Murder is an Art

by Bill Crider

  “I’m not apathetic,” Neville said. “I’m just not excited about the same things you are. If you want things to change, get busy and change them.”

  “Maybe I will,” Johnson said, and he stomped away down the hall.

  Neville, glad to see him leave, turned back to his desk and picked up his pen. He had a computer in the office, but he preferred to write his first drafts out in longhand and then polish them up as he entered them into the computer’s memory. And then there was his secret shame, which also kept him from the computer and which he didn’t like to think about.

  So he wouldn’t.

  He read over the last paragraph of his article, but he couldn’t get back into the flow of things. With a glance over his shoulder at the computer, he laid the pen down again. Damn that A. B. D. anyway. He was always causing trouble in the department, so much so that Jack hated going to departmental meetings. Not that Sally held many meetings. That was one of the things that Jack liked about her.

  It wasn’t one of the important things, however. What he liked even more was the way her smile was just a little crooked, and the little crinkles at the corners of her eyes. And the way she looked him straight in the eye when she talked to him. Not to mention the way that she looked in the tights she wore to aerobics class.

  He’d seen her only by accident, of course, one late afternoon when he’d been passing by the room where the class met. Pausing for a moment to watch the exercisers was only natural, or so he told himself. He might have grown to adulthood in a less enlightened era, but that didn’t mean he was a sexist pig. He hoped.

  But maybe he was. It wasn’t easy to get the image of Sally in the leotard out of his mind. Not that he’d tried very hard.

  Sally had come to Hughes six years earlier, just after her husband had died in a car crash—an accident, Jack had heard, though Troy Beauchamp had spread the rumor that it was suicide.

  “He had an inoperable tumor,” Troy said. “I know a man who knows the family, and he says that Good couldn’t take the pain any longer. So he ended things in a way that would look like an accident. That way Sally got the double-indemnity payment.”

  Jack had no idea whether Troy was telling the truth. It was always that way with Troy’s stories. They were plausible, but you could never be sure about their veracity. Troy would pass along any story that he heard, no matter what the reliability of the source might be.

  Anyway, whatever had happened to Sally’s husband was beside the point. She was single, and that was all that interested Jack.

  For her first two years at Hughes, she had kept pretty much to herself, which was all right. She was a division chair, after all. People in positions of power, even such power as a division chair had, sometimes liked to hold themselves aloof.

  But then something had changed. Maybe she had finally gotten over the worst of her grief. At any rate, she began dating.

  She didn’t date anyone from the college, but Jack heard stories (mostly from Troy Beauchamp) about her going out with some of the more prominent members of the community and even with an administrator or two from colleges in Houston.

  He didn’t blame her. She needed to get out, have a little fun. Jack didn’t get out himself, but he could certainly understand someone who did.

  Jack had been married, too, but not for long. His wife had left him while he was still in graduate school, saying that he was paying more attention to his studies than to her. She had probably been right, and Jack was sorry that he hadn’t arranged his priorities differently. It was too late for that now, however, and he’d never really thought about getting married again.

  Oh, he’d dated a lot of different women, and unlike Sally, he hadn’t restricted himself to people outside the college community. There were still a couple of women on the faculty and staff who held grudges against him because they thought he’d led them on. And, like his wife, they were probably right.

  Still, he didn’t think his breaking up with them had been all his fault. None of them had been exactly perfect. Vera Vaughn, for example. Holy smoke! Troy Beauchamp occasionally liked to speculate about her sex life. If he only knew.

  Jack knew, and he suspected that Val Hurley knew. Val had dated Vera only recently, and while they appeared physically mismatched—Vera tall and lithe, Val short and stocky—they might have been better matched than they appeared. Jack had always thought Val looked a little like a satyr. Whatever the case, Vera and Val were no longer going together. Jack had no idea why. Maybe he could ask Troy.

  Jack shook his head and tried to drag his mind back to Buddy Holly and the article he was writing. It was impossible. The trouble was that he was very attracted to Sally Good, and that no doubt proved something perverse about him. He was sure that she was never going to date anyone from the college, and even if she did, it wouldn’t be him.

