by Alaric Hunt
“Oh.” She turned back from the window. “Sorry, too much school talk. Call me Michelle, will you? Anyway, Columbia is a traditional school. It’s not a diploma mill. The early years are meant to be tough. They mean to push you out of school, and I guess it’s better that way. Not at all like Harvard, which is under a national microscope, so some students get an automatic pass. Columbia is tough because it’s not as famous. Crazy, right? But a weeder course weeds out weak students, and an ax is a tough professor—they cut out dead wood, students who struggle to make good grades. Some of them really put pressure on the bright students, since it’s not all about being smart. Toughness, grace under pressure—the axes are looking for that. Wyatt went after both of them, and they stuck together against him.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Last semester.” She smiled, and her eyes brightened. “Cammie changed her plans after that. She wasn’t prelaw then. She was retaking a mandatory she’d flunked last year, and admin—administration, the deans—was making Greg retake the mandatories because of the time he spent away from school. See, he transferred credits from the University of Wisconsin. That’s a good school, but he lacked his senior credits and it was years ago that he went there. He wasn’t even prelaw at UW. So she was chasing him, and she was way behind. She didn’t do summer sessions, except that she was trying to catch up with him.”
“She was more relaxed before she met Olsen?”
“Absolutely. Cammie didn’t have anyplace to be anytime soon. Once she started with Greg, that’s when she wanted to keep up.”
“The difference in age wasn’t a problem? He’s a lot older—”
Tompkins rolled her eyes, and Guthrie’s question slowed to a halt. “That’s true, but it didn’t hurt him. He spent some years in the army. That’s how he was paying for Columbia. Being older just made him a man in the pool of boys. A few years didn’t hurt him a bit.”
“With Bowman, you mean?”
“Her, too.” Tompkins grinned, then eased away from the window. “Let me get you something to drink. You like juice?” She padded barefoot into the kitchen.
One small table filled most of the space on the kitchen’s tiled floor, penned between countertops. Above the sink, a small window looked out onto the street. The refrigerator and stove flanked it in a tiny triangle. With tall glasses of orange juice, they crowded around the small table, and their voices dropped to the whispers of conspirators.
“You knew them both pretty well,” Guthrie said, and gave Tompkins a moment to assent. “Where were you on the evening of the twenty-third?”
She frowned, realizing he was asking about the night of Bowman’s murder. She tucked a lock of hair behind her round, pale ear and bit her lip. “I was here. I had to give an oral on the twenty-fourth, so I was prepping.”
“What about them? Do you know where they were?”
“I didn’t keep track like that.”
“I’ve heard different from other people, Michelle.”
She reddened. “That’s crazy.”
“People wouldn’t notice you if you weren’t there,” Guthrie said.
“Not that. You can’t be saying I killed Cammie.”
The little detective shrugged and finished his glass of orange juice. Vasquez covered her mouth and pretended indifference. Guthrie had warned her he would turn the interview after he let Tompkins talk for a while. As a suspect, Michelle Tompkins seemed unlikely, but he wouldn’t walk around it without looking to see if odd numbers added up.
“Maybe,” he said. “I can’t see your connection yet. You got some interest here, or this doesn’t get pushed in the first place. My imagination is free to supply motives.” Guthrie jabbed at the tabletop with a finger. “They’re law students, but you’re international studies—nothing there. Undergrads, you’re a grad student. You don’t match up in age with either one of them. They’re Hollywood pretty, you’re a step or two above plain—”
“Oh, you are so full of it!” she exclaimed.
“Then what puts you together with them?”
“I had something they both wanted! I know the ropes at Columbia.”
Guthrie frowned and dropped his hat onto the small tabletop. “I’ll accept that for a why—but not a how. That’s why you had something to do together, not how you came to find out about it. How always comes along in front of why. You meet someone before you discover what use they are to you—”
“Cammie’s my cousin. She’s from the other side, my father’s side,” she said. “She’s not a Whitney, but she has the curse—a trust, legacy, expectations.…”
Guthrie settled back into his chair, frowning. “Okay, your cousin.”
