The Little Black Dress

by Linda Palund

  “Oh? What does that mean?” I said, unexpectedly offended. “I’m not wearing a buzz cut? I’m not butch enough?”

  “Well, I guess.…”

  “Honestly, I don’t understand that anyway. Why would I want to look like a boy when I don’t even like boys?”

  “You said you liked me.”

  “Okay. You’re right. I don’t dislike men or boys. I just don’t want them as sexual partners, and I have no desire to look like one or to have my lovers look like one.”

  “You have lovers?”

  “No, I was just thinking about Carmen. She was so feminine, so womanly. I loved her.”

  Seth leaned forward now and stretched his long arms across the table. “It’s all right if you’re gay. I like you the way you are, and if gay is the way you are, then I like that too.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief and took his hands in both of mine, amazed at how big his hands felt and how long his fingers were. Carmen’s hands were so small, like mine.

  “That’s nice to know,” I said.

  “So, the answer is simply that I don’t know about me yet,” he said. “I’m kind of a late bloomer.”

  “You’re seventeen years old,” I said.

  “Yes, but I haven’t had time to think about my sexual orientation, Lucy. I’m definitely not ready to declare.”

  “Well, then, that’s okay too,” I assured him. “I like you the way you are, whatever way that is.”

  CHAPTER 18

  THE MURDER BOARD

  AFTER WE finished our coffee, we said good-bye to Sebastian and walked back up the stairs to our separate cars. Then we each drove home to our own houses. I needed to talk to my mom about Stephanie, and Seth promised to keep an eye on the police reports and call me as soon as any important reports came through.

  Stephanie’s autopsy report came in later that night, and Seth phoned me as soon as he saw it, then printed off a copy and drove right over to my house. We locked ourselves in my bedroom again and studied the report.

  It was just as horrific as Carmen’s murder, only this time there was only evidence of two perpetrators.

  “That’s interesting,” I told Seth.

  “Yes, and this time both perpetrators are in the system. They have the same DNA profile as Carmen’s killers,” Seth announced.

  “So it was definitely not only, as they say, the same MO, it was the same exact guys, minus one!” I was on to something now, even though it didn’t make Stephanie’s murder any more palatable.

  Seth, sensibly, hadn’t printed out the photos this time, but the report described the savage attack on Stephanie in the same gruesome detail as Carmen’s report. Stephanie had been brutally raped and beaten, and every part of her body had undergone some horrific abuse. She had also been strangled at some point during the ordeal. Once again, using the most modern technology, and judging by the time of death and the nature of her wounds and the body’s healing ratio, etc., it was determined she was already dead when half the rape had taken place. It was sickening and difficult to read, but then a little light shone at the end of the findings that made us think perhaps we were moving closer to finding her killers.

  “Look at this, Lucy!” Seth pointed at the last lines of the report. “Evidently, Stephanie managed to put up a pretty good fight. Both her arms were broken in the struggle, but the coroner found not only the perpetrators’ skin under her fingernails, they found bits of hair and skin in her teeth.”

  “She bit one of them!” I yelled. “Fantastic!”

  A few minutes later, we had all the case files from both murders laid out across my two beds. I had taken the chalkboard out of the rumpus room and set it up between the windows in my bedroom, and I was standing beside it with a piece of chalk, ready to start our own “murder board.”

  “Let’s go over what we know are the facts,” Seth said wisely.

  I drew a line down the middle of the board, from top to bottom, and wrote CARMEN on the left side and STEPH on the right. “Okay,” I began. “Here are the two victims. Should we start with what they had in common?”

  “Yeah.” And Seth walked over and stood on the other side of the chalkboard. “I’ll fill in Steph’s side, and you do Carmen’s.”

  “Okay, well, let’s start with Wednesday night, then. They were both abducted and murdered on a Wednesday night,” I said, and we both wrote WEDNESDAY in our columns.

  “New to school?” offered Seth.

