The Book of Kills

by Ralph McInerny

  He shook these thoughts away with difficulty. It was silly to think that the hitherto Iron Woman of the Main Building was not subject to the ills men—and women (even in his private reveries, Ballast was careful to use inclusive language)—were heir to.

  “I could phone Harold,” Carole said, looking at him over the tops of her glasses.

  “Harold?”

  “There seems to be something going on between them.”

  Here was a case in point. His own secretary knew things he did not. Ballast had no idea who Harold might be.

  “He works in the computing center.”

  “On campus?”

  “Yes.”

  “Find out if he is in. Discreetly.”

  He went into the chancellor’s office, where the topic of discussion was whether or not to fire Otto Ranke. The chancellor followed the exchange among his advisors with a pained expression.

  “I studied with him as a student.”

  “There is no guilt by association,” Ballast said, plunging into the discussion.

  At Anita Trafficant’s desk, Carole was looking up the number of the computer center when her phone rang. She picked it up and managed to remember to say “Chancellor’s office.”

  “Anita? You can imagine our fury. We will not stand by and allow them to railroad an esteemed colleague into prison on trumped-up charges.”

  “Who is speaking, please?”

  A long silence ensued. “Who am I speaking to?”

  “This is the chancellor’s office.”

  “I want to speak to Anita Trafficant.”

  “She hasn’t come in today.”

  The phone went dead. Honestly. Carole had found the number of the computing center. She dialed it and asked for Harold.

  The phone was put down and minutes later the voice that had answered said, “He must be out on a job.”

  “This is the chancellor’s office.”

  “Anita?” The voice turned pleasant.

  “No. I am sitting in for her today. I must locate Harold.”

  “I’ll try to reach him.”

  At her own desk in the university counsel’s suite, Carole would have had a dozen tasks to do. But at this strange desk, she sat in helpless inactivity. She looked at the closed door of the chancellor’s office. She opened and closed drawers. She got up and checked the coffee, but there was still three-quarters of a pot. She poured a cup and took it to her desk. She turned to the computer, brought up the word processing program, and began to write a nonsense memo to herself. Of course she would neither store it nor print it out, but she had to be doing something. She summarized what had happened since Mr. Ballast had told her to take over for the absent Miss Trafficant. That was soon done.

  Carole had no ambitions beyond the position she now held. She had been a legal secretary and enjoyed the pointless precision of the documents she typed. Mr. Ballast was a demanding boss, largely because of his frenetic jumping from problem to problem, many of them imaginary. Some, of course, were not. Carole had to suppress her sympathy with those with a grievance against the university, but Mr. Ballast relished his role of advocate for and defender of the university, no matter what. Of course, that was the appropriate attitude of the university counsel; she wasn’t criticizing him, not even in the privacy of her own mind. Loyalty came easily to her. Still, it was unnerving to see the relentless way Mr. Ballast proceeded against those who had been denied tenure and had the gall to take the university to court.

  Sufficient time had gone by to justify another call to the computing center.

  “He might not have come in today,” she was told when she asked again about Harold. “I called his house but he doesn’t answer.”

  Carole hung up the phone, but her hand still lay upon it. She was not a prurient woman, but she had noticed Anita and Harold together. Carole was married to a good man and had a son for whom she feared. She read jumbo novels with guilty pleasure, she had listened to talk shows on television, she had secondhand knowledge of the ways of the world. She picked up the phone and dialed Anita’s apartment.

  The ringing went on and on, unanswered. Carole imagined a couple, impervious to that ringing, wrapped in one another’s illict arms. Such things happened. One heard of them every day. Finally she hung up the phone, feeling like the audio version of a Peeping Tom. She did not relish reporting the results of her efforts to Mr. Ballast, but of course she must do so.

  It was the first thing he asked when he emerged from the chancellor’s office in company with others who had been involved in the meeting.

  “He apparently hasn’t come in today.”

  “Were you able to reach Anita?”

  “Her phone is not answered.”

  “Call Harold.”

  “He doesn’t answer either.”

  “Well, well.” Mr. Ballast looked to see the reaction of the others. “I’m worried about her. Someone ought to check. After what has been happening on this campus . . .” He left the sentence unfinished. He had an inspiration. “Get hold of Philip Knight and ask him to check out Anita’s apartment.”

  47

  LAVERNE RANKE CAME stumbling back into the library, which she had just left when her shift ended and evening had fallen, with the story that she had been attacked beside the reflecting pool. The reaction was mixed. Laverne’s long history of aloof reticence now made her coworkers dubious. Her new cloth car coat was covered with snow, but there were no visible signs of physical harm.

  “She probably slipped,” said an unsympathetic voice.

  Laverne broke into tears, the shock with which she had stumbled back inside gone. “My baby,” she cried, placing the spread fingers of a pianist on her middle. “My baby.”

