A Knife in the Back

by Bill Crider

  Sally looked around the garage carefully before getting out of the car. Satisfied that no one was skulking there, she closed the garage door and went into the house through the interior door that led into the kitchen. As soon as she stepped inside, Lola, the Meanest Cat West of the Mississippi (and possibly east of the Mississippi as well; the jury was still out on that) careened into the room, sliding on the tile as she rounded the corner. She had a bit of trouble righting herself, having something of a weight problem, besides having considerable trouble in getting any traction on the hard, slick floor. When she finally came to a stop, she sat like the Buddha and regarded Sally with something akin to contempt.

  The look didn’t bother Sally, who was used to it. Lola was a calico, and someone had told Sally that calico cats often had bad dispositions. Sally didn’t mind. Lola could be affectionate enough when she chose to be. She just didn’t choose to be very often.

  In any event, Sally was glad to see that cat, whose presence meant that there was no one lurking around inside the house. If there had been, Lola would have been nowhere to be seen. She might have a bad disposition, but she wasn’t exactly brave. In fact, she was about as courageous as a cabbage. She was extremely distrustful of strangers, even when Sally was with them, and tended to hide under the bed when anyone except Sally was around.

  “Hungry?” Sally asked the cat.

  Lola, of course, didn’t answer, but then she didn’t need to. She was always hungry, as both of them well knew. Lola had been put on a strict diet by the vet after her last checkup, a move that had not improved Lola’s disposition in the least. It hadn’t helped much with her weight, either, but Sally thought she could detect a slight change for the better.

  She opened the cabinet to get Lola a kitty treat. One treat a day was Lola’s total allotment, and she looked forward to it with an almost unholy anticipation. Her tail switched rapidly from side to side as she watched Sally’s every move.

  Sally tossed the treat in Lola’s general direction, and Lola jumped to the side, snatching it out of the air as gracefully as a cat her size could do anything.

  “Good girl,” Sally said, and bent down to rub her head.

  Thanks to the kitty treat, Lola was now in what passed for a pleasant mood, and she suffered the rubbing with as good a nature as she possessed, even to the point of purring a bit.

  Then Sally checked her answering machine for messages.

  “You have one new message,” the metallic voice informed her when she pressed the button. “I will play one new message.”

  “Hello, Sally.” The digitized voice of Sally’s mother. “I hope you’ll give me a call and let me know what’s going on there. I just saw the news on TV, and it’s very frightening. I hope you aren’t involved. You’re usually home before five on Fridays, and since you aren’t there I’m worried. Please give me a call.”

  Nancy Jan Walton spent too much time worrying about her daughter, or at least that was Sally’s opinion. But maybe that’s what parents did. Sally and Ron hadn’t been able to have children (a fact about which Nancy often offered vocal regrets), so Sally wasn’t entirely sure.

  She picked up the phone to make the call, but then she thought better of it. There was something else she needed to take care of first.

  She went into her bedroom and opened the dresser drawer where she kept her pistol. Where other women might have kept nightgowns or slinky underwear, Sally kept her plain undies and a gun.

  Lola, having inhaled the kitty treat, followed Sally into the bedroom.

  “Shoo,” Sally said, looking back at the cat. “You don’t need to see this.”

  Lola gave Sally a disgusted look, sat down, and refused to move. Sally shrugged.

  “All right, then. You can stay. But don’t come any closer.”

  She opened the drawer and removed the gun case, put it on top of the dresser, and opened it. The Ladysmith was a lethal but lovely piece of machinery, smelling of gun oil. Sally felt a little better knowing that the pistol was where it belonged, but it wasn’t as lethal as it looked because it wasn’t loaded. That would never do.

  Lola lost interest in the proceedings, possibly because there didn’t appear to be anything to eat forthcoming, and left the room. That was fine with Sally, who didn’t think untrained cats should be around firearms in the first place.

