by Donn Taylor
“If we hear a car drive up, we’ll have time to get out of her office. Any other part of the building is fair territory for faculty.”
She needed no further encouragement, but skipped ahead of me up the stairs to the second floor. The hallway stood empty, unadorned except for three strands of yellow tape across Laila’s door. I put on my surgical gloves, checked that Mara was wearing hers, and opened the door with my passkey. We threaded our way between strands of tape into the office and closed the door.
“What are we looking for?” she asked.
I shook my head. “I wish I knew. Anything out of the ordinary, I guess. Especially anything that might connect her to anyone else.”
We made a quick survey of the office. I looked toward where Laila’s body had lain and saw that a dark bloodstain still marred the floor. I wondered if it could ever be cleaned. Cable ends lay open on the table that had held her computer. The only other furnishings were a desk with a swivel chair behind it and two hardwood straight chairs facing it. Laila apparently talked to students from behind her desk. Most of us come around in front because students respond better in a less formal setting.
My personal orchestra broke into something loud and dissonant—the Shostakovich Symphony no. 5, I think. Nothing distracts you quite like orchestral heavy artillery when what you really need is a quieter heartbeat.
Shelves on two walls of the office stood mostly empty. The third wall held no picture or other decoration, nor did the walls on either side of the door. The only sign of academic activity was a desktop cluttered with papers.
“Let’s have a look at the desk,” I said. “You go through her papers, and I’ll take the drawers.”
Irritated even more by Shostakovich’s bombardment of French horns and timpani, I opened one drawer and began searching. After a pause, Mara started on the papers.
Neither task took long. The middle desk drawer contained the usual clerical miscellany of scissors, pencils, and paper clips. The others contained only a stack of ungraded true-false exams and two chemistry pamphlets. I riffled the pages of these and found nothing of note.
Disappointed, I turned to Mara. “What did you find?”
She wrinkled her nose. “A bunch of ungraded papers. A few memos from the dean. Unpaid utility bills for her house.”
A car approached outside, and we stood frozen in apprehension. My heart jackhammered against my ribs again, counterpointing the mental bedlam of Shostakovich. The car passed and the engine sound faded.
“We need to get out of here,” Mara said. “What’s left?”
I resurveyed the bare office. “Books. You take the shelf behind the desk. I’ll take the other.”
Not that there were many books. The three upper shelves in my assignment stood empty, with maybe a dozen on the bottom shelf. Most proved to be high school chemistry texts, supplemented by a few on teaching methods. I checked the blank prefatory pages in each book, then held each up by its spine and riffled the pages. Nothing fell out.
Another zero.
I replaced each book where I found it and turned to Mara, who was reading an oversized book with a sculptured maroon cover. She’d had even fewer books to deal with, for I recognized much of her shelf’s contents as Overton University yearbooks. Laila had been here long enough to accumulate six of them.
“I found something interesting,” Mara said. “Laila’s high school annual. Her senior year.”
She kept her place with a finger and held the cover up for me to see. It showed the words “Bi-County Consolidated High School,” and was dated the year before Laila entered college.
“Laila is listed as a senior,” Mara said, “but this is what’s interesting.” She flipped the book open to the page marked by her finger, then indicated a photo on the bottom half of the page. It showed a much younger version of Laila seated on the lap of a skinny male teenager, her arms around his neck. Laughing and mugging for the camera, she held her cheek against his. The boy’s arms were wrapped close around her, one hand resting on her hip and the other on her thigh. But he wore a startled expression, like an altar boy caught sampling the communion wine. A caption in bold print below the picture asked:
Can Dee Laila make more trouble for her Samson, Bobby H.?
I looked more closely at the boy in the photo. He had light brown curly hair and a peaches-and-cream complexion. Though he was very, very young, there was no mistaking the face of the man we knew as Professor Bob Harkins.
