Third Degree (A Murder 101 Mystery)

dummy and could see where this was headed. “Hello?”
    “Blunt force trauma to the head,” he said dully.
    “I know,” I quickly amended. “That’s what you said. That’s probably what you even put on the certificate of death!” I said, much more cheerily than the circumstances would have required. “I actually just have a question. Regarding death. And stuff.”
    “And stuff?”
    “Well, maybe not ‘stuff,’ per se, but other things.” Nothing like sounding like a complete moron to solidify your credibility. “Can we have a cup of coffee?”
    “I’d much prefer a scotch,” he said.
    “Okay! Then scotch it is. What does your schedule look like?”
    “It looks like a spiral-bound notebook filled with monthly calendars.”
    I was stunned into silence until I realized he was joking. Not exactly gallows humor, but not exactly humor, either. “Oh, right. How is tonight? Say seven? I can meet you anywhere you’d like.”
    He asked me to meet him at an Irish pub in White Plains not far from his office and conveniently located across from a funeral home, an appropriate landmark when one was meeting the medical examiner for a drink. Until then, I had a few things to figure out, the first being what I was going to do now that I had a Hooters waitress as a roommate.
    I called Crawford and gave him the update, leaving out the part where I was going on a first date with the ME and most of the stuff about Ginny Miller and her thoughts on poison. Crawford knew me well enough that that was just enough information to get me snooping around, and let’s just say that he doesn’t like that aspect of my personality.
    “Wait,” he said. “You’re living with a Hooters waitress?” I heard him relay this information to Fred; they were in the car, riding to a homicide. “And she’s a friend of Max?”
    “You heard me, brother. Hooters waitress. In my house.”
    “Do you know anything about this person?”
    “Only that she needs a place to stay.”
    “Oh, good. I feel so much better.”
    “She’s a nice kid. She’s getting a degree in criminal justice from John Jay.”
    “Sounds like a regular Mother Teresa.” Fred mumbled something in the background that I couldn’t understand but it didn’t matter; if Fred had been standing right next to me, chances are I wouldn’t have been able to understand him, either. “I’ve gotta go. Call me later, okay?”
    I hated deceiving Crawford but I hated him being mad at me more. I had tossed and turned all night wondering why I was helping Ginny Miller, a woman who up until last night had been my archenemy. But now I saw her for what she was: a lonely, kind of depressed middle-aged woman who had succumbed to the charms of a seemingly sophisticated—if you believed money gave you class, that is, which I didn’t—and wealthy man. I didn’t know a lot about the relationship but I had gleaned that much. And she seemed hell-bent on making amends and saving her marriage. I had to respect that. Albeit begrudgingly, given the way she had treated me.
    And there was the added bonus of her having attended to my terminally ill mother in her last days. I had spent every day and night at the hospital for two weeks but was hard-pressed to remember any nurses or doctors whom I had met during that time, so overcome was I with grief and exhaustion. My mind wasn’t my mind then; I was younger than I should have been while attending to a sick parent and it was all I could do to maintain my sanity in the midst of a horrific tragedy. My father had already died several years earlier. But I do remember that the people who had taken care of my mother had kept her comfortable, out of pain, and clean. They were angels who flitted in and did their work silently and without too much disturbance.
    If Ginny Miller had been one of those angels, I was certainly in her debt.
    The whole poisoning angle was an interesting twist. Although I had seen the guy die, who knew if he had died in the manner to which we all ascribed? What if he had been slowly poisoned? And by whom? It was a question that should be answered. Because if George Miller was innocent, then he shouldn’t have to go to jail. That much was very clear to me and my inbred sense of social and moral justice.
    It’s a high horse but someone has to ride it.
    The day went quickly, and when I had interviewed my last student, I hightailed it out of there. I was in White Plains, a city in Westchester where the ME’s office was