Read The Finishing School Online

Authors: Michele Martinez

Tags: #Detective and Mystery Stories, #Preparatory schools, #Manhattan (New York; N.Y.), #Mystery & Detective, #Women Lawyers, #Legal, #General, #Mystery Fiction, #Vargas; Melanie (Fictitious character), #Suspense, #Women Sleuths, #Public Prosecutors, #Legal Stories, #Fiction

The Finishing School (3 page)

“I wouldn’t want to speak for Luis. Best you ask
him
that,” Seward said finally.

“Your point is well taken, Mr. Seward. When did Mr. Reyes first call
you
, then?” Melanie asked.

“I’m not exactly sure when he first called,” Seward said, exhaling calmly. “It was loud at the benefit. I didn’t hear my phone ring. When my wife and I were leaving, I realized I had a voice-mail message. I listened to the message, then immediately called Luis back. That’s when he told me Whitney and Brianna were dead.”

“What time was that?”

“Quite late. Perhaps midnight.”

“What did you do next?”

“I rushed home, naturally.”

“At what point did you call the police?”

“Once I got home. I met Luis at the door, checked in Whitney’s room to see exactly what it was we were dealing with, and then I called the commissioner. From this very phone, in fact,” he said, nodding toward the telephone on his desk.

Melanie saw that Seward was watching her reaction carefully.
He’s worried his behavior looks fishy
, she thought.

“Is there a reason you didn’t call the police immediately? As soon as Mr. Reyes told you he’d found the bodies?”

Again Seward paused. “Ye-e-es,” he said slowly. “I knew I wanted to deal with this through my personal contacts, and I didn’t have the commissioner’s number with me. It’s unpublished, you see.”

“But weren’t you worried that the girls might have needed medical attention, that perhaps they were—”

“Still alive? No. If I’d felt that was a possibility, naturally I would have acted differently. But Luis made it quite clear they weren’t breathing. I felt there was nothing I could do except try to minimize the fallout from the situation for myself and my wife.”

“How long did it take you to drive uptown?” Melanie asked.

“Holiday traffic was awful. All the tourists looking at the tree. It took half an hour at least.”

“You waited over half an hour after hearing that Whitney and Brianna were dead before you called the police?”

Seward sighed. “To an outside observer, I understand that might seem cold. But put yourself in my shoes. I knew the second the press heard about this, they’d descend on us like a plague of locusts, and I was right. You saw what it was like downstairs, didn’t you? My wife is a very fragile woman, and she’d just learned of her daughter’s death. I couldn’t subject her to a horde of flashbulbs in front of the building, especially not when it was
my
political career bringing them to our doorstep. So I did what I had to do to ensure our privacy. I knew the girls were already dead, so I didn’t think it would matter. Please. Try to understand.”

Melanie’s instincts were clanging like a fire alarm. She realized she suspected Seward of something. But what? When she thought about it, there was nothing here. Anything strange James Seward had done, he’d just told her about himself and provided a perfectly plausible explanation. Like most people, Melanie distrusted rich, arrogant politicians. She’d better be careful not to let that personal prejudice color her judgment.

“Look,” Seward continued, reading the ambivalence in Melanie’s expression, “I may not have done things perfectly, but I’m in a very difficult position. I’m trying to be as cooperative as possible. In fact, if we’re finished with the preliminaries, I’d like to tell you where Whitney and Brianna got the drugs that killed them.”

“You
know
?” she asked. Ray-Ray looked at her in astonishment.

“I can’t know definitively, since I wasn’t there. But I have my suspicions,” Seward said.

“Please, by all means, tell us what you think,” Melanie said.

“Carmen Reyes, the super’s daughter, is—or I should say
was
—a classmate of Whitney’s at Holbrooke. She got in on a College Bound Kids scholarship. I had a hand in arranging that, and now I’m kicking myself. Because Carmen was here right before Whitney and Brianna died. The whole reason Luis used his passkey to get in is that Carmen hadn’t come home when she was supposed to, and he was looking for her.”

“You believe that Carmen Reyes gave Whitney the drugs, Mr. Seward?”

“Yes, it’s obvious, isn’t it? Carmen was here earlier tonight, right before this happened, and now she’s gone. Disappeared.”

“She hasn’t returned home?”

“That’s correct. And it’s…what? After four o’clock in the morning?”