  Sally kept the .38 cartridges in a separate drawer. She got them out, liking the feel of them as she took them out of the box, and slipped four of them into the pistol’s cylinder. Might as well leave the cylinder under the hammer empty, she thought. If four won’t do the job, the job can’t be done.

  Sally closed the case on the now-loaded pistol but didn’t put it back into the drawer. She went into the kitchen where she found Lola sitting impatiently, tail swishing back and forth on the tile floor.

  “I know what you want,” Sally said. “You want tuna. But you can’t have any. You’re on a diet, and you know it. It’s your own fault for eating too much.”

  Sally told herself that she only imagined that Lola’s glare intensified at the word diet.

  “You know the rules,” Sally said. “One cup of dry food a day. And that’s it.”

  Lola looked back disdainfully at her food bowl, which was still more than half full of the healthy (not to mention high-priced) reduced-fat cat food that the vet had recommended. It promised a balanced meal with plenty of protein, a combination of flavors that any cat would love, vitamins, minerals, and an ingredient that contributed to balancing a cat’s pH factor. Wonderful stuff.

  Lola, however, was not impressed.

  “Meow,” she said, which of course was all she could say, but it was clear from her tone that what she actually meant was, “That crap bites the moose.”

  “It probably does,” Sally agreed, “but if you weren’t so greedy, you wouldn’t have to eat it. For that matter, you don’t have to eat it anyway if you don’t want to. You don’t have to eat at all.”

  Lola looked at her calmly, twitched her tail once more, then got up and marched to the food bowl. She looked at the food for a second or two, then looked back over her shoulder at Sally as if to say, “I’ll eat it, but I’m not going to like it.”

  “Nobody says you have to like it,” Sally told her. “You do as you please. It doesn’t matter to me whether you eat it or not. I have to make a phone call.”

  As Sally picked up the telephone on the kitchen counter, she could hear the steady crunching of the dry food between Lola’s teeth.

  20

  Jack Neville sat in his home office playing Freecell on his computer. He’d won sixteen games in a row. The Kingston Trio’s double CD of the albums At Large and Here We Go Again was playing on the computer’s sound system, and Jack was listening to the last track of the CD, “A Worried Man,” which he’d always thought of as the quintessential Kingston Trio song and which seemed particularly appropriate to him at the moment. It wasn’t so much that the words fit his current situation; in fact, since they involve a love triangle, or maybe it was a quadrangle, they didn’t fit the situation at all.

  But the title fit really well. If there was ever a worried man, it was Jack Neville.

  He was worried about his ribs, which weren’t really hurting all that much, but that was because during his visit to the ER, he’d been given some pills for the pain. When the effect of the pills wore off, he’d be hurting, all right. Weems had assured him of that. He had a prescription for more pills, of course, but he didn’t like taking medication if he didn’t have to. He’d wait and see what developed. Maybe aspirin would be enough to keep things manageable.

  He was also worried about Weems, who still seemed to think Jack might have killed Ralph Bostic, though it should have been obvious to anyone that Jack had done no such thing. At least the detective didn’t seem inclined to blame Jack for Ray Thomas’s death. Or maybe he was just trying to lull Jack into a false sense of security before he pounced and sent Jack away to the Big House.

  Jack wished that D
ean Naylor had been around after the Thomas murder. It was possible that Naylor would have been more sensible than Weems. He might even have granted Jack the right to teach his own classes again.

  That was a laugh. Naylor was afraid of even the slightest hint of impropriety, and murder was about as big an impropriety as there was. He’d heard of Thomas’s murder by now, and he was undoubtedly going nuts. If he had his way, Jack would probably never get back into the classroom again. So naturally Jack was worried about that.

  He was worried about Sally, too. He wondered if she thought less of him because he hadn’t fought off the masked welder. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t tried. His ribs were proof enough of that. But Superman he wasn’t. He wasn’t even Batman, if it came right down to it. Or Robin. More like Alfred, the butler.

