tightly on his side. Her face was nuzzled into his neck, but her hair tumbled down his chest in strawberry blonde waves. They stopped and he steadied her against his body, began whispering to her, then turned her around to face him. I wouldn’t have continued to watch, but the closer they got, the more the male resembled not a student but someone older, and, at even closer range, began to resemble an older man I recognized as—Mike McCoy.

  Had the bedroom door in Lipton and Sherman’s apartment been slammed in my face by Mike? Was a redheaded coed his perk for protecting Cory and Rod—a sacrificial coed under the influence of alcohol, or worse, GHB?

  He’s the one who always bails them out, Elliot had warned me. Mike McCoy is a puppet. And what was it Emily had said? He likes the students to call him Mike.

  I geared into reverse and parked, hidden, behind another car. I watched as they walked a short distance to Mike’s car. He helped the girl into the passenger side, gently touching the top
of her head to protect it from hitting the door, and then closing her in. As soon as he sat behind the wheel, she lunged toward him and fell against him where they became a solid mass of body and her head slid down his chest out of view. He immediately started the engine and sped off. For a more secluded venue perhaps? Maybe this was Mike’s modus operandi with women: Pump them full of alcohol, take them for a test drive along the river, and then scurry off to complete the Indy 500 at his place. I suddenly felt like a dipstick in a string of Mike’s regularly scheduled oil changes.

  But, hey, I wasn’t going to cry over Mike McCoy. Some guys you cry over—the one with whom you’d already picked out a name for the baby you were carrying, or the guy who’d made you pool your assets in a joint account shortly after he got the big bonus, and maybe the one you’d been doing Sunday crossword puzzles with for the last two consecutive years. These were the ones you pined after, the ones who were taking a little of your heart with them on their way out of town.

  But Mike McCoy? Nah. He probably couldn’t even do a crossword puzzle unless it was in the back of the NASCAR Winston Cup Illustrated.

  My heart would heal soon enough. But my ego was a more fragile thing. If Mike was steeped in the nasty business of Cory and Rod’s enterprises, how could I ever trust my judgement again? I dared not even consider the possibility that he was capable of rape. Murder. How could I not have seen the rough in the diamonds—his sparkling eyes and the danger behind them?

  I drove straight home, shivering and feeling like death. I needed a good night’s sleep to prepare me for another day at Holton, where I hoped in the morning the body count held steady at two.

  THIRTY

  Camp Cassie

  I ARRIVED IN MY office early the next morning, deciding it was time to throw caution, and quite possibly my job, to the wind. Mitsy Becker’s name had come up one too many times for me to keep ignoring it. I found her name in my online Rolodex and dialed her up.

  “Hi, Dr. Becker, this is Marianna Melone.”

  There was a pause in which I sensed, if not wariness, at least a healthy dollop of caution, and then, “Yes. Hello, Marianna. Please call me Mitsy. You’re in quite early this morning.”

  “Yes, and I hope I’m not disturbing you, but I’d like to look through some of your closed files. Some of what you and I do here at Holton seems to overlap. Emily Barton, for instance—”

  “Why would you want closed files?”

  “Just as a reference point. You know, to see how you were handling things, to shorten my learning curve here.”

  “Yes, of course. But then there is the confidentiality problem . . .”

  “With the closed files of the dead girls also? And don’t forget, I’m sworn to confidentiality too.”

  “Well . . . to tell you the truth, there are no closed files. When and if I ever open a file on a student, it’s destroyed as soon as the student’s problem is resolved—or when they stop coming. For routine things such as colds and flu—but those aren’t the ones you’re interested in, are they?”

  “No. I’m interested in drug dependencies.”

  I heard a chuckle at the other end of the phone. “Files can be discovered by good attorneys, so shredding is the smartest course of action—or not opening them to begin with. We only keep records of dates and times. Scheduling records, if you will.”

  “Sounds a bit legally precarious to me. If I were a doctor treating a patient, I would want a record of it for my own protection.”

  “This is a small school, Marianna. I have chats now and then with some of the students. We don’t have to keep a record of a simple discussion when there’s no real treatment involved. And I assure you, no one will sue us for keeping their privacy.”

  “All right, then. Give it to me straight up, Mitsy. What happened with Lisa? The drugs. You don’t think we had the last clear chance to help her? You don’t think we failed her at all?”

  Mitsy answered quickly, as if she had thought about this question already. Her genes were programmed for guilt, as mine were, but she’d already worked through it, as I supposed I might have done if I stayed at Holton long enough.

  Or maybe not.

  Mitsy answered, “Lisa was never caught with drugs on her. The most we could have done is sent her home. But amazingly, she was passing all her courses. You can’t expel someone for being a threat to herself. Her family failed her, not this school.”

  There it was, Mitsy’s absolution. It was Lisa’s family’s fault, not Holton’s—or hers. Was Mitsy Becker in denial because she was a bad therapist, or was she denying things because she was worried too?

