Rhapsody in Red

by Donn Taylor

  My companion threw me a doubtful glance. “How do we go about this?”

  “You stay in the car and beep if anyone enters the building,” I said. “That should give me time to find a safe area.”

  Her lips tightened. “Does that mean I don’t search her office?”

  “Not this time. Maybe tomorrow.”

  Her frown let me know she didn’t like the setup, but she accepted it. When I got out, she maneuvered herself across the stick shift into the driver’s seat and rested her hand on the horn button. I walked boldly into the building, my hand clutching Dean-Dean’s passkey in my pocket. Although I still wore running shoes, my footsteps on the stairway echoed in the empty building. I reached the second floor and turned toward Laila’s office.

  That’s when my plans went awry. Luther Pappas, the janitor, was pushing a wide wax mop along the floor near Laila’s office. The perpetual scowl on his middle-aged brow testified to a hard life. The heated building required no coat, and Pappas’s bulging biceps and shoulder muscles threatened to split the short-sleeved shirt he wore. At my entry, he looked up with a gaze half-startled, half-resentful.

  “What do you do here? No one comes here on Saturday.” His heavily accented voice sounded like a growl. I had to remind myself it always sounded that way.

  “I hope I haven’t interrupted your work.” As faculty, I wasn’t going to be intimidated by a janitor, even one with the title of custodial associate. But a bit of conciliation wouldn’t hurt. “I . . . I keep seeing images of what happened here Wednesday,” I said, pointing to the office still adorned with yellow tape. “I thought if I came back and saw things normal, the way they used to be, it might drive the bad memories out of my mind.”

  “Miz Sloan was not a good woman,” he said. The muscles of his hairy forearms flexed and unflexed as he gripped the mop handle. “She made me much trouble.”

  “How was that?” I feigned idle curiosity.

  “Bad temper.” His brow drew into a deeper frown. “One afternoon when I go to clean her office, I think no one there, so I unlock the door and open it. She stand behind her desk, wrap some kind of package, jump like I catch her doing something wrong.”

  His eyes searched my face. “She call me names I never call a dog. Tell me never come again without knock, or she complain—say she faculty, so they believe her and not me. After that I never clean this floor till she gone.”

  “What kind of package?” I asked. “How big?”

  He studied me again. Then he leaned the mop against the wall and his hands described something a bit more than a foot square and three or four inches deep.

  “So you didn’t see her after that?”

  “Once.” His eyes held suspicion. “Why you ask so much question?”

  “I don’t know.” I shrugged and tried to look innocent. “I guess knowing more about her helps get rid of a bad memory.”

  “Once I walk by here to see if she gone. The door left open. She and that other teacher—Miz Kirsch—stand by the desk, talking. Something between them on the desk, I don’t see what. They stop talk and look at me. Miz Sloan put herself between me and thing on the desk. I say ‘scuse’ and go on.”

  A car horn beeped outside. I’d forgotten about Mara waiting in the car.

  “Thank you,” I said to Pappas. “What you’ve said will help me forget what . . . what I saw here that day.” The thought was neither logical nor what I felt, but I hoped he wouldn’t notice.

  “One thing more.” Pappas raised a restraining hand. “You always say ‘good morning’ to me on campus. Not many do. So I tell you about that policeman, Staggart.”

  My stomach tensed. Footsteps sounded on the stairs. “What about the policeman?”

  “He try to make me say I see you in the building before Miz Sloan killed.”

  “You know that I wasn’t.”

  The footsteps drew nearer. The car horn beeped again.

  Pappas looked down at the floor. “Staggart make trouble. I tell him what he want to hear.”

  Before I could ask further questions, Bob Harkins emerged from the stairwell. His step reflected the energy of the young, and his face was the face of a man content with the world. When he saw me, his expression changed.

  “Returning to the scene of the crime, Press? In any case, you’re just the man I want to see. Come in a minute?” His hand gestured toward an office farther down the hall.

