Elena rose, settled her shoulder holster more comfortably and pulled on a lightweight jacket. “Then let’s do it.”
Eight
* * *
Friday, May 15, 10:55 A.M.
“It looks like one of those temples in Mexico where the Indians cut out people’s hearts,” said Leo, scowling at the Humanities building with its turquoise and salmon tile trim.
Elena, having read the “Architecture of Herbert Hobart University” pamphlet, knew that they were looking at Mayan Revival, an American offshoot of art deco. Since Sarah had given her the pamphlet, Elena didn’t pass the information on to Leo. No use reminding him that she had failed to arrest a woman who might be guilty of dissolving her ex-husband after an unsuccessful attempt to kill him with an exploding snail.
Since the university was in the interim between spring finals and summer school, the detectives found few faculty members in their offices. The English Department secretary was at his desk, but the chairman was gone. As they went down a hall to visit Professors Donald Mallory and Anne-Marie LaPortierre, Leo said, “He’s gay, right?”
“Who?”
“The secretary. He’s gay.”
“Lance is? Son of a gun!” said Elena. “I thought he was cute.”
“Cute? You thought he was cute? Come on.”
“Well, he’s got nice blond hair like yours and a better than average build.”
“The hell,” muttered Leo, who was over six feet and very thin. “He’s short. Lemme ask you this. Would you go out with a secretary?”
“Why not? Concepcion was a secretary when you met her.”
“Well, yeah, but Concepcion’s female. I mean secretaries are supposed to be — “
“That’s a sexist remark, Leo,” said Elena. “You owe me a quarter.” Since the sensitivity training class, they had a bet on that he couldn’t go a whole week without making a sexist remark. Leo had maintained that he never made sexist remarks. Elena claimed a quarter every time he did. In the month since the class, she’d collected $2.75 and had to argue for every penny of it.
“I don’t see anything sexist about expecting a secretary to be female,” said Leo. “That’s just — “
“Sh-sh.” She knocked at the door of Professor Donald Mallory, who told them, among other things, “Angus McGlenlevie was a fraud — poetry-wise. Our departmental secretary is ten times the poet McGlenlevie was. Angus wrote pornographic doggerel. It doesn’t scan, has no rhyme scheme, has no metaphors of note. How a man of his meager talents could put himself into the same literary category as William Shakespeare and John Donne . . . ”
Dr. Mallory, it turned out, was a Renaissance scholar who disliked not just Angus McGlenlevie but any poet who postdated the Jacobeans — except Lance Potemkin. Leo didn’t know who the Jacobeans were. Elena remembered that they had flourished during the reign of James I. She thought Ben Jonson, whose plays she had detested, was one. Dr. Mallory, she noted, was neither surprised nor dismayed to have read that Angus McGlenlevie had been murdered. Could Professor Mallory be the murderer? Motive — professional jealousy? Critical disgust?
Professor Anne-Marie LaPortierre wasn’t surprised either, although she hadn’t read the morning paper. “The man tries to seduce anything female from the veriest freshman to me, and I’m fifty-five and uninterested.”
“She may be fifty-five,” Elena remarked as they headed for the College of Engineering through a corridor of tall palm trees, “but she looks in good enough shape to have delivered the fatal blow, walked to the bathroom with the corpse under her arm, and with the other hand carried in enough acid or whatever to dissolve him.”
“Nah,” said Leo. “She’s old enough to be someone’s grandmother. Grandmothers don’t do stuff like that.”
“What about the grandmother who beat her son-in-law to death with a tamale steamer?”
“Well, there was her,” Leo conceded. “How do you figure they got palm trees this size in here? They sure as hell didn’t grow in Los Santos on their own, and the university’s only been around three years. You figure they dug ’em up in California and sent ’em in by train or what?”
“Florida,” said Elena, and they entered the Engineering building, on whose first floor were the offices of the Department of Electrical Engineering and the super-efficient Virginia Pargetter, Executive Assistant to the Chairwoman. Virginia was a stern, gray-haired lady, slat-thin with a square-jawed face, who informed them that she did not inadvertently delete things from her computer files, that if Dr. Tolland’s vacation telephone number was gone, which it was, then it had been feloniously deleted, and she thought the felony should be investigated. Leo promised her that they would look into it.
“I hope you didn’t mean we personally are going to look into it,” Elena muttered as they began knocking on doors in the Electrical Engineering Department. “The only computer I know anything about is the terminal at my desk, and you’re not much better.”
“Hey, I was just putting her off. But if this chairlady was going to kill her husband and disappear, she wouldn’t want anyone to know where,” he pointed out. “And she’s a computer whiz, right? I mean the sign in the hall says Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. So she’d know how to get rid of the information. Right?”
That supposition had already occurred to Elena, although she wasn’t sure what Sarah did. Research — Sarah had mentioned research, but not on what. Being chairwoman, teaching — but again Sarah had never been specific about what she taught. Maybe she was a specialist in — Elena tried to imagine what electrical engineers did — power plants, perhaps. Or lighting — like lamps, football fields, those weird green street lights they had across the river in Mexico.
