It wasn’t until the door slid shut that I realized that she got off on the third floor. The coffee shop was in the lobby. Either she got off on the wrong floor by accident because I’d rattled her. Or she got off on the wrong floor on purpose to get away from me.

Either way, she was running scared. Which is something, I imagined, murderers often do.

Chapter Fourteen

I headed home along Olympic Boulevard, wondering if Denise had bumped off SueEllen. I could just picture their final confrontation. (“My man-made boobs are perkier than your man-made boobs!”)

Then suddenly I saw Beverly High coming up on my left. I remembered what Lt. Webb said about Brad having lunch on the football field the day of the murder.

On a whim, I turned left and pulled into the parking lot. The last time I’d seen this many luxury cars was the night of Heidi’s party. Of course, not all them were luxury cars. There were a few old clunkers there, too. Those were parked in the teachers’ section.

I squeezed my Corolla in between a BMW and a Porsche with the vanity license plate HOT BOD. The campus intellectual, no doubt. Then I left the parking lot and wandered past various low slung buildings, until I finally came to the football stadium. At this time of day, it was deserted.

I took a seat in the bleachers and looked out over the empty field. How convenient, that Brad claimed to have eaten lunch here on the day of the murder. If he was the killer, it would be too dangerous to pretend he’d eaten at the school cafeteria. Even if his friends lied for him, he ran the risk that some nerdy kid would come forward and testify that he hadn’t been there at all.

Of course, maybe Brad was telling the truth. Maybe he really did eat lunch out here in the football field.

Back when I was in high school, I never ate lunch in the cafeteria. A hotbed of snobbism, with a caste system straight out of Calcutta, the cafeteria was Hell with mashed potatoes—all the popular kids sitting together, all the nerds sitting together, and all the rest of us, floating somewhere in between, in awe of the caste above us and terrified of being contaminated by the caste below.

Which is why I joined the Art Squad. In a tiny cubicle in the basement of the building, my best friend Mara and I spent our lunch hours painting posters for the dances we never went to and the pep rallies we scorned. How safe we felt, tucked away with our egg salad sandwiches and acrylic paints, far from the frantic jockeying for social status in the cafeteria.

I was busy re-living the bad old days of high school, when suddenly the silence was shattered by shrill laughter. I looked up and saw The Enemy. A dozen or so cheerleaders were ambling out onto the football field for cheerleading practice. These were the girls I’d alternately loathed and envied in high school. The crème de la crème, the school beauties, every one of them sporting flat tummies and perfect hair.