by Alaric Hunt
Michelle Tompkins came from the auditorium with a satchel over her shoulder, near the front of a small group of students. She wore a pleated khaki skirt that clung to her hips and revealed muscular calves tapering down to slender ankles. Her chocolate brown hair bounced in unruly waves above the collar of her short-sleeved button-down shirt. When she saw the detectives, her eyebrows knitted into an annoyed frown, but she strode quickly over.
“You have been busy,” she said.
“We have,” Guthrie said. “I believe I found the mess you warned me about.”
Tompkins smiled bitterly. “Wasn’t difficult, was it?” she asked quietly. “I suppose it’s fortunate that most of it’s gone—or unfortunate, since that was Cammie.” She looked at them impatiently and took a hesitant step along the mezzanine. “Perhaps we should go somewhere off campus?”
“We like the idea of an audience,” Vasquez said.
“Then you had a reason for the drama yesterday. I’ve already heard several versions, though, naturally”—she smiled again, but it looked like mockery—“only one call from Sigma. That was Amanda, in a panic.” She walked over to the mezzanine rail and lowered her satchel to the carpeted floor. “I won’t disagree that the method makes sense. You might frighten someone into foolishness. How is it that I can help?”
“You have an insider’s view of what they were doing at LMA,” Guthrie said. “So far, we have the story from witnesses standing too far away, or from witnesses who’re busy trying to hide it.”
Tompkins’s eyebrows lifted in surprise, then drifted back downward into an annoyed twist. “I’m not sure what you think I can tell you. I didn’t even know she was kidnapped outside LMA, until you told me—”
“Quit kidding me, Michelle. You’ve been trying to stay clear since the beginning, but you must’ve thought it was something sexual all along. You were running with her before she met Olsen. You met Olsen after she brought him in, but that’s when your knowing the ropes at Columbia became important. You knew she was up to absolutely nothing before she met Olsen—and I bet she didn’t go outside the Sigma set to bring in an alumna. You had to go to her. You knew what she was doing, because she was some use to you—”
“Okay, I get it! You’re a detective!” Tompkins said. Some passing students slowed to listen when she raised her voice, but then hurried on when Guthrie gave them a hard look. Vasquez propped herself against the railing after peering over; a few faces in the lobby were turned their way.
“It’s true. I went to Cammie. I saw how easily she moved around, and I sold her the idea that I would be useful to her.” She smiled, but with a thoughtful look that tinged it with sadness. For a flashing moment, she was beautiful, but even when her expression changed, the image wouldn’t go away. “That turned out to be true.”
“What was the point of it?”
“Cammie was my way into LMA.” She shrugged, leaned back against the railing, and stretched out a hand on either side of it. The relaxed pose plushed her curves to Hellenic proportions. “If it comes out, it comes out. I suppose it’s too late to worry about exposure—there were too many pictures anyway to keep all of them from escaping.” She laughed. “When I first came to Columbia, I didn’t look like this. I could say that more clearly. I was undeveloped—I suppose I looked like you,” she continued, glancing at Vasquez. “But I didn’t have your face. I was introverted, an outcast forced upon the socially more adept; a plain, unattractive girl with no advantage but money. Despite what everyone might say, money doesn’t make pain go away. When I was an undergrad, I dealt with it by focusing on school, and trying not to get trampled. By the time I realized I did want to be included, my role was already set in stone. I was the outsider.
“Then Cammie came to Columbia. The initial connection was a family one—I was supposed to look out for my cousin—and she was a Sigma legacy, too.” She smiled bitterly. “But imagine anyone asking me to help watch out for Camille Bowman. There was nothing I could do for her.”
“Maybe you’re selling yourself short,” Guthrie said. “She needed you for school.”
“Not really,” Tompkins said, and shook her head. “Cammie was smart, even if it wasn’t easy to see past the face. She only had to apply herself. That wasn’t how it unfolded, though. In the game the houses played, she could decide who played with whom. She could put me with the people I wanted, and that’s where we started. It wasn’t until after she met Greg that I saw she could be something more than that.”