“We can get a computer expert over here from I.D. & R. if we need to,” said Leo.
“Wouldn’t we have to get a search warrant for that?” Elena asked.
“Damned if I know.”
Three electrical engineering professors, one an Indian woman who seemed to be suffering some kind of nervous collapse, all looked blank when asked if they could shed any light on who might have killed Angus McGlenlevie, the ex-husband of their chairwoman. None of them had met Angus McGlenlevie.
One said brusquely, “Well, it wasn’t Sarah,” and swung around to his computer, a clear signal that he didn’t care to talk to them anymore.
Another said, “Are you sure Sarah was married to this person?” He was puttering around in a lab full of mysterious equipment.
The Indian lady burst into tears and said she was returning to India the next day and had no thoughts on the death of Mr. McGlenlevie, whose name she mispronounced badly.
“Don’t you think it’s strange that she never introduced him to any of her colleagues?” Leo asked.
“You wouldn’t ask that if you’d met him,” Elena replied. “I wouldn’t have introduced him to anyone.”
“Why not? If I remember right, you introduced Frank to people.”
Elena scowled at him and returned to the departmental office to ask Mrs. Pargetter if she happened to remember where Sarah had said she was going after the Chicago meeting.
“Boston,” said the secretary curtly.
“Do you remember where in Boston?”
“No.”
“Why didn’t she just tell you that in the first place?” asked Leo as they went out into the intense dry heat of the afternoon.
“She’s a New Englander,” said Elena. “Didn’t you notice the accent? If you don’t ask the right question, they don’t volunteer any information. I read that in a book.”
“Bad habit — reading. The lieutenant wouldn’t like it. He thinks women should stay in the kitchen, illiterate and pregnant.” His face lit with delight at Elena’s angry reaction. “Let’s hit the apartment house like I said in the first place. Since no one’s in the offices, they’re all home. Right?”
Among the neighbors of Angus McGlenlevie there was a consensus of opinion. The only unusual sound they’d heard from his apartm
ent recently was silence. No one agreed on how long this blessed silence had lasted. One week, two. The silence had been broken by screaming. Last night. That had been closer to normal than silence, so only one neighbor had called the campus police. “I’m glad I didn’t go up there,” said a redheaded lady. “Imagine having a grisly murder right above one’s head.” That witness lived on Three.
“Most of the time we heard noisy sex, loud music, and people shouting lines of poetry,” her husband explained. He was a cello professor who liked to play his instrument in the second bedroom when McGlenlevie wasn’t drowning him out. “I just thought the screams meant he was back home again. I put my cello away and got out the earphones, which usually works. You can’t use Bach or Vivaldi, but even McGlenlevie can’t overpower Wagner. By the time the first act of Das Rheingold was over, the screaming had stopped.” The professor ruffled his thinning hair and added with an ingenuous smile, “He was a satyr, you know.”
None of them seemed unduly grieved by Gus’s demise. None had seen Sarah entering or leaving his apartment — ever. Several recognized pictures of Bimmie Kowolski and Lili Bonaventura, although they couldn’t say for sure when they’d last seen these ladies in the lobby, elevators, or hall. Several said other women visited his apartment, but they didn’t know who and couldn’t describe them very well. “After all,” a portly economics professor remarked, “women streamed in and out There must have been something attractive about him, although what it could have been — well, that’s always puzzled me.”
“Female masochism,” said his wife, a chunky psychologist with a squint in her left eye. “The man attracted women who thrive on psychic pain. Many a time I thought of putting hidden cameras in McGlenlevie’s apartment. Three or four days out of his life would destroy feminist psychology. Now it’s too late. Damned shame too.”
That was as close as anyone came to mourning Angus McGlenlevie. Certainly no one was surprised that someone had killed him.
“I could have done it myself,” said the birdlike wife of a professor of Balkan language and culture. “He kept borrowing things — sugar, coffee, my mother’s crystal dessert dishes, the New York Times, tampons. And he never returned anything. I don’t see why he couldn’t buy his own New York Times — and tampons? He asked my husband if I could spare him a tampon. My husband slammed the door in his face.
“And do you think that discouraged him? Oh, no. He was back the next day wanting to borrow my car. He smashed up Professor Tolland’s car. Did you know that? You think she killed him? She wouldn’t even speak to him. When you remove that crime tape from his apartment, I’d like to go in and get my mother’s crystal back. Of course, he may have sold the whole set. I wouldn’t put it past him. Do you think I could sue his estate . . . ?”
She was still talking as Leo and Elena, smiling apologetically, backed down the hall.
Nine
* * *
Monday, May 18, 9:15 A.M.
