Mayhem, Mystery and Murder

by John A. Broussard

  And heaven help me if I’m off by a penny in collections. He’s there to supervise the counting, and he bags the day’s take himself every day to send off to bank. Wednesday’s the only exception. The local bank is open only a half day on Wednesdays, so he makes a big ritual of seeing to it I lock up the money instead on that day, with his usual reassurance about how he’ll be there “bright and early” Thursday morning to check it out with me again. Big deal! He might just as well come right out and say he doesn’t trust me.

  Well, I’d finally had enough. He was going to be in for a big surprise this Thursday. I was going to be there early myself to follow him into the empty office. I wasn’t about to miss the look on his face when the money turns up missing, and he has only himself and his sloppy security provisions to blame.

  Lefty and I were supposed to rendezvous at the neighborhood eatery after the deed was accomplished. As I sat nursing a lukewarm coffee, and even though it was still early yet, I became more and more convinced I would be left standing at the altar. It didn’t bother me too much. I could make good use of the two thousand dollars, but it was even more important to me to make Blakely squirm. I kept fantasying he’d be fired.

  So, in the middle of my fantasy, I was surprised and pleased to see Lefty come into the café well ahead of schedule. But I quickly decided the early arrival meant something had gone wrong.

  He’d gotten cold feet, or the damned old drainpipe had fallen on him. I should have warned him. The salt air, here in Hawaii, has an uncanny way of rusting out just about any kind of metal. That’s all I needed. Lefty limping away from the crime scene with the whole neighborhood alerted by the crash. I looked out the plate glass window, fully expecting blue uniforms to be in pursuit. None were.

  “Well?” I said, trying to be as non-communicative as my emaciated friend. Maybe my reduction to monosyllables stimulated him, because he spoke more in the next few minutes than he had during all of our previous meeting. Only now his eyes had shrunk to slits and I could have sworn he’d become suspicious of me, of my motives, and of the whole enterprise.

  “It worked like a charm. Come out to the parking lot and we’ll divvy up.”

  The two thousand was all there—tens, twenties, fifties and a couple of hundreds.

  As he turned to go, I asked, “Any hitches?”

  He was still eyeing me strangely. “Nope. Everything went like clockwork.”

  “Well, thanks.” And I meant it. The money was gravy. The real pay-off was going to be Blakely’s expression first thing in the morning.

  “And thanks to you,” Lefty said, as he went off to his car. “Many, many thanks.”

  The big morning arrived. Blakely waddled over to my desk with me in tow. I could hardly contain myself as he borrowed my key, opened the drawer, took out the metal box, and flipped open the cover.

  In thinking back to those moments, I really should have had a mirror so I could have seen the expression on my own face. The money was there, exactly the way I’d left it the night before!

  Blakely was saying something about putting it in a bank bag for delivery before noon, but I wasn’t much listening to what he said. He didn’t notice, but just rambled off to harass some of the other clerks before putting in the usual token half-hour at his desk. Mostly, I remained in shock.

  If I hadn’t been in a semi-conscious state, I might have noticed what was happening to Blakely a lot sooner. He’d come back to his desk and was madly shuffling through it, so much so that his wild motions—expending far more energy than I ever realized he had—finally begin to penetrate. He looked over at me, his usually red face an odd shade of white, green and purple. Suddenly he rushed off in the direction of the men’s room, to vomit, for sure.

  My curiosity overcame my own shocked condition, and I sauntered over to see what might have accounted for Fatso’s incredible reaction. The scratches all over the lock of the bottom drawer in his desk was more than a clue. Lefty had broken into the wrong desk!

  And I didn’t have to think very hard to figure out Blakely had had money squirreled away there. Remembering Lefty’s suspicious look, his near eagerness to part with two thousand dollars, and his effusive thanks as he departed—all convinced me that whatever had been in Blakely’s bottom drawer would make Wednesday’s bank bag look like the widow’s mite. And that kind of cash in a county official’s desk could mean only one thing—something thoroughly illegal. I was willing to wager my own part of the loot Blakely would never mention the theft—ever.

