13: Reluctant Witness

“Well, what do you think, Jefferson? Did Heidi covet her neighbor’s husband?”

“Fifty-fifty chance on that,” I said.

Banfield gave the two of us a “you-guys-have-three-heads-each look.” “Of course, she did. And I’d say it took all of about a week for her to realize that wasn’t going anywhere.”

Mac and I looked at each other and shrugged our shoulders.

“Does that mean you regard her as a suspect or discard her as a suspect?” Mac asked Banfield.

“Too early to say, but the betting is this was a crime of passion and she doesn’t strike me as the passionate type.”

“On the contrary, I know from working with her that Heidi is quite passionate about her view of how the university—and world, for that matter—ought to work. I constantly infuriated her by failing to meet her standards. However, she was never anything less than controlled.”

“And controlling, if possible,” I put in.

“So, if she killed somebody,” Banfield said, “it would have been planned.”

“I believe so,” Mac said. “Of course, Professor Burch’s murder could have been planned to look like it was spur-of-the-moment.” This kind of double thinking always gives me a headache. “I speak only theoretically, of course. I find it hard to imagine Heidi Guildenstern as a murderess, although I have been surprised before. I think we need to talk to the objects of Professor Burch’s deplorable attentions. I wish Heidi were less discreet about naming others beyond the three students we know about.”

My phone made a noise. Incoming! talking to fr joe late today for alumni mag story, Lynda texted. may not be home when you get here. polly will watch the 3 amigos. Triple M—Sister Polly—may be a religious sister, but she’s also an Army veteran. She would have those kids saluting by the time I got home. I texted back good luck wishes, husbandly comments of a romantic nature, and emojis of a smiley face with two hearts for eyes and a pair of lips. We also agreed to meet on campus at the end of the workday.

Mac observed my feverish typing. “Media inquiries, Jefferson?”

“The work never ends.”

The first interview Banfield had set up was with Amal Abood, now a senior at another small school in New Boston, Ohio. She would meet us at her part-time job in a restaurant. New Boston was a little less than an hour and a half drive east from Erin on U.S. 52, the Ohio River Scenic Byway. Banfield piloted us in her cruiser as if alert for land mines, which reminded me that her left leg was made of plastic and metal. The sun shone brightly, and so did Banfield.

“May I smoke?” Mac asked.

“In your dreams, Seb.” That dealt with, she moved on. “Ms. Abood is what you might call a reluctant witness.” If she hadn’t had her hands on the wheel, she probably would have put air quotes around “reluctant witness.”

“How so?” Mac said. He sat in the front. I sat in the back with his crutches.

“She doesn’t want anything to do with St. Benignus. At first she refused to cooperate.”

“How did you persuade her?”

“I told her she could talk to me or Assistant Chief Gibbons.” She smiled. “I was betting she wouldn’t know what a gorgeous hunk of male we’re talking about here.”

Hunk? L. Jack Gibbons? Well, maybe. I guess.

“You said ‘reluctant witness,’ but she isn’t actually a witness in the murder investigation, is she?” I said. “She’s more like a suspect.”

“That’s something else she doesn’t know.”

We tossed around a few ideas here and there that didn’t amount to much, then talked about some of Banfield’s battlefield experiences and some of ours poking our noses where they didn’t belong. We’d all seen too many dead bodies.

“So, tell me everything you know about Jack Gibbons,” she said, trying to sound casual and failing miserably.

“We don’t know jack about him,” I quipped.

“Come on, dudes. Give. You’ve worked with him on cases for years. I bet you know everything important about him.”

“He is unmarried and unattached,” Mac said.

“See, I was right. You know everything important about him.”

This sounded serious. I started texting Popcorn, then erased it. It wouldn’t be fair for Gibbons to be the last to know he was in the archer’s crosshairs.

“I want to start my own restaurant,” Amal Abood said in excellent English. “That’s why I am pursuing a degree in entrepreneurship.”

We met her in the back room of a Middle Eastern café in downtown New Boston where she was about to start her shift waiting on tables to help pay her tuition. The café featured belly dancing on Saturday nights, as graphically advertised on posters. No need to mention that to Lynda.

Ms. Abood was part of a phalanx of international students drawn to SBU by Ralph Pendergast’s strategic targeting of that population when he was provost. (He also added online courses and new majors in biomedical sciences and health and wellness to better compete in the academic marketplace. No flies on Ralph.) Her family had been driven out of Damascus by ISIS in 2014. She was short, with long, midnight-black hair and large brown eyes.

“You must have been very disappointed by your work-study experience with Dean Burch,” Banfield said after the preliminaries were checked off.

“I regarded that as a road bump not a roadblock,” the interviewee said.

Mac raised an eyebrow, impressed with the turn of phrase.

“That’s what my advisor says,” she explained. “She’s pretty good with words. Anyway, it was a bad experience, but not the worst of my life by a long way.”

DA-da-da-da—DA-da-da! That was my smartphone, belting out the Indiana Jones ringtone that I assign everyone but Lynda (“Boléro”) and Mac (“You’re so Vain”). Hadley Reams was calling. Damn! I’d forgotten to call and assure him and Maggie about GK’s commitment to the campus safety review, even approving the hiring of outside help. I can’t remember everything! Nevertheless, Hadley could wait. I declined the call.

“This was three years ago that you transferred out of SBU—after the fall semester in 2015, wasn’t it?” Banfield said.

She nodded. “That’s right.”

“But you didn’t file a complaint then.” Banfield had studied the investigators’ report—maybe memorized it, for all I knew.

“No. I just wanted to get out of there and move on. Besides, he was the dean and I am a woman from Syria. I didn’t even have any friends on campus. But when Ms. Fischer called me and said that I could help other women, make it so nobody else would go through the humiliation I suffered, I told her what Dean Burch did to me.”

“I realize the details must be embarrassing to talk about.”

Amal Abood didn’t look embarrassed. At that moment she looked like somebody who could take me on in a fair fight, never mind that she was about a foot shorter than me and female. “He asked me to stand on a chair to adjust an air vent in the ceiling whenever I wore a dress, then he would look up my dress. I stopped wearing dresses. Then he would drop books and ask me to pick them up while he watched me from behind. It was degrading. Once he gave me an SBU Lady Dragons T-shirt as a present and asked me to try it on. I could see it would be very tight-fitting across my chest, so I refused. He got very upset and said I was ungrateful.”

If I read Banfield’s body language correctly—and I did—Burch was lucky to be dead.

“Do you know anybody else he did these things to, other than the other two students who are on record?”

“No. I don’t even know who the other two were. I haven’t been in contact with anybody at SBU since I left.”

“You must have been very angry at Warren Burch,” Banfield said. “I know I would be.”

“Only at first. Now I am grateful to him.”

“I don’t understand.” That makes at least two of us, Aurelia.

“What he did to me became a motivation, like everything bad that has happened in my life. It all makes me determined to realize my dream. That is the American way, no?”

“That is the American way, yes,” Mac said.

“I am doing very well now. My average is 4.0.”

Maybe you should have sent Burch flowers while you had the chance. Wait a minute! It’s not too late. The funeral is Friday.

“And now Dean Burch is dead,” Ms. Abood added. “May he be at peace. That should have only happened on God’s time.”

“Have you been on the SBU campus lately?” Banfield asked. Like, say, the night Burch was murdered?

The answer came quickly and firmly: “No. Why would I ever go back there?”