Emily Pasquarelli pushed open the door to Greg’s classroom.
‘Hey,’ she said, all smiles. ‘What is it you wanted to …?’ Her voice trailed off in a puzzled uptick. Greg, despite the end of the school day, was not alone. Andrea Velasquez was sitting at the back of his classroom, the heel of one ratty looking sneaker tapping absently against the floor. And sitting beside her was the woman police detective, Rachel Lev. Lev was absolutely still, her face expressionless, her eyes drifting from Greg, to Emily, and back to Greg again.
Emily closed Greg’s door with exaggerated care, sealing them off from the outside world. When she turned back around the smile was still there, but tighter now, not quite reaching her eyes.
‘What’s going on?’ she asked. Her voice was bright, perky even.
‘You killed Lindsay Delcade, biatch,’ Andrea blurted out before Greg could say anything.
Emily’s response was half gasp, half laugh.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said dismissively. She looked over to the detective. ‘Is this some kind of sick police joke?’
Lev shrugged.
‘If it is, it’s nothing to do with me, ma’am – or the department.’ She pointed a finger firmly toward Greg. ‘Mr Abimbola, here, has a theory of the case. It’s not the department’s theory –’ she glanced sideways at Andrea – ‘but Mr Abimbola was most insistent that I be here to hear it just in case the department has it wrong. So here I am.’ She stretched in the chair like some recalcitrant student, sparing Greg a glance that was something between amusement and exasperation. ‘I hope he’s not wasting my time.’
‘Greg?’ Emily looked a little unsteady on her feet. She placed an immaculately manicured hand on Greg’s desk, bracing herself against it. ‘You don’t actually think I had anything to do with this, do you? Not after you and I …’ Her voice trailed off, stilled by whatever it was she saw in Greg’s face.
Greg was glad he didn’t have a mirror. If his expression reflected even half of what he was feeling, he had no interest in seeing it. His heart thumped slowly in his chest, pumping thin, listless blood into a still-resisting brain. He desperately wanted to be wrong, to reset to that magical evening at Alleghalto, with a beautiful, intelligent woman whose skin had gleamed in the soft light, whose hands had meshed so easily with his. Compatible gears in the same machine. A possible future.
But he wasn’t wrong. Because God had no future in mind for people like him. It was what he deserved. What he had always deserved. The first hints of a headache pounded at his temples.
‘Maybe you should take a seat,’ he suggested, not unkindly.
‘I’d rather stand.’ The words were cold, now. The sort people reserved for those who would do them harm.
‘Fair enough. And I want you to know, I understand why you killed her. I might have done the same in your position.’
There was a sharp intake of breath from the back of the room. Lev, Greg guessed.
‘I didn’t kill anybody.’
‘Yes, Emily, you did.’
Emily laughed without humor, the sound ringing dismissively in Greg’s ears.
‘All of this,’ Greg said, ‘all of it, is about two things. Stayard College, and Lindsay Delcade’s inability to take no for an answer.’
He smiled at her sadly.
‘You must have been so happy when Scott got into Stayard. He’s a bright, clever young man, and now he’s at one of the best universities in the world. With a degree from Stayard, all things are possible: doors that you didn’t even know existed suddenly swing open. Your son’s future is assured. And you, his mother, are rightly proud of his achievement. And proud, happy mother that you are, you share your joy with Lindsay Delcade, your good friend from high school.
‘Lindsay was kind to your face, I’m guessing. But, as you told me yourself, she was very, very competitive. You knew it was killing her to think that Scott could get into Stayard when Vicki Delcade couldn’t. You told me the other night that it was “eating her alive”. Vicki, as we both know, is a genuinely talented performer, but not particularly academic. And as Vicki moved through high school, her mother must have realized that she wasn’t getting anywhere near Stayard without help. Never mind that the poor kid had no real interest in going there, Lindsay Delcade did. She terrorized the teachers into giving Vicki As that weren’t deserved, and ruined the career of a chemistry teacher who had the temerity to give her a B.’
‘Which makes Dr Freedman far more likely to have killed Lindsay than anybody!’ Emily interjected. ‘He was there that night, you know.’ She was looking at Detective Lev, seeking her support. ‘He could easily have gotten her into the custodian’s room and killed her right there. He hated her.’
