Rhapsody in Red

by Donn Taylor

  But if Staggart hadn’t planted those notes, someone else had. The only person with reason to do that was the murderer. The notes probably meant the murderer was someone on campus, someone actively working for nothing good. And while Staggart concentrated on Professor Thorn and me, he might not be looking for the real killer. So someone else would have to.

  Like it or not, that someone would have to be me.

  A weight of responsibility I hadn’t felt in years descended on my shoulders like a leaden overcoat. I felt as Julius Caesar must have felt just before he crossed the Rubicon in rebellion against the Roman Senate. But unlike Caesar, I’d already been forced out into the river. My only choices now were to drown in place or swim to the other side.

  I decided to swim.

  Dean-Dean still had his back to me while he argued on the phone. I sidled over to his neatly labeled key rack, lifted the university passkey, and slipped it into my pocket. If I was going to be fired, it might as well be for cause rather than false rumors.

  I was seated again when Dean-Dean finished his call and turned back around.

  “Is that all?” I asked before he could refocus on me.

  He looked a bit disoriented, which is not unusual for him. “I . . . ah . . . well, I suppose it is.”

  I stood up, said “Thank you,” and left before he could get himself back together. He hadn’t stated a definite conclusion, ordered me to do anything, or issued an “or else” ultimatum. I made it through the door before he could do any of those. Two more faculty crowded in as soon as I left. With that kind of traffic, he’d never know who stole his key.

  Outside the executive center I stopped and took a deep breath. It might be the last calm breath I got for a long time. Dark clouds hung low overhead and the chill November wind stung my eyes.

  The wrong side of the Rubicon was not a comfortable place.

  CHAPTER 8

  I sat a long time in my office thinking things through while my private orchestra ground away at something eighteenth-century that I didn’t recognize. Decision and darkness arrived together, a congruity I hoped was not prophetic. I phoned Professor Thorn at her apartment and hoped Staggart hadn’t bugged my phone. I also hoped I wasn’t doing too much hoping lately.

  “About your visit this morning,” I said to her, “circumstances have changed. I’d like to get together and compare notes.”

  “What made the change?” I couldn’t blame her for sounding doubtful. I’d been pretty blunt.

  “Not on the phone,” I said. “I’d rather explain in person.”

  She said nothing while she thought it over. I could hear her breathing, quick and short, the way a person breathes when he’s deciding whether to hold his temper or let it fly.

  “I’m not about to come to your office or home at this time of night,” she said, “and you certainly can’t come here.”

  “Neutral ground, then,” I said. “How about Dolt’s?”

  Her tone grew ironic. “That might be appropriate.”

  So it was agreed.

  Dolt’s Café is a student hangout below the hill from the college but well short of downtown. The owner’s name is actually Dalt, so he put up a neon sign with Dalts written in script. That’s right: no apostrophe. On public signs, the apostrophe to signal possessive case has become an endangered species. Dalt’s was no exception.

  Soon after he put up the sign, college kids used duct tape to convert the a to an o so that it read Dolts. Mr. Dalt liked the joke and left it that way. Students claim it refers to the owner, but he says it refers to his clientele. Judging by the noise level inside, both opinions may be correct.

  Professor Thorn was there ahead of me, wearing an expression that said she’d marked me tardy. She’d taken a table for two against a wall where everyone in the place could see us. The café was packed, and the speaker system blasted out a beat so loud and fast you could hardly hear the vocalist caterwauling behind it. With that racket going on, no one could overhear us.

  We had better insurance than that. At the nearest table sat four students, two boys and two girls. Each was totally immersed in a cellphone conversation, shouting to be heard above the background noise. I wondered why they’d bothered to come together. At any rate, they were too self-absorbed to eavesdrop.

  The café smelled of beer and burnt hamburger, but we each ordered coffee and a sandwich. Professor Thorn made a point of having separate checks. I briefed her on my interviews with Staggart and Dean-Dean while we waited. Her expression subsided from skeptical to neutral as I explained. She relaxed a bit when I told her my conclusion: “That love note with my name on it puts a different light on the threatening note with your name.”

