Red Leaves by Paullina Simons
‘No I wasn’t. It was a mix-up.’
‘He says you forgot.’
‘Yeah, and pigs fly out of my butt. I never forget anything. Especially,’ Frankie said, half-mocking-suggestively, ‘meeting Albert in my room.’
What was that supposed to mean? Spencer wanted to meet this Frankie. ‘Got it,’ said Spencer. ‘Was Kristina sober?’
‘Stone sober. I know that. I know that for a couple of reasons. I kissed her good-bye, I smelled her breath. She was lamenting there was nothing to drink – Murphy’s was closed.’
With a pain in his heart, Spencer thought, she used to go to Murphy’s too?
He willed his mind back to Frankie, who said, ‘We offered her a beer, but she took a Coke instead. So I knew she was sober.’
‘There was a bottle of Southern Comfort in Kristina’s room.’
With a tone of distaste, Frankie said, ‘Yeah, she liked that stuff. We gave her a bottle for her birthday. But she never drank that bottle, never even took it with her.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I know because Tuesday afternoon when I was in Conni’s room, the bottle was on her desk. She had to move it off to make room for our books.’
‘How did you know it wasn’t Conni’s?’
‘You kidding?’ Frankie laughed. ‘Conni is strictly a beer drinker.’ Then he corrected himself: ‘Only since she’s turned twenty-one, of course.’
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ said Spencer. Time was ticking by. He had to go.
‘Conni had been feeling bad that we had given Krissy a bottle of liquor. She said Kristina wasn’t happy about it. We had talked about that for a few minutes.’
‘There was a spilled bottle of Southern Comfort in Kristina’s room.’
‘There was? Huh. Well, maybe Conni brought it to Krissy after poker.’
‘Yeah,’ Spencer drew out. ‘Maybe. Go on.’
‘During poker, I was sort of needling Kristina to walk the wall. It’s a really sick thing she does, but the guys at Epsilon love to see it, so I goad her on every once in a while, and sometimes she does walk it. Not often. But sometimes. She’s gotta be pretty drunk, though. They collect by the window at Feldberg and watch her. It’s this thing.’
‘Do you watch her?’
‘Nah,’ he said casually. Too casually. ‘I’m usually last in line. As I said, I don’t watch her so much as …’ He stumbled on his words. ‘… watch over her,’ he said, haltingly. ‘It’s really dangerous, but it’s a thrill for everybody. I just kind of watch her to make sure … well, it doesn’t matter –’
‘To make sure what?’
‘Nothing. To make sure she doesn’t stumble. That Tuesday night, she said she might do it. So I waited.’
‘But she was sober.’
‘How long does it take to get a little tipsy?’ Frankie asked. ‘If Conni brought her the bottle, it would’ve taken Kristina no time at all.’
Spencer asked why Frankie had egged her on to do something so patently dangerous. If she fell, she’d be killed.
‘I guess,’ Frankie said slowly. ‘You should have seen her on that thing, though, man. She glided across it and back like an angel. She had God on her side when she was there.’
‘I’d say the odds were against her.’
‘Yeah. She used to say, our whole life is against us. She crashed on Monday night in her car. She could’ve been dead then. I had a good feeling about her when she was walking. She was very steady. She put on a real show. And she always turned around and walked back on the ledge. But anyway, that night I wasn’t sure if she was going to do it, and I wasn’t going to go back to Epsilon and tell the buds unless it was a sure thing. They’d kill me.’
‘Sure, to come out in a blizzard,’ said Spencer.
‘Yeah. And also I had work to do. So I went up to Feldberg. I always study up there. It’s real quiet, and I like my spot. It’s on the second-floor lounge, smack dab overlooking the bridge. I moved a table next to the window and a chair. I like it, it’s secluded. That’s where I was.’
Spencer was silent. His breath was short. He knew he was hearing about the last minutes of Kristina’s life, and he couldn’t bring himself to question Frankie, nor hurry him along.
