Addressed to Kill Page 13

  “Oh dear. I guess that’s why Ben brings that old bell out every time he takes over. I didn’t realize he was overdoing it. He seems to like being back there.”

  “I didn’t mean to make you worry. We all fall asleep on the job once in a while, and I don’t think anyone would take advantage of him.”

  Not since the robbers have been caught, I thought.

  “Now, what can I help you with?”

  “Okay, you got me. I need to call Mercedes and I don’t have her number.”

  “Well, that sounds harmless.”

  I waited while he dug out his phone, or perhaps an early twentieth-century notebook, and read it off to me. I tried not to rush off now that I had what I wanted, but a call waiting came in from Greta. I think Quinn believed me when I told him and signed off.

  “Oh, Cassie,” she said in a muffled voice. “You know that paper I gave you? It turns out I probably shouldn’t have done that.”

  “What paper?” I asked.

  “Um. Oh. Thank you,” Greta said, letting out a whew of a sigh.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  12

  The longer I sat with my coffee, the better Mahican’s boxed salads looked. I picked out a Greek salad, just for the feta cheese and olives, as well as a caramel brownie, just for the sugar. I’d been much too nervous to eat at the police department brunch. Besides, I wasn’t sure I was supposed to partake. Although Dyson had told me Sunni seemed happy that I was accompanying him, he was not much more than a kid, and I questioned his ability to psych out a chief of police with a wide array of superpowers.

  I was due back at the station in an hour or so. If I took “or so” to mean twenty minutes, then I had until twelve thirty before picking up Dyson. Close to an hour on my own. Time for a little useful interaction with the key players in this week’s drama. Where had they all been on Monday afternoon, for example, when Dennis Somerville’s home was supposedly being invaded? According to Sunni, she’d checked all their alibis, but what if she missed something? You couldn’t always depend on superpowers being foolproof.

  I wished Sunni had shared the alibis and whatever forensics she had. Had she found the gun, for example? How about perfect fingerprints all over Dennis’s office from someone who shouldn’t have been there? Too soon for that feedback, I realized, recalling Sunni’s lectures on how much backlog there was in understaffed crime labs.

  I took my salad to the table and dialed Mercedes, who picked up right away. Coming through my phone was background noise that seemed to match exactly the noise in Mahican’s. No wonder. Mercedes marched toward me with her usual swagger, today’s cape a deep green. We had a good laugh when we realized that she’d been entering the coffee shop when I called.

  “When I saw Ben behind the counter at the post office, I thought you might be sick.”

  “No, no, just some personal business.”

  She smiled. “Oh, good,” she said, and headed for the barista. I suspected she was relieved as much that I wouldn’t be cancelling my presentation to her class as that my health was good. She came back with her lunch, a packaged sandwich and chips, and joined me at my table.

  We chatted about how accommodating Ben was. Mercedes had lived in town all her life; her ex-husband and Ben had been good friends until Cyrus passed away a couple of years ago.

  “Fishing buddies, I’ll bet,” I said.

  We pried our packages open and tried to look as refined as possible unwrapping primitive plastic utensils, tearing apart impossibly sealed dressing packets, and arranging tiny napkins on our laps. “I almost forgot,” Mercedes said, taking a small pill container from her purse and placing it next to her picnic-style box. “You called me?”

  “Right. I thought we could verify some details for tomorrow.” Face-to-face with someone I was considering, however dubiously, a murder suspect, I became tongue-tied. It would have been much easier to interrogate her by phone. Or so I told myself. “Shall I meet you at the same place?”

  Mercedes chewed on a cracker and nodded. “Mary Draper Hall.”

  “Also, I realize I don’t know exactly how long the classes run these days.”

  “Fifty minutes. You can plan on talking for about a half hour and then take questions. Does that sound okay?”

  “Yes, and I’ll have enough material in case everyone falls asleep and there are no questions.”

  Mercedes laughed. “If they do, it won’t be the first time.” She picked a tiny pink pill from her box and swallowed it with a swig of water.