  “I should think so,” she said, still noncommittal.

  “It looks like someone wants to implicate both of us,” I said. “I propose we form a partnership to find out who. But there’s one thing I have to ask you first. Just what was your relationship with Laila Sloan?”

  Her jaw clamped tight and her eyes became blue fire. “Nothing like you’re implying.”

  The server delivered our orders and commanded us to enjoy them. I had a ham and cheese and she had a Reuben with sauerkraut hanging out the sides. She dawdled with it for a minute, perhaps deciding how much to tell.

  I used the interval to attack my sandwich and test the coffee, which compared unfavorably to Tabasco sauce mixed with rubbing alcohol.

  After a thoughtful bite of Reuben, Professor Thorn turned her blue gaze on me again. “I haven’t been well-received on this campus. As a female Wiccan in a Christian department full of married males, I’ve been as welcome as the groom’s ex-mistress at his wedding reception.”

  “How about the single women on faculty?”

  “I didn’t toe the party line, and that was that. I had lunch once or twice with Brenda Kirsch. She was nice enough, but we had nothing in common. Then, last month, Laila Sloan started dropping by my office for chats. We could at least find something to talk about, so we had dinner together a couple of times. She invited me to her house to watch a DVD, but by then she was getting too free with her hands, so I said no.”

  The heavy beat from the speakers pounded my ears while I digested that information. It still wasn’t quite enough. So I said, “But you were on good enough terms that she asked you for a ride to the post office.”

  “Yes. I’d told her definitely to keep her hands to herself, that I wasn’t demonstrative in that way. She seemed to accept it. She said her car was in the shop and she needed to mail a package. I thought she meant the post office just down the hill from the campus, but she’d had trouble with one of the clerks there. So we used another one.”

  “Which one?” Overton City has a main post office in the city center plus two branches, east and west. The west branch was in the valley close below the campus.

  She paused, looking puzzled. “The one on the east edge of town,” she said. “Now that you mention it, I wonder why she didn’t use the main office. It’s so much closer.”

  “But she did mail the package . . .?”

  “She mailed three. I didn’t question that at the time, either.” She looked more puzzled than ever.

  We were getting off the subject, so I asked, “And that was the extent of the . . . uh . . . friendship between you and Laila?”

  She gave me that gorgonizing look again, but she only said “Yes.”

  We sat there awhile with the music battering our brains. My internal orchestra counterpointed mildly with Schubert’s Trout Quintet. Then Mara said, “You mentioned a partnership to find out who planted those notes. What did you have in mind?”

  I pushed the remains of my sandwich aside. “It’s possible Staggart dreamed up that bogus love note to get revenge on me. But even so, I can’t see why he’d write a threatening note to implicate you. The only other person those notes would help, as far as I can see, is the murderer.”

  She showed a sardonic smile. “So you’ve finally decided I didn’t do it?” I must hav
e looked either surprised or guilty, for she added, “You know I had opportunity and a possible motive. What changed your mind?”

  I decided to come clean. “I never had a firm suspicion, but I did harbor some doubts. You might have clobbered Laila in a fit of temper, but I couldn’t see you choking her afterward. You might have written a note to make police think someone was throwing suspicion on you, but it wouldn’t have been a threat. And you wouldn’t have written a second note to implicate me in a way that would throw even more suspicion on you. When Staggart showed me that second note, he put you in the clear with me.”

  She pushed her own plate aside. “There’s something I have to know before we form a partnership. Why does Staggart hate you?”

  I looked away for a moment, making up my mind. “It’s complicated,” I said, “and there’s too much noise in here. I’ll tell you sometime when our eardrums aren’t splitting.”

  She arched her eyebrows.

  “Promise?” “Promise. It happened in the Army back in the eighties.”

  “And he still holds a grudge?”

