“What?”
“They had basketballs on their heads.” I grab the roll of bandages from him, pull away my sweater, and ram the roll of bandages into the biggest wound. “Half a basketball, over their faces, with little eye holes cut out —”
“My God.” Tom, looking pale, blinks down at us. “Is that… is that Manuel?”
“Yes,” I say, as Cooper leans forward and pulls down one of Manuel’s eyelids.
“He’s going into shock,” Cooper says, pretty calmly, in my opinion. “You know him?”
“He works at Fischer Hall. His name is Manuel.” Julio, I know, is going to flip out when he sees this. I pray that he doesn’t come looking for his nephew.
“They did this as a warning,” Manuel says. “A warning to me not to tell that I gave it to her.”
“Gave what to who, Manuel?” Cooper asks him, even as I’m shushing him, telling him to save his breath.
“The key,” Manuel says. “I know I shouldn’t have, but I gave her my key.”
“Who?” Cooper wants to know.
“Cooper,” I say. I can’t believe this. I can’t believe he’s interrogating a dying man.
But he ignores me.
“Manuel, who’d you give your key to?”
“Lindsay,” Manuel says. Manuel shakes his head. “I gave Lindsay my key. She was crying… she said she’d left something in the cafeteria, something she needed to get. At night, after it was closed—”
His eyelids drift shut.
Cooper says, “Damn.”
But then the EMTs are there, shoving us both out of the way. And I’m actually relieved, thinking everything is going to be okay.
Which just goes to show how much I know.
Which is nothing.
15
I told a white lie
There’s no sense denying.
To tell you the truth
I wasn’t even trying.
“Little White Lie”
Written by Heather Wells
You know what happens when someone nearly gets murdered during a Division III college basketball game that is being televised live on New York One?
Everyone keeps right on playing.
That’s right.
Oh, they posted cops at all the exits, and after the game—which the Pansies lost, twenty-four to forty. They just never came back after the second half. And not even because they heard about what happened to Manuel. Because no one told them. No, basically, the Pansies just suck—the cops made everybody stop on their way out and show them their hands and feet and the insides of their bags, so they could check for blood and weapons.
Not that they told anyone that’s what they were checking for, of course.
But they didn’t find anything incriminating. They couldn’t even hold the people with half-basketball masks for questioning, because roughly every male in the audience had a half-basketball mask.
And it was pretty obvious—to me, anyway—that the guys who’d stabbed Manuel were long gone. I mean, I highly doubt they stuck around to watch the rest of the game. They probably got out before the cops even arrived.
So they didn’t even witness the Pansies’ humiliating defeat.
Neither did I, actually. Because no sooner was Manuel loaded into an ambulance with his heartsick uncle at his side and carted away—the paramedics said he had lost a lot of blood and had some internal injuries, but that nothing vital had been punctured, so he’d probably be okay—than I was whisked off to the Sixth Precinct to look at mug shots with Detective Canavan, even though I EXPLAINED to him I hadn’t seen their faces, due to the masks.
“What about their clothes?” he wants to know.
“I told you,” I say, for the thirtieth time at least. “They were wearing regular, everyday clothes. Jeans. Flannel shirts. Nothing special.”
“And you didn’t hear them say anything to the victim?”
It’s kind of irritating to me that Detective Canavan keeps referring to Manuel as “the victim” when he knows perfectly well that he has a name, and what that name is.
But maybe, like Sarah’s gallows humor, saying “the victim” is a way of distancing himself from the horror of acts of such violence.
I wouldn’t mind distancing myself from it, either. Every time I close my eyes, I see the blood. It wasn’t red like blood on TV. It was dark brown. The same color the knees of my jeans are now.
“They didn’t say anything,” I say. “They were just stabbing him.”
“What was he doing there?” Detective Canavan wants to know. “By the soda machines?”
“How should I know?” I ask with a shrug. “Maybe he was thirsty. The line at the concession stand was really long.”
“What were you doing there?”
“I told you. I had to go to the bathroom, and the line at the other ladies’ room was too long.”
When Detective Canavan arrived at the sports complex—because of course we called him, to tell him what Manuel had said, about giving a key to Lindsay—I had suggested that he stop the game and question every single person present—particularly Coach Andrews, whom I now had reason to believe was more deeply involved than previously thought.
But President Allington—who unfortunately had to be informed of what was going on, given how many cops were lurking in the building—balked, saying that New York One would be on the story in a red-hot minute, and that the college had had enough bad publicity for one week. The last thing the school needed was reporters going around asking questions about a crime that, for all we knew, might in no way be connected to Lindsay—despite what I told everyone Manuel had said.
Then President Allington went on to assure us that, bad publicity aside, New York One would also be within their rights to sue if the game were stopped, claiming they stood to lose a million dollars in advertising if the game didn’t continue.
I honestly never suspected those Bowflex commercials brought in so much revenue, but apparently Division III college basketball is considered must-see TV by those folks most likely to be interested in purchasing exercise equipment for the home.
“One thing I want to be sure everyone understands,” President Allington also said to Detective Canavan, unfortunately (for him) within my earshot, though he was speaking softly so that no lurking reporters might overhear, “is that New York College is in no way responsible for either the death of that girl or the injuries sustained by Mr. Juarez this evening. And if he did give her a key with which she might have accessed the cafeteria, we are in no way responsible for that, either. Legally, that’s still trespassing.”
Which caused Detective Canavan to remark, “So what you’re saying, Mr. Allington, is that if Lindsay used Manuel’s key to gain access to the cafeteria, she damn well deserved to get her head chopped off?”
