Invasion of Privacy - Jeremiah Healy (17 page)

I glanced down at the form. At the top over a couple
of detailed paragraphs, it had spaces for FULL NAME, DATE OF BIRTH,
and YEAR OF GRADUATION.

Since I didn't know the last two, I positioned my
letter the same way she held her sheet. "I already have an
authorization?

Zina read it. "Hey, Plymouth Mills, that's,
like, south of Boston, right?"

"Right."

"We don't get many grads going all the way down
there."

"You don't?"

"Uh-unh. Most of our students are state
residents when they come here, and they already know Vermont's the
best place to live you could ever find."

I smiled with her. "Well, after I get a look at
his records, maybe I can persuade Mr. Dees to move back."

Zina shook her head. "I'm real sorry, but you
have to use our form."

"But I'm only going to be here for today."

"Sorry."

I read the two paragraphs of line print on her piece
of paper. "Look, I know my letter isn't worded quite the same
way, but it's pretty clearly the same thought. Andrew Dees here is
authorizing you to release all his records to me."

"Uh-huh, but your letter there doesn't have the
disclaimer clause or the hold-harmless clause, and the university
counsel says we have to have both to cover ourselves from liability."

Zina said the legal phrases correctly, but she
pronounced them slowly, as though she didn't know for sure what they
meant. In a bureaucracy of any kind, that usually means the person
you're dealing with isn't going to yield. I thought about asking to
see her superior, then remembered Harriet's demeanor and had a better
idea.

"Could I have a couple of those forms, then?"

Zina seemed relieved.
"Sure."

* * *

"Hi, can I help you?"

"It's not exactly a résumé, but I was
wondering if you could type this up for me?"

The young guy in the photocopy place across from the
Towne Restaurant looked at the registrar's form and said,

"Why don't you just use the form itself,
mister?"

"I don't want all that stuff about DATE OF BIRTH
at the top."

He ran his hand over hair too short to twist around a
finger. "Okay, but it's still going to be five dollars a page."

"A steal at twice the price."

He took it to a desktop computer and got to work. I
sat in my car outside the Towne, enjoying the soup and half-sandwich
the waitress inside had put up for me in take-out fashion. Homemade
vegetable beef in the cardboard cup, deviled ham on toasted wheat in
the waxed paper. Two bucks. The fifties aren't dead everywhere. A few
minutes later, I was finishing my soup when Zina bicycled down the
street from the direction of campus. No helmet, though, and she just
leaned her bicycle against the wall outside the restaurant, not
bothering to lock it when she went inside. I thought about Primo and
the concept of trust.

Then I ate the rest of the
half-sandwich before turning my key in the ignition.

* * *

"Yes?"

"I'd like to see the records of a former student
here?"

Harriet sighed deeply, then stood stiffly, plucking
another form from the sheaf on her desk like she was pulling a weed
in her garden. At the counter she managed not to slap the thing in
front of me.

"Have this completed and signed, then bring it
back to us. There'll be a three-dollar charge for copying the
transcript."

I looked at the form and frowned. "Gee, I'm
really sorry, but the former student typed up his own version of
this."

"We insist upon that form, sir."

"Yes, I can certainly understand that, but . .
." I took out the résumé shop letter I'd forged and gave the
impression of comparing the two. ". . . but, fortunately it
looks as though he got all the magic words right, just left off the
stuff at the top."

I turned the form and the letter so Harriet could
read them. She took her time, then flinched a little at the end.
Looking up at me, Harriet smiled sweetly. "Well, you're
certainly right. However, without YEAR OF GRADUATION, it will take me
a few minutes."

"I can wait." Patience and deference, the
keys to success. "I'd say he's in his early forties, if that
helps at all."

"Certainly does. Please," waving toward one
of the scoop chairs, "sit down, make yourself comfortable."

Harriet disappeared into the bowels of the office.
Five minutes later, the door to the corridor opened and three campus
police officers—a big male, a medium female, and a small male—came
in, hands on their still-holstered side-arms. Harriet materialized at
the counter, as though she'd been hiding behind one of the tile
cabinets. She used a manila folder to point in my direction. "That's
him."

The medium female said to me, "You want to
stand, please? Slowly."

I looked at them. "Let me guess. Poppa Bear,
Mama Bear, and Baby Bear, right?"

The small male said, "Just one more word,
jerk-off."

I stood, slowly.
 

=12=

I'd driven by the campus police headquarters on the
way in without realizing it, since their operation looked like one of
the old, ivy-covered classroom buildings. After the big male officer
had frisked me for weapons and the medium female had taken the file
folder from Harriet, all three cops walked me out to another yellow
Ford Explorer. Momma Bear got behind the wheel, mumbling into a radio
mike held too close to her mouth for me to hear what she was saying.
I rode in the back seat between Poppa Bear and Baby Bear. Even with
the small man to my right, it was a tight enough fit that I was glad
no one had decided to cuff me.

The female officer pulled us into the curb, taking a
POLICE VEHICLES ONLY slot. She got out first, followed by the big
male officer, then me and the small one. We went through the high
doors, a blue-on-yellow plaque reading CAMPUS SECURITY.

Inside, the floor was old grooved wood, the walls
covered by bulletin boards so covered themselves with notices that
you almost had to take the existence of the boards beneath as an
article of faith. A woman in civilian clothes behind the counter
might have been Harriet's older sister, but we weren't introduced.
She just nodded to us, and we all moved through the swinging gate in
the counter, past a few unstaffed desks and to a door stenciled
DIRECTOR. As the female officer opened the door, I said, "Action,
camera . . ." and the big male officer nudged me into the
office.

