Big Boned

10

“No,” Cooper says.

I’m not surprised. They’ve ambushed him, following me home and—despite my assurances that it’s going to go down this way—insisting he’ll let them borrow his precious and tenderly restored BMW ’74 2002.

Yeah. Because that’s about as likely to happen as my getting up every morning to run a 5K. For the fun of it.

Still. They’re standing in his second floor office, where he has the window wide open to let in the late-afternoon breeze, stray random bullet from the park be damned.

“Cooper,” Sarah says. “You don’t understand. This is an emergency. A young man’s life may be at stake.”

“Take the train,” Cooper says. He’s sitting with his feet on his stupendously messy desk, going through his mail in a bored sort of way. Cooper is usually very tidy in his personal life—he keeps the public areas of his house and even his bedroom almost obsessively neat most of the time.

But his office and car are another story. I can’t understand it. Often it looks like a tornado ripped through both—papers, cheese-smeared burger wrappers, wadded-up napkins, empty coffee cups, Post-it notes with cryptic writing on them, piles of them, everywhere. Periodically he goes through both—the office and the car—and cleans them beyond recognition to sparkling and spartan neatness. Then he starts letting things pile up again. He claims this is how he stays “organized.”

It’s really a good thing that he has me to do his billing, actually, or he’d have no money at all coming in, seeing as how he’d never even be able to find his clients’ statements, let alone send them out on time.

“Sure,” Gavin says. He’s looking at a fly that’s just landed on a particularly cheesy-looking wrapper from Johnny Rockets that’s sitting on top of one of Cooper’s office stereo speakers. “We could take the train. But how are we supposed to get from the train station to Jamie’s house? Huh?”

“Easy,” Cooper says, casually flipping an announcement from Publishers Clearing House that he may be a million-dollar winner onto the parquet floor. “It’s called a cab.”

“I don’t even know if they HAVE cabs in Rock Ridge,” Sarah cries. “In fact, I very much doubt it fits in with their town plan.”

“Tough break, kid,” Cooper says. “Guess you’re gonna have to rent a car.”

“You have to be over twenty-five to rent a car in New York,” Gavin points out.

Cooper looks up from the Victoria’s Secret catalog he’s found beneath the rest of his mail. “Well, what do you know?” he says. “Heather, aren’t you over twenty-five? Oh, but wait… I believe you and I already had a little talk about you getting involved in this particular murder investigation this morning, didn’t we?”

I scowl at the tops of my shoes. I get where he’s coming from. I really do. But he doesn’t have to be so insufferably pedantic about it.

“You guys,” I say to Sarah and Gavin. “Cooper is right. The police don’t need our help. We should probably stay out of this.”

“But Sebastian didn’t do it!” Sarah shrieks.

“Then he has nothing to worry about,” Cooper says calmly, as he hands the Victoria’s Secret catalog to my dog, Lucy. Since she’s been sitting beside him this whole time, patiently waiting for exactly this moment, she lets out a happy doggie gurgle, then slides to her belly and sets to work, methodically ripping the catalog to shreds, and adding to the general detritus already lining Cooper’s floor.

Sarah does not seem particularly soothed by Cooper’s assurance. In fact, it seems to have the complete opposite effect on her. She flops down onto the paperwork-strewn couch across from his desk (fortunately Cooper has an outer office in which he receives clients, and which he keeps scrupulously neat. Were they to see this, the inner sanctum, doubtless his client list would shrink significantly through lack of confidence in his detecting abilities—primarily his ability to find anything in his own office, such as his clients), and, hugging herself, begins to rock back and forth, her gaze fixed on the floor. She appears to be making a slight keening noise.

Cooper eyes her as warily if she were a cheeseburger he’d ordered well done that had arrived medium rare.

Gavin takes this opportunity to announce, “This… this is bullshit.” Then he pivots around on his heel and leaves the brownstone, banging the front door noisily behind him. I hurry to Cooper’s open window and lean out from it just in time to see him run down the front stoop and head toward Sixth Avenue, his shoulders hunched, his fists buried in the pockets of his jeans.

“Gavin,” I call after him. “Wait! Where are you going?”

Gavin’s shoulders tense, but he doesn’t respond. He doesn’t even turn his head, even though I know he’s heard me. Every drug dealer on the corner has turned and cried, “Oh, hey, Heather!” in a pleasant way.

Kids.

I wave to the drug dealers, then duck back into Cooper’s office.

“I don’t get it,” I say, to the room in general. “Where does he think he’s going?”

