Tough Lessons Page 15

  As she answered the door, her voice drifted into the room and Joseph could hear the uncertainty in it. “Yes?” she asked.

  “Mrs. Geller, I’m Assistant Chief McCavity of the NYPD.” The tone was brisk and businesslike. “We’d like to speak to your husband.” And when Mrs. Geller failed to answer, Joseph could easily imagine her standing there frozen and open-mouthed on her own doorstep. “If I may?” McCavity urged gently, and she must have reached out herself and opened the door wider and then pushed in passed the shocked woman, because the next thing she was standing in the room, looking down at the ashen-faced figure of the coach.

  Philip Geller looked as if his world was about to come an abrupt end. He was still sitting there staring at the carpet when his wife followed McCavity into the room. “Philip…” she began, but as soon as she saw him sitting there she knew something very bad indeed had happened. Any hopes that the police could’ve made some sort of mistake seemed to evaporate when she noticed the expression on her husband’s face. For his part, Geller was trying not to look into her eyes.

  McCavity said, “We’d like to ask you a few questions, Mr. Geller…” And it was then that she seemed to finally realize Joseph was sitting opposite the coach. “What the hell are you doing here?” she asked and stared at him like she was dreaming and he couldn’t be real.

  “I had a few questions of my own,” he said.

  “About a set of keys, by any chance?” she asked and Joseph nodded. “Well, what do you know?” she asked rhetorically and then she transferred her attention back to the football coach.

  Before she could say another word, the wife interrupted her. “Philip, what’s going on?”

  “It’s nothing, Lillian,” he said weakly, his face flushed. “We’ll talk about it later.”

  “I’m afraid we’ve got to talk about it right now, Geller,” said McCavity. “We need to know why your prints have been retrieved from a set of keys that was thrown in some bushes, a bunch of keys that you shouldn’t have set eyes on.”

  “It’s not what you’re thinking?” said Geller.

  “Oh, really?” she asked. “What am I thinking, Coach?” she said with mock good humor.

  “That I had something to do with the killing of Hernando Lopez. That’s what he, thinks, too.” He looked over at Joseph. “But it ain’t so, no way.”

  “Then would you mind explaining to me why you had a spare set of keys for the school? Because you’d better have a very good reason.”

  Geller looked like a man in a quandary. Joseph knew that even if he did have a good reason that was nothing to do with murdering a fellow teacher, his job, his livelihood, the new life Geller had built for himself at Antoinette Irving, limited as it was and so unappealing to his wife, was in jeopardy. At the very least, he had broken school rules and the law and he was likely to be dismissed from the school. These would be the concerns of an innocent man, but if he really was guilty of murder then they were the least of his worries.

  Geller looked round the room at the expectant faces peering back at him and finally his eyes settled on his wife. She looked so confused, hurt, and apprehensive. “I can’t tell you,” he said finally. “I just needed ’em.”

  “Very well,” said McCavity. “In that case, Philip Geller, I’m arresting you for the murder of Hernando Lopez. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to have an attorney present during questioning. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you. Do you understand?”

  McCavity finished reading the coach his Miranda rights but her words were lost in the high-pitched shrieks of Geller’s wife. She was crying, “Philip, Philip, what’s happening? What have you done, oh, Philip?” as he was hauled to his feet by the two detectives.

  Geller was handcuffed with his hands behind his back, then led to the door. It was only when the cuffs were actually on him that Philip Geller seemed to wake from his trance and realize the sheer magnitude of what was happening to him.

  “You’re making a mistake. Please let me speak to you in private. My wife—”

  “You can speak to me all you like down at the precinct, Mr. Geller,”

  “No, no, don’t, you don’t understand,” and the big man started to fight. He was trying to break free. The two detectives were also heavy-set men and Geller was in handcuffs but they were struggling to hold onto the big man as he tried to prevent their progress toward his front door. “No, hear me out, it’s not what you think. I didn’t kill anyone.” He was shouting now, kicking out at the two men and trying to use his feet to stop them from dragging him along, wedging them into door frames and pressing back against them. “This whole thing, it’s not about Lopez. It’s about a girl, just a girl, goddammit.” Then he let out a stifled moan as one of the two detectives tired of the fight and landed a crafty, unseen blow into his torso to cease his struggles.

