Rhapsody in Red

by Donn Taylor

  For the first time since we’d left Alfalfa Heights, Mara came alive. “That much fits, but not the rest of it. The lines just before that are, ‘Round the decay / Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare. . . .’ There’s no decay of any colossal wreck around here. Those buildings look well-maintained. And those fields may be boundless, but they’re only bare because the harvest is in and the winter crop hasn’t come up yet.”

  Another score for her erudition. Those lonely years she’d spent by herself—she must have spent them reading.

  “All right,” I said. “So you’ve read Shelley. Try this one: ‘My glass is full, and now my glass is run, / And now I live, and now my life is done.’”

  “Easy.” The blue eyes laughed. “That was written by Chidiock Tichborne in 1586 before his execution in the Tower of London. The allusion is to an hourglass.”

  “I give up,” I said. “Look, it’s okay that you’ve read everything, but you didn’t have to remember it.”

  She laughed aloud and changed the subject. “I know you dread this interview, Cupcake, but let’s go in and get it over with.”

  “I can imagine being in my cups,” I said, “but not as pastry.”

  She was gracious enough to let that one pass.

  Inside, we checked in with a middle-aged secretary behind a name sign that announced her as Ms. Lydia Tenfife. She reminded me of a medieval dragon guarding a horde of treasure. Remembering the cupcake incident, I resisted the temptation to ask for St. George. Instead, I gave our names and said, “I have an appointment with Mr. Wimberly.”

  The dragon deigned to announce me over an intercom, and after a while the treasure horde came out to greet me. Morris Wimberly was a sallow-complexioned man of medium build, and he had the manner of one accustomed to telling people what to do. He wore his suit coat unbuttoned in deference to a pudgy abdomen. The suit was dark blue, which meant he out-authoritated my brown one. His face wore an impatient expression.

  I introduced myself and Mara and asked if there was somewhere we could talk.

  Looking at Mara, he said, “Mr. Barclay, I believe I granted the appointment to you.”

  Before I could object, Mara looked at me and said, “That’s fine, Dr. Barclay. I’ll wait out here.” She emphasized the title Dr., nicely neutralizing Wimberly’s demoting me to Mr.

  Wimberly shut his office door behind us and motioned me to a chair more or less facing his desk. I gathered he liked to keep the desk between him and his visitors but didn’t want to seem too obvious about it. He occupied his swivel chair, clasped his hands in the Dean-Dean manner, and eyed me across the desk.

  “Well, Mr. Barclay,” he said, “you’re writing a posthumous appreciation of Miss Sloan. What do you want to know about her?”

  I showed him my most innocent smile. “Mainly, I’d like to know why you hired a teacher with a criminal record.”

  His face reddened. “I . . . uh . . . we didn’t know about that when we hired her. By the time we found it out, she’d established herself as an excellent teacher and a valuable colleague.”

  That excuse had more holes than the average golf course, but I let it pass. I needed to shake something loose, and do it quickly before he had time to gather his wits.

  “Come off of it, Wimberly.” I used the military voice I hadn’t used in years. “You were schoolmates with Laila Sloan in this very school. You knew exactly what she was into.”

  His face turned deeper crimson. “We . . . uh . . . did go to school here, but I graduated a year ahead of her. I had no idea what her group was doing until she was indicted.”

  “Baloney.” I stood and leaned over his desk. “You were an active member of her gang. I have witnesses.” I actually had only one witness, unless Sophie Sloan developed a dual personality.

  Wimberly tried to bluff it through. “What do you think you can gain with that information?”

  “I’m also a journalist,” I lied. “Laila Sloan’s career and the names of the people she manipulated would make a surefire true-crime story. But I’d rather find out who murdered her and limit my story to that. Which would you prefer?”

  His hand dropped to his lap. “What do you want to know?”

  “Everything you know.” I sat back down. “Start with why you hired her.”

  “You’ve already guessed,” he said. “She blackmailed me.”