  “Yeah, I guess. They both started school as sophomores in the fall.” And I wrote NEW TO SCHOOL and then SOPHOMORE on Carmen’s side, and Seth did the same for Stephanie.

  “And neither of the girls dated boys at our school,” added Seth.

  “That is very true—and both were attractive and turned down a lot of guys.”

  “Okay, now we are getting somewhere.” Seth grinned, and he wrote BEAUTIFUL in my column and BEAUTIFUL in his, and then added DID NOT DATE in his, and I wrote that in mine also.

  I couldn’t think of anything else, so I stood back and stared at the chart until something came to me. Seth put down his chalk and did the same.

  “Hmmm. Not a lot to go on.”

  I stared at the words for a while, and then something clicked. “Isn’t Wednesday night the only day in the week that there isn’t a football practice?”

  “Yeah. I think you’re right. They never have sports practice on Wednesdays because games are always on Fridays. They have a heavy practice on Monday and Tuesday nights and sometimes on the weekend, but they take Wednesday off, have a minipractice on Thursday, and the big game is always on Friday.”

  “So, it could be possible that these creeps are actually on our football team. They could actually go to our school!”

  “That’s crazy! Murderers and rapists, especially brutal ones like these, don’t just go to some middle-class high school like this! They’re gonna be real criminals, probably from Compton.”

  “Look, we already know that the killers are white guys, from the hairs found on Carmen and from the skin in Stephanie’s mouth. Plus, they’re not in the system, so they are not known criminals.”

  So I added WHITE KILLERS to my Carmen list, and Seth took up the chalk and wrote the same in his column.

  “And now you’re thinking that they’re jocks going to our school?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m thinking.” And I wrote JONNY FREEMAN on Carmen’s side of the board, then moved over some papers and sat down on the bed and just stared at his name.

  “What does that mean? Who’s Jonny Freeman?”

  “Listen, Seth. Do you remember when I told you about that guy who thought he saw Carmen in the backseat of his car when he rolled it off the edge of Bellagio Road last year? That’s Jonny Freeman! He nearly died in an accident he said was caused by seeing Carmen’s ghost. He’s been in the hospital ever since. Now, six months later, two guys kidnap and murder a girl in the same way that three guys kidnapped and murdered Carmen last year, before Jonny Freeman was out of commission.”

  “And now you’re thinking that Jonny Freeman is the third guy in Carmen’s murder? And he and his creepy friends on the football team are responsible?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m thinking. Is there any way we can get your dad to swipe him for some DNA?”

  “They’ll have lots of DNA at that hospital he’s in, but I don’t know if we have enough evidence to convince my dad to get a search warrant.”

  “Well, then, we’ll have to work on that. See if we can come up with something to convince him.”

  “But there’s something else that we can use too, that I just remembered,” Seth said, brightening up. He got up and walked over to the chalkboard again. “Stephanie took a sizable chunk out of someone’s arm. Whoever it is, they’re going to be wounded. We need to take a good look at any guy wearing a large bandage on his arm!” Then he added WOUNDED PERP on Stephanie’s side of the board.

  “Brilliant!”

  “But it’s not going to be easy to find some
one with a bandage and accuse him of being a rapist,” Seth added. “First of all, those guys on the football team are usually pretty heavily taped up, especially their wrists. They’ve always got their forearms covered in bandages. And, even if whoever it is doesn’t get taped up, he’s probably wise enough to know that this bite will incriminate him, so he’ll tape himself up so he looks like the others or he’ll wear a long-sleeved shirt to school.”

  “Yeah, that’s true, but maybe we can see them before they get taped up before a game. You’re a guy, maybe you can go into the locker room and see them when they’re dressing.”

  “You must be crazy! I can’t go into the locker room when those jocks are in there. Do you want to get me killed too?”

  “Okay, I see your point.” I sat back down on the bed and thought. “Let’s see what we can do, from a purely investigative viewpoint.”