  And so the news had come out. A sudden sisterly solidarity formed among her fellow librarians, and Laverne was taken away, half carried, to the area behind the check-out desk where she was consoled and fussed over by women aroused by a condition that might be any one of theirs. Laverne’s unmarried state was, at least for the nonce, forgotten.

  That a daughter of the confessed murderer of Orion Plant claimed to have been attacked beside the reflecting pool of the library drew different reactions elsewhere.

  “The next thing we know Freda will claim to have been raped in her home.”

  “It runs in the family.”

  There was indeed something of the supererogatory in Laverne’s allegation. Campus security checked the spot where the attack had allegedly occurred and found only a peaceful scene with what might have been a snow angel described in the newly fallen snow. It was soon received opinion that Laverne had faked the attack in order to have an occasion to announce her condition to the world.

  Roger Knight heard of Laverne after Phil had responded to a request from the university counsel. He recalled his unspoken surmise when he was visiting Professor Ranke in the county jail. Laverne would be the one to make her condition public. And so she had. Roger shared the general skepticism about an attack being made on her person. He had already telephoned Marcia Plant and asked to see her. She would be home all night, she said. Not a warm welcome, but then he had hardly expected one.

  After he got his golf cart unplugged from the recharging cable, he sat behind the wheel enjoying the sight of the snow drifting past a lamp some yards away. It might have been falling to cover with its innocence the astounding events that had been rocking the campus. When he pulled away, he decided to make a long detour past the place where Laverne claimed she had been attacked. He circled the area, which had been trampled by the feet of campus security and bumped over something hidden in the snow. Ignoring whatever it was was the preferable option, but he knew that he would later wonder what it had been. He unbuckled himself and got himself onto his feet. With the side of his boot he cleared away the snow. Then he stooped to pick up the tomahawk.

  He managed to get it into one of the massive side pockets of his hooded jacket, stuffed the cloth with which he had wiped the snow off the seat into the same pocket,
and continued on his way to the Plant residence.

  Marcia Plant had the look of a young woman just realizing that she was all alone in the world. Her husband was dead. His eager replacement, Scott Byers, had been arrested by the police and, she suspected, would emerge from confinement with his ardor considerably cooled. She looked very much like bad luck to any eligible young man. In the circumstances, she seemed delighted to find Roger Knight at her door and urged him to come in out of the snow. Roger stamped his boots on the stoop and entered, beginning the process of freeing himself from his outer garment, a hooded coat the athletic department had presented him with, a size far beyond XXL.

  “Thirty,” he remarked at the sight of the label. “Roman numerals.”

  “My age.”

  “I would never have guessed it.” This was fact, not flattery. Roger had nothing of Philip’s ability to guess the age of females.

  “People say I’m still young, but thirty is old.”

  She hung his coat on a peg next to another dripping garment. The overshoes on the floor beneath had left fresh little puddles around them.

  “Some people complain of snow. I’ve never understood that. It is beautiful outside.”

  She made a face. “You can have it.”

  He launched into his reason for coming. He had heard of the room set aside for the records of Younger Real Estate.

  “Orion worked there. The records had been in storage, but Orion persuaded my mother to let him bring them here. He spent hours and hours up there.”

  “Your mother.”

  “She’s in California with my brother. Maybe I’ll go out there and begin a new life.”

  When Roger said nothing, she went on.

  “You wonder why they didn’t come back when all these things happened. Orion and my mother didn’t get along. He was pretty pushy, just taking over the house as if it was ours, not my mother’s. She got fed up and decided to go to California.”

  “And your father?”

  “He’s dead.” The way the information was given surprised Roger, but she went on to say she had been a child when he died. “My memories of him are all blurred now. Of course, there are photographs.”

  “But your mother kept the records of the family business.”

  Marcia nodded. “But she resented having to pay rental for storing them. Orion never guessed that was her reason for agreeing that he should move them here.”

  “Why did he do that, I wonder.”

  “He had gone out there and poked around in the boxes. He got quite excited about it.”

  “Well, he was an historian.”

  “He wanted to be one, anyway. They threw him out of the university, you know.”

  “Yes. Professor Ranke told me.”

  An angry expression flickered on her face and was replaced by a look of wonder. “Imagine him just confessing like that.”

  “As a Catholic he’s used to confessing.”

  “I suppose. I’m not a Catholic.”

  “The Youngers weren’t Catholic?”

  “Way back when, they were. My father had been baptized, but I guess it didn’t take.”

  “Would you have had your children baptized?”

  She looked at him. “We never had any.” And then suddenly she was crying. “I wanted kids. I wanted to quit work and settle down to being a housewife and mother. Women who haven’t worked or have cushy jobs say they don’t want that, but I don’t believe them. All my friends want a husband who earns the money while they raise the kids and take care of the house. I love to cook.” She sobbed as if some impossibly attractive dream had receded beyond her grasp. “He didn’t want kids.”

