Lonnie was completely still for a long moment. He stared at her, a strange, half-puzzled look on his face. Disbelief warring with something else. It was as if he’d just figured out the answer to a riddle, but the answer was wholly unexpected. Jocelyn waited. The moment stretched on. Lonnie licked his lips but said nothing. Finally, Jocelyn said, “You have someone in mind?”
“You think Sydney was having a sexual relationship with Cash Rigo?”
“There is a possibility,” she admitted. “They were close, weren’t they?”
Lonnie blinked as if bringing himself back from a reverie. “Yes, they were. He was our coach and history teacher. He was cool. I mean, to us. Sydney used to say he was lame, but I know she genuinely liked him. She was always hanging around him. He was one of those teachers who tried to be your buddy, you know? Hard to believe he would do something like that, but . . .” he trailed off.
Jocelyn uncrossed her legs. It suddenly felt overly hot in the office. She resisted the urge to pull off her jacket. “But what?” she prompted.
Lonnie leaned closer to her, their heads nearly touching. They’d lowered their voices unconsciously, even though they were completely alone in his office. “I’ve never told anyone this story,” he began. “You know Cash Rigo was married to the school nurse, right?”
Jocelyn nodded. “Francine.”
“Yeah. We called her Mrs. Rigo. She came to school once . . .” he hesitated. He looked at his hands, picking at a cuticle on his left thumb. “Busted up.”
Jocelyn sat up straighter. “In what way?”
Lonnie looked back up at her. He pointed to his face. “Black eye. She told people she ran into a door or something ridiculous like that, and that, of course, sparked up some rumors.”
“When was that?”
Lonnie’s eyebrows drew together. “It was senior year, I remember that much. It was before Syd died.”
“Weeks before she died? Months?”
“A couple of months. It had to be sometime in March of that year because it was still cold. I twisted my ankle.” He snapped his fingers. “Yeah, March. It was right before a big meet we had with Roxborough High School. I remember I was pretty bummed out that I couldn’t run that night. Anyway, I went to her office for my ankle, and she had a pretty nasty black eye.”
Jocelyn frowned. “There was nothing in the case files about domestic violence.”
Lonnie said, “Like I said, they were just rumors. I totally forgot about the whole thing. I mean Syd died two months later, and the way she was murdered—”
He broke off and looked away from Jocelyn, his eyes finding a spot on the floor next to her chair. He took a deep breath, his chest rising and falling slowly, a slight tremble in his frame.
“Did Mrs. Rigo say anything about her black eye?” Jocelyn asked. “Offer any explanation for it?”
He took another breath, this one less shaky, and met her gaze again. “While I was there, in her office, she asked me if I could keep a secret. I said sure I could, even though I didn’t really care about her secrets. I mean, I was seventeen. I cared about sports and Syd and getting laid. She told me that she had had a fight with Cash—that things weren’t good between them, and she was afraid of him.”
“She just told you all this? Just blurted it out?”
“Yeah.”
“But why?” Jocelyn asked. “Why would she tell all that stuff to a seventeen-year-old student?”
Lonnie smiled, a sardonic twist to his lips. “Because she wanted a gun.”
Jocelyn couldn’t keep the surprise from her face. “She asked you to get her a gun?”
Lonnie nodded slowly, chuckling. “I was so mad. I mean I felt badly for her, no doubt, but here’s this white woman asking a black teenage boy to get her a gun.”
Jocelyn leaned back in her seat, stunned. “That is wrong on so many levels.”
“I know it,” Lonnie agreed.
“What did you tell her?”
“I told her I couldn’t help her. I asked why she’d assume that just because I was black and lived in North Philly that I could get her a gun. She got upset, said it wasn’t like that. I said that’s exactly what it’s like. She begged me not to tell on her. She said Cash would kill her.”
“And you never told?”
He shook his head. “She was so . . . pathetic. I really did feel badly for her. I mean, I was angry, but I wasn’t about to get in the middle of anyone’s domestic drama. A few more months, and I was out of that school. I didn’t want to get caught up in anything that might derail my future.” He looked at his hands again. “Selfish, I suppose.”
“No,” Jocelyn said firmly. “Not selfish at all. Francine Rigo was a grown woman. No matter how bad her situation was at home, she had no business asking a seventeen-year-old kid for help, much less asking you to do something illegal.”
“True,” Lonnie said noncommittally.
“And, from what my partner and I have gathered thus far, they’re still married, so maybe she didn’t need that gun after all.”
“I guess she didn’t. It was weird though. Coach Rigo never struck me as a wife-beater—or a murderer.”
Jocelyn thought of all the people she had arrested during her time as a police officer. Many looked and acted the part of criminal, but there were a large number of her collars who didn’t seem all that bad—and they were often the ones who had committed the most heinous crimes. She gave Lonnie a pained smile. As if of its own free will, her right hand moved to cover the scar on her other hand. “You never know what people are like behind closed doors.”
Chapter 13
October 23, 2014
Jocelyn purposely waited for Cash Rigo to drive away before she knocked on the Rigos’ front door. She wanted to talk to Francine Rigo alone and she wanted to catch them both off-balance. They lived in a large two-story Tudor-style home in Mount Airy. It was a neighborhood nestled between the Chestnut Hill and Germantown neighborhoods in the city, touching both affluence and poverty, relative safety on one side and a strong likelihood of violence on the other. It had been rejuvenated in recent years, its large Victorian and Tudor-style homes rehabbed, and inhabited by young professionals like the Rigos, who kept their homes with loving precision—fresh paint, neatly mowed lawns, and perfectly pruned gardens. Nothing in disrepair.
Francine opened the front door with a confused smile on her face. She wasn’t what Jocelyn had expected, although Jocelyn wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting, having only seen Francine before on grainy police footage. The woman before her was short and plump. She wore a billowing red blouse over black leggings with brown soft-leather boots that came up to her knees. Her round face was framed by shoulder length brown hair that looked fresh from a salon—the ends cut to curl under, her locks shiny and soft-looking. She had big blue eyes, a small straight nose, and a thin mouth. She was plain, her attractiveness understated. Jocelyn would bet that she spent a lot of time to look as casually attractive as she did now. Not a knock-out, Kevin would say, but worth a look.
“Can I help you?” Francine said.
Jocelyn took a decisive step forward as she extended her hand in greeting, nearly putting one foot inside the house. “Jocelyn Rush. I’ve been hired by the family of one of your husband’s former students. We’re holding a scholarship fundraiser, and we were hoping he’d speak. Is he home?”