“It’s like five degrees outside!” Sarah yells.
“I’ll go,” I volunteer sweetly.
Both Sarah and Tom stare at me incredulously.
“Seriously,” I say, setting down my coffee-cocoa and getting up to grab my coat. “I mean, it’s not like I’ll be able to get any work done, with you at my desk, Tom. And I could use some fresh air.”
“It’s like five degrees out!” Sarah shouts again.
“It’s no big deal,” I say. I wind my scarf around my neck. “I’ll be back in a jiff.”
I scoop up the petty cash vouchers sitting on Sarah’s desk, and sail from the office. Out in the lobby, Pete starts laughing when he sees me. Not because I look comical in all my outside layers, but because he’s remembering what I’d said about my dad.
Well? Whycan’t he just want to rebuild his relationship with the daughter he barely knows?
Seriously, with friends like Pete, who needs enemies?
Ignoring Pete, I go outside—and almost turn back, it’s so cold. The temperature seems to have plummeted since my walk to work an hour ago. The cold sucks the breath from my chest.
But I’ve made up my mind. There’s no turning back now.
Lowering my head against the wind, I start across the park, ignoring the offers of “smoke, smoke,” from Reggie’s compatriots as I make my way toward the other side of campus—the opposite direction from the Budget Office. Which also happens to be the direction from which the wind is blowing in subarctic blasts.
Which is why, when I hear my name being called out from behind me, I don’t turn around right away.
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My ears are so numb beneath my knit cap, I think I must be hearing things. Then I feel a hand on my arm and whip around, expecting to see Reggie with his gold-toothed grin.
I don’t think it’s necessarily the wind that sucks away my breath when I see that it’s Cooper Cartwright.
“Oh,” I say, goggling at him. He’s as bundled up as I am. Except for the squirrels (and the drug dealers) we’re the only two living beings stupid—or desperate—enough to be in the park on this frosty morning.
“Cooper,” I say, through wind-chapped lips. “What are you doing here?”
“I stopped by to see you,” Cooper says. He’s breathing slightly heavily. Apparently he’s been running to catch up with me. Running. In this weather. In all those clothes. If it were me, I’d have collapsed into a gelatinous heap. But since it’s Cooper, he’s just breathing slightly harder than usual. “And Sarah and Tom said you were on your way to the Budget Office.” He jerks a gloved thumb over his shoulder. “But isn’t the Budget Office that way?”
“Oh,” I say, thinking fast. “Yeah. It is. But, uh, I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and just stop by to see this one guy about this thing. Was there something important you needed to see me about?”
Please , I’m praying.Please don’t let him have spoken to my dad before I’ve gotten a chance to speak to him about my dad….
“Yeah,” Cooper says. He hasn’t shaved again this morning. His dark razor stubble looks delectably prickly. “My brother. And why he might have left a message asking to speak to me about you. Any idea what that might be about?”
“Oh,” I say, feeling slightly sick with relief. Although possibly that’s from all the whipped cream. “Yeah.
He wants me to come to his wedding. You know, to show there’s no hard feelings—”
“In front of the photographers fromPeople ,” Cooper finishes for me. “I got it. I should have known it wasn’t anything important. So.” His icy blue gaze focuses on me like a laser. “You’re stopping by to see this one guy aboutwhat thing?”
Damn! How does he always know?Always ?
“Well,” I say slowly. “See, it turns out Lindsay was seeing a new guy before she died. A Winer.”
“A what?”
“You know.” I spell it. “As in Winer Construction.”
His dark-lashed eyelids narrow. “Heather. Why does this sound to me like you’re investigating that dead girl’s murder?”
“Because I am,” I say, then hold up both gloved hands in protest when he inhales to begin his tirade.
“Cooper, think about it! Winer Construction? The Winer Sports Complex? They’re bound to have skeleton keys to locks all over the city. Doug could totally have had access to the caf—”
“Did anyone sign him in that night?” Cooper demands.
Damn. He knows the workings of Fischer Hall almost as well as I do.
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“Well, no,” I say. “But there’s a thousand ways he could have snuck in. Chinese food deliverymen do it all the time, to slip menus under the kids’ doors—”
“No.” That’s all Cooper says. He accompanies the word with a single head shake.