  But the one thing still bothering me was how Lefty, who had clearly demonstrated his superb talents as a second-story man, could have picked open the wrong desk.

  I pulled out the map, and then it dawned on me. I’d circled the position of my desk on the transparency before I made a paper copy of it, then in my rush to make the copy without anyone seeing me do it, I had put the transparency in the copier wrong side down. The map’s floor plan was a mirror image of the actual floor plan. The circled desk on the finished copy was now Blakely’s, not mine.

  As I tore the map into shreds, I couldn’t help but wonder how much Lefty had pocketed. I also wished him all sorts of luck with his newfound fortune.

  WHO IS EUNICE LOUISE EUBANKS?

  She was sufficiently annoyed by the first letter she opened that a usually imperturbable Jerry, who was immersed in a novel, looked up. “Now what?” he asked.

  “Two quarters in a row they’ve screwed up my records.”

  “Who?”

  “The school, the registrar, or whoever it is who sent out last quarter’s grades. Look at this. It’s the other Eunice Louise Eubanks, again. I didn’t mind so much last time when she got all A’s, but she’s just about flunking out this time. There’s even a Dean’s warning attached.”

  “Didn’t you tell them about it last time?”

  “Of course. The clerk was real sweet and said she’d take care of it right away. I should have known it couldn’t be that easy.”

  “You’ve just encountered Murphy’s Law of Ongoing Bureaucracy. If anything can go wrong, it will—over, and over, and over again.”

  “You know, I could understand it if my name were Linda Jones, but Eunice Louise Eubanks! How could there have been two sets of parents who would have wished that combination on anyone?”

  Jerry grinned at Eunice’s growing annoyance. “I had a friend back in high school named Chauncy Fahnestock. Would you believe? One day he ran into another Chauncy Fahnestock. He said the other Chauncy even looked a little like him. They couldn’t find any relatives in common, though.”

  “There are Eubanks all over southern Indiana, and I guess we’re all related, but I don’t know of any of them named Eunice, much less Eunice Louise.”

  Jerry shrugged and went back to his book, saying, “Well, try it again. Threaten to sue. It might work.”

  That was one of Jerry Wilkerson’s qualities which Eunice found trying. He was so relaxed about everything, even his own studies. And yet he did well in most of them except English, which he insisted should require neither grammatical nor spelling accuracy, as long as the ideas were communicated. Since Eunice was an English major, his attitude toward language didn’t sit especially well with her, either.

  But then, theirs was just a relationship of convenience. Eunice had recognized that the behavior of her wild senior year in high school couldn’t continue into college. Jerry was a comfortable companion and acquiesced quite readily to the arrangement. That he was ruggedly handsome, with the build of a linebacker—and drew envious looks from other coeds when the two of them walked across campus together—didn’t hurt either. They had finally settled down to a semi-marital relationship with no commitments, in an off-campus house, along with two other couples.

  The end result wasn’t particularly exciting. Eunice occasionally missed the partying of the past, frenzied one-night stands and more alcohol than was good for her. But her grades were now commendable though not spectacular, and she wanted to maintain her average. Still
, looking over at Jerry stretched out full length on the bed and engrossed in his novel, Eunice suffered one of those momentary pangs of boredom.

  “Jerry?”

  “Huh?”

  “I wonder if this other Eunice looks anything like me?” The question really welled up from Eunice’s own past. A lonely child, the only one in the family, she had grown up with the fantasy of having been a foundling—perhaps an abandoned princess, or at least an heiress to a fortune. And mixed into the fantasy was the notion she had a sister somewhere. Once she’d started in school, the fantasies had gradually faded away, but the reality of this other Eunice stirred up childhood memories and perhaps old longings.

