by Liz Bradbury
“Oh, right,” I muttered sarcastically, “like Mickey would think of using a condom and then carefully dispose of it, but forget to put his pants on when the police came to talk to him.”
Sara went on, “There’s some blood evidence under Daria’s fingernails, but only a trace. The lab will take weeks on it. Mickey’s confession made the blood DNA a low priority. We’ll press for the test results and we’ll try to get the confession thrown out. Hey, and we have some new information. The marks on Daria’s neck indicate a cylindrical object pressed against her windpipe choked her. The police found a heavy marble rolling pin in her kitchen sink, in a pile of dishes. Possibly the murder weapon, they’re still testing it, but no prints. Daria must have been doing the dishes when she was attacked. The sink hose was draped in the sink; there was water all over the floor. The police searched for other physical evidence, but Daria hosted that office party in her apartment earlier that day. Two dozen people were there. They’d played charades and Twister. There was DNA everywhere...”
“I’ll check each party guest, maybe one of them did it,” I suggested.
“Well, we’ll get a list, but each one you rule out makes the shadow of doubt narrower and spotlights Mickey. It’s not our job to find the killer, only to get Mickey off.” Sara paused looking out the window, I knew she was considering the arguments she and Emma would use at Mickey’s hearing, she went on, “Of course, if you could find the real killer...”
“I’m not sure I could do that without ruling any of the others out,” I considered.
“I bet Storm could find the killer, or would she be too busy chasing women?” teased Emma.
“Woman-chasing in a fair match? Storm, She-ra or Wonder Woman?” I posed the names for consideration.
All three of us called out laughing, “Wonder Woman!”
“And don’t you forget it,” Emma declared as she turned into Washington Mews. “Maggie, I hope you didn’t mind my explaining to Mickey that you like girls...”
“Yeah, like I’d mind. Geez Emma, I’m as out as a lesbian can be.”
“I know, I know... of course it’s been a while since you had a girlfriend...” Emma ribbed.
I changed the subject, “Does Mickey choose superhero names for everyone?”
“Nope,” said Sara. “Only Justice League types like us get to be superheroes, the rest are just plain cartoon characters.”
“Halle Berry was so hot as Storm in the X-men but I don’t even know who the male Storm is, what does he look like?” I asked.
“He wears caveman clothes and is kind of huge like the Hulk but not green,” said Emma.
“I can’t believe you know that,” Sara muttered.
“I don’t look anything like that! I’m in pretty good shape. Does Mickey think I’m a Hulk type? I’ll have to go on a diet...”
“Your body’s fine, but you have the dullest wardrobe in Fenchester,” said my beloved but annoyingly accurate sister. “Mickey’s nicknames don’t have to do with how you look, they usually have something to do with your name. Yours was easy. Gale - Storm, get it? Wonder Woman is Strong, and even She-ra kind of sounds like Sara, and then he throws in the fighting for justice stuff, but that’s secondary. Some are impossible to figure out. He calls Farrel Case Fur Ball. She has no idea why, and by now neither does Mickey.”
Farrel Case is my best friend. We happened to be passing the rowhouse she and her partner Jessie Wiggins own in the Washington Mews Historic District. Emma swung into a parking spot in front of the four story converted factory building that houses Martinez and Strong, Attorneys at Law and Gale Investigations, Inc. By an extraordinary set of circumstances, I own the whole building. I’ve converted the third floor loft into my living space. I’m sporadically working on the fourth floor, but I had to take some time off from construction to actually earn a living. That’s one of the bummer things about self-employment; you actually have to work to make money. Of course Mickey’s pro-bono case, while morally satisfying, wasn’t exactly a cash cow.
We piled out of Emma’s car and Sara punched in the code to the keyless entry system. We can change the combination whenever we want without having to worry about replacing keys. We have other security precautions as well, even building-wide video surveillance with monitors in the offices and my loft. Lawyers and investigators often have enemies. It’s a byproduct of the legal eagle and beagle business. We climbed the stairs to our second floor offices.
