The public had the impression that screwy things did not happen around the college end of town, but any officer knew better. You could ask the campus cops about the weirdness they dealt with. There were bomb threats and threats of other kinds. Bad fistfights, duels, accusations and denials of date rape, unquestioned rape, thefts. Occasionally grand larcenies like the priceless Persian carpet removed from the dean’s office, a particular embarrassment. The museum once lost an oil by a fairly well-known follower of the Hudson River school.
Most of the campus cops’ reports, however, were the stuff of amusing stories. The unamusing ones were conveyed to parents through Dean Spofford, who was assigned to deliver grim tidings. The substance of these were along the lines of: Your son was on acid; he thought he could fly. Or: Your daughter OD’ed on smack, pills, vodka. Sometimes the news would be too bizarre or tragically ludicrous to be explained over the phone, in which case Spofford would find a way to duck it.
When a student was murdered, an event that occurred once or twice a decade, the perpetrator was often what the thoughtful referred to as a young community male. The police referred to such people as dirtbags. A dirtbag might be a crackhead from one of the dead mill towns up the valley, or a ghetto kid from the far side of any street that took you anywhere. He might even be from one of the old neighborhoods like Salmone’s. The new century was short on promise for townies. Some dirtbags were solitaries but most of them ran in packs. They tended to get loaded and talk too much, whereupon the dime, as the old expression had it, would drop. Salmone would get the call and usually the state would get a conviction. The less said about that, the better.
When the suspect, usually the killer, was a student, circumstances differed. The college maintained a pretty professional security service that often knew a surprising amount of what was going on around campus. Normally the officers made use of less than they knew. Most of the problems they had to deal with were trivial kid stuff. Sometimes things got serious, as in the theft of the carpet — a prank theft by nihilist art students but nevertheless grand larceny of an object worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Intramural murder was something else. Law enforcement had to tread carefully, and rarely even in the bad old days did a city cop take the end of a telephone book to a student suspect. And no more rubber hoses, even for dirtbags.
The Common was no longer under snow as Salmone and Polhemus walked across it. They followed the path that was being cleaned by men in Day-Glo vests, chiefly offenders performing their community service. The sleet had given way to a pale blue sky edged with cirrus clouds; the lower storm clouds were heading inland for the hills. It was getting noticeably colder again.
They talked about the weather most of the way across. Polhemus, it turned out, knew about all sorts of weather — tropic, arctic, subtropic, subarctic. The park service had kept him on the move, having to relocate his family almost every two years, and there were parks in every climate zone. He told Salmone he had started out as a ranger but transferred early to the park police to keep his job.
“They want us to quit,” he told Salmone. “They want to do away with the parks. Wait and see, Sal. Not one national park in America will ever be two hundred years old. The Congress thinks they were a terrible idea.”
“People get hurt in the parks,” Salmone said.
21
WHEN THEY GOT TO CROSS INN, Salmone put a hand on Polhemus’s shoulder to make him pause.
“Brookman seems like a guy who might have a lot of girlfriends.”
“That’s what I hear,” Polhemus said. “It’s not allowed but nobody snitched on him.”
As they went inside, Polhemus told him a little about Shelby Magoffin, that she was a professional film actress and a little older than she looked.
“She has a bad-ass husband down south she has a restraining order on. Which I don’t even know is enforceable in this state outside our property. She has a few overenthusiastic fans. She’s semi-famous. We haven’t had any real trouble.”
They talked to Shelby in a small paneled room, cleared and curtained for the purpose. Polhemus stayed but left all the questions to Salmone.
“Can I call you Shelby?”
“Of course,” she said. “Yes, sir.”
“You weren’t with Maud when she died?”
“No, I sure wasn’t.”
“Where were you?”
“Where was I? I was right here. I was sleeping, I believe.”
“Was Maud having an affair with Mr. Brookman?”
“You know,” Shelby said, “it’s hard for me to talk about her personal affairs so soon.” She let it rest there, and Salmone wondered if she would talk at all. Finally, she asked, “Is that relevant?”
“We think it might be.”
She took off the white scarf she had been wearing and wrapped it so as to cradle her elbows. She was elfin-faced, big-eyed, looking guileless.
“I don’t get it,” Shelby said. “Why?”
“If we knew, it would help us. We’re working for her now.”
She looked at him with patient contempt, a waif no longer.
“Yes, sir. It seemed like she was in love with Mr. Brookman because he had seduced her last year.”
“When you last saw her the other night, she was on her way to his house?”
“I guess so.”
“Could you tell us her mood at that time?”
“Real upset,” Shelby told him and, to his surprise, started to cry.
It put him on more familiar ground. He moved toward her a little and let her see his eyes.
“Was she angry?”
Shelby took the scarf from around her arms and touched a tear with it.
“Yeah. Angry, hurt, left… All those things. His wife had come back. Coming home pregnant like the best of all possible wives, bearing him kiddies. So he was ditching Maud. He was breaking up with her. Like cutting her loose, goodbye, like that.”
“Would you say she was intoxicated?”
“Yeah. Intoxicated.”
“How angry was she? Angry enough to be violent if she was intoxicated?”
“Nothing violent about Maud. Drunk or sober.” Shelby slid into a posture vaguely based on Maud’s. “She was demonstrative in her own space. She was verbal.”
“What did you think about Brookman?”
“Oh, everybody likes Brookman, sort of. Big lovable rogue of a guy. Incredibly hot. I liked him at first. Then I thought about it and I had to feel bad for Maud. Married guy, kids, big talker.”
“Did she ever come back injured? With a bruise?”
“Huh? No!”
“He have a lot of girlfriends besides Maud?”
“Over time I guess he did. I think he was the kind of guy who took ’em one at a time.”
“But like you say,” Salmone said, getting a little intrigued with her, “he was married.”
“Sure, there had to be the wife. Then he had to go out and be adored. He wasn’t that promiscuous, not by the standards of this place.”
Salmone, faintly surprised, glanced at Polhemus. Polhemus shrugged.
“So you don’t think there was another young woman somewhere?”
“I’m sure there wasn’t.”
“How about Maud? Did she have a boyfriend? Did she break up with another student over Brookman?”
“Not while I knew her.”
Salmone thanked her courteously for her time. She was very fidgety by then, her big innocent eyes blinking and looking for corners.
“Who should we talk to next?” Salmone asked her.
“I don’t know,” Shelby said. “Maybe Jo Carr at counseling. Maud was gonna see her after she left here.”
“What time was that?”
“A little before ten, maybe.”
“Late for counseling.”
“Miss Carr wanted to see her. Well, I think Jo Carr knew about the situation. She had an interest in Maud.”