Invasion of Privacy

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 resume 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 file 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.

11

    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