  Jerry lowered his book and looked over at her. “Nowhere near as pretty, I’ll bet.”

  Jerry could be sweet at times, Eunice decided. “I wonder if I’ve ever seen her on campus.”

  “Probably. Why don’t you look her up? Tell her if she goes back to straight A’s again, you’ll trade transcripts with her.”

  “How would I get in touch with her?”

  “There’s a student directory. You could drop her a note.”

  Eunice decided she didn’t really want to meet her. She was certain she didn’t want to sit around searching out some common kinship. She just wanted to see what the other Eunice looked like.

  “So how are you going to find out what she looks like without actually meeting her? You going to stand in the cafeteria line and ask everyone who comes through if they know a Eunice Louise Eubanks? There are over four thousand students here, not counting part-timers. That should keep you occupied for the rest of the school year.”

  “Why can’t I just find out what classes she’s taking?”

  “You know better than that. You can’t get any student’s schedule but your own.”

  “I can’t. But you can. Wouldn’t your ex-girlfriend in the registrar’s office do you a favor?”

  Jerry pondered the suggestion. “Yeah. I suppose Cynthia would do it for me. But I may have to take her to lunch.”

  “That’s O.K. I’ll go along and pick up the tab.”

  Jerry grinned. “You aren’t going to get off that easy. How about editing my next English paper, too?”

  Eunice grinned in return. “Since I was going to do it anyway, it’s a deal.”

  The schedule didn’t seem too promising. Swimming was out. Eunice knew she couldn’t mingle unobtrusively in a swim glass. Econ 101 wasn’t much better, but for different reasons. She knew it would be a class of hundreds. Trying to pick out the other Eunice from the mass would be a waste of time. Psych 200 held more promise, but it would mean cutting one of her classes. What was left was a physics class on lower campus. Eunice decided the search for the other Eunice wasn’t worth the entailed half-mile walk.

  Still curious, however, she wandered into the economics class the next morning and was pleasantly surprised to find the prof practiced the primitive habit of using a seating chart. Why anyone would have a chart in a class of four hundred was beyond her, but there it was. A copy was tacked to the wall, and a moment’s inspection listed a Eubanks in the fourth row from the front, three seats in from the left. Eunice found a place at the back of the room where any stray auditors would ordinarily be seated.

  Shortly before the bell, a tall, dark-haired girl occupied the Eubanks chair. Eunice shook her head. She doesn’t look a bit like me. She’s at least a half-foot taller, for one thing. Deciding she would be far too conspicuous if she got up and left now, since the professor had immediately begun class, Eunice endured fifty minutes of what she rated as the most boring lecture, in the most incomprehensible accent she had heard since starting college. Her only reward was getting a better look at the object of her search when the other Eunice got up to leave.

  “I can’t see why you didn’t at least introduce yourself,” Jerry said that evening when she described her discovery.

  “I can’t see we’d have much in common. She looks like she pumps iron, and you know how much of an athlete I am. Besides, she wears designer clothes. I’m not in her league.”

  Surveying Jerry’s bulk, she added, “She’s really more your type.”

  Jerry grinned. “If that means built like me, I’m not interested. I go for the petite variety, obviously.”

  The urge to know more about the other Eunice faded into the background. Only chance revived it. A bad case of laryngitis—not hers, but her English instructor’s—produced an unexpected class cancellation. On her way to the library, the list of Psych 200 quiz sections caught her attention and stirred up memories of the other Eunice. Quiz sections, much smaller than regular classes, made for much greater student-instructor interaction. The hour to spare, a lingering curiosity about the other Eunice, and her name on the Section III list prompted Eunice to sit in. This time she made a point of asking the instructor’s permission to do so. The anonymity of a four-hundred student class made informal auditing routine, but a twenty-person quiz section was something else again. Permission was readily granted, and Eunice suspected the young graduate student in charge of the section was rather flattered by any uncoerced attendance in his class.

