Death of a Lovable Geek

by Maria Hudgins

  I led Kenneth around to his car, still parked in front of the castle. “Would you do me a favor, tonight?” I looked at him through lowered eyebrows. “If my friend from the dig is able to join us, would you flirt with her?”

  “What?” He laughed and jumped backward, as if he’d been hit.

  “I assure you, she’ll be easy to flirt with. She’s very pretty, and by doing so, you may help someone else come to his senses.”

  “Am I likely to get beaten up?”

  “Not at all. The person who needs to come to his senses is quite docile, I think, and if I’m wrong, I’ll protect you.”

  Still laughing, he drove off.

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  Van had hoped his visitor would be Dotsy, but it wasn’t. The jail was too small to boast of anything like a visiting room, with Plexiglas shields and telephones, and newcomers were simply taken down the hall to the prisoner’s cell where they could talk through the bars while an officer watched, a few feet away. Van dropped his year-old copy of Fish Farmer magazine, his sole source of entertainment since they’d locked him up, on the floor beside his bunk when he heard two sets of feet approaching.

  “I want my money, asshole,” the visitor said.

  “Fine, thanks, and how are you?” Van stood back from the bars, both hands jammed into his pockets.

  “I’m not in the mood for jokes. I want my money.”

  “Well, you got me there. I don’t have any. I don’t have a watch, or a comb, or a pack of breath mints, because they made me empty my pockets when they brought me in.”

  “Where is my money?”

  “In Seattle, Washington, most likely.”

  “Okay then, I want my tickets.” The visitor hissed out the words under his breath, his gaze darting to the guard and back to Van.

  “The police have them.”

  “Holy shit. Did you tell them?”

  “No,” Van whispered, turning his face away from the listening guard, “and I can’t change my story now, or they’ll think I’m lying about other stuff, too.”

  “You better hope you get convicted. That’s all I’ve got to say.”

  “What?”

  “We don’t have the death penalty over here anymore, so you’ll live longer if they convict you than you will if they let you out.”

  Van’s face flushed and his jaw muscles worked furiously. “When I get out, you’ll either get your money or your tickets.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  I drove back to Aviemore and to Ed Cross’s office as soon as Kenneth Owen left the castle. Cross told me he had sat in on the police’s interview with Van this morning and that it had lasted more than two hours. It had ended with Van being formally charged with the murder of Dylan Quale.

  “Van insists that he knows nothing about these Super Bowl tickets,” Cross said. “But it makes no sense. The police don’t believe it, and I don’t believe it, either. Two tickets, for two adjacent seats in a stadium, for a sporting event to be held in the U.S. next February. One found in the stairwell of Castle Dunlaggan, only a few yards from a dead body, the other found in Van Nguyen’s desk drawer in a room that, coincidentally, he happened to share with the deceased! Van Nguyen is the only person in sight, other than yourself, who comes from America and has any likelihood at all of possessing such tickets. It strains credulity, you must admit, Mrs. Lamb.”

  “Did the police mention fingerprints?” I asked.

  “Apparently, the ticket found on the stairwell bears the fingerprints of everyone but the Dalai Lam U, and the one found in the desk drawer has Van’s prints and some fuzzy ones they can’t identify.”

  “I agree with you, Mr. Cross. Van isn’t telling the truth about those tickets, but that doesn’t make him guilty of murder.” I kept my hands clasped together on my lap, tightly enough that Ed Cross wouldn’t see them shake. “Could we go over to the jail together and talk to him?”

  “I suppose so,” he said, as he rolled his desk chair to the coat tree and grabbed his jacket.

  We walked the short distance down the main street to the police station. Crossing the parking lot, I stopped Mr. Cross with a tug on his tweed jacket sleeve. “Oh, look, there’s a student from the dig,” I said. “Assuming he’s here to visit Van, I guess that answers my question about whether the kids at the camp know about the arrest.”