  “I thought I’d start with Sir Rowland Hill and how the valentine tradition took off in Victorian England once he instituted penny postage.”

  “Now, see, that’s the kind of thing I find fascinating,” she said.

  It was hard to tell whether Mercedes was sincere or doing her best to encourage the slow kid in the room.

  “How come I wasn’t invited to the party?” a throaty voice came from over my shoulder.

  Joyce Blake had the same idea for dining today. I hadn’t noticed her arrival, but she joined us now with yet a different variety of Mahican salad, hers being spinach based. Had I lost my chance to query Mercedes? I wasn’t sure whether the addition of Joyce at the table would work for or against my little plot to play interrogator, but I had to make use of the little time I had left. Neither was it lost on me that with the capture of the three burglars, the murder case might also have been solved, and I could hang up my nonexistent badge. My curiosity won out as usual—I reasoned that Sunni might need more information, if only for completeness in her report.

  I allowed a little more small talk about the postal service, sharing a tidbit about the young “post boys” of Victorian England who wore scarlet jackets and delivered the mail by horseback, and who often stopped to play together, leaving their horses and their precious cargo untended and the object of a great many robberies.

  “Cassie was giving me a peek into her lecture tomorrow,” Mercedes said. “You should drop in if you’re free.”

  “A lecture on the post office. How fascinating,” Joyce said, and this time the insincerity was blatant.

  “Seriously, how often do you think about it?” Mercedes asked. “Having a postal service accessible to the masses was a significant step in free information exchange.”

  “You’re right,” Joyce said. “I usually dwell on the negatives. Bills and endless junk mail, plus solicitations, and even hate mail.”

  Hate mail. I was nearly overcome thinking of the mail that had caused Dennis Somerville such consternation. It bothered me to cut short a discussion of the postal service, but I was aware of my mission of the moment. If I was going to do this, it had to be soon.

  “You know, I’m still a little upset that my last interaction with Dennis was unpleasant,” I said. Both women became intensely interested in their salads. I plowed on. “He came into the post office on Monday morning, very unhappy with some letters he’d received, ostensibly from students.” When this little poke drew no response, I went further. “Mercedes, weren’t you in the lobby at that same time?”

  Mercedes covered her mouth, indicating she was chewing and unavailable to answer. Joyce took over.

  “If you ask me, Dennis made much too big a deal about those letters,” Joyce said. She caught herself quickly, covering her mouth, also. “Oh, I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t be speaking that way. It’s just that I wish he hadn’t gotten all worked up about them. It’s not the first time a C student tried to make our lives miserable. These days, he’s lucky it didn’t go viral.”

  Mercedes nodded, in sweeping vertical motions of her head. “They’re getting ruder and ruder,” she said. “The other day, I made a note on one guy’s paper, that he was using too many words that were foreign to the general reader. Do you know what he did? He sent me an e-mail saying ‘look them up.’”

  “One of my complex variables students
said I should put all the assignments online. He said, ‘It’s not rocket science.’”

  “Hey,” Joyce said. “We ought to do a skit on this.”

  “Most insulting moments. It doesn’t have to be all students, though I’ve certainly had enough of them.” Mercedes seemed to come to life at the idea, then became aware that she might be scaring me off. “But they’ll love you, Cassie. Really, they love any speaker who isn’t me. For a break, I mean. Trust me.”

  “I’m trying to,” I said.

  Possibly to lure me away from thoughts of mean students, Joyce cited a rude taxi driver she’d met at a conference in Albany.

  I realized they were talking about a skit for the Ashcots, like the one I’d heard at this morning’s rehearsal, on being dumped.

  “I love this idea, Mercy,” Joyce said, and came up with a chorus of “we get no respect.”

  “We don’t get paid enough,” Mercedes sang in response.

  Mercifully, they kept their voices low and well below the volume of Mahican’s patrons.