  “Dr. Becker, failing courses shouldn’t be the only reason we take a troubled kid under our wings. You know as well as I do that there are plenty of ways to pass classes that don’t involve studying. A lot of brilliant kids end up in trouble, and their grades never suffer.”

  “Are you indicting me, Marianna? Do you think Lisa is my fault?”

  “I think Lisa’s death was a cumulative effort by Holton to protect its reputation at the expense of some of the students. Oddly enough, in an effort to protect Lisa, we let her down by looking the other way while she was falling deeper into trouble.”

  “Marianna, just a word of caution to the wise, if you wish to accept it. This isn’t the attorney general’s office and these kids aren’t hardened criminals, so go easy on them, or it won’t be easy for you.”

  “I’m not sure what that means.”

  “I’d like to see you do well here. We need someone like you—a breath of fresh air in this musty place. So try to listen to what Ken says with both ears open. He’ll tell you how he wants to move these cases forward, but you have to listen very carefully.”

  “And when a matter is resolved in my office, I just throw the file away?”

  “Rita will give the incident reports to Ken.”

  “And he keeps them?”

  “We don’t have to know everything. We just have to do our jobs and let Ken do his.” I let it go. I wasn’t going to put Mitsy on the spot just because I was willing to buck authority and lose my job.

  Mitsy and I hung up. I felt a little pang, as if I had given in too easily, but I understood Mitsy’s healthy fear of fraternizing—with me or any of the employees. She was protecting everyone, herself included. Mitsy was like Switzerland. She was where you could hide secrets with no questions asked and a gracious smile. But if my secrets were safe with her, so were everyone else’s.

  The last few seconds Mitsy and I were on the phone, my light was blinking away. Rita had picked up the call and taken a message which she now relayed to me word for word, leaving out what I knew were my mother’s histrionic exclamations.

  Hand-picked by her school to attend, Cassie had been in chaotic preparation for a weeklong soccer camp on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. (Her SATs may have been Dumpster material, but at soccer she was tenure-track to pro. I, at her age, couldn’t even kick a basketball.) Cassie was threatening not to attend because my mother had forbidden her to pack any clothes not sports-related. This would be my little sister’s first time so far away from—in her words—her “overprotective, stifling parents,” and rumor had it, said my mother, that there were off-campus parties planned for which Cassie had packed a number of provocative outfits.

  I told Rita I’d be back shortly and then drove to my parents’ place to find the militarily spit-polished house in a turmoil: Cassie’s clothes were strewn over every available piece of furniture. Toiletries covered her bathroom floor as she made the excruciating decisions about which eye shadows to pack and which to leave forlornly behind, how many dozen pairs of soccer cleats she needed, and whether she would need a strapless bra. My mother wrung her hands in anticipatory terror. Her tragically bent reasoning was that even if Cassie managed to survive the bus ride to the Cape, she would surely be raped or butchered if she forayed into big bad Provincetown after dark. I made the mistake of warning Cassie about her previous use of fake IDs in bars and her recent underag
e drinking spree at Nick and Tony’s, and my audio-acute mother overheard me. The three demons of hell were unleashed as Cassie, my mother, and I screamed at each other in seemingly foreign tongues. My presence proved useless, and after a final bellow at Cassie for making me leave work, I slammed out the door and felt guilty about it as soon as my front tires left the driveway. My short temper with Cassie always came back to haunt me in the form of guilt. I considered myself more like her mother than her sister, and I should have known better than to let her go off on a sleep-away trip with my parting words to her You’re going to end up in a ditch if you don’t lose that cocky little attitude.

  I calmed down and sped back to work, swearing under my breath because now I was late and I’d undoubtedly lost my usual parking spot on George Street.

  I was still looking for a substitute space when a police car drove past me and through the front gates. I discontinued my search and frantically followed the black-and-white. I pulled into a visitor parking spot and shrugged my shoulders at the potential Holton parking violation that would soon be added to the liability column of my deteriorating employment record.

  In my office, O’Rourke had already made himself comfortable behind my desk. He was using his coffee cup as an ashtray while Rita danced around him spraying canned Lysol through his smoke rings and trying to interest him in a tasty chiclet of nicotine gum.

  “Fräulein!” Rita noticed me first. “It is the police. I’ve been keeping him company.” Her dark eyes dazzled as she held the Lysol can to her breast.

  “Rita, you’re an ace. I’ll take it from here.”

  Like a proud mare at the finish line, Rita shook her chin-length mane and pixie bangs. “The pleasure was all mine.” She backed out of my doorway.

  It felt like home with O’Rourke in my office. Like the old days when we’d be playing cat and mouse with defendants’ lives, and not thinking a lick about the consequences. And if I had been back at the AG’s under this same scenario, I would be smiling. But something about being at Holton made me feel defensive. Like I was the robber and O’Rourke was coming for me.