Invasion of Privacy

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, “Only 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 modem, 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, flipping 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