Stork Raving Mad(42)

I pulled out my cell phone and checked the time on that—2:40 p.m. Which meant I’d been sleeping for over an hour. I didn’t feel particularly rested, but then I rarely did these days.

I began to pick my way through the debris to the doorway.

Halfway there a thought stopped me. If memory served, Ramon was one of the students sleeping here in the living room. With everyone else either being interrogated or attending a rehearsal, now might be a good time to see if his sleeping pills were still findable—before it occurred to him to dispose of them.

I poked around the room until I figured out where Ramon’s stuff was. They’d put together a ring with everyone’s mailbox keys on it, and apparently someone had just made a mail run to the dorms and thrown small bundles of letters and flyers on some of the sleeping bags and air mattresses. I scanned the addresses until I found a pale pink envelope addressed to Ramon lying on one of the sleeping bags. The return address was a Mrs. Angelica Soto in San Antonio.

I glanced over my shoulder. Still no one around. If the living room had a door I’d have closed and locked it, but there was only the huge open archway. I felt incredibly exposed as I rummaged through the heaps of stuff around Ramon’s sleeping bag.

Eventually I found a pill bottle tucked under his pillow. Diazepam, two mg to be taken at bedtime.

I pulled a tissue out of my pocket, picked the bottle up with it, then heaved myself back to my feet and studied it.

Diazepam? Wasn’t that the generic name for Valium? If Ramon’s sleeping pills had been some kind of barbiturates, dosing Dr. Wright with three of them might well have had serious ill effects. But I seemed to recall Dad saying that one benefit of Valium was that overdoses, though serious, were rarely fatal. So if Ramon really had used only three of these, then unless his doctor had prescribed a particularly high dose, they weren’t likely to have been the cause of Dr. Wright’s death. Was two mg a high or low dose?

A question for Dad—Dad, and of course, the chief, who would doubtless like to see the bottle. I wrapped the tissue around it and tucked it away in my pocket.

As I passed through the foyer I heard noises coming from the coat closet. It sounded as if things were falling off the shelves. I strode over and pulled the door open.

Dr. Blanco was lying on the closet floor on a pile of boots and shoes. Scattered around his head were several Frisbees, half a dozen flashlights, a softball glove, a tennis racket, and the bag containing Rob’s bowling ball.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“That thing could have killed me!” he exclaimed.

“The bowling ball?” I said. “Yes, I imagine it could if it landed right on your head. But then, as bowling balls go, it’s pretty mild mannered. Most of the time it just stays up there on the shelf where we put it. I’ve never known it to lie in wait and pounce on an innocent bystander before.”

Of course, storing the bowling ball on an upper shelf wasn’t a particularly clever idea, but I’d discuss that with Rob later.

“I hope I don’t have a concussion,” Blanco said.

“Then again, bowling balls can be pretty territorial,” I went on. “I can’t answer for what it would do if it caught someone ransacking its closet. Just why were you ransacking the closet?”

“I wasn’t ransacking,” Blanco said. “I was gesticulating. I must have bumped the shelf.”

“Gesticulating,” I repeated. “And you normally hide in closets to practice your gesticulating?”

“I was having a conversation. An animated conversation. On my cell phone.” His tone was petulant rather than guilty, so perhaps he was telling the truth. “Since there doesn’t seem to be a single room in this entire house not filled with dozens of boisterous, inquisitive people, I was attempting to use your coat closet to obtain some small measure of privacy.”

I considered asking why he didn’t go back to his own office to make his calls. After all, the planned emergency meeting of Ramon’s dissertation committee was presumably postponed for the time being. But perhaps he had his reasons. The lack of heat in his office. Or orders from the chief to stick around for a while.

He had begun to thrash around, dislodging the sports equipment that had landed on him. He looked up at me as if expecting help. I patted the twins and watched as he struggled to his feet.

“If the bowling ball did hit you on the head, you could ask Dad to take a look at it,” I said.

“Thank you,” he said. “But I think I would prefer to see my own physician. But—”

He paused as if deep in thought.

“This incident has made me wonder. About Dr. Wright’s death, I mean. Could she possibly have hit her head in the fall?”