  His face returned to normal color and his tone grew introspective. “For two years before Dee Laila got caught, her group ran wild—burglaries, larceny, vandalism, you name it. I was involved in the first year of those and . . .” He dropped his gaze. “. . . and personally involved with Dee Laila. But I was lucky. I graduated and went off to college before she got caught.”

  He looked up again, his eyes pleading. “I put all that behind me. Finished college, married and started a family, taught for a while and moved into administration. When this job opened up, I thought it was safe to come back. For several years it was. Then we advertised for a chemistry teacher, and Dee Laila showed up.”

  “Her specialty was home economics,” I said. “She wasn’t qualified in chemistry.”

  Wimberly looked away. “We often hire people outside their academic expertise. The important thing is knowing how to teach and getting along with students.”

  I’d heard that line before, and it always rankled me. But this was no time to argue educational theory, so I asked, “She made you hire her or she’d tell everything she knew?”

  He nodded. “People whose farms and businesses we’d robbed were still around. They might have done more than get me fired.” He stirred in his chair. “Strangely, she did all right as a teacher. Not great, but she learned enough chemistry to stay ahead of her students, and they liked her. No trouble there: I’d told her straight out if she got personally involved with one, all bets were off.”

  “Not great as a teacher? Your letter of recommendation said she was.”

  He shrugged. “You work in education, so you know the game. If I don’t sing her praises, they don’t hire her and she hangs on here like an Al Capone around my neck.”

  “Albatross,” I corrected. Considering all we knew about Laila, though, maybe he had the right word. But I needed to know more. “Her file at Overton contains a letter that says she worked in Insburg before she came here, but the man who’s supposed to have written it says she never worked there.”

  Wimberly shook his head. “Trust Dee Laila to pull something like that. She claimed that job on her application here, but I never checked on it. She had me over a barrel.”

  “If she never worked at Insburg, that leaves five years of her life unaccounted for. Do you have any idea what she did in those years?”

  “No. . . .” He looked thoughtful. “Well, once in a group at lunch she said something about ‘when I worked in Las Vegas.’ I asked her about it later, and she claimed she never said it.”

  I was getting nowhere again. “Can you give me names from her high school gang?”

  Reluctantly, he repeated the names of the Wiggins twins, Bob Harkins, and the deceased Lem Peterson, then added, “There was Brad Bergson, but he moved to Australia ten years ago. Shirley Potter was in it for a while. She’s married and lives in Seattle, last I heard. That’s all I can remember.” He thought awhile longer. “No, there was a little freshman the year after I left. They called her BJ.”

  “BJ what?”

  He squinted into space. “What was her name? Jefferson? Joseph? . . . No, none of those.” He snapped his fingers. “Jones. It had to be Jones.”

  He rose and took two strides to a bookcase built against the wall. His fingers moved along a shelf of yearbooks, finally coming to rest on a single one. He lifted it from the shelf and flipped through it until he found the page he wanted.

  “There,” he said, holding it up for me to see. His finger moved to one particular photo and stopped. “That’s BJ.”

  The caption under the picture read “BJ Jones.” The face above the caption was young and immature, bu
t readily recognizable.

  It was the woman we knew as Brenda Kirsch.

  CHAPTER 30

  One-on-one, Morris Wimberly had the backbone of an amoeba, but as we returned to the outer office he metamorphosed into the stiff-necked administrator we’d met when we came in. It was a remarkable transformation.

  We found Mara in deep conversation with the dragon, Ms. Tenfife, who greeted our appearance with an expression like we’d caught her shooting craps. Wimberly made no pretense of a gracious parting, but returned to his office without further comment. After he did, the two women exchanged smiles and handshakes.

  “Thank you, Lydia,” Mara said. “I enjoyed talking to you.”

  “And I with you.” The dragon kept smiling and holding Mara’s hand. “I hope I’ve been helpful.”

  “You’ve been very helpful indeed.” Mara gently but definitely disengaged her hand.

  Outside, the prairie wind blew cold dust in our faces. The Honda’s windless interior brought welcome relief and its heater brought more as we drove back to Bullerton. Mara wiped her hand on her coat, but tried not to be too obvious about it.

