Long before the launch party and Joe’s murder, I had scheduled a trip to New York to meet with press contacts and alumni and pitch stories about the college. I was tempted to cancel, but I thought it would be better to present my agenda than let the press run away with their own take on Joe’s death. I spent most of Thursday confirming my appointments for the next day and putting together the materials I wanted to take with me.
Just before five, I started to pack my briefcase with Eastern catalogs and press kits. I had just run out of room and started to put the overflow into a pair of plastic shopping bags when Sally came in with the file on Verona Santander, the girl who had complained about Ike Arumba’s behavior, and a copy of Joe’s letter about Ike.
“I’d hate to have to push this forward,” Sally said. “But if the girl has a real complaint then I need to do something about it.”
“Ike’s graduating this term, isn’t he? What could happen to him?”
“Hard to say without knowing exactly what he did. He could be suspended or even expelled. I know he’s looking for a job in college admissions after he graduates, and if he gets something like this on his record I can’t imagine any college that would hire him.”
“That’s tough. You think it could be a motive for murder?”
“Ike? You think maybe he killed Joe?”
“Norah said that she saw Ike and some of the guys from the Rising Sons outside getting high just before Joe was killed. That gives Ike opportunity. And now he’s got a motive, and he could easily have picked up a knife from the buffet line.”
Sally shook her head. “He seems like such a nice guy, though.”
“But drugs can change you,” I said. “Maybe Ike started getting paranoid about Joe, and the dope made it worse.”
Sally helped me carry my promotional material out to the BMW, Rochester frolicking around us. “Are you taking Rochester with you?” she asked, as she leaned down to pet him.
“Are you kidding? I can only imagine the damage this mutt could do in a Manhattan hotel room. He’s staying with my friend Rick.”
Rochester must have recognized Rick’s name, because he barked and nodded his head.
We drove home, and I walked and fed Rochester, then packed my suitcase, including a rolling duffel full of Eastern flyers and merchandise. We’d had pens made up for the launch party, and I also had some no-slide doohickeys you put on the back of cell phones, with the Eastern logo, and some other giveaways.
Just after seven, I loaded it all in the car along with Rochester’s bowl, a canvas bag of his toys, and the remains of a 20-pound bag of dog chow. “Come on, boy,” I said, waving his leash. “Let’s go for a ride.”
He scrambled behind the dining room table and put his head behind one of the table legs. “Rochester,” I said. “No nonsense. I have a train to catch.”
I had to get down on my hands and knees and hook the leash onto his collar, then pull. He resisted for a while, his claws scrabbling on the tile floor, but eventually I got him out from under the table. Then, of course, it all became a big game to him. He jumped up on me and stuck his nose in my crotch.
I scratched behind his ears, then he got down and rushed toward the front door. “Wacky dog,” I said.
We drove over to Rick’s house, near the Delaware in the oldest part of town. It had been his parents’ place, and he had bought it from them when they moved to Florida. I opened the gate to his fenced-in front yard and let Rochester loose, then returned to the car for all the doggy stuff. By the time I had it in hand Rick had the front door open, and Rascal had rushed out to romp with my dog.
“You didn’t need to bring all this stuff,” Rick said. “I’ve got dog chow, and toys, and a bowl.”
“Rochester likes his own stuff.”
“Rochester’s a spoiled brat.” Rick reached down to scratch behind the golden retriever’s ears. “Aren’t you? Are you the most spoiled dog in Stewart’s Crossing?”
Rascal came blasting across the yard to get his share of the attention. “I think he’s got some competition for that title,” I said.
I squatted down to hug Rochester one last time. “You behave for Uncle Rick, and play nice with Rascal.” He woofed and nodded his head.
He tried to follow me out the front gate to the car, and when I closed him inside the yard he sat on his haunches and looked at me. He barked twice, and I said, “I’m coming back, dog. Don’t get your nuts in a twist.”
I got in the car, and even over the engine I could hear him howling mournfully. Rick just laughed as I drove away. I parked the BMW at the train station in Trenton and caught a late evening train to New York. It was nearly eleven by the time I was checked into my room, in a very old and not very elegant hotel on the Upper West Side. I thought briefly of Rochester, wondering if Rick was giving him his late-night walk, and then I was asleep.
The next morning I retrieved coffee and donuts from a café around the corner and returned to my room, where I set up my agenda for the day. Before I left, I called Barnard College information and got Verona Santander’s phone number. When I reached her at her dorm, she wasn’t eager to talk to me. “It’s important, Verona.” I explained about Joe’s murder and Sally’s problems in organizing the office. “It would help us to understand. To know what’s what.”
“Well, OK,” she said. “But you’ll have to come up here. I have a class from 3 until 5. Can you meet me at a coffee shop called Papa’s on Amsterdam at 118th at a quarter past five?”
I checked my watch. “I’ve got an appointment at four myself. I can shoot up on the subway after that.”
My first appointment was with a newsmagazine writer who’d gone to Eastern. His office was a cubicle high up in a skyscraper but stuck in the middle of a warren of similar cubicles.