“My cousin. I didn’t meet Greg until after she did.”
The little detective nodded slowly. “I get it. Olsen wasn’t in the picture until last semester. Maybe that was around the time Bowman slowed down at the Long Morning After. Did you used to spend time with her there?”
“That doesn’t have anything to do with this,” Tompkins said, reddening. “It’s illegal to get drunk?”
“Not at your age, but it was at hers. And X don’t come from a pharmacy anytime—but that ain’t what I’m after here,” Guthrie said. “Bowman was a regular at the Long Morning After. I don’t need you to confirm that. I got that. She was snatched right outside that place. Maybe somebody you know, or saw, knew her from there.” Watching her expression, he stopped. “No, that wasn’t on the TV, was it? You didn’t know that. Something got her killed, Michelle.”
“They said she wasn’t raped,” Tompkins whispered.
He shrugged. “Maybe college boys are smart. Maybe they learn things while they’re watching TV instead of going to class, like being satisfied with just making somebody dead. But back to you. When you went to the Long Morning After with her, did you roll with her, or did you watch from a booth? Did you go upstairs? Is that where she really met Olsen?”
“They call it LMA—just LMA. That’s not where she met Greg,” Tompkins said. “Greg didn’t have anything to do with LMA. If—” She drew a deep breath and glanced around the small kitchen as if she wanted an exit.
Guthrie watched her struggle for a moment, then waved a hand to cut her efforts short.
“I don’t mind a whitewash, but I still got a problem. Somebody took Bowman outside”—he paused—“LMA. That doesn’t look like coincidence. You’re looking at it from a seat inside that angle. Who do I look at there? Who wanted her?”
Tompkins laughed, then stopped quickly. “You’re kidding, right? Everybody wanted Cammie. You’ve seen some pictures.” She frowned and studied Guthrie for a moment, sparing a glance for Vasquez. The question was serious because Camille Bowman was dead.
“Nothing’s going to make this easy,” she said finally. “You’ll be walking out into a minefield. This’s Columbia University in New York City. We have the best, the brightest, and the most powerful. If LMA was involved, then maybe it was one of the Greeks. She was a sister, and LMA is a Greek hangout. Outsiders do go to the club, but the Greeks are deep there. She went outside with Greg—he wasn’t a Greek. They were scared of him, though. They didn’t try any of the usual games with him. After I got to know him, I knew they made the right decision, to leave him alone.”
Tompkins smiled, looking at Vasquez. “It just sounds complicated. They wanted her back with them, and maybe they would’ve done anything to break them up. Sport fucking, gossip, whatever would work. Greg was too old for games, though. And whatever it was about him, bouncing into him made Cammie grow up in a hurry.”
“Then the Greeks it is,” Guthrie said. He gave Tompkins a searching look as he plucked his fedora from the table.
“Do it,” she said. “Greg didn’t kill her. I didn’t kill her. But she’s dead. Next to that, nothing else matters. But if a Greek did it…”
The little detective nodded. “Maybe it don’t matter, but it can stay in the dark.”
The afternoon was even hotter when they went back o
utside. The air conditioning in Tompkins’s building was a spoiler. They had a long walk back to the car. Vasquez was quiet because she was thinking. Michelle Tompkins had shown her a glimpse of college, and it didn’t seem so different from the barrio. The muchachos in the neighborhood played games with the chicas, clowned their rivals, and tried to tear people apart with drugs and intimidation. That wasn’t new to her. Seeing the blancos doing the same things behind their closed doors, that was new. Papì had that part wrong. That part of the world wasn’t different, or safe. Just like the muchachos crossed the line sometimes, and somebody got killed, that could happen anywhere, to anybody. Guthrie had an angry look on his face. He was going to find out who killed Camille Bowman. Vasquez could see that in the firmness of his step. She understood then why HP Whitridge paid the little man money to sit around and do nothing. He wanted him nearby if something important came up. Money didn’t matter next to that. Just like reasons didn’t matter when someone was dead.