“Like what?”
“An adult.”
“Olsen is your problem here,” Vasquez said. “I think you have a thing for him, and that’s why we’re here. I know you said you didn’t kill your cousin. You sold me on that. But everything we uncover points at you or Olsen. Do you—”
“That’s crap,” Tompkins said. “I didn’t do it. Neither did Greg. Whether I like him really isn’t an issue. The games might have made him look bad, maybe, but they were over before Cammie started with him—but not before they met. At first, they were classmates, like I told you. Once she realized she wanted to be with him, she left the games, but even then she had been following him around for weeks. He knew she was doing crazy things, and he knew that she stopped. He thought it was childish, he told her so, and left it at that. Greg is just cut from a different cloth.”
Vasquez smirked. “That could convince his mother.”
“Does it really sound that stupid?” Tompkins asked with a pained expression. “Then okay, he makes me stupid. I can’t say I have a lot of sympathy for lucky people, like you”—she nodded at Vasquez—“or myself. You’re looks-lucky and I’m money-lucky. I know I helped make this mess, but now I need a way out. Maybe lucky people need help sometimes, too.”
“What’s important is that you were rolling with Bowman before Olsen came along,” Guthrie said. “We’re not interested in the rest of it. Your eyes were on the inside. Who was she with before Olsen? Not hookups. I need to know who spent time at her apartment. Who felt territorial?”
“That could’ve been anyone from the G unit, but I think you already started with the top of the list—Justin Peiper.”
Guthrie shook his head. “Who had a key?”
“I had one, and then there was ‘the key.’ It was passed around.” She shook her head at their frowns. “This time, it isn’t what you think. Cammie’s Greenwich Village apartment was the spot, but not always for her. My apartment on the West Side was our safe house. Grove Street was for playing around. A lot of sisters used it.”
“You mean Sigma Kappa?”
“And Alpha Chi Omega. The boys, too.”
Guthrie whistled. “That’s what you mean by the G unit. Delta Psi fraternity, two sororities—”
“And Kappa Alpha, more guys. Two pairs of houses.”
“I guess I don’t need to tell you that a pass-around key is gonna make it hard to keep this quiet,” he said. “Did she fight with any of them? Why did Olsen get the gun?”
“The sisters were scared of Cammie—they wouldn’t cross her. She wanted the gun because of Peiper. He’s real intense. She didn’t tell Greg that, because he probably would’ve hurt Peiper. She fed him a story about a rash of break-ins.” Tompkins frowned, pausing thoughtfully. “Greg was out a lot at night—he didn’t sleep through nights—so a lot of times he wouldn’t be there. But the gun was crazy. Peiper wasn’t going to do anything to her.…” Tompkins dribbled to a stop.
“That don’t sound right to me, neither,” Vasquez said.
“Maybe that’s the brick I need,” Guthrie said. “Somebody’s going to feel the pressure.”
Tompkins scooped up her satchel and lifted it onto her shoulder. She put on a pair of plastic-framed glasses to hide her blue eyes, and suddenly she was anonymous again, mouselike and plain. Vasquez leaned against the mezzanine rail and watched her walk away.
“She’s real sure you’re gonna protect her, viejo,” Vasquez said.
“It’s something more than that,” Guthrie said
, “because she knew that all along. I think she don’t believe we’re gonna find out what she was doing.”
The young Puerto Rican detective frowned. She looked again for Tompkins, who was walking unnoticed across the lobby. More eyes were aimed at the detectives than gave the graduate student even a passing glance. They followed her down the stairs, into the pool of hot sunlight pouring down from the transparent ceiling. Passing outside was like dropping from the pot into the fire. The sun was ascendant, and the clouds skulked in fear along the eastern skyline.
The Columbia campus seemed empty. When they left, they were immediately caught up in the movement of the city, like leaving an empty back bedroom where the coats were stacked to join a dinner party. All of the people of New York rubbed against one another in the streets, no matter how different they were. Going from one world to another could take a lifetime, or it could be as easy as passing through a door. Just when they walked on the streets, opposites could catch a glimpse of each other and dream, anytime they wanted.
