Acid Bath

by Nancy Herndon

“ — until such time, if it comes, when you really are too overcome by your personal problems to carry out your duties.”

  Sarah paled.

  “Now, I’m not saying that will happen, Sarah. Let’s hope this mess just goes away.”

  “Yes, let’s hope.”

  “As for Bonnard, if I have to relieve you, I think I’ll appoint myself temporary chair. That might teach him the value of loyalty.”

  Sarah was surprised and touched, and she went on to her 4:30 appointment with her lawyer feeling a bit heartened.

  She had a thing or two to tell him as well. One was a description of Gus’s sexual liaisons. “I think you should let me talk to the police,” she said. “There had to be dozens of people who had a better reason for killing him than I.”

  “The police won’t see it that way,” said Formalee. “You go in and talk about his infidelities, you’ll be putting arrows in their quiver.” Formalee was well known as a bow-and-arrow deer hunter, one of the few who actually got a deer on rare occasions. “You’ll look like the stereotypical jealous wife — excuse me, ex-wife. At any rate, I don’t want you saying a word to them, Sarah. If we go to trial, I probably won’t even put you on the stand.”

  “Are you saying that I’m not at all credible?”

  “Sarah, if you take the stand, the prosecution might find a way to ask you about the snail. Otherwise, I’ve got a shot at keeping it off the record.” He stared at her reproachfully, having asked about and been told the story. “Plastique, for God’s sake! That’s terrorist stuff. Where did you get it, anyway?” Oliver Formalee ran a distracted hand through his dignified hair. “No, don’t tell me. It makes me damned uneasy to realize that there are women around who can turn on a blender and blow up an apartment house.”

  “You’re overreacting, Oliver. I blew up a snail shell, not an apartment house.”

  Sarah had forgotten about the snail — momentarily “But someone killed him and then tried to make it look as if I had. How are we going to find out who if we don’t force the police to continue the investigation?”

  “If you can afford it, we’ll hire a private detective.”

  “It’s going to cost me my life savings to defend myself against something I didn’t do.”

  “Better than going to jail,” said Formalee. “You want me to find a detective?”

  “Let me think about it. Have you got the information from my engagement calendar?”

  “We only talked about that this morning,” said Formalee dryly.

  “And I can’t use the computers. I could have retrieved the information that way.”

  She left the lawyer’s office and drove to the Camino Real, where she was meeting Colin for a drink under the hotel’s historic Tiffany dome. The deep, soft lounge chairs and low tables, discreetly separated from one another, plus Colin’s relaxed company, were very soothing to her frazzled nerves. However, she felt a tinge of conscience regarding him. Colin would be leaving on Monday, and because she had been pursuing her own problems, she had palmed him off on other faculty members for extensive tours of the campus and the city.

  “Why don’t you have dinner with me?” he suggested. “There’s an excellent restaurant not fifty yards from us.”

  She shifted in her squashy leather chair and thought. If I spend the evening with him, I could end up in his bed, just for the reassurance of a human touch. And I hardly know the man. “I’d better go home, Colin, and think through my problems.”

  “You know,” he said reassuringly, “that it’s got to turn out right in the end.”

  “Just the fact that I’ve been arrested makes me question that,” said Sarah, “and I don’t want to wait for the end, as you put it. Formalee said homicide trials sometimes take as much as three years to get to court.” She shuddered to think of spending three years with her future at risk. She’d go crazy.

  “Do you want me to stay?”

  She glanced at him in surprise. “I’m sure you’ve better things to do with your summer.”

  “Professionally speaking I do, but the few days I’ve been here have improved my health and outlook.”

  “Have they? Well, I’m glad something good has happened. Are you seriously considering our offer then?”

  “As long as you’re going to be chair.”

  “Well, I’m still chair at the moment. I had a talk with the dean. He’s not going for Bonnard’s let’s-all-take-care-of-Sarah-by-dumping-her pitch. If I start going to pieces, Dean Brumbaugh will appoint himself chairman.”

  Colin Stuart chuckled. “I’d like to meet that man.”

  “I assumed you had,” said Sarah and glanced at her watch. “Unfortunately, it may be too late now.” She finished her drink, refused with regret his offer to stay in Los Santos — how could she enlist that sort of extensive support from a man she’d only known a few days? — explained that several of the E.E. faculty would pick him up for dinner at seven, and went back to her apartment to sort through everything she knew about the case.

  The police had given her little information, but she had photocopies from the local papers, which she’d made at the library before her appointment with the dean. She read the stories over and over, astonished at the details. Someone had hit Gus on the head and then put his body in a bathtub full of unslaked lime. Why? Why the attack? Why the lime? And whatever the motive, the police couldn’t be sure it was Gus.

