Big Boned (10 page)

But Sarah is already up and heading for the cafeteria doors. I throw Gavin a tired look. “Thanks.”

He shows me both his palms in a what’d-I-do? gesture.

“Let’s go,” I say to him. To Magda, I say, “See you later. Good luck with your waxing.”

She glares at me as I hurry after Sarah, Gavin hot on my heels. “Not everyone is naturally fair like you, Heather, you know,” Magda calls after us hotly. “Some of us need a little extra help!”

Out in the front lobby, we find that Sarah has already thrust herself in the middle of the tight circle of college administrators that’s formed around Detective Canavan, and is insisting, “…so you just need to get in touch with her at her parents’ house as soon as possible. We can of course give you that information if it will help at all with your investigation—”

Detective Canavan, seeing me approaching, gives me a help-me look over the top of Sarah’s head. “Right,” he says, to Sarah. “We’ll get right on that.”

“Sarah,” I say, gently.

“Here, why don’t I just go get it for you right now.” Sarah turns around and starts heading back for the residence hall director’s office. “I assume it’s all right for us to go back into our office now, right?”

“Uh,” Detective Canavan says. “Yes. The crime scene is clear.”

“The crime scene.” Sarah laughs. There’s nothing humorous in the sound, however. “Right. I’ll just go get you Jamie’s home address and be right back. Don’t go anywhere.”

She hurries away, her long hair flying behind her. Dr. Jessup, still standing in front of Detective Canavan, gives me a look. “What’s this about a resident knowing something about Dr. Veatch’s murder, Heather?” he wants to know.

“I don’t know,” I say. “It’s just something another resident overheard. It could be nothing…just a rumor.”

“Hey,” Gavin says indignantly. I elbow him, and he quiets down.

“I’ll have someone get in touch with this, er, Price girl,” Detective Canavan says. “But the evidence against Blumenthal is pretty convincing.”

“And may I ask what that evidence is?” I want to know.

“You may,” Detective Canavan replies, with a smile, “but that doesn’t mean I’m going to tell you.”

Dr. Jessup, overhearing this conversation, laughs heartily. But there’s nothing sincerely humorous in the sound.

“I guess Heather’s been working here for so long she’s starting to consider herself an expert in homicide,” he says loudly—but not loudly enough to be overheard by any of the students who might be milling around.

“Yes, well,” Detective Canavan says, “this building does seem to see more than its fair share of manslaughters.”

Dr. Jessup looks slightly queasy upon hearing this, as if regretting having brought up the subject in the first place.

“Here.” Sarah comes running back, out of breath, a slip of paper in her hand. “Here it is, Detective. Jamie Price’s home address and phone number. This is where she is. Or where she will be. So you’ll go question her?”

“Sure thing,” Detective Canavan says, taking the slip of paper, folding it in half, and putting it in his pocket. “Now, if you people don’t mind, I have places to be, things to do…”

“Of course, of course,” Dr. Jessup says, laying a hand on the detective’s back. “Just one more thing…”

The two men step from the lobby, followed by the rest of
the housing administrators, as well as Reverend Mark and, of course, Muffy Fowler.

Sarah looks at me. She’s still panting.

“He’s not going to ask Jamie what she knows, is he?” she asks.

“I don’t know, Sarah,” I say. “Maybe. Probably not right away. He says whatever evidence they have against Sebastian is pretty convincing.”

Sarah’s eyes are wet again. “Then Gavin’s right,” she says. “We’ve just got to go and ask her ourselves.”

“Sarah,” I say. “I really don’t think that’s a very good idea.”

“A man’s
life
is at stake,” Sarah insists.

“I’m with Sarah,” Gavin says. “Plus, I think Jamie needs us.”

“
Sebastian
needs us,” Sarah corrects him.

I look at the ceiling. “This is not happening.”

“And,” Sarah goes on, “there’s no need to rent a car. I know someone who has one…someone I’m sure will be happy to help us.”

I look at her curiously. “You do? Who?”

“No,” Cooper says.

I’m not surprised. They’ve ambushed him, following me home and—despite my assurances that it’s going to go down this way—insisting he’ll let them borrow his precious and tenderly restored BMW ’74 2002.

Yeah. Because that’s about as likely to happen as my getting up every morning to run a 5K. For the fun of it.