‘By the time I saw her,’ Frankie said, ‘she was already halfway down the bridge, and very wobbly. Very. I got a bad feeling in my chest right away, watching her. I actually opened the window, but decided against yelling. I was afraid to scare her further. So I watched for a few seconds, and then she tripped. She just kind of slipped on the snow, and fell over, I nearly jumped out of my skin, I didn’t have enough time to react, to do anything. She slipped, but held on to the wall and climbed back up and just lay there for a few seconds. She must’ve been so scared.’
‘She lay there naked in the snow?’
‘Yes.’ Frankie shrugged. ‘I know it sounds weird. But she was a philosophy major. There are men in Tibet who pierce their bodies or eat swords or walk on hot coals and don’t get hurt. She had this gift. She successfully steeled her body against the cold.’
Not in the last battle of her life, thought Spencer.
‘I watched her,’ Frankie continued, ‘I was still panicked. Then I saw her jump four feet down off the wall, and she never does that. She usually turns around and walks back. I understood that she must’ve been very scared. She was at the end of the bridge, I was real relieved. I shouted something at her. Like, hey Krissy, well done, you crazy kid. Something like that.’
‘Did she hear you?’
‘I really thought she did. I really did. Because she stopped and looked around, kind of. She looked up and then into the woods behind Feldberg. I thought she didn’t know where my voice was coming from. So I yelled at her again. She looked around her.’
‘And then?’ Spencer was stiff, his fingers gripping the phone.
‘And then she walked out of view down the path behind Feldberg.’
‘Into the woods?’
‘I don’t know. I guess. I didn’t see her then.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I thought, silly girl. I shook my head. Kind of remembered that she was scared shitless of the dark. Whenever we walked her dog behind Hinman Hall, she hung on to my sleeve and didn’t let go.’
Spencer was shuddering, the hand holding the tape recorder was shaking. He was remembering the black timber of the ancient Douglas firs.
Frankie continued, ‘I closed the window, and tried to look at my books some more. But it was late –’
‘How late?’
‘Plenty late. I wrapped up my books –’
‘Right then and there?’
‘Yes. I was tired. I closed them all up. Put them into my backpack, put on my coat, zipped in, put my gloves on, put the hood on. How long would you say that all took me?’
‘Maybe five minutes?’
‘Maybe. Seven, or so. Eight? No, not as much as eight. No, wait, I went to the bathroom first. Yes. So maybe fifteen minutes. Yes, that’s right –’
‘You were in the bathroom for ten minutes?’
‘About, yes. I washed my hands, too, washed my face. Eight to ten minutes. That would make sense, because when I got back to Epsilon, it was, like, one-forty.’
‘About half an hour after Kristina disappeared into the woods?’
‘Yes.’
‘And that’s it.’
‘That’s it.’
‘You sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘You didn’t see anybody else?’
‘No.’
‘You didn’t see her after that?’
‘No.’
No, of course not. That was it.
Spencer turned off the tape recorder. His head shuddered involuntarily and he dropped the receiver.
Will Baker and Ed Landers from the crime lab were waiting for him at the Feldberg parking lot.
‘Where’ve you been?’ said Will in a hushed but strident voice.
Spencer raised his eyebrows. ‘Looking for
Ed Landers was a tall man with gold-rimmed glasses and extremely large, protruding ears, about which Ed was painfully self-conscious. No one in the department was allowed to make jokes about them, certainly not to Ed’s face. Spencer liked Ed. He was a good guy and a thorough professional, and he didn’t take a lot of shit.
In Kristina’s room, Spencer asked Landers to dust the Southern Comfort bottle and Baker to bag it. The bottle was half empty. Spencer found the cap nearby, and then got down on his hands and knees and smelled the floor where the liquor had spilled. The carpet smelled moldy, like a bum’s clothes at Penn Station in New York. If Kristina had drunk something the night she died, this wasn’t it.
Then Spencer methodically examined the room. He started with the clothes on the bed and went down on the floor on his hands and knees. What am I looking for? he thought, searching under the bed. What am I hoping to find here?
