Big Boned

13

Tom has apologized a million times for the plow remark.

“Honest,” he keeps saying. “If I’d known she was his ex-wife… ”

“It’s okay.” I have more important things to worry about than Tom’s faux pas. Like the fact that Gavin is apparently in jail.

“What’s she even doing here?” Tom wants to know. “Why didn’t she have the cab from the airport drop her at Wasser Hall, like everyone else from Owen’s family? What, she didn’t get the memo?”

“There was some business of Owen’s she needed to follow up on,” I say. We’re sitting in my office—well, Tom in his old office (now the former site of a grisly murder… thank God the housekeeping staff didn’t go on strike until AFTER they’d cleaned up the crime scene), and I’ve just returned, panting, to my desk in the outer office—just like old times.

Except for the whole Tom-got-a-promotion-and-is-just-filling-in-while-the-Housing-Office-searches-for-a-replacement-for-his-replacement-who-happens-to-have-gotten-shot-in-the-head-yesterday thing.

I don’t tell him the rest of it—like just how much Mrs. Veatch—Pam, I mean—didn’t know about her ex’s new life in the city. Or how much it turned out we didn’t know about Dr. Veatch. Because it’s still weirding me out a little.

Instead, I sit down and start clacking at my keyboard, Googling Rock Ridge Police Department. Come on, come on… I know the town is small, but they have to have cops, right?

Bingo.

Pam had just assumed that since Owen worked in a residence hall, he naturally lived in it, too, since most residence hall director positions are live-in.

I’d explained to her that her ex had actually been much more than just a hall director—that as part of his compensation package for his position, ombudsman to the president’s office, he’d gotten a swank, rent-free apartment in a neighboring building in which many of the college’s administrators, including the president himself, lived.

“So is it far?” Pam had wanted to know.

I had blinked at her. There’d been a lot of ruckus at the desk just then, what with Brian and Mr. Rosetti just leaving, and Tom having dropped his bomb about Sebastian’s gun having been a match for the one that killed Owen, and Felicia still waving the phone with Gavin waiting to have me take his call, and all.

“Is what far?” I’d asked intelligently.

“The building Owen lived in?” Pam had asked.

“Uh,” I’d said. All I could think was Gavin’s in jail? In Rock Ridge? The chic, exclusive bedroom community of New York, which can’t have more than five thousand people in it? Does it even have a jail? Has the entire world gone insane?

“Seriously,” Tom had chosen that moment to start in, for the first of what would prove to be the many apologies he would give over the course of the next half-hour. “I am so, so sorry, ma’am. I didn’t have the slightest idea—”

“It’s all right,” she’d said, with the briefest of smiles at him. “How could you know?” To me, she’d asked, “Well? Is it?”

“It’s a block away,” I’d replied.

She’d looked relieved. “So I can walk to it? I’m sorry to be such a pain… it’s just I’ve walked so much today—”

“Oh.” She wanted to see his apartment?Why? “It’s just down the block… ”

“I wonder if you can help me, then, Heather… ” For the first time, I noticed Pam was carting a wheelie suitcase behind her, and had one of those quilted overnight bags in a red and white floral pattern slung over one shoulder. “Surely you would know.” Her wide, friendly face—not pretty, exactly, and completely makeup free, but certainly pleasant-looking—was creased with concern. “Since you worked with Owen… Has anyone been giving Garfield his pills?”

“Uh… ” I’d exchanged puzzled looks with Tom. “Who, ma’am?”

“Garfield.” Dr. Veatch’s ex had looked at us like we were morons. “Owen’s cat.”

Owen had a cat? Owen owned—had made himself responsible for — another life? Granted of the four-legged variety—but still. It was true, of course, that Owen had been fond of the cartoon Garfield, to a degree none of the rest of us could understand.

But that he’d kept a cat, in his apartment?Owen, the driest, least warm person I had ever met, had owned a PET?

I’d had no idea.

It changed my perception of Owen. I’ll admit it. It sounds stupid, but it’s true: It made me like him more.

Well, okay: It made me like him, at all.

I guess my surprise must have shown on my face, since Pam, looking horrified, had cried, “You mean the poor thing hasn’t had any food or water since yesterday? He’s got thyroid disease! He needs a pill daily!”

I’d walked her to Dr. Veatch’s apartment myself while Tom scooted back to our office to hold down the fort. Then I’d waited with her for the building super, gone with her to the apartment, helped her with the key (the locks in these old buildings can be tricky), and waited tensely while she’d called, “Garfield! Garfield? Here, puss, puss.”

