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“Oh, you,” I cry, giving him a little ladylike smack on the arm. “I’ve heard all about you. I was friends with Roberta, you know.”
He looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. The eyebrows have furrowed. “Who?”
God, he’s good. There isn’t a hint of guilt in his silver gray eyes.
“Roberta,” I repeat. I have to admit, my heart is pounding at my daring. I’m doing it. Detecting! I’m really doing it! “Roberta Pace.”
“I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
I seriously can’t believe this guy. “Bobby,” I say.
Suddenly, he laughs. “Bobby? You’re friends with Bobby?”
I didn’t miss both the strange emphasis on the you’re and the use of the present tense. I am, after all, a trained investigator. Well, at least, I do the data entry for one.
“I was friends with Roberta,” I say, and I’m not smiling or pretending to be less than twenty-one anymore. Because I can’t believe the guy can be so cold. Even for a killer. “Until she fell off the top of that elevator last week.”
Chris stops dancing. “Wait,” he says. “What?”
“You heard me,” I say. “Bobby Pace and Beth Kellogg. Both of them are dead, allegedly from elevator surfing. And you slept with both of them right before they did it.”
I hadn’t meant to just blurt it out like that. I’m pretty sure Cooper would have been more subtle. But I just… well, I got kind of mad, I guess. About him being so flippant about it. Roberta’s and Elizabeth’s deaths, I mean.
I guess a real investigator doesn’t get mad. I guess a real investigator keeps a level head.
I guess I’m not destined for that partnership in Cooper’s business after all.
Chris seems to have frozen, his feet rooted onto one black and one white tile.
But his grip on my waist doesn’t loosen. If anything, it tightens until suddenly, we’re standing hip to hip.
“What?” he asks, and his eyes are so wide that the blue-gray irises look like marbles floating in twin pools of milk. “What?” he asks, again. Even his lips have drained of color.
My face is only inches beneath his. I see the incredulity in his eyes, coupled with—and, shoddy investigator that I might have been, even I can see this—a slowly dawning horror.
That’s when it hits me:
He doesn’t know. Really. Chris had no idea—not right up until I’d told him just then—that the two dead girls in Fischer Hall were the ones with whom he’d, um, dallied just days before.
Is he really such a man-slut that he’d known only the first names—the nicknames—of the women he’d seduced?
It certainly looks that way.
The effect my announcement has on Chris is really pretty profound. His fingers dig convulsively into my waist, and he begins to shake his head back and forth, like Lucy after a good shampoo.
“No,” he says. “That’s not true. It can’t be.”
And suddenly I know that I’ve made a horrible mistake.
Don’t ask me how. I mean, it’s not like I have any experience in this kind of thing.
But I know anyway. Know it the way I know the fat content in a Milky Way bar.
Christopher Allington didn’t kill those girls.
Oh, he’d slept with them, all right. But he hadn’t killed them. That was done by someone else. Someone far, far more dangerous…
“Okay,” says a deep voice behind me. A heavy hand falls on my bare shoulder.
“Sorry, Heather,” Cooper says. “But we have to go now.”
Where’d he come from? I can’t go. Not now.
“Um,” I say. “Yeah, just a sec, okay?”
But Cooper doesn’t look too ready to wait. In fact, he looks like a man who’s getting ready to run for his life.
“We have to go,” he says, again. “Now.”
And he slips a hand around my arm, and pulls.
“Cooper,” I say, wriggling to get free. I can see that Chris is still in shock. It’s totally likely that if I stick around awhile longer, I’ll get something more out of him. Can’t Cooper see that I’m conducting a very important interview here?
“Why don’t you go get something to eat?” I suggest to Cooper. “I’ll meet you over at the buffet in a minute—”
“No,” Cooper says. “Let’s go. Now.”
I can understand why Cooper is so anxious to leave. Really, I can. After all, not everybody deals with their exes by, you know, sleeping with them on the foyer floor.
Still, I feel like I can’t leave yet. Not after I’ve made this total breakthrough. Chris is really upset—so upset that he doesn’t even seem to notice that there’s a private eye looming over his dance partner. He’s turned away, and is sort of stumbling off the dance floor, in the general direction of the elevators.
Where’s he going? Up to the twelfth floor, to his father’s office, to hit the real liquor—or just to use the phone? Or up to the roof, to jump off? I feel like I have to follow him, if only to make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid.
Except when I start to go after him, Cooper won’t let me.
“Cooper, I can’t go yet,” I say, struggling to free myself from his grip. “I got him to admit he knew them! Roberta and Elizabeth! And you know what? I don’t think he killed them. I don’t think he even knew they were dead!”
“That’s nice,” Cooper says. “Now let’s go. I told you I have an appointment. Well, I’m late for it as it is.”
“An appointment? An appointment?” I can hardly believe what I’m hearing. “Cooper, don’t you understand? Chris said—”
“I heard you,” Cooper says. “Congratulations. Now let’s go. I said I’d bring you here. I didn’t say I could stay all night. I do have actual paying clients, you know.”