  Proctor Galigher loped across the lot, pointing a keyless entry device at a silver Quattro. The car responded with a little tweet. I couldn’t remember for certain, but I was pretty sure the Quattro belonged to Hannah Dunbar, the pretty endocrinologist from the dig. I vaguely recalled seeing her climb out of it in the parking lot at the dig. Of all the students, Proctor was the last one I would have expected to see here.

  “Proctor!” I called out, too loudly for him to pretend he didn’t hear.

  He turned and waved, then opened the car door and started to hop in, obviously trying to get away without talking to me. But I was too quick for him. “Have you seen Van?” I asked.

  “I was checking to see if he wanted me to bring him anything,” Proctor said. He closed the car door and started the motor, giving me no chance to prolong the conversation.

  Ed Cross was able to gain entry for both of us into Van’s tiny cell, while an attendant waited for us in the hall. I sat on the bunk and wondered how in the world one could get any sleep on it. It was like a concrete slab covered with a thin, woolen blanket. Cross elected to remain standing, and Van started to sit on the floor at my feet but I stopped him. “Don’t sit on that floor. It’s filthy!”

  “Hello, Mom?” Van said, cupping his hand to his ear. “That woman’s voice travels halfway ’round the globe. Amazing.”

  “Sorry, I can’t help myself. Here. Sit beside me. Is there anything you need, Van? Anything I can bring you?”

  “Some clean clothes would be nice, and some better reading material.” Van kicked at the magazine on the floor. “Do you think they’d let me have my MP3 player in here?” He planted his elbows on his knees and glanced up toward Ed Cross. Van’s black eyes seemed to have lost their sparkle.

  “I’ll ask before I leave today,” Cross promised, then cleared his throat self-consciously. “Mrs. Lamb and I are both concerned about those Super Bowl tickets. Neither of us believes that you have no knowledge of where they came from.”

  Van flinched at the accusation.

  “Look at it this way,” I said. “Regardless of whose tickets they are or where they came from, it doesn’t matter. Compared to a murder charge, those tickets mean nothing! I don’t care if you printed them yourself. I don’t care if you stole them from an inner-city boys’ club. You’re better off telling the police the truth because they’ll find it out anyway, eventually.”

  “Why didn’t you say that to begin with?”

  “I got them from a friend back home who can always get you tickets for anything you want. They’re real tickets; not counterfeit or anything. Just not necessarily obtained legally. Those tickets aren’t supposed to be on sale yet. Proctor paid me to get the tickets for him, because he wants to give them to Tony Marsh. Tony’s supposedly going to Florida in February for some conference or other and he’s taking a woman with him.”

  “What woman?”

  “I don’t know and I didn’t ask.” Van looked up at Ed Cross who was standing in the middle of the cell, his arms crossed, his face grim. “I hadn’t seen Proctor between the time I got the tickets in the mail and when Froggy was killed. So when the police questioned me that next day in the tent at the dig, Tony was standing right there and Proctor was behind Tony, waving and making signs like, you know.” Van made a “zip it” motion across his lips. “When the police asked me if I knew anything about a Super Bowl ticket, I didn’t know they’d found one at the castle. I thought the tickets were both still in my room. I didn’t know why the hell they were asking about it, but with Proctor and Tony standing right there, I said ‘No.’ ”

  “And then you felt as if you had to stick to your story, when they
found the other one in your desk,” Cross said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Why did Proctor care?” I asked. “Because he wanted to surprise Tony with the tickets? Under the circumstances, wasn’t it more important to tell the police the truth?”

  Van waited a while before he answered. “Proctor was going to let Tony think he had been given the tickets for free. He didn’t want Tony to know how much he’d paid for them because then it would have seemed like an out-and-out bribe for a good grade in field studies.”

  “But it was an out-and-out bribe, wasn’t it?”

  “Proctor comes from a rich family. He has a lot more money than brains. He mostly gets along by doing stuff like that, but sometimes it backfires on him.”

  “Like that plagiarized paper that Froggy read?”