At a desk in the small reception area, our shared secretary Evelyn Quaid chirped, “Emma, you have an ACLU board meeting in forty-five minutes, and...” she glanced at a memo, “Ingrid called and left a message on your voice mail." Emma scrambled into her office without a word and slammed the door. Sara howled laughter.
“Who’s Ingrid?” I asked Sara.
She caught her breath, pushing her dark curly hair back into place. “It’s what she calls the new girlfriend, and the name fits, she looks just like Ingrid Bergman.”
“Yum.”
“She’s a flight attendant,” Sara continued as she shrugged off her coat, “she flies to Paris several times a week, it’s thrown Emma’s schedule off completely. She actually goes on dates at 3:00 AM and gets to the office by 9:00 AM.”
“How’s that affecting her work?” I smirked.
“It’s improving it!”
“Sara, you’re due in court in thirty minutes and Maggie,” said Evelyn, “you have a message too. It’s from President Bouchet. He wants to see you.”
“Evie, you make him sound like the President of a country... is he?” I reached for the memo.
“Oh...well... I guess he might be,” said Evelyn slightly confused, “but he called from Irwin College.”
Sara called after me as I headed for my little office next door, “Gracias, querida, bien hecho.”
“De nada,” I called.
Sitting behind my desk I thought about Mickey. He was so alone. His family had found him too complicated, too different from them, too hard to understand. They’d moved away, leaving him behind in a lonely world to fend for himself.
I looked slowly around my office, from the big windows overlooking the rooftops of Washington Mews, to my private investigator license which I’d hung up less than a year ago, to a painting I’d done in art college. Next to the painting was a five-year-old photo of me in Fenchester City Hall, receiving my promotion to police lieutenant.
On my desk were two smaller pictures. The one of me on my eighth birthday sitting between my mother and father in an amusement park in western New York State was the last picture taken of my mother. She died just a few days later. She’d been an artist and taught me that the harder a problem was, the more unconventional the solution might have to be.
A prime example of my mom’s problem solving skill was my name. When family pressured my parents to name me after a wealthy yet unpleasant Aunt, Mehitabel Arrabella Gale, Mom and Dad regretfully conceded. Covertly, my mother crafted the plan to call me Maggie, using my initials M. A. G. for inspiration. Ultimately the wealthy Aunt didn’t cough up. Turned out she had debt up to her eyeballs. But my nickname stuck.
The other picture on my desk is of me when I was eleven, surrounded by my new family. Three years after my mother died, my father married the brilliant, wild, and often hilarious free spirit, Juana Anita Martinez. We not only added Juana to our family but her daughters, eight-year-old Sara and three-year-old Rosa. I learned to speak Spanish fluently from my new mother and sisters. I also learned I didn’t have to be sad and lonely any more.
I shook myself out of this little reverie and placed a call to Irwin College. The president’s secretary put me on hold.
“This is Max Bouchet,” said a deep booming voice over the phone a minute later. “I hope you can help us Ms. Gale. We have a problem here at Irwin College, and you’ve been recommended to me by...well, let’s just say it was someone in the police department. I’d rather not talk about this over the phone, so if you’re free this afternoon at 1:45...” I
agreed to meet him at his office in the Administration building.
Dr. Max Bouchet was the new President of Irwin. He’d only been there about two months. He hadn’t even been formally installed. Like many college presidents, Bouchet was a corporate guy. The bottom line is the line a college president must toe these days. Some businessmen can pull it off. Others struggle with the academicians from their very first minute on campus.
The newspapers had been full of how Bouchet was a major young CEO who had recently sold his successful company for an obscenely large amount of money. He could probably buy Irwin lock, stock, and barrel, with enough Benjamins left over to live happily-ever-after in a palatial tropical paradise. Yet, Bouchet had applied for the Irwin leadership job because he said he was devoted to learning and knowledge. He had a doctorate in economics.
Bouchet also was one of very few African American private college presidents in the US. Probably the only one who also happened to be a multimillionaire. And he’d just called me to come and see him about a problem. How cool was that?