* * *
Jude Nelson was distracted when Guthrie and Vasquez walked back into his bodega on 149th Street. The bell rang, and their eyes began adjusting from the brilliant sunshine of the street as if the sound were a signal. A half dozen middle school kids, dressed in tones of urban cool, drifted in the two narrow aisles of the bodega. Nelson stood at the counter, frowning, occasionally craning his neck when one of the youngsters rounded the end of the shelves in the back. The streaks of white in the old store owner’s mustache and beard stood out sharply against his dark face.
Guthrie leaned against the counter for a minute, watching, then smiled. “All right,” he announced. “All of you bring a drink and a candy bar to the counter. I’m buying.”
The kids hesitated, gathering, and finally the biggest boy asked, “What’s the matter with you?”
“Look, kid, I can’t rob the place with a bunch of witnesses in here,” Guthrie snapped. “Bring something on up here, then scram.”
A stream of sodas and candy passed across the counter, and the kids hurried out. Only one lingered to stare for a moment through the window. Nelson settled back on his stool with a sigh. The kids had been nerving up for a half hour, preparing for one of childhood’s rites of passage—shoplifting. Watching was hard, even though he knew that it was just something kids would do, like throwing rocks or splashing their way through puddles.
Guthrie admitted to Nelson that he was a reformed shoplifter. A younger but not too much smaller version of himself usually pocketed chocolate cupcakes. That was before he realized sugar was bad for him, he continued, while he paid for some cupcakes. The old store owner laughed. He’d lived down south when he was little, and he’d slipped into orchards and carried away peaches.
“Kids are gonna find something to steal, sure enough.” Nelson shifted on his stool and smoothed his mustache. He nodded to Vasquez when she drew breath to ask a question, then said, “Ghost Eddy heard me out, but I don’t know if it made much difference, considering that his hands didn’t pause about going in his pockets.
“That big man is hard to read, with that beard covering most of his face, and wearing those mirrored aviators. Maybe he even keeps his eyes closed and smells his way back and forth.” The old man grinned. “I suppose waiting those few days wound me up about it, and then my pitch sounded flat.
“He spent fifty-four dollars on vodka and Kahlúa, a tin of sardines, and some cheese crackers, in case you’re interested, and he had new money, just like usual. He has a lot of pockets. I suppose when he’s drunk, he might forget where he put the money. While he fished in his pockets, I talked. I’ve watched him do that a hundred times, and usually he don’t pay it mind. He might have a particular order he goes about it.”
Nelson grinned. “That was fun. Are you on your toes, young lady?” He didn’t give Vasquez a chance to reply before he continued. “He didn’t say anything, so I asked him if he didn’t mind whether the wrong man might be sitting in jail. After he set out his money, he says, ‘What makes you think they don’t have the man I saw?’”
“So I say, ‘What about you? Do you know?’”
“‘That don’t matter,’ he says. ‘Did a killing ever matter before, except when there was some money in it? Leave it be, old-timer.’
“Can you imagine?” the store owner said. “That big old man may not be quite as old as me—I can’t always tell—but he’s near it. So I says, ‘You’re old enough to know things do change. I own this store, and you’re buying straight from my hands—how’s that? Then look who’s sitting in the White House. Things change. How can you leave a man in jail on maybe when you’re holding for sure? Don’t do that.’
“He heard me, but I couldn’t read him. I’m sure I could’ve said more. You reminded me just now when you walked in on those kids. When I was a child, I stole peaches from white folks in Georgia, dreading what they might do. Now I got white kids stealing from me. The world moves on.”
“But it ain’t made him talk?” Vasquez asked.
“Afraid not,” he said. “I suppose he had some of the right of it. Money’s what’s got you here. That man in jail’s paying, else he would have no one on his side.”
