Of course she had known that the Knight brothers were private investigators in New York, despite the formidable learning of Roger that had more than justified the offer to him of the endowed chair. She had assumed that Philip had gone into virtual retirement since moving to Notre Dame. That Ballast had enlisted the aid of the brothers to find out who was behind the disturbing events of the previous week had not surprised her. She had assumed they were on a wild goose chase until Orion Plant emerged as the most likely person behind the apparent campaign to embarrass the university. It occurred to her that the death of the dismissed graduate student lifted the threat of any further harassment. Prosecuting him would have been to prolong the effect of what had already happened.
“Busy?”
Harold looked in at her, grinning.
“Of course I’m busy.”
“No one would have guessed. Got any coffee?”
“I thought you came to ask me to lunch.”
“You read my mind.”
But his mind was just what she could not read. She had told herself that it was demeaning for her to fall for someone in the computer center, a man at the beck and call of anyone having a computer. A very good-looking maintenance man, and eligible. Who obviously liked her. His one suggestion that their relation move to a more intimate level had been rebuffed, strategically. Or tactically. Anita Trafficant was of a mind to accept an offer of marriage from Harold Ivray.
He suggested the Decio deli, which would not have been her choice, but she was so pleased to see that his recent preoccupation and indifference were a thing of the past that she did not demur.
“You read my mind,” she said.
“If only I could.”
“You’re not trying hard enough.”
“Because I’m Hertz?”
“I don’t get it.”
“Number one. Avis isn’t, and has to try harder.”
“You’re number one,” she purred, and slipped her arm through his.
The deli was crowded with refugees from the library staff and a handful of resentful professors. A place designed for the faculty had become the gathering place of the help. Two secretaries leaned toward one another at the table they shared, knees touching. The sandwiches were huge and Anita offered to share with Harold, but he was hungry. They ordered one and a half turkey sandwiches and Anita took possession of the last empty table, getting to it before a shaggy, shuffling professor with greasy hair and a lowering expression could claim it. His bald companion grinned menacingly. Anita ignored them, irked that they did not recognize her. No one else seemed to either. She decided that was the attraction of this place.
“Wasn’t that terrible about the graduate student,” she said when Harry brought their food and sat across from her, his knees touching hers as if they were secretaries. But it was just the size of the tables.
Harold frowned as if he didn’t understand her.
“You have to have heard of the body found by the lake day before yesterday.”
“Was he a graduate student?”
“Was is the word. He’d been expelled.”
He clearly was not interested in the topic. Why should he be? Still, a murder was a murder. He began to talk about hockey.
“That’s where we’re going tonight.”
Ye gods. “Oh good.”
The fact was, she would have gone to a wrestling match with him if that’s what it took. He decided that she needed a short course on the game to enhance her pleasure that night. Was it for this that they had slipped and slid across the campus? Their walk had given her added excuse to cling to him. He must be brought to a decision before he suggested staying over at her place because she didn’t know if she could trust herself.
Back at the office, she settled at her desk and ignored the work that awaited her. Father Bloom had been getting calls from trustees and was unlikely to bother her for a time. She turned to the computer and called up a database few had access to. Employees of the university, divided into categories. Would Harold be staff? He was listed under maintenance. She called up his personnel file.
A September birthday, late. But she already knew he was a Libra. She herself was a Pisces. A good combination, very good. Adams High School, a degree from IUSB. He had worked at Best Buy before being hired by the university. The data on the form would not have interested anyone, but for Anita Trafficant it was suffused with an emotional charge, conferred on it by her desire to become Mrs. Harold Ivray. She went back to the top of the form, What was his middle name?
Harold Cruelle Ivray.
Cruelle? Why was that familiar? Mrs. Harold Cruelle Ivray, she mused. And then she remembered. Cruelle was the name of the early settler written about in the story in the Picayune. She had sent that off to the trustees, along with the story of the finding of the body of Orion Plant. Cruelle. Funny, Harold hadn’t mentioned that. She would kid him that he was the descendant of a nineteenth-century mass murderer.
29
ALREADY ON FRIDAY THE lot behind the house was beginning to fill with cars of people come for the game. Marcia welcomed the presence of strangers. People she knew, more or less, had been coming by, not knowing what to say any more than she did. Orion had not made her feel much like a wife, betraying her with the professor’s daughter he swore he’d never loved and had been glad to get free of. Ha. She tried to rid herself of these thoughts, telling herself she was a widow now and to stop thinking that Orion had only gotten what he deserved. He had become fanatic about some long-dead Indians, giving them—and Laverne Ranke—the attention she deserved. Scott Byers was there most of the time now, but other people who came, the Bacons, other fellow students of Orion’s, probably thought he was there for the same reason they were. People left and others came, and Scott remained and after everyone else had gone he stayed.