  When the bell rang, there was still no sign of the other Eunice. The section leader called the roll, and Eunice reacted with a start when the student next to her said “here” at the sound of “Eubanks.”

  “Other than the fact she looks like an athlete too, she’s really a lot different from the student in Econ,” Eunice told Jerry. “She’s shorter, has light brown hair, and she’s a lot more casual than the other one. Torn jeans, dirty sweat shirt and all that. What could be going on?”

  “She just has someone sitting in for her.”

  “Who?”

  “Your other Eunice.”

  “Sure, but which one is the other Eunice?”

  “Good point. You’ll never know.”

  “Yes I will. I want to see her transcript.”

  “Oh, oh! Another lunch for Cynthia, right?”

  Eunice laughed. “And another English paper for me to correct.”

  “You won’t get much out of the transcript.”

  “There’s a photo attached. That’s what I want to see.”

  “That’s the problem. Cynthia can make you a copy, but she can’t go showing you the original. And you know what a photocopy of a photo looks like.”

  “It doesn’t matter. It’ll be clear enough so I’ll be able to sort out the real Eunice from the bogus one.”

  It wasn’t enough. The photocopy was surprisingly good, and there was no question but the chubby, baby-faced Eunice Louise Eubanks pictured was neither of the two students Eunice had seen. The transcript gave little other information. Age 18, mother deceased, father in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia—which was listed as her home address. Consistent A’s in high school. A year of mostly A’s in college and straight A’s the first quarter of this school year, as Eunice already knew.

  Eunice admitted her mystification.

  “It’s easy to explain,” Jerry said, dismissively. “She’s just paying those two to take her classes. She’s off on a European vacation with her boyfriend and doesn’t want her father to know.”

  Eunice was skeptical. “A straight A student taking off in the middle of the year? C’mon, Jerry. I can see her bagging the whole thing, just taking off from school. But turning her classes over to those two? The one in Psych class couldn’t answer a single question the section leader asked her. And from the looks of last quarter’s grade record, they were probably doing the sitting then, too.”

  “Maybe there is no Eunice Louise Eubanks other than you. I heard a bunch of Yale students a few years back enrolled a dog, took all his courses and almost got him graduated before the administration caught on.”

  “Did the dog make all A’s his first quarter?”

  “You’ve got a point. Nobody’s going to waste so much effort and time on a prank. The dog ended up with gentlemen’s C’s.”

  “Well, I’m going to waste some of my time to ge
t to the bottom of this.”

  “What are you going to do? Confront them like on that old TV show and ask, ‘Will the real Eunice Louise Eubanks please stand up?’”

  “Nope. I’m going to watch for the tall one and start up a conversation.”

  Jerry laughed. “You’ve already said you have nothing in common with her. How far is a discussion about the weather going to get you?”

  “Not far, but a discussion on clothes will.”

  “Right on. I never met a woman who wasn’t eager to talk about what she’s wearing and where she bought it.”

  “I have to admit you’re right, but the way you say it makes you sound like a male chauvinist pig.”

  The chance meeting wasn’t simple to arrange. Initially, however, the prospects had seemed promising. Both the Econ Eunice and the Psych Eunice appeared together at the cafeteria on the very first day when Eunice arrived early and lingered over her lunch. The problem was they appeared together three days in a row, and Eunice preferred to confine herself to just her target. On the fourth day, her persistence was rewarded. The Econ Eunice showed up alone, and Eunice managed to slip into the cafeteria line just behind her. Eunice had made it a point to wear one of her best outfits each day of the week, and clothes was indeed the icebreaker.

  She quickly learned her newfound acquaintance, Marcella Hawkins, was not at all reticent about discussing her most recent purchases. At the introduction, Eunice kept her first name on the assumption the less deception the less the possibility of detection, and used Jerry’s last name. Her own passing familiarity with some of Chicago’s more exclusive stores was all she needed to produce a catalog of places to shop for “quality” apparel.