“America’s ugly along that side of her face,” Guthrie admitted.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Late in the afternoon, Guthrie and Vasquez parked across the street from New Albuquerque Pawn and Loan on Forty-seventh Street, which boasted a painting of a man wearing a blue-and-cream shirt with a tall hat, overshadowed by a saguaro cactus. The heat was oppressive, but down the street clouds were boiling like rice, rushing in from the Atlantic. The pawnshop was a low-rent crackhead dive. Scrawny humans of indeterminate sex vibrated in and out of the entrance, in various stages of pre- and post-score mania. A handful of junkies with nothing to sell orbited the entrance while worrying fingers through their matted hair, torn between running for a soft score or spending the afternoon begging from the more fortunate. The detectives walked the gauntlet to enter the pawnshop.
Ground-out cigarette butts filled the cracks between the sidewalk and the storefront. Inside, an off-on smell of old vomit waited like a lonely dog. Suggestive stains darkened the floor in front of the display guitars, where some junkie bent on a jones had paused to reconsider his bygone musical career. The counterman was a tall, fat heavyweight with body hair all of the way down to his fingertips. A cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth, and the eye above it was sealed shut from the heat. A dirty patch on his brown workshirt said ROBBIE. Glassed counters and displays stretched past open doorways into more collections of used, grubby memorabilia.
“Ralph Gaines been in here yet?” Guthrie asked. The counterman didn’t blink, but he reached out to take the fifty that appeared in the little detective’s hand.
“Nope.”
“Tell him Clayton Guthrie was here asking.”
Guthrie and Vasquez walked out. The heat on the street was a relief. They dodged through the traffic like they were making sure the smell of the pawnshop couldn’t follow them without getting hit by a car.
“They’ll run when they hear your name,” Vasquez said, frowning, when she settled back behind the wheel of the Ford.
“Ain’t but one way out,” Guthrie said. “We wait. You go ahead and have that Smith in your pocket. Ralph’s terrified of guns.”
They rode low in the front seat and watched the New Albuquerque. The clouds rolled in from the east and darkened the afternoon into early twilight. A hard, thick shower swept through Hell’s Kitchen like a whisk broom. Junkies scurried back and forth like startled cats, crouching in doorways. Once the rain blew through, they rolled the windows back down to enjoy the cool air chasing the rain.
The Gaines brothers came hurrying down Forty-seventh Street as the sky lightened again. Both men had bulging pockets and jackets stretched around misshapen packages. Rodney kept getting out in front, then pausing to wait impatiently while Ralph caught up with him. At some distance, Ralph’s limp w
as pronounced. He swung a stiff right leg wide to the side before it would go forward, bouncing along like a disco dancer obsessed with practice. They disappeared into the pawnshop.
Guthrie and Vasquez climbed out of the old blue Ford and crossed the street. The junkies in front of the New Albuquerque watched, and their hollowed-out eyes turned dark with suspicion. They drifted away from the storefront. Guthrie posted Vasquez on the west side of the door, because the Gaines brothers had come from the east. The Gaines brothers spent some time bargaining for their score, and Vasquez started to get impatient.
“Ralph was always slower than Rodney,” the little detective said. “That was how he ended up with the limp.” He paused to step out to the sidewalk and glance down the street.
“Anyway, back when they were baby dirtbags, they ran out of places to make a score, but they still needed a bag—like that wasn’t every day—but this time they had the bright idea to hit their mother. That was probably Rodney’s idea. He’s pretty stupid. They tore up the house looking for wherever it was that the money was stashed, and she came home while they were looking. She was a pretty tough old Brooklyn girl, and she kept a purse gun. When she came in, I guess she heard them rooting around, tearing up the kitchen. Rodney’s got good ears; he dove out the window. Ralph tried behind him, but he was still hanging halfway when she came through the door with the gun out. Naturally, she couldn’t recognize his ass end, so she plugged him right in the ass while he was trying to pull the rest of the way across the window ledge.”
Vasquez was still laughing when the Gaines brothers hurried out. They stared at her, rushing, and plowed into Guthrie because they were trying to go back the way they’d come. A flurry of cursing ended when Vasquez flashed her pistol.
“Freeze, chico,” she said.