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a good ID. Man, she didn’t even have a car. Plus, she left a note. They usually do.”
    “How do you leave a note in a burning building?” Maybe that’s what was bothering me.
    “Left it at her dorm. Shoved it under this woman’s door. Miranda somebody. Starts with a
G
.”
    Miranda Gironde, the resident adviser.
    “So you treated it like a homicide?”
    “Right up till the pieces started falling into place, saying she did herself. You know, maybe if we didn’t find a note. Maybe if we didn’t find out about how she bought the gas. I mean, the way it played, she douses herself with gasoline and lays down naked on this thing — whachacallit, the kids have ’em — a fucking futon. Lights a match. Fuck, you think nothing bothers you after awhile, drunks beating kids, puking in the backseat, but this one bothered me.”
    I wondered how long before he wouldn’t feel anything at all.
    “Smelled like roast pig,” he said. “Didn’t want to eat anything grilled for a while. The smoke just bit at the back of your throat. I thought maybe I’d be a fireman once, but man, I don’t know how they fucking do it. That’s not how I want to end up. You get shot, hey, you get shot; they can still fix you up for a nice funeral. You’re not a crispy critter.”
    He was already getting the humor right.
    “I need the name of the boyfriend, the next of kin, the people you interviewed.”
    I could see that he wanted to deny me the information. Then I could see him think about Shea, about having Shea owe him one.
    Benjy Dowling was the boyfriend. Not a student, Somerville address. I’d already spoken to Miranda Gironde at Phillips House. A Jean St. Cyr was in the mix, and sure enough, she was the roommate. The next of kin was Albert Farrell Brinkman, a Swiss businessman. They’d spoken to him by phone; he was elderly and unable to travel.
    I said, “Who made the ID? The boyfriend?”
    “Wasn’t much to ID. One of those where the morgue asks if you’ll please send a photo. Two choices: dental records, DNA. Took awhile, with the goddam reporters all screaming for the ID. Hell, we had to find the kid’s great-uncle in fucking Switzerland.”
    “Next of kin send the dental records?”
    “ME would know. I don’t have it. Christ, those Harvard stiffs are lucky she didn’t do it in the dorm,” Burkett said. “Man, you send your kid to Harvard, you think she’s gonna be with high-class kids. Imagine, sending your kid to Harvard, she rooms with somebody burns down the whole goddamn dorm?” He had a ring on his finger. Married. Maybe with a kid, a little girl he had dreams for.
    “Other than the boyfriend, who was upset by the news?”
    “Woman at the dorm, one found the note, she took it hard, but she coulda been scared for her job. She was shocked, you could tell, but not as shocked as she might have been. Shit, I don’t know. Everybody deals with their shit differently, you know what I mean?”
    I knew what he meant.
    “Anything feel — I don’t know — off about it?”
    “Other than a kid killing herself for no reason, you mean?”
    “Note say anything about being pregnant?”
    “Nope.”
    “Remember it?”
    “Don’t have to. I wrote it down.” He thumbed through a well-worn spiral pad. “It said she was unworthy, something about being unworthy to be there. Here it is. Three fucking sentences and out: ‘Unworthy as I am, I apologize to those who tried to help me. Time to delve for deeper shades of meaning, ladies and gentlemen. Sorry, but I simply can’t go on.’ ”
    Delve for deeper shades of meaning
? What the hell was that about? This was her life, not some freshman class in literary criticism.
Ladies and gentlemen
. A litle sarcasm there? An acknowledgment of class differences?
    I said, “So, you’re okay with it being suicide?”
    “Hey, not just me, Carlyle. I didn’t make the fucking call. The ME, the arson guys, we all did our job with this one.”
    “Hey, I’m not saying you