  “Oh, you heard about that, did you? Yeah, like that. He tried to bribe Froggy not to turn him in, but Froggy wouldn’t have it.”

  “Froggy told you this?” I looked at Van closely and saw relief on his face.

  “Yeah, Froggy told me.”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  As I drove back to the dig, I rearranged my thoughts about the Super Bowl tickets. I felt sure that Van had at last told us the truth, and when I put myself in the place of a young man being questioned by police, not knowing at the time why he was being questioned, I began to understand. Already suffering from a guilty conscience because of his illicit procurement of the tickets, he would have been sitting there in the spotlight while the Scottish police, one of his superiors (Tony), and his partner-in-crime (Proctor) all watched.%and listened. I could understand that he might have said to himself, I don’t know what the hell is going on, so I’d better play it safe and do what Proctor is telling me to do: zip it.

  This was my fourth trip today between the castle/dig and Aviemore, and I was beginning to feel the glow of competence. When I reached the side road where I had to make a left turn and climb the hill toward the dig, my foot slid automatically to the clutch in preparation for down-shifting. Wow. The little Micra and I puttered smoothly up the hill, past the MacBane farmhouse, and into the pitted parking area beside the tent. I steered expertly around the worst mud holes and braked to a clean stop alongside Tony’s car without even killing my motor. Wow.

  Joyce Parsley had moved to a new spot on the other side of the church wall and was drawing a grid of an excavated hole. Her head bent low over the big pad of graph paper resting on her knees, she sketched with her left hand, holding the pencil at an awkward angle. Both her feet rested in the bottom of the hole she was sketching and, as usual, her camouflage hat was pulled down low, hiding her face.

  “I’ve been to the jail to see Van, Joyce.”

  “What?” Joyce looked up with a start. Her hat toppled sideways. “Why is Van in jail?”

  “They’ve charged him with Froggy’s murder.”

  “Oh, no! He couldn’t have done it!”

  “I agree, but I’m afraid the police think he did.” Joyce could be very difficult to talk to, I’d found. She had a dozen ways to avoid eye contact and to sidestep unpleasant subjects. That hat of hers. She used it like an ostrich uses sand. At the moment, I wanted Joyce to come clean with me and, to do that, I needed eye contact, so I pushed her grid drawing aside, stretched out on my stomach, and stuck my head into the hole. “What’s this?” I reached in deep with one hand and flicked a small, shiny flake of mica. “Oh, it’s nothing. Never mind. Ever since I found that gold coin, I think every shiny object I see is another one.”

  Now that I’d forced her to put the drawing aside, I turned to face her, propping myself up with one hand on the edge of the hole.

  I said, “Joyce, do you miss Froggy? I do.”

  “I miss him a lot,” she said, her eyes filling up with tears. She swiped at her nose with the back of her hand.

  “Froggy was very fond of you.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “He talked about you,” I said. Here, I was lying a little bit. Froggy had mentioned Joyce to me once, but all he’d said was that Joyce followed him around. He thought she was almost a stalker.

  I remembered Froggy telling me, “At school, I saw her walking past my flat at strange times of day and night. She’d happen to be walking past the biology building when I was going in or out, and here, gosh, I’ve seen her hiding in the bushes outside my window!” Joyce, I thought, didn’t need to know that.

  “He talked about me?” Her face reddened. “What did he say?”

  I mentally crossed my fingers and said, “He talked about how he considered you to be a good friend and he said he felt comfortable around you.”

  Joyce beamed.

  “So when Van told me what you said the other night, when you saw him outside the door of the camper and yelled, ‘You killed Froggy,’ I said to myself, ‘I bet Joyce knows something.’ ”

  “No! It wasn’t like that!” She grabbed my arm. “I didn’t even see Van. I was yelling at that old man behind him.”

  “Boots?”

  “I don’t know his name, but he’s the creepy, old guy who’s always hanging around with that black-and-white dog.”

  “That’s Boots. He works at the castle as a handyman.”