The first night she slept with him, wanting to be held and comforted, but doing her part too; she had felt awful until she convinced herself that she wasn’t married anymore, this was different, and besides, it was a way of balancing accounts with Orion. The police had been the worst, the detective named Stewart and another man introduced as Detective Knight. That was funny, Knight, but it must have been just a coincidence. This man was tall and had the weight his height accommodated, whereas Professor Knight . . .
“He knows more than the rest of them put together,” Orion had assured her.
“Well, he weighs more than the rest of them put together.”
“Solid gold.”
“Solid fat,” she said, and Orion had drawn back his arm.
“You hit me and I’ll kill you.”
Among the things she did not tell the police: “He didn’t come home at all that night.”
Scott nodded. “She told all of us that.”
“Us.”
“I’m a graduate student in mathematics.” He put out his hand and the man named Knight took it. Lieutenant Stewart just looked at Scott and she wished he would shut up.
“I’ll be going, Marcia,” Scott said at last. “If there’s anything we can do . . .”
We? After he left, Marcia supposed he hadn’t wanted the police to be thinking bad things of her, having a man in the house when her husband had just been found murdered.
“Had he mentioned anyone threatening him?”
“He did the threatening.”
“Oh?”
“It was the way he was. A chip on his shoulder.”
“Out to get the university?”
“He said he was for the Indians, not against Notre Dame.”
“How did that get started, his dissertation?”
“I guess.”
“How did he feel about being let go by the history department?”
“He was mad. At first. But in a way, I think he was glad.”
“How so?”
“He had been at it for years. I think it had soured for him.”
They wanted to know about her, where she had met Orion, did she still work in the Huddle. It was almost a
relief to talk to them, tell them anything, they seemed interested in whatever she might say.
“You were here Tuesday night?”
“Yes.”
“Weren’t you worried when he didn’t come home?” She had been worried he would. Scott had come by when he heard about the scene outside the library and he swore he would beat the hell out of Orion when he showed up. It was nice to have a protector, but she had wondered if Scott would be a match for Orion.
“You going to be all right here alone?” Stewart asked.
“I’ve lived here all my life.”
“Any relatives?”
She had called her mother in San Diego and talked with her brother, who would pass it on to mom and she could tell he was worried she was going to ask that they come be with her. Instead, she said, all that distance, what was the use? There was nothing they could do for Orion now. Her mother had been glad to get out of the house, the way Orion took over, making one of the bedrooms his study and stacking all those records of Younger Real Estate all over the room. Once he found those, he never mentioned his dissertation again. When Marcia asked about it he growled that he was doing research, what did she think? What all those old papers had to do with anything, she didn’t know. But they were what got him started on the poor Indians. He remembered to call them Native Americans with others, but when he spoke to her they were Injuns.
Already Orion seemed a stranger, someone she had hardly known. What a change from before their marriage to after. Not that it seemed much of a wedding, with a judge in the courthouse. It had been over in five minutes. When they went through the revolving doors onto Main Street she had thought those five minutes weren’t much different from the five minutes before and after. They had gone to a motel by the toll road and then to Niles for a couple days and it had been everything she had dreamed, more or less. She could believe that a great change in her life had occurred, and nothing would be as it had been. Maybe she would quit working at the Huddle.
“Don’t do that. Not yet.”
“Your stipend is enough for the two of us. We won’t have to pay rent.” And until her mother left, they had lived off her. Her mother had always done the shopping. Orion went sometimes, but her mother had expected him to chip in and he didn’t. Where would they have been if she hadn’t kept on at the Huddle after Orion had been dropped from the graduate program?
Scott came back after the police left, just letting himself in with the key she had given him. She didn’t want him standing outside, waiting for her to open the door. But if anyone noticed him just coming and going with his own key it would look worse. Well, she didn’t care. Only a few of the people who had lived here when she was growing up remained. The university had bought up a few houses and torn them down. That’s why there was the big lot in back that the man facing Ivy Road rented on game weekends.
“I have to go to the funeral parlor.”
“I better not go with you there.”
“Well, I don’t want to go alone.”
“Call Carlotta. The Bacons will go with you.”
Why didn’t she resent his deciding things the way she had Orion’s? Scott had been so sweet. She might have thought he was taking advantage, her being bereaved and all, but he seemed only to want to comfort her.
Russell Bacon drove her to the funeral home on Cleveland Avenue and the traffic was getting heavy, people going home, but football fans arriving too. Marcia had never been to a funeral home before. She had been too young when her father died. It had been some time before she realized that he would never be coming home again. All she remembered of him was his cough, he was always coughing, and then the coughing stopped and he wasn’t there anymore. Why couldn’t it be that way now?