Thunderclaps exploded in my head as I put that fact together with what I already knew. At minimum, Bob had given me a false impression of his acquaintance with Laila, and he’d probably just plain lied about it. The name Bi-County Consolidated set off another explosion. Consolidated meant that students who came from widely different towns might have been schoolmates.
“You need to look at this page, too.” Mara held the book in front of me again. That page, labeled “Sophomore Class,” held rows of small, square photos. Her finger pointed to one at the center of the page. Again, there was no mistaking Bob Harkins. Mara’s finger shifted to the list of names, which confirmed his identity as “Robert Harkins.”
“What do we do now?” Mara asked.
Another car engine approached. This one halted in front of the building and remained there, idling. A door opened downstairs. Footsteps sounded on the stairs and then outside in the hall. We had missed our chance to escape from the office. Now everything depended on the visitor’s intentions. The office afforded no places to hide. If the visitor came in, we’d be discovered.
I held my breath and I could see Mara holding hers. The footsteps passed our door and continued. They stopped farther down the hall. A key turned in a lock and a door opened. Four more footsteps, then silence.
Mara tiptoed toward our door, but I stopped her with a gesture.
“Don’t,” I whispered. “That door didn’t close.”
We waited, motionless, breathing as quietly as we could. The car engine outside continued idling. Presently, the footsteps started again. A few of them first, then a door closing, then the steady clomp-clomp back down the hall. Thankfully, back down the stairs. The building’s outside door closed, a car door slammed, and the engine climbed from idle into life. It faded as the car moved around the circle.
“Now,” I said. “Put the book back and let’s go. We’ve used up our quota of luck for the day.”
“Maybe for the decade,” she said.
We wove our way back through the yellow tape into the hall, walked less cautiously down the stairs as we pocketed our surgical gloves, then strode openly onto the campus circle. My tension eased with each step of the journey, but by the time we reached her car, fatigue had flooded through me, permeating each limb as if some alchemist had turned my blood into lead.
Mara’s face showed the strain, and her eyes looked the unspoken question, “What next?”
“We separate,” I said. “You go in your car and I walk home in the usual way. Then we meet off-campus and compare notes. What’s a comfortable place for you?”
She turned up her nose. “Not Dolt’s.”
I took the plunge. “How about Dr. Sheldon’s room?”
“Oh.” Consternation played across her face. “Then you know I let the cat out of the bag.”
“It’s more like you uncaged a tiger. You’d know that if you knew Dr. Sheldon better.”
We agreed on two o’clock that afternoon, and she departed in her Ford Taurus. It sounded like it could use a new muffler as well as a new heater. I sauntered down the walkway to my house, accompanied now by an eighteenth-century minuet.
Dean-Dean’s memo about the mothball smell bothered me. I wondered if my running suit had left a lingering fragrance in Laila’s office, and if it could be traced to me. So as soon as I got home, I stripped off the running suit and started it through the washing machine. I took a long shower in the hottest water I could stand, growing each minute more conscious of my deep fatigue.
After the shower I set th
e alarm and flopped on the bed, but my mind kept churning with the paltry sum of routine information we’d produced. The only item of real significance was Laila’s high school connection with Bob Harkins. I dreaded confronting Bob with that, as I knew I must. And my mind was riddled with fear. Mara and I had taken extraordinary risks and had been lucky thus far. But our luck couldn’t hold forever, and who could tell what further risks we might have to take before we completed our self-imposed mission?
And what chance did we have, really, of solving this murder before the effort cost us our jobs or Staggart managed to pin the murder on one of us? Or both.
At some point in those thoughts I drifted into sleep, my mind echoing with the mocking rasp of blues played Clyde McCoy-style on a wah-wah muted trumpet. And I dreamed of swimming endlessly in a hostile sea that had no shore.
CHAPTER 15
Fortunately, one can’t drown in a dream. At least, I didn’t drown in that one. The alarm clock shook me out onto dry land in my own house. The clock reminded me I had an appointment.