‘I thought about that,’ Greg agreed, dragging Emily’s attention away from the police officer, ‘but it doesn’t make any sense. If Demetrius Freedman had lured Lindsay into the custodian’s room, it would have been because he had a plan. Demetrius is a planner. He was here half the night rehearsing for some damned experiment, because that’s the kind of man he is. If he’d planned to kill Lindsay for what she did to his career, how come he forgot to bring a weapon? Whoever killed Lindsay stabbed her with the first thing that came to hand: Andrea’s screwdriver. Demetrius would have brought a knife, or a gun, or a rope to strangle her with. He would have been prepared. And besides, if Demetrius hated Lindsay Delcade, the feeling was entirely mutual. No one dragged Lindsay Delcade into the custodian’s room. She must have intended to go there of her own free will. And there’s no way Lindsay Delcade would agree to meet someone she couldn’t stand in a school basement, after hours, to smoke marijuana.’
Greg saw the shot hit home. Emily flinched. Detective Lev shifted in her seat.
‘Vernon, the custodian, told me that the police found pot at the crime scene, and an ashtray that he said didn’t belong there. Which means someone brought that ashtray with them. No one was dealing pot down there, Emily. Pot dealers don’t bring ashtrays. Lindsay and her killer were smoking it together. Demetrius could have let her in, I’ll give you that, but they weren’t friends. Quite the opposite, in fact. There’s no way on God’s green earth that those two would’ve been sharing spliffs.’
Emily, at long last, decided to take a seat.
‘But the ashtray would have had prints on it, or DNA,’ she said, defiantly. ‘And if it did, I’d have been arrested days ago, wouldn’t I, Detective?’
‘There were no usable prints on the ashtray,’ Lev said, after a moment’s hesitation. ‘The DNA was all Ms Delcade’s.’
‘From her blood, I suppose?’ Greg asked. ‘Vern did say the ashtray was covered with it.’
Lev nodded.
‘And here’s the other thing,’ Greg continued. ‘What kind of person brings an ashtray – a Stayard ashtray, no less – just to smoke pot? Someone who’s neatnik tidy. Perhaps army tidy, and with innate good taste on top of it, so she couldn’t bear to use something as hideous as a coffee mug or an old tin. And maybe someone who wanted to send a message: my child is at Stayard, yours isn’t.’
‘That’s cold, man,’ Andrea interjected. ‘Cold.’
‘It is,’ Greg agreed. ‘But it was Emily who told me that women’s friendships are complicated. What was it you said? Oh, yes: “We’re all frenemies at some level.”.’
Almost despite themselves, Greg noticed, Emily and Rachel were nodding. Only Andrea seemed unconvinced.
‘When all’s said and done, there are only four people who looked like they might have killed Lindsay Delcade: Andrea Velasquez—’
‘I didn’t do it!’
‘—who couldn’t have done it, because she’d already left before Lindsay even got here; Lindsay’s husband, who, even if he followed her here, couldn’t have killed her without the murder being discovered by whomever Lindsay was meeting; Demetrius Freedman, whom Lindsay wouldn’t have been seen dead with, if you’ll excuse the expression; and you, Emily: a tidy, tasteful woman, who brought an ashtray to send a message.’
‘This is nuts!’
‘Is it? Apart from her children, the only person in the world who ever had a good word for that woman was you. She and her husband were at daggers drawn, you yourself told me she had no close friends. And yet she went out every Monday night, regular as clockwork, to see someone. And that someone was you.’
‘I never said that! I told you she was seeing someone – some man. A guy.’
‘A guy that your good friend somehow never got around to telling you about. And a guy that even her husband, who has no warm feelings toward his wife at all, doesn’t believe exists. He was adamant that she was having nights out with the girls. His only mistake was his use of the plural. There was only one girl. You.’
‘Right, like I’d come down to the school basement for a girls’ night out.’
‘What better place to smoke pot? You can’t smoke at home with your mother there, I suspect, and Lindsay, I’m guessing, wouldn’t smoke in front of her kids, or anywhere she might be seen in public. She wanted to be a congressman’s wife, remember? The custodian’s room is perfect. It’s completely private, it’s comfortable in a grubby kind of way, and no one would ever think to look for you there. And the two of you did it regularly. So regularly, you didn’t even have to text about it. You both just turned up; same time, same place. That’s why you had an ashtray specially for the occasion, and it’s why Andrea and Mr Szymanski often smelt marijuana down there the morning after.’
‘I thought it was Vern,’ Andrea murmured. ‘That it was medicinal or something.’
‘And he thought it was you,’ Greg said, smiling. ‘He called you a pot head.’
