by Clea Simon
‘Well, clearly,’ she started to explain, ‘what happened . . .’ She stopped herself cold.
Dulcie had been about to tell the detective all of this. About to explain her theory, with all the parts as evidence, when she caught herself. He knew her, he said. He had daughters her age, he said. But he also now had one piece of evidence that placed her closer to a murder victim than she had previously admitted to being. To tell him about the manuscript page was to give him another piece, a possibly damning piece. And for all she knew, all this talk of daughters could be a ploy to get her to confess.
Dulcie didn’t buy into Lucy’s paranoid world view. Detective Rogovoy might be a man, a man in authority, no less. That didn’t mean he was ‘The Man’ or inherently evil. However, her years here at the university had taught her to recognize what she didn’t know. Chief among those things was what a father might act like, if that father were also a police officer, and whether Rogovoy’s statement of trust was consistent with paternal behavior or simply a way of handling a suspect.
She also didn’t know who had gone through her desk. Whoever it had been had not cared much about being found out. Perhaps he or she had thought Dulcie wouldn’t notice. In all fairness, she realized, she almost hadn’t. However, whoever it was had a clear intent: putting her squarely in the frame for murder.
‘I’ll be down there soon,’ she said, finally, and managed to get off the line. That was probably the best she could do, she realized. Afterward, assuming the police let her go after this interview, she would find out who was after her, and what other tricks he – or she – might have in store. The question was: how?
Taking another bite from her sandwich, she toyed with the phone. Chris would have ideas. Thanks in no small part to his academic discipline, he was a very organized and logical thinker. But she’d already left him a message. He would have called back if he’d gotten it. Unless – Dulcie didn’t like to think about this – he was still angry. Once again, she found something stuck in her throat. Bagel, undoubtedly, she told herself as she forced herself to swallow and dabbed at her eyes.
Lloyd was off limits because of his faith in Rafe. This new information, Dulcie realized, might sway her office mate. After all, someone had gone into the visiting scholar’s suite to plant evidence. Who better than the house senior tutor? Then again, Lloyd might hold firm. His loyalty was one of his better traits, one that Dulcie had relied upon in the past. No, she couldn’t risk it.
Trista? Now that was a possibility. Dulcie was curious if the blonde Victorian had learned anything on her own, and this new info would certainly energize her. She wiped her mouth and reached for her phone again, only to have it ring in her hands.
This time, she looked at the caller ID before picking up. Not Chris, but not the police headquarters, either. Only after the third ring did she recognize the number: someone was calling from the office of the Mildon Collection.
‘Hello?’ She’d never gotten a call from the Mildon. ‘Dulcie Schwartz speaking.’
‘Ms Schwartz! It is I, Thomas Griddlehaus!’ The little clerk’s voice was soft, and she thought he had his hand over the receiver, but his palpable excitement made even his whisper oddly distorted.
‘Mr Griddlehaus?’ Dulcie paused, worried. ‘Is everything OK?’
‘Yes! Yes!’ He was almost yelling, in a breathless kind of way. ‘I’ve found it, Ms Schwartz! I was filing the sequestered material. You know, the material I’d set aside for the unfortunate Ms Sloane Harquist? Well, I was looking through the pages, simply to make sure I filed everything correctly, of course, and I realized that we’d been looking at something incorrectly. You must come down here, Ms Schwartz. As soon as possible! I believe I’ve found the missing key.’
THIRTY-SEVEN
Dulcie had rarely felt so torn. What she wanted to do was race down to the special collection and see whatever page or passage Griddlehaus had found, and then get right to work on it. What she had promised to do, however, was go talk to Rogovoy. She’d said she would. She’d been ducking the detective for days. And, considering that she seemed to be still under suspicion, it was the sensible move.
Or was it? A half-hour later, Dulcie wasn’t so sure.