  “Apparently. I haven’t thought much about him for twenty years or more, though I’d heard he’d arrived in town. It looks like he’s done all right for himself: captain of homicide in a fair-sized city. But we’ve managed not to cross paths until now.”

  “That’s because you haven’t gone around murdering people.” Her foot bumped mine under the table. “Oh,” she said. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t color outside the lines,” I said. As soon as I said it, I wished I hadn’t.

  But she laughed. “I guess turnabout is fair play.” Then her face grew serious. “That doesn’t change the rules.”

  I raised my right hand as if taking an oath. “I won’t even bring my colors.”

  She skewered me with another glance. “Just what does this partnership involve?”

  “We investigate the murder and every person who’s been identified as a suspect. Some of it I can’t do alone. I should warn you that I have no qualifications as a detective, and we may have to cut some corners. That may land us in trouble with the administration and with the law. It could also be dangerous. We’re dealing with a murderer.”

  That’s when my pastor, Urim Tammons, stopped by the table. He is a portly man a bit past sixty, thoroughly knowledgeable and comfortable with himself and his calling, always sympathetic but never overbearing.

  “Hello, Press,” he said. “I heard you had some excitement the other night.” He was too kind to say that if I’d gone to prayer meeting, someone else would have found the body.

  “It was harder on Professor Sloan than it was on me.” I’ll be John Brown’s butler if I hadn’t promoted her again. So I switched to introductions. “Professor Thorn, this is Pastor Urim Tammons from Saint Mark’s Grace Church. Pastor, this is Professor Mara Thorn from the department of religious studies. She and I found the body together.”

  “Glad to meet you,” the pastor said to her. “Not the best experience for someone new in town. . . .” He let the thought hang in the air.

  “I managed to get through it,” she said, suddenly all sweetness and light. “But I’m sorry it had to happen to her.”

  Score another couple of points for her. In less than a second she’d switched from serious discussion to make a gracious response to the pastor. And she hadn’t let herself be haunted by the trauma of finding a dead body.

  “We all are sorry it happened,” Pastor Tammons said. He looked from one of us to the other and said, “Let me know if I can help in any way.”

  We thanked him and he left. It was so like him to offer himself without pushing. He’d checked on me every month or so since Faith’s death, and I’d explained that I wasn’t bitter against God. Just spiritually numb. Everything about Saint Mark’s Grace Church reminded me of Faith and drove grief deeper into my heart. He’d told me, and I’d conceded, that someday I’d have to get through it and come back. But after three years I still wasn’t ready. His stopping by was a gentle reminder that he and the church were still there.

  He’d said one other thing, too: “God isn’t through with you yet, Press. If He were, He’d have taken you along with Faith.” Theoretically, I knew he was right, but since her death I hadn’t felt any development.

  While I mulled those memories, Professor Thorn sat there without saying anything, her jaw tight and her blue gaze focused on the bridge of my nose. The beat of amplified music battered our eardrums, counterpointed by the random clatter of dishes and the muddle of shouted cell-phone conversations.

  Gradually, she relaxed like a stiff apron siphoning up water.

  “All right,” she said. “We’ll be partners. How do we begin?”

  I came back from memory land. “We start with Laila. Why would someone want to kill her? Meet me at the corner behind her house at six thirty tomorrow morning. Wear a dark warm-up suit and running shoes.”

  Her eyebrows lifted again. “We’re going to search her house? What about the police?”

  “They have one car staked out in front. That’s why we’re approaching from the rear.”

  “What about fingerprints?”

  “No problem,” I said, trying to look confident. “I’ve taken care of that. And one other thing: If we’re going to work together, I don’t want to keep saying ‘Professor Thorn.’ Is there something I can call you that you wouldn’t find offensive?”

  “Call me Mara,” she said.

  “That sounds like something Naomi said in the book of Ruth.”

  “I know.” She showed a secretive smile. “That’s why I chose it.”