  “Wait a minute!” Seth brightened up. “I think I’ve got part of a plan.”

  “And what’s that?” I asked.

  “Well, it’s a two-parter.” He sat down on the floor in front of the bed. “Part one is this: all sports injuries that require medical attention of any kind, including just antiseptic and a Band-Aid, have to be reported to the school administration—and logged in to the nurse’s accident report logs. I’m not sure whether they have those on the computer yet. They may only keep the log on a clipboard, but that’s probably hanging in the nurse’s office somewhere. I can hack into the school computer, but it might be easier for one of us to just get sick and go to the nurse’s office and look for ourselves. That will rule out the real injuries, anyway.”

  “Okay, so what’s the second part?”

  “I just realized that I might be able to get into the locker room without getting beaten up.”

  “And how exactly is that going to happen?”

  “Baseball tryouts are starting.”

  “Yes, and?”

  “I never told you this about me—’cause you know, we only just started hanging out, but—” He paused. “You know I’m not a jock, right?”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “What I didn’t tell you is that I’m kind of a good baseball player. I was kind of the starting pitcher on our school’s baseball team in Austin.”

  “Kind of?” Seth was standing in front of the chalkboard now, and seeing his shy, lanky posture, I could suddenly see it.

  “You’re some kind of a baseball star, and you never told me?”

  “Look, I’m not a jock! I just have this knack. Baseball’s really popular in Austin, and I started out in little league!”

  I had to forgive him now. My own brother was in little league. Baseball was in a special category for a team sport. It was one of the few sports that did not require brawn. In fact, you didn’t have to be big at all, and it certainly helped to be a quick thinker, and a little agility went a long way. I had also heard that height in a pitcher was a definite advantage.

  “Okay! I believe you, and I forgive you for not telling me.”

  “And you don’t think I’m a jock?”

  “And I don’t think you’re a jock—’cause if you are, you are the nerdiest jock I’ve ever met!”

  “Great, that’s settled. Now, let’s see if I can hack into the injury log, if they have one.”

  “And if you can’t, I might get a migraine or something and have to go to the nurse’s office next week.”

  “Right.” So I stood up and wrote a few more things on the murder board. I wrote JOCKS on both sides and INJURED PLAYER on Stephanie’s side.

  I felt pretty good about all this. Like maybe we were getting closer to finding them. I really wanted to go to Seth’s father with our murder board suspicions, but Seth convinced me we should wait and see what else we could pick up in the coming week that would enable homicide to get a search warrant for Jonny Freeman’s DNA.

  That night, I put myself to sleep plotting our next moves.

  CHAPTER 19

  THE NEW COACH

  SETH WAS no slacker, and that very night, he hacked into the nurse’s office computer and looked to see if he could view any of the nurse’s logs, but there didn’t seem to be any info for sports injuries there, nor was there anything in the administration’s computers, the sports department’s, or the physical education computer. So, on Monday, I developed a god-awful migraine and had to go to the nurse’s office and lie down. She was terribly sweet when I told her I just needed to rest in a darkened room for a while, and it was all right with me if she wanted to sneak out for a cup of tea in the teacher’s lounge.

  When she was gone, I looked around her office, and I found the sports’ log right away because it was hanging on a nail on the back of the door—and I also found the photocopier, so I ran off a quick copy of all injuries suffered since school had begun this fall. I stuffed one copy into my jeans pocket and lay back down and studied the other.

  I didn’t find what I had expected, but what I did find was exceedingly curious. Among the normal stream of sports injuries caused by the overly zealous use of force on the playing field, or the too-strenuous workouts on the practice field, the number of cheerleading injuries drew my attention. They began popping up with unusual regularity. Right after the tryouts ended and the school year began, the cheerleading team started showing up in the nurse’s office with one injury after another. There were many more than I would have expected and a lot more than Wendy had come to know about. They were mostly bumps and bruises in the beginning, requiring only ice and arnica, but they seemed to get progressively more serious in the next month, beginning with a dislocated shoulder, followed by a broken collarbone, and then Natalie’s black eye.