  Joseph didn’t know who was the more stunned by the clean-Marine’s admission, Geller’s wife or himself.

  “Philip?” she said in a high-pitched, panicked voice, as her husband was bundled through the door and into the police car. She kept repeating, “Philip, Philip? What have you done?”

  But Geller was saying nothing. His shocked, red face simply stared out of the car window, as if his wife wasn’t there at all. The car pulled away, leaving Lillian Geller plaintively calling his name over and over as it disappeared with her husband.

  “Take her in our car,” ordered McCavity. “We’ll need to speak to her, too.” And poor dumbstruck Mrs. Geller was led away as well.

  McCavity paused on the driveway for a moment to speak to Joseph. She did not seem pleased with him. “Well, we do keep bumping into each other, don’t we? People will start to talk,” she said. “Always one step ahead of the dumb old NYPD, aren’t we, Mr. Solinka? It’s amazing really, the resources I got at my disposal; all those detectives out there working their butts off for me twenty-four-seven, forensic teams in their little laboratories testing keys and knives for prints and DNA and yet, when we finally turn up at the killer’s house, here you are already. There’s just one thing I don’t get. We’re here because one of my hardworking guys found some keys in a bush that shouldn’t have been there or any place else. Another took a witness statement from a pupil who saw Coach Geller with his own set of keys for the school. When my officer learned that he shouldn’t have his own set, we knew we had our man. Once the prints we took off the keys from the bushes matched the ones Geller had on file, this was sewn up. But you couldn’t possibly have known what my detective was told. So what are you doing down here?”

  “You’re forgetting I used to be a detective myself back in—”

  “Back in Lagos, yah-huh. I forget nothing, Mr. Solinka.” Except my name, he thought. “Sherlock Holmes couldn’t have known that Coach Geller’s keys were in that bush.”

  “No, but I spoke to a man in a parts yard right by the school who admitted he cut a set of keys just like those very recently. He then described a man who sounded almost exactly like Philip Geller.”

  McCavity’s mouth opened and she seemed a little lost for words. “Holy…and just how did you get him to do that?”

  “I coaxed it out of him.”

  “You coaxed it out of him.” She snorted a bitter and humorless little laugh. “And who might this cooperative man be?”

  Joseph owed no loyalty to Tony De Luca and he knew that withholding evidence would put him in a lot of trouble with McCavity. She looked like she needed very little reason to throw the book at him right now, so he gave her the man’s name without protest.

  McCavity nodded. “And you’d have given me that name when exactly?”

  “Right after I’d been to see Geller for his explanation. Didn’t want to bother you till then. I guess this time you were one step ahead of me.”

  “Don’t patronize me, Mr. Solinka. I don’t appreciate it.” She turned to one of her detec
tives and gave him De Luca’s name and address, then ordered, “Bring him in for questioning, right now.” Then she turned back to Joseph. “This better stack up,” she told him, not needing to add an “or else.”

  The message was clear. McCavity had spelled it out for him, in fact. She didn’t like her modern, high-tech, scientific police force being made to look second rate by a lone amateur sleuth who had learned his skills in some third-world backwater. Joseph had made himself too high profile for McCavity’s liking. He could tell that any chance she got from now on, she was likely to make his life difficult.

  16

  “I never trusted Philip,” said Brigitte firmly. “And I’m not just being wise after the event.”

  “Female intuition, or did he give you cause to think he was a murderer?” asked Joseph as he steered the cab round a tight corner on the way to her apartment.

  “It’s not that,” said Brigitte. “I’m not claiming he was my first pick as a murder suspect. I’m just saying there was something about him that was hard to like. He always struck me as being wired way too tight, like if there was one man I’d have guessed might one day show up at Antoinette Irving with an M16 and go postal, it was him.” Joseph laughed. “What?” she asked.

