“This was it? There was no complicated motivational background, a bad childhood, a hidden rape?” Tibor said. “It doesn’t feel right somehow. It doesn’t feel like an American crime.”
“I know what you mean.” Gregor was finished with his salad. He pushed the bowl away. “At Windsor they were ripping off the student drawing accounts. Parents deposited money in school accounts, which students were allowed to draw from; but as a safety precaution they had to sign off on the transaction with their houseparent before they took the cash. Then they used their student ID as a debit card. The IDs had those magnetic strips on the back.”
“Ah, yes, I see,” Tibor said.
“Well,” Gregor said, “Cherie and Melissa stole the IDs, which wasn’t hard to do. Kids leave their wallets all over the place; they leave the IDs in backpacks and wherever. They’d pick them up. The student concerned would report an ID missing. They’d put in for a new one for the student, and when they did they were supposed—well, Cherie was supposed to; she was the responsible faculty member—they were supposed to change the PIN number. And sometimes they did, but the thing is, also as a safety precaution, the PIN had to be on file and guess who kept the files?”
“Oh,” Tibor said, “that was very stupid.”
“The school seemed to think that since the student IDs could only access the drawing accounts, it was more important for the school and houseparents to be able to get into the accounts than it was to make sure they couldn’t be stolen from. Anyway, there they were, it was a perfect setup, and they were able to skim more than two thousand dollars a week.”
“A week? I think students have much more money now than when I was one,” Tibor said.
“I’m sure they do,” Gregor said. “But they’d stayed at Windsor a lot longer than they had anywhere else because they were making a lot more money and it was a lot easier. Then, when Mark and Michael Feyre started school this fall, things started to fall apart. First they made a mistake with Mark and made a withdrawal at a time he knew he couldn’t have made it himself. It didn’t matter that they’d forged his signature on the account book. He knew where he had been at the time he was supposed to have been signing it, several miles away in Boston. So the first thing they had to do was to neutralize him so that he couldn’t pursue it, and Cherie took care of that by making him sick with arsenic. Then, while he was in the infirmary, she went up to his room and tampered with his multivitamin capsules by putting a very small amount of arsenic into each one. That kept him sick, and it kept him screwed up, and they figured that if that went on long enough, he’d flunk out or be asked to leave. Which is probably what would have happened if it hadn’t been for Michael Feyre.”
“Ah,” Tibor said. “The boy whose mother won the lottery. That was on CNN.”
“Yes, the boy whose mother won the lottery,” Gregor said. “Unfortunately, he was an out-and-out psychopath. He was a bully and worse. And everybody knew it. At some point he found out what Cherie and Melissa were doing, and he got hold, not only of a whole bunch of stolen student IDs that were all of students in Hayes House, but of the bank card for the secret account as well. He stole it and he told Cherie Wardrop that if she wanted it back she had to go get it for herself. He threw it under a stand of evergreens out near a pond at the back end of the Windsor campus. She went out there to try to get it back, and Mark saw her from a window in the library, lying flat on her stomach and trying to push herself under the branches. He thought she was a student or somebody from town passed out. It was Friday. He figured somebody had been drinking. By the time he got out there, Cherie was gone, and he started to think he was hallucinating. Except something about the scene bothered the hell out of him and went on bothering him.
“In the meantime Cherie had gone back to Hayes House and gone up to see Michael Feyre. According to her, he told her that since she was too stupid to find the cards for herself, he’d give them to her, but only if she ‘serviced’ him. What he wanted was to have her tie him up and put a noose around his neck, to, uh—”
“Autoasphyxiation erotica,” Tibor said. “I am not a child, Krekor. I read the papers. They tie themselves so that they are almost strangling and that gives them a bigger orgasm. Or they think so. I have never tried it. I think it’s very stupid. Every year there’s another case at UPenn or Penn State, and the silly boy ends up dead.”
“Yes, well, Michael Feyre had no intention of ending up dead. He always made sure to have women there for safeties. And there were always women. He was good at sexual blackmail, our Michael. Cherie said he warned her that if she tried anything funny, the cards were where somebody would be able to find them; and she wouldn’t know where toget them on her own. But she didn’t believe him. She thought he either had the cards on his person somewhere, or in the room, or that they were right there under the evergreens where he said he’d put them. So as soon as she got the scene all set, instead of unzipping his fly and giving him the blow job she was supposed to give him, she kicked the chair out from under him and let him hang. Then she searched the room, and when she couldn’t find anything, she decided the cards were under the evergreens, and there wasn’t anything she had to worry about. She went back downstairs to her apartment. Mark came home and found Michael hanging and dead. End of problem.”