by John Farrow
“You’re not going to like this,” she says, then changes her mind. “Or maybe you will.”
Émile has spread out the photographs at the end of a long table intended for student study and quick lunches. Other students chat quietly a short distance from them. He waits, sunlight from outside glowing on his brow.
“I’ve seen this woman before,” Roberta says, concentrating, trying to sort through a distant memory.
“She worked here. Cleaning up,” Cinq-Mars points out.
“Yeah. Yeah. Do you know who she was talking to one time?”
“Tell me.”
“I remember this because it struck me funny. A woman from the janitorial staff, a black woman like me yet, talking to a professor.”
“What’s unusual about that?”
“It did not seem like a friendly talk. More like they were arguing. You know, a prof doesn’t have much to do with someone who sweeps floors. If they do, they don’t have to argue about anything, know what I mean? A prof is like management. If one wants something from the janitorial staff, I don’t see there’s much to argue about. Get me?”
“I do. That might be odd. Do you remember who was the prof?”
“Sure do. Professor Edith Shedden.”
Polite exchanges, she had said of her encounters with Malory Earle. The terminology now strikes him as interesting, especially as a reliable witness is now contradicting that characterization.
“This is Professor Toomey, I take it,” Roberta goes on, looking at the photos. “I’ve seen him around, too. More than once. I can tell you who with, too.”
“Who with, Roberta?” He wants to kiss her in the friendliest and most celibate of ways. He’s delighted with the president’s choice of accompanying guard.
“The same boy we just saw, snooping by his office. A lot of times I seen them. The boy’s hard to miss, tall like he is. The prof, this picture of him makes him look bigger. He’s a shorter man, on the dumpy side. More like me, ha ha. Walking together, they stood out in a way. Otherwise, there was nothing unusual about them.”
“Except that you saw them together a lot. Wouldn’t you call that unusual?”
Roberta agrees. “I could. Yeah. Definitely. Unusual.”
“The boy held to a different opinion. Why? The university must have a computer file of all students, with their photographs.”
“Sure do.”
“I’m sorry to ask this of you, Roberta. I’ll need you to look through those photographs until you find that boy’s face. That’ll give us a name and address, because we have to talk to him. He did say that he and the professor didn’t hang out. That’s sounding like a lie now.”
“Don’t be sorry, sir. Protecting the young ones. That’s what I do. Anything related to that is fine with me. Do I start that job right away?”
He has to hold her back. “For now, I need you to take me to the clock tower. After that you can check the pictures. Roberta, you’ve said nothing about the girl.” He points to Addie Langford’s photograph. “Anything?”
“Sorry,” Roberta laments. “Never seen her. Sure pretty, though. Know what? I’ve never been up the clock tower. Too bad it has to be for this sad time.”
“You can sneak up after I come down,” Cinq-Mars says. He doesn’t explain himself. “I have to go up alone. I’ll wait for you afterward.” He returns the three eight-by-tens to their brown envelope, tucks it under his arm. “Lead the way,” he instructs.
“You’re a funny duck,” she says. Roberta smiles, and leads the way.
SIXTEEN
After his visit to the clock tower, which offered no specific clues but left an impression that might prove useful over time, Émile Cinq-Mars gets in touch with Chief Till. They arrange a meeting, to be conducted in secret, along a deserted highway not far from Sandra’s family farm. Both men hope the road remains deserted. State troopers are swarming Hanover, Holyoake, West Lebanon, and Lebanon; finding a side road where they can piss in a ditch without a SWAT team descending on them is dubious. Yet they do meet without being noticed and exchange information. Before Cinq-Mars gets away he receives a gem uncovered by the chief. In talking with Addie Langford’s parents, Till learned that the day before she died she said she had lined up a dream job for the summer. “With a donor!” was how she had phrased the opportunity.
She didn’t name her employer, not that her parents recalled.
“Put the word out that her folks want to speak to that individual, to say thanks,” Émile instructs him, forgetting for a moment not to sound as though he’s the one giving the orders.
Till forgives him. “How do you mean, out?”
“Through her friends. Through Dowbiggin. Through the local press.”
“You think it counts?”
“If someone comes forward, we vet him. Or her. If not, we seek him out.”
Sitting behind the wheel of his Escalade, the chief on the passenger side, Cinq-Mars dips his chin. He doesn’t elaborate on why the news about the job offer is vital, but Till notices the man’s heightened interest. He has more on his mind than a process of elimination. Lately, he’s been provoked by news of interconnections and shared contacts among the victims. Nobody anticipated that, and it’s not to be ignored, or kept to themselves. The hard part will be to share information with the troopers without them hearing of their clandestine, side investigation.
“Let’s push on,” Émile suggests, “before we dump our findings in Hammond’s lap.”
“He asked me to pick up the parents,” Till gripes. “He did it to keep me out of his hair. Can he blame me if I kept my ears open?”
“Watch. He might find a way.”
As Till drives off, Émile stays on the side road next to a frog pond, the big guys croaking away, amphibians and one pensive human peaceably pondering the universe. Bulrushes line the water’s edge. He makes a crucial call to Palmerich, amazed to promptly be put through.
“Émile,” the president remarks. First-name basis. Wow. He wants news.