  I wasn’t about to follow up on that. “My given name is Preston,” I said. “They call me Press.”

  “All right, Press,” she said. She picked up her check and stood. “Six thirty, then. I’d rather you didn’t see me out.”

  I waited five minutes, pondering all the while about the enigma that was Mara Thorn. Then I paid my check and left. The cold wind outside struck me between the eyes, but it wasn’t as cold as the polar ice in my heart.

  Tomorrow morning I would begin my career as a burglar.

  CHAPTER 9

  Laila Sloan had lived in an old-fashioned frame house four blocks from my own. Its backyard was enclosed by a wooden privacy fence, with a gate opening into a mid-block alley used for garbage collection. Yellow crime-scene tape surrounded the entire property, and we’d be in deep trouble if I got caught violating it. I wouldn’t have risked it except that trees and bushes restricted the neighbors’ view. The pre-dawn darkness would cover our entry, but we’d need luck for our exit.

  At six thirty Saturday morning, my private orchestra worked busily at something in sixteenth-century counterpoint. Professor Thorn—Mara—arrived at the corner behind Laila’s house exactly on time. She wore a dark blue running suit with dark gloves, and she’d added a black toboggan to hide her blonde hair. My dark hair needed no cover, and my running suit was black. It dated from the eighties, and I’d dug it out several years ago to jog with Cindy until she left for the university. For two years since then it had hung with other garments in a mothproof bag, and it smelled of mothballs. But I guessed it was good enough for burglary.

  Burglary was a lousy occupation for a couple of professors, but, I told myself, we’d been forced into it. My premonition seemed to be proving true.

  “Put the gloves in your pocket,” I told Mara, “and put these on.” I handed her a pair of latex surgical gloves. Faith had used them for dishwashing because she had a water eczema that split the skin on her fingertips. As a pianist, she couldn’t afford wounded fingers. Regular rubber gloves didn’t agree with her, either, so she switched to surgical gloves. I’d never bothered to get rid of them after she died.

  We opened the back gate in the alley and slid between strands of yellow tape into Laila’s backyard. The grass there hadn’t been mowed for a couple of months before the November cold killed it. But it presented no obstacle, having apparently been trampled down by sever
al herds of policemen.

  I peeked around the house to make sure the cop was still in his car out front, then stationed Mara as a lookout while I worked on the back door. I still had trouble thinking of her by her first name, but maybe I’d get used to it. The door brought the first surprise of the day. I turned the knob and it opened. My penlight showed fresh tool marks on the doorjamb.

  Another burglar had been there before us.

  Mara joined me, and I warned her about the other intruder.

  “So what do we do?” she whispered.

  “We hope he’s gone. If he hasn’t, we’ll do whatever we have to. But we can’t waste this chance. Heaven knows when we can get in here again.”

  She gave a quick nod, and we slipped through the door. It opened into the kitchen. In the half-light of approaching dawn, I could recognize the stove, refrigerator, and an island, but I couldn’t see any details.

  Because our fellow burglar might still be in the house, we stood for several minutes in silence, listening. We heard nothing, not even a creaking board, so I finally decided no one was there. Still, the possibility put our nerves on edge.

  Mara whispered, “All right, Sherlock, what do we do now?”

  “We wait for full daylight,” I whispered back, “and I can’t be Sherlock because you’re too feisty for Dr. Watson.”

  She cocked her head to one side. “I always thought he was too much of a doormat. What are we looking for?”

  “I don’t know exactly,” I admitted. “Anything that might suggest why Laila Sloan was murdered. Use your imagination.”

  Her eloquent expression showed her opinion of that guidance.

  As the light improved, we saw that the kitchen was organized by someone who’d made a fetish of neatness and intended to spend quality time there. The stove and refrigerator were late models, and an impressive array of cutlery hung on racks above a wooden-top worktable. On a small table at one side stood a collection of recent cookbooks—all gourmet. Maybe that’s why Laila was a bit overweight.