I thought I already knew what Irwin College’s problem was. Just a few days ago there’d been a suicide there. Sad to say that while suicides on college campuses are tragic, they’re not all that rare. Overworked, under pressure students, fueled by drugs, alcohol, teen hormones, and depression, sometimes choose the one-way express to oblivion. Colleges keep the frequency of these tragedies quiet so tuition-paying parents don’t get cold feet about sending their fragile progeny away from the nest.
But this campus suicide was different. It had been a faculty member, Dr. Carl Rasmus, who’d jumped from a six-story building. It was still making the local front page days after the body had been discovered. The police were still, declining to comment, on the circumstances, but the local press and TV had a load of read-between-the-lines innuendo.
Sara and Emma had both briefly served with the late Carl Rasmus on the Pennsylvania Gay and Lesbian Committee on Performing Arts. Though they hadn’t known him well they’d felt his death personally. I could talk to them about Rasmus later. But now, I went on-line and searched all the local newspapers for information.
Rasmus had been an Assistant Professor in the Music History Department. Music History was a relatively new program at Irwin, but then Irwin College was so old, anything less than 100 years was considered new-fangled. On Rasmus’s last birthday, he’d been thirty.
He was in his fourth year of teaching at Irwin and nearing the odious period of a tenure review. According to the papers, he’d finished his doctorate just two years before and had actually published quite a bit; he was well liked and had made significant contributions to the College. Of course, this was all being said about him after he was dead, in the don’t speak ill of period.
The papers mentioned that Rasmus was an expert in 20th century American composers and that he played the piano, oboe, and the clarinet. He was single, hard working, and had been blind from birth. I reread that part because it was a surprise. Nothing had been mentioned about his blindness on the TV news. Even Sara and Emma hadn’t mentioned it. I wondered how he got around his disability when it came to reading and grading student’s work. In fact, campus communication in general, now almost completely done via email, must have been very complicated for someone who couldn’t see.
Just two days ago an article in the Fenchester Daily News said Rasmus had left a detailed note on his computer indicating his reasons for taking his own life, but the text of the note wasn’t included.
Chapter 2
The edge of Irwin College has been just two blocks west of Washington Mews since about 1860. For more than a century before that it was in the middle of town in what’s now the Fenchester Historical Society building. Irwin College was one of the first ten colleges in the United States and probably the very first dedicated to art and architecture.
You’d think there’d be soaring experimental architecture cantilevering all over the place. There’s a little of that, and a little over-attention to Neo Rococo detail in some of the 19th century buildings, but all in all there’s an almost anal restraint in the designs and ornamentation of most of the structures. It’s as though the designers had a desperate fear of creating something that would someday be outdated. So they stuck to the tried and true principles of design and beauty: the arithmetic mean, the properties of scale and balance, elements that occur in nature, but not too natural. Maybe a good school motto for Irwin would have been, “Form Follows Function As Long As It’s Beautiful, Simple and Not Too Ostentatious,” which, when you think about it, is not a bad plan.
Not too ostentatious... until you look closely. There’s attention to architectural detail in the placement of every brick and the planting of every shrub. The proportions of the windows in relation to the façades of even the most mundane buildings are painstaking. Only a couple of Irwin’s structures are ugly or cheap looking. The rest are gems.
I walked the four blocks to the Irwin Administration Building, not because I wanted the exercise, but because in the middle of the day finding a parking place there would be like finding room for a king-sized bed in a sardine can. People going to Irwin actually parked in my block. So even though it was December and wet, gray, and cold out, I grabbed my shoulder bag and took to the slush covered sidewalks.
I was wearing a heavy polo shirt, fresh black jeans, a wool blazer, and my new squall parka. The parka had a spiffy lined hood in case I needed a hat, and special lined pockets strategically placed for optimum hand-warm-ability. I really liked this jacket.