  Elena’s question about fillings nagged at her. Gus didn’t have cavities. And bone disease. What was that about? The man never even caught colds. He’d thought being spattered with hot garlic butter was a major medical emergency. Yet obviously no one believed her about his teeth.

  Then there was the lime. They said someone rerouted the unslaked lime by computer on May 1. After thinking for a minute, she looked up the number of Jaime Esposito, president of the local engineers’ society, and called him.

  “Jaime, this is Sarah Tolland, and before you hang up, I didn’t kill him.”

  “Jesus, Sarah, I never thought you did. What can I do for you?”

  “Do you know the date of that speech I gave?”

  He was gone briefly, then returned with the date. “Thank you, Jaime!” she exclaimed. “You may have saved my life, or at least my sanity. Do you remember what time I arrived at the banquet?”

  “Sure, you got there before me, and I got there around quarter to seven.”

  “Right, and you can vouch that I was there the whole time?”

  “Well, of course I can. I sat beside you.”

  “And I left when?”

  “I don’t know. Must have been ten o’clock. No, wait a minute. We went down to the bar and had a couple of drinks — you and I and Marta, and let’s see, the Bigelows, and Nacho. Nacho was with us. We were all together until quarter after eleven, eleven-thirty.”

  “Yes!” said Sarah, her arm rising in the clenched fist sign of triumph, a gesture she’d never made in her life. “Thanks again, Jaime. I’ve got to get off.”

  “Sure, Sarah.”

  Eleven-fifteen or eleven-thirty. She could account for her time from six forty-five to eleven-fifteen that evening. She thought back to her conversation with Formalee. The rerouting had been logged in around nine according to information from the D.A.’s files. She’d have been talking in front of a hundred people or so when someone — the murderer, no doubt — made that change from a computer in the library. It could have been anyone. She thought a minute, Formalee’s insistence that she was not to talk to the police going through her mind. Then she punched out Elena’s number. No one answered.

  Thirty-three

  * * *

  Friday, May 29, 7 P.M.

  As Elena dressed for her dinner date with Karl Bonnard, she thought about Beltran, who wouldn’t let her pursue the acid bath case any longer. He had been angry at her suggestion that the Bonaventuras might have trashed her living room, accusing her of trying to sabotage the case. So she could only wonder in her few spare moments that afternoon: Had that clothes
horse Bonaventura lawyer and thick-neck Willie Spozzo left town? Had they been in Los Santos before they showed up at her desk? Had they or their people wrecked her house?

  She hadn’t touched the living room. The crime scene unit had finished with it. The insurance adjuster came and went, assuring her that a check would be in the mail. But Elena made no move to clean up. When she left the house, she stared at the room as she threaded her way among the wreckage; when she returned, she looked at it again, her anger at the vandals and at Beltran hardening.

  Shaking her head, as if to eject the bitterness, she combed and redid her French braid, thinking about Sarah. Had she gone straight back to work once she bonded out? Were people at the university edging away from her because she’d been accused of murder? Were students whispering, dropping the one course she taught in the summer? Frustrated because she couldn’t call Sarah, angry because Beltran had her road-blocked, Elena turned her attention to the case on which she’d worked all afternoon with Leo — a dead man who had beaten his wife and a wife who had disappeared after the murder. Beltran wanted the woman found. Elena suddenly realized that she hoped the woman was a thousand miles away, deep in the interior of Mexico, safe for the first time in years, staying with family who loved her and didn’t show their affection with clenched fists.

  Elena had suggested to Karl that they eat somewhere casual, not because she didn’t appreciate eating in expensive restaurants, but because she didn’t have time to go out and buy a dress. He might, after all, notice if she wore the same dress two dates in a row. She settled for the pants suit she wore to court.

  His idea of casual turned out to be the dining room at the Camino Real, where during the whole meal she had to listen to harp music. It sounded like running water and induced a need to visit the ladies’ room after two glasses of wine. Worse, over by a giant potted plant sat the man who had been with Sarah in court and when she was arrested. He ignored his companions and stared at Elena, making her feel guilty and restless. When she came back from the second trip to the powder room, worried that Karl might think she had some embarrassing bladder problem, she took a different seat so her back would be to the starer.

  “How’s the McGlenlevie case going?” Karl asked.

  “I’m not really at liberty to discuss that,” said Elena.

  “Well, you can understand that I’d be concerned. Not only is Sarah a friend and colleague of three years, but I may well be stuck with the chairman’s duties if the administration decides that the scandal and the time she’ll have to spend defending herself will lessen her effectiveness as our chairwoman.”