  He thought about the great teenage confidence that Buddy Holly expressed in songs like “That’ll Be the Day” and “Not Fade Away.” Too bad I don’t have confidence like that, Jack thought. But then I’m not sixteen anymore.

  A little voice in his head said, You didn’t have confidence like that even when you were sixteen.

  “Oh, shut up,” Jack said.

  7

  “I’m sorry to take up more of your time,” Fieldstone said. “But we have a serious matter to settle.”

  He was sitting behind his big desk again, with Sally and Val on the couch opposite him. He looked too serious to be talking about something like an office chair, and Sally wondered what was going on. Maybe he was talking about the painting again.

  “I thought we’d just settled things,” she said. “Mr. Talon seems satisfied with the solution Dean Naylor offered.”

  “I’m not talking about the painting,” Fieldstone said. “The goat’s nothing. This is different, and much more serious.”

  Sally had no idea what was going on, and it was clear from his expression that Val didn’t either. So Sally decided to take the risk of looking foolish.

  “Is it about Val’s new chair?”

  Fieldstone sat up a little straighter. “New chair? What new chair? Are you joking, Dr. Good?”

  Well, she’d known she might look foolish.

  “No, I’m not joking,” she said. “It’s just that A. B. D.—I mean, Perry—Johnson came by my office today to complain that Val had bought a new office chair. I thought maybe Perry had come by to complain to you, too.”

  “No,” Fieldstone said. “And he’d better not. Let him put his thoughts in a memo if he wants to complain. I don’t have time to deal with petty departmental jealousies.”

  To her mild surprise, Sally found herself defending A. B. D. “This isn’t petty, not to A. B.—to Perry. He thinks we shouldn’t be spending the college’s money on luxuries like new office chairs.”

  Fieldstone assumed a lecturing manner. “Let me explain something, Dr. Good. Each department chair here at Hughes is in charge of his or her own budget. That means if Mr. Hurley”—he inclined his head toward Val—“wants to buy a chair, he can buy a chair. All he has to do is keep within his budget for the year. We may be in a mild financial bind, but we’re not broke, not by a long way.”

  “That’s what I told Perry,” Sally said.

  “Good. Then he doesn’t need to bother me with a memo, does he?” Fieldstone didn’t wait for her to answer the question. He answered it himself. “Of course he doesn’t. Now about this other thing…”

  His voice trailed off, and he looked over Sally’s head and out the floor-to-ceiling window. Sally didn’t have to turn around to know there wasn’t anything special to see out there, not unless you had an inordinate fondness for parking lots filled with cars. She realized that Fieldstone was having difficulty broaching the subject. It must really be serious.

  She sneaked another look at Val, who gave a surreptitious shrug. Finally, Fieldstone lowered his eyes to Val.

  “Do you know a student named Tammi Thompson?” he asked.

  Tammi had been in Sa
lly’s composition class. She was a very pretty young woman, with beautiful long black hair and a striking figure.

  “I know her,” Val said. “She’s in my Painting I class.”

  “And that’s all? You don’t have any other relationship with her?”

  A silent warning went off in Sally’s head, and Val twisted on the couch as if his underwear had suddenly shrunk three or four sizes.

  “Well?” Fieldstone said.

  “Well,” Val said.

  A saying of her grandfather’s echoed through Sally’s head: Well, well. It’s a deep subject for shallow minds.

  “I’m giving you an opportunity to explain, Mr. Hurley,” Fieldstone said.

  “There’s nothing to explain, really,” Val replied, but his tone indicated to Sally that there was a lot to explain. More, in fact, than Val was willing to discuss.

  “I think there is something to explain,” Fieldstone said. “I had hoped that there wouldn’t be, but your behavior is making it obvious that there is. I’ve already heard one side of the story. Now I’m ready to listen to yours.”