On her desk, he found Conni’s note, carelessly thrown on top of a text-book. Dear Krissy, we took Aristotle with us to Long Island. Wish you could’ve come, too. Have a happy Thanksgiving. Love, Conni.
Spencer read the note several times, then gave it to Will.
The closet had some interesting periodicals in it, all bagged by Baker: People magazines from the seventies and early eighties, Newsweeks arranged as if they had been looked through recently – a November 15, 1993, issue was right next to an November 10, 1988, issue, which in turn was underneath an August 27, 1993, issue. Some recent Life magazines, one Time with the Dalai Lama on the cover. And a copy of a newspaper called Greenwich Time with a subscription sticker torn off. ‘Put that one in a separate bag, Baker,’ Spencer said. What would a girl from Brooklyn Heights be doing with the Greenwich Time?
It took Spencer three hours to sift through Kristina’s papers. Landers dusted nearly everything, but Spencer didn’t have much hope for fingerprints in this case unless they were right on Kristina’s pale neck. He was certain fingerprinting would show that every one of her three friends and most of her basketball teammates had prints all over her desk, her chair, and maybe even her bed.
The men barely spoke as they worked. Once in a while, Spencer asked Baker to bag something, or Landers to dust a drawer or inside a closet shelf, but Landers and Baker knew their jobs very well.
The drawers in Kristina’s desk and her closet contained few personal items. She had some college textbooks and term papers, but there were no journals and no diaries. Her class notebooks had no doodling on them – surprising for someone with such an untidy room. Sloppy and distracted note-taking usually went along with room contents, but not in Kristina’s case. Her class notes were meticulous, written in beautiful, book-perfect penmanship. How did that mass of hair, those loose clothes, this messy room, and the spilled bottle of Southern Comfort go with such refined handwriting?
Spencer was looking for stronger, more personal clues: a photograph, a canceled check, a bank statement. Spencer O’Malley was a desperate man the day a bank statement became personal. But the clues in this room were as obscure as Kristina’s admission records. This was the place she called her home, and yet it was a game of Clue with two suspects and three murder weapons missing. In fact, the room screamed to Spencer that there was something wrong.
A room kept so devoid of personal belongings was not an accident. A girl so seemingly careless would be careless with everything. Kristina was only outwardly careless, Spencer realized. Almost as if to make a pretense of carelessness. But why? Was it to hide the very fact that she took great pains to eliminate every single item from her room that might speak of who and what she really was?
Everything that might shed any light on her had been removed, and that shed more light on her than anything. It was like a beautifully wrapped gift that turned out to be an empty box. Kristina monthly, daily, hourly, emptied that box.
What came crashing into her room every hour of every day that she needed to keep it so thoroughly cleansed?
Spencer searched in vain for a photo, one single photo of anything. Or a Rubik’s Cube, an Eagles cassette, a newspaper article, a picture of her mother. Anything. But what really tipped him off was the absence of canceled checks or statements or bank information of any sort. No ATM receipts. No deposit receipts. Kristina Kim had been a careful person. Spencer looked again through her purse; there was nothing in it. There was a brown leather man’s wallet, very worn and old, with shredded seams and the plastic credit card dividers long gone. A cash card from New Hampshire Savings Bank told Spencer there should have been bank information. An American Express card. A Dartmouth College green debit card. Three singles. A folded, blank piece of paper. And that was it. There wasn’t even a receipt for the black boots that Spencer knew Kristina had bought only two days before she died. That receipt must have been thrown out immediately, as matter of course. But why throw out a silly shoe receipt? Unless it was just a matter of habit, or unless it was in safe place.
‘Will, let me have a look at her keys again,’ Spencer said, and Baker dutifully took them out of the plastic bag. Ed Landers had nearly finished dusting the purse. Spencer smirked. Ironically, his fingerprints would be all over that purse. Maybe I’m a suspect, too, he thought, looking through the key set. There was nothing unusual about the key ring: big keys, car keys, and a small key that looked like a mailbox key, but he found another key, also small, but thicker, heavier, and coded. There was a number on it.