“So you think Carmen—”

“Of course. She gave them the heroin, then she saw the terrible results of her actions, and she ran away. Carmen Reyes is the answer to this whole thing.”

 

5

 

FOR THE FIRST MINUTE after she woke up, Carmen was sure she was dead. Everything was black. Something was weird with her breathing, like she was choking. And her arms and legs were numb. She’d seen what he’d done to Whitney and Brianna. The terrible way they’d died. It probably felt like this. Maybe he’d done the same to her?

The next minute her brain started to function again. It interpreted the signals from her body more precisely. Carmen felt the pressure against her eyes and realized that it was dark because she was blindfolded. Her tongue told her that she was choking on a rag stuffed in her mouth. And the sparks that shot through her arms and legs when she moved let her know that she was tightly bound and stuffed into a confined space.

The minute after that, Carmen screamed. A hoarse sobbing sound through the gag. She screamed again and again, till her throat burned. She felt like screaming forever, until she lost her voice or suffocated on the rag or went totally insane. But at some point, when she drew breath, her mind registered utter quiet all around her. Wherever she was, she was alone. There was nobody to hear her screams, so she forced herself to stop.

Wherever
he
was now, she knew, he’d be coming back. Probably soon. That thought immediately calmed her—the calm one feels on the verge of death. She wanted to live to see her family again. Papi and Lulu. She
had
to. The three of them were so close since Mami died. They wouldn’t be able to handle another loss, couldn’t go on without her. Right that moment she swore she’d make it, for their sakes. And, having seen what this man was capable of, she’d better conserve her energy. Surviving would take everything she had.

 

6

 

MELANIE’S NEXT STEP was to interview the super who’d discovered the bodies. She and Ray-Ray took the service elevator down to the basement of James Seward’s Park Avenue building. In contrast to the exquisite mahogany car that had ferried them to the penthouse, the service elevator was painted industrial gray and smelled like garbage. Directly across from where it let them out, a grimy door bore a small nameplate reading L. REYES, SUPERINTENDENT.

Ray-Ray pressed the buzzer. They waited. A darkening at the peephole told them someone was looking out.

“Yeah? Wha’ you want?” said a gruff voice from the other side of the door. The accent threw her back years, to her father’s English. Her father had lived in New York for two decades, but his English never made it beyond passable.

“Señor Reyes, Melanie Vargas. Soy de la oficina del fiscal.”

The door swung open immediately.

“Prosecutor? Yes, I been waiting!” The short, balding, coffee-skinned man who stood before them looked like he’d walked through hell. His eyes were puffy and red, his face haggard, yet he smiled at her and pumped her hand excitedly.

“This is Special Agent Raymond Wong from the Drug Enforcement Administration,” Melanie said.

“Good, come in, come in,” Reyes said, relief in his voice.

He led them into a sparsely furnished living room with concrete walls and floors. An electric heater in the corner did nothing to dispel the basement chill. Exposed pipes punctuated the ceiling, their sickly green paint peeling off in strips. Even the small Christmas tree pushed up against the far wall looked like it was struggling.

“Here. Sit down, and I get you her picture. You need that, right?”

Melanie and Ray-Ray exchanged uneasy glances. Should they tell Reyes they weren’t exactly here about his daughter? The fact was, they
did
need to find Carmen Reyes. She might know something.

“Well, actually—” Melanie began.

“I’m glad you change your mind. Three times I call the police, and they keep tell me missing-person report you can’t file for twenty-four hours. But Carmen is a very good girl. She never go out at night. She never go
anywhere
and not tell her
papi
. Look at this picture. You see how good she is? This from Great Adventure last summer.”

He handed Melanie a framed photograph of a tall, skinny girl standing in front of the sign for the Nitro. She wore pink sunglasses and a huge grin that showed her braces. Her hair was pulled back into a demure ponytail, and her T-shirt read ROCK THE VOTE. No question, she looked like a dream teen, sweet and studious. On the other hand, appearances were often deceiving.

“Is this the most recent picture you have of Carmen?” Melanie asked.

“Yes. My wife die from cancer four years ago. Since then is only the three of us, and we so sad we don’t take too many pictures.” Tears flooded Reyes’s eyes. How could Melanie possibly tell this man that James Seward had just accused his daughter of supplying the heroin that killed her classmates? She decided she wouldn’t. Not yet anyway, not until she knew more.