“Where do you think?” Sarah says, bitterly, from the couch. “He’s going to see her.”

I blink at her. “He is?Why? ”

“Why do you think?” Sarah demands wildly, shoving a wave of thick dark hair from her face to glare at me. “God, when did you get so dense? Are you blind? Jamie Price looks exactly like you. Except, you know.Younger.”

Too shocked to know how to reply to this, I opt for saying nothing. For a second or two, the room is silent, save for the sound of Lucy’s contented licking, shredding, and chewing. Then Cooper says, “Ooookay. So when exactly did we all hop on the train to crazy town?”

Sarah heaves a shuddering sigh, then says in a small voice, careful not to meet either of our gazes, “Look. I’ve got to talk to Sebastian.”

We both glance at her. Slowly, she raises her gaze from the floor.

“They let them have visitors?” she asks, looking suddenly much younger than her twenty-two years. “In jail? Right?”

“With suspected co-conspirators,” Cooper says, “in order to get their stories straight? Yeah, not so much.”

I swing around to stare at Cooper in shock, just as Sarah sucks in her breath… and promptly bursts into tears again.

“How—how c-could you?” she cries. “I never—you have to know I would n-never—” She breaks down into loud, hic-cupping sobs, burying her face into the arm of the sofa.

I give Cooper a sour look. He stares at Sarah in astonishment, then looks up at me. “What’d I say?” he wants to know.

“Don’t give me that,” I growl at him. “You know exactly what you said. Suspected co-conspirators, my ass. Sarah.” I cross the room to sink down beside her on the couch, then try to gather some of her copious hair from her eyes. “Sarah, he didn’t mean it that way. He didn’t mean he thinks you’re a co-conspirator. He meant that from the prosecutor’s perspective, that’s how it might seem if you were to ask to see Sebastian right now—”

“Oh, Heather, you’re home.”

With his usual perfect timing, my father appears in the doorway. He’s holding a large cardboard box of his belongings. My dad’s been moving out, slowly but surely, for the past week.

When he notices Sarah, and her theatrical sobs, his happy grin that I’m home from work fades, and he says, “Oh dear. I see this isn’t a good time. I did hear the news, you know. About your boss. Such a shame. People do seem to die at an alarming rate at your place of work, Heather. I don’t believe in that sort of thing, of course, but if I were a superstitious man, I might almost start to suspect that Fischer Hall is, in fact, cursed.”

Lucy, seeing my dad, gets up from her now almost completely shredded magazine, and, her tail wagging, goes over to give him a lick on the hand.

“Oh, hello, Lucy,” he says. “Not now, dear. We’ll have our walk in a little while. I have to get this box uptown. Which reminds me, Heather, when you have a moment, there’s something I need to speak to you about. A little business proposal Larry and I have been meaning to discuss with you. It could work out to be quite advantageous for all three of us. It’s something I think you’ll quite like, actually. But, er, I can see now is not quite the time… ”

As Sarah’s sobs rise in volume, Dad flings a questioning look in Cooper’s direction, since I’m obviously too busy trying to stanch the flow of Sarah’s tears to reply.

“My fault,” Cooper says, indicating Sarah. “I’m a heartless cad. Insensitive, too.”

“Oh,” Dad says, nodding. “Yes, of course. I’ve always liked that about you. Uh, Heather?”

I look up from rubbing Sarah’s back. “Yes, Dad?”

“Tad called. Apparently he’s been trying to reach you on your cell phone. He’d like you to call him back. Just wants to see if you’re all right, considering… well, all that’s happened.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

“Well.” He gives one last look at the stricken figure beside me on the couch, then shrugs. “I think this will be my last night here at the brownstone. If there are no objections, I’d like to make braised short ribs for dinner for all of you. I have them marinating now. I assume you’ll both be home for dinner?”

Cooper and I nod. Dad looks pleased.

“Excellent,” he says. “I’ll see you around eight o’clock then. You, too, Lucy.” To Sarah, he says, “You’re welcome to stay for dinner, as well, young lady. Hopefully you’ll be, er, feeling better by then. Plenty for everyone. Well. Bye, now.”

And off he goes. Lucy, disappointed he didn’t take her with him, goes sulkily back to ripping Giselle Béndchen’s face off. Cooper’s gaze strays out the window, at the pinkening sky, just visible over the roofs of the brownstones across the street. Sarah’s sobs, meanwhile, have slowed. She seems to be mellowing a bit, if the way she’s wiping her nose on her sleeve is any indication. I look around for a box of tissues… then remember where I am.

