Final Date – Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Fifteen:

Jim left for the holidays, and the house was uncomfortably empty. I used my mornings to give him a Christmas present — a freshly painted living room. My tenant two years back had liked pink. Jim wasn’t too crazy about it, so I gave him a nice, neutral beige. I wasn’t the world’s best painter, but it kept me busy. Dave’s boys were in town and he was justifiably preoccupied.

I had them over once for lunch, but it wasn’t a smashing success. Although they were intrigued by a lady cop, they were still their mother’s boys, and they weren’t too keen on the idea of Dad having a girlfriend. They were polite enough, and they ate like a couple of young wolves, but the coversation was littered with too many inside, family jokes. Dave had been beaming with pride when he had ushered them into my kitchen, and he had a right to. They were fine-looking boys. But he was definitely irritable by the time they left. I swallowed my own resentment and told him to knock it off — they were still too young to accept the fact that Dad needed some things they couldn’t provide. After they left, I sulked.

My request to Mike Edwards for a little magic from the university computer turned out to be more complicated and formidable than I had thought. Mike talked a programmer in the computer department into handling the project, but it had to be worked into his other duties, and it was taking a long, long time — time that was expensive. Bradley’s eyes bulged when I gave him an estimate of the bill, but he didn’t call me off. The chief was on him daily for results, and we weren’t getting any. Bradley was banking on the computer.

Mike presented me with a pile of printouts on Christmas Eve. It was a dull, dismal day, darkening into gray rain just as my shift was starting. The campus was nearly deserted. Lights burned in only a few windows as I sloshed into the parking lot. One clerk was on duty in Mike’s office, but even she was locking her desk to go home. Mike’s desk  was amazingly clean. He was flying out in a few hours for two weeks in California with his son’s family, and his mind was already on the sun and the coast.

“I had to use a lot of favors to get these today,” he said after I’d given him a perfunctory holiday kiss on the cheek.

“And I appreciate it,” I said as I greedily grabbed the folder.

He raised one eyebrow in disapproval. “You aren’t planning to spend Christmas with this stuff, are you?”

I grinned. “My mother’s been planning dinner for weeks. I’d be shot if I didn’t show up.”

“I’d help her,” he said ominously, and for a moment, I could imagine him flying back from Los Angeles just to load the gun.

“Did you go through any of this?” I asked as I thumbed through the printouts.

It was his turn to grin. “Of course I did.”

“Anything jump out at you?”

“Nothing spectacular. Some interesting names.”

“Such as?”

“I left you some notes. You read the printouts first and see what you think.”

I made a face. “Why not tell me now?”

Mike eased me toward the door. “Because I’d rather see if you reach the same conclusions all by yourself,” he said smoothly.

He’d rather be in California, I thought. “We can’t waste anymore time, Mike.”

“Would I leave town if I thought there was a problem?”

I made a small sound of satisfaction. I’d been toying with the idea that there would be no more murders while the university was shut down for the Christmas break — either because the murderer was a student himself, or because he was too smart to kill anyone else while all those other potential suspects were out of town. It was comforting to find Mike agreed with me.

It also gave us some time.

Mike lifted his jacket off the door knob. “Not trying to rush you, Jo, but there’s a plane to catch, and my wife won’t be too happy if we miss it.”

I tucked the folder under my arm and said my good-byes. Mike had the look of a man who was very anxious to get the gray Midwest behind him.

All the way back to the station, I fantasized about kicking off my boots and curling up in Bradley’s chair with a hot cup of coffee and a pile of computer printouts. But the rain had turned icy and we were running with too short a staff for me to pull rank and decline to help out with the drivers who had started celebrating before they hit the road. I glanced wistfully at the folder once or twice as red-faced wives trooped in to bail out their jolly husbands, but the printouts still lay on my desk untouched at eleven, when Shaleah smuggled in a bottle and we drank a toast to the shift change. The chief stopped by and blandly accepted the cup Shaleah offered. There was a brief attempt at song, led loudly by a drunk hanging onto the counter, but then more calls came in, and people scurried out to their cruisers, and I went home.