Still. They’re standing in his second floor office, where he has the window wide open to let in the late-afternoon breeze, stray random bullet from the park be damned.

“Cooper,” Sarah says. “You don’t understand. This is an emergency. A young man’s life may be at stake.”

“Take the train,” Cooper says. He’s sitting with his feet on his stupendously messy desk, going through his mail in a bored sort of way. Cooper is usually very tidy in his personal life—he keeps the public areas of his house and even his bedroom almost obsessively neat most of the time.

But his office and car are another story. I can’t understand it. Often it looks like a tornado ripped through both—papers, cheese-smeared burger wrappers, wadded-up napkins, empty coffee cups, Post-it notes with cryptic writing on them, piles of them, everywhere. Periodically he goes through both—the office and the car—and cleans them beyond recognition to sparkling and spartan neatness. Then he starts letting things pile up again. He claims this is how he stays “organized.”

It’s really a good thing that he has me to do his billing, actually, or he’d have no money at all coming in, seeing as how he’d never even be able to find his clients’ statements, let alone send them out on time.

“Sure,” Gavin says. He’s looking at a fly that’s just landed on a particularly cheesy-looking wrapper from Johnny Rockets that’s sitting on top of one of Cooper’s office stereo speakers. “We could take the train. But how are we supposed to get from the train station to Jamie’s house? Huh?”

“Easy,” Cooper says, casually flipping an announcement from Publishers Clearing House that he may be a million-dollar winner onto the parquet floor. “It’s called a cab.”

“I don’t even know if they HAVE cabs in Rock Ridge,” Sarah cries. “In fact, I very much doubt it fits in with their town plan.”

“Tough break, kid,” Cooper says. “Guess you’re gonna have to rent a car.”

“You have to be over twenty-five to rent a car in New York,” Gavin points out.

Cooper looks up from the Victoria’s Secret catalog he’s found beneath the rest of his mail. “Well, what do you know?” he says. “Heather, aren’t you over twenty-five? Oh, but wait…I believe you and I already had a little talk about you getting involved in this particular murder investigation this morning, didn’t we?”

I scowl at the tops of my shoes. I get where he’s coming from. I really do. But he doesn’t have to be so insufferably pedantic about it.

“You guys,” I say to Sarah and Gavin. “Cooper is right. The police don’t need our help. We should probably stay out of this.”

“But Sebastian didn’t do it!” Sarah shrieks.

“Then he has nothing to worry about,” Cooper says calmly, as he hands the Victoria’s Secret catalog to my dog, Lucy. Since she’s been sitting beside him this whole time, patiently waiting for exactly this moment, she lets out a happy doggie gurgle, then slides to her belly and sets to work, methodically ripping the catalog to shreds, and adding to the general detritus already lining Cooper’s floor.

Sarah does not seem particularly soothed by Cooper’s assurance. In fact, it seems to have the complete opposite effect on her. She flops down onto the paperwork-strewn couch across from his desk (fortunately Cooper has an outer office in which he receives clients, and which he keeps scrupulously neat. Were they to see this, the inner sanctum,
doubtless his client list would shrink significantly through lack of confidence in his detecting abilities—primarily his ability to find anything in his own office, such as his clients), and, hugging herself, begins to rock back and forth, her gaze fixed on the floor. She appears to be making a slight keening noise.

Cooper eyes her as warily if she were a cheeseburger he’d ordered well done that had arrived medium rare.

Gavin takes this opportunity to announce, “This…this is bullshit.” Then he pivots around on his heel and leaves the brownstone, banging the front door noisily behind him. I hurry to Cooper’s open window and lean out from it just in time to see him run down the front stoop and head toward Sixth Avenue, his shoulders hunched, his fists buried in the pockets of his jeans.

“Gavin,” I call after him. “Wait! Where are you going?”

Gavin’s shoulders tense, but he doesn’t respond. He doesn’t even turn his head, even though I know he’s heard me. Every drug dealer on the corner has turned and cried, “Oh, hey, Heather!” in a pleasant way.

Kids.

I wave to the drug dealers, then duck back into Cooper’s office.

“I don’t get it,” I say, to the room in general. “Where does he think he’s going?”

“Where do you
think
?” Sarah says, bitterly, from the couch. “He’s going to see
her
.”