“Cooper, listen to me,” I say, even though I know it’s pointless. “Detective Canavan isn’t asking any of the right questions. He doesn’t know how to get information out of these kids. I do. I swear that’s all I’m doing. Gathering information. Which I will fully turn over to him.”
“Do you honestly believe I’m that gullible, Heather?” Cooper demands.
He is glaring down at me. The wind is biting into my face and making my eyes sting, but it doesn’t appear to be bothering him at all. Possibly because he’s got all that razor stubble to protect him.
“You know, it’s very stressful to work in a place people are calling Death Dorm,” I say. “Tom only just started working there, and he already wants to quit. Sarah’s being impossible. I’m just trying to make Fischer Hall a fun place to work again. I’m just trying to do my job.”
“Counseling some kid because she put Nair in her roommate’s shampoo bottle,” Cooper says, mentioning an all-too-frequent form of roommate torture around New York College, “and finding the person responsible for boiling a cheerleader’s head on a cooking range are two entirely different things.
One of them is your job. One is not.”
“I just want to talk to the Winer kid,” I say. “What harm can TALKING do?”
Cooper continues to stare down at me, as the wind goes on whistling. “Please don’t do this,” he says, so quietly I’m not entirely sure he’s said it at all. Except that I saw his lips move. Those oddly lush (for a guy) lips that sometimes remind me of pillows, against which I’d like to press my—
“You can come with me,” I offer brightly. “Come with me and you’ll see. All I’m doing is talking. Not investigating. Not at all.”
“You’ve lost it,” Cooper says. Not without some disgust. “I mean it, Heather. Sarah is right. Youdo have some kind of Superman complex.”
“Up, up, and away,” I say. And take his arm. “So. Coming?”
“Do I have a choice?” Cooper wants to know.
I think about it.
“No,” I say.
10
I undo the latch of my front door
It’s not the kung pao chicken I’ve been waiting for It’s not a man carrying bags of food
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It’s only you, and you’re up to no good.
“Delivery”
Written by Heather Wells
Fraternity Row, otherwise known as Waverly Hall, is a huge building on the opposite side of Washington Square Park from Fischer Hall. Set back from the street by a stone wall around a courtyard, and entered beneath an archway, it’s more Parisian in style than other buildings around the square, and for that reason, more distinctive. Maybe that’s why it was determined by the trustees that this building would house the college’s Greek fraternities (the sororities, of which there are fewer, are housed in a more modern building on Third Avenue), one frat per floor.
I, of course, never learned Greek, so I don’t understand what all the symbols on the buzzers by the front door mean.
But I recognize Tau Phi Epsilon right away, because the signTAU PHI EPSILON , in subdued black lettering, instead of the Greek symbols.
Unlike the well-swept sidewalk in front of Fischer Hall, the courtyard in front of Waverly Hall is filthy, littered with beer cans. The potted shrubs on either side of the front door are decorated with women’s underwear instead of twinkly Christmas lights—all different sizes and colors and styles of women’s underwear, from black lacy thongs to white Calvin Klein briefs to polka-dot bikini bottoms.
“Now, that,” I say, looking down at the panties, “is just a waste of good lingerie.”
Cooper, however, continues to look murderous, not even cracking a smile at my semi-joke. He yanks open the door and waits for me to enter before going inside himself.
The heat inside is so intense, I feel my nose begin to defrost at once. We enter a fairly clean foyer guarded by a gray-haired New York College security officer, whose face is crisscrossed by so many broken capillaries that his off-duty (one can only hope) predilection for whiskey is plainly obvious. When I show him my staff ID and tell him we’re there to see Doug Winer of Tau Phi Epsilon, he doesn’t even bother buzzing up to see if Doug’s there. He just waves us toward the elevator. As we pass, I realize why: he’s busy watching soap operas on one of his desk monitors.
Joining Cooper in the tiny, three-person elevator, I’m silent during the bouncy ride…until the cab lurches to a stop on the fifth floor, and the door opens to reveal a long, somewhat dingy hallway, along which someone has spray-painted in three-foot-high flourescent pink letters:FAT CHICKS GO HOME .
I blink at the letters, which reach nearly to my hip, and are scrawled across doors and walls indiscriminately. The Tau Phi Epsilons are going to have some pretty hefty floor damage charges come the end of the school year.