  “You mean they’re going to fire her?” asked Elena, horrified.

  “No, no, she’s tenured. That’s how they got her to come here, that and the chairmanship, for which she really had no prior experience. But they may relieve her of the chairmanship.”

  “That’s terrible. People are innocent until they’re proven guilty.”

  “I’m glad to hear that you feel that way,” said Karl.

  Elena eyed him sharply. He’d said he might “get stuck with” the chairmanship, but the truth was that he was going to profit from Sarah’s misfortune. “Don’t you?”

  “What?”

  “Think she’s innocent?”

  “Of course. Although I realize that she may have had a motive. Considering everything I’ve heard about McGlenlevie, it’s a wonder she didn’t kill him while they were married.”

  “What was your personal experience with him?” Elena asked.

  “Actually, I never met the man.”

  “Never? He and Sarah were married for — what? — two years?”

  Bonnard shrugged. “They didn’t mix socially with the department. Perhaps she was ashamed of him — or afraid he might try to strike up an acquaintance with one of the wives or with Dr. Ramakrishna.”

  “I think I met her.” That would be the little Indian lady who was having a nervous breakdown.

  “Well, she’s not the best professor we’ve got,” said Karl. “But she tries,” he added hastily. “Of course, all that’s beside the point. No matter how much evidence you have against Sarah, and I assume it’s considerable” — he looked at Elena questioningly but got no response — ”I simply can’t believe that Sarah killed him. And then treated the body with such — vindictiveness. The newspaper description would indicate a — well — intense hatred. Of course, one never knows what lies in the human heart, especially a heart that has been wounded — But Sarah? No, no, she’d never do what — well, what happened.”

  Intense hatred? Was that the explanation of the unslaked lime? To erase from existence as much of Gus as could be done away with? Elena and Leo had been thinking mostly in terms of the lime being used to disguise the time of death and eliminate odor so the body wouldn’t be discovered. But hatred? It made sense. Not in connection with Sarah, but . . . or was she underestimating Sarah’s resentment of Gus? Was Sarah so good an actress that she could fake that mildly irritated detachment that had seemed to characterize her feelings for her ex-husband and the horror she’d shown on hearing how he died?

  And why was Karl spending the whole evening talking about Sarah? It wasn’t very flattering. But then Elena had to admit that she’d been pumping him. Maybe he was wondering why she kept talking about Sarah.

  “I hope you’ll let me order dessert and a liqueur for you,” he said.

  Elena gritted her teeth. She liked to do her own ordering.

  “You’ll love this combination,” Karl assured her. “Calvados and apple tart.”

  “What’s Calvados?” she asked suspiciously.

  “Apple brandy. It’s the perfect complement for the tart.”

  When the order arrived, Elena tasted the apple tart — good. Then she took a sip of Calvados. It tasted like kerosene. Obviously there were drawbacks to associating with gourmet types, no matter how handsome.

  In fact, that had been a problem between her and Sarah. Sarah claimed Mexican food gave her indigestion. Elena thought most French food was the pits. But Sarah had never insisted that Elena imbibe kerosene with dessert. On the other hand, French food was often covered with some gunk, so you couldn’t be sure what they’d put underneath, probably cow’s spleen or something disgusting from a goose, which seemed to be a French favorite. Sarah had once ordered goose liver as a first course. The memory of that evening made Elena want to laugh out loud, but Karl was looking terribly serious, worrying about Sarah evidently.

  “If you want to know about Gus McGlenlevie, you ought to ask Virginia,” he said. “She may have been the first person in the department to suggest that someone kill him. This is just gossip, of course.”

  Jesus, thought Elena, Shut up about it, will you? “What happened?” she asked like the good detective she was.

  “Oh, McGlenlevie’s girlfriends kept calling the department. If they couldn’t get him at English, they’d try E.E.”

  Elena remembered the conversation on the exploding snail evening. About Gus’s girlfriends calling the house and how angry he had been because Sarah wouldn’t relay messages, because she threw out the answering machine, and finally because she arranged for an unlisted number.

  Karl might mean well, but everything he said was like another nail in Sarah’s coffin.

  “And then there was the time he wrecked her car.” Bonnard chuckled. “Sarah’s a remarkable woman. She has as much appreciation for a fine car as a man. Now, I hope you won’t take that as a chauvinist remark.” He smiled engagingly at Elena. “I guess I’m remembering my own wife, who thinks that a car is on the same level as a washing machine. If it works, who cares about the rest?” He was swirling his Calvados in the brandy snifter, sipping as if he actually enjoyed the stuff.