How simple it all sounded.
Lucy’s eyes teared up. She brushed back her very straight, very shiny black hair. I could almost read her face: Now I don’t have a friend anymore.
I couldn’t bring myself to put her through another minute of anguish. I took a small piece of paper from my purse and slipped it across the table to Lucy.
“This is the address for Elteen Kirsch, Keith’s cousin in Chicago. In case you want to send her a note.”
Lucy let out a little gasp. “Thank you very, very much, Dr. Knowles.” She put her hand, warm from the mug of hot chocolate, on mine. “It’s so good to have a friend,” she said.
I felt like a heel.
It was now close enough to ten o’clock so I went to the police station to meet Virgil. I hoped he didn’t expect me to simply hand over my bag of samples. In my mind, he and I sat at a table that was anywhere but in Interview Two and worked together, comparing loops and slants until one of us shouted, “Eureka!” And then Virgil would go out with handcuffs and an arrest warrant and bring in the killer. Bruce and I could go away to the Cape for a few days and I’d be back to prepare fall syllabi and lessons as I always did in August. I longed for reuniting with my steady, well-behaved math majors.
A girl can dream.
Once again I found myself in the waiting area of Henley’s police station. I tucked the paper bag of handwriting samples near my legs, checked my email using my phone, and replied to a few students with applied statistics questions. Then I resumed my practice of staring at the bulletin board across from me, with its wealth of memos and flyers.
Last time I’d focused on the fascinating stats about my hometown. This time I looked at the material around the charts. Wanted and missing persons flyers. A bicycle and pedestrian safety notice. A policy statement regarding abandoned vehicles. A bright orange “buckle-up” bumper sticker. I chuckled at a little cop humor: a cartoon picturing one policeman giving another the Heimlich maneuver while a doughnut pops out.
I remembered that two simple themed crosswords were due to one of my children’s puzzles editors in a couple of weeks. Why not use the surroundings for inspiration? I whipped out a small pad and pen. My vast experience in waiting rooms like this during the past week told me I had plenty of time before I was summoned. Working on puzzles would be a good release of the nervous energy coursing through me.
For the first level puzzle I sketched out a simple grid with four across and ten down and only nine common letters. I drafted simple fill-in-the-blank clues like “A (blank) is pinned to a police officer’s uniform” and “A policeman’s car is often called a (blank).” The next level would have a much larger grid. I’d use my standard fifty across and fifty down. I started making a list of words I’d fit into the intermediate level grid. Beretta. Miranda warning. Canine. Search warrant. I looked at the bulletin board for ideas. Mug shot. Home security.
The background noises of chatter and ringing phones didn’t bother my concentration. But a sudden burst of screaming startled me. Two officers had entered the front door. The inordinately loud yelling came from an old man with a leathery face and a long, unkempt gray ponytail being dragged between the uniformed men.
“I know my rights. Check your own laws. I did nothing wrong,” I heard between yelps of “police brutality.”
Virgil came out of the office area at the same time that the old guy was spitting out terms like “fuzz” and “pigs,” epithets I thought had died with the sixties. The man himself was a throwback to photos I’d seen of “the good old hippie daze,” as my mother called them, spelling out the last word for me each time.
“It’s Dweezil,” Virgil said to me. “He’s harmless.”
“I take it this is a repeat performance?”
“Oh, yeah. There’s a little settlement on the west side of town. A bunch of people who were in college in the sixties and haven’t quite adjusted to real life. They have their own little pot farm out there.”
“I thought marijuana was decriminalized a couple years ago.”
“They go back and forth, the state legislature. Right now a small amount of marijuana is just a ticketable offense, except Henley passed a town ordinance prohibiting smoking it in public. The state law is so complicated and basically unenforceable that most uniforms ignore it, unless someone makes a nuisance of himself.”
“Like Dweezil.”
Virgil nodded. We walked back to the office area where it was significantly quieter.
“Funny how different people turn out,” Virgil said. “My dad has newspaper photos on his office wall of himself and his buddies with their arms locked, protesting this and that. You can tell they’re yelling at the cops and you know my dad must be pretty proud of his past or he wouldn’t be displaying the pictures. But probably a couple of years after the pictures were taken he goes to law school, then he marries my straight-arrow mom and ends up a prosecuting attorney. He’s probably the same age as Dweezil.”
“It was an interesting generation,” I said, my mind wandering to my own mother and her political activism in her heyday.
Then my renegade mind wandered farther from home. To Dean Phyllis Underwood. There had to be some important reason why she wanted whatever was left in Keith’s office. Could her motive have to do with a crime that Keith found out about? She did, after all, belong to the generation that was known for activism that sometimes led to violence.
I ran the numbers. How old was she, other than the one hundred and ten years old she seemed to most of us? I remembered a discussion at a faculty meeting about extending the mandatory retirement age for administrators. I wished I’d paid more attention. My best recollection was that the dean, a case in point at that meeting, was in her early sixties, making her now about sixty-five or-six. That put her smack in the late sixties as a college student. The college website would give her year of graduation.
What if she did something back then that wouldn’t look so cool now for a college dean? Something she wouldn’t be proud of or want shown off as Virgil’s dad did? I pictured the young, if she ever was, Phyllis Underwood. Smoking pot, protesting, maybe even getting arrested. I would have laughed hysterically if I weren’t surrounded by cops who might misunderstand my behavior and carry me away.
Virgil and I took seats at a small table in Interview One. Whew. My ex-student Terri had been right about the difference between this room and Interview Two. Interview One was air-conditioned, even cooler than the outside areas, and the chairs stood even on four good legs.
“Are arrest records available to the public?” I asked Virgil.
He raised his eyebrows. “Anyone in particular?”
“Just curious.” I pointed to my bag of cards and notes. “It’s about another matter entirely.” Maybe, maybe not, I said to myself.
Virgil sat back. “On the arrest records, yes and no. You have to have a ‘need to know’ such as the press would have, but your average citizen would not. The press is entitled to the report for factual information, like name, age, date and time of the arrest, but we can limit what else they can see.” He gave me a questioning look. “Does that help?”
“A ‘yes’ would have been more help,” I said.
“Well, there are some exceptions, like with Megan’s Law where you can find out if someone has been arrested for certain sex crimes. In fact, you can check that on the Internet. But if your car is stolen and the police recover it being driven by someone they arrest, you’re entitled to the theft report but not to the arrest report. Once the case was charged by the DA’s office for a criminal prosecution, it used to become a public record, but not anymore. There’s this thing called ‘probable cause’-”
I held up my hand. “Thanks. Any more is too complicated.”