CHAPTER SEVEN
That afternoon, Guthrie’s office in the Garment District seemed like a different place to Vasquez. Trucks thundered by with late deliveries and outgoing products; that was the same. Traffic piled up in a screeching battle of horns and shouts when the kids pushed racks of clothes in the street; that was the same. Vasquez sat still while she worked; even that was the same. The difference was that she could see something coming from it. That was enough.
The little man ordered bad pizza, like he always did in the afternoon. He wanted mushroom and sausage—Vasquez could hear him on the phone—and the pizza would come with that and pineapple. She didn’t know, but maybe it was some kind of joke. Guthrie ate it and never complained. Tranh, a Vietnamese with a big hat, always brought the pizza. Guthrie would pretend to speak Vietnamese to him and he would laugh and accept an oversized tip. The pizza boxtops were like a portfolio of old record albums in the storage room in the back.
That afternoon, Guthrie showed her how to read the police reports from his contact at Police Plaza. After he explained, the jargon wasn’t difficult to understand, and she could see how different things related to reveal a method. NYPD went by a system. Guthrie pointed out that they had blind spots and weaknesses, but in what they did, they were thorough.
Uniformed officers had canvassed heavily along the Harlem River, near the scene of the murder. They had some “shots fired” reports from the night of July 23, but all those interrogated had been noted down as “busybodies.” Guthrie wasn’t too interested in those, except for practice, because none of them really agreed on two shots—they claimed from one to five, seemingly at random. He made Vasquez push pins into a wall map of the city to locate the site of each report. A few days later, the uniforms had canvassed again, but in Morningside, in the area around the Long Morning After. They’d found nothing worthwhile but the bartender, Sand Whitten.
Tommy Johnson called while Vasquez was finishing a hardened crust of mushroom and sausage pizza. Guthrie usually put his calls on speaker to keep from handling the phone. The little detective spent the first few minutes saying “Uh-huh” and letting the young man calm down. Tommy was getting kicked around in the ISU lab for bringing Guthrie inside. His next stop would be typist or errand boy, and he didn’t know which of those looked better. He wanted to take a bus back to Ohio.
Finally he slowed, and Guthrie said, “Boy, it’ll get back better. They can’t keep you down. I mean, who else over there can actually take that chromatograph apart and put it back together—”
“I put it back together wrong!”
“Well, you didn’t have any leftover parts, like I do when I rebuild a transmission—”
“Guth, they want to kill me!”
The little detective made shushing motions at Vasquez. She was using her Yankees cap to smother some laughter. He threw a wad of paper at her, because some of Tommy’s distress was her fault, for overreacting during the interview, even though Guthrie had accepted the blame at the time.
“The only good thing that happened that morning was meeting that girl, Rachel,” Tommy said. Vasquez’s laughter came to a sudden halt. “Do you think she might’ve liked me?”
“Boy—”
“She has blazing eyes! Green and gold! Maybe it was the light,” he added more softly.
Guthrie glared at the young Puerto Rican, plainly meaning her to keep quiet. “Maybe,” he said. “Who knows? I tell you what, though. I’m going to give you something, and then you can spoon-feed it to your boss. You tell her right where it came from, and you tell her she’s got to lay off—”
“I can’t say that, Guth! She’s not doing anything official.”
“Listen. You can tell her that, and then you tell her there’s more, but I’m not going to give it to you yet. She’ll respect you if you give it to her straight, and she’ll respect you for having contacts that reach outside the office.”
The phone was silent for a half minute. “You think so?”
“I ain’t gonna bullshit you. The other morning was a disaster. We should’ve kept quiet better. But you’re not gonna fix it by letting on that you’ll get pushed around.”
“I’m not getting pushed around!”
Guthrie sighed. “Relax. Everybody does. You pushed your boss into letting us in, because she wanted to keep you happy. She was getting something, or she wouldn’t have gone along with you. Once you let her know what the score is, she can get back to where she wants to be—she wants you there, but you did something that she needs to make look good. You do that by giving her something. Get it?”