  “You,” he said. “I take you to a shooting gallery a couple of times and you already know your M16s from your Uzis, and then you say that some other guy looks like he might enjoy loosing off a few rounds in public. Seriously, though, you’ve got to be careful. Make sure you’re not trying to fit a guy to a crime just because you don’t like him. Geller could be the biggest neo-con, clean-Marine, George Bush–loving, flag-saluting Bible basher in the city, but that don’t necessarily make him a murderer.”

  “I didn’t say it did,” she argued, “and how do you know I’m not a flag-flying neo-con myself? What makes you think I’m not a George Bush lover with a picture of Dick Cheney on my mantelpiece and an ‘I Love Donald Rumsfeld’ T-shirt on underneath my Antoinette Irving sweatshirt? How can you be so sure you know what makes me tick?”

  “Apart from the fact you have a brain? Let’s see, the way you dress, the newspapers and magazines you read, the fact that you care about the kids in your school and have actually left America and seen some other countries. You know that there is a whole complicated world out there and I don’t think seeing that would turn you into a card-carrying Republican.”

  “Mmm, well.” She seemed a little put out. “Some of that may be true, Joseph, but don’t go thinking you know me completely based on the clothes I wear and the magazines I read. Life isn’t always that simple, Mr. Ace Detective. There’s plenty of people out there who would make unkind assumptions about you, but it doesn’t make them true.”

  “I guess they would.” Joseph knew what she meant and he was a little annoyed with her now, like she was saying, It’s okay that you’re a cab driver from one of the world’s most corrupt countries. I can see through that but there are many who wouldn’t. He wasn’t sure why, but her words stung him a little.

  Perhaps it was this that made him continue the argument about the coach. “I’m just saying that Geller having a spare set of keys doesn’t necessarily make him a murderer.”

  “Even though you said as much yourself? You asked me if it was possible to get a spare set of keys cut for precisely that reason.”

  “Yes, and you told me it was impossible, if you recall. That was another conclusion you jumped to.”

  “Are you pissed at me, Joseph?”

  “No.”

  “You are, aren’t you? Is it because I had an opinion on the case? Am I not entitled to have one? I may be an amateur but surely…or is it because I’m a woman? Don’t they have any female detectives in Lagos?”

  Joseph didn’t know how to answer that one. He didn’t give a damn about her being a woman but he had to admit she was right. He was pissed at her. He was irritated by her unblinking assumption that Philip Geller was a murderer, for little more reason than that she disagreed with his politics and his ethos on life was alien to her. Joseph had always seen Brigitte as a died-in-the-wool liberal. She was a Bill Clinton fan who freely admitted she thought it was little more than mildly amusing that the president got a blow job from an intern in the oval office, just as long as he was still benignly watching over the country, keeping it safe from the right-wing military industrial complex. She had deplored the tales of Guantanamo Bay and the “extraordinary rendition” of terrorist suspects to Camp X-Ray, calling it “little more than legalized kidnapping with no right of trial or appeal.” How ironic then that she should be so quick to judge someone on such little evidence. If a Republican had been convinced a hippy type was a murderer just because he wore a beard and had burned his draft card during Vietnam she would have been up in arms. Now, when it suited her, Brigitte’s own political bias was enough for her to condemn Geller. It was as unscientific as putting him in the frame for murder because his eyebrows met in the middle.

  Perhaps he was being too harsh. He told himself it was not Brigitte’s fault if she took an instinctive view of these things. She might not be as thorough and reserved as a seasoned detective but he realized she was probably entitled to her prejudiced viewpoint on the man, just like everybody else. Besides, wasn’t Geller always so quick to condemn the youngsters in his care?

