Point Of Departure. Laurie Breton
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camper. Straightforward and sincere seemed the most appropriate route. “Mr. Armentrout?” Policzki said.
Armentrout looked up, focused on his face, recognized that this was yet another stranger, and scowled. “When can I leave?” he said.
“I’m Detective Policzki. Mind if I ask you a few questions?”
“I already answered questions. Twice. Don’t you people ever talk to each other? This is ridiculous. I already told you everything. I’m a busy man. I have work to get back to.”
Policzki hunched down in front of him, balancing on the balls of his feet. “I understand how busy you are,” he said. “And I realize this has inconvenienced you. But it won’t take long, and when we’re done, you can get back to your busy life. Unfortunately…” he paused, and in the silence he heard the rasp of a zipper as one of the EMTs maneuvered the DOA into a body bag “…the victim over there won’t be able to do that.”
Armentrout winced and closed his eyes. Sighing, he said, “Fine. What do you want to know?”
“Why don’t you tell me everything that happened, starting with the time you arrived?”
“We had a two-thirty appointment. I was twenty minutes late because my one o’clock meeting ran over. I got here about ten of three, knocked on the door. Nobody answered. It was unlocked, so I let myself in. I figured the Winslow woman was somewhere in the house and hadn’t heard me knock. I called her name a couple of times, came down the hallway and around the corner and saw this guy’s feet sticking out from behind the kitchen island. Hell of a shock.”
“I imagine it was. What did you do then?”
Armentrout rubbed the back of his neck with a beefy hand. His eyes were a little bloodshot. “I walked around to check. I thought somebody’d passed out or something, and maybe needed medical attention. I didn’t realized the guy was dead until I saw the blood.”
“How’d you know he was dead?”
Armentrout gave Policzki a long, level look. “I wasn’t born yesterday. It was pretty obvious.”
Fair enough. “What did you do when you realized he was dead?”
“I got the hell out. If there was a killer on the premises, I wasn’t about to hang around and wait to become his next victim. I hightailed it out of there and called 911 from the park across the street. I waited there until the cops arrived.”
“All right. Did you, at any time, touch anything?”
“Just the doorknob.”
“Were you acquainted with the victim? Was he anybody you’d met before?”
Armentrout shook his head. “I figured he was one of Kaye Winslow’s associates. I don’t know who the hell he is. Maybe she can tell you.”
She probably could, Policzki thought, if they could just locate her. “All right, Mr. Armentrout,” he said, “I think we’re done. I’ll need verification of your whereabouts earlier this afternoon, and a number where I can reach you in case I have more questions.”
“Verification of my—what the hell, am I a suspect?”
“It’s routine, sir. You’re the person who found the body. In the absence of a smoking gun or a signed confession, we have to consider you a suspect until we can rule you out. Hopefully that’ll happen sooner rather than later.”
“I don’t believe this.” Armentrout fished in his pocket for his wallet. He pulled out a business card and shoved it into Policzki’s hand. “I go out to look at a house and end up in the middle of a mess like this. My whole goddamn afternoon’s been screwed up. You’d better believe I’ll be crossing this mausoleum off my list of possibilities.” Glowering, he slid the wallet back into his pocket. “Matter of fact, I wouldn’t buy a house in Boston if somebody paid me to take it off their hands. Not after this insanity. Maybe I’ll find something in Newton or Andover. I hear Lexington’s nice.”
He left in a huff, this short, self-important businessman whose schedule had been hopelessly derailed by his discovery of a dead body. Hell of an inconvenience, Policzki thought as he watched him go. A real shame that murder had disrupted the guy’s busy day.
The door slammed shut behind Armentrout. Across the room, O’Connell, the forensics tech, closed up his fingerprint kit. “That went well,” he said.
“Right,” Policzki said. “He didn’t pull a weapon on me, or threaten to have me fired, so I guess in the greater scheme of things, it could have been worse.”
“Oh, yeah. It could’ve been a lot worse.” O’Connell nodded in the direction of the black plastic bag the two EMTs were wheeling toward the front door. “You could’ve been that guy.”
The setting sun poured like honey through the closed windows of the lecture hall, infusing it with the ambience of a sauna. The dog days of summer were a thing of the past, but so was the air-conditioning that had rendered them tolerable. Cheap construction, minimal insulation and a simpleminded administration that insisted the heating system be turned on according to the calendar instead of the thermometer all conspired to ensure that learning take place in the most hostile environment imaginable. In the midst of this tropical paradise, Assistant Professor Sam Winslow sat reading the latest Dan Brown paperback while his art history students waded through the first exam of the semester. Fifty-eight heads leaned over fifty-eight blue books as fifty-eight pens scratched diligently against paper.
Sam had come to this job six years ago with the zealous idealism of a new convert. It had taken him awhile to accept the irrefutable truth that ninety-eight point eight percent of his students simply didn’t give a shit. Back Bay Community College wasn’t the kind of place that bred art majors. His classes were well attended because everybody who graduated from BBCC needed nine hours of humanities credit. They’d heard that Professor Winslow was an easy grader, and how hard, after all, could art history be? With a few notable exceptions—primarily those few students who signed up each semester for his introductory painting class—his students were here for one reason only: the three credits that would magically appear on their transcripts if they paid attention in class, showed up on exam days and regurgitated his words back to him in some kind of meaningful form.
This was what his life had come to: he trafficked in regurgitation. Not a particularly pretty realization, especially at four forty-five on a sticky Indian summer afternoon when the only thing he’d eaten since breakfast was a couple of purple Peeps that had been left to petrify on the table in the faculty lounge. Judging by their cardboard consistency, they’d been there for a while.
At a soft rap on the door, Sam glanced up from his book and saw the face of Lydia Forbes, Dean of Arts and Sciences and his immediate supervisor, framed in the tiny window. Setting down his book, he got up from his chair, crossed the room and, with a slow sweep of his gaze over the classroom—his students were supposed to be adults, but it didn’t hurt to give them the impression that he had eyes in the back of his head—he opened the door and stepped out into the corridor.
“Lydia,” he said, leaving the door open just a crack behind him.
“Sorry to interrupt, but you didn’t look busy.” Six feet tall in her conservative two-inch heels, Lydia met him nearly eye to eye. Thin almost to the point of emaciation, she wore a brown tweed suit, her gray hair pulled back in its customary severe chignon. Eyebrows that were a dark slash in her pale face gave her a look of perpetual surprise. The first time he’d met her, he’d thought she looked just like Miss Grundy, the schoolteacher from the Archie comics. It hadn’t taken him long to see that the outer package was merely professional camouflage for a woman with an infectious laugh, a bawdy sense of humor and a relentless addiction to unfiltered cigarettes. “Take a walk with me,” she said.
He glanced back at the classroom. Reading the uncertainty in his gaze, she said, “For Christ’s sake, Sam, pull that big stick out of your ass. They’re adults. Let them be responsible for their own actions.”