  “How did you make Ms. Tenfife smile?” I asked. “She looks like she could ‘call spirits from the vasty deep.’”

  “Unlike your Owen Glendower,” Mara said, referring to the Shakespeare character I was quoting, “she calls gossip from the nasty shallow. What did you learn from Wimberly?”

  I gave her a summary and asked about the dragon’s gossip.

  “Ms. Tenfife complained that Laila had more privileges than the football coach. I gather that constituted a serious inversion of the school’s value system.”

  “Positively shocking,” I said.

  “When Laila began teaching chemistry, according to my source, she thought a valence was something you hung above a window. One Mr. Higgins, a rather fat physics teacher, carried her through that first semester by staying after school and getting her ready for the next day’s classes. His wife put a stop to that early in the spring semester, but by then Laila had learned enough to get by on her own. No one ever said she wasn’t smart.”

  “That’s our Laila,” I said.

  “Not much specific after that.” Mara made a moue. “Mr. Wimberly always sang Laila’s praises, though Ms. Tenfife never saw a reason for it. She sniffed and said Laila always covered all the bases.”

  I chuckled.

  Mara arched her eyebrows.

  “Ms. Tenfife doesn’t know what Laila did during summer vacations. She would disappear after graduation and not show up again until the first autumn teachers’ meeting.”

  “Disappeared summers,” I mused. “The five years before she got this job are unaccounted for, too, though Wimberly heard her say she once worked in Las Vegas. Maybe Sergeant Spencer can follow up on that.”

  Mara continued as if she hadn’t heard. “I turned up one other gem. Ms. Tenfife says Wimberly went to an administrators’ convention in Denver last week—the week Laila was killed. Those things usually open on Thursday night and run through the weekend, but Wimberly made a last-minute change and left on Tuesday. Ms. Tenfife says she usually makes his travel arrangements, but this time he made his own.”

  I gave a low whistle. “So he could have gone to Overton City and committed the murder. We came out here to narrow down our list of suspects, and now we’ve increased it.”

  “That’s one we can hand off to Sergeant Spencer,” she said. “What do we do next?”

  “Nothing today.” Outside, the shadows lengthened. “Tomorrow we’ll drive to Prosperity and see what we can find out about BJ Jones, a.k.a. Brenda Kirsch. With any luck we can be back in Overton City tomorrow night.”

  She sighed. “Then we’ll have to deal with our suspension. I don’t look forward to that.”

  I didn’t either, so we finished the drive in silence. The gloom continued at supper in the same shabby café where we’d risked breakfast. My internal musicians were more than welcome while they performed Schubert’s Symphony no. 8 (“Unfinished”). We said nothing more than “Good night” as I dropped Mara at her motel. When she disappeared beyond the glass doors, the car seemed suddenly empty.

  Back in my migrant-workers’ motel, the well-mannered cockroaches deferred to my claim of squatter’s rights. The rats apparently had insomnia, but were courteous enough to stay out of sight. For a long time I lay on my bed of screeching springs and brooded on our lack of progress. We’d turned up mountains of dirty laundry on all four of our likely suspects—six suspects, counting Threnody Harkins and Morris Wimberly—but not one bit of information that made any one of them either more or less likely to be the murderer.

  On that happy reflection, and with the bedsprings and my internal piccolo competing in different keys, I fell asleep.

  Next morning, overcast skies and a sharp, gusty wind did nothing to dispel my downcast mood. My internal musicians dragged through some kind of funeral march. I hoped that wasn’t prophetic.

  That day’s breakfast proved as perilous as that of the day before, but the sullen waitress had been replaced by a jolly, red-faced woman who liked to question the customers. I ignored her, but Mara answered graciously, eventually confiding that we taught at Overton University.

  “How’s Johnny doing over there?” the waitress asked.

  “Johnny who?” Mara looked taken aback. “We have quite a few students named John.”

  “Students!” The waitress laughed. “I’m talking about Johnny Cantwell, the man you work for.”

  Mara blinked, so I interceded. “He’s made quite a reputation for himself.”