Strictly speaking Elena was off today, but anxiety impelled her to visit the basement at headquarters in search of information about the acid bath case, as the papers were still calling it. Then, if she wasn’t facing the end of her career — because, for instance, they’d found evidence of Sarah’s presence at the crime scene — Elena had some home-repair errands to run. She armed the security system and locked the heavy carved door of the house she still thought of as the place that Frank bought.
They hadn’t been married two months before he purchased at auction a crumbling adobe in one of the pretty, older sections of town. It was a foreclosure sale and, as he pointed out, dirt cheap with his V.A. loan. They’d fix it up together, that was Frank’s idea until he’d actually taken part in some of the fixing up.
Elena paused for a moment to study her house, white walls, mellow red roof tiles drowsing in the May sun among the slender spearhead cedars. With forested mountain around it, she might have been back home in New Mexico, but here all the green that surrounded the house had been planted by her or by previous owners, certainly not by Frank. Two weeks on the home improvement detail had killed his enthusiasm. Work done on the house thereafter — the adobe patching, the painting, the rotten wood replacement, the floor sanding, the nailing up and yanking down, the plumbing and electrical work, the gardening — she’d done it all in the years when she was finishing up her degree at the state university and then in her spare time after she joined the force. World-class home handyperson — that was her. Fellow officers asked her advice on rusting evaporative coolers and clogged drains. There were crooks in town who stopped stealing cars and burglarizing houses long enough to give her a call because their fruitless mulberries had bag worms.
Turning away from the house, she cut over to her Ford pickup truck parked beside a satin-green Palo Verde tree. She thumbed the security disarmer, without which the truck would have said, when she first laid her hand on the door handle, “Back off,” in a loud, threatening voice. Then if she persisted, the alarm would have gone off, bringing to their front doors all the old folks who lived in the neighborhood. Frank liked to break into her truck and move it over a few parking places or a few blocks just for the hell of it, to remind her that he hadn’t disappeared since the divorce, but she thought that she and Coronado Perez down at Safe Auto Supply had finally thwarted him.
She climbed in and headed for Five Points, deciding that besides the cement to patch up the stone walls that edged her property, she’d buy a little straw, mix up some adobe, and slap it onto the bad places on the east side of the house where the August rainy season had made inroads. And of course, she’d need whitewash.
Once on Montana, she began to think about work. She’d made an arrest in the drive-by shooting just yesterday, in the case where nobody saw a thing. It came together because Leo got Crime Stoppers to put up a thousand dollars for information leading to arrest and indictment. Lo and behold, within twelve hours they had a make on a 1974 rusted red Pontiac with, as the female informant had said, “big pipes sticking out the back.”
So they — she and a detective from Sergeant Holiday’s squad, both on weekend duty — arrested four boys, three of them juveniles, who probably thought they’d put in a few years down at Gatesville and come on home. Elena doubted it. People were getting sick of the drive-by shootings where grandmothers died in front of their TVs and little girls took a slug in the shoulder while doing their geography homework at the kitchen table. The judges were certifying the shooters to stand trial as adults, and the juries were sending them off to Huntsville for long stretches, which was fine with Elena.
Then there was the acid bath case, which was taking up part of her day off and in no way an easy arrest. The coroner’s report was in. Probable cause of death, a blow to the back of the head, crushing the skull, delivered with a blunt instrument, not found. However, they couldn’t be sure the blow had killed him, or when, because they had only bones left and a few strands of hair on the edge of the tub, which looked like the hair found in a brush from the bedroom dresser. D.P.S. would tell them for sure, but not in time to help the investigation. The height and build of the bones matched what she remembered of McGlenlevie. And there were teeth. Teeth with enough fillings so that dental records should have given them a positive I.D.
She had called, first, every dentist on the list provided by the university health insurance company, and then every damn dentist in town, and finally about fifty dentists across the border in Mexico. If Angus McGlenlevie had ever been to a dentist around here, nobody would admit it, so he couldn’t be identified by dental records, which meant they didn’t really have a positive I.D. on the remains — beyond the early statement of Lili Bonaventura that the ring on the skeletal finger was the Girls’ Intramural Volleyball Championship ring that Coach Gus and all the players had got at the end of the volleyball season. And of course, the corpse had been found in McGlenlevie’s bathtub, so why wouldn’t it be him? As Leo said, “Who the hell else would it be?”
Three days after she discovered the body, L
ili Bonaventura still refused to talk to them. However, interviews with other members of the volleyball team had yielded information about Lili and Coach Gus. Some of the girls had said she was the team captain and let it go at that. Some of them had taken their last finals and flown home or to the French Riviera or wherever rich girls migrated in the summer, but two, who had stayed for summer school, said Lili had been getting it on with Coach Gus every other Thursday since she made team captain. One of them said Lili claimed that sex with Coach Gus was very creative, him being a poet and all. Elena believed that. A man who ran around in a sweat shirt that said “Poets Do It In Iambic Pentameter” and had a beard like a small tumbleweed, except that it was red — well, the wonder was, not his sexual proclivities, but that Sarah had ever married him.
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