A woman about my age in a maize blouse and the skirt
to a suit stood from behind a desk with computer and fax on one
corner and an elaborate telephone on the other. She was medium
height, with even features, a milkmaid's complexion, and brown hair
brushed back the way Primo Zuppone's would look if he kept it dry.
The jacket to her suit hung on a multi-pronged brass fixture next to
a framed diploma from some company that made parking meters. The
woman wore the blouse with the cuffs unbuttoned and the sleeves
rolled twice up her forearms. When she smiled, I got the feeling
she'd been doing this kind of work a long time.

"I'm Gail Tasker." Both hands flicked out,
like the woman was shooing flies. “Sit down, please."

She sounded like a classmate of mine at Holy Cross
who'd come from the Bronx. As the female officer handed Tasker the
manila file Harriet had given her, the big male officer pushed a
chair over for me. It was institutional gray, with black, punctured
pads on the seat and back.

I said, "On1y if there's room for everyone."

Baby Bear started to growl something, but Tasker cut
him off with a shake of her head. "There are two ways we can do
this, my friend. The modern, polite way, and the old-fashioned, hard
way. So far, you've been on the fringe of polite, so we try that a
little longer. It doesn't work, we regress."

"Maybe if you regress enough, I institute a
civil rights suit."

"I'm not worried.”

And she wasn't, either, which meant Tasker thought
she had something on what I'd been doing at the registrar's office.

I sat down.

Tasker nodded, once to me, then to the officers
behind me. "Dave, if you'd stay. Trish, Garth, you can return to
patrol."

Dave was the big male. The other two left, closing
the door behind them.

Tasker dropped back into her desk chair, elbows on
the blotter, hands joined to prop up her chin. "How about we
start with some ID?"

I took out my holder and extended it to her.

She opened it, read a moment, then looked up at me.

"Mr. Cuddy, you have one of these for Vermont
too?"

"No."

Tasker picked up a pen, jotted down some information,
then closed my holder and tossed it—politely—back to my side of
her desk.

As I put it away, she opened Harriet's file folder.

"What's a private investigator from Boston,
unlicensed in the Green Mountain State, doing at our registrar's
office?"

"Trying to get a copy of that file."

Tasker looked up again, then went back to the folder.
"Haven't seen one of these in a long time. Back before we had
computers, individually typed courses, handwritten entries for
grades. God, it must have taken forever for them to get things done."

I waited patiently while she turned pages, dipping
back and forth a few times. "While you're browsing, mind if I
ask you a question?"

Tasker looked up a third time. "Go ahead."

I glanced toward the diploma. "You really go to
Parking Meter School?"

Officer Dave coughed behind me, but Tasker threw back
her head and laughed out loud. My mother would have called it a good,
healthy woman's laugh. "Given where we are, Mr. Cuddy, just
about everybody on this campus has a car. You have any idea what that
means for us?"

"None."

"Well, first you've got faculty members, who
think it's their God-given right to have a dedicated space reserved
for them personally every day of the week, even if they're in their
offices only Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Second, all the students
think the tuition they pay ought at least to include a spot for their
car, since it sure doesn't guarantee them a job when they graduate.
Then you've got administrators, and visiting parents with their
teenage kids 'shopping' for colleges, and—"

"I get the picture."

Tasker paused. “So the only way you can possibly
manage this mess is by economic self-determination."

"Meaning making them all feed meters."

"Or most of them, at least. The meters are
really pretty good, and not just as moneymakers, either. They're very
well-made, mechanically speaking. Only problem is, they are
mechanical, so they're going to break down, and it costs us
twenty-nine ninety-five each time we send one back to the factory. So
I took one of my PSA's down—"

"Pee-Ess-Ays?"

Dave shuffled his feet on the floor. Tasker said,
“Parking Service Attendants. I took one of them with me to this
school the manufacturer runs down in Arkansas. You fly into
Springfield, Missouri, home of Bass Pro Shops. You ever been to L.L.
Bean in Freeport?"

"Yes."

"Well, this is the same idea, only bigger.
Five-story waterfall, trout stream, aquarium. Two different places to
eat, a zoo full of stuffed animals."

"A zoo . . . ?"

"Full of stuffed animals. Then we drove south to
the factory. And guess what you pass along the way?"

"Bill Clinton's hometown?"

"No. Branson, Missouri, home to the performance
theaters of country stars, has-been sixties' singers, and you name
it. Zillions of buses and RVs filled with retired people hitting the
theaters and shops and restaurants. And let me tell you, they really
pack those theaters."

"To see . . . ?"

"Bobby Vinton, Tony Orlando, Pat Boone-"

"Stop, you're making me giddy."

Officer Dave coughed a little louder, and Tasker
paused again. Then, "Mr. Cuddy, Trish said over the radio you
were a wiseass. Didn't anybody ever tell you that first impressions
were the most important?"

"Sorry."

Tasker flicked her hands again. "The road south
from Branson goes through mostly rural areas, with homemade signs
advertising quilts and fenced-in yards full of cement lawn
ornaments."

"Lawn ornaments?"

"Miniature deer, full-sized swans, even a lawn
pig, with colored rocks."

"Colored rocks too."

"Painted, to serve as border markers. And we
saw, I forget exactly where, this sign for maintaining the highways.
You know, volunteer your group to do roadside cleanup?"

"We have those in New England too."

"Yeah, only down there, the sign said, 'Adopt a
Highway. This Mile Maintained by the Ku Klux Klan.' " Tasker
shook her head. I checked my watch.