Dave was supposed to come by after he’d seen his boys off, probably on the same plane that Mike Edwards had booked. I had wine chilling on the back porch, dinner warming in the oven and, after a rousing debate with a lot of old fears, a fire crackling in the fireplace. Only then did I spread the printouts out on the coffee table and settle down to read them.

Michelle and Peggy had never shared a class, but the computer had found twenty men who had been, at one time or another, in one class with Michelle and another with Peggy. Given the differences in their ages and the differences in the courses they studied, I hadn’t expected so many other people to turn up in the same sections. None of the names was familiar. That meant twenty new people to track down. Bradley would not be pleased.

Mike had included the class rosters that had been fed into the computer. Dan O’Brien showed up in two of Michelle’s classes and Frank Pierce, in one, the one where he had met her. Chip Greathouse appeared on the roster of a course Peggy had taken in the spring. That wasn’t particularly surprising, but I found it interesting that Chip hadn’t mentioned it.

The women had shared some instructors, too. I chuckled when I saw that Michelle’s English professor had taught Peggy Rafferty’s freshman literature course. The man had been so certain that he hadn’t known Peggy — I was going to enjoy shoving that little fact up his nose.

The women had had the same psychology professor and the same history professor. The young man who had been a graduate assistant in Peggy’s freshman biology course had advanced to instructor by the time Michelle had taken the same course two years later. I found that very interesting.

But not as interesting as Al Dexter. He had taught a political science course that Peggy had dropped halfway into the fall semester during her sophomore year. I wondered whether Dave knew that. And I wondered why Dexter hadn’t talked about it.

Peggy and Michelle had lived in the same freshman dormitory. Three men on the custodial staff and one in the cafeteria had worked there both years. Both women had applied at different times for part-time work at the student union. Peggy had worked for a year in the information booth; Michelle had been put on a waiting list. The same man had handled their job interviews.

Both women had made special trips to the registrar’s office to reschedule classes — Peggy on the day she had died. The same man had initialed their schedule changes.

When Michelle was a freshman, her purse had been stolen while she studied at the library. When Peggy was a sophomore, a flasher had barged in on her in the women’s restroom at the science building. The same campus police officer had taken their reports. I was sure that had distressed Mike Edwards greatly.

While living on campus, both women had taken dormitory-sponsored CPR classes, taught by the same volunteer, a city fireman. That greatly distressed me.

Peggy and Michelle had signed the same petition last spring demanding the reinstatement of a popular but decidedly dishonest student officer who had been caught with his fingers in the wrong cash drawer. I duly noted the names of the students who had circulated the petition. Two of the young men were still in school. I also noted the men who had signed the petition right before and right after Peggy and Michelle.

Over three and a half years, Peggy had visited the student clinic six times. In a year and a half, Michelle had visited twice. The doctor who had treated Michelle both times had also seen Peggy three times. Once — in April — the women had visited the clinic on the same day, although several hours apart. 

And then there were the dozens of men all over campus who routinely processed all the paperwork — the grades, the schedules, the tuition payments — produced by two college students.

The computer had turned up roughly seventy-five men for me to check out. Seventy-five men, including Al Dexter.

Mike had scribbled a big question mark by Dexter’s name, and an even bigger one beside the graduate assistant-turned-instructor. I figured that was supposed to tell me something. And he had torn through the paper drawing a big black line under his officer’s name. That told me more about Mike than anything else. There was also a note about a ten-year-old breaking and entering arrest next to the cafeteria worker in the girls’ dorm, and speculation about drug deals among some of the students. A dozen names, including Dexter’s, had check marks beside them. On the last computer sheet, Mike had left instructions for me to “check the vets.” I wondered whether he meant all the vets within a fifty-mile radius, or just Dave’s friends.

Dave let himself in. I heard him in the hallway, fumbling with packages and his coat and grunting hello to the cats. I thought of stashing all the papers away before he could catch me with them, but decided against it. Holiday or not, I wanted him to look at those names.

He came into the living room and ceremoniously placed two packages under the tiny tree he had ordered me to decorate. Then he pulled two catnip toys out of his pocket and tossed them onto the floor. Slash pounced on them with reckless disregard. Purrvis was bored.