‘Ornery old bastard.’
‘But it was Lindsay and Emily the whole time. And for a long time.’ He turned to face Emily again. ‘I don’t know when you figured out that you could get into the custodian’s room without being seen, but you turned it into a routine. There’s an old packing crate outside the loading bay. You placed it there so you didn’t have to clamber up a four-foot-high ledge, just a couple of big steps and you were up. And once you figured it out, you told Lindsay. You even gave her a key.’
Emily Pasquarelli was looking very pale, now.
‘A key?’
‘A key,’ Greg repeated. ‘I should have seen it before, but I was too stupid to notice. There are meant to be five keys. Ms Ellis has one, you have one, Vernon and Andrea have one each, and there’s a spare kept on a hook in the custodian’s room, just in case. If I went to your cubicle right now, I’d find your key, wouldn’t I?’
‘Yes,’ Emily admitted, reluctantly.
‘And I know for a fact Ms Ellis’s is holding down one of her ridiculous piles of paper. I saw it there yesterday.’
Emily looked, if anything, even paler.
‘Andrea and Vernon both have theirs, which means there should be only one key in the custodian’s room. But there are two. Vern found it last Wednesday, while he was cleaning up the crime scene. It had fallen into a bucket of odds and ends. Vern thought it was Andrea’s, and I did, too, for the longest time. Until Andrea put me right, that is.’
‘So whose was it?’ Rachel Lev asked. She’d pulled out her notebook and was scribbling furiously.
‘Lindsay Delcade’s. You had it made for her, didn’t you, Emily? So she could get in as soon as she arrived. Couldn’t have your friend hanging around a loading bay where some passerby might see her if you were running late, could you?’
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’ Emily Pasquarelli’s voice was little more than a whisper.
‘If you say so. I doubt it’s been used much since Monday before last. There’s a good chance Detective Lev will find Lindsay’s prints on it, even now.’
‘I’ll take my chances.’ Emily’s bright eyes glittered with defiance.
‘When I realized there were too many keys, I knew it had to be you. Bryan Delcade didn’t have access to a key to copy it. Ellis could have, of course. And Demetrius, I suppose, could have sneaked down to the custodian’s room and borrowed the spare long enough to make one. Problem is, like Andrea, there was no reason on earth why either of them would copy a key for Lindsay Delcade. The only one close enough to Lindsay to want to give her a key, was you.’
‘Circumstantial.’
‘I don’t think circumstantial means what you think it means, Emily. Circumstantial evidence is still evidence. And if there are prints on that key, you’ll never be able to explain it away.’
‘If there are prints on that key, Columbo, come talk to me then. Better yet, talk to my lawyer.’ She stood up abruptly. ‘I’ve had enough of this … this … witch-hunt. I’m leaving.’
‘I think you should stay,’ Rachel Lev said, suddenly. ‘And it would be better for everybody if I didn’t have to make you.’
Greg tried to shoot the detective a grateful look, but she wouldn’t meet his eye. Emily sat back down, perched awkwardly at the edge of her seat.
‘I’ll be quick, Emily, I promise. Quicker, anyway.
‘As you very well know, but I didn’t until Bryan Delcade told me, the relationship between Calderhill Academy and Stayard College is corrupt. Stacey joked with me the other day that you’re the one who runs the school, not Ms Ellis. While that’s not strictly true, you told me yourself that you handle all the school’s finances. I’ve seen the spreadsheets on your computer. You’ve got a spreadsheet for everything. You know every cent that goes in and out of this place – and why. And a good chunk of that money greases the wheels in the Stayard admissions office. Sure, there are kids, like your son, who get in honestly. But there are a whole lot more whose parents pay bribes to a guy called Johnathan Lorde, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Stayard. Bribes brokered by the school principal. Vicki Delcade is no Scott Pasquarelli. There was no way she was going to Stayard without Johnathan Lorde’s very illegal assistance. Assistance that cost half-a-million dollars, and which had to be paid no later than the Monday on which Lindsay Delcade died. Lorde was in town that night, having dinner with Ms Ellis. I’m guessing they were finalizing the details. It’d be nice to think that she slid him the money in a big brown briefcase, but I’m guessing it got wired to some dodgy account somewhere. Boring but practical.