I grabbed a quick ham sandwich and headed out the door. At the rate I was eating ham sandwiches, I’d probably turn into a pig, which would be preferable to what I was beginning to feel like. A donkey, for instance.
I arrived at Dr. Sheldon’s quarters on time, but he and Mara were already waiting. They wore expressions like a couple of cats poised outside a mouse hole. Whatever they might have learned, they expected my information to be the main course.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll go first, but I expect some input from both of you.”
Mara showed no expression at all, but Dr. Sheldon ventured a knowing smile.
“Before you do,” he said, “let’s agree on what we hope to accomplish. You both say Captain Staggart wants to indict you for the murder, and you’re both under pressure from the college administration. You think finding the real murderer will solve both problems. I’ve offered to supplement your efforts with computer research.”
Mara nodded and I said, “That’s the size of it.”
“May I say before starting,” Dr. Sheldon said, “my considered opinion is that all three of us are nuts. My computer work will keep me from dying of boredom, and it should bring no negative consequences. But what you’re doing is dangerous. You’re dealing with a real murderer, and the closer you get to him—or her—the more likely you are to become the next victims. And the probability of your succeeding can best be expressed in negative numbers. Are you sure you want to continue?”
“Yes.” Mara showed him her steely blue gaze.
“I have to continue,” I said. “The police won’t find the real murderer as long as they’re focused on us. And on the job front, I like teaching history. I’d make a lousy salesman.”
“You would at that,” Sheldon agreed. “So our chances are less than zero, but we continue anyway.”
Mara and I nodded, and at that moment my internal musicians launched into something appropriate—from Dvo?rák’s Symphony no. 9 (From the New World), his variations on “Three Blind Mice.”
That wasn’t exactly reassuring.
Nevertheless, I summarized what I’d learned from the personnel records, conveniently omitting the fact that I’d peeked at Mara’s.
“So the records show no definite connection between Laila and any of the suspects,” I said. “Pappas’s record shows only that he’s a naturalized citizen. Laila, Bob Harkins, and Brenda Kirsch list hometowns near the western border of the state, but I found no other common factor.”
Mara stirred as if she wanted to say something, but I went on with my report. “Laila and Gifford Jessel overlapped one year at Insburg Community College, but that has several thousand students enrolled, mostly commuters. It’s possible Giff and Laila never met.”
Before Mara could break in, I continued. “I talked Saturday with Pappas and Harkins. Pappas says he and Laila didn’t get along. He found her in her office wrapping a package. She called him names and threatened to complain about him. After that, he avoided her as much as he could. Another time, though, he saw her and Brenda in Laila’s office with something between them on the desk. He didn’t see what it was because Laila stepped in front of it. He made his excuses and left.”
“What kind of package did he see?” Mara asked.
“When I asked, he made motions with his hands.” I imitated the motions. “Something a little more than a foot square and several inches deep.”
Mara nodded. “That would describe two of the three packages she mailed with me. The third was much deeper and maybe a little wider. Shaped more like a cube.”
“Pappas is afraid of something,” I said. “Laila’s threat of a complaint panicked him. And Staggart has something on him, enough to force Pappas to say he saw me in the science center about the time Laila was killed.”
Mara gasped, but Dr. Sheldon looked thoughtful and stroked his chin.
“Were you in the chemistry building then?” he asked.
“Science center,” I corrected. Maybe Dean-Dean had influenced me more than I’d thought. “No. I was in my office. Unfortunately, nobody saw me there until Mara came by.”
Sheldon pursed his lips. “If worst comes to worst, your defense counsel can give Pappas a lie-detector test. If he flunks it or refuses to take it, that should create doubt in the prosecutor’s mind. Slow him up a bit.”
“For heaven’s sake,” I protested, “you already have me in the docket.”
He showed his leonine smile. “Just thinking analytically, as one of my protégés used to recommend.”
You might know I was the guilty protégé. Okay, now he’d evened the score for my correcting him about the color of neon and reminding him of his own demand for accuracy.