  The Kingston Trio CD stopped, and Jack took it out of the slot and put in another one, the double album called Make Way and Goin’ Places. Jack wished he were going places, but he wasn’t, so he might as well try to do something about his situation. Maybe he could deal with it intellectually.

  He got out a sheet of paper and wrote down the names of the people who knew about his knife being in his office: Fieldstone, Jorge, Mae Wilkins, Stanley Owens, Ray Thomas.

  He stopped with the last name. Did Thomas really know? Yes, he hadn’t liked Jack, but he’d asked him once if he’d ever finished the knife, and Jack had said it was in his office if Thomas ever wanted to stop by and see it. Thomas, of course, had never stopped by, but he’d known the knife was there.

  So, Jack thought, suppose Thomas had killed Bostic and then … well, Jack didn’t know what came then. Thomas was dead, but Jack didn’t know the actual cause, and he didn’t know Thomas’s connection with Bostic. But he left Thomas’s name on the list anyway.

  There were other people he could have added, too. Jack’s mother, for example. She knew the knife was there because Jack had told her. But she lived in Dallas, a good five-hour drive away, and she didn’t know either Thomas or Bostic. It would take someone with Weems’s mentality to suspect her of the murder, though she was even less likely to be guilty of something like that than Jack himself.

  Motive, Jack thought. His mother didn’t have a motive. Who did?

  Fieldstone did. Bostic wanted him fired. That was no surprise. Bostic was cheating the school, and Fieldstone didn’t want him on the board.

  That reminded Jack to add Hal Kaul’s name to his list of people who knew about the knife. Hal must have known about Bostic’s deal to fix the school’s vehicles, and he must have known about the exorbitant charges. Maybe they were in on it together and had a difference of opinion. Thieves fall out. Jack added Kaul to his list of people with a motive.

  Mae? Lovers fall out about as often as thieves, or at least that was Jack’s opinion. He’d had a falling out or two himself.

  Roy Don Talon. He had a motive, Jack thought, but had he known about the knife? Probably not, but Jack put his name down on the “motive” list.

  But even if all those people had a motive to kill Bostic, what was their connection with Thomas? As far as Jack knew, there were no connections. So how could he tie the two murders together? The answer was easy. He couldn’t.

  The Kingston Trio was singing a song called “Hangman,” and Jack stopped the CD. He didn’t like the subject matter, though it had never bothered him before. He was getting a bit touchy about executions.

  He left his list in the office and went into the kitchen, where he fixed himself a grilled cheese sandwich. When he’d gotten sick as a kid, his mother had often made him grilled cheese sandwiches as a special treat, and they’d been his comfort food ever since. He liked them with plenty of butter on the toasted bread. They just weren’t the same without it.

  He ate the sandwich and drank a glass of Pepsi One while he thought about the murders. He couldn’t think of anything else to add to his lists, but maybe Sally could. He could always call her and ask, but he didn’t think bothering her at home would be a good idea. After all, it was his fault that she’d been chased around the auto mechanics building by a hammer-wielding masked man.

  He was sure she must be having second thoughts about having accepted his invitation to go out. Not because of the murders, however, or the masked man. He wished it had been because of the murders. He could handle that. No, it was something more fundamental, some kind of basic uncertainty that she wanted to go out with him at all.

  Or that’s the way it appeared to Jack. But he was no expert on reading people, especially women. It was possible that he was wrong about the whole thing. He hoped so.

  There was one way to find out, or to take a step toward finding out, and that was to call her, whether he thought it was a good idea or not.

  He went back into his office and looked up Sally’s number in the faculty directory that he kept on the desk. Then he picked up the phone and punched the number. And got a busy signal.

  He wondered who she was talking to. Oh well, he could try again later. Right now, he thought he’d have another grilled cheese sandwich.

  21

  Sally loved her mother. She even liked visiting with her now and then. But she didn’t particularly like talking with her on the telephone. Coming over the wires, her mother’s voice always seemed to have a vaguely accusing tone, whether she meant to or not. Her voice seemed that way on a cell phone, too, so it wasn’t just the wires. But Sally could have been imagining it.