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it to sound like that. It’s just I’ve been bothered about it ever since I left Geller’s house. I arrived there thinking maybe he’d done it but I left there convinced that he hadn’t.” She opened her mouth to speak and he interrupted her. “I know, I know. I’m using the same intuition as you, only my gut feeling is going the other way. Again, I have to ask, what is the guy’s motive? He and Lopez didn’t get along, so what? You and Geller don’t get along, either, but I don’t see you taking potshots at him in the school car park. It just doesn’t stack up. Then there was that thing he said about a girl when he was being led away. He left it right up till the end, like it was costing him a lot to say it.”

  “Well, his wife was there, wasn’t she?”

  “Which made me think it might be true.”

  “Mmm.”

  “What?”

  “Well, there was talk, rumors I suppose you could say about Geller and some of the girls.”

  “What kind of talk?”

  “That he wasn’t exactly proper in the way he handled himself around them.”

  “In what way?”

  “You want details? I don’t know. It was just a vibe I picked up from some of them and from a couple of the other teachers. It was the way he carried himself when he was around them, something intangible, inappropriate touching, that sort of thing. I don’t mean he went up to them, grabbed their breasts, and went ‘Honk!’ I just heard that he was a little…”

  “Less than politically correct.”

  “Yeah,” she agreed, “and he’d make comments of the ‘My how you have grown, young Amy Carter’ variety. Not something you could report him for because it could all be dismissed as innocent. He’d say stuff to them that he could claim was just about them having grown taller since last semester but really he was talking about them being well-built. I mean that’s not nice for a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old girl to have to hear from a teacher.”

  “No,” he agreed. “You’re right. It isn’t.”

  “A man like Geller,” she continued, “spends his whole time with men, except for the wife he’s probably known since they first dated back in high school. I don’t think he gets women. I don’t reckon he understands them. It’s that Madonna-whore thing some men have, you know. They think women are all either virgins they can bring home to mom and then marry, or sluts who’ll lay down for anybody, when the truth is a little more complex.”

  “Is it?”

  “Now I know you are teasing me, Joseph, so stop it. You know it is.” She smiled. “I may not know everything about everybody but I am sure of this one small thing: you are no Philip Geller. You
understand women, Joseph. I know you do.”

  She was right, to a degree. He had known women, a number of them, right up until he met Apara and had convinced himself that he would never look at another. And then Apara had died and suddenly he was back out there in the big world, alone again.

  Brigitte pulled down the sun visor and took a moment to examine her reflection in the mirror. When she was happy with the state of her hair and makeup, she pushed the visor back into place. “Soon be home,” she said a little self-consciously. “You got time for coffee?”

  The cab had never really warmed up during the short journey back to Brigitte’s apartment and the atmosphere had become a damn sight colder once Joseph politely declined her invitation for coffee. The look on her face had said it all. Before he was given the chance to explain that he had things to do, before he could begin to intimate that he wasn’t sure coffee was such a good idea, particularly when he was pretty damn sure she didn’t mean just coffee, she had thanked him for the shooting lesson and climbed out of the cab.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, immediately realizing he’d somehow messed up.

  “I’m fine,” she said primly, then walked off before he could respond, leaving Joseph to drive back to the project alone.

  So Brigitte was mad at him, in a way that all women were mad at all men from time to time. Not really mad, not pan-throwing, crockery-smashing, stab-you-through-the-heart-with-a-carving-knife mad. No, Brigitte was the kind of mad where if he bothered to ask her whether she was mad she would simply and calmly say no, even when the correct answer was yes. If he was then foolish enough to ask her if she was okay she would reply “Fine.” Joseph had been married for almost fifteen years and he knew what “fine” meant. To a man it meant okay, maybe even great, as in a fine wine. To a women it meant, “I am mightily pissed off and about to declare war on you.” When Apara said, usually through gritted teeth, that she was “fine,” he knew she was about to go to DEFCON two and he was in big trouble. At that point he would usually go away and sit somewhere quietly until he could attempt to work out her reasons for being pissed at him. Then, whether he felt she was being entirely reasonable or not, he would try to find some way to thaw the ice that had magically appeared between them.