Paul Christopher - Michelangelo_s Notebook

The young detective sat down across from his partner.

“We got a problem, Iz.”

“No, you’ve got a problem. You haven’t told me what it is yet, so I’m still enjoying my breakfast.” He picked up a piece of bacon, wrapped it around one of the marinated Royal Reds and popped the morsel into his mouth, chewing and doing his imitation of Homer Simpson, which almost always got a laugh out of Kenny. Not this time.

“We’ve got a body in a swimming pool.”

Izzy sighed. Kenny liked to get full value for all that education, which meant it took him forever to get to the point.

“Presumably a dead body.”

“Yeah.”

“Old person?”

“Yeah.”

“So old people drown in pools all the time.”

“Except he didn’t drown. I don’t think anyway. It looks as though he bled to death in the pool. He’s floating faceup and the water’s red.” Faceup was a little strange. Natural flotation usually made bodies flip onto their fronts.

“He in the deep end of the pool or the shallow?”

“Shallow.”

That explained it. He was probably grounded on the bottom of the pool.

“Somebody call Maggie?”

“On her way.”

Gulf Shores was lucky enough to have a county coroner who was not only a doctor but also a pathologist, working out of the morgue at the Baldwin County Medical Center up the road in Foley, a ten-minute drive away down Route 59. Maggie was in her early fifties, like Izzy, but she had an ass like an eighteen-year-old and she knew it, which was fine with Izzy.

“Hemorrhoids, maybe?” Izzy ventured.

Kenny’s mouth twisted up into a cross between a scowl and a simple look of distaste. Somebody with an associate’s degree didn’t joke about possible murder victims. Izzy, on the other hand, even made jokes about the extraordinary number of pedestrians killed crossing Gulf Shores Boulevard-most of them half blind or carrying walkers or canes-referring to it as the annual roadkill count. Men were squirrels, women were beavers. For Izzy violent death was a job; for Kenny it was a calling.

“I think it was murder,” said Kenny, his voice heavy with doom.

“Why?” said Izzy. “People bleed for all sorts of reasons. Maybe he had lung cancer or an embolism or something.”

“I don’t think he could see too well, or his goggles got clouded up.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“There’s broken bottles all over the bottom of the pool.”

“Bottles?”

“Yeah, like you’d take a bottle and smash it and then put the bottom of the bottle on the bottom of the pool. I’ve got twenty-twenty vision and I could barely see them. There’s hundreds of them. It looked like he was swimming and started walking up the deep end and got cut, badly. Not to mention this big long sliver of glass that’s sticking out of his mouth. That was no accident.”

Izzy took a sip of coffee and fished out his Zippo and his Marlboros. “A sliver of glass?”

Kenny nodded, somber. “About a foot long, like a dagger. Looks to’ve cut his tongue just about in half.”

Izzy snapped open the Zippo, fired up his Marlboro and took a deep drag. He stared down at his breakfast plate. He felt a bubble of gas moving painfully through his system. He should have had something simple, maybe just the oysters. He sighed again and let out a cloud of smoke.

“Well, you’re right there, Kenny boy. A foot-long piece of glass sticking out of an old man’s mouth sure doesn’t sound like an accident, even in Gulf Shores.” He pushed himself away from the table and heaved himself upright. The gas bubble gurgled. “We better go take a look.”

Finn Ryan pushed away from the computer in the Ex Libris office, pinched the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger and squeezed her eyes shut. At her right hand there was a ragged pile of scribbled sheets from a yellow pad representing her efforts over the past few hours. She sat forward, yawned and tapped the pages together, trying to concentrate. Half her thoughts kept wandering back to the warm liquid feeling in the pit of her stomach and the faint iron memory of Michael as he’d slowly pushed into her, neither of them able to wait for the bed, her legs wrapped around his waist as she sprawled back over the table in the kitchen. Wonderful enough and enormously satisfying, but always with the feeling of distance and loneliness, of someone who could never quite give all of himself. A dark, cold anger that was as much the source of his sexuality as simple passion. Perhaps it was only the age between them but she knew that whatever they had together was not going to last for very long, one way or the other.

“Fiona Katherine Ryan, you think too goddamn much.” She stared down at the yellow sheets in her hand, focusing. Who else would start up an intimate relationship with a man at least twenty years older than her in the midst of investigating a murder or two and trying not to get killed in the process herself? And all because of a sheet of parchment inked by the hand of a genius five hundred years ago. It didn’t seem quite real, but then she remembered the copper tang of blood in the air that signaled Peter’s killing and the black insect helmet of the homicidal bicycle freak as he spun through the air to his death. Very real.

She’d started her research by looking for a Greyfriars Web site. For some reason she’d been a little surprised to find that it was slick, graphic-based and very sophisticated. She’d been expecting something a little plainer, an austere page in Times New Roman with a crest in the corner. The crest was there, the faintly sinister image of a shield split by a bar running left to right with three thistles on the right and a black swan with two Maltese crosses on the left. The word Greyfriars and the Latin motto Mens Agitat Molem sat over the shield. A scroll ran below with a second obscure verse in Latin: Aut Inveniam Viam Aut Faciam. The first motto meant: Mind Over Matter and the second, roughly translated, meant: I Shall Find a Way or Make One.

According to the Web site’s canned version of the school’s history the Mind Over Matter motto fit the school’s original purpose. Founded in 1895 by a Calvinist minister named George Haverford, the first principle of the school was to remove boys from the temptations of the opposite sex in an utterly isolated environment where they could turn their attentions to the Teddy Roosevelt concept of manliness in all things-particularly sports, military training and rigorous academics. Add cold showers and a hefty dose of hard-edged religious teaching and you had a school that every parent of the time could love. Reading between the lines it was the epitome of “Children should be seen and not heard”-and seen as rarely as possible. In every way that Finn could see it was the worst of everything she’d ever heard about English boarding schools.

Searching the Web and using Valentine’s private and very complicated search engine, something called ISPY-XRAY, Finn found a variety of Web sites, some established by ex-Greyfriars students and others by run-of-the-mill information junkies that told a different story. Looked at a little closer it appeared that Greyfriars had a less illustrious background than the official Web site suggested. According to what she’d discovered, the “manliness” of the school had led to half of the alumni from the mid nineteen hundreds being slaughtered in the trenches of Belgium and France. An inordinate number had committed suicide. The hazing of lower form kids by their “betters” in the senior grades had led to at least one death and a series of lawsuits just before the Crash of 1929 that had nearly bankrupted the school. What the lawsuits didn’t take, the Depression did, and the school foundered, buried under debt and bad publicity. In 1934 a group of alumni purchased the school, which by then was in receivership. At this point, Finn stumbled on her first real clue: a list of Greyfriars’s new trustees. There were twelve names in all but it was the first six that caught her attention: