by Bill Crider
“I swear to God,” Troy had told her. “It just about covers his back. It’s this huge rooster pecking on the eyes of a corpse. There’s no color in it except for the red in the rooster’s comb and the blood dripping from the corpse’s eye sockets. Creepy? Amen. And Jorge’s muscles? Jesus. You wouldn’t believe the way he looks. He’s like a Russian Olympic weight lifter.”
Weights had a lot to do with Jorge’s appearance, all right. He’d done a lot of lifting while serving out his sentence in one of the high-security units of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. He’d also earned three degrees during his stay there: his associate’s, his bachelor’s, and his master’s.
Jorge, in other words, had profited from the two primary things that the state legislators, and not a few of the state’s citizens, from time to time wanted to deprive prisoners of: weight lifting and education. He still worked out at least an hour a day in the college gym, and he was working on his doctorate at the University of Houston.
“Fieldstone called, all right,” Sally told him, “but he didn’t say what he wanted.”
“Of course not. That’s part of his technique, a power thing. Keeps people off balance.”
Sally silently agreed. Jorge had pretty good insights into people, a talent that had probably stood him in good stead while he was in the crossbar hotel.
“Did he say anything to you?” she asked.
“Just that he wanted to see me in his office. It must have something to do with the prisons, though, if I’m involved.”
Sally nodded. Hughes Community College offered classes in several of the nearby prison units. The program had begun in a small way, but it had grown to the point that it required its own coordinator. That was where Jorge came in. Who better to deal with inmates, wardens, and prison educational personnel than a product of the system? The college’s personnel officer had begun recruiting Jorge even before his release.
“Any lockdowns?” she asked. “Escapes? Problems in any of the classes?”
Jorge shook his head. He had thick black hair pulled back into a little ponytail. With the ponytail and the bulging suit, he looked a little like a B-movie drug dealer. The tassels on his shoes only added to the picture. If he’d been carrying a pistol in a shoulder holster, he would have been perfect.
“If it’s not any of the usual stuff, what could it be?” Sally asked.
“I guess we’ll just have to wait and let Fieldstone tell us that,” Jorge said.
3
Fieldstone’s office was in the Administration Building, so Sally and Jorge had to go outside, not always a pleasant prospect when you live near the Texas Gulf Coast. In the summer, the weather was generally intolerably hot and muggy, and in the fall and spring, it was lukewarm and muggy. There wasn’t much of a winter to speak of, but it was muggy, too.
However, now and then a cool front would push through, the sky would clear, the sun would shine, and the air would be pleasantly dry. It was that way as Sally and Jorge crossed the quadrangle to the Ad Building.
“It’s a great day to be outside, isn’t it?” Sally said.
Jorge said, “Any day is a great day to be outside.”
Sally immediately felt guilty. She was just making conversation; she hadn’t meant to remind Jorge of his prison experience. However long it had lasted, and the rumors about that varied, it couldn’t have been pleasant.
But Jorge hadn’t spent his time in solitary confinement or whatever they called it now—administrative segregation, maybe. Sally wasn’t always up to date on prison terminology. At any rate, Jorge hadn’t been inside a building all the time; surely he had been allowed an occasional walk outside in the yard.
She thought about asking him, but she didn’t know how to go about it. Neither did anyone else, for while everyone was curious about Jorge’s prison experience, they found him too intimidating to ask about such a personal thing.
He wasn’t deliberately intimidating, but his size put people off. He wasn’t just muscular; he was tall. Sally was five-seven, but her head barely reached the top of Jorge’s shoulders.
And it wasn’t as if he’d been in the slammer because he’d been caught driving ten miles over the speed limit on the Interstate; he had served time for murder. He might have seemed more approachable if he had been imprisoned for some drug-related offense, or possibly even something more serious—armed robbery, say. But murder was a little tricky to work into the conversation.
Like the stories about the length of time Jorge had spent behind bars, the stories about the exact nature of his crime varied. Oh, there was no doubt about the murder. That was well established. But no one seemed to know for sure just exactly what the circumstances had been.
One story had it that Jorge had killed his wife’s lover. Troy Beauchamp favored that one, and Sally had heard him tell it more than once in the faculty lounge.
“The way I heard it is that he came home early from work one day,” Troy had said. “And he caught his wife in bed with another man.”
“What kind of work did he do?” asked Vera Vaughn.
Vera was a tall, stout blonde who taught sociology and dressed in leather a lot—leather skirts, leather pants, leather jackets. Sally’s opinion was that if the college ever did a stage production of Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, Vera would be a shoo-in for the title role.
Vera also had strong feminist leanings and occasionally expressed convictions that Sally thought were based more on emotion and speculation than on facts and research. For instance, Vera believed that the top women marathoners consistently finished behind the top men only because of social and cultural conditioning.
“Who cares what kind of work Jorge did?” Troy asked.
“It could be important,” Vera answered. “A man’s self-image is often related to his job. Jorge could have been driven to murder because of low self-esteem.”
Troy grimaced. “I think he was a garage mechanic or something. He might have gotten his hands dirty, but he probably made more money in a week than I do in a month. Anyway, he came home early, and—”
“I don’t think mechanics ever get off work early,” Gary Borden said.
Gary taught psychology. He, or at least his wardrobe, had never emerged from the 1970s. He wore Buddy Holly glasses and dressed like a member of the cast of The Bob Newhart Show, the one where Bob played a psychologist. The lapels of his sports jackets stretched nearly to his armpits, and his ties were almost as wide. He liked to joke that he was related to Bob’s neighbor Howard.
“When I take a car in to get it fixed,” Gary went on, “I sometimes get a call to come by and pick it up at six-thirty or seven in the evening. Those guys put in long hours.”
“Who cares what kind of job he had or what kind of hours he put in?” Troy asked. “The thing is that whatever he did, he got off early, he went home, and he caught his wife in the bedroom with this guy. Pulled him right off her and beat him to a bloody pulp with his bare hands.”
Sally could almost picture it, Jorge standing there in greasy coveralls, his big hands like mallets, grease in the creases of his skin and under his fingernails. He was silently looking down at the battered body of the man who had been making illicit love to his wife. She wondered if he felt remorse.
“The wife called 911 while it was going on,” Troy said. “But by the time the cops got there, it was too late.”
“The cops always show up too late,” Gary said.
Vera had a different slant on things. “I thought that in Texas, it was perfectly all right to kill your wife’s lover if you caught them in the act. A typical example of how males manipulate the law, in my opinion.”
“It’s not all right,” Gary said. “I mean, it’s definitely against the law. But I’ve heard you usually get no-billed by the grand jury. Anyway, that’s not the story I heard about Jorge.”
“Then you heard wrong,” Troy said.
Troy liked gossip, but he always liked to think that his version of events was the correct one, whether it wa
s or not. He didn’t like to be contradicted.
“Tell us what you heard,” Sally said, always ready to get a new slant on things involving Jorge. She was intimidated by him, but she had to admit that he was interesting.
“I heard he killed some kid with a baseball bat,” Gary said.
“An aluminum bat or a wooden one?” Troy asked, possibly in revenge.
Gary looked thoughtful, the way he might if some student in his class had raised his hand in the middle of a discussion of cognitive dissonance to ask when the winter break began.
“Gee, that’s a very good question, Troy. I never thought about it before. It was probably wood, but it might have been aluminum. Either way, the results were the same.”
“So tell us the story,” Vera said. She didn’t like interruptions unless she was the one doing the interrupting.
“It happened when he was just a kid,” Gary said. “In San Antonio; some kind of gang-related thing. Some other kid had raped Jorge’s sister—”
“Typical of a male gang member’s aggression and hostility toward women,” Vera said.
“Sure,” Gary agreed. “Anyway, the cops couldn’t pin it on him. He got some of the other gang members to swear he was playing cards with them when it happened, and it came down to her word against his and eight or ten other guys’. Jorge started in on the witnesses first, beating them up and making them promise they’d recant. When the rapist heard about it, he went after Jorge with a gun.”
“Gun versus bat for the honor of a woman,” Troy said. “Sounds like the plot of a bad black-and-white American-International movie from 1957.”
“Were there any good American-International movies?” Vera asked.
“We could ask Jack Neville,” Sally said.
Neville was as much a product of the fifties as Borden was of the sixties. He could spend hours arguing whether Fabian’s musical efforts had held up better after forty years than Frankie Avalon’s.
“I’d rather not,” Gary said. “Do you want to hear about this or just forget it?”
“I’m sorry,” Sally said. “I want to hear about it.”
Gary looked at Troy, who nodded. Vera just smiled, cruelly, which was the only way she could smile.
“All right, then,” Gary said. “The way I heard it, the other kid shot Jorge twice, but Jorge still managed to get to him with the bat. Smashed his head like a pumpkin.”
“Smashing Pumpkins,” Troy said. “Sounds like a good name for a singing group.”
Gary looked at him blankly.
“Never mind,” Troy said. “I forgot that you were a Moby Grape fan.”
“Tell us more about smashing the head,” Vera said.
There was a look in Vera’s eyes that made Sally feel vaguely queasy, though not as queasy as the image of Jorge bleeding from his not-quite-mortal bullet wounds as he stood looking down at the crushed head leaking blood and fluid out onto the dark concrete of some back alley in San Antonio. She wondered if Troy had seen the bullet scars in the gym, but this probably wasn’t the time to ask.
“That’s the whole story,” Gary said. “More or less, anyway. Somebody took Jorge to the emergency room, and the cops arrested him.”
“Couldn’t be true,” Troy said. “The way you tell it, it was a clear-cut case of self-defense. Jorge would never have been sent away for murder if it had happened that way. It happened the way I said. Trust me.”
As colorful as both stories were and as convincing as they sounded, Sally wasn’t sure that either of them was even vaguely connected to reality. She’d heard other stories, too, and most of them were just as sensational as the two Troy and Gary had told. But nothing she’d heard had the ring of absolute truth. Someday, maybe she’d find out what had really happened.
But not right now. Right now she had to deal with Fieldstone.
4
Eva Dillon was behind her desk when Jorge and Sally entered the Ad Building. Sally thought she detected a telltale trace of chocolate at the corner of Eva’s mouth, but she didn’t mention it.
She said, “Dr. Fieldstone wanted to see us.”
Eva nodded. “Go right in.”
Sally opened the door and preceded Jorge into the president’s office. The dark wood walls were covered with plaques presented to Fieldstone by various civic groups, interspersed with enlarged photographs of Texas wildflowers taken by Fieldstone himself. An avid amateur photographer, he took weekend trips every spring to get his glossy shots of bluebonnets, Indian paintbrushes, and Indian blankets.
Fieldstone sat behind a desk that wasn’t quite as large as the deck of an aircraft carrier, in a chair that made Sally’s executive model look as if it had been put together by the only English major in a high school crafts class. Fieldstone was wearing a dark suit that must have cost at least nine hundred dollars, along with a starched white shirt and an Endangered Species tie.
On the couch to his left sat Val Hurley and James Naylor, the academic dean, while on the couch in front of the desk was a man Sally recognized, though she had never met him.
His name was Roy Don Talon, and he was a local automobile dealer who’d made a fortune thanks to a series of TV ads in which he told potential customers in Houston to “Drive to Hughes for huge savings.”
Sally would have liked to blame Talon for the fact that something like sixty percent of her students spelled the name of the school “Huge Community College,” but it probably wasn’t entirely his fault.
The fact that he dressed like a performer on the Grand Ol’ Opry in the 1950s was his fault, however. He wore a sequined Western-cut jacket, matching pants, and cowboy boots—the same outfit he wore for his commercials. His ten-gallon hat was beside him on the couch. Maybe he was keeping up his image, but Sally thought it was a little much.
All four of the men stood when Sally walked into the room, a gesture that she knew was meant in the best possible way, so she didn’t take offense. Vera Vaughn would probably have cut them off at the knees.
“Dr. Sally Good, chair of Arts and Humanities, and Mr. Jorge Rodriguez, who’s in charge of our prison program,” Dr. Fieldstone announced. “You two know Dr. Naylor and Mr. Hurley. This is Roy Don Talon.”
“Howdy, ma’am,” Talon said, sticking out his hand to Sally, who shook it quickly and let it go. It was cool and dry, and she felt as if she were shaking hands with a lizard.
Jorge didn’t let go of Talon’s hand quite so soon, and Sally noticed a narrowing of Talon’s eyes. She wondered if Jorge was showing off his grip.
“Everyone have a seat,” Fieldstone said.
Hurley and Naylor sat back on the couch behind them, so Sally was forced to sit beside Talon, who picked up his hat and set it on his knees. Jorge sat beside Sally, and her arm brushed against his. For some reason, she felt as if she might be blushing.
“Mr. Talon has come to us with a problem,” Fieldstone said. “A somewhat serious problem.”
“What problem?” Jorge asked.
“Satanism,” Dr. Fieldstone said. “At least that’s what Mr. Talon is calling it.”
“That’s not what I’m callin’ it,” Roy Don Talon said. His voice was rough but sincere, a good voice for selling cars. “That’s what it is, plain and simple. What I want to know is, what are you-all gonna do about it?”
“It’s not Satanism,” Val Hurley said. “It’s just a painting of a goat.”
Hurley looked a little like a goat himself, Sally thought. Or a satyr. He was short, with a triangular face, and his hair, which was wavy and parted in the middle, twisted on his forehead into two hornlike curls.
“Sure it’s a goat,” Talon said. “And the goat is a well-known symbol of Satanism and witchcraft. You can ask anybody that knows, and they’ll tell you that. And what about those numbers on his head? Huh? What about ’em?”
“Numbers?” Hurley said. “What numbers?”
“Those numbers on that goat’s head. Six-six-six, plain as day. The Number of the Beast. Right out of the book of Revelations.�
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Sally thought about telling him that the biblical book was actually “The Revelation of St. John the Divine” and that there was no s on the end of the word, but she didn’t. It wouldn’t have done any good, and besides, Talon didn’t give her a chance. He just kept right on talking.
“Don’t tell me you don’t know about those numbers,” he said. “They’re right there for ever’body to see. I came out here to the art show because I like to support the college when I can, but seeing that picture gave me a shock, I’ll tell you.”
So that’s what this was about, Sally thought. The student art show. She decided it was time to speak up.
“I didn’t see any numbers,” she said.
“You been to the art gallery?” Talon asked.
She said, “Yes. I go to all the exhibits.”
“Did you see the picture of that goat?” Talon asked.
“Yes,” Sally said, trying to remember if she actually had. If so, the painting hadn’t impressed her, but she wasn’t going to admit it.
“Then you’ve seen the numbers,” Talon said. “Case closed.”
Sally wasn’t going to be talked to like that, even if Talon was one of the biggest taxpayers in the district. She stood up and asked, “Are you calling me a liar?”
“Now, now,” Fieldstone said, standing as well. He walked out from behind his desk, the top of which was as clean as the floor of a compulsive’s kitchen. Sally thought about her own desk, which by comparison looked like an explosion in a paper-recycling facility.
“No one’s making any accusations,” Fieldstone went on. “Mr. Talon is—”
“Mr. Talon is making accusations,” Jorge said.
He didn’t have to stand up to get anyone’s attention. He was a commanding presence even while he was sitting down.
Talon said, “Damn right I am.” He glanced at Sally. “Pardon my French, ma’am. But there’s Satanism goin’ on here, and I aim to put a stop to it.”