Medieval Murders

by Aaron Stander

  Ray parked in a near-empty faculty lot and stopped by a Starbucks for a large coffee and raspberry scone. The coffee and food seemed to help lessen the effects of the hangover. He started to go to his car, and then decided he could use the walk. The campus religious center was in an area of newer buildings on the east side of the central campus. Most of the buildings in the area had been erected in the 60s on land reclaimed from old homes and apartments, when enrollments exploded with the arrival of the baby boomers. Most of the steel framed, concrete block buildings were faced with thin tan bricks, aluminum, and glass, built in a style that started looking dated and dowdy a decade or two later.

  The center was built in the style of its neighbors, streamlined gothic windows and doors suggested the edifice’s devotional intent. Ray stood for a moment in the cool, dull interior, waiting for his eyes to adjust. Then he followed the signs to the office of Father Robert Durning—known on campus as Father Bob—at the back of the building on the lower level. The door to the office was ajar, and Ray could hear Father Bob. “Listen, I’ve got an appointment in a few minutes. I’ll get back to you tomorrow with an answer, okay? God bless.”

  Ray knocked and pushed the door open. Father Bob stood up and reached across the desk to shake hands. “Please,” he motioned to one of the two unoccupied chairs, “have a seat.”

  Elkins settled into the chair, the same chair he had sat in when he and Father Bob had discussed the details of Ellen’s funeral. He was struck again by the intense blue of Father Bob’s eyes, the color heightened by his deep tan and his thick blond hair.

  “You mentioned on the phone that you wanted to talk about Sheila Benson. Don’t know how much I can tell you. It’s strange, really. I had almost daily contact with the woman, but I can’t say I ever really learned much about her.”

  “Well, just start by telling me about the daily contact,” said Ray.

  “As you know, this is an ecumenical campus ministry. My office is here, but I conduct services at our campus chapel down the street. We don’t have an organized altar guild like a regular parish. Sheila filled that role. She came in every morning about six-thirty and helped me with the seven o’clock mass. This has been going on for years, long before I arrived. She hardly ever missed a day.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “This is the start of my fourth year.”

  “So, she was here on Monday morning?”

  “Yes,” Father Bob answered. Elkins waited until it became clear Father Bob wasn’t going to say anything more.

  “Monday, did you notice anything unusual?”

  “No, she was here when I arrived and had taken care of everything. I’m not much of a morning person. I come in, do the Mass. It’s a ritual, it’s sort of automatic, and then I go down to the Brown Jug. After an hour of coffee, breakfast, and the paper, then I’m fully awake.”

  “How did she get in?”

  “She had her own key.” Father Bob slid back in his chair, pulling his athletic frame into a more erect posture.

  “To the exterior door?”

  “Well, actually I’ve never thought about it. She must have had keys for most of the doors. She would need several.”

  “How many?”

  “Let’s see. One for the chapel door, it’s kept locked during the night. Another for the vestry. And then she had a key for the storage cabinet where we keep the wine, communion wafers, chalices, and other valuables. Again, before I arrived, there were several instances of theft and vandalism, so we have this heavy steel cabinet to keep things safe. So that’s three keys.

  “You gave her....”

  “No, I didn’t give her anything. Sheila came with the Ministry. She had performed the same function for Father Timothy. He probably gave her the keys. If you need to know, I could find out where he is, and you could pursue it with him.”

  “Monday, did you see her leave?”

  “I don’t remember. Days blend. As I said, after the service I go down to the Jug.”

  “How many people were at the service?”

  “There are never many, as few as three or four, occasionally around ten. And I’m not sure about Monday. They’re mostly foreign students—usually from South America, Asia, and Africa—occasionally a staff or faculty member. Our kids don’t like to get up that early. But then, I didn’t either when I was a college boy,” he gave Elkins a wry smile.

  “Can you remember anyone who was here Monday morning? Someone I might talk to. Are there any regulars?

  “Monday morning was a bit of a disaster, and the subsequent events have made things even more of a blur.” He opened his hands.

  “How so,” Elkins pushed, hearing impatience creeping into his voice as he moved forward in his chair.“I was out with a friend till very late. I’m afraid I had a very bad hangover,” he said sheepishly. “It’s been years since I’ve had a head like that.” He ran his right hand along his temple, pushing his carefully styled hair back. Elkins noted the early hints of a receding hairline.

  “Let me return to Professor Bensen,” pressed Ray, locking his eyes on Father Bob’s. “Is there anything else you can tell me about her?”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Your relationship with her, how did you get along?”

  “If truth be told, when it came to Sheila, I was of two minds. Here in the church she was wonderful. She was pleasant, helpful, and almost too willing to please. But when I would meet her in other settings she was a completely different person. Sheila was schizoid.” He stopped again and waited, letting the word hang.

  “How so?”

