Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 133, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 811 & 812, March/April 2009

She shut the door softly behind her. I went out on the balcony, lit a cigarette, and smoked while I looked out at gray sidewalks and gray skies that hinted at snow but would only deliver another cold, driving rain. For a couple of minutes, I concocted a convoluted story straight from a made-for-television movie. Ashley was the jealous neighbor, in love with Lea’s boyfriend, enraged by the way Lea treated him, certain that if Lea were out of the way, she and Ryan would live happily ever after. But the theory was silly, pure fantasy. I clung to the possibility of Ryan Beatty as the murderer. I glanced at the sagging railing. Maybe Ryan Beatty had had enough of her cheating, and things had gotten out of hand. That would be a hell of a lot easier to tell Cheryl than that her daughter had finally taken an honest look in the mirror and decided she wasn’t good enough to live.

I flicked my cigarette off the balcony, stepped forward, looked over the rail, and spotted my butt on the sidewalk. The only thing that told me was that it was a long way down.

Investigating anything is a lot like life itself. Three quarters of everything you do is a waste of time. After my visit to Lea’s apartment, thirty-six out of the next forty-eight hours were a complete wash. I tracked down Ryan Beatty’s address but Ryan’s roommate, a stocky black kid with a facial tic, told me that Ryan hadn’t been home since Lea’s funeral and swore he had no idea where Ryan was staying. I dropped by the Delta Bar and Grille, but the manager, a saggy-breasted middle-aged woman with a smoker’s cough, told me that Ryan had taken the week off. She thought he might be at his parents’ place over in Arkansas, but she couldn’t say for sure. I spent half an hour with the University of Memphis’s strength-and-conditioning coach, who told me that Ryan’s problem was that he had a head for the game but not the body for it. In an era of two-hundred-forty-pound quarterbacks, Ryan Beatty was tall and naturally scrawny. Desperate to play, he took steroids to bulk up, got caught, and then got bounced off the team. For Ryan, college had only been an excuse to play football so as soon as he left the team, he left the university. When I asked if he thought Ryan might have killed Lea Washburn, the coach looked genuinely surprised. Not Ryan, he said. No way. Even when Ryan was “riding the ‘roids,” he’d been emotional, prone to crying jags over an incomplete pass at practice or a bad call during a game, but never violent.

I interviewed a couple of Lea’s classmates who told me almost exactly what Ashley, her across-the-hall neighbor, had. Lea was a sad girl who didn’t fit in and slept around a lot. I spoke with Lea’s professors, two of whom admitted to having an affair with her. They were very nervous and very married. Both expressed their regret over Lea’s death and provided me with alibis before I asked. And both begged me to keep their affairs secret, not from their wives, but from their departmental chairs. Exhausted, disgusted, and running out of options, I stopped by the Refugee, avoided as many of Cheryl’s questions as I could, and answered the others with outright lies. In fact, the only reason the entire forty-eight hours weren’t a complete waste is that I managed to get a few hours of sleep and somehow found myself spending a couple of relatively pleasurable hours talking the saggy-breasted, gravel-throated manager of the Delta Bar and Grille out of her phone number.

The next day an old University of Memphis football brochure gave me Ryan Beatty’s hometown in Arkansas and a quick call to the Calico Rock sheriff’s department gave me Beatty’s parents’ phone number and address, but I put off making the drive to Arkansas.

Stopping by the Better Way Foundation, the nonprofit suicide-prevention hotline that Lea Washburn had called before she’d gone headfirst over the balcony, seemed like a good idea. It was the last of the loose ends, and I was up early and determined not to hit the nearest bar until the sun was dipping on the other side of the Mississippi.