“Yes, and actually, I was surprised to see her. All she’d been talking about all week was going to her daughter’s baby shower. But the way she was dressed, I thought, maybe she’d changed her mind.”
“What do you mean?”
“She was wearing the ugliest muumuu I had ever seen, not at all something someone would wear to a party.” He thought another moment and said, “Of course, she didn’t have much reason to come to work looking good anymore.”
Was he rubbing my nose in it? Assuming that even with George out of the picture, Annette wouldn’t want me?
“As I was leaving, she was coming into George’s office carrying all of our personnel files,” Mancini said, barely able to keep the anger out of his voice. “Her file was right on top. I felt bad for her; that bastard was making her deliver her own execution papers. She was still here when I left.”
“What time was that?” I asked, hoping his answer was precise enough to narrow down the time of George’s murder.
“A few minutes after six p.m.,” he said.
I nodded to my deputy, who escorted Doug Mancini out and brought in the next faculty member.
Eduardo Calibri—Ed for short—started babbling before he entered the room. “What have the others told you, Steve?”
I took a deep breath. “Why don’t we talk about what you have to tell me, Dr. Calibri. You must have a theory about what happened.”
Calibri threw his shoulders back and sat upright, grinning from ear to ear. “I’ve been wondering when you’d ask! We’ve all been talking about it, and everyone thinks your best bet is Annette.”
This is going to be easier than I thought.
“Go on,” I said.
“George’s office was locked when the cleaning lady came in this morning. I asked her that, specifically, before coming to see you.” He nodded with satisfaction.
By all means, interfere with a police investigation.
I waited for him to continue.
“Who locked the door if George was lying in there dead to the world? Who had keys to his office? George, the cleaning lady, and Annette.”
“Why couldn’t the killer have used George Lewis’s keys?” I asked.
“Come on, Steve. Now you’re just insulting us. George’s keys were on his desk. I saw them myself this morning, before you shooed us all away.”
Of course you did.
I had everything I needed from Calibri and sent him out with my deputy.
After three more hours of interviews with the Business Department faculty, I learned the following: George Lewis planned to hold a department meeting in two days, in which he would “make a historic announcement.” Everyone knew what it was: he was dissolving all their tenure contracts and giving them renewable one-year posts in his new certificate program. They all expected that he would spend that year finding and hiring their replacements. Some of them had talked about suing or throwing his offer back in his face; but they couldn’t afford an expensive lawsuit, and their chances of leaving Boswell County to teach at another college were limited, considering they had few publications on their vitae and even less respect, coming from the lowest-ranked business program in the state. The youngest of them were in their mid-to-late forties, too old to start over somewhere else; and their only option in town was mussel farming in the Clinch River. They were at George’s mercy. Stuck. If George had lived, the SOD committee would have been little more than a group whining session, but now it gave them all an alibi.
My next stop was President Smithson’s office. He had insisted on being informed at every step of my investigation, and the mayor had given me the usual order to keep him happy.
We sat in his office, just slightly less opulent than George Lewis’s, and he grilled me for a solution. “So, what are you saying, Steve? You think one of my faculty did this? Do you have any idea how that’s going to look?”
“No, sir. I mean, I don’t know, sir. They all have alibis.”
“That settles it, then. You’ll just have to look somewhere else for your murderer.” He rolled his chair backward and stood to escort me out.
I remained seated. “It’s just that, well, their alibis are each other. It sounds way too convenient.”
“Unless you can prove that they’re all lying, you’ve got no choice but to move this investigation along,” the president insisted.
I knew Smithson was right. I also knew what that meant. Annette.
I had left instructions with my deputy to call me as soon as she arrived at Dillard. With no message waiting for me on my phone, I decided to catch an early lunch.
The walk to the faculty/staff dining room was brisk. The December air was crisp and unforgiving. Clutches of flame azalea bushes crouched low along the path, bare branches trying to shelter their cores from the biting wind. Every kind of maple imaginable—silver, red, striped, sugar, black, and ashleaf—shivered along Campus Walk. Bigleaf magnolias yearning for spring lined the pathways between the academic quad and the rest of the buildings.
The dining room was buzzing with the news of George’s murder. All of the Business faculty were there, each holding court at his or her own table, entertaining rapt listeners with what it was like to be interrogated, how George’s office looked decorated with his own cranial matter, and why it was only a matter of time before Annette would be arrested.
I rose to get my third cup of coffee, when I heard the familiar ring tone I’d assigned to all my work numbers. It was my deputy. Annette Walker was in Dillard Hall.
* * * *
I waited in Dillard 400 for my deputy to bring Annette in. I couldn’t sit still and paced the large room. I hadn’t seen her in a week, not since I ran into her outside Washington Hall.
Annette had been coming out of her regular Friday afternoon committee meeting, and I was on my way to lunch. We walked together to the dining hall. She’d been bubbling over with the news of her daughter’s baby shower—the theme, what she would wear, her gift for her first grandchild. I’d hugged her with my congratulations; she’d hugged me back.
