about what thing?”
Damn! How does he always know?Always?
“Well,” I say slowly. “See, it turns out Lindsay was seeing a new guy before she died. A Winer.”
“A what?”
“You know.” I spell it. “As in Winer Construction.”
His dark-lashed eyelids narrow. “Heather. Why does this sound to me like you’re investigating that dead girl’s murder?”
“Because I am,” I say, then hold up both gloved hands in protest when he inhales to begin his tirade. “Cooper, think about it! Winer Construction? The Winer Sports Complex? They’re bound to have skeleton keys to locks all over the city. Doug could totally have had access to the café—”
“Did anyone sign him in that night?” Cooper demands.
Damn. He knows the workings of Fischer Hall almost as well as I do.
“Well, no,” I say. “But there’s a thousand ways he could have snuck in. Chinese food deliverymen do it all the time, to slip menus under the kids’ doors—”
“No.” That’s all Cooper says. He accompanies the word with a single head shake.
“Cooper, listen to me,” I say, even though I know it’s pointless. “Detective Canavan isn’t asking any of the right questions. He doesn’t know how to get information out of these kids. I do. I swear that’s all I’m doing. Gathering information. Which I will fully turn over to him.”
“Do you honestly believe I’m that gullible, Heather?” Cooper demands.
He is glaring down at me. The wind is biting into my face and making my eyes sting, but it doesn’t appear to be both ering him at all. Possibly because he’s got all that razor stubble to protect him.
“You know, it’s very stressful to work in a place people are calling Death Dorm,” I say. “Tom only just started working there, and he already wants to quit. Sarah’s being impossible. I’m just trying to make Fischer Hall a fun place to work again. I’m just trying to do my job.”
“Counseling some kid because she put Nair in her roommate’s shampoo bottle,” Cooper says, mentioning an all-too-frequent form of roommate torture around New York College, “and finding the person responsible for boiling a cheerleader’s head on a cooking range are two entirely different things. One of them is your job. One is not.”
“I just want to talk to the Winer kid,” I say. “What harm can TALKING do?”
Cooper continues to stare down at me, as the wind goes on whistling. “Please don’t do this,” he says, so quietly I’m not entirely sure he’s said it at all. Except that I saw his lips move. Those oddly lush (for a guy) lips that sometimes remind me of pillows, against which I’d like to press my—
“You can come with me,” I offer brightly. “Come with me and you’ll see. All I’m doing is talking. Not investigating. Not at all.”
“You’ve lost it,” Cooper says. Not without some disgust. “I mean it, Heather. Sarah is right. You do have some kind of Superman complex.”
“Up, up, and away,” I say. And take his arm. “So. Coming?”
“Do I have a choice?” Cooper wants to know.
I think about it.
“No,” I say.
10
I undo the latch of my front door
It’s not the kung pao chicken I’ve been waiting for
It’s not a man carrying bags of food
It’s only you, and you’re up to no good.
“Delivery”
Written by Heather Wells
Fraternity Row, otherwise known as Waverly Hall, is a huge building on the opposite side of Washington Square Park from Fischer Hall. Set back from the street by a stone wall around a courtyard, and entered beneath an archway, it’s more Parisian in style than other buildings around the square, and for that reason, more distinctive. Maybe that’s why it was determined by the trustees that this building would house the college’s Greek fraternities (the sororities, of which there are fewer, are housed in a more modern building on Third Avenue), one frat per floor.
I, of course, never learned Greek, so I don’t understand what all the symbols on the buzzers by the front door mean.
But I recognize Tau Phi Epsilon right away, because the sign TAU PHI EPSILON, in subdued black lettering, instead of the Greek symbols.
Unlike the well-swept sidewalk in front of Fischer Hall, the courtyard in front of Waverly Hall is filthy, littered with beer cans. The potted shrubs on either side of the front door are decorated with women’s underwear instead of twinkly Christmas lights—all different sizes and colors and styles of women’s underwear, from black lacy thongs to white Calvin Klein briefs to polka-dot bikini bottoms.
“Now, that,” I say, looking down at the panties, “is just a waste of good lingerie.”
Cooper, however, continues to look murderous, not even cracking a smile at my semi-joke. He yanks open the door and waits for me to enter before going inside himself.
The heat inside is so intense, I feel my nose begin to defrost at once. We enter a fairly clean foyer guarded by a gray-haired New York College security officer, whose face is crisscrossed by so many broken capillaries that his off-duty (one can only hope) predilection for whiskey is plainly obvious. When I show him my staff ID and tell him we’re there to see Doug Winer of Tau Phi Epsilon, he doesn’t even bother buzzing up to see if Doug’s there. He just waves us toward the elevator. As we pass, I realize why: he’s busy watching soap operas on one of his desk monitors.
Joining Cooper in the tiny, three-person elevator, I’m silent during the bouncy ride… until the cab lurches to a stop on the fifth floor, and the door opens to reveal a long, somewhat dingy hallway, along which someone has spray- painted in three-foot-high flourescent pink letters: FAT CHICKS GO HOME.
I blink at the letters, which reach nearly to my hip, and are scrawled across doors and walls indiscriminately. The Tau Phi Epsilons are going to have some pretty hefty floor damage charges come the end of the school year.
“Well,” I say, staring at the wall.
“This,” Cooper bursts out, “is exactly why I don’t think you ought to be getting involved in this investigation.”
“Because I’m a fat chick, and I ought to go home?” I ask, struck to the quick.
Cooper’s expression darkens even further… a feat I hadn’t thought possible.
“No,” he says. “Because… because… guys like this… they’re animals.”
“The kind of animals who would chop off a cheerleader’s head and cook it on a stove in a dorm cafeteria?” I ask him pointedly.
But he’s apparently speechless with indignation. So I knock on the door closest to the elevator, the one with TAU PHI EPSILON written over the frame.
The door swings open, and a dark-haired woman in an honest-to-God maid’s uniform—not one of those sexy ones they sell on Bleecker Street, but a real one, with long sleeves and a skirt below the knees—blinks at us. She’s fairly young, probably early forties, and has a dust rag in one hand. She’s not wearing a lace cap, though. Thank God.
“Yes?” she says. She has a heavy Spanish accent. Heavier than Salma Hayek’s, even.
