by Bill Crider
Jack had been hoping Weems didn’t know about the yelling. But he couldn’t deny it. Not entirely.
“I wasn’t doing any yelling,” he said.
Weems shrugged. “Maybe so, maybe not, but Bostic was. Nearly had a stroke, the way I heard it.”
“It wasn’t quite that bad,” Jack said.
“Yeah, well, if somebody had accused me of being a crook in front of everybody, including a reporter from the local rag, I might even have a stroke myself.”
Jack didn’t believe that for a minute. He was pretty sure that nothing bothered Weems that much.
“I didn’t exactly accuse him of being a crook,” he said.
“Sure you did. You said he had a big conflict of interest, that he was gouging the college for money, and that he should resign from the board. But he didn’t resign, so you got rid of him another way. By killing him.”
“You keep saying that, but I don’t think you have any proof,” Jack said. “Otherwise we wouldn’t be having this friendly conversation, as you called it. You’d have arrested me and locked me up.”
“I have the proof,” Weems assured him. “It would just make things easier if you’d admit it.”
“Well, I’m not,” Jack said. “Mainly because I didn’t do it.”
Weems shook his head sadly.
“I miss the old days,” he said. “If this was the old days, I could get out the rubber hose and beat the truth out of you.”
Jack couldn’t tell for sure, but he thought Weems might be joking. He hoped so.
“But if you don’t want to confess, that’s okay,” Weems went on. “Like I said, I have the proof.”
“You still haven’t mentioned just what that might be, though.”
“Your knife,” Weems said.
“My knife?”
“Yeah, your knife. The one that has your initials on the blade. The one you left sticking in Ralph Bostic’s back.”
Damn, Jack thought. I knew I never should have signed up for that knife-making class.
5
The bell rang while Sally was standing there looking into Jack Neville’s deserted office, and students poured out of the classrooms to fill the hallway, some laughing, some talking, some pulling out their cell phones. Some were heading for the vending machines, and some were just trying to get outside where they could light a cigarette. Not a one of them paid any attention to Sally and Troy.
“They’ve hauled him off to the hoosegow,” Troy said, sounding to Sally like an actor in an old Roy Rogers movie, and she briefly imagined Jack dressed as a rhinestone cowboy, astride a horse, his hands tied behind him with a piece of a dirty lariat.
Sally almost smiled, but she realized it was a time for serious action, not fantasy. She turned and left the office, pulled the door shut behind her, and brushed past Troy.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“To get Jack. He has a class in room one-fifty-nine next hour. Go dismiss his students before you go to your own class, please.”
“I’ll write a note on the board,” Troy said. “That way I can go with you.”
“I don’t need any help. Just dismiss the class.”
Sally made her way back to her office through a crowd of swarming students. She picked up her purse and turned off her light. Just before she shut the door, she went back inside and got a Hershey bar out of the desk drawer. If she ever needed a quick pick-me-up, she needed it now.
She munched on the candy bar as she walked toward the rooms that housed the campus police station. As much as she liked chocolate, she could hardly taste it for worrying about Jack.
She finished the Hershey in time to toss the paper into the trash can in front of the cop shop. She went inside and asked the dispatcher, a chunky blond civilian, for Chief Desmond.
Desmond stepped out of his office before the dispatcher could call him. He said, “If you’re here about Jack, you don’t have anything to worry about. He’ll be fine.”
“How do you know that?” Sally asked.
Desmond ushered her into his office, closed the door, and offered her a chair. Sally said she preferred to stand.
“Jack’s just been taken in for questioning,” Desmond said. “I’m sure the police don’t really suspect him.”
“That’s not the way I heard it.”
“How did the word get out so fast?”
“Troy Beauchamp.”
“I should have known. Does anything ever happen that he doesn’t know about?”
“Probably not. What I want to know is whether I need bail money for Jack.”
Desmond smiled. “Of course not. He hasn’t been arrested. I told you: It’s not serious.”
“It’s serious to me. I’m going to get him out.”
“He’s probably out already if he cooperated. I’m sure he’s not a serious suspect.”
“Who is, then?”
“Weems didn’t tell me.”
“I didn’t think he would.” Sally opened the door. “I’m going to see if I can help Jack.”
Desmond shrugged. “If you want to, go ahead. But you’re probably wasting your time.”
“I’ll take the risk,” Sally said.
She was getting into her Acura Integra when Troy Beauchamp came running up.
“I’m going with you,” he said. “I’m Jack’s friend, too, and he needs all the friends he can get right now.”
“What about the classes?”
“I got Wynona to dismiss them.”
“You didn’t tell her why, did you?” Sally asked.
“Of course not,” Troy said, settling into the passenger seat. “I know better than that. Wynona’s quite a gossip, you know.”