  Frustrated because he’d kept me from following up with Pappas, I feigned a pleasure I didn’t feel. “Of course, Bob. What’s on your mind?”

  Outside, the car horn beeped again.

  Harkins glanced in that direction. “That’s Professor Thorn in your car. I parked beside her and we had a nice conversation. She said she wasn’t familiar with the car and blew the horn by mistake.” He laughed. “I guess she doesn’t learn very fast.”

  His office was arranged much like mine, except he had several photographs of his wife and daughters. We took chairs facing each other beside the desk.

  His boyish face grew earnest. “I’m worried about the police investigation. I’ve never been suspected of anything before. Do you have any idea what’s going on?”

  “Not much,” I said. “Dean-Dean said we’re all under suspicion.”

  He frowned. “I’m probably the number one suspect because I was in that lab down the hall all afternoon. I couldn’t see anything from there, of course, and I didn’t hear anything out of the ordinary.”

  “Then keep telling the same story.”

  “That policeman, Staggart . . .” Worry made Harkins look closer to his actual age. “He’s dug up the background on why they hired Laila Sloan. He thinks the other chemistry professors and I hold a grudge against her because, as he put it, she ‘succeeded’ where we had ‘failed.’ He implied that gives us a motive to kill her.”

  “Given my involvement with the nursing curriculum, I suppose he thinks I have the same motive.”

  “He implied as much.”

  I’m not much of an actor, but I put on a huge sigh. “We can hope there’s safety in numbers. He can’t very well accuse all of us. . . . But look, you did work on the same floor with . . . with the deceased. Did you get to know her?”

  Something flickered in his eyes. “We spoke in passing, exchanged remarks about the weather, but we never held a substantive conversation.”

  I didn’t like that flicker. “Sounds like a cold relationship for two faculty with offices so close together.”

  His jaw tensed. “I kept it as cold as I could. I did resent her being hired, and I certainly resented her lowering the grading standards. We’re graduating nurses who don’t know enough chemistry to conduct a litmus test.”

  I forced a grin. “It may not be that bad.”

  “It’s bad enough. Not one of her students has ever taken an advanced chemistry course. They know they aren’t prepared.”

  The conversation was going nowhere, so I put it back on my track. “Do you know what Laila was doing with those packages?”

  “What packages?” He seemed bewildered.

  I raised my hands, palms up. “People say she mailed a lot of packages. I was curious. How well do you know Pappas?”

  “The janitor? Not well. He’s a surly fellow, but he cleans what he’s supposed to and doesn’t fool around with things in the lab. He doesn’t complain when someone makes a mess. Do you think he—?”

  “I really don’t think anything.” I repeated the palms-up gesture. “We were talking in the hall, and I gather he didn’t like Laila very much.”

  “He never complained about her to me.” Harkins pointed to a pair of photographs on his bookshelf. “Those are new pictures of Amy and Suzie. Their piano teacher was one of Faith’s students. Sherry McKeon—used to be Sherry Vogel before she married.”

  “I remember Sherry,” I said. Harkins obviously wanted to change the subject. Out of courtesy, I studied the two photographs. They showed two girls of junior high age, each wearing a white knee-length dress ado
rned with a pattern of green leaves and yellow flowers. Nature had favored them with the same peaches-and-cream complexions their parents had, and they wore their dark hair in ponytails secured with yellow ribbons. As I’d told Mara, Bob’s family looked like something out of the fifties.

  “That’s a fine-looking pair,” I said. “I know you’re proud of them.”

  “You’ll be happy knowing Sherry teaches Faith’s low-wrist technique.” Harkins demonstrated by resting the curved fingers of one hand on the edge of his desk, his wrist held below the level of the desktop. “The girls complained about it at first, but now they hear the different sound it gives them.”

  “Faith always said it was important.” As if on cue, my head echoed with the solemn opening chords of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto no. 2, one of Faith’s favorites. But I kept the conversation going. “How is Threnody doing?” I glanced at the photograph of Bob’s wife, the older image of her daughters even down to the style of dress. She looked exactly like what she was: the polished product of a prestigious Eastern school.