‘In any event, Lindsay didn’t have the money. Her husband had already spent it smoothing the path of his political career. Lindsay came in that Monday morning to beg Dean Ellis for more time.’ Greg found time for a wry smile. ‘I say “beg”, but that wasn’t really Lindsay’s style, was it? “Berate” was more like it. I heard some of the histrionics myself, but I didn’t understand the context until much later. Anyway, Ellis held the line, and Lindsay saw her daughter’s shot at Stayard slipping away.
‘But Lindsay, as we all know by now, was not the sort of woman to take no for an answer. She took a rideshare that evening for her regular girls’ night out, arriving here, with the key she shouldn’t have had, at eight twenty-seven p.m. Maybe you’d already got here, maybe you arrived a bit later: only you know, of course, because you knew how to get through the loading bay without being picked up on camera.
‘You brought the ashtray, and either you or Lindsay brought the pot. Lindsay was still steamed about the Stayard thing, and I daresay the ashtray didn’t help her mood. It was cold, too, because even though Andrea had fixed the furnace by then, it hadn’t had a chance to warm the place up. Lindsay kept her coat on. So did you, I imagine. You were certainly wearing your gloves because, like you told me, you can’t stand having cold hands.
‘And then Lindsay, who can’t take no for an answer, started leaning on you to help her out, didn’t she? Because, if there was anyone at this school who could work a miracle for her, it would be you. It’s you who knows where all the money goes. It’s you who knows everything there is to know about the Stayard admissions scheme. It’s you who Lindsay hoped would know about any loopholes. And Lindsay, who can’t take no for an answer, and doesn’t know how to beg, did what she does best. She threatened you. She would blow the lid on the whole, rotten scam. The school would be ruined. You would be ruined. You’d never work again. You might even go to jail. And Lindsay Delcade just kept piling it on because that’s what Lindsay does. She would have been right in your face about it, screaming and abusive. And at some point, you just snapped, grabbed that big old screwdriver and stabbed her. Again, and again, and again. You’re ex-army. You know how to kill someone, even if this was your very first time.’
‘And then what happened?’ Emily asked. Her voice had become somehow unmoored from her stiffly held body. It sounded light and carefree – curious, even. As if she genuinely wanted to know.
‘Killing someone is … hard to process. It’s difficult to think straight. Your heart would have been going a million miles a minute, your hands would have been shaking, you’d have been gasping for breath. You dropped the screwdriver. You’d been wearing gloves because of the cold, that’s why your prints aren’t on the handle, only Andrea’s. But now the gloves were covered in blood. You cleared away the joints you’d been smoking, but when you tried to pick up the ashtray, you couldn’t hold it. It was too heavy, and your gloves were slick. You let it lie where you dropped it. During the attack, Lindsay’s key had fallen into a bucket full of bits and pieces, and the unsmoked marijuana had rolled under the sofa. I don’t know if you tried to find them before you fled or not, but flee you did. Your smooth-soled shoes left a couple of bloody footprints on the way out, and your gloves deposited Lindsay’s blood on the door handle when you opened it. After that, you were gone. No one suspected you. You were “at home with your mother”. And your mother would have backed you up, I’m guessing. Either because you asked her to or, more likely, she was confused and assumed you were home. You almost got away with it.’
‘Almost?’ Emily’s laugh was laced with derision. ‘None of this is going to hold up in court. You’ve got a key that might have Lindsay’s prints on it. So what? I let her have the key as a favor so she could come in here and get high. I never joined her. I wasn’t here and there’s absolutely nothing that says I was.’
‘Pity about the sanitation strike.’
‘The what, now?’
‘Trash cans are cleaned out on Tuesdays, both here and at your apartment. But for the strike, they’d have been emptied the day after the murder.’ Greg took a step toward his desk. ‘But they weren’t.’
‘Strike’s over,’ Emily reminded him. ‘They were emptied today.’
‘But not before Ms Velasquez over there went dumpster diving. Turned out the police had gone through the school trash after the murder—’
‘Of course we did,’ Lev interjected. ‘We’re not idiots.’
‘—but Andrea made it to your apartment building before the garbage trucks. She found these.’ Greg reached into a desk drawer. Pulled out a bulging Ziploc bag. ‘The leather gloves you had at dinner last night looked exactly like your old ones. But last night’s were brand new. You hadn’t even removed the little plastic loop that held the shop label. These, the ones in the bag, are your old ones. They were soaked in blood. Enough that you couldn’t pick up the ashtray, that you left marks all over the door handle. Even though you probably weren’t at your best, having just killed your best friend from high school, you knew enough not to throw them away outside. You dumped them at your apartment building instead. And you know what? They’re still soaked in blood – caked, really. They’ll be loaded with Lindsay Delcade’s DNA – and yours.’ He shook his head, genuinely saddened. ‘I don’t think you’ll be talking your way out of that one any time soon.’