‘Bingo,’ he said quietly. ‘There was a farmer had a dog, and Bingo was his name-o …’
‘Detective O’Malley? Pardon?’ It was Landers. He seemed confused. Will smiled without comment.
‘It’s all right. You people finish up here. I’ve got to get to the bank before it closes.’
‘It’s well after three,’ Will pointed out.
‘Yes, but the employees are there till five, proving.’
Prove it all night, prove it all night, Spencer hummed as he drove back to Main and parked next to Molly’s Balloon, which in turn was next to the New Hampshire Savings Bank. Spencer knocked on the bank’s glass doors.
‘We’re closed,’ a grouchy-looking man mouthed to him through the glass.
Spencer took out his badge and the door opened.
‘Who is your manager? I need to speak with him, please.’
Spencer was introduced to Mr Carmichael.
He told Mr Carmichael about Kristina. For the first two minutes, Spencer couldn’t get much out of Mr Carmichael, who put his head in his hands and cried. ‘She was a nice girl,’ he kept repeating. ‘A very nice girl.’
Spencer finally said, ‘I’m here because I noticed a key of hers that looks like a safety deposit box key. I used to have one myself.’
‘Yes, she had one, if that’s what you mean,’ Mr Carmichael answered.
‘May I see it, please?’
‘Let me ask you, don’t you need a search warrant to look inside it?’
He didn’t need one if he didn’t expect to find anything. He could just look through it and leave. But if he found something that might implicate someone and that someone would stand trial, he certainly would need one. If he didn’t have one, he might as well put his own badge in Kristina’s safety deposit box and go on border patrol in the north of Vermont. If they’d have him, that is. If they thought he was still fit for anything after searching through a safety deposit box without a warrant.
‘I guess I do need one, yes.’ He glanced at his watch. Four forty-five. He had just a few minutes. ‘I’ll be right back.’
Mr Carmichael walked him to the glass front doors. ‘It’s incredible that she is dead, you know,’ he said quietly to Spencer.
‘Yes, I agree.’
‘Do you think it was an accident?’ Mr Carmichael asked, and Spencer heard him suck in his breath as if to prepare for a response that was out of sync with a quiet small New England town on a cold December afternoon. People got five-dollar parking tickets here, and rooted for the Dartmouth Big Gr
As he passed the curmudgeon who had not wanted to let Spencer in, Spencer leaned closer to Mr Carmichael and answered, ‘No, I don’t think it was an accident.’
He saw Mr Carmichael’s pained expression. ‘What is it? What?’ Spencer asked.
Mr Carmichael avoided Spencer’s gaze when he said, ‘Come back with the warrant, go through her things, and I’ll talk to you then. Get permission to sequester the funds in her accounts.’
Spencer remembered Krishna’s three singles in her wallet. ‘She has funds in her accounts?’
Mr Carmichael looked at Spencer meaningfully. ‘Come back and I’ll talk to you then, Detective O’Malley.’
Spencer got his search warrant in what was record time even for him – twelve minutes. Kristina’s bank accounts were immediately frozen, pending disposition of her estate. Spencer rushed back to the bank, thinking, what is it that Mr Carmichael has to tell me? What does he know?
The bank employees had gone. Mr Carmichael let Spencer in. They walked to the back and through the vault. Mr Carmichael found the right key on his formidable key chain, and together they opened Kristina’s safety deposit box.
‘I’d like to examine it in private, please,’ Spencer said, and knew how it sounded. It was good that he wasn’t trying to suppress information. Imagine the power of the police officer who had the right to look through a dead woman’s safety deposit box in private. Still … the trappings of the Pandora’s box that Spencer held in his hands were too strong and too important to ignore.
Mr Carmichael took him to a small empty room and closed the door.
He lifted the metal cover of the big box. His heart beat faster.
To Spencer’s surprise, it was not filled with the stuff that Kristina cleared out of her room with the intensity and completeness of a forest fire. Spencer expected to find the receipt for the black boots stacked neatly on top of canceled checks and monthly statements. He expected to find tear-stained love letters, stacked neatly beneath the receipt for the black boots.