“You’re saying that if I fix making her look bad, it’ll go back to the way it was?”
“Maybe better, boy. After this, she’ll know she can count on you to get square.”
“I guess you got something big, then, because did I mention that they want to kill me?”
The little man laughed. “Come to think of it, I got something big. The uniforms missed an eyewitness to the Bowman murder when they canvassed. He didn’t come forward. He don’t like cops.”
“He saw the murder?”
“That’s right. That’s why Rachel was gawking when your boss said things that corroborated his story.”
“I wasn’t—” Vasquez stopped suddenly when Guthrie gave her a hard look.
Tommy Johnson missed her voice because he was already speaking. “What the hell, Guth? You could’ve said this then!”
“No, I couldn’t. And really I still shouldn’t. This guy’s in the wind, and maybe he ain’t feeling like talking. I’m looking for him, and I don’t need cops getting in my way.”
Tommy set off a long string of fireworks, and Guthrie dialed down the volume on the phone. “He comes by that mouth honest,” he said to Vasquez. “His mother talked just like that. I think it’s an Ohio thing.”
When the phone grew quiet, he turned it up again. “Here’s the rest of what’s going on. The witness spooked before he could finger anyone. I have to get a follow-up interview—and he don’t like cops. His handle is ‘Ghost Eddy,’ and he seems to be mostly around Washington Heights and Morningside. They can check that, but otherwise they need to stay away. He ain’t no drunk loser, Tommy. He’s more like David Morgenfeld, you remember?”
“Holds his liquor. I got it.”
“You got all that?”
Grumbling, Tommy Johnson repeated, and Guthrie corrected. “And you don’t know if this vagrant saw Olsen?”
“Nope,” Guthrie replied. “That brings me to my other problem, now that we’ve done a little something about yours. Olsen’s in jail on the Bowman murder, but I’m pretty sure—”
“I hope you’re not about to ask me for anything on the Barbie dolls,” Tommy interjected.
“You could at least give me time to come out and say it.”
“Wasting your breath.”
“Boy, when I get something else to give you, you gotta give me that stuff.”
“If this works,” the young man said after a pause. “If I’m still getting wa
lked on, you’re getting crap.”
The little detective frowned when he cut off the phone. “Major Case is laying on those files real hard,” he said. “I guess we need to pull what we can pull from the newspapers.”
* * *
Another search of the NYPD reports didn’t reveal additional clues. The Garment District had closed down around them and become silent while they studied. Guthrie’s cell phone chattered as he was gathering his things to leave. Black-haired John was waiting on 153rd Street, near the cemetery. The phone call lasted only a few seconds—long enough for the vagrant to give his location—and then ended abruptly. The little detective explained that they would have to meet him face-to-face. Black-haired John was afraid of telephones. Guthrie had seen him use one once, and he’d held it arm’s length while shouting at it.
Vasquez drove. The traffic was light in the late afternoon, but the sky was cooling as slowly as a pan left carelessly on a stove. Along the way, Guthrie explained that John liked to keep his family close to the river, so he didn’t often go below 130th Street. Vasquez turned on 153rd and cruised along the cemetery. Black-haired John slid from an alley alongside a bodega and turned to pull them back the other way. Vasquez followed him until he walked into an abandoned lot off St. Nicholas, and she parked. They climbed from the old blue Ford and cut across the lot behind him.
A couple of kids watched Guthrie and Vasquez suspiciously as they followed John into an alley on the far side of the lot. The alley was suddenly dark, long with winds and bends from jutting redbrick buildings on each side, which hid everything but a narrow slice of hot sky far above. Farther down the alley, they came to an open space that once had been a porch for one of the old buildings, long since enclosed from an ancient street. The door onto the porch, wrapped behind an iron railing, seemed painted shut. The sounds of the street were far away and faint. More kids lurked down the far side of the alley. On the porch, Cindy’s slender form was wrapped around a huddled youngster.
Black-haired John slowed and began orbiting a crusted drain, a bit off center in the hidden space. “Ghost Eddy don’t want to be found,” he said.