  I didn’t know why, but these injuries made me feel as if something was more wrong with the cheerleading squad than a few new routines would warrant, and I desperately wanted to know more. I decided I would somehow enlist Wendy’s help to see if she could get one of her friends, like that Caroline person, to confide in her.

  I stayed in the nurse’s office, napping for most of the afternoon, and then met up with Seth at the end of the day. We decided to go to Pip’s again, and we ate cheesecake and drank coffee while we studied the nurse’s log and made a list of the real football injuries. There actually were far too many injuries for the list to be of any use, but as we went through the log, Seth noticed the cheerleader injuries right away.

  “What’s this all about? Here’s a broken wrist on one girl, there’s a broken collarbone on another girl, Natalie gets a black eye, and this girl Claudia complains of hearing loss—after she says she smacked her head on the mat during practice? It sounds to me like the girls are beating each other up!”

  “I was going to mention that. I thought that looked strange too. Something’s going on. They all say it’s just the new routines, but this is the first year anything like this has happened. My friend Wendy knows some of the girls on the squad, and she’s even getting worried about it. She says they’re all starting to look depressed—which I don’t think is a good thing for a cheerleader.”

  “I don’t know how it ties in with the football team, but the two usually go together—cheerleaders and football players….”

  “Yeah. So I’m going to do a little investigation of my own on that score. I’m going to talk to Wendy again and see if she can find out any more from her friends on the squad.”

  “Good idea. So, why don’t we start looking at the football team seriously. Maybe you can tell me what you know about Jonny’s friends on the team? If we make Jonny Freeman our focus, he should lead us to the other suspects. It makes sense if we figure that he was really the third guy, then we could follow his connections to find the other two guys.”

  “Okay. Firstly, Jonny wasn’t on the football team. He was a track star—a sprinter who also ran the hurdles, and from what I heard, he was pretty amazing. But he didn’t hang out with the track team. Basically, they weren’t cool enough for him. He liked to hang out with the football team, probably because that was where a
ll the hot girls were. And he didn’t hang out with just anyone on the team; he hung out with the school’s star quarterback, Luke Ritter.”

  “Hey, I’ve seen that Luke character around the school. He’s pretty hunky.”

  “Yeah, he’s definitely got the looks: chiseled face, lopsided grin, and those baby blues.” I couldn’t help but grin at Seth. “You don’t have to be ashamed. He’s incredibly attractive to nearly every girl and guy in the school.”

  It was true; with his good looks and his Muscle Beach physique, he was a major heartthrob. He could also throw the football amazing distances, with laser-beam accuracy. He was generally recognized as a phenomenal player, and that’s how he earned his nickname “Skywalker.” I never paid any attention to football, but even I couldn’t help noticing him and his buddies leaning against the railings or striding around the school, laughing at their inside jokes or picking on one of the nerds.

  I filled Seth in on the recent history of our football team, which fittingly went by the name of the Wildcats. “It is pretty much agreed that our school has a remarkable football team, not only because we are number one in our division, but because we are number one without having any black players on our team.”

  “Yes, I kind of noticed that you don’t have very much variety in color at your school.”

  “This is because there aren’t many kids of color in our neighborhood!” I answered. “Well, actually, there are a few, but they’re all just middle-class nerds, and the blackest thing these kids do is play trumpet and saxophone in the school band.” Seth laughed, and I went on.

  “University High has traditionally been more famous for its marching band than for its football team, and has always spent more money on the orchestra and the auditorium than on the sports facilities. But the story changed two years ago, when certain alumni of the dot-com generation made a concentrated effort to raise the school’s sports profile. They hired this big-time coach from a Midwest junior college who came with a reputation for putting his school on the sports map, especially the football team. His name is Coach Billy, Billy Boehm, and he’s the biggest ego on campus.