  “She’s fine.” Harkins picked up a pencil and tapped the eraser on his desk, a hint for me to leave. “She stays busy with racquetball, church activities, driving the girls here and there . . .”

  “Give her my regards.” I stood and headed for the door, the Rachmaninoff still echoing in my brain. “I enjoyed talking to you.”

  “The same,” he said, his head already buried in a book.

  Pappas was nowhere in sight as I left. Laila’s office door pulled at me like a whirlpool pulls at driftwood, but with an effort I resisted. It would have to wait for a more opportune time.

  At the car, Mara greeted me with a set jaw and a visage like a small inferno. “It took you long enough. I’ve been worried sick.”

  “You look healthy enough except for your temper,” I said. “I got more than I bargained for. Let’s go to lunch, and I’ll tell you what I learned.”

  She still occupied the driver’s seat. She got out, circled the car, and established herself in the passenger’s seat before she replied. “Tell me right now. It’s too early for lunch, and I have work to do. This had better be good.”

  I got in the driver’s seat and described my conversations with Pappas and Harkins, omitting the flicker in Harkins’s eyes that I’d taken as a warning signal. Her attitude softened as she realized I’d had little choice about my actions.

  “Professor Harkins said he’d talked with you before he came up,” I said in conclusion. “How did that go?”

  She wrinkled her nose. “Embarrassing. He spoke to me, and I had to pretend I’d blown the horn by accident. He recognized your car and asked what you were doing here. I said he’d have to ask you. He laughed and acted like he thought something was going on between you and me. Then he left.”

  Her temper was back, but at least it wasn’t directed at me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to start any rumors.”

  She burned me with that glance again. “Do we go on with our investigation, or do we quit?”

  “We keep going if you’re willing,” I said. “I have to go on in any case.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “I’m still in. What do we do next?”

  “Personnel records of all the suspects. At seven o’clock on Sunday morning there shouldn’t be anyone around except the security guard. I’d like you to keep him occupied while I look at the files.”

  Her eyebrows arched. “And how do I ‘keep him occupied’?”

  I gave her a hard look. “Use your feminine wiles.”

  Her eyes blazed. “That man is fifty years old if he’s a day, and he hasn’t had a bath in that long, either—”

  “You’ll think of something,” I said. I admit I was nettled at her thinking fifty years made a person old. “The main idea is that if I get caught, you’ll be in the clear. One casualty is enough.”

  Belligerence left her face, replaced by something like concern. “You know you’ll be fired if you get caught.”

  I showed her a grin. “I don’t plan to get caught.”

  I wished I felt that confident.

  CHAPTER 12

  The rest of Saturday was the longest and loneliest I’d known for many months. Bob Harkins’s idle talk about piano instruction started the memory train out of the station, and I couldn’t find a way to get off. My spirits were already low when I dropped Mara at her apartment, and after that they dove “full fathom five.” I lay on my bed, stared at the ceiling, and let the memories take over.

  Faith, so delightfully pleasant in most things, had been a harridan on low-wrist technique for the piano. She made her new students master it by playing nothing but scales for the first week—fingers arched, wrist below keyboard level, and the full weight of the arm carried on the ends of the fingertips. When they did it correctly, she could tap the underside of the student’s forearm and the fingers would not leave the keys. Students could always raise the wrist, she said, when they needed to reach farther back into the keys, but the habit of firm touch would remain.

  For the doubters, she would show clips of José Iturbi playing in the old movies. By the end of the second week she’d have the student convinced. Then they’d go on to build repertoire. That technique gave her and her students a distinctive sound: when they struck a note, it sang.

