Third Degree (A Murder 101 Mystery)

I could. Rather than continue with this train of thought, I decided to go with the real reason I had asked him here.
    “What do you know about poison?”
    He pointed at my cup. “Only that that qualifies.”
    “I’m not kidding. Do you know anything about arsenic?”
    “No. That’s what we’ve got Crime Scene for.”
    “Are they chemists?”
    “Some of them are.” He looked around the store and decided he couldn’t resist, I guess. He got up and ordered a large black coffee and a bagel with cream cheese. He carried both back to the table and started eating. “Where is this going?”
    I told him about the Ginny Miller scenario, and my meeting with McVeigh. “I need to know about arsenic. How it is administered, how long it takes to act, how it kills you. Know anybody I can talk to?”
    He put his head in his hands. “Why do you care?” he asked from underneath his palms.
    I could feel the tears welling up before I even formulated an answer. “She took care of my mother, Crawford.”
    He took his hands off his face. “So what? That’s her job. She’s a nurse.”
    He was uncharacteristically short, not giving me the answer I was looking for. The minute he saw my face, he knew he had spoken too soon. He started to recant, but I closed my eyes and shook my head, attempting to silence him. “No. Don’t say anything.”
    “I know a guy who knows a guy … anyway, I can help you with the arsenic thing.”
    “Forget it.” Passive-aggressiveness is my stock-in-trade.
    “Really. Just let me get six hours of shut-eye and I’ll make a few calls.” He passed a hand over his eyes. “I’m wiped out.”
    “Thanks, Crawford.” This wasn’t exactly how I had wanted our early-morning meeting to go; my decision to call him had been ill-advised at best. I gathered up my stuff, all crammed under my seat. “I’ve gotta go.”
    He grabbed my hand. “Do you think she may be using you? You know, for your connections and everything?”
    “Oh, I know she’s using me,” I said, standing. “It’s just that I remember …” I started and then revised what I was going to say. “I just remember what it was like to be suspected of something I didn’t do.” I decided a joke would make this encounter end better than it had started. “And George Miller is one heck of a DPW head. I wouldn’t want to lose him.”
    Crawford smiled wearily. “Let me walk you out,” he said, getting a bag for his bagel as we passed the crowded counter. Once outside, he put his arms around me. “It won’t do me any good to ask you not to get involved, right?”
    I shook my head. “Right.”
    He gave me a long hug and kissed me solidly on the lips. “Okay. Can I come over and meet the Hooters waitress tonight?”
    “She’s more than a Hooters waitress. Her name is Queen and she’s a criminal justice major at John Jay.”
    “And a Hooters waitress …”
    “And a Hooters waitress.”
    “So, can I?”
    “Sure. As long as you know that you’ll have to sleep with me, with my priest on the couch below us.”
    He looked up at the sky and sighed. “You don’t make it easy.” Crawford’s got a healthy respect—bordering on the obsessive—for church authority.
    “And that’s why you love me,” I said. He walked me to my car and made sure I was buckled in before walking away.
    I didn’t hear from Crawford for the rest of the day and I expected that he had slept longer than he had originally anticipated. He’s a guy who needs his sleep and he doesn’t get that much. He can go for long stretches without food and often does, but miss a night’s sleep? The man turns into a beast. I didn’t bother him and figured he would call me when he got up, got the information I needed, and was in a position to talk.
    I wasn’t looking forward to going home. My home was my haven. Just me, Trixie, and sometimes Crawford. Now I had Queen and Kevin and they were taking up a lot of space. Talk about your personal space being violated. Did I have to start cooking dinner every night? Do their laundry? What role, exactly, was I going to be playing in their lives besides providing a roof over their heads? I thought a house meeting might be in order to clarify our different roles.
    But to my surprise, nobody was home. No Queen, no Kevin, and no Trixie. A note on the kitchen table written in Kevin’s chicken scratch informed me that the trio had gone for a run down by the river and would return in about an hour with a pizza.
    Maybe