Wynona Reed had big hair, big eyes, and a big mouth. Unlike Troy, she wasn’t the first to find things out, but she always found out eventually. Her intelligence system might not work fast, but it was second to none. She had been at Hughes for more than twenty years and remembered everything that had happened during that time. Everything. If there was a skeleton in a closet, Wynona could rattle it. If there was a buried secret, Wynona could, if she chose to, hand you a shovel and tell you where to dig. If there was an embarrassing incident that every other person on campus had forgotten about, Wynona probably had it recorded on videotape. And she was not exactly the soul of discretion.
Sally started the car and headed out of the lot.
“Luckily there aren’t any other gossips at the college,” she said, looking at Troy out of the corner of her eye.
“I’m hurt,” he said, catching the look. “You know I’d never say anything that might reflect badly on anybody.”
“I just wanted to be sure,” Sally said as she turned onto the street and headed for the police station.
“You admit it was your knife, then?” Weems said.
“No. I admit that I made one in a class I took,” Jack said. “But someone stole it. I kept it in my office, and I never lock the door. It disappeared weeks ago.”
Weems sighed. “Let me ask you a question,” he said.
“Isn’t that what you’ve been doing?”
“I mean another kind of question. How many times have you had students tell you that they couldn’t turn in a paper because their grandfather had died?”
Jack could already see where Weems was going, but he answered anyway.
“Lots of times. I don’t keep a count. I do sometimes tell the students at the beginning of the semester that they might want to drop my class and take another one if their relatives aren’t in good health because there’s a pretty high mortality rate among the grandparents of my students.”
“They don’t get the joke, though, do they?”
“No.”
“And when they come in to tell you their grandfather has died they think it’s a really clever, original excuse, one that nobody ever thought of before, right?”
“Probably,” Jack said.
“But it’s not. Students have been using it ever since I was in college and a
long time before that, I’ll bet. It’s something every teacher has heard a hundred times.”
Jack just nodded.
“Well,” Weems said, “that’s the way it is with the old ‘somebody stole it’ story. Every time we arrest some guy whose car’s been used in a robbery, he tells us that the car was stolen an hour before the crime was committed. Whenever we find a gun at a crime scene and trace it to some guy with a rap sheet longer than War and Peace, he tells us that the gun was stolen months before we found it. You see what I’m getting at?”
“I’m way ahead of you,” Jack told him.
“Good. Then you can see that your excuse isn’t very original. I’m a little disappointed in you. I thought you could come up with a better one.”
“I didn’t know I was going to need one,” Jack said. “How about this one: My fingerprints aren’t on the knife.”
“How do you know that? Because you wiped them off?”
“No. Because if they were, you’d have booked me already. My prints are on file because I’ve taught classes at the prison units, and you’d have checked them immediately. If you’d gotten a match, I’d be in a cell right now. So you might as well admit it. You don’t really have any evidence. Well, you might have my knife, but you can’t prove I used it.”
“You don’t have an alibi,” Weems pointed out.
“I don’t need one if you can’t prove I was at Bostic’s place when he was killed.”
“We’ll see about that.”
“We certainly will. Which reminds me. Now I remember something else that I learned on TV.”
“What’s that?” Weems said. “You’ve just remembered that you’d better call your lawyer?”
Jack shook his head. “That’s not it. I didn’t think I’d need a lawyer when you brought me here, and I still don’t think so.”
“What is it, then?”
“I think I’ll leave now.”
“What makes you think you can do that?”
“I think I can do it because this is just a friendly question-and-answer session. It’s not like I’m under arrest or anything.”
“You probably watch Law and Order,” Weems said. “I’ll bet that’s where you learned that.”
“It doesn’t matter where,” Jack said. “What matters is whether I’m right.”
“You’re right,” Weems said. “But let me tell you something.”
Jack felt himself relaxing all over. Now that he had the upper hand, he was getting almost comfortable in the squeaky metal chair. A college English teacher could outsmart a cop any day of the week, even a cop who read Beowulf.
“Sure,” Jack said. “Tell me.”
“I’m going to be watching you like a hawk,” Weems said. His tone, which had been merely unfriendly, turned downright ugly. “I think you killed Bostic, and I’m going to know your every move from now on. When you slip away to that private men’s room they have at the college for teachers, I’ll know it. When you—”
“We don’t have a private men’s room,” Jack said. “We use the same one the students use. Well, the dean has one in the back of his office, but nobody else ever uses it. Not that I know of, that is.”
“Don’t try to get me off the track,” Weems said. “I’m going to be on you like—”
“White on rice? A cheap suit? Fresh paint on an old barn?”
“All right,” Weems said. “That’s it. I should’ve known you’d turn out to be a smart-ass when you thought you were off the hook. But you’re not off the hook. Don’t ever think that.”
“Don’t worry,” Jack said, standing up. “I won’t. Can I go now?”
“It’s may,” Weems said, without the hint of a smile. “You’re supposed to say, ‘May I go now.’ I’d think an English teacher would know that.”
Jack got up and opened the door. Weems made no move to stop him, so Jack went out into the hall. He had the uncomfortable feeling that Weems might still have the upper hand after all.