  “Let me give you an example,” his elbows now resting on the desk, he brought his hands together, interlacing his fingers in a prayer-like pose. “Earlier this year I was part of a panel discussing the role of women in the clergy—it was one of those colloquies put on by the Inter-faith Council—and Sheila, representing a women’s group, was also on the panel. It was dreadful. I don’t think that I, personally, have ever been so bitterly attacked.” He stopped and waited again for Elkins to pursue. Elkins was feeling annoyed by the game.

  “Yes?”

  “Her attack was really against the Catholic Church, but it was directed at me, and she expected me to answer for the Church.” Father Bob’s face reddened, and his voice rose in pitch. “Sheila was vicious, holding me accountable for two thousand years of history. It was all about the oppression of women by the Church, a church controlled by, to paraphrase her, a bunch of old white men committed to the subservience of women. And that was just her opening gambit. She got into the Church’s position on birth control as another weapon of oppression. The most difficult thing wasn’t her arguments, it was her anger. I’ve never confronted that kind of hostility. Talk about cognitive dissonance. Here,” he opened his hands, fingers forward, palms up, “she was the overly deferential helper, but on the outside she referred to us as a bunch of oppressive bastards.”

  “Did you think she was capable of a violent act?”

  “No. Well, I shouldn’t say that. After that confrontation it crossed my mind. In a society with so many guns floating around, there’s always that possibility.” He brought his hands together again.

  “Do you know anything about her private life, who her friends were, was she in any relationships?”

  “No, not really. All I know about her is hearsay,” Father Bob responded, his tone calming. “I don’t think she liked men, or at least had relationships with men. And I don’t know about her relationships with women.”

  “Are you suggesting…?”

  “I’m not suggesting anything. I know so little of Sheila beyond our relationship here. Anything I might say about her sexual orientation would only be conjecture on my part.” He gently rapped the knuckles of his right hand on the desk.

  “Given your training and experience in counseling, would you speculate on why Professor Bensen might have taken her own life?”

  As I’ve told you several times,” he offered i
n an irritated tone. “I didn’t really know her. Her death is a tragedy. If I thought that she was suicidal, I would have made every effort to reach out to her. In the past I’ve attempted to build a relationship with her, but she was inaccessible. Now I feel guilty that I didn’t do more, didn’t try harder, but I don’t think I could have ever reached her. Her problems were deeper than I had suspected.”

  “Let me go over some old ground again. You don’t remember seeing her leave on Monday?”

  “Everything sort of blends together.” He paused, looking at his fingertips as he bounced them together, his wrists now resting on the edge of the desk. “I think I was talking to a couple of worshipers after the Mass. I don’t remember seeing her go. This was the nature of our relationship. She came in and performed her duties, but we didn’t talk very often. That’s the way she wanted it.”

  “What time would she have left?”

  “7:25, 7:30 at the latest. It’s a very short service.”

  Elkins slid one of his cards across the desk, “You know where to reach me. If you have any more thoughts about Monday, or anything else that you think might be useful, please give me a call.” He started to rise.

  “Before you go. There’s something I don’t understand,” said Father Bob, his eyes on Elkins’s in a hard stare.

  “What don’t you…?”

  “Why are you going to all this trouble when the woman obviously killed herself?”

  “This is an unexplained death,” answered Ray. “We investigate all such deaths to eliminate the possibility of foul play.”

  “Is there any suggestion...?”

  “No, not at this time,” said Ray, pushing himself out of his chair. He stopped at the door and held Father Bob in his gaze for a long moment, “Thank you for your help.”

  Father Bob nodded, but said nothing more, turning his attention to a stack of papers on his desk.

  Ray was glad to get out into the sun. Father Bob made him uncomfortable. Perhaps it was the memory of Ellen’s funeral. Father Bob had gone on and on about how glad Ellen was to be with Jesus. Ray wasn’t sure. Ellen was a fallen-away Catholic who, even at the end, showed no interest in renewing her faith. In her final weeks Father Bob visited her at the hospice. Ray had the impression that she found Bob annoying. She said he was, “too pretty” to be a priest. However, at the end Ellen had asked for a Catholic funeral. She said her mother would find comfort in that.

  10

  Ray was happy to get back into the sunshine and warmth of the day, away from the dull light and chill of the air-conditioned building. He retrieved his car and drove over to University Maintenance, a complex that occupied a two-block area on the north side of campus that housed the power plant, repair and trade shops, storage facilities, and a management building.

  Ray found John Stockton, the Director of University Maintenance, in his littered office near the main entrance of the one-story cement-block building.

  “I was expecting you a bit earlier,” said Stockton, as he stood and extended his hand.

  “Just running a bit behind,” Ray replied, dropping into a chair. “When I sent you that e-mail yesterday….”

  “Isn’t that always the way. Every afternoon before I leave work I write a to-do list for the next day. Then I get here, and all I do is fight fires, one little crisis after another. At the end of the day I look at the list, and I haven’t accomplished any of those things. Frustrating as hell. So you want to know about the lock and key system.”

  “I want to know how Sheila Benson, the woman who jumped from the carillon, got a key for the building.”