  Sally wished that Jorge were there. He would have enjoyed the way Fieldstone was manipulating Val by withholding crucial information and giving Val every chance to hang himself.

  Which he proceeded to do.

  “She asked me to paint her,” he said. “I didn’t want to do it! She practically begged me!”

  Sally groaned. Both men looked at her.

  “Are you all right, Dr. Good?” Fieldstone asked.

  “Yes. I’m sorry. It’s just that—”

  “I know,” Fieldstone said. “You were surprised. So was I, when I heard about this. And I don’t like surprises. Especially not this kind.”

  Sally told herself to get a grip. Val was one of her division members, after all. It was one thing to manipulate an outsider like Talon, but she was tired of Fieldstone doing it to Val.

  “Just exactly what kind of surprise was it?” she asked. “You haven’t told us that.”

  “I thought that maybe Mr. Hurley would tell us.”

  “I’d rather hear what you were told,” Sally said. “And I’d like to know who told you.”

  Fieldstone put his hands on top of the desk and steepled his fingers. Sally could see his class ring from Texas A&M. Besides surprises, another thing he didn’t like was Aggie jokes.

  “All right,” he said. “Tammi Thompson told me.”

  “What did she tell you?” Val asked.

  “That you were doing a painting of her.”

  “She asked me to.”

  “In the nude,” Fieldstone said.

  Val sank against the back of the couch.

  “Is that true?” Fieldstone asked.

  Val didn’t say anything, and Sally groaned again, inwardly this time. She’d known from the moment Val had admitted that he was doing the painting where this was headed, and she was afraid that it was only going to get worse.

  “Well?” Fieldstone asked.

  “Well,” Val said.

  Déjà vu, Sally thought.

  “It’s true, isn’t it?” Fieldstone said. “You’re doing a painting of her in the nude.”

  Val nodded. “It’s true.”

  Sally began coughing. She opened her purse and felt around inside it for a tissue. Fieldstone sighed and folded his arms across his chest.

  “But she asked me to,” Val said weakly. “It wasn’t my idea.”

  “You’re aware of the policy in the faculty manual, the one dealing with relationships between faculty and students?”

  Val said that he was.

  “Then you know that you should never have entered into a private intimate relationship with a student, no matter whose idea it might have been.”

  “I know, I know,” Val said. “But I didn’t see any real harm in it.”

  “Because it was her idea,” Fieldstone said. “Fine. And whose idea was it for you to touch her?”

  Sally put the wadded tissue back in her purse. My God, she thought. It was hard to believe that she’d been worried about something as silly as a new chair. Or a Satanic painting, for that matter.

  “I didn’t touch her,” Val said. “Not really.”

  “‘Not really’?” Fieldstone said. “How can you ‘not really’ touch someone?”

  “I might have touched her, but if I did, it was an accident that happened in passing. There was nothing more to it than that.”

  “That’s not what Ms. Thompson and her husband say.”

  “Her husband?” Val said. “He’s the reason she wanted the painting. It was going to be a gift for him. She assured me that she had cleared it with him. I wasn’t worried about him at all.”

  “Obviously.” Fieldstone’s voice was cold. “And I’m sure you weren’t thinking about him when you touched Ms. Thompson in an artistic way.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of anything,” Val said. “Except of course the artistic arrangement of the model.”

  “You sound as if you really believe that,” Fieldstone said.

  “I do. I know it was wrong to do the painting, but Tammi—Ms. Thompson—seemed to want it so much. She said that it would be a surprise for her husband on their anniversary.”

  Sally was feeling better about things. Val sounded completely sincere. Maybe he was innocent.

  “A nude picture for an anniversary gift?” Fieldstone said. “Really, Mr. Hurley.”

  It didn’t make much sense, Sally had to admit. She stopped feeling better.

  “She wasn’t completely nude,” Val said. “She was draped.”

  “But of course under the drape she was nude.”

  “That’s right. But there was nothing vulgar about it.”