I manage to find a pile of napkins from Dunkin’ Donuts that don’t look too used. I pass them to her. Sarah raises her head, takes the napkin wad, then blows her nose. Then she looks at Cooper, and, hatred—it’s hard to mistake—glittering in her eyes, says, “I had nothing to do with Owen’s murder.”

“I didn’t say you did,” Cooper says. He’s taken his feet off his desk, and is clacking away at his keyboard, apparently Googling something. Knowing Cooper, it’s probably Giselle Béndchen.

“You called me a co-conspirator!” Sarah cries.

“What Heather said,” Cooper says, still not turning from his computer monitor.

“It’s true, Sarah,” I say. “They’re not going to let you talk to Sebastian. I doubt he’s even allowed to have visitors, aside from his lawyer. Besides, he’s probably not even in Manhattan anymore. He’s probably at Rikers by now.”

“Rikers!” Sarah echoes, with a horrified gasp.

“The Tombs,” Cooper corrects me, still not turning around. “They’ll have transferred him to Manhattan Detention Center from the Sixth Precinct by now.” He glances at the time on his monitor. “Or maybe not. He’ll go to Rikers in the morning, for sure, though.”

“He can’t,” Sarah says, jumping to her feet. Her eyes are wide with panic. “He can’t go to Rikers. You don’t understand. He has asthma! He has allergies!”

Cooper finally spins around in his computer chair. His expression, when he faces Sarah, is furious. He looks… well. He looks scary. Like he had this morning when he’d warned me about interfering in Owen Veatch’s murder investigation.

“Okay,” he says, angrily. “That’s it. I’ve had it up to here with this bullshit, Sarah. You tell me what the fuck is going on, or you get out of my house. No”—when Sarah glances for help in my direction—“don’t look at Heather. You look at me. Tell me, or get out. I’m giving you until the count of three. One.”

“He didn’t do it!” Sarah cries.

“I know he didn’t do it. Tell me how you can prove it. Two.”

“Because I just know! I know him!”

“That’s not good enough for the DA to drop the charges, Sarah. Three. Get the fuck—”

“He couldn’t have done it because Owen Veatch was shot from outside the building,” Sarah shouts. “And I can prove Sebastian was inside Fischer Hall at the time Owen was killed!”

“How can you possibly do that?” Cooper demands.

“Because,” Sarah says, her round cheeks suddenly going crimson. “I… I signed him in, the night before.”

“You what?”

I feel my blood run cold. But in a good way.

“She signed him in,” I say, rising from the couch and crossing the room to stand beside Sarah, pieces of Victoria’s Secret catalog crunching beneath my feet. “The sign-in logs, at the security desk. All guests to the building have to be signed in, and leave a piece of ID with the guard. What time did you sign Sebastian out this morning, Sarah?”

She shakes her head. “Late. After breakfast. It was like eight forty-five.”

I throw a triumphant look at Cooper. “After the murder could have taken place. Don’t you see? That proves he couldn’t have done it. The guard wouldn’t have let him out of the building without signing out. He couldn’t have done it.”

Cooper, however, is frowning.

“I don’t get it,” he says. “If this is all true, why didn’t the kid tell the cops when they asked him where he was at the time of the murder? Why didn’t he show them the sign-in log?”

“Because,” Sarah says, looking unhappy. “He… he was protecting someone.”

“Who?” I demand. “Who could he possibly—”

“Me, all right?” Sarah can’t seem to lift her gaze from the floor. “He’s… he was protecting me.”

Cooper, with a happy sigh, leans back again in his office chair, causing it to squeak. “And here I thought chivalry was dead.”

“It’s not like that,” Sarah says quickly, lifting her gaze, her cheeks flaming once more. “We’re not—we’ve never—”

I give her a curious look. “But, Sarah—then why else could he be protecting you?”

“I… I’d rather not say,” Sarah says. “Can’t we just bring him the sign-in sheets? Detective Canavan, I mean?”

“What were you doing all night,” Cooper wants to know, “if you weren’t having carnal knowledge of one another? I mean, if you’ll excuse my curiosity? Because I can assure you, Canavan will ask.”

“No, we can’t just bring him the sign-in sheets,” I say testily, in reply to Sarah’s question. “I want to know. What’s Sebastian protecting you from, Sarah? What—”

“And were you actually with him at eight o’clock?” Cooper asks. “You said you signed him out at eight forty-five. But were you with him the entire time from when you signed him in the night before until you signed him out this morning?”