‘Someone must have planted it. Isn’t that obvious?’ Dulcie was nearly yelling. Not a good tactic when talking to the police, she knew. However, she had never run into such a ridiculous situation. She had come in determined to defend herself, Rogovoy’s last words ringing in her ears. However, she’d been so distracted by Griddlehaus’s news that she’d failed to come up with a reasonable explanation. ‘What’s the alternative? That I killed her and left my address book in her room? I already told you, I think someone was in my desk—’
In front of her, Detective Rogovoy sat with a stone-faced young cop wearing the city of Cambridge’s blue uniform. Rogovoy raised his eyebrows a fraction of an inch. It was as much of a hint as Dulcie was going to get, and she sat back down.
‘Well, someone was. I can tell,’ she said, trying not to squirm on the hard wooden seat. ‘And what you’re saying doesn’t make any sense.’
Rogovoy opened his mouth – then shut it. The presence of his stony colleague was clearly having a dampening effect on his usually more voluble self.
‘OK, then. Go back to the . . . the incident. You know the timeline.’ Dulcie had a vague sense that she was digging herself in deeper. Unfortunately, she couldn’t see any solution except to try to excavate a way out. ‘You know that when I showed up, she – ah, Ms Harquist – had been, well, gone for a while.’
‘And for the half-hour before the police were notified, you were . . . in the courtyard?’ The other cop, younger than Rogovoy and leaner, sounded cool, like a shark. He looked down at a sheet of paper that Dulcie was sure he’d already memorized. ‘You were “hanging out” after your class?’
‘After my section, yes. Which I teach. I started to walk into the Square to get some lunch, and then I ran into a colleague and we returned to Dardley House.’ Dulcie bit her lip. This young cop had a sharp-featured face and no familiarity with the trusting traditions of the university community. She turned toward Rogovoy. ‘The detective here talked to me right after. He took my statement.’
‘There are gaps,’ was all her old ally said. His face, she now saw, was shut down like an old stone wall.
It was her own fault, Dulcie knew. She had arrived at the police station without a strategy – and without calling Suze. All she could think about was getting through this and returning to the Mildon to see what Griddlehaus had found. To make matters worse, she hadn’t been fully focused on the questions the young cop had asked her. She hadn’t seen the way the muscle on the side of his face clenched when she brushed off the timing discrepancy. And she hadn’t seen the glint in his eye when he questioned her about Melinda’s missing manuscript.
‘So, you never saw the dead woman’s book?’ His voice had been as flat as a rock, a very cold, flat rock.
‘No, never,’ she had responded automatically. ‘I mean, yes, when I went in and found her, I saw it. I mean, before I found her. It was on the bookshelf. At least, I think it was. And then this morning—’
She’d caught herself then. She’d been about to tell them about the page that had appeared in her bag. The page that might implicate her. ‘This morning, I was wondering about it again.’ Even to her ears, it sounded lame.
‘You were thinking about it,’ the city cop repeated. Rogovoy shook his head, a barely noticeable gesture. It might have been unconscious, an expression of sadness or disappointment. She had always been a bad liar, she knew that. At that moment, however, she hadn’t wanted to see his response as a sign that he knew she was holding something back. That he was disappointed in her. Rather, she took it as a warning – a subtle way of telling her to quit talking, at least while that other, sharper cop was there. That only made her more nervous.
‘You see, she and I are researching the same author. Were. That is, I still am, and her thesis would have
been interesting to me, if I had read it.’ The young cop turned toward Rogovoy then and nodded. They knew, then. They probably knew she was on disciplinary probation, too. ‘But I didn’t. I was barely in there for a minute. Maybe even less.’
In response, Rogovoy fished something out of a folder he’d kept on his side of the table. A heavy plastic bag that he then pushed halfway across the table toward her. She looked down at it, and saw the missing address book inside, its scarred leather binding and one bent corner as familiar to her as any of Esmé’s toys. Rogovoy then repeated what he’d told her on the phone. That her address book had been found on the floor of the suite bedroom. ‘Like it had fallen out of someone’s bag, perhaps when someone knelt down to search for something. Or to hide.’
That was when Dulcie had lost it. The whole situation sounded ridiculous to her. ‘You can’t really think I killed her and left, and then came back?’ She looked from Rogovoy to the young cop and back again. Neither was giving her an inch. ‘What? I was so overcome by guilt I came back just to raise the alarm?’
