Third Degree (21 page)

I watched him go, hands in his pockets, whistling as he walked down the street and out of sight. I believed he would be in touch. But I wasn’t so sure I would like what he had to say.

I went in through the back door; the house was a beehive of activity, and packed to the gills with strangers. I took in the three Crime TV crew members sitting at my kitchen table, devouring a pepperoni pizza. One, a young hipster-looking guy with long hair, threw a piece to Trixie, who happily jumped in the air to catch it in her mouth.

“Hey, chief,” I said, grabbing the dog by the collar and pulling her away from the pizza. “I’ll call you at midnight when she’s throwing up pepperoni.”

“Who are you?” hipster kid asked, shoving another slice of pizza into his mouth.

“Just the owner of the house,” I said. I put the dog in the powder room in the hallway and walked into the living room where a bevy of Hooters waitresses had convened. I tripped over a large cable that transversed the area between the kitchen and the front door. There were lights, cameras, and microphones littered everywhere, and a technician on the stairs leading up to my second floor recording my every move. I slapped the camera out of his hand as if I were Sean Penn coming out of the Ivy in Hollywood. Max was in the living room holding court, instructing them on the next case, it seemed, while they sat in rapt attention. I was momentarily blinded by the preponderance of enormous breasts but managed not to appear gobsmacked. Or so I thought.

“We’ll do a stakeout in front of the cheater’s house,” Max said. “Oh, hi, Alison!” she said, noticing me in the archway leading into the living room. “Everyone, this is Alison Bergeron, my best friend in the whole world and maybe the smartest person I know.”

Flattery will get you nowhere. “Hi, everyone. Now get out.”

Max was mid-sentence, giving the waitress/private investigators their next assignment, when she realized that hell hath no fury like a sexually frustrated college professor. She looked over at me. “Excuse me?”

“Out.”

“We’re having a meeting,” she explained in her usual clueless fashion.

“I can see that,” I said, using my supercilious polite tone. “But this is my house and I need to eat. And drink. And do some work. And generally live the life that I work so hard to have.”

Max snorted. “We’ll only be five more minutes.” She seemed genuinely put out.

“No, you’ll be gone now.” I took in the doe-eyed stares of the Hooters gals, Queen among them. I pointed at her. “You can stay.”

Max strode toward me, Tinker Bell in five-hundred-dollar shoes. “A word, please?”

We stood in the hallway, the camera guy training his lens on us. I turned my back on him, blocking his view. “What the hell is this?” I hissed.

“This is our preproduction meeting,” Max said, as if it were the most apparent thing in the entire world. “We decided to have it here instead at the office because Queen has a lot of homework and a test to study for.”

“Don’t you think you should have asked me first?”

Max considered this and then made a decision. “No.”

“No?”

“Queen lives here so it’s kind of like her house and I didn’t think you’d mind.”

The cameraman was inches from my face and I gently pushed him away. “You were wrong. I’m going to take the dog for a walk. You have ten minutes to get everyone out of here. Got it?”

Max’s look was a cross between sad and angry but she nodded her head dutifully. “Fine. We’ll be gone in fifteen minutes.”

“Ten.” I turned and opened the powder room door, liberating a very grateful Trixie.

“I don’t know if—”

“Ten!” I called back over my shoulder as I hooked Trixie’s leash onto her collar and went out the back door into the blissful calm of my backyard. Good God, I thought, as I crossed the lawn and walked down the driveway, Trixie setting the pace. As a result, I was being dragged more than walking of my own accord. Nevertheless, I was relieved to be out of the house and on a quiet street in a suburban neighborhood and away from the prying eyes, and pendulous breasts, of a bunch of Hooters waitresses. Sorry. Make that “private investigators.”

Although I tried not to, I replayed the events of the last several days in my mind, spending way too much time on thoughts of my mother and her untimely death at the age of forty-eight. Heck, I wasn’t that far off from that myself. I had managed, for all of these years, to keep those emotions pressed down deep in my subconscious, thinking of her often but only focusing on the good times, when she was a raven-haired beauty with not a care in the world save her awkward, studious daughter and her place in the world. Goddamn Ginny Miller, I thought. As painful as it was to witness Carter Wilmott’s death, it was way harder to sift through the emotional wreckage that was years of repressed grief over the loss of a woman whom I had treasured.