She didn’t recognize Orion. They explained to her that the suit had been bought for the occasion—she had told them when they phoned that Orion didn’t own a suit—and it gave him a strangely grown-up look. His face looked waxy and unreal.
“You were members of Sacred Heart?”
“Orion was, I guess. I’m not Catholic.”
“Father Gerald will say the rosary Sunday night. Monday seemed best for the funeral, because of the game.”
They left her alone with the body, closing the doors of the viewing room, and Marcia retreated to the side of the room, but she couldn’t get out of sight of that waxen face. Finally she went up to him and talked, telling him what had been going on, everyone had been so nice. She didn’t mention Scott, of course.
When she opened the doors and looked out, Carlotta was sitting in a plush red chair crying.
“What’s the matter?”
Carlotta looked up at her with tear-filled eyes, and then she stood and took her in her arms, and they rocked back and forth. For the first time, Marcia wept.
30
SCHIPPERS FLEW IN FOR the game, just letting Miss Trafficant know he was coming in his private plane.
“I’ll be picking up several others on the way. We will be five in all.”
“Did you want to go to the game?”
“Of course.”
That was a problem, but tickets could be commandeered from members of the Congregation. Several hours later, Schippers walked in with his party, all of them, like himself, trustees. They wore similar grim expressions.
“Is he expecting us?”
The chancellor had summoned his advisors when Anita told him of Schippers’s call, and they had been in there behind closed doors ever since. The president and provost, too. Ballast had popped out now and again.
“Coffee,” he had said the first time, and went back inside.
She served them coffee. Silence fell over the gathering while she was in the office, but she heard them start up again as she closed the door. Big powwow.
“You got any AA batteries?” Ballast asked the next time he popped like a cuckoo out of the chancellor’s office. His Palm Pilot had gone dead. “I’ll bring them in,” she said, having had an inspiration.
She called Harold and asked him to bring her some AA batteries.
“It’ll be a while.”
“You running out of energy?”
“Not likely.”
“They’re for the chancellor. Emergency.”
He dropped whatever he was doing and came. He had picked up the batteries at the bookstore.
“I thought you had those things in stock.”
“Why would we?”
“Wait. I’ll be right back.”
She tapped and entered, and silence seemed to go like a wave before her. Ballast took the batteries and looked apologetically at the others, but he was ignored. She closed the door again on the resumed discussion.
Harold was not in the office. She couldn’t believe it. She had called up his personnel file and wanted to show it to him and ask about his middle name. It was right there on the screen. She had half expected to find him looking at it when she returned.
She sat, but her spirits sank lower than she did. What an unpredictable guy he was beginning to be. She tapped a key and the file came up. She leaned forward, her mouth open. Harold’s middle name had disappeared from the first line of his personnel file.
Her buzzer sounded and she went into the chancellor’s office. He looked worse than he had when he came back from being kidnapped. The trustees were in a ring facing the desk, the chancellor’s advisors scattered about the edges of the room.
“Can we accommodate all these gentlemen for the game tomorrow?”
“I called Corby and have four. Finding a fifth won’t be difficult.”
“Would you get us rooms in the Morris Inn?”
Anita looked at Schippers. The Morris Inn was booked in perpetuity for game weekends. The chancellor controlled three rooms. She explained this.
“We’ll double up.”
All the other multimillionaires nodded. They seemed to like the prospect of roughing it.
“Of course you’re my guests,” the chancellor said.
They had never doubted that
by the looks they exchanged.
“Maybe we should continue this without kibitzers, Father.”
Schippers said this to the president, referring to the chancellor’s advisors. Father Bloom seemed about to protest, but Ballast had risen and then the others followed suit. Anita held the door for them. The chancellor watched them go as if he were being abandoned.
Ballast said, “They’ll eat him alive.”
“What’s he done?”
“You heard him. He didn’t know how to reassure them that everything is all right.”
“He’ll tough it out.”
They wandered away, instructing her to call them immediately if the chancellor asked for them.
“Maybe we should wait here.”
“I have work to do.”
The interruption had served to take her mind off Harold’s surprising departure after she had explicitly asked him to stay. Did he find her bossy? She was bossy. Somebody had to be around here.
The local evening paper arrived. Not the Picayune, which in any case had decided to lay off the university, but the other one. They had decided to fill the vacuum created by the Picayune’s failure to follow up its scoop. The story was on the front page, running along the bottom third of the page. It told of the mysterious death of Orion Plant, who had been researching the legitimacy of the transfer of the land the university stood on. The clear implication was that these events were connected. There was no mention of the chancellor’s having been kidnapped. Orion’s summary dismissal from the graduate school was mentioned with the heavy implication that this had been a species of retaliation.
Feeling devilish, Anita made copies of the story and took them in to the chancellor and his guests.
31
The Book of Kills Page 12