I was thinking about the possibilities when Annette stepped into the room. I started toward her, arms outstretched, but dropped them when I saw my deputy walking in behind her.
After a quick exchange with my deputy about the results of the faculty interviews, I motioned for him to leave. He closed the door behind him. Annette remained standing, her hands clasped in front of her.
“Annie.” I placed a hand on her shoulder.
She smiled weakly and sat down in one of the student desk chairs near the door.
I took a chair near her. “Annie, tell me what happened last night.”
She crossed her arms over her chest and didn’t look up when she spoke.
“I left here the same time I do every night, a few minutes after six p.m.,” she began.
“George asked me to stay late and help him write up new contract letters, but I had Stacy and Mark’s shower to go to, and the bus was leaving in less than twenty minutes. If I missed it, I would miss my connection. The party started at eight, and I wanted to leave myself plenty of time.”
Annette had grown up in Manhattan, I knew, where it was too expensive and too crowded to own a car. She got used to public transportation early in her life and stuck with it. She had moved to Boswell County three years ago but still hadn’t learned how to drive. Lately, George did much of her driving for her—to and from his house. I pushed that thought aside and continued with my interview.
“There were plenty of buses that would have gotten you to Stacy’s by eight p.m.; what was your rush?” I asked.
“The shower got moved at the last minute from Stacy’s house to one of her friend’s in England Run,” she explained. “Jennifer, my student aide, gave me the message. I’d never heard of the neighborhood, so I wanted to leave myself extra time to get there.”
“So, plenty of people must have seen you at the party,” I said, feeling this, coupled with the complicated bus routes I knew she had to
take to get there, could serve as an alibi.
Her lips clamped down in a thin line.
“I never made it to the party,” she said. She rubbed her temples with her fingers. “I tried asking people for directions; but no one had heard of the street. The bus dropped me off in the England Run area, and from there I had planned on walking the last few blocks. I finally stopped at someone’s house to use their phone, but my daughter didn’t pick up. I ended up coming home.” She dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief.
“Why didn’t you just use your cell phone?”
“I lost it last week, right after I saw you. I just don’t know where it went. You know, this is all so strange. When I spoke to my daughter late last night, she said the shower location had never changed. Why would someone leave me a fake message like that?”
Good question.
“Annie, I’ll need to know exactly which buses you took and everyone you talked to. Do you remember where the house was where you stopped?”
Annette gave me her bus route and the general location and description of the house where she had stopped to call her daughter. The other people she had talked to were simply passersby; there would be little chance of tracking them down. Still, I had something.
“What happened in George’s office, Annette?”
“I didn’t kill him, Steve. You know me better than that.” She looked confused, as if trying to figure out if all of this was real. “I can’t believe he’s dead.”
I tried asking her a few more questions, but she was barely holding it together.
“It’ll be okay, Annie,” I said, and put my arms around her. She sniffed noisily but didn’t say anything. Instead, she searched my face, as if looking for a clue about what I was thinking. I wanted to tell her, but it wasn’t time.
Just then, my phone rang. It was Smithson. I told Annette that I’d see her again soon and asked my deputy to drive her home. President Smithson wanted to know if I had learned anything new. I spent the next half-hour in his office filling him in.
“So, Annette killed George in a fit of rage over being rejected? Wrath of a woman scorned, huh?” Smithson said.
“Just a minute, sir. I still have leads to follow up. I’m not ready to make an arrest, yet,” I said, picturing squad cars racing to Annette’s house and officers dragging her away in shackles.
“Well, see that an arrest gets made soon. We’ve got students running around scared, parents threatening to pull their kids out, and townspeople spreading more and more rumors about what’s happening at Hathaway. This is not how I want to end my presidency.”
He dismissed me with the understanding that I would report every new detail to him as soon as I uncovered it. Of course, the news would go live the minute I left his office. He would make certain everyone knew that someone would pay for the murder. Right now, it looked as if that someone would be Annette.
* * * *
I spent the next day recreating how George Lewis’s murder would have happened if Annette were the killer. I started with a visit to the student aide, a local girl, who was waiting out the investigation at home with her parents.
The four of us sat in their living room, Jennifer McNally and her parents on the sofa, me settled on a recliner in front of them.
“Jennifer, can you tell me what you remember about that phone call?”
She licked her lips before she spoke, the silver stud in her tongue visible for just a second.
“Yes, sir. I, like, remember writing down the message for Annette; she was at lunch. I mean, someone called to say that, like, her daughter’s shower had changed. Then they gave me directions to, like, give to Annette.”
This is, like, going to take, like, a really long time.
“Did you recognize the caller’s voice?”
“No, sir. I mean, the lines are, like, really busy during lunch, and, you know, I’m the only one there. I just, like, try to get the phone calls over with as quickly as possible, you know?”
“Of course, that’s understandable,” I said. “Do you remember if it was a man or a woman who called?”
“No, I mean, I can’t remember; there were a lot of calls yesterday.”
“So, someone called, gave you directions to Stacy’s baby shower, and hung up. That’s it?”