The cat had been fine, of course. A big, menacing orange thing, just like its namesake, it had needed only a can (well, okay, two) of food, some water, and a tiny white pill—kept in a prescription bottle Pam seemed to have no trouble finding, in a decorative blue and white sugar bowl that matched all the other china in the hutch in Owen’s dining room cabinet—before it was good as new, purring and contented in Pam’s lap.

Not knowing what else to do, I’d left her there. The cat seemed to know her, and, well, whatever, it wasn’t like Dr. Veatch needed the place anymore. Obviously the president’s office would reassign the apartment to someone in good time. But Pam clearly loved the cat, and somebody needed to take care of it. So it seemed logical to leave her there with it.

And it wasn’t like Simon Hague was going to let her bring it into Wasser Hall. I knew Simon and his pet unfriendly policies (I myself have been known to turn a blind eye to the occasional kitten or iguana, so long as all room and suite-mates were amenable to the situation, and I didn’t get a call from a parent complaining later on). I wouldn’t have put it past Simon to have refused Pam entrance into his building if she’d been carting Garfield along with her, pet of recently murdered former staff member or no.

No, Pam and Owen’s cat were fine as—and where—they were.

Though I figured a well-placed call to Detective Canavan, just to make sure his detectives were finished going through Owen’s personal things, wouldn’t hurt.

By the time I got back to Fischer Hall, left the message with Detective Canavan, and remembered Gavin, he’d hung up.

But it isn’t, I find, when I finally get through to the Rock Ridge Police Department, like there’s more than one prisoner at the jail there. Or more than one police officer I have to get through in order to speak to the chief, either. Henry T. O’Malley, the chief of police himself, in fact, answers on the first ring.

“Is this the Heather Wells?” he wants to know. “The same one my kid made me listen to over and over about ten years ago, until I thought I would go mental and shoot myself under the chin with my own weapon?”

I ignore the question and instead ask one of my own. “May I inquire as to why you are holding Gavin McGoren in your town’s jail, sir?”

“‘Every time I see you, I get a Sugar Rush,’” he sings. Not badly, for a nonprofessional. “‘You’re like candy. You give me a Sugar Rush.’”

“Whatever he did,” I say, “I’m sure he didn’t mean it. He just gets a little overexcited sometimes. He’s only twenty-one.”

“Trespassing on private property,” Chief O’Malley reads aloud from what I assume is Gavin’s arrest report. “Breaking and entering… although between you and me, that one’ll probably be dropped. It’s not breaking if someone opens the window for you, and it’s not entering if you’re invited, whatever the girl’s father wants to believe. Oh, and public urination. He’s going to have a hard time getting out of that one. Unzipped right in front of me—”

Unbelievably, in the background, I can hear Gavin yelling, “I told you I had to go!”

“You simmer down back there,” the chief yells back, seemingly over his shoulder. I have to hold the phone away from my face in order to keep my eardrum from being broken. “You’re just lucky it was me who answered the call and not one of the Staties, or you’d be sitting over in the Westchester lockup. You think they’d have brought you coffee and waffles for breakfast this morning, huh? Do you? With real fresh-squeezed orange juice?”

In the background, I hear Gavin grudgingly admit, “No.”

“Then remember yourself,” Chief O’Malley advises him. “Now,” he says, into the phone. “Where were we? Oh, yes. ‘Sugar Rush. Don’t tell me stay on my diet. You have simply got to try it.’ The words are forever imprinted in my memory. My daughter sang them morning, noon, and night. For two years.”

“Sorry about that,” I say. Seriously, why do I always get the sarcastic and jaded law enforcement officers, and never the sweet, enthusiastic ones?Are there any sweet, enthusiastic ones? “So how much is his bail?”

“Let me see,” Chief O’Malley says, shuffling through the papers on his desk, while in the background, I could hear Gavin yelling, “Can I talk to her, please? You said I get one phone call. Well, I never got my phone call, because I never actually got to talk to her. So could I please talk to her? Could you let me out of here so I could talk to her, please? Please?”

“Mr. McGoren is being held on five thousand dollars bail,” Chief O’Malley says, finally, in response to my question.

“Five thousand dollars?” My voice rises to such a squeak that I see Tom’s head appear around the doorway, his eyebrows raised questioningly. “For trespassing? And public urination?”

“And breaking and entering,” Chief O’Malley reminds me.

“You said those charges would be dropped!”

“But they haven’t yet.”

“That… that… ” I can’t breathe. “That’s highway robbery!”

“We’re a simple little town, Ms. Wells,” Chief O’Malley says. “We don’t see much crime. When we do, we hit it. Hard. We have to maintain certain standards to ensure that we stay a simple little town.”

“Where am I going to get five thousand dollars?” I wail.

