James Grippando - Last Call

"Benny, can you help me again?" she said, catching her breath.

Crumpled candy wrappers and empty soda cans littered the work area around Benny's computer monitor. He swiveled in his chair to face Andie, but his mouth was too full to respond. He held a half-eaten Twinkie in one hand and a soda can in the other.

"What…now?" he said, swallowing.

Andie showed him the disk. "Can you clean up a still image for me?"

"Right this minute?"

"Pretty please?"

Bennie washed down his Twinkie with a hit of caffeine and sugar. "Okay," he said. "But first: in the television series Star Trek , who was originally offered the role of Spock, but declined?"

Andie felt a headache coming on. She liked Star Trek , but this was the price she paid for pretending to love it just to stay in the good graces of the all-important tech guys. "I don't know. Martin Landau?"

"Corrrr-ect!"

"Really?"

"Yup. And then in a truly interesting twist, after Landau left Mission Impossible , Leonard Nimoy joined that show to play the role of disguise expert-"

"Benny, please. The disk?"

He took it and inserted it into the computer. "Sure."

The image popped onto the screen. Benny worked on a monitor much larger than Andie's, and it looked even worse on the big screen. "Well, that could use some work," said Benny.

"Can you fix it?"

"Let's see." Benny zoomed on his face, sharpening the features, darkening the background, adjusting the color. Two minutes and several dozen mouse clicks later, the face was almost as clear as the other two images Andie had pulled from the movie.

"How's that?" said Benny.

"Great. Can you do anything with his shirt?"

"What about it?"

Andie pointed. "There's some kind of artwork on it, I think."

He trained the zoom onto the man's chest, and after another round of computerized adjustments, the shirt started to come into focus.

"It's a frat house," said Andie.

"What?" he said, still tinkering with the image.

"Those are Greek letters on his shirt. This was a fraternity party."

Benny tightened the zoom, and with another series of clicks the front of the man's shirt filled the screen. "That's the best I can do," he said.

Andie studied it. "Pi Alpha Delta," she said.

"Hope that helps," he said.

"More than you know," she said. She thanked him, brought the disk back to her office, and printed out the still images of the cameraman, the heckler, and his friend. Then she called university information to find out if there was a Pi Alpha Delta fraternity on campus.

There was.

Andie tucked the printed photographs into her purse and bolted out of the office.

It took twenty minutes of dodging speeding motorcycles on the expressway and another ten of winding through residential neighborhoods to reach the university's main campus. Pi Alpha Delta was actually located off-campus, one of five fraternity houses directly across from the intramural athletic fields on a busy four-lane boulevard. Andie parked her unmarked sedan in the church lot up the street, walked a half block to the house, and wondered how many frat boys had used the acronym as a bad pickup line – as in, "Come on over to my PAD."

Andie had yet to confirm that the PAD house existed in the 1970s, but from the looks of it, she was betting yes. The unadorned one-story cinder-block construction with low-slung roofline was the typical hurricane-resistant style of the 1960s that only a Florida architect could love. She walked up the sidewalk and rang the bell at the front door. It seemed surprisingly quiet inside. Apparently, even frat boys stopped to recharge their batteries every once in a while.

The door opened, and a muscular young man wearing only nylon jogging shorts and flip-flop sandals greeted her. If Andie had to guess, she'd say he spent more time working on his suntan and his six-pack abs than his studies.

He smiled and said, "Hey, baby."

"Hi. Do you live here?"

"Yeah. Wanna see my-"

"Don't say it," she said. Obnoxious enough, but on some level, she was sort of flattered that he hadn't taken her for the mother of one of his buddies. "My name's Andie," she said. "Andie Henning.

"I'm David. You with a sorority?"

Either David was playing with her, or the darkness was kinder to her thirty-something face than she realized. "Yeah," she said, playing along. "I'm a pledge over at FBI."

He scrunched his face, as if reciting the entire Greek alphabet in his head, and then it hit him. "You mean…"

She nodded and flashed her badge. "Can I come in?"

"Yeah – sure," he said nervously. "I guess so."

He let her inside and closed the door. "How can I do for you? I mean, what-"

"Relax, okay? You're not in any kind of trouble."

"I should probably get our president."

"Is he here?"

"Yeah. But he's kind of – he's with his…"

"He's in his PAD?"

He smiled, which softened some of his nervous edge. "You know how that is."

"Look, I'm working on a very old case. It doesn't affect anyone who currently lives here. All I want to know is if you keep any composite photographs of your old fraternity classes around the house."

"Of course," he said. "They're hanging in the chapter room."

"Great. Can I see them?"

"Well, I don't know."

"It will take five minutes. You live here, so all I need is your consent."

"It's just that, we don't really let anyone in the chapter room. Not even pledges. It's only for brothers."

"Oh, come on. You know as well as I do that there's nothing sacred in there. The only reason you keep it locked is because you don't want anyone looking at those composites and seeing what a bunch of geeks you PADs used to be."

"Yeah," he said with a chuckle. "Those mullet haircuts in the eighties were the best."

"What about the seventies?" she said, soft-pedaling her real interest. "The days of big hair and bad mustaches. Or maybe you don't go back that far."

"Oh, we go back to 1962."

"Wonderful. I love a place with a sense of history. So what do you say? You and me in the chapter room for five minutes? Or do we have to go knocking on the door of your president's PAD?"

"Well, okay. Follow me."

He led her down the hall and through the cafeteria. It was after the dinner hour, but some men were still at the tables, eating and talking, while others were actually studying. They looked up with curiosity as Andie and David passed. Andie followed him to the kitchen, which smelled of some food that Andie was quite certain she'd never eaten. The final leg of the journey was down a hallway that was too narrow to walk in any formation but single file. The Greek letters IIAAwere painted on a door that more or less blended into the wall, as if someone had made a halfhearted effort to create a secret entrance. It was secured with a combination lock. David made Andie face the other way as he dialed in the code, and then he took her inside and switched on the light.

"This is it?" she said.

She hadn't meant to insult him with her reaction, but had she endured the living hell that fraternity initiations were in the 1970s and earlier, this first look at the secret chapter room would have smacked of the proverbial crock at the end of the rainbow.

"This is it," he said.

The windowless room had all the charm of an unfinished basement – concrete floor, walls of painted cinder blocks, and shop-style fluorescent lighting suspended from the ceiling. Covering the walls, however, were several dozen framed composite photographs, each with head shots of young men dressed in suits. Andie immediately zeroed in on the composites where the outfit of choice was the powder-blue leisure suit. Andie went straight to them, as she removed her printed photographs from her purse.