6
Jack wandered down the hallway toward what he thought might be the front of the building and eventually wound up in an area of offices. He didn’t want to ask anyone any questions, so he looked around until he found an unmarked door. He pushed it open and stepped into the main entrance to the police station and jail. The first person he saw was Sally Good, who was standing at a window talking to a uniformed officer behind the glass. Troy Beauchamp stood beside her.
Sally looked around and saw Jack, said something else to the officer, and walked over to where Jack was standing. Troy trailed along behind her.
“Hey,” Jack said.
“Hey, yourself, Dillinger,” Troy said. “You don’t look any the worse for wear.”
“Weems didn’t give me the full treatment,” Jack said. “I think he wanted to, though. It’s good to see the two of you. I appreciate your coming down here. I was wondering how I’d get back to campus.”
“Your class was dismissed,” Sally said. “Are you sure you want to go back to school? I could take you to your house.”
“I’ll go back. I have another class, and I wouldn’t want Weems to think I was scared of him. Let’s get out of here.”
They went out through the tall glass doors at the front of the building and got into Sally’s Integra. Troy thoughtfully sat in the back, which wasn’t easy to get into.
“Did you convince them you were innocent?” he asked.
“No,” Jack said, and told them the whole story, knowing that Troy would spread it over the campus within ten minutes of his arrival there.
“It sounds as if you’re in real trouble,” Troy said when Jack was done. “Too bad about that knife. You really should lock your office, you know. We got a memo from Chief Desmond about that not long ago, right after A. B. D. Johnson had those checks stolen. Boy, was he upset.”
“He thought it was part of an administrative plot,” Sally said. “When he found out that a student had taken them, he felt better about it.”
Perry Johnson, better known as A. B. D. because he had finished his graduate work All But the Dissertation, was easily agitated. He saw nearly everything that happened at Hughes as an administrative plot, and everyone suspected that he was on daily, if not hourly, medication to control his blood pressure, which by the end of the day was usually off the chart if the redness of his face was any clue.
“Isn’t Perry the one who was really behind that argument you had with Bostic at the board meeting?” Sally asked Jack.
“Yes,” Jack said. “He’s the one, all right. I wish I’d never gotten involved with that faculty senate.”
“We need a group to speak for us,” Troy said.
“Sure,” Jack agreed. “But I’m not sure that was any of our business.
“It’s our business if the school’s getting ripped off,” Troy said. “We’re taxpayers as well as employees.”
He had a point, Sally thought, but she suspected that Jack felt pretty much as she did, that the attack on Bostic had been motivated as much by politics as by a desire to protect the district’s taxpayers. It was true that Bostic was a crook. He’d received a contract to do the repair work and upkeep on all the school-owned vehicles, and he’d been charging exorbitant rates for the work. Someone had brought this to the attention of the faculty senate and pointed out that not only was the college losing money but there was an enormous conflict of interest now that Bostic was sitting on the board.
She wondered whether the faculty senate would have launched an attack against a more popular board member, one who spoke up for the faculty and who wasn’t out to shut down some of the school’s programs, even if he was a crook. But maybe she was being too cynical.
On the other hand, maybe she wasn’t.
“What got Perry so upset in the first place?” she asked.
“Crooked business dealings,” Troy said.
“That’s not what I mean. He wouldn’t have complained to the faculty senate unless someone had told him what was going on. How did he find out about t
he business relationship in the first place?”
No one had an answer for that, and as Sally drove on beneath the branches of the oak trees that spread across the streets, she wondered who’d been talking to A. B. D.
When they got back to the school, they went to their offices. Sally waited for a few minutes, then went looking for Jack. He was sitting at his desk, playing Freecell.
She said, “Relaxing, I see.”
Jack looked up guiltily.
“I don’t blame you,” Sally said. She closed the office door. “We need to talk.”
She sat in the chair provided for student visitors, and Jack minimized the Freecell screen.
“I’ve been thinking,” Sally began.
“Me, too,” Jack said.
“You know that Fieldstone will go ballistic when he hears about this, don’t you?”
“I don’t blame him. There’s no way to make murder look good. It’s bad for the college’s image.”
Sally nodded. It wasn’t that Fieldstone wouldn’t feel sympathy for the dead man and his family. It was just that one of his main concerns was the school’s public image. He was content when the board was content. He liked happy taxpayers. He hated complaints. So did the board members. Sally understood; she didn’t like complaints, either. But she didn’t think Jack had quite figured out what she was trying to say. Either that, or he was in denial about the position he was in, through no fault of his own.
“Fieldstone’s not going to like the idea of having a murder suspect in the classroom,” she said.
Jack started to say something, then stopped.
“The students probably wouldn’t mind,” Sally said. “They know you, and they’ll know you couldn’t kill anyone. But their parents are a different story. You can imagine the kinds of calls that Fieldstone will be getting. He may be getting them already.”
“Are you saying I should stop teaching? Resign?”
“Of course not. I’m not even suggesting a leave of absence. I’m just warning you. You have to be ready if Fieldstone calls you.”
“I’ll be ready. I guess. I just wish I had more confidence in the police.”