The Cake

Excerpt From: The Cake

God, it was hopeless. He’d prepared what he thought was a damned good class on advanced criminal procedure, but the blank faces staring back at Phillip Sedgwick indicated otherwise. He scanned the body language of his thirty students. They all seemed to lean to the right, as if any moment their bodies would airlift en masse, hurling their way out through the doors. Well, he was bored too, but come on, he was a cool guy. He had smarts. He had charisma…didn’t he?

It was annoying as hell. Half of the students and their inane questions drove him up the wall, the other half looked so uninterested he wasn’t sure they were even alive. Granted, not everyone here would become a judge or legislator, but he’d hoped his second-year class would have gained a more advanced understanding of at least some of the concepts he tried to teach. He’d also, apparently mistakenly, presumed they had a higher level of interest in the elective course.

In desperation, his gaze fell on the girl in the third row. She openly read a book that he knew, from its colourful binding, had absolutely nothing to do with the subject matter. It probably wasn’t even a textbook related to the law at all. The guy sitting beside her elbowed her, his gaze meeting Phillip’s. The girl kept reading, oblivious to all the attention now focussed on her.

Phillip felt a trickle of sweat bead at his collar.

Oh, my God! My body’s leaning towards the door, too!

He straightened his back. No, he didn’t want to stay in the stuffy room any more than they did, but since the new college rules clamped down on using air conditioning in the spring and none of the windows opened, they would all have to suffer.

Outside, San Francisco beckoned. He ached to feel the breeze he could see ruffling the leaves on the trees, wanting its cooling action on his skin. Below that, he saw green grass and a few students barefoot, lying on their backs. He swallowed down a pang of jealousy. Callow youths…if only they knew how lucky they were.

With the silence having gone on for too long and half of the class staring at him, he had no choice. He had to take control. Besides, he’d damn well played to much tougher crowds and won.

Phillip left his desk at the front of the room and strode up the stairs on the left side of the lecture room, stopping by the girl still immersed in her book.

“Anything you care to share with the rest of us?” he asked, hands on hips.

Too late, he saw the title: The Sex Life of the Foot and Shoe. Great, just great.

She looked up, blinking. A few kids smothered smiles. A couple of them giggled. She had the grace to look embarrassed. Phillip walked back to his desk, leaning on the podium, and waited.

“Um…yeah. It’s interesting. It…well, it’s about the history of shoe design…and why people wear certain types of shoes.”

“And it relates to advanced criminal procedure…how?”

The girl chewed at her lip. “Well, it says you can tell a lot about people by the shoes they choose to wear.”

“Really. And what do my shoes tell you about me?”

Her gaze never left his face. “You wear boots. You’re sexually confident, inclined to think highly of yourself. According to the book, since yours are never scuffed, you’re probably great in the sack.”

The class burst into laughter. Phillip, mortified, took a deep breath and hoped his embarrassment didn’t show. He did what any good circus master would do. He used the situation to his advantage.

“You see,” he said, when the laughter subsided, “a good criminal investigator uses all the tools he has at his disposal to his advantage, however limited they might be. Did anyone here see the movie The Silence of the Lambs?”

Several hands shot up into the air. He warmed to his subject now that he had the attention of the entire room.