“Here’s your suspect, boys,” she said. “Caught him fleeing the scene.”
“Mindy, why don’t you just go home?” said one of the policemen.
“Here, tell ‘em where you were five minutes ago.” She bumped her hips into my head.
“Well…”
“Come on! Speak up!”
“I was in the bathroom…upstairs. I had some trouble with the toilet.”
“With the toilet?” asked the policeman.
“It’s true, sir! Look at his shoes!” A lesser, younger officer piped up from the side. “There was water everywhere.”
“Hmmm.” The policemen started think. “Water, huh? Well, we’ll have to take you in.”
Mindy grinned at me.
“Can I go tell my parents?” I asked.
The policeman thought again. “Ok, but come back.”
I retrieved my arm from Mindy’s love handles and turned to leave--but stopped. “Couldn’t that be a calling card?”
I pointed to a corner of paper sticking out of the body’s pants. The policeman bent down and pulled from the victim’s key pocket a small black and white photo. He handed it to his partner.
“Look’s like that cat’s got homocidal tendencies.” He turned to me. “How did you know to look there?”
“No one puts anything in their key pocket. Any bulge is suspicious.”
He handed me the photo. It was a portrait of a young, Hispanic man, the victim’s age, a ripped, denim jacket over his bare chest, a knife in his hand, his mouth sneering at the camera.
“Good work,” said the policeman. “Good work, indeed. How would you like to help us out a little?”
Mindy protested. “Sarge! He’s no detective!”
“Mindy, go home!”
“He’s too attractive, Sarge!--”
“I’m too what?” I said.
“We could sure use another hand.”
“He’s bait at best!”
The detective ignored her. “Where would you like to start?”
I decided to tackle the victim’s classes first. It would take a week to visit all of them so the police gave me a room in the old Georgian house--which I later learned was a Christian fraternity--to sleep and work in, provided I help fix the toilet. The other residents were not very useful. They had spent so much time trying to look like one another and succeeded, that they were all too afraid they’d be next to even be seen with me. They never left the house, only left their rooms to silently pass into another, throwing me sly, knowing looks as they went.
I snuck into the back of a full lecture hall and heard, “Structural narratology(2) …” The professor meandered from there and dismissed his class, half of which immediately swarmed him with bodies and questions. I waited a half hour for my turn.
“Did you know--” I began to ask.
He gave me his office hours and showed a young woman his writer’s callous.
“It’s been like that all week,” I later reported to the policeman. “None of his teachers recognize the boy in the photo. I don’t think that last one ever looked at a male, much less a Hispanic.”
“We’re stuck,” the policeman said.
“We have to start back at the beginning,” I said. “What do we know? The victims are young men. Broad shouldered. Flawless complexion. Blood replaced with seltzer. All killed in the residential area of campus. Ok. What connections does the young man in the photo have to this area?”
I was given an interrogation room in the basement of police headquarters and a long list of possible connections, so long my stay at the fraternity was extended indefinitely. It seemed like everyone who had ever set foot on campus came into the dim, steel room and checked their hair in the two-way mirror--even my parents.
“First of all, I’d like to know why you left without me,” I said.
They gave an apathetic pause before my mother launched into something about my being too gloomy. I let them off the hook but called up to make sure they got a parking ticket on their way out.
I was running out of ideas. I didn’t feel fresh. I had a moment between interrogations to roll up my sleeves and wipe my cuffs across my forehead. Mindy came in and, though I didn’t think I had another one in me, I sighed.
“All right, boss,” she said. “How are we doing?”
“Mindy, you are not a detective. Why don’t you just waddle back outside and help yourself to some donuts.”
She inched her way up onto the doctor’s room white paper sheet that for some reason covered the table.
“I still think I was right. Your good looks could impede this investigation,” she said.
“Thanks, Mindy.” I picked up the interview list and turned to the mirror, thinking if I squinted I could see the policemen sleeping in the other room. I ran my thumb down the page and, to my surprise, printed below my parents’ names: “Mindy.”
“I think it’s in the way you hold yourself,” she said. “No, it’s your eyes. Something in your eyes is very handsome.”
“Mindy, I’m going to ask you a few questions.”
“Come here, I want to see what’s so doggone handsome in your eyes.”
I stepped closer to the table. “Where were you coming from when you met me outside the planetarium?”
“It’s the pupils. Isn’t it? They’re darker than most people’s, aren’t they?”
“Your wig--”
“You know, I don’t tell many people. I suffer from chemo. The hairs fall off with the cancer therapy. Or they will soon."
I had gone too far. My foot slipped into the straps of Mindy’s purse. I knocked it over. A bottle of club soda rolled across the floor and as I watched it roll I could see, in the corner of my eye, her watching me. She lunged off the table, arms stretched to my shoulders and pinned me to the mirror.
There not being much strength in fat, I was able to throw her down. She hit her head against the table, though not hard enough to shift a hair of her wig or deter her from pulling out a penknife. She crawled at me fast but I darted out and locked the door. I ran into the room behind the mirror ready to wail at whoever didn’t think I was worth saving but there was no one in there. I ran upstairs.
“The sergeants want you over on Lee Street,” said the receptionist.
Lee Street was no stranger to police presence, it running through the shady neighborhoods behind campus.
“Keep the interrogation room locked,” I said on my way out.
A crowd like the crowd I first saw in the fraternity stood outside a convenience store. Showing my sheriff’s badge, I slipped my way to the front.
“This was dragged up from the sewer this morning, sir.”
I saw the body of a young Hispanic man, a ripped, denim jacket over his bare, ripped chest. Rats crawled over his legs, but his face--lips still sweetly sneering, eyes open to our faces--seemed somewhat serene, as if he had just been complemented.
“Nothing in the key pocket, sir.”
A rat wiped its mouth and belched.
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