I blink at her. “He is?
Why?
”

“Why do you
think
?” Sarah demands wildly, shoving a wave of thick dark hair from her face to glare at me. “God,
when did you get so dense? Are you blind? Jamie Price looks exactly like
you
. Except, you know.
Younger
.”

Too shocked to know how to reply to this, I opt for saying nothing. For a second or two, the room is silent, save for the sound of Lucy’s contented licking, shredding, and chewing. Then Cooper says, “Ooookay. So when exactly did we all hop on the train to crazy town?”

Sarah heaves a shuddering sigh, then says in a small voice, careful not to meet either of our gazes, “Look. I’ve got to talk to Sebastian.”

We both glance at her. Slowly, she raises her gaze from the floor.

“They let them have visitors?” she asks, looking suddenly much younger than her twenty-two years. “In jail? Right?”

“With suspected coconspirators,” Cooper says, “in order to get their stories straight? Yeah, not so much.”

I swing around to stare at Cooper in shock, just as Sarah sucks in her breath…and promptly bursts into tears again.

“How—how c-could you?” she cries. “I never—you have to know I would n-never—” She breaks down into loud, hic-cupping sobs, burying her face into the arm of the sofa.

I give Cooper a sour look. He stares at Sarah in astonishment, then looks up at me. “What’d I say?” he wants to know.

“Don’t give me that,” I growl at him. “You know exactly what you said. Suspected coconspirators, my ass. Sarah.” I cross the room to sink down beside her on the couch, then try to gather some of her copious hair from her eyes. “Sarah, he didn’t mean it that way. He didn’t mean he thinks you’re
a coconspirator. He meant that from the prosecutor’s perspective, that’s how it might seem if you were to ask to see Sebastian right now—”

“Oh, Heather, you’re home.”

With his usual perfect timing, my father appears in the doorway. He’s holding a large cardboard box of his belongings. My dad’s been moving out, slowly but surely, for the past week.

When he notices Sarah, and her theatrical sobs, his happy grin that I’m home from work fades, and he says, “Oh dear. I see this isn’t a good time. I did hear the news, you know. About your boss. Such a shame. People do seem to die at an alarming rate at your place of work, Heather. I don’t believe in that sort of thing, of course, but if I were a superstitious man, I might almost start to suspect that Fischer Hall is, in fact, cursed.”

Lucy, seeing my dad, gets up from her now almost completely shredded magazine, and, her tail wagging, goes over to give him a lick on the hand.

“Oh, hello, Lucy,” he says. “Not now, dear. We’ll have our walk in a little while. I have to get this box uptown. Which reminds me, Heather, when you have a moment, there’s something I need to speak to you about. A little business proposal Larry and I have been meaning to discuss with you. It could work out to be quite advantageous for all three of us. It’s something I think you’ll quite like, actually. But, er, I can see now is not quite the time…”

As Sarah’s sobs rise in volume, Dad flings a questioning look in Cooper’s direction, since I’m obviously too busy trying to stanch the flow of Sarah’s tears to reply.

“My fault,” Cooper says, indicating Sarah. “I’m a heartless cad. Insensitive, too.”

“Oh,” Dad says, nodding. “Yes, of course. I’ve always liked that about you. Uh, Heather?”

I look up from rubbing Sarah’s back. “Yes, Dad?”

“Tad called. Apparently he’s been trying to reach you on your cell phone. He’d like you to call him back. Just wants to see if you’re all right, considering…well, all that’s happened.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

“Well.” He gives one last look at the stricken figure beside me on the couch, then shrugs. “I think this will be my last night here at the brownstone. If there are no objections, I’d like to make braised short ribs for dinner for all of you. I have them marinating now. I assume you’ll both be home for dinner?”

Cooper and I nod. Dad looks pleased.

“Excellent,” he says. “I’ll see you around eight o’clock then. You, too, Lucy.” To Sarah, he says, “You’re welcome to stay for dinner, as well, young lady. Hopefully you’ll be, er, feeling better by then. Plenty for everyone. Well. Bye, now.”

And off he goes. Lucy, disappointed he didn’t take her with him, goes sulkily back to ripping Giselle Bündchen’s face off. Cooper’s gaze strays out the window, at the pinkening sky, just visible over the roofs of the brownstones across the street. Sarah’s sobs, meanwhile, have slowed. She seems to be mellowing a bit, if the way she’s wiping her nose on her sleeve is any indication. I look around for a box of tissues…then remember where I am.