I realize it’s futile. Even if Cooper did change his mind and let me go, I don’t have any idea where Chris has disappeared to. And how smart would it have been, really, for me to follow him? I mean, considering what happened to the last couple of girls with whom he’d—how had I put it? Oh yeah, dallied. Hey, maybe I should be an English major. Yeah. A novelist, AND a doctor. AND a detective. AND a jewelry designer…
Cooper and I slip outside. I don’t even have a chance to say good-bye to anyone, or congratulate Rachel on her Pansy. I’ve never seen a guy so eager to get out of one place.
“Slow down,” I say, as Cooper hustles me to the curb. “I got heels on, you know.”
“Sorry,” Cooper says, and drops my arm. Then he put his fingers to his mouth and whistles for a cab that’s cruising along West Fourth.
“Where are we going?” I ask curiously, as the cab pulls to the corner with a squeal of its brakes.
“You’re going home,” Cooper says. He opens the rear passenger door and gestures for me to get inside, then gives the driver the address of his grandfather’s brownstone.
“Hey,” I say, leaning forward in the seat. “It’s just right across the block. I could’ve walked—”
“Not alone,” Cooper says. “And I have to head in the other direction.”
“Why?” I don’t miss the fact that Marian the Art Historian has just slipped out the library doors behind us.
But instead of walking over and joining Cooper on the curb, she shoots him an extremely unfriendly look, then hurries off on foot toward Broadway.
Cooper, whose back is to the library, doesn’t see the professor, or the dirty look.
“I’ve got to see a man,” is all Cooper will say to me, “about a dog. Here.” He shoves a five-dollar bill at me. “Don’t wait up.”
“What dog?” The cab starts to move. “Cooper, what dog? Are you getting another dog? What about Lucy? What’s wrong with Lucy?”
But we’re already gliding out into traffic. Cooper has turned and strode off towards West Third Street. Soon I can’t see him at all.
What had all that been about? I mean, really. I know Cooper’s clients are important to him, and stuff. And I know he thinks this whole thing with me and the deaths in my building is like a figment of my imagination, or whatever.
But still. He could at least have listened to me.
That’s when the cab driver, who appears to be Indian—like from India, not Native American—says, helpfully, “I believe that’s an expression.”
I look at his reflection in the rear view mirror. “What is?”
“See a man about a dog,” the cab driver says. “It’s an American expression. Like rolling stone gathers no moss. You know?”
I slump back into my seat. No, I didn’t know. I don’t know anything, apparently.
Well, I guess I knew that. I mean, isn’t that why I’m working at New York College? To get an education?
Well, I’m getting one, all right. And I haven’t even started classes yet.
22
You’re magic
Magic to me
I’m under your spell
Even my friends can tell
You’re magic
Magic to me
“Magic”
Performed by Heather Wells
Composed by Dietz/Ryder
From the album Magic
Cartwright Records
After Cooper and I—and Chris Allington—left the Pansy Ball, Rachel Walcott was awarded a Pansy for exemplary service to the college.
She shows me the little flower-shaped pin the next morning, pride gleaming in her pretty brown eyes. She wears it on the lapel of her black linen suit jacket as if it were a medal of valor or something.
I guess maybe to her it kind of is. I mean, in a single semester, she’s had to deal with way more tragedy than most administrators have to face in their entire careers.
I’ve never won anything in my entire life. Well, okay, a recording contract, but that’s it. I know they don’t generally give out Grammys for songs like “Sugar Rush.” But hello, I never even won like a People’s Choice Award. Not even Teen People’s Choice.
And I was totally the Queen of Teen. At least, up until I stopped being one.
But I try not to let Rachel see my jealousy over her award. Not that I’m even that jealous. Just, you know.
I’d been the one who’d dragged all the boxes up from the basement. The boxes we’d packed up Roberta’s and Elizabeth’s things in. I’d been the one who’d packed them, too. And I’d been the one who’d dragged them to Mail Services, and had them shipped. I think I should get something for that. Not a Pansy, maybe, but like a Dandelion, maybe.
Oh well. When I’m able to prove that the girls’ deaths were the result of murder, and not accidental, and when I find out who their real killer is, maybe I’ll win like the key to the city, or something. Really! And the mayor’ll give it to me himself, and it will be broadcast on New York One, and Cooper will see it and realize that even though I’m not an art history professor or a size zero, I’m still totally smart and cute, and he’ll ask me out and we’ll get married and have Jack, Emily, and Charlotte Wells-Cartwright…
Well, a girl can dream, right?
And I am happy for Rachel. I congratulate her and sip my coffee as she describes what it had been like, winning this prestigious award in front of all her peers. She tells me how Dr. Jessup had hugged her and how President Allington had personally thanked her for services above and beyond the call of duty. She chatters excitedly about how she’s the first administrator in the history of New York College to receive seven separate nominations for the award, the most any one person has ever garnered—and she’d gotten them all in just her first four months of employment! She says how glad she is that she’d gone into higher education instead of business or law, like so many of her fellow Yale grads.
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