I didn’t really owe Ginny anything but she had played her trump card and I had fallen for it. How could I not help the woman who had helped my mother pass from this world into the next? And how could I not help a man, George Miller, who was guilty of only a really bad temper but not manslaughter if Ginny’s theory was proved? I had once been suspected of something I hadn’t done and it was a very painful time. The helplessness that I felt then came rushing back to me now and gave me some insight into the hell in which George Miller resided.

I kept walking, thinking that if I gave myself enough time, I could just walk away from this whole mess completely.

But I know myself better than that. I couldn’t. And I’m sure that’s what Ginny was banking on. I’m nothing if not completely transparent.

My heart was heavy as I started back to the house, Trixie having been successful in her mission to mark her territory throughout the entire neighborhood. My feet hurt; I hadn’t changed out of my high heels upon entering the house and I now had a little more sympathy for women who served hot wings and beer in platform shoes while running investigations. These women were to be lauded. I looked for signs of the Crime TV crew, but there were none. The trucks were gone, as was Max’s bright red Mini Cooper. All that was left at the curb was a brown Honda Fit, parked at an angle, its front wheels resting on my lawn.

I ran up the driveway, the dog dragging me once again, and burst through the back door. Kevin was sitting at the kitchen table with Queen, the two of them deep in conversation. He looked at me with sad eyes.

“Is there any room at the inn?”

I left the house extra early the next morning, wanting to avoid giant breasts and “innocent until proven guilty” priests. I knew that Crawford had pulled a double shift and called him on the off chance that he might meet me for a coffee before he went home. I could tell, even over the phone, that he was dead tired but he agreed anyway, suggesting a Dunkin’ Donuts midway between campus and his precinct. I was on my third Boston cream doughnut and second cup of coffee when he walked in.

“What’s so important that it couldn’t wait until the weekend?” he asked, settling his lanky frame into a small Dunkin’ Donuts chair.

“Well, good morning to you, too!” I said. I realized, as I finished the remainder of my coffee, that I should have stopped at one cup; my heart was racing and I felt like I needed to run a marathon. What did they put in this stuff? Rocket fuel?

“No, seriously,” he said. “I’m exhausted. What’s going on?”

I filled him in on my new house guest while I had his attention.

“You’re running out of room,” he said in his usual cut-to-the-chase way.

“It’s like a home for wayward waitresses and priests.”

“They can’t stay.”

“And I can’t throw them out,” I said.

His look told me that he thought I could. Rather than continue with this train of thought, I decided to go with the real reason I had asked him here.

“What do you know about poison?”

He pointed at my cup. “Only that that qualifies.”

“I’m not kidding. Do you know anything about arsenic?”

“No. That’s what we’ve got Crime Scene for.”

“Are they chemists?”

“Some of them are.” He looked around the store and decided he couldn’t resist, I guess. He got up and ordered a large black coffee and a bagel with cream cheese. He carried both back to the table and started eating. “Where is this going?”

I told him about the Ginny Miller scenario, and my meeting with McVeigh. “I need to know about arsenic. How it is administered, how long it takes to act, how it kills you. Know anybody I can talk to?”

He put his head in his hands. “Why do you care?” he asked from underneath his palms.

I could feel the tears welling up before I even formulated an answer. “She took care of my mother, Crawford.”

He took his hands off his face. “So what? That’s her job. She’s a nurse.”

He was uncharacteristically short, not giving me the answer I was looking for. The minute he saw my face, he knew he had spoken too soon. He started to recant, but I closed my eyes and shook my head, attempting to silence him. “No. Don’t say anything.”

“I know a guy who knows a guy … anyway, I can help you with the arsenic thing.”

“Forget it.” Passive-aggressiveness is my stock-in-trade.

“Really. Just let me get six hours of shut-eye and I’ll make a few calls.” He passed a hand over his eyes. “I’m wiped out.”

“Thanks, Crawford.” This wasn’t exactly how I had wanted our early-morning meeting to go; my decision to call him had been ill-advised at best. I gathered up my stuff, all crammed under my seat. “I’ve gotta go.”

He grabbed my hand. “Do you think she may be using you? You know, for your connections and everything?”