“What about Bob Harkins?” Mara asked. “You said he denied anything beyond a speaking acquaintance with Laila, but that photograph showed them wrapped around each other like stripes on a barber pole.”
“He did lie about it,” I said to Dr. Sheldon, “and we did find the picture in Laila’s high school annual. I dread facing Bob about that, but it looks like I’ll have to. That brings up something else. The personnel records show nothing about high school work. Potentially, Bi-County Consolidated High School could also connect Brenda Kirsch to Laila. But we didn’t find anything about her in the annual. We know she recommended Laila to the administration, but we didn’t learn how she knew enough about Laila to do that.”
Dr. Sheldon’s hands formed loose fists, and he struck their knuckles together. “I didn’t find much on Brenda, either. Only a hundred or so items about her coaching days here. Nothing about her earlier years, and nothing to connect her with Laila.”
He pursed his lips again. “For that matter, I didn’t find anything on Laila before she began teaching at that high school. You’d think she’d leave some kind of record.”
“Her first name was Dee,” Mara said. “Maybe she didn’t go by Laila until later.”
“Dee Laila?” Sheldon asked. “Sounds like someone couldn’t spell. Or played cute with names.” He snapped his fingers. “All right. I’ll look for her again under Dee. I found the usual information about Harkins and Jessel, but nothing you haven’t told me.”
He looked at Mara and said, “Your turn.”
She gave him an appreciative smile like she’d never shown me and said, “Not a great deal. The security guard—Elmo Koontz—hasn’t seen anyone suspicious near Laila’s office at any time this fall. He did see a couple of tough-looking fellows walk across campus yesterday, but that’s too late for our purposes.”
Sheldon and I exchanged glances but said nothing.
She sighed. “That poor, lonely man certainly likes to talk. He thanked me for sharing donuts with him, and I felt really bad for taking advantage.”
“Burglars can’t have consciences,” I said.
Her glance showed me a bit of blue fire, but nothing like the conflagration she’d shown me earlier.
“Sergeant Spencer likes to talk, too,�
�� she said, her face now expressionless. “He said Dean Billig told him he’d fire the no-good who’s been stealing passkeys. Except that the dean used a more colorful expression.”
Dr. Sheldon snorted. “Dean-Dean has a habit of hip-shooting off the top of his head, which in his case may not be a mixed metaphor.”
“I’ll take the Fifth Amendment on that,” Mara said. “Spencer also said Staggart was beside himself because someone broke into Laila’s house. He—Staggart—found new evidence there, but he doesn’t know if it’s usable because he didn’t find it on his first search. He’s doubled the police guard.”
I thought Spencer had talked too much, but I couldn’t complain about it. “Anything else?” I asked.
She gave me her ironic smile, nothing like the approving one she’d shown Dr. Sheldon. “Spencer is happy because Staggart is bringing him in on the investigation. It seems they’re short of manpower.”
“That’s good news,” I said. “We’ll have someone on their team who isn’t prejudiced against us.”
Mara’s smile changed to a friendly one, the first from her that I could remember. “Prejudiced for you, actually,” she said. “He told me about that research paper he mentioned just after we found Laila’s body.”
“What research paper?” Dr. Sheldon asked.
Mara directed her answer to him. “As a student, Sergeant Spencer wrote a paper on ‘Anti-Semitism in Elizabethan England’ for our distinguished Professor Barclay. Spencer wrote that in 1594 one Dr. Lopez, a Jewish physician, tried to poison Queen Elizabeth I, and the subsequent outpouring of anti-Jewish sentiment resulted in plays like Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta.”
Dr. Sheldon waited expectantly.
“Our good professor assigned a grade of A-, but he pointed out that since Marlowe was stabbed to death in 1593, it was unlikely that he wrote The Jew of Malta in response to an event that happened in 1594. He further explained that the same applies to the play itself, which was produced on stage as early as 1592.”