I manage to find a pile of napkins from Dunkin’ Donuts
that don’t look too used. I pass them to her. Sarah raises her head, takes the napkin wad, then blows her nose. Then she looks at Cooper, and, hatred—it’s hard to mistake—glittering in her eyes, says, “I had nothing to do with Owen’s murder.”

“I didn’t say you did,” Cooper says. He’s taken his feet off his desk, and is clacking away at his keyboard, apparently Googling something. Knowing Cooper, it’s probably Giselle Bündchen.

“You called me a coconspirator!” Sarah cries.

“What Heather said,” Cooper says, still not turning from his computer monitor.

“It’s true, Sarah,” I say. “They’re not going to let you talk to Sebastian. I doubt he’s even allowed to have visitors, aside from his lawyer. Besides, he’s probably not even in Manhattan anymore. He’s probably at Rikers by now.”

“Rikers!” Sarah echoes, with a horrified gasp.

“The Tombs,” Cooper corrects me, still not turning around. “They’ll have transferred him to Manhattan Detention Center from the Sixth Precinct by now.” He glances at the time on his monitor. “Or maybe not. He’ll go to Rikers in the morning, for sure, though.”

“He can’t,” Sarah says, jumping to her feet. Her eyes are wide with panic. “He can’t go to Rikers. You don’t understand. He has asthma! He has allergies!”

Cooper finally spins around in his computer chair. His expression, when he faces Sarah, is furious. He looks…well. He looks scary. Like he had this morning when he’d warned me about interfering in Owen Veatch’s murder investigation.

“Okay,” he says, angrily. “That’s it. I’ve had it up to here with this bullshit, Sarah. You tell me what the fuck is going on, or you get out of my house. No”—when Sarah glances for help in my direction—“don’t look at Heather. You look at me. Tell me, or get out. I’m giving you until the count of three. One.”

“He didn’t do it!” Sarah cries.

“I know he didn’t do it. Tell me how you can prove it. Two.”

“Because I just know! I know him!”

“That’s not good enough for the DA to drop the charges, Sarah. Three. Get the fuck—”

“He couldn’t have done it because Owen Veatch was shot from outside the building,” Sarah shouts. “And I can prove Sebastian was
inside
Fischer Hall at the time Owen was killed!”

“How can you possibly do that?” Cooper demands.

“Because,” Sarah says, her round cheeks suddenly going crimson. “I…I signed him in, the night before.”

“You what?”

I feel my blood run cold. But in a good way.

“She signed him in,” I say, rising from the couch and crossing the room to stand beside Sarah, pieces of Victoria’s Secret catalog crunching beneath my feet. “The sign-in logs, at the security desk. All guests to the building have to be signed in, and leave a piece of ID with the guard. What time did you sign Sebastian out this morning, Sarah?”

She shakes her head. “Late. After breakfast. It was like eight forty-five.”

I throw a triumphant look at Cooper. “
After
the mur
der could have taken place. Don’t you see? That proves he couldn’t have done it. The guard wouldn’t have let him out of the building without signing out. He couldn’t have done it.”

Cooper, however, is frowning.

“I don’t get it,” he says. “If this is all true, why didn’t the kid tell the cops when they asked him where he was at the time of the murder? Why didn’t he show them the sign-in log?”

“Because,” Sarah says, looking unhappy. “He…he was protecting someone.”

“
Who?
” I demand. “Who could he possibly—”

“Me, all right?” Sarah can’t seem to lift her gaze from the floor. “He’s…he was protecting me.”

Cooper, with a happy sigh, leans back again in his office chair, causing it to squeak. “And here I thought chivalry was dead.”

“It’s not like that,” Sarah says quickly, lifting her gaze, her cheeks flaming once more. “We’re not—we’ve never—”

I give her a curious look. “But, Sarah—then why else could he be protecting you?”

“I…I’d rather not say,” Sarah says. “Can’t we just bring him the sign-in sheets? Detective Canavan, I mean?”

“What were you doing all night,” Cooper wants to know, “if you weren’t having carnal knowledge of one another? I mean, if you’ll excuse my curiosity? Because I can assure you, Canavan will ask.”

“No, we can’t just bring him the sign-in sheets,” I say testily, in reply to Sarah’s question. “I want to know. What’s Sebastian protecting you from, Sarah? What—”