  I’ve never understood how she came to love anyone as different from her as I was. I came to Overton with a chip on my shoulder from the Army and grad school, on guard with everyone I met. But never with her. That was her special gift, along with one other. She found delight in everything she saw and led everyone nearby to share her delight. She provided the perfect antidote for my saturnine disposition. I never understood what she saw in me, but we found instant companionship and were married the following summer. A little more than a year afterward, Cindy was born.

  My thoughts wandered more as I lay on the bed, hoping the ceiling would show me how to assuage the pain. Three years ago Faith had died on that same bed. It was the most heartrending of memories, and yet one I’d consciously revisited again and again.

  The telephone on the bedside table rang. I rolled over and answered, then lay back with the phone at my ear. Cindy’s voice, so much like Faith’s, created its own silken melody.

  “How’re things going, Daddy? I called to check on you.”

  You don’t want to know, I thought. But I said, “They’re fine with me. As you might expect, the campus is in an uproar with a murder on its hands. But the police are working on it.”

  “I’m glad you’re okay.” She paused, and I knew she was about to broach the real reason for her call. “Daddy, would you mind too much if I didn’t come home for Thanksgiving? My roommate’s family invited me to spend the holidays with them.”

  My heart felt a father’s little pinprick that Cindy would prefer someone else’s company, but my mind flooded with relief. I didn’t know how long this investigation would go on, and I needed more freedom than Cindy’s presence would allow.

  “This is your roommate, Heather Albright?” On autopilot, my built-in parental caution had to ask.

  “Of course, Daddy. She’s the only roommate I have.” Her tone said parents ask too many questions.

  “And there are no men involved?” My caution came off autopilot into conscious control.

  “Oh, Daddy. Of course not. Eduardo and some other guys are driving with us, but they’re staying with their parents and I’m staying with Heather’s. We all belong to the same residence life education group. Besides, Eduardo has never tried anything. He’s earned my trust.”

  My caution went on red alert. “Trust doesn’t work that way, Cindy. A man has to earn your trust again every day—every minute, actually. Con men set you up by pretending to be good people. Sometimes you don’t know the difference till they cross the line.”

  “Oh, Daddy.” I could almost see her squirm. “You know I won’t do anything like that.”

  “Of course not, honey. You go ahead and have a go
od holiday. I just want you to take care of my girl.”

  “You know I will, Daddy.”

  She rang off. The house seemed more empty than ever. My internal musicians rollicked through a sprightly rondo, with a fife skipping from note to note like a mockingbird fluttering from limb to limb. But the music could not touch the deeper cloud of depression that descended upon me.

  That presented me with a choice. I could lie there and feel sorry for myself, or I could get up and do something, anything, to stop the memory train. Maybe not derail it, but at least park it on a siding for a while.

  I picked up the phone and dialed Lincoln Sheldon’s number in the assisted-living center. “I’m free this afternoon,” I said. “Would you like to run a few errands?”

  “Errands?” he said. “Horsefeathers. You’re feeling charitable, and you think I need a therapeutic change of environment.”

  Horsefeathers was a favorite expression of his. He’d once explained it was the name given to shingle-like wood cuttings formerly used for siding on New England houses. He found it amusing when people thought he meant something else.

  Before I could answer, he continued. “Well, you’re right. I’ve read books till my eyes are falling out, there’s nothing worth watching on the stupid TV, and I’ll be hanged higher than Haman if I’ll start playing dominoes. Come get me out of this place for a while.”

  He was waiting out front in his wheelchair when I drove up. I suppose even the November cold gave him a refreshing change. He got into the passenger seat of my Honda without too much trouble, and I managed to fold his chair and wrestle it onto the floor of the backseat.

  “Where do you want to go?” I asked as I started the engine.

  “Dolt’s,” he said with a glance that dared me to disagree. “The people there think a lot of noise means something significant is happening. Right now I’m inclined to agree.”

  When we parked in front of the café, I could tell he was right about the noise. The university football team was playing out of town that Saturday, but the stay-behinds had the place revved up like jet engines in a boiler factory. I hated to think what it would sound like later tonight. The din of iniquity, I suppose.