“I suggested Mr. McGoren phone his parents,” Chief O’Malley says. “But for reasons he is reluctant to share with me, he preferred to call you.”

“Just let me TALK to her!” Gavin shouts, in the background.

“Was it Jamie Price’s parents?” I ask. “Who called you? It was her house you found him in?”

“I am not at liberty to discuss the details of Mr. McGoren’s case with you at this time,” Chief O’Malley says. “But yes. And,” he goes on, a bit primly, “I would like to add that he was not fully clothed at the time of my apprehending him, when he was, in fact, crawling out of the younger Ms. Price’s bedroom window. And I don’t mean when he unzipped to relieve himself, either. That was later.”

“Hey!” I hear Gavin protest.

“Oh God.” I drop my head to my desk. I do not need this. On today of all days. I can hear, off in the distance, the protesters outside chanting, “What do we want? Health benefits for all! When do we want them? Now!”

“Tell him I’ll be there as soon as I can,” I say.

“Take your time,” Chief O’Malley says cheerfully. “I’m enjoying the company. It’s not often I get anyone sober in here, much less college-educated. For lunch I’m thinking about picking up chicken wings.” Then he holds the phone away from his mouth for a moment and calls to Gavin, “Hey, kid. You’re not a vegetarian, are you?”

“Heather!” I hear Gavin scream. “I have to tell you something! It wasn’t Sebastian! It wasn’t—”

Then the line goes dead. Chief O’Malley, having evidently reached the end of his patience, has hung up.

When I raise my head again, Tom is standing by my desk, looking down at me worriedly.

“Wait… ” he says. “Who was that you were just talking about? Gavin? Or Sebastian Blumenthal?”

“Gavin,” I say, to my keyboard.

“He’s in jail, too? Like… literally?”

“Like, literally. Tom. I gotta go up there.”

“Where?” Tom looks confused. “Owen’s apartment? You were just there. How much hand-holding does that lady need? I mean, they were divorced, right? Maybe you should send Gillian up there for a little grief counseling. The two of them look like they’d get along great, anyway—”

“No, I mean, I have to go to Westchester,” I say. I’m already rolling my chair back and rising from my desk. “I have to talk to Gavin.”

“Right now?” Tom looks shocked. And a little scared. “You’re gonna leave me alone? With all that going on outside?” He casts a nervous look at the window—now firmly shut, the blinds drawn—through which Dr. Veatch had been shot. “And that?”

“You’ll be all right,” I tell him. “You have the student workers. Both desks are fully scheduled. All of Dr. Veatch’s appointments are canceled. For God’s sake, Tom, you’ve been handling the frats. They’re way harder than this place.”

“Yeah,” Tom says nervously. “But nobody gets murdered there.”

“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” I say. “I’ll probably only be gone a few hours. You can reach me on my cell if you need me. If anyone asks where I am, tell them I had a family emergency. Understand? Don’t tell anyone about Gavin. It’s really important.”

“Okay.” Tom looks unhappy.

“I mean it, Tom.”

“Okay!”

Satisfied, I turn to go—and nearly careen with my best friend (and former backup dancer, now wife of rock legend Frank Robillard) Patty, who is clutching a half-dozen bridal magazines to her ever-so-slightly burgeoning belly. But she has an excuse—and it’s not grande café mochas with whipped cream, but being the four months’ pregnant mom of a three-year-old.

“Who told you?” I demand, staring at the glossy copy of Elegant Bride that’s staring up at me.

Patty flicks an accusing look at Tom, who shrugs and says, “Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you, Heather. Patty called while you were next door with Owen’s ex. Oooh, you got the May issue! My God, it weighs as much as a Thanksgiving turkey.”

“I can’t believe you told him first and not me.” Patty, who even when not pregnant has a tendency to glow in an irritatingly radiant manner, lowers herself with a dancer’s grace into the blue vinyl chair beside my desk and picks up one of the magazines. “I think she should go with pure white. Ivory will make her look sallow. What do you think, Tom?”

“I was thinking just the opposite,” Tom says, settling down at my desk. “A cream will bring out the rosy tones in her skin.”

“Do you know there’s a gigantic rat across the street from your building, with all sorts of people parading around it?” Patty asks. “And when were you going to tell me about your boss being shot in the head yesterday, Heather? This is ridiculous. How long do you plan on working in this death trap? You can’t have lost another boss.”

“I was telling her to wait until she’s had eight,” Tom says, with a laugh, “then quit, and say—”

“—eight is enough!” they both finish.

“Hold that thought,” I say, “I’ll be right back.”

And I dart from the office before either of them can say another word, or look up from the glossy photo they are admiring, of a Jackie O style wedding gown that in a million, trillion years would never look good on a girl like me.