I was sitting on the floor at the coffee table, my back propped against the couch. Dave grinned and slid onto the couch behind me. I leaned my head on his good knee and mumbled, “Merry Christmas.”

We watched the fire in silence. He stroked my hair, and I felt in his hands the tension and loneliness of sending his boys home. I thought it was a hell of a thing to lose them on Christmas Eve, even if they did take him away from me, and when the feel of his hands on my head and shoulders changed, I was more than willing to slide up onto the couch and hold him. There was a sadness in his touch as we quietly made love on the couch, a sadness that only went deeper and deeper from him to me, and I would have cried in the end if his arms hadn’t tightened viciously around my waist and he hadn’t looked at me with eyes wide and unguarded, and we knew what the other wanted and needed, and together it was very good.

And surprisingly soon afterward, he was starved. I padded around the house in knee socks and flannel robe, getting the dinner and wine that had been waiting for him. We ate on the coffee table, my papers pushed aside, and he talked about the boys. Josh, the younger one, was as stubborn as his dad, and was having trouble in school. Adam was fourteen and, predictably, none too happy with his stepfather or anyone else over thirty. Josh wanted a dog; Adam wanted to be left alone. Josh didn’t believe in homework; Adam believed in hanging out with the guys. Dave could see the problems they had outgrown since their visit last summer and new problems that had cropped up in their place, and it gnawed at him to know it was all happening to them so far away.

“You could go teach on the Coast,” I said bravely.

He reached across the plates and squeezed my hand. “You can’t get rid of me that easily.”

I didn’t even try to mask my relief. But I felt obligated to repeat that he didn’t have to be so far away from them.

“Number One,” Dave said as he refilled our wine glasses, “the farther I am from their mother, the better — for all four of us. The marriage was rarely friendly, the divorce was bitter, and there is no reason to believe anything would be peaceful if I were closer to the kids. And Number Two, the boys have to cope with things as they are, not as they want them to be. They’d have problems whether they were living with me or with their mother. They have to learn to deal with that. Switching parents wouldn’t solve anything.”

“That could be just a copout,” I said carefully.

Dave grinned. “Could be. And I’ll be the first to admit that I feel these pangs of responsibility only twice a year, when they leave me. Most of the time, I get along just fine on my own.”

“At least you’re honest about that.”

“I never claimed to be the world’s best father. If I were, I’d still be married.”

“Thank God you’re not,” I said with feeling.

His smile was wicked. “You mean you wouldn’t love me if I had a wife?”

“It certainly would be an inconvenience.”

“Nothing more?”

“I’m a very resourceful person. I’d work around it.”

Dave leaned back and studied me with some amusement. “I believe you would.”

I tossed a package at him. “Open it, for God’s sake, and tell me how much you adore it.”

He didn’t adore it — men don’t adore sweaters — but it was soft and warm, and I dearly adored hugging soft, warm sweaters. I was a little nervous about the second gift — a cane was such a damned personal thing to buy such a proud man — and it didn’t help when he pulled off the bright red bow and examined the cane with infinite care under the lights.

“I’m not being critical, Jo. I appreciate the thought. But you don’t just pick up any cane. It’s gotta feel right, like a good pair of shoes.”

“I got it through your therapist,” I said in a tiny voice.

I half-expected him to be indignant that I had barged into that part of his life, but suddenly, he looked like a delighted kid. “Well, hell,” he said, “if Tom picked it out….” He stood and took a few brisk turns around the room. The cane moved smoothly with him, too new yet to be a part of him, but it had potential. He leaned over and kissed me. He was pleased.

And I was more than pleased with the delicate gold chain he’d bought for me, and secretly dismayed by what I was sure was the price. Dave could be alarmingly impractical, as proven by the filmy little thing in black that was lurking in the second package.

I giggled as I held it up to the light. “It’ll never fit.”

“I checked the tags on your underwear, Madame,” he said pleasantly. “It’ll fit.”

“How’d you ever get the nerve to buy it?”

“I made Adam do it.”

“David!”

“I’m a big boy, Jo. I can buy lingerie without blushing.”

“I’ll bet,” I chuckled, and hugged it to my chest. It was barely useful and not the least bit suitable for Midwest winters, but I loved it.