  I was tempted to add a few stories of my own, of customers who’d been rude to me over the years—complaining when I asked for an ID, blaming me for damaged or soiled mail, wondering why I didn’t have on hand every single commemorative ever produced. As entertaining and therapeutic as this interlude was, I needed to get back on topic.

  “I didn’t realize you knew about the letters,” I said, addressing both women. “Did the police ask you about them? Whether you had an idea who might have sent them?”

  Joyce rolled her eyes. “The police.” Mercedes took another mouthful of spinach, seeming happy to let Joyce be the spokesperson. “You know, they come on campus as if they’re so important. I know you’re friends with the chief, Cassie, but this time they sent this rookie who’s probably not even old enough to attend the college.”

  Greta. I pictured her with her bouncy ponytail. But Greta was a police academy graduate, if nothing else, and deserved our respect. On the other hand, I’d seen Sunni on campus and wondered why she didn’t do the interviews herself.

  “You mean Officer Bauer?” I asked. “Is she the one who asked you about the letters?”

  “The letters and Dennis’s murder. What is she? Eighteen?”

  “She’s a sworn officer, Joyce. Maybe Sunni thought Greta would relate better to the students.” I spoke before realizing that I’d be seen as predictably defending my friend.

  Joyce grunted. “Maybe. And it is certainly more and more a youth culture. I wonder if the killer is a youth. Getting even with an old person.”

  It surprised me that a teacher of youth would speak the word so harshly.

  Mercedes gasped. Joyce put her hand on that of her friend. “I’m sorry, Mercy. Sometimes I forget that you two . . .”

  She trailed off, much to my dismay. “You two what?” I wanted to know but didn’t ask. Some interrogator. Afraid of offending the interrogatees. Mercedes had been off the hook for these questions, and was now breaking into her brownie.

  “How about you, Mercedes?” I asked, before the first piece of chocolate made it to her mouth. “Am I right that you and Dennis were at the post office at the same time on Monday?”

  “Yes, I was there that day, but way in the back of the line. I noticed that Dennis stormed out, that’s all. I didn’t know why.”

  “He wanted me to investigate where the letters were coming from. It’s such a funny feeling,” I said, “when the last thing I remember about Dennis is going to be that unpleasant interaction.”

  “Tell me about it,” Joyce said. “I thought we’d settled all that fuss about the curriculum, but that morning it all came back.”

  “Catalogue time,” Mercedes said.

  “What time?”

  “We’re getting next fall’s catalogue of courses ready.”

  “So soon?”

  Mercedes and Joyce both chuckled. At the blissfully ignorant postmistress, I guessed. “We have to get all the courses and requirements squared away, and, not that we have to, but we always end up rethinking every decision, rearguing every outcome.”

  “Like that calculus course you mentioned?” Lucky I remembered the term. “I don’t see why the stakes are so high about what gets offered when.”

  Joyce took a breath and let it out with a loud sound. Not loud enough to drown out the mix of music coming through Mahican’s speakers, but loud enough to tell me she was heavily invested in the issue. The issue that was no longer a problem with Dennis Somerville out of the way.

  “What one department requires from another department at the college is at the heart of ninety percent of our meetings.”

  “She’s right,” Mercedes said. “For example, if I’m going to teach Locke’s theory of government in the Enlightenment period, it would be nice if the English department offered a class in the literature of the era, perhaps some of the early feminists.”

  “There’s another dimension in the case of math and science,” Joyce said. “If you’re teaching a topic in science that depends on a certain course in mathematics, as physics does, then you assume the mathematics department is going to offer the necessary courses before the student takes physics.”

  “That makes sense,” I said, venturing into areas where I had no business.

  Joyce let out another tense breath and I thought her face reddened slightly. Who knew science and math were hot topics fraught with such intense emotion? Joyce had been much more low-key when talking about the same disagreement yesterday. Today her ire seemed to have bubbled to the surface. I wondered if it had bubbled on Monday afternoon, with dire consequences for Dennis.