“Oh, I know she’s using me,” I said, standing. “It’s just that I remember …” I started and then revised what I was going to say. “I just remember what it was like to be suspected of something I didn’t do.” I decided a joke would make this encounter end better than it had started. “And George Miller is one heck of a DPW head. I wouldn’t want to lose him.”

Crawford smiled wearily. “Let me walk you out,” he said, getting a bag for his bagel as we passed the crowded counter. Once outside, he put his arms around me. “It won’t do me any good to ask you not to get involved, right?”

I shook my head. “Right.”

He gave me a long hug and kissed me solidly on the lips. “Okay. Can I come over and meet the Hooters waitress tonight?”

“She’s more than a Hooters waitress. Her name is Queen and she’s a criminal justice major at John Jay.”

“And a Hooters waitress …”

“And a Hooters waitress.”

“So, can I?”

“Sure. As long as you know that you’ll have to sleep with me, with my priest on the couch below us.”

He looked up at the sky and sighed. “You don’t make it easy.” Crawford’s got a healthy respect—bordering on the obsessive—for church authority.

“And that’s why you love me,” I said. He walked me to my car and made sure I was buckled in before walking away.

I didn’t hear from Crawford for the rest of the day and I expected that he had slept longer than he had originally anticipated. He’s a guy who needs his sleep and he doesn’t get that much. He can go for long stretches without food and often does, but miss a night’s sleep? The man turns into a beast. I didn’t bother him and figured he would call me when he got up, got the information I needed, and was in a position to talk.

I wasn’t looking forward to going home. My home was my haven. Just me, Trixie, and sometimes Crawford. Now I had Queen and Kevin and they were taking up a lot of space. Talk about your personal space being violated. Did I have to start cooking dinner every night? Do their laundry? What role, exactly, was I going to be playing in their lives besides providing a roof over their heads? I thought a house meeting might be in order to clarify our different roles.

But to my surprise, nobody was home. No Queen, no Kevin, and no Trixie. A note on the kitchen table written in Kevin’s chicken scratch informed me that the trio had gone for a run down by the river and would return in about an hour with a pizza.

Maybe this roommate thing wouldn’t be so bad after all.

I poured myself a glass of wine, kicked off my pumps, and settled in to watch television, relishing the quiet. I flicked through the channels, settling on the local news station, News47 Westchester, knowing that the weather report would be coming up. I don’t know why but I’m obsessed with the following day’s weather. Generally, News47 Westchester’s meteorologist is wrong, and I’m usually not dressed appropriately as a result, but I always check. Someday, he’ll get it right and I won’t be wearing suede boots when the next monsoon hits.

With the exception of DPW chiefs who kill local bloggers, not too much goes on in the county. You have your usual drug busts, DUIs, and shady politicians, but as counties around New York go, it’s generally a pretty safe place to live. That’s why when something exciting happens, all hell breaks loose.

And hell was busting out all over.

I sat up when the “Breaking News” banner blasted onto the screen. Although overused as a notice, sometimes it represented really good, juicy, happening news. And today’s interruption didn’t disappoint. For when the banner rolled off the screen in a haze of red and purple, the News47 Westchester station colors, there was a woman, standing on the ledge of the highest part of the Tappan Zee Bridge, her hand gripping one of the iron beams that held the bridge together and aloft. I leaned in closer. Traffic was stopped in both directions and everyone from the bridge crew to the state police was gathered on both the north- and southbound lanes. The woman stayed on the ledge, her balance surprisingly good, as the wind whipped around her on her lofty perch.

The commentator was giving us viewers a blow-by-blow account of what had happened up until this moment. The woman had been driving in the northbound lane until she had suddenly pulled her car over in the right lane, causing a twelve-car accident, and climbed to the railing of the bridge where she had stood for the past hour, apparently contemplating her next move. Her next move seemed obvious to me: she was going to jump as soon as she got the courage. As usual with stories like this, I wondered what had her so distraught that she felt this was her only way out. I had been in many dark emotional places in my life but ending it all had never occurred to me.

The commentator was just about to throw the report back to the studio when the woman did just what I expected she would: she threw her arms out wide and executed a perfect swan dive, a beautiful sight if only the ending hadn’t been preordained tragic. I grabbed my chest, horrified, and let out a strangled sound because as I watched this surreal and heartbreaking event unfold, I realized that I knew the woman.

And I knew why she had jumped.