“Mr. Reyes,” she said gently, “please, have a seat. I’d like to ask you some questions.” She nodded at Ray-Ray, who opened his notebook.

“Of course. Whatever you need, you tell me. What she wearing, when I last see her. I remember.”

“We’ll get to all that. But first tell me about Carmen going to visit Whitney Seward tonight.”

“Yes, I think it’s connected, right? Could be some drug dealer give Whitney the stuff, and he kidnap my Carmen so she don’t tell!
¡Ay, Dios
! ” Tears began falling from Reyes’s eyes, and he buried his face in his hands. “I don’t know what I gonna do if sonthing happen to her!” he cried. His stocky frame began to heave and shake with sobs.

“Let me get you a glass of water,” Melanie said.

She went into the adjacent galley kitchen and flipped on the overhead light. The shadows of dead cockroaches stood out in bold relief inside the plastic light fixture. New York was strange, the way extremes of wealth and poverty coexisted so closely, even in the same building.

After he drank the water, Reyes seemed calmer.

“About seven-thirty, Whitney call Carmen and say can she come upstairs and study for the math test. My Carmen a genius with numbers. They got her working in the office at Holbrooke because she so good with math. She could make a lotta money in business someday, but she say she wanna be math teacher instead, work with kids.”

“So it was Whitney who called Carmen, not the other way around?”



. I thought was strange, because Whitney never call here. Whitney and Carmen, they were not friends.”

“No?”

“Whitney is very fast. Carmen’s afraid of her. Besides, Whitney is very mean to Carmen, because she rich and Carmen is poor. You know, Carmen don’t got the right clothes, like that.”

“Why did Carmen go upstairs if she didn’t like Whitney?”

“How we gonna say no? Mr. Seward is the
jefe
. The boss. He run the co-op board in this building, so he hire and fire the staff people. And he get my girls in good school so they go in college. Not just Carmen but Lourdes, too. Lulu, we call her, my little one. So if Whitney ask for help to study, you bet Carmen gonna help her.”

“So Carmen went upstairs to the Sewards’ apartment?”

“Yes.”

“What time?”

“Right away when Whitney call. Maybe seven-thirty, seven forty-five.”

“What was Carmen wearing?”

“Her school uniform. Plaid skirt and navy sweater. She didn’t have no coat. I hope where she is now, she not too cold.” Reyes began to cry again, covering his eyes, his shoulders shaking. After a moment he pulled himself together and looked up.

“I know this is difficult, Mr. Reyes. You’re doing a good job.”

“I’m trying. Help my Carmencita.”

“Let’s stay focused on the details of what happened, okay? I think it’ll be easier that way. How long was Carmen upstairs before you discovered the bodies?”

“After maybe two, three hours, I say, Wha’s happening? Is taking too long. So I call up there, and nobody answer the phone. I wait little bit more. Then about maybe ten-thirty, I worried, so I go up and knock on the back door. No answer. I try front. Same. So I go in with my key and look around. And I find this terrible thing.” Reyes drew a ragged breath and looked up at the ceiling with reddened eyes.

“Tell me where you found the bodies.”

“Whitney on her bed. The other girl on the floor near the bathroom. Carmen nowhere.”

“What were they wearing when you found them?”

“Whitney got on a top and underpants. The other, nothing.”

“Did you touch or move anything in the room?”

Reyes looked alarmed. “No. I know better. You get in trouble for that, right? I see a lotta cop shows on TV.”

“Why didn’t you call the police right away, when you discovered the bodies?”

“I call Mr. Seward first, because it’s his daughter, his house.”

“And he told you not to call the police?”

Reyes looked alarmed. “Tell me? No. He never say nothing like that.”

“James Seward didn’t tell you not to call the police?” Melanie asked, confused. Hadn’t Seward already admitted that to her?

“No, I tell him, please,
señor
, you call. I don’t speak too good, you know. He never tell me not to call.”

“Okay.” Melanie paused, intending just to note this minor discrepancy and move on. Yet something about the timing here bothered her. “Mr. Reyes,” she couldn’t help asking, “your daughter was missing, right?”

“Yes.”

“And you’d found her two classmates dead?”

“Sí.”

“Well, I guess I’m just surprised you wouldn’t call immediately yourself.”

Reyes flushed red, his eyes leaking tears again. “Yes. Of course I
wanna
call right away, because Carmen is gone. I
want
to.”

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