  “I don’t see how you can keep getting mixed up in things like this,” her mother said after Sally had filled her in on recent events. “It just doesn’t seem right, somehow.”

  “I’m not ‘mixed up’ in anything,” Sally said, trying to make light of things. “Nothing’s happening here.”

  “That’s not what the reporter was just saying on the news program I saw. She’s the one they always send out to the tragedies. Do you know the one I mean?”

  Sally knew which channel her mother always watched, and she knew exactly which reporter her mother was talking about, a young, diminutive blond woman with even worse hair than Sally’s. Or maybe it wasn’t really worse at all. Maybe the reporter just pulled it as close to her skull as possible and plastered it there to keep from looking too glamorous when she asked people how they felt on learning that a close relative had just been killed in a fiery freeway crash.

  “Reporters always like to exaggerate things,” Sally said. “They like a big story, and if they don’t have one, they invent it.”

  “But she mentioned something about a man in a hockey mask, like that terrible movie.”

  “It was a welder’s mask,” Sally said. “And it wasn’t anything at all like a movie.”

  Which was true. It had been much worse than a movie.

  “I knew you were mixed up in it! You were in danger! I could feel it.”

  Sally’s mother liked to believe that she had some sort of extrasensory perception where her family was concerned. She claimed to have experienced a ghostly visit by her sister the night of her death, and to have heard her long-dead mother’s spectral voice calling to her the night her father died. The fact that no one else in the family believed the stories didn’t appear to discourage Sally’s mother in the least. “I know what I know,” she always said when challenged on the subject. It was hard to argue with a statement like that.

  “I wasn’t in any real danger,” Sally said. “Jack Neville was there with me.”

  “They didn’t mention either of you by name, but I knew it was you. Is Jack the nice young man you’re going out with?”

  “I haven’t gone out with him yet, and young might be exaggerating a bit, but he’s nice, yes, even though he’s been accused of murder.”

  Sally’s mother didn’t appear to have noticed her daughter’s last remark.

  “I’m sure he was a big help,” she said.

  Not really, Sally thought. But at least he tried.

  “I hope you’ll have a good time with him when you do go out,” her mother went on. “You need t
o get out and have a little fun. After all, it’s been six years now.”

  She had been insisting that Sally get out and have a little fun for at least five and a half of those years. One thing about mothers, they never stopped caring about you.

  “But if he’s accused of murder,” Sally’s mother continued in a worried tone, proving that she’d been listening after all, “how nice can he be?”

  “He didn’t kill anyone,” Sally said. “Trust me. I know him better than that.”

  “Just how well do you know him?”

  First her mother wanted her to go out, and now she didn’t. Not that Sally was surprised. Her mother was a firm believer in the Emersonian idea that a foolish consistency was the hobgoblin of little minds. Except that consistency didn’t have to be foolish for her mother to have nothing to do with it.

  “He’s been a member of my department for six years now,” Sally said. “Ever since I came here. I think I know him well enough.”

  “You can never be sure how well you know a person. That’s what the neighbors always say when that reporter interviews someone who lives next door to a killer. ‘We thought we knew him very well. He seemed like such a nice man.’ That’s what they always say.”

  Sally thought back over the conversation.

  “I believe you’re the one who said he was a nice man.”

  “Well, I hoped that he would be if he was going out with my daughter. Is he?”

  “Is he what?”

  “Nice.”

  “Yes,” Sally said, suppressing a sigh. “I told you that. He’s very nice.” Maybe too nice. Maybe that’s why I’m having second thoughts. But is it possible for anyone to be too nice?

  “I hope he’s not too nice,” her mother said, as if she knew what Sally had been thinking. It was a trick at which she was all too good.

  “Can anyone be too nice?” Sally asked. Might as well. Her mother probably knew she was thinking it.