Small Vices

Chapter 15

It had started to get dark as I walked across the leafy campus. It was a nice fall evening with just enough coolness to make my jacket feel useful. The campus was empty, and I was woefully out of place on it. I had a momentary vision of myself, a middle-aged man with a broken nose and a thick neck and a gun on his hip walking alone, remote below the darkened sky.

The Phi Gam house was a big brick house of Georgian design. The front door led into a foyer. To the right was a living room. To the left was something that appeared to be a library. Straight ahead a stairway ascended to the next floor. There were half a dozen young women in the living room. The library was empty. All of the young women turned and looked at me when I came in.

I said, “Hello.”

Several of them said, “Hi.”

One of them said, “Are you looking for somebody?”

They all had the quality of voice kids that age use when they’re talking to somebody’s parent. I walked into the living room and sat on the arm of a couch. There was a big television set on one wall. The girls were watching Hard Copy.

“My name is Spenser,” I said. “I’m a detective and I’d like to talk with you about Melissa Henderson.”

One of them said, “Melissa?”

“Yes, did you know her?”

“Sure, she lived here.”

The girl doing the talking had on a black tee-shirt and gray sweatpants. She was dark haired, dark skinned, wore no shoes, and her toenails were painted red.

A pale blond woman said, “How do we know you’re a detective?”

The dark girl said, “What the hell else would he be, Kim? Coming in here asking about Melissa?”

Kim was sticking to her guns.

“I think he should show us some identification,” she said. “You know what Mrs. Cameron said.”

Several of the girls groaned. Kim was apparently the sole law-and-order candidate in the group.

“Mrs. Cameron?” I said.

The dark girl said, “She’s the housemother. She gave us all a big talk about how we had to be careful about people coming around after Melissa was killed.”

“Why?”

“People would be poking around, she said, making trouble.”

“What kind of people?” I said.

Another girl spoke.

“Like you,” she said and we all laughed except Kim, who was looking severe. Severe is not easy for a twenty-year-old kid.

I said, “Don’t hurt my feelings, now. But what’s wrong with me?”

“Not a thing,” the dark-haired girl answered. “I don’t think Mrs. Cameron knows why we’re supposed to be careful. She’s just doing what Old Lady Corcoran told her.”

“Old Lady Corcoran being?”

“The dean.”

“Oh, her,” I said.

And we all laughed again, except Kim.

“So what was Melissa like?” I said.

“Crazy,” the other girl said. She had on a man’s white shirt and blue cotton gym shorts. There were two big pink rollers in her hair.

“Crazy how?”

Kim got up suddenly and walked out of the room. I suspected that my moments were numbered.

“All ways,” Pink Rollers said. “Anything you wanted to try, she was ready.”

Talking about the woman they had known made them all remember what had happened to her and they were suddenly silent.

“Was she rebellious?” I said.

“Hell, yes,” Dark Hair said. “She’d try anything if someone told her not to.”

“She have a boyfriend?”

“I think so.”

“Know his name?”

“No. Melissa used to call him the Prince. She was kind of cozy about him. She never brought him around.”

“He a college guy?”

Nobody knew.

“Might he have gone to Taft?”

Nobody knew.

“Anyone she was unusually close to, a roommate, somebody that might know?”

Nobody knew of such a person. Melissa had roomed alone. She had lots of friends, several among those present. But no especial one friend.

“Tell me more about Crazy,” I said.

Behind me a woman said, “Just what is going on here?”

I turned halfway and looked over my shoulder at a woman in her late sixties with silver hair and rimless glasses. She had on a dark flowered dress with a white collar and modest high heels and a string of pearls. She was a housemother if I ever saw one.

I said, “Mrs. Cameron, I presume.”

“I’m the housemother here. Off-campus visitors require my permission.”

“You sure know how to make a guy feel welcome,” I said.

“I’ll have to ask you to go.”

“How do you know I’m not somebody’s professor come down to help them with their paper on Provencal poetry?”

“Please leave.”

“Or somebody’s dad. How would you feel coming in here and kicking out somebody’s dad who just stopped by to see how you were spending his thirty thousand a year.”

“I know who you are. You are not welcome.”

I looked at the young women.

“I think Kim has ratted us out,” I said.

They all laughed.

“Oh, come on, Mrs. Cameron,” Pink Rollers said. “We like him. We invited him to stay.”

“Take that up with Dean Corcoran, Marsha,” Mrs. Cameron said.

She turned to me. Very firm.

“Will you leave or must I call the police.”

“He is the police,” Dark Hair said.

“He is not. He is a private detective. He’s been told already that he’s not welcome on campus.”

Pink Rollers said, “Hey. A private eye?”

I said, “Here’s looking at you, kid.”

“Whoa, is that cool or what. A private eye.”

Mrs. Cameron turned without a word and walked out of the room.

“Cops will be here soon,” I said.

“The campus cops?” Dark Hair said mockingly. “What are you gonna do?”

“I’ll probably go quietly,” I said. “I don’t think I’ll shoot it out with them.”

“Oh, damn,” Pink Rollers said and we all laughed.

I took several cards from my shirt pocket and handed them around.

“If any of you, ah, undergraduate women have anything to add about Melissa, or think of something later, or want to have a nice lunch paid for by me...”

“You can call us girls,” Dark Hair said. “Kim’s the only one that’s really PC.”

The familiar pulsating glow of a blue light showed through the front window and a minute later the front door opened and Chief Livingston came in with two patrolmen. Mrs. Cameron greeted him at the door.

“I ordered him to leave as soon as I discovered he was here,” she said. “He basically defied me.”

“He probably does that a lot,” Livingston said. “Come on, Mr. Spenser, time to go.”

“What charge?”

“What charge? Oh, Jesus Christ, excuse me, ladies, it is against college regulations for anyone to visit a domicile without permission of the resident supervisor.”

“Oh, that charge,” I said.

Livingston grinned, and jerked his head toward the door. I got up from the arm of the couch where I’d been sitting and walked to the door and turned. I’d been so successful with my Bogart impression that I tried Arnold Schwarzenegger.

“Ah’ll be baack,” I said.

None of them knew what the hell I was doing. But they liked me. They all waved and hollered “good-bye” as I went out the door with the cops.