He revived the fire, and we curled up on the couch. It was past two in the morning, but neither of us felt like moving to the bedroom. I gave him my computer printouts and drifted with my head on the arm rest while he sipped wine and read. The windows rattled a little as sleet pelted the glass. I wrapped my robe tighter around me and was warm and content.

“Al told me about the Rafferty woman,” Dave finally said.

I pried my eyes open. Without my contacts, I could  see nothing more than a dark, hairy blur at his end of the couch. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked as I fumbled on the end table for my glasses.

“I thought you knew. You seem to know everything else.”

“Really?”

He stared at my glasses. “You look different.”

“Thanks a lot,” I huffed.

“That’s not necessarily an insult.”

“It doesn’t sound like a compliment.”

“It’s neither. You’re just different. Do you ever make love with your glasses on?”

“What the hell for?”

“To see what you’re doing.”

“I’d rather feel my way around.”

He grinned. “Is that what you call it?”

I grinned back. “That’s what I call it. Tell me about Al.”

“Ask him.”

“C’mon, Dave, I showed you everything I have.”

“So you did.”

I blushed.

“There’s nothing to tell,” he relented. “Rafferty signed up for a class last fall, then dropped out. He remembered the name, but couldn’t even place the face.”

“Why didn’t he tell me?”

“The last time you saw Al Dexter, he was plastered, remember?”

“The happy father,” I said, nodding. “You believe him?”

Dave thought about that for a moment, then sighed. “Yeah, I believe him, but you won’t care for the reason.”

“Try me.”

“Al isn’t exactly what you’d call a faithful husband.”

“No shit.”

Dave raised an eyebrow. “What a nice puritanical little girl you are.”

“No Puritan. I just don’t like the feeling I get from the man. I don’t feel like he sees me as a person.”

“Is he a person to you? Isn’t he just a suspect?”

My blush deepened. “Touche, friend.”

He patted my hand. “You’re right about him though. Women equal sex. And he gets lots of women — at least enough that he doesn’t have to risk playing around with students.”

“Where’s the risk? It isn’t like he’s teaching high school, and these aren’t little girls.”

“My dear lady, they may be of age, but it still isn’t wise to dip into the pool of students. It raises nasty questions about grades and how the young women earned them.”

“And Al wouldn’t take that risk?”

“He likes his paycheck.”

I munched on a thumbnail, remembering Mike’s note. “Is Al a vet?”

Dave’s eyes narrowed. “Yeah, he’s a vet. What of it?”

“Christ, Dave, don’t be so touchy. I just wondered if he knew anything about guns.”

“He knows enough. He was in ‘Nam.”

“You don’t say that with approval.”

“No disapproval, either. He went to ‘Nam and he came home, period.”

“He isn’t in your vets’ group?”

“Not interested.” Dave shrugged. “That’s okay. Lots of guys aren’t.”

“And you want me to lay off Al?”

Dave smiled gently. “I think you’re grasping.”

“You got anything better?”

He thumbed through the papers. “I’d say you’ve got a lot of possibilities right here.”

“Like what?”

He picked up a paper at random. “Like this campus cop. He has access to a gun. Or does that hit too close to home?”

I squirmed. “Close enough. But we’ll check him out.”

“And this fireman?”

“Firemen don’t carry guns,” I reminded him.

“Okay, he’s not a cop, but he’s worth investigating, isn’t he?”

I nodded reluctantly.

Dave shuffled through the printouts. “All these students and all these employees — dig in, woman. You aren’t anywhere close to the end.”

“But why would any of them kill Michelle Whittier or Peggy Rafferty?” I asked stubbornly.

“Why wouldn’t they?” he countered just as stubbornly.

I looked at the names spilling out over the coffee table, and there was no comfort in them at all. “Oh, God, David,” I whined. “I’m so tired of this.”

His eyes softened, and his voice lost its biting challenge. “I know, lover,” he said, brushing the hair out of my face. “I know.”

I let him lock up and lead me to the bedroom. But long after he was peacefully asleep, long after Slash had wrapped himself around my feet and Purrvis had succumbed to the lure of the catnip, my mind was still churning wearily through names, and none of them seemed to fit.

    

 

 

Continue to Chapter Sixteen