“Thanks for thinking of me, Steve. I’m always interested in news of my alma mater. You’ve been getting a lot of press lately.”
“Not exactly the kind we’d like.” I settled back in the easy chair across from his desk. The walls of the cubicle were about six feet high and covered with articles, posters and ads, mostly clipped out of his magazine. “We want to develop a particular image for Eastern. You can understand that-- we want everyone to know the Eastern that you and I do.”
He nodded. “I’m impressed with your fund-raising campaign. Five hundred million is a lot of money for a small school like Eastern to raise. I hope you don’t expect to get much of it from me. ” He laughed.
“The money people come after me,” I said, and we both laughed. “What we want right now is your good will. We want you to think of Eastern when you need a comment from an academic source.” I dug into my briefcase. “I’ve brought you some of our recent materials. I don’t expect you to make us a cover story, but I do hope that when you call Harvard or Yale for a comment on computer education or financial aid or athletic recruiting, you’ll think of Eastern too. We’re representative of the kind of things that are happening to small private colleges around the country, and some of our professors are doing headline research. Here’s our experts list-- if you need an academic comment for a story on anything from the drought in Africa to unemployment in Detroit, we’ve got a faculty member with something to say.”
It had been hard work to get professors at Eastern to relate their research to contemporary topics. It seemed they never studied concrete things like consumer purchasing, but instead looked at “The purchase of small consumer goods in Henry James’ The Golden Bough.” Purely academic research. If we’d had a business school or a medical school my job would have been easier, but we had a few sociologists and historians who ought to make it into an article somewhere down the road. We chatted for a while about Eastern and I went on to other interviews.
Around 4:45 I caught the subway uptown to Morningside Heights. Rush hour had already begun and the trains were jammed with people in heavy winter coats carrying shopping bags and briefcases. Almost every woman seemed to be wearing a navy or gray pinstriped business suit with a whit
e blouse tied into a bow, carrying a leather folder, and wearing running shoes with brightly colored swirls and logos on them.
I got to the coffee shop first, and I sat at a booth in the back with a view of the door. Verona came in a few minutes later. She was about five foot six, very pretty, with frizzy brown hair pulled into a knot and tied to the side with a pink scarf. She was wearing a knee-length gray down coat with a thick pink vertical stripe, and I looked up and smiled when she looked at me.
She came back to the booth. “Mr. Levitan?”
I stood up and stuck out my hand. “You must be Verona. Thanks for agreeing to meet me.”
When she hung up her coat, I saw she was wearing blue jeans and a pink sweatshirt that said, “Go Climb A Rock” underneath it. The waiter came by and she ordered a Tab. “I’ll have coffee,” I said. “Very light, with sugar.”
“How can I help you?” she asked.
“As I told you, Eastern’s director of admissions was murdered recently. His assistant, Sally Marston, is a friend of mine, and when we were going through his files to find out where things stand, she found a cryptic reference to you.”
“To me?”
I nodded. “One of Sally’s best assistants is a student named Ike Arumba.” Verona grimaced when she heard the name. “Apparently Joe Dagorian had some problem with Ike, and it relates to a letter you sent. We can’t find the letter in the files, but we did find a draft of a letter recommending that Ike be expelled from Eastern because of something involving you. I’d like to find out what you said in your letter that turned Joe against Ike.”
Our drinks came, and Verona took a long sip of her Tab. “Two of my really good friends went to Eastern the year before I graduated from high school,” she said. “They both liked the school a lot, so I went out to visit them in the early fall and I really liked the campus, too. I filled out my application in December and sent it in, and in January Eastern had a reception in Portland-- that’s where my folks live. Since they were away on vacation then, I went to the reception by myself. Ike Arumba gave a presentation on Eastern. I was really into going there then.”
“What made you change your mind?”
She didn’t say anything. “I promise you I won’t repeat this unless it’s necessary, and I’ll get your permission before we involve you any further.”
She nodded. “Afterwards I went up to tell him how much I enjoyed the presentation and that I was really looking forward to going to Eastern. See, my grades were good but I didn’t do real well on the SATs and I thought if I was nice to him he’d help me get in.”
She looked to me for reassurance. “It’s easier for the admissions staff when they can attach a face or a personality to the application,” I said.
“He was really nice and he asked me if I wanted to have dinner with him. He said he was all alone in town and didn’t know anybody, and I thought he was kind of cute.”
“And?”
“Well, we went to this restaurant, and we had a couple of drinks and then dinner and then a couple more drinks and then he asked me to go to bed with him.”
“Good god!” I said. “What an asshole!”
“You’ve got it,” she said. “I did think he was cute, and I really wanted to go to Eastern. And I was pretty naive and I thought, like, maybe if I don’t he’ll fix it so I won’t get in. So we went over to his hotel room and, well, you know.”
“It’s absolutely the most unprofessional thing I ever heard,” I said. “But just to be clear, you did have sex with him?”
“Yes. He was bummed that I wasn’t a virgin, but afterwards he gave me cab fare to get back to my car, and then a few weeks later I got into Eastern.”
“And then you wrote the letter?”