  “I don’t doubt it.” The waitress beamed. “We knew he’d make a success at anything he did when he grew up.”

  “Were you kin?” Mara asked.

  “Next-door neighbors. From the time he was housebroke, that boy had a special knack. He could always find out what people wanted and give it to ’em.”

  We said nothing, so she continued. “We thought at first he’d make a salesman. When he went to teaching school, we said he’d end up as principal.” She laughed again. “We never dreamed he’d be president of a big university.”

  “He’s certainly done that,” I said, and reached for the check. “No telling what he’ll do next.”

  The waitress followed me to the cash register and took my credit card. Remembering my fiasco in Insburg, I didn’t try to be funny.

  “When you see Johnny again,” she said, “tell him Bertha Nussbaum said ‘Hi.’”

  “I’ll do that,” I said, and Mara nodded agreement.

  “I can’t believe it,” she said as we drove toward Prosperity. “Can you imagine J. Cleveland Cantwell in short pants?”

  “No,” I said, “but I can imagine his finding out what people want and giving it to them. That’s what he’s done at Overton, but I don’t think he’s happy with the result. That last faculty meeting bothered him. I think he’s realizing that if he doesn’t define what the college stands for, someone else will do it for him.”

  She frowned. “That meeting bothered me, too, but as a newcomer I didn’t think I should comment.”

  I felt a stab of conscience, though I don’t think she intended to criticize my silence. The metropolis of Prosperity consisted of about ten buildings on each side of a two-lane highway. As in Alfalfa Heights, more than half of the buildings stood empty and in disrepair. A single convenience store was the only life showing.

  Behind its counter we found an unshaven elderly man in overalls. He said the town used to have a Jones family, but he never knew much about them. He referred us to a man named Sherman at Sherman’s Feed Barn. “Turn left at the next corner,” he said. “You can’t miss it.”

  He was right about that. The turn placed us facing the front of an unpainted, barnlike structure where the street ended a block away. Above the door hung a paint-flaked sign that announced, “SHERMAN’S FEED BARN, Solomon Sherman, Prop.” The barn could have used a prop because its walls sagged a bit left of plumb. I hope
d they wouldn’t collapse with us inside.

  Most of the barn’s dirt floor stood bare, but a wooden platform in a far corner held an assortment of feed sacks. From among them emerged another grizzled, overalled elder who admitted being Solomon Sherman.

  I introduced us and said, “We’re trying to locate members of a Jones family who used to live here. We heard you might be able to tell us something about them.”

  His look classified me as an Iranian used-car salesman. “And what kind of bill would ye be tryin’ to collect?”

  Before I could answer, Mara said, “Press, I think I left my purse unlocked in the car. Would you please check on it for me?”

  Her gaze told me to get lost, so I retreated to the car. As expected, I found her purse locked inside. I looked back at the barn. Mara’s gestures seemed to plead for Mr. Sherman’s favor. He showed a grudging smile that gradually changed to enthusiastic. Before long, he grew as voluble as a carnival barker.

  I sat in the car and watched the show. After awhile, Mara returned with a self-satisfied smile while Solomon Sherman, Prop., fondly observed her departure.

  “What did you do?” I asked as we drove back to Bullerton. “Bribe him with a month’s supply of gasoline?”

  “Nothing so crude,” she said. “I merely told him BJ and I were roommates in college, and I’d lost track of her. He was happy to help a lady with a problem.”

  “He thought I was a bill collector. How did you convince him I wasn’t?”

  “That was easy, too.” The blue eyes danced. “I told him you were my boyfriend, and that you never told the truth when a lie would do just as well. After he got through convincing me I needed a new boyfriend, he told me about the Jones family.”

  “What about the Jones family?” I didn’t ask how she’d answered Sherman about a new boyfriend.

  “He said BJ was a loner from the very first—partly because both parents worked and left her to her own designs. There weren’t many girls in town, so she played mostly with the boys. She could outrun all of them and outfight most of them. With the ones she couldn’t beat, she did enough damage so they didn’t seek a repeat engagement.”