  “It does not make sense,” Joyce blurted out. “Let me explain something to you, Cassie. Some people, like you, think that all mathematics is is a service to physics and other sciences.” She threw up her hands and brought them down again, nearly knocking over her box of salad.

  “I didn’t realize—”

  Mercedes rolled her eyes and gave me a sympathetic look. I guessed she’d heard all this before.

  “As if it’s not a legitimate field of study for its own sake, with no applications to anything else. As if it shouldn’t be taught in an order that coincides with its own development.”

  I was stumped. “Oh,” I said.

  “There are studies in complex analysis, abstract algebra, and many other classes that never mention the physical world.”

  “Oh,” I said again.

  I would have thought it was a good thing to be of service to science and studies of the physical world. But apparently not. I had a lot to learn, and Joyce still wasn’t finished.

  “It’s arrogant physicists, like Dennis and others in his department, who can’t see that. But you see those students over there?” She pointed to a table along the street side of the shop. “They’re my math majors. They’re not taking linear algebra to be able to find the trajectory of a bullet or to find out how fast a ball falls from the roof of a building. They’re studying it for its own sake, because it’s beautiful and elegant.”

  I felt another “Oh” coming on, and took a bite of cracker to stifle it. I wanted to ask why her students had traveled a half hour for an expensive cup of coffee, but then remembered what campus cafeteria coffee was like. Besides, I knew that any off-topic remark would only annoy Joyce more.

  I’d started out on Joyce’s side, but now I began to wonder if the math department deliberately scheduled courses so they would not be useful to science majors. Strange. Wasn’t a college campus—the Gown—supposed to be a model of higher learning, unfettered by the pettiness of the politics that ran the Town?

  Joyce’s tone took an abrupt turn as she apologized for being “callous,” as she called it. “It’s probably a good idea if I leave,” she said. “It’s not a great day for any of us.” She looked at me. “Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow, Cassie. Good luck with yo
ur lecture.” She hoisted her rainbow-colored knitted purse over her shoulder, grabbed her trash, and headed out.

  “Me, too,” Mercedes said, following close on her heels.

  It wasn’t clear what she was referring to. Was it something I said that drove the women to cut short their lunch hour?

  I knew what I hadn’t said: I’d forgotten to sneak in a question about Joyce’s or Mercedes’s alibis for Monday afternoon. I’d stopped counting how many chances I’d blown, and I still had a half hour before I was due at the station. If I tried, I might be able to fit in a few more failures.

  * * *

  Now that the table had quieted down—that is, no one but me was left—I had an opportunity to look around the café, now fairly crowded. I checked each table as best I could to see if I knew anyone else in the shop. I wasn’t looking for company; I was looking for suspects.

  The room had grown more crowded, noisy with chatter and background music, mixed with the occasional sound of the coffee grinder. I seemed to be the only one dining alone. When my gaze landed on the table Joyce had pointed out along the Main Street side of the shop, I saw a group of what looked like five female students crowded around a card table—the one designated for handicapped customers, I noted—with cell phones and tablets or laptops.

  What were the chances the students would talk to a stranger? But I wasn’t really a stranger, I told myself. I ran the post office, which they must use at least once in a while, if only as part of an office job. Maybe to send valentine cards through Romance, Arizona, or Loving, Oklahoma. They might have been in Mercedes’s classroom on the day I visited. I wished I’d paid more attention. Finally, I could claim that I was practically BFFs with their math teacher, whom I’d recently annoyed.

  An idea formed. I summoned my courage. I was glad I’d decided to stuff my tablet and stylus into my shoulder bag at the last minute, and pulled it out now. I called up a greeting card site I subscribed to, one I’d kept from Ben’s view, lest he blame me for the fall in USPS revenue. I searched for an appropriate sympathy card and selected one for my “project,” as the menu options called it. I carried the tablet over to where the young women were keyboarding, texting, and sliding their fingers across screens. Not a pen or piece of paper in sight.