  “Okay, whatever,” Joyce wrinkled her nose and looked out toward the moor.

  “You’re saying Boots killed Froggy? Why? What makes you think that?”

  Joyce ducked her head again and muttered, “No reason. He just acts creepy.”

  I knew that wasn’t all. Not by a long shot. I gave her a minute to reflect on how inadequate that answer had been, then tried another approach.

  “When was the last time you saw Froggy, Joyce? The last time I can remember seeing him was at lunch that day.”

  “I saw him after that. About two or three o’clock, maybe.”

  “And he was okay then?”

  “He was running.”

  “Running where?”

  Joyce paused a moment and squinted past the dig in the direction of the MacBane house. “About two o’clock, I got tired of working so I took a walk down the road.” She pointed northward with her pencil. “I saw Froggy come running out of the house where he stays. The MacBane house. He ran down the drive toward the castle, but he didn’t see me and I didn’t see where he went.”

  “Did you tell this to the police?”

  “Yes.” She glanced toward me briefly. “Of course I did.”

  “What was he wearing?”

  “Shorts. No shirt. He was carrying a shirt in his hand, but he wasn’t wearing one.”

  “Did he go into the castle?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t watch him that far.”

  “And you’re positive you’ve told this to the police?”

  Joyce flashed me a defensive scowl. “Yes. I told you I did.”

  “So where does Boots come into this? You must have had some reason for yelling ‘You killed Froggy.’ That isn’t the kind of thing you yell at somebody just because you think he’s creepy.”

  Joyce mashed her hat down lower, over her eyes. She dug at the stitching on her boot with her pencil.

  I waited.

  “Later that night … after dark … I was walking down the road again. I was about to the place where … there’s a concrete slab beside the road in front of the MacBane house … I was there when I saw the geezer—Boots—walking toward me … from the direction of the castle.”

  “Yes, I think I know the spot.” I recalled seeing the slab. It was cracked and weedy now, encroached upon by rhododendron bushes and pines, but I somehow thought it may have once served as a milk pick-up spot. Joyce was obviously having trouble telling me this story. She was admitting to spying on Froggy. From that concrete slab, one would have a clear view of Froggy and Van’s bedroom window and a convenient thicket of bushes to hide in. “Did Boots see you? Did he threaten you?”

  “No, he didn’t see me.” She cleared her throat. “There was a moon out. When I saw Boots, I saw something bright flash in hi
s hand. It flashed in the moonlight. It was a knife. A big knife.” Joyce looked straight at me and held her chubby little hands out, about a foot apart. “A really big knife.”

  “And you’re sure he didn’t see you?”

  “Well, he might have, because he turned all of a sudden and headed off toward the woods.”

  “Which woods? The one between the castle and the MacBane house?”

  “Yeah. The one where they have that old cabin.”

  “The shooting hut. Did you tell this to the police?”

  “No. They didn’t ask me about it so I didn’t tell them. All they wanted to know was when was the last time I saw Froggy, and I told them about seeing him running down the road.”

  “Joyce, you have to tell this to the police.”

  “No!” She wrapped her arms around her waist protectively. “They’ll say I was perverting the course of justice, or whatever.”

  “I don’t think they will. Do you want me to take you to the police station?” I stood up and took her by the arm. “Joyce, if you could see the pathetic little jail cell they’ve put Van in, you’d do anything you could to help him.”

  * * * * *

  As it turned out, I didn’t need to make yet another trip to Aviemore. When we ducked into the tent to retrieve my purse, Joyce and I got absorbed into a conference with Tony, Hannah Dunbar, and Graham Jones. Tony explained that they were discussing the long-overdue memorial service for Froggy, but now there were two deaths that needed to be formally acknowledged.

  Hannah asked me if I thought it would be better to have one service for both of them or have two services. “John’s funeral will be Wednesday. The police have indicated that Froggy’s body will be released to his parents soon, and they plan to have his funeral back home, of course.”

  “Won’t most of the kids want to attend John’s funeral?” I asked.