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preoccupied by my new living situation, I would have seen that there was hardly any water in the toilet, but I had been preoccupied with my full bladder. The heroin was in an airtight bag and had been jammed into the toilet, obstructing the flow of water into the waste pipe, which caused the explosion.
    I had called Fred who, in turn, called the U.S. Cavalry, or so it seemed. Two police cars—“cruisers,” as I like to erroneously refer to them—screeched to a halt outside the building, unloading a quartet of uniformed cops, three male and one female, young and old, big and bigger. Two detectives from the narcotics bureau also arrived, looking dazed and bedraggled, not unlike the people with whom they usually dealt. Crawford explained to me that the drug squad liked using guys who had a certain “grittiness” to them; if these two—Marcus and Lattanzi—were any indication, I’d say that the department had succeeded. I would have mistaken the two of them for junkies had I passed them on the street.
    I was pushed out of the way and told to sit in my “living room” with my hands in my pockets so that I wouldn’t touch anything. My “living room,” I wanted to clarify, was in Dobbs Ferry, not in this two-hundred-year-old building that smelled like Murphy’s oil soap and sweat.
    Lattanzi, compact and swarthy in jeans and a worn pair of cowboy boots, knelt in front of me, his pad resting on his knee. “Start at the beginning.”
    The beginning? Like how I was just minding my own business, drinking flat Diet Coke at a faculty mixer, and ended up living in an ancient building with cranky toilets? Or this beginning: I had had too much coffee before I left the house that day which facilitated my having to pee immediately upon entering my new digs? I looked at Lattanzi’s black eyes and decided to go with the short and sweet version.
    “I had to pee. I flushed. The toilet exploded.”
    “And this Brookwell guy? Ever met him?”
    I flashed on Wayne Brookwell’s face, his mouth hanging slightly agape in his official St. Thomas Web site photo. “Nope.”
    Lattanzi stood up. “Lucky for you your boyfriend can plumb.”
    “He can? He can plumb?” I asked, having no idea what he was talking about.
    The detective rocked back on his cowboy boots. “Well, he can stick his hand down a toilet. That’s more than I can say for his partner.”
    I heard Fred gag as Crawford came up with something not, shall we say, germane to the case.
    I went into the hallway and perched on the desk in the main part of the lobby. From what I was told, we were waiting for the Crime Scene people, who would dust the room and look for any additional evidence.
    I thanked the stars above that spring break was still on and that no one would be back to the building until at least lunch-time the next day. Because if Etheridge, Merrimack, or anybody else in the administration saw what was going on, I was toast. I wouldn’t put it past them to enter some trumped-up charge in my file to continue to withhold my tenure and get me off campus tout de suite . Even I had to admit: I was becoming a giant pain in the ass, even if the stuff in the toilet had no relation to me whatsoever.
    The cops, Marcus and Lattanzi included, were congregated outside of the suite in the hallway, chatting amiably about a variety of topics. I got bored sitting in the empty lobby and came back to the room, not obeying the cops’ command to stay out of the way. I stood on my tiptoes trying to observe what was going on in the bathroom over Fred’s hulking frame.
    “Find anything else?” I asked, watching Crawford hand Fred something wet and nasty, which Fred put in a Ziploc bag. He took a permanent marker and wrote something in his chicken scratch along the top. He added the bag to a couple of others that sat on the sink next to the toilet.
    Crawford hoisted himself up from the floor, wetter and dirtier than he had been when he arrived to help me move. He wiped his hands on