She shook her head. “I decided that Eastern had to be really sleazoid to send a jerk like him off to recruit, and like, did I really want to go to college with sleazebags? So I decided to go to Barnard, and then I sort of forgot about it. But I’m, like, really involved with the women’s center at Barnard, and when I talked about it everybody said I should write a letter to Mr. Dagorian and tell him what happened. I did that about a month ago, and he called me up and we talked about it, and he said he would see that Ike got disciplined. That’s the last I heard.”
I paid the check and we walked out together. “I appreciate your telling me this, Verona. I know it doesn’t help much, but please accept my apologies for what happened. I went to Eastern myself and I know that creeps like Ike don’t come through very often.”
“Thanks. Anyway, I really like Barnard and I’m glad I didn’t go to Eastern. I mean, god, to be out in the boondocks like that! After all, I came east to get to civilization, after Portland and all.”
As the subway rattled and clanked downtown, I wondered if Joe’s threat would have been enough to motivate Ike to murder. Joe could not only destroy Ike’s chance for an Eastern diploma, forcing him to leave without a degree, but he could derail Ike’s plans for a career in college admissions.
I had made a mistake myself, so perhaps I was more sympathetic to Ike than Joe would have been. As well, I recognized that we only had Verona’s word for what happened. Suppose she had seduced Ike? Or what if she was just nuts, and had made the whole thing up? Both were possible.
When Mary suffered her first miscarriage, she had gone on a spending spree, plunging us deep into credit card debt. It had taken us two years of overtime and freelance work to climb back out of that morass. Then she got pregnant again, and we both felt like we were on top of the world—debt free, ready to start our family.
Then she miscarried again. I was so frightened she’d fall into the same pattern again that I hacked into the main credit card databases and put alerts on all her cards. A couple of days later, the police came for a visit, and my downward slide began.
So I understood how scary consequences could be. But did Ike? And had he done something to protect himself?
18 – No Satisfaction
I met my graduate school roommate, Tor, for dinner that night, at a steakhouse in midtown. He was a Swedish exchange student in business school, and for a few years we were young and single together in the city. He was a successful investment banker, married to a former model, with two kids in expensive private schools.
Every time we met I couldn’t help considering the different directions our lives had taken. Tor was generous to a fault; it would never have occurred to him to criticize me for my choices or make me feel bad about the difference in our fortunes. He was a couple of inches taller than I was, with blond hair so light it was almost white. I couldn’t remember if he had looked different when we were in our twenties, though I was sure he’d looked a lot less prosperous.
“So you’ve joined the ranks of the gainfully employed,” Tor said as we sat down. He still had a touch of his Swedish accent, which came through in the unaccustomed emphasis on certain syllables. “And how is it, this new job?”
“A little creepy.” I told him about Joe’s murder.
“Not another one. I don’t know that I want to keep hanging around with you. People you know end up dead.”
“People die all the time,” I said, as the waiter approached. Tor ordered us both some very expensive Scotch. Without even looking at the menu he said, “I’ll have the 24-ounce Porterhouse. Baked potato with butter, and creamed spinach. Caesar salad.”
“Make it two of everything,” I said.
When the waiter left Tor said, “Yes, people die. But around you they get murdered.” He looked at me. “You’re not snooping around in this murder, are you?”
I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. “I know the detective, from when my neighbor was murdered. He’s been asking me for information.”
“Remember what happened to you last time, Steve,” he said. “And to Rochester. You don’t want that again.”
“I’m staying out of trouble. Scout’s honor.” I held up two fingers.
“Bjorn is in the Boy Scouts,” Tor said. “So I know that you are
supposed to hold up three fingers, not two.”
“Whatever. How are Bjorn and Lucia, and Sandra?”
Tor had married Sandra, a former fashion model, a year after I left for the West Coast with Mary. Bjorn, ten, and Lucia, eight, were named after Tor’s parents, still living in Stockholm.
“All fine. Bjorn is too smart. He already has an argument for everything. He is reading Dickens now. Do you believe that? And Lucia is studying ballet. She is already the best in her class.”
I couldn’t help being jealous. Tor was one of my best friends, and I was happy about every good thing that had happened to him, from his business success to his loving marriage to his healthy, happy children. But whenever I saw him, I started comparing his life to mine.
The waiter brought the salads, and we went on to talk about a lot of different things, catching up in bits and pieces on our lives. “You ever hear from Mary?” he asked, as we dug into the porterhouse.
“Not since last year. I think it’s best. She has a new husband, a new baby. And I have Rochester.”
“Yes, Rochester. You keep sending me pictures of your dog, which is causing a lot of trouble in my household.”
“How so?”
“Bjorn and Lucia want a dog. ‘Uncle Steve has Rochester. Why can’t we have a dog?’” He speared a chunk of beef. “I tell them that Uncle Steve lives in the country with lots of space for a dog to run. We live in the city.”
“And does that work?”
“No. The family next door bought a bichon frise last month. My children are over the moon. ” He ate the meat on his fork, and then sighed. “Maybe you can recommend a breeder? We could drive out to Stewart’s Crossing when the weather warms up, visit you and look for a dog.”
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