  “Orion?”

  “That’s what he said anyway.”

  “And now Laverne Ranke is pregnant.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “She hasn’t kept it a secret.”

  “But she isn’t even showing.”

  “She blurted it out not long ago, when she escaped back into the library.”

  “That’s her all over. What a terrible woman.”

  “You might have harmed the child. Orion’s child.”

  She looked at him blankly.

  “Excuse me for a moment.” Roger levered himself to his feet and went to where she had hung his jacket. He took the tomahawk from the pocket and brought it back into the living room. “I found this.”

  She didn’t quite recoil at the sight of the tomahawk, but she pressed back into her chair.

  “It was covered with snow. If I hadn’t found it, someone else would have.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You can’t just hold it in, Marcia. Eventually, you’ll go crazy thinking about it, or explode.”

  “You think I attacked Laverne?”

  “How bitter it must have been to know Orion had gotten her with child when he refused to have children with his own wife.”

  “Oh, she seduced him. After all, he was only a man. Even a woman without looks can be attractive in certain situations.”

  “Did Orion tell you Laverne was pregnant?”

  “Yes! The bastard. All that about waiting, we couldn’t afford a family, not yet. There would be plenty of time later.” She pounded her hand on the arm of her chair. “And then he stood right there, puffing up his chest like the cock of the walk, saying there was something I should know. Maybe he thought he was sterile or something. He was so proud. Did he expect me to congratulate him?”

  “You were angry.”

  “Angry. I could have killed him.”

  “And you did.”

  She just let it go. She was still remembering her triumphant husband telling her another woman was carrying his child.

  “When did he tell you?”

  “That night. Before the others got here.”

  “And you sat through the meeting hating him.”

  “And her. She was here too.”

  “But she left with the others. And then Orion left. Did he know you were following him?”

  “You think you’re so smart, don’t you?”

  “I think it wasn’t very smart of you to kill your husband, Marcia. I think you know that too. How you must have been suffering.”

  “If I did, it was his fault.”

  “It must be awful to be betrayed by your own husband.”

  The tears came again, self-pitying tears. The tears of a woman wronged who had tried to right that wrong and only made things infinitely worse.

  “Thank God you didn’t harm Laverne.”

  “I hope she loses her baby.”

  “Is that what you were trying to do?”

  “I don’t know! I had to do something. After all she had done. Orion was bad enough. You say he betrayed me and I suppose he did, but that didn’t surprise me. Men do things like that.”

  “So do women.”

  “That’s different.”

  He was tempted to tell her of those who had suffered for what she had done—of Carlotta’s husband still in jail, of Scott Byers taken away for questioning, of Professor Otto Ranke. But he knew that would be a blind alley.

  “You must have been surprised when the body was found where it was.”

  “I couldn’t believe it. Why would Russell Bacon do such a thing?”

  “To get the body off his doorstep.”

  “Orion nearly got to their doorbell.” She stopped. “Would I have struck him if he hadn’t tried to get help? He was going to get the Bacons on his side, they would all be against me. So I did it.”

  “Killed him.”

  “I struck him. I didn’t mean to kill him.”

  A silence developed and Roger Knight sat looking at her. Perhaps she hadn’t meant to kill Orion. That was between her and God.

  “I think I should make a phone call.”

  It was a moment when she could have gotten hold of herself, denied everything, chased him from the house. But she nodded and Roger went to the phone.

  EPILOGUE

&nb
sp; MARCIA PLANT REPEATED her story when she was taken downtown, and afterward Lieutenant Stewart told Roger that this was absolutely the last confession of the murder of Orion Plant he wished to receive. Phil could not be located to hear this latest twist in the investigation so Stewart offered Roger a ride back to the campus.

  “Father Carmody is coming for dinner tonight. Why don’t you join us?”

  “As one who has sampled your cooking, I accept.”

  “We’ll start with cannelloni, go on to veal Parmesan with a salad of which I am justly proud, and end with spumoni.”

  “Is that a wine?”

  “The wine will be a Chianti.”

  “My cup runneth over.”

  “If you like.”

  Stewart hovered in the kitchen, telling him of Professor Ranke’s reaction when he was given the news he could go. “After all, we had nothing but his say-so for everything he said.”

  “The same can be said of Marcia Plant.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “How so?”

  “The lab finally found a clear set of prints on the tomahawk. I mean the one found with the body.”

  “And?”

  “We shall see.”

  Stewart did not act like a man who doubted the outcome of the match with Marcia’s prints.

  “A case is always difficult when you have so many people with good reason to have done the deed.”

  “And Bacon and Byers?”

  “Byers has been released. Kreps is still deciding about Bacon.”

  “For moving the body?”

  “It is an offense.”