‘Not exactly,’ the young cop spoke. ‘We know that you were in the process of leaving when the senior tutor and your colleague were coming up the stairs to look for you. We are considering the possibility that you were going to call for help. Raise the alarm, as you put it. We are also considering the possibility that you had been there before, and that you came back to retrieve what could be seen as evidence.’
THIRTY-EIGHT
At that point, Dulcie had finally shut her mouth. ‘I don’t think I should say anything else,’ she said, once she could again summon words. ‘May I go?’
The city cop had nodded, and Rogovoy had heaved himself to his feet to escort her out.
‘There’s something you’re not telling us,’ he said as he walked her down the hall. ‘And that’s a mistake. I don’t know if you’re protecting somebody or if you think you know better, but, believe me, you really should talk to me.’ He looked at her then, big eyes as sad as a spaniel’s, and she was sorely tempted to spill it all.
It was a risk she didn’t dare take. ‘I didn’t do it, Detective Rogovoy,’ she’d said finally, her voice falling to a whisper. ‘I didn’t do any of it. I think someone is trying to set me up.’
‘And who would that be?’ He leaned in, and in that moment she realized her mistake. She’d grown used to thinking of the detective as her friend, the gentle ogre. He was in cop mode, though. All he wanted was information, and Dulcie knew that anything she could say would only damn her further.
Besides, all she had were suspicions. ‘I don’t know, Detective. I honestly don’t know.’
Since they didn’t seem to be charging her – goddess be praised – he had let her go then, along with all the usual warnings about how she needed to stay in touch and how they would likely have more questions. As soon as she was on the sidewalk, she realized how foolish she had been to go in there alone. She needed help. Legal help.
Suze answered on the first ring. ‘Legal aid.’
‘Suze, I’ve done a really stupid thing.’ Walking down Garden Street, Dulcie confessed it all: from finding the manuscript page to going in to talk to the police without counsel. She’d been naive, she knew that. But Suze, she was sure, would commiserate.
‘You didn’t tell anyone about the manuscript page?’ That wasn’t the response she anticipated. ‘And it appeared in your bag, when?’
‘This morning,’ said Dulcie. Something was tickling at the back of her memory.
‘Did you leave your bag anywhere? You know, in a public place, unattended?’
‘No, I would never do anything so silly.’ The words were automatic, but she could hear the sharp exhalation of breath over the line. Her former room-mate and best friend clearly thought she could do something even more foolhardy, and that she had.
‘Well, that’s not useful,’ Suze said after an overlong pause. ‘Nor is the fact that you didn’t immediately go to the police with this. You’re lucky they didn’t search your purse.’ She paused again. ‘Did you check to see if there was anything else in there? Anything potentially incriminating?’
‘Of course,’ said Dulcie, making a mental note to do so at the next available opportunity. She opened her bag now, and looked through it. Pens, her pad – that was it. ‘But Suze, I don’t know if the page was slipped into my bag. I think it was put into my desk. I picked up a pad from my office yesterday, and I had the strangest sense that someone had gone through my desk, you know? Also, I’m nearly positive that’s where my address book was. Maybe someone went through my desk, grabbed my address book, and stuck this in my pad. Maybe I wasn’t even supposed to pick it up.’
‘That’s possible.’ Suze sounded a little more optimistic. ‘And your office is probably more accessible, right? When are your office hours?’
‘This afternoon.’ Dulcie looked at her watch. ‘In twenty minutes, actually.’
‘Oh,’ Suze paused. ‘Well, who else has access to your office?’
‘I share it with Lloyd, Lloyd Pruitt. He’s been in there and so has his girlfriend, Raleigh.’ Suze knew Lloyd and Raleigh. They’d both been guests at their old apartment in Central Square.
‘And when are Lloyd’s office hours?’
Dulcie thought a moment. ‘Thursdays, from one to three. So . . . before this all happened.’
There was quiet on the line, and Dulcie realized she was biting her lip. ‘Suze?’