She nodded.
“Jennifer, is there anything else you can think of?” I asked.
“There is, like, one thing,” she said. “I, like, always look at the caller ID when a phone call comes in, you know, so I don’t have to ask for the phone number. I mean, it just, like, saves me some time or whatever, you know?”
I nodded. Like, go on.
“Well, anyway, this call came from somewhere, like, on campus. The number was only four digits long, you know.”
Yes, I know.
My interview with the student aide ended just before six p.m., leaving me enough time to make the 6:20 bus—the same bus Annette said she took the night before.
I re-traced Annette’s bus route. The weekend bus schedule was the same on Friday and Saturday evenings, as were the drivers. All three remembered Annette because she had asked them several times if she was going the right way, how far away her stop was, exactly which bus she should take to make her transfer. I also stopped at the house from which she had called her daughter. The people who lived there remembered her.
“She was a pretty woman, but that dress she was wearing wasn’t the least bit becoming,” the wife noted.
“Pretty or not, she didn’t have to behave so poorly,” the husband added. “Rude, really.”
Not at all Annie’s personality, but, under the circumstances, understandable. She was so easily flustered.
* * * *
“That’s it, then. Annette made the phone call herself, to give her a way to get out of going to the party,” President Smithson decided when I briefed him in his office the next morning.
“Why would she do that, sir?” I asked. When I could have done it just as easily. I knew she wouldn’t be there, and the student aide wouldn’t recognize my voice.
“Come on, Steve. Do I have to do your job for you? She was never planning on going to the baby shower. She just told everyone she was. She made sure a couple of bus drivers and some random family remembered seeing her far away from the murder site, so she’d have an alibi. Why else would she have acted so agitated, if not to be memorable?”
Her only daughter? Her first grandchild? I can see it.
“Maybe she was just frustrated because she was lost?” I said.
“Yes, or maybe the blood residue your people found in the ladies room sink in Dillard came off of Annette’s hands. How long before we know if the blood is George’s?”
I can tell you now; it’s George’s.
“Not long, sir. But chances are pretty good it’s his, since the doors to Dillard were locked at 6:15 last night. Officer Reynolds was on duty, and he recorded the time in the police log.” I had to re-lock them when I left.
“And Annette was the last person to see George alive,” he said, putting his own pieces together.
Second to last.
“But, sir, the lab results showed no blood residue on Annette’s muumuu. If she had mutilated George Lewis, the medical examiner said she definitely would have been covered with his blood.”
“Really, Steve, you disappoint me. A muumuu? When have you ever known Annette to wear a muumuu? I don’t mind telling you, I’ve watched her from time to time. That woman knows how to wear clothes right.” He waggled his eyebrows.
Didn’t I mention the baby shower had a Hawaiian theme?
“Don’t you see it, yet, Steve? All right. I’ll spell it out for you. Annette was wearing a muumuu because it was easy for her to take off. The reason you didn’t find any blood on her clothes was because she wasn’t wearing any when she killed George. She distracted him, beat his brains out, washed up, then put her muumuu back on. My wife sleeps in one, and they’re the easiest things to get in and out of, if you know what I mean
.”
Yes, I know what you mean.
I dropped my head into my hands and said through my fingers, “And the murder weapon, sir? What did she do with that?”
“She must have gotten rid of it that night. It’s dark by five-thirty nowadays; it’s not like she’d have to worry about being seen,” he said, wiping his palms together to suggest a clean disposition of the matter.
You’re right; a dark blue police uniform, even a blood-soaked one, would hardly be noticed in the dark. And now, all that was left of it was ashes, which, along with a steel baseball bat, were somewhere at the bottom of the Clinch River. There was no evidence left to trace anyone to George Lewis’s murder.
“Not bad, not bad,” Smithson said to himself and nodded. “Clever, really. I guess our little Annette is more than just a pretty face.” Sherlock Holmes sat back, pleased with his own adroitness.
“It’s not looking good for Annette,” I said and shook my head with as much disquiet as I could feign.
* * * *
Annette’s trial lasted only three days. The prosecution hammered on her motive, her access to George’s office, and the fact that she was the last known person to see George alive. By the time the prosecution rested, Annette looked defeated, drained of any hope, ready to give up. She didn’t know what I knew, that in my pre-trial interview with her lawyer, I had given him everything he would need to find all the holes in the case against her. When I told her, she would be so grateful.
I sat back and watched her lawyer go to work. He pointed out to the jury that all the evidence against Annette was circumstantial and that there were no eyewitnesses. He saved his trump card for last.
“Dr. Shepherd,” Annette’s lawyer addressed the chief medical examiner for Boswell County. “A crime of this much violence, this much anger, would you call it a crime of passion?”
“It certainly looked that way. In fact, of the eight blows inflicted, only the first was necessary to kill George Lewis. The remaining seven did nothing more than satisfy some animalistic urge in the killer.”
It was certainly made to look that way.
“Let’s take a look at the timeline, shall we, Dr. Shepherd?”
Chesapeake Crimes Page 14