“Would you two,” Sarah shouts, sounding like she was going to start crying again, “stop talking at the same time? It’s so frustrating! You’re like my PARENTS!”

This brings Cooper and me up short. We close our mouths and blink at one another.Parents?

“No, I wasn’t with him the whole time,” Sarah says. “And it isn’t anyone’s business what we were doing—”

“But, Sarah,” I interrupt, getting over the parent thing. Because, whatever. That’s her opinion. And did I mention her frizzies? “You know that when you sign someone in, it’s your responsibility to stay with them the whole—”

“You think you can waltz into the Sixth Precinct and tell them something is none of their business when they ask?” Cooper hoots delightedly. “Because I really want to be there when you do that.”

Then, like a sledgehammer, it hits me.

“The coffeemaker!” I cry, pointing at Sarah accusingly.

Both Cooper and Sarah stare at me as if I’ve begun speaking in tongues. Sarah’s the only one who looks slightly nervous, though.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says.

“Oh yes, you do,” I say, still pointing at her. “The storage room. Where we sat while we were waiting for the forensics team to get through with our office. I thought the guys from housekeeping were using it as a break room. There was a sleeping bag in there. And a coffeemaker. Someone has obviously been crashing in there. But it wasn’t the building staff. It’s Sebastian, isn’t it? You’ve been signing Sebastian in and letting him live there illegally, haven’t you?Haven’t you? ”

Sarah, with a shudder, buries her face in her hands. She doesn’t reply.

But she doesn’t have to. Her body language says it all.

“No wonder Sebastian didn’t tell the cops where he was when Owen bit it,” I go on. “He couldn’t! Because he knew he’d get you in trouble, and you’d lose your job for letting a student live in the building illegally. Sarah! What were you thinking? Have you lost your mind?”

Sarah drops her hands and glares at me.

“It’s not Sebastian’s fault!” she cries. “It was my idea! And it was all the stupid Housing Department’s fault in the first place! He requested a roommate who kept kosher! And what did he get? A California surfer who checked off kosher because it was the more expensive meal plan and he thought that meant the food would be better! He didn’t even know what kosher was. And then when Sebastian went to his hall director to ask for a room change, he was told there was nothing available. What was he supposed to do? Compromise his religious values?”

“No,” Cooper says. “Apparently he preferred to compromise your job instead.”

Sarah inhales so sharply that her breath hitches. A second later, she’s hyperventilating.

Fortunately I find an abandoned Starbucks sack lying nearby and, after pushing her back down on the couch again, force Sarah to breathe into it for a few minutes. Soon she’s breathing normally once more.

Sitting between Cooper and me, staring sadly at the last page of the Victoria’s Secret catalog as Lucy devours it, Sarah says, “I guess I’m the biggest idiot in the world, aren’t I?”

“Not the biggest,” Cooper offers.

“We don’t have to tell them how long you let him stay there,” I say. “We can just say it was for that one night.”

“No.” Sarah shakes her head, so violently that her long, bushy hair nearly whips both of us. “I was the one who was blinded by love. Not even real love, because it’s not as if he cares about me as anything more than a friend. Like a guy like that ever could love a girl like me.”

“Stranger things,” Cooper says dryly, “have happened. Especially after a night or two in the Tombs. He might emerge with a new appreciation for the fairer sex in general.”

I long to elbow him, but Sarah is in the way.

I needn’t have worried. She’s not listening, anyway.

“I abused my power as a resident hall graduate assistant,” Sarah says. “I lied, and took advantage of my sign-in and key privileges. I’ll turn myself in.”

“Not for nothing,” Cooper says. “But to whom? Your boss is dead.”

“Yeah,” I say. “And my inclination is to chalk it up to temporary insanity. Spring fever, as it were.”

“I’ll never speak to him again,” Sarah says. “After we’ve turned over the sign-in log and I’ve given my deposition. And the GSC has gotten the president’s office to cave to all of our demands. And I’ve found him safe but affordable housing elsewhere. And made sure he’s received proper psychiatric counseling for whatever post-traumatic stress he might suffer from all of this.”

“That’s the spirit,” Cooper says, encouragingly.

“Of course,” Sarah says, as the three of us head back toward Fischer Hall to pick up the sign-in sheets and take them over to Detective Canavan’s office, thus speeding the release of the man with whom Sarah claims most emphatically to no longer be in love with. “It would be much better if we could just figure out who really did kill Owen. Not just for Sebastian,” she adds, hastily. “But so everything could go back to normal.” Cooper and I exchange glances.

“Yes,” I say. “It would.”