“Well,” I say, staring at the wall.
“This,” Cooper bursts out, “isexactly why I don’t think you ought to be getting involved in this investigation.”
“Because I’m a fat chick, and I ought to go home?” I ask, struck to the quick.
Cooper’s expression darkens even further…a feat I hadn’t thought possible.
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“No,” he says. “Because…because…guys like this…they’reanimals .”
“The kind of animals who would chop off a cheerleader’s head and cook it on a stove in a dorm cafeteria?” I ask him pointedly.
But he’s apparently speechless with indignation. So I knock on the door closest to the elevator, the one withTAU PHI EPSILON written over the frame.
The door swings open, and a dark-haired woman in an honest-to-God maid’s uniform—not one of those sexy ones they sell on Bleecker Street, but a real one, with long sleeves and a skirt below the knees—blinks at us. She’s fairly young, probably early forties, and has a dust rag in one hand. She’s not wearing a lace cap, though. Thank God.
“Yes?” she says. She has a heavy Spanish accent. Heavier than Salma Hayek’s, even.
I show her my staff ID. “Hi,” I say. “I’m Heather Wells, and this is my friend Cooper Cartwright. I’m with the Housing Department. I just wanted to—”
“Come in,” the woman says disinterestedly. She steps out of the way so that we can enter, then closes the door behind us. We find ourselves in a spacious, well-lit loft—the old-fashioned kind, with high ceilings, crown molding, and parquet floors—in a foyer surrounded by doors on all four sides.
“They’re in there.” She nods her head toward a set of closed French doors off to the right.
“Um, well, we’re actually looking for someone in particular,” I say. “Doug Winer. Do you know which room is—”
“Look,” the woman says, not unpleasantly. “I just clean here. I don’t actually know any of them by name.”
“Thank you for your time,” Cooper says politely, and, taking me by the arm, steers me toward the closed French doors. He’s muttering something beneath his breath that I don’t quite catch…possibly because the minute his hand closed over my arm, my heart began to drum so loudly in my ears, it drowned out all other sound. Even through seven layers of material, Cooper’s touch excites me no end.
I know. I reallyam pathetic.
Rapping sharply on the glass panes of the double doors, Cooper calls out, “Hello, in there.”
A voice from within hollers something indistinguishable. Cooper looks down at me, and I shrug. He throws open the French doors. Through the thick gray fog of marijuana smoke, I’m able to make out the green felt of a billiard table, and, in the background, a wide-screen TV transmitting the flickering images of a football game. The room is lit by a bank of windows that let in the uneasy gray of outdoors, and by the warm glow of a brass and stained-glass lamp that hangs over the pool table. In a far corner, a spirited game of air hockey is taking place, and to my immediate left, someone opens a mini-fridge and pulls out a beer.
That’s when I realize Cooper and I must have just died—possibly on that rickety old elevator—and I’d somehow ended up in Guy Heaven by mistake.
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“Hey,” says a blond kid leaning over the pool table to make a difficult shot. He has a joint pressed between his lips, the tip of which glows red. Incredibly, he’s dressed in a red satin smoking jacket and a pair of Levi’s. “Hang on.”
He draws back the cue and shoots, and the click of balls is drowned out by the sudden thunder of the football fans as they cheer on a favorite player. Straightening, the kid removes the joint from his mouth and studies Cooper and me from behind a hank of blond hair. “What can I do you for?” he inquires.
I look longingly at the beer the kid reaches for and sucks back while he waits for our response. A glance at Cooper tells me that he, too, is fondly recalling a time in his life when it was okay—even encouraged—to drink beer before lunchtime. Although I never actually lived through a time like that, never having gone to college.
“Um,” I say, “we’re looking for Doug Winer. Is he here?”
The kid laughs. “Hey, Brett,” he calls over his red satin shoulder. “This babe wants to know if Doug’s here.”
Brett, at the air hockey table, snorts. “Would we be enjoying this excellent ganja if the Dougster wasn’t here?” he inquires, raising his beer bottle in the air like that guy in that play who held up the skull and said he knew him well. “Of course the Dougster is here. The Dougster is, in fact, everywhere.”