  “So you say,” Fieldstone said. “But both Ms. Thompson and her husband are quite upset. They’re considering pressing charges against you. And against the school.”

  Sally felt almost sorry for Fieldstone. The most frightening word to any college administrator these days was lawsuit. Combined with a falling enrollment and financial problems, a lawsuit could prove a nearly crippling blow to the school.

  Val sat forward on the couch. “But that’s ridiculous. I did nothing that anyone could find offensive. I swear it.”

  “You might have to swear it,” Fieldstone said. “In a court of law.”

  “I think Val and I should hear what Ms. Thompson and her husband have to say about this,” Sally said. “It’s only right that Val have a chance to hear their story and tell them his side of things.”

  “I’ll see if I can arrange that,” Fieldstone said. “Mr. Hurley, are you sure that Ms. Thompson made no comment to you about your actions at any time during her last sitting?”

  “I’m absolutely sure. She seemed very pleased with the way things were going.”

  “I see. And she never objected to your fondling her?”

  “I object to that word,” Sally said. “You’re acting as if Val has been proven guilty.”

  To Sally’s surprise, Fieldstone said, “You’re right. This isn’t something for me to make a judgment on without a thorough investigation. As Mr. Hurley’s immediate superior, you will have to talk to the Thompsons and bring them together with Mr. Hurley.”

  Sally had been afraid that he might suggest something like that. “May I ask Dean Naylor to assist me?”

  “That might be a good idea,” Fieldstone said.

  Sally certainly thought so. Naylor was as slick as ice, and he would be able to deal with the Thompsons and Val in a way that would make both sides feel better about things.

  “I’d suggest that you meet as soon as possible,” Fieldstone said.

  He opened a desk drawer and took out a piece of paper. Sally could see that there was something typed on it, and Fieldstone looked at it for a few seconds before handing it to her.

  “Here are the Thompsons’ phone number and address,” he said. “Give them a call as soon as possible.”

  “I can’t believe this is happening,” Val said. “I j
ust can’t believe it.”

  Fieldstone leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms.

  “You’d better,” he said.

  8

  Sally went back to her office and closed the door. She sat at her cluttered desk and tried to think about the composition papers that she had to grade, but she knew that she wouldn’t be grading any more of them that day. She would never be able to concentrate.

  She had spent a few minutes with Val after they’d left Fieldstone’s office, and he’d pleaded with her to believe in his innocence.

  “I know it was wrong to do the painting,” he said. “But I did nothing anything else that was wrong. I never touched Ms. Thompson in a lewd way. I never even thought about doing a thing like that. If she says I did, she’s lying.”

  “Why would she lie about something like that, Val?” Sally asked.

  Val’s shoulders slumped. “I don’t know. I can’t understand it. She seemed so happy to be doing this for her husband, and now she’s accusing me of something I didn’t do. Surely you know me well enough to know I’d never do a thing like that.”

  Sally wanted to reassure him, but she couldn’t. She’d heard that he had been dating Vera Vaughn recently, and she had the feeling that anyone who dated Vera would do just about anything.

  But that was a truly uncharitable thought, and she regretted having it. To make amends, she said, “I hope that you wouldn’t, Val. Maybe it’s just some kind of misunderstanding.”

  She didn’t really believe this, but it was the only thing she could think of that might make Val feel a little better.

  “Whatever happened,” she said, “we’ll get to the bottom of it.”

  And speaking of bottoms, she wondered uncharitably just exactly where Val had touched Tammi. She didn’t know how to ask him, however. It was a hard question to put delicately. What could she say? Somehow, “Did you grab her ass, Val?” didn’t seem properly genteel.

  So what she said was, “I hope that when Tammi and her husband come up for their meeting with us, we find out that there’s just been some kind of communications breakdown.”

  “That must be it,” Val said. “It has to be. A communications breakdown. A misunderstanding. That’s it, all right. Tammi—Ms. Thompson—must have misinterpreted something I did, though I don’t see how. Anyway, we’ll get it all straightened out when we talk to her. I’m sure of it.”