‘I need to think about this a bit, Dulcie, and I want to talk to one of the partners here, one of the real lawyers. There’s a lot about evidence that I’m not really up on, and they deal with this kind of thing all the time. It doesn’t sound good, I won’t lie to you. But in the meantime, maybe you can do something, too.’
‘Sure.’ It sounded like Suze was calling in the heavy hitters. That had to be good, Dulcie told herself, trying not to feel even more terrified. ‘Anything.’
‘I need you to make a list of anyone who may have had access to your office at any point since the killing. Maybe you can find out if Lloyd had any visitors; maybe he left the door unlocked for some reason. It’s all within the bounds of plausibility. But I also need you to prepare yourself for two possibilities.’
‘Yes?’ Dulcie’s mouth had gone dry.
‘One, that we may have to surrender this page to the police. It’s too little, too late, and you definitely shouldn’t go in alone, but it may still be the prudent move.’
‘Uh huh.’ Dulcie closed her eyes, and immediately pictured Detective Rogovoy, shaking his head in disappointment. ‘And the other thing?’
‘The other thing is that this may end up implicating Lloyd.’ Dulcie started to protest, but Suze cut her off. ‘If he’s the only one who had access to your office and to your desk, you need to consider the possibility that he’s more involved than you know. This is a murder investigation, Dulcie. We don’t know who the cops are talking to – or who they suspect. But I can make suggestions about who you should or should not talk to, Dulcie. Right now, I don’t think you can trust Lloyd.’
THIRTY-NINE
It was with a heavy heart that Dulcie walked back to her office. Lloyd, her friend and ally so often before, had become first someone she couldn’t confide in and now – what? A suspect? Dulcie shook her head, then acknowledged the truth. Maybe not a suspect in the official sense, in the sense that the police would be questioning him. But he was someone she had to be suspicious about. Someone she needed to avoid talking to. She’d already had her doubts about his loyalty, but to imagine him actively betraying her was chilling.
Unless, the thought hit her with a happy jolt, he hadn’t. Lloyd could be perfectly innocent of the whole set-up. Maybe he had left the office open – or let someone else, a friend, use their shared space for some reason. Dulcie found herself walking faster.
That could be it; suddenly it was all perfectly reasonable. Lloyd would have no reason to suspect anyone. Maybe he’d met a friend here. Maybe he’d run off to the bathroom whil
e his friend waited. Not Raleigh, but . . . Rafe came to mind. Rafe, who Lloyd trusted, certainly enough to hang out in his office for a few minutes. Maybe Rafe had planted that page here. Or maybe he’d simply hoped to hide it, afraid for some reason to destroy it. Either way, if it had been stuck into Dulcie’s drawer without Lloyd’s knowledge, that would exonerate Lloyd. Suddenly, instead of dreading a meeting with her office mate, she was hoping he’d still be there. He’d explain. It was all so obvious, Dulcie practically ran the last block.
‘Don’t lock up!’ She called down the hall. Lloyd had his key in the door as he looked up.
‘Dulcie! You’re early.’ He checked his watch. ‘Unless this is off.’
‘No, no, you’re fine.’ Dulcie leaned on the door frame and tried to catch her breath. ‘I was hoping you’d still be here.’
Lloyd raised his eyebrows. Office etiquette called for each to vacate the tiny space when the others’ students might come by. ‘Everything OK?’
‘Of course.’ Dulcie spoke too quickly and saw the puzzled look on her friend’s face. He didn’t know anything, she was sure. And then, suddenly, she wasn’t sure. Suze’s warning echoed through her mind. She couldn’t just ask. Too much was at stake.
Lloyd, meanwhile, was staring at her. ‘I mean, as much as it can be now,’ she tried to cover. ‘I just . . .’ She looked at the door, unsure how to continue. ‘You always lock this, don’t you?’
‘Of course.’ He was definitely looking at her funny. ‘Dulcie, is something wrong? Did something go missing?’
‘No, I mean, I don’t think so.’ She sounded inane, and she knew it. Getting information without giving any was more difficult than she’d thought. ‘I just thought maybe someone had been in my desk,’ she came up with finally. It was weak, but it was better than asking outright. ‘Everything was . . . messed up.’