Emily Pasquarelli gasped, the blood draining from her face.
‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ Detective Lev muttered. ‘You didn’t think to lead with that?’ She stood up, produced a pair of flex cuffs from her overcoat pocket.
‘It wasn’t like that,’ Emily said. She said it so quietly no one was sure she’d spoken until she said it again, more loudly. ‘It wasn’t like that at all.’
The room was suddenly very still. Even Lev stopped moving, the cuffs hanging poised and translucent in her hands.
‘It wasn’t about the school,’ Emily Pasquarelli said. ‘It wasn’t about me. It was about Scott.’
‘Your son?’ Greg prompted. He said it gently, like a priest. He’d seen the look on Emily’s face many times before, in musty basements and corrugated-iron shacks in Africa, and Asia, and Central Europe. Capitulation. The recognition that there was nowhere to go, nothing to fight over. Only a last, final need to be understood.
Emily nodded.
‘Lindsay was furious Ellis hadn’t given her more time to pay. But she could have gotten Vicki in next year if she’d been prepared to wait. Ellis had told her that. She’d make sure the kid was still on Lorde’s list next time around. I told her that, too. It would give her a chance to get the family finances in order – or to get a divorce settlement out of Bryan. And it would give Vicki a year out to try her hand at acting like she wanted.’
Tears were starting to leak from Emily’s eyes.
‘But Lindsay wasn’t having any of it. She wanted Vicki in right now. She said Vicki would have gotten in already if it hadn’t been for ghetto teachers like you and Mr Freedman screwing with her GPA. And Ellis had approached her with what she called a “side way in”, so Ellis had a moral obligation to make it happen.’
Emily took a long, stertorous breath.
‘Then she said it was up to me to persuade Ellis, because the principal always listened to what I had to say. I tried to tell her that there was nothing I could do, that it really was too late, but she wouldn’t have any of it. She would go to the press, she said, and the police, and it was my son who would pay the price. After she was done, no one would ever believe Scott got in honestly. He would be thrown out of Stayard without graduating, along with every other Calderhill alum. His face would be all over the internet, on TMZ. He’d be disgraced. No other college would take him. His whole future would be ruined, and he’d spend the rest of his life as an anonymous nobody, just like his mother.’
Emily jammed a fist into her mouth, held her breath for a moment.
‘I … I just lost it. The screwdriver was right there, and she was screaming at me to stop and I just couldn’t. And then it was too late. It was too late …’
She broke down, then, sobbing. A deep, primal wailing interrupted by jagged gulps of breath that filled the whole room. She seemed insensible to Rachel Lev moving alongside her, looping the flex cuffs around her wrists.
‘Emily Pasquarelli, I am arresting you for the murder of Lindsay Harris Delcade. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to have an attorney …’
Minutes later, as Rachel Lev transferred her prisoner to the custody of two uniformed officers, Emily managed to shoot Greg a watery smile.
‘We would have made a good team,’ she said.
Greg was too churned up to say anything. He watched her go, face and body rigid. So lost was he in his own thoughts that the gentle tap on his shoulder made him jump.
‘Thank you, Mr Abimbola, for all your help,’ Detective Lev said. The smile was wide, and genuine, and made her look far less severe than normal. ‘I’d like to say that we’d have got there eventually but, hand on heart, I’m not sure we would have. You and Ms Velasquez get down to the station as soon as you can. For statements and all that good stuff.’
And with that she was gone, taking long strides out of the room in her sensible shoes and slightly scuffed pantsuit. Her overcoat billowed behind her as she walked.
‘You did it, Mr Bimbo! You did it!’
Andrea hugged him so hard it almost squeezed the breath out of him.
‘So we did,’ Greg agreed, smiling.
‘You think they’ll give me my boots back, now?’
‘I’m sure they will. But take the receipt, just in case.’
Andrea let go of him, looking slightly worried.
‘Now I have to go to PCC and do some serious brown-nosing. I don’t want to get flunked out because of the, you know, furnace thing. I got an appointment with the dean of students at four thirty.’
‘Well, good luck with that. If there’s anything I can do there, let me know.’
‘Thanks, man.’
Greg found himself casting a speculative eye over the assistant custodian.
‘Andrea? How would you like to put that IT training of yours to good use?’