  “How she got a key, that’s an interesting question. The person who can best explain our rather cobbled together system is Ben Beyer. He’s been in charge of keys since the 60s, think he was right out of high school then. In the beginning, he was a university carpenter and looking after keys was just sort of an extra assignment. I think he’s been doing it full-time more than thirty years. Could have retired ten years ago, but he’s stayed on, and I’m damn glad. He knows everything about the locks and keying systems at this place, and none of it is documented. I’ve tried to get him to start writing things down, but he says he’s always too busy, and I think that’s probably true. When he does finally retire, we’ll be in an even bigger mess.” Stockton stood. Come on, I’ll take you over there.”

  Ben Beyer had his back to them when they entered the lock shop. He was cutting a key and didn’t notice them until he switched off the machine and turned to get something off his desk.

  “Didn’t see you boys there,” he said.

  “Just arrived and didn’t want to interrupt you. Ben, this here’s Elkins from University Police. He’s investigating that death over at the carillon, and he’s got some questions about keys.”

  “Horrible thing,” said Beyers. “I’ve been around here a long time, and I can never remember anything like that. Was she some kind of wacko or something?”

  “We’re trying to figure it out,” said Ray. “I need to know about the key system.” He held out the key in the plastic bag. “That’s an AC001 key,” Ben looked at the key through the bag.

  “What does that mean?” asked Elkins.

  “A bit of history here. It’s one of the old series. There wasn’t any key system until the 50s when the college started to grow real fast. That’s when they put in the first key system. It was used in all the new buildings, and they eventually converted most of the locks in the old buildings. It’s a real simple system, or at least it was in the beginning. The master key that would open everything had the AC001, ‘AC’ for ‘All Campus’ and the ‘001’ was, well, I’m not sure. The other keys had letters and numbers to identify buildings and rooms. Faculty members get a key to their office and that key also opens the exterior door of the building. Department chairs have a key that opens all the doors in their department, deans have the same kind of thing, but for the area they manage.

  “When we became a university in the early 60s that master code was changed to ‘AU’. So I can tell you that key,” he pointed to the key in the plastic bag, “is from before sixty-two. There are very few of those around anymore. The ‘AUs’ will open the ‘ACs’, but it won’t work the other way.”

  “Who has access to master keys?”

  “Pretty much limited to maintenance people: custodians, electricians, plumbers, the supervisors in the paint and carpentry shops. Police and fire have them, too.”

  “How many of the master keys are in circulation?” asked Elkins.

  “Can’t tell you for sure. We’ve ordered thousands of blanks, maybe tens of thousands over the years. I’ve never kept records of how many of a given key I cut, but I’ve made a lot of those. You know, we have people that need them day to day, and keys get lost. People quit and take them along. Contractors, they’re the worst, they don’t return them. Given how many are probably floating out there, I guess we’re damn lucky we don’t have more problems.”

  “How about the carillonneur?”

  “That’s ole Percival Pennington, but he don’t have a master. He’s got a key for just that building. He has a second key for his office and the entrance doors in the music school. He loses his keys at least once a year, usually more, and the replacements I give him are just cut for those doors. Let me show you.” He went to one of several gray metal cabinets hanging on the wall, opened it, turned several hinged leaves, like pages in a book, and removed two keys held together on a thin metal ring. “I always do both his keys, his office and the carillon, as a set. And I make up several sets at a time, knowing he’ll be needing them.” Beyer lifted a key set off the hook. He removed one of the keys from the ring. He turned several leaves in the storage cabinet and removed a second key. He put this key against the key that would only open the carillon door. “Look at these two. If you compare that AC001 with this one, you can see the difference.”

  “Yes, I see it. So Pennington would never have had an AC001?”

  Beyer rubbed his chin as he t
hought about the question. “Well, if truth be told, I might have given him an AC001 a time or two over the years. I always have an inventory of those. And in that particular lock in the carillon, they work better. That lock never gets enough use. It’s always cranky. The master key works better. Besides, I wasn’t worried about Professor Pennington running around campus opening doors he shouldn’t.”

  Beyer picked up the plastic bag holding the key Ray had brought in and inspected it closely again. “I guess the mystery you gotta solve is how that woman got the AC001. And, like I said, over the years a lot of those went out of here. And given the looks of that one, it’s seen a lot of miles.”

  11

  Thursday morning Elkins sipped on a mug of coffee as Char Pascoe briefed him on a long list of items. Working toward her summary, she leafed through pages of a legal pad to check her notes.

  “Pennington is still at his place in northern Minnesota. This is according to the dean’s secretary in the music school. He had a heart attack in early August. They hope he will be back and well enough to play in the next couple of weeks. She told me that he has been emeritus for almost ten years, but he continues on as the carillonneur. She said he usually comes back to campus the week before the first home football game. I guess that won’t be true this year.”

  “They don’t have anyone else?”

  “I asked that question.”

  “And?”

  “It was just weird, like Pennington has always been here. No one expected that he wouldn’t show up. She said they were scrambling for a possible replacement.” Char paused briefly, “I did get his number, and I called him in Minnesota. I wanted to know if anyone else had a key to the carillon.”

  “And?”