Winter in small Eastern cities can seem particularly grim on days like this. Regular municipal street sweeping ends in November. Fewer homeowners sweep sidewalks in the cold. Casually dropped litter or over-spill from trash pick-ups accumulates. People stay inside. In winter, the city looks best at night when sundown hides the grime and trash, and holiday lights twinkle.
Irwin College has many confusing buildings, pathways, gardens and monuments, but it’s easy to find the Administration Building. It’s dead center in the half circle drive off Washington Street, in the main area of the campus. Even better, over the door is a huge polished granite sign with gilt letters that says Administration Building. Its marble steps were no longer in the pale gray sunlight, so puddled slush had turned to ice. It felt slick as I made my way up to the double glass doors.
In the middle of the lobby was a huge donut-shaped reception desk. In the donut hole a student sat on a stool eating an apple and reading a textbook laid open on the counter. Her long straight hair fell forward making a hair-sided pipeline to the book pages. She’d grown her own cubicle.
I considered asking for directions, but I couldn’t bear to break her concentration. The sign next to the elevator said the President’s office was on the fourth floor. The doors were open, so I rode up.
The elevator opened into what was definitely a rich guy’s domain. My shoes sank deep into the luxurious carpet pile. The hall was decorated with real art from the College’s permanent collection. I stopped to admire a large Peter Milton etching of a cat sitting on a garden wall. Opposite it was a Robert Rauschenberg silk screen and a Louise Nevelson pressed paper serigraph. This stuff was original, no offset litho reproductions here. Impressive.
The hallway ended at a perpendicular space, which formed a wide reception area. On the far wall were several doors. I figured the one with the reception desk in front must be Bouchet’s office. The receptionist was studying a piece of paper. She looked about twenty, had fluffy blond hair and a figure that would kindly be called plump and cattily be called porky. Inexpertly applied make-up tried but failed to make her seem older.
“Maggie Gale?” she squeaked. When I nodded, she said with sincerity, “I’m sorry, President Bouchet is on the phone. He asked if you could just wait for a few minutes. Would that be OK? Would you like some coffee?”
“No thank you... Ms...?” I extended my hand. Her blue eyes widened. Nobody ever asked who she was.
“Connie Robinson,” she sa
id shaking my hand.
I smiled back. I took off my jacket and hung it up on a coat rack in the corner and sat down in one of the chairs lined up against a wall of windows. From there, I could see the entrance to the stairs in front of me. To my right was Connie at her desk. To my immediate left were double doors with a sign that read, Large Conference Room.
The beige wall-to-wall carpeting ran from the elevator throughout the reception area. On top of the carpet in front of Connie’s desk, were two beautiful, handmade Asian rugs. Rugs like these were a special passion of mine. Each was about five by seven feet. One was a late 19th century camel hair Afshar, probably from Southern Persia. It had a beautiful dark blue field with a red geometric diagonal pattern. The other was a Heriz silk of about the same age, with an intricately patterned medallion in the center. The corner of the Heriz was flipped over as though it had a mind of its own.
A sign on one of the other doors to the right said, Miranda Juarez, Assistant to the President. The door opened and a small capable looking woman in her late forties came toward me with her hand extended.
“Ms. Gale? I am Miranda Juarez, President Bouchet’s assistant,” she said with a strong Latino inflection, a firm handshake, and a confident manner. “We are just waiting for two other people to arrive for a quick meeting in President Bouchet’s office. Then he would like you to meet with a larger group in the conference room.”
I heard the elevator ding. Two people came down the art-lined hall. First came a man about thirty years old with thick blond hair parted in the middle, a ruddy complexion, and a huge handlebar mustache. He tugged on his mustache with one hand, trying to balance a load of loose papers in the other. He had nerd-alert stamped all over him.
He and the woman who came after him must have come directly from outside because he had on a puffy down jacket and she was wearing a tailored dark tweed coat and red scarf. When the nerd-alert man got almost to the reception desk he dropped the papers. They scattered all over the floor at his feet. He dove down on his hands and knees and began pushing the papers into a pile. The woman in the coat, Miranda, Connie and I all moved to help him, but he waved us away by flailing his arms.