“Sir, about that cocktail party we discussed.”
“I remain exceedingly uncomfortable with the idea.”
Exceedingly. Émile hadn’t gauged the man’s opposition to the concept as that trenchant.
“A few things have changed since we last spoke, sir.”
“I remain to be convinced. What have you heard?”
“This year, as you know,” Émile begins, “Professor Toomey finagled an invitation to the party. You mentioned that he wasn’t an obvious choice of invitee. Sir, last year, without an invitation, he still wrangled his way into the party by pestering to be another person’s date. Clearly, it’s been a priority for him to attend these functions. We need to know who he knew and who he was interested in contacting. The party may give us clues into his life which are currently missing.”
“Interesting.” The president’s words are noncommittal, yet a breath of compliance hangs in the air between them. Émile feels that he’s gaining ground, and presses on.
“Sir, someone described as a donor offered Addie Langford a job this summer. Understand, this doesn’t accuse anyone of anything or frame any donor in a bad light. Chances are, whoever offered her that job was simply doing the young woman a favor for all the right reasons. He may offer an internship every summer. As with Toomey, we need to know her connections, what she was up to, who she was seeing, where does this all lead. Two of the deceased may have had contact with a person or persons attending that gathering. That’s compelling. As well, one of your professors was acquainted with all three victims. That professor happens to be going to the party. Again, nothing is defamatory, not in the slightest, but what your people know is important to us. The police need to expand their knowledge on that front. This isn’t adversarial. We simply desire to know what the victims knew, with particular emphasis on what interested them. We care about who they talked to and why.”
The other end of the line is dead air for what feels like a minute. All that time he can’t even hear the m
an breathing.
“Émile,” Palmerich comes back at last, “I appreciate that you’re making progress with your investigation, at least with getting to know the victims. I don’t wish to stand in the way of that.” Émile is happy that he doesn’t have to make that threat again. The president is bringing up the issue of interference on his own. “You’ve implicated an unidentified donor, not with the crime, but with knowledge of a victim. He or she might expect to be interviewed, as that will show that every stone is being turned over. In that sense, I have no choice. I need to show that we’re doing things the right way.” The argument is not one that occurred to Cinq-Mars—people familiar with the victims may expect to be interviewed, and wonder why not if they’re ignored—and he’s glad that the president has made it for him. “With your solemn vow to be circumspect, I will issue an invitation for you to attend the donors’ party. With this proviso. I do not want you to discuss the murders at the event. Forfeit those conversations. Do you wish to be introduced as a donor yourself? As a disguise?”
“That depends on how much cash I’m obliged to contribute.”
While the president doesn’t laugh, he emits a sound which relaxes the tension between them. “Write a check for any amount you care to, Émile. I presume you caught my meaning.”
“I’m not sure I can pull off being a financier. I’ll dress well. Say I’m from Canada with a niece graduating, that’s no lie, and that I’d like to help the school out. No lie there, either. I’ll be a minor benefactor with a personal interest. I’ll use my own name. These out-of-towners haven’t heard of me.”
“Very well. Thank you, Émile. You can pick up the invitation in a sealed envelope from my secretary. No one in the office will know what it is, for the sake of our ongoing discretion. Forgo the RSVP as well, as I don’t want your name on any list.”
Not a party animal by a long shot, Émile is thinking that he’s never been as happy to receive an invitation. Then he reminds himself that it’s probably all for naught, that nothing is likely to come of it. Typical police work. Scratch the sand in the hope of finding a buried clue, only to hit solid rock.
Or more sand.
He drives on home.
* * *
Émile Cinq-Mars has a hunch that his time in the clock tower will eventually prove beneficial, although he’s admitted to himself that putting stock in such an opinion requires a leap of faith. Technically, Roberta was supposed to accompany him wherever he went, including up the clock tower stairs. Given that nothing existed for him to steal up there on high, and given that he was insisting on solitude, she let him ascend on his own.
“Don’t,” she warned him, “try to change the time of day.”
She meant to be facetious, and was rewarded with a smile, yet her remark struck him as ironic. Time. As always, of the essence. Perhaps not in the traditional sense. He didn’t need to accomplish anything specific in the tower, only to give silence and meditation their due. Time reveals secrets. Time extracts truth from infinite space and from the decay of physical matter. He was sensing a spiritual poke again, both in the clock tower and on his drive home after his talk with Till. So be it. Spiritual concepts were part and parcel of his hypothesis of the world, why not permit them entry into his investigative tangents? As he has pontificated to others, the mind possesses a core brain, thousands of times quicker in its computations than any conscious mind, and way too quick for the dragging effect of language. A thought that requires words is slowed down by that imposition, the brakes are on. Often perceived as intuition, or a voice from dimensions more esoteric than that, Cinq-Mars considers the core brain to be merely functional, though so wickedly fast that any insight or conclusion it might pass along to a wakeful mind arrives with such acuity, and with such velocity, as to knock the thinker onto his or her intellectual derrière. The unwary thinker is stunned and at a loss, as if from a blow. Stripped bare of a conscious process—the conscious mind too slow to register how a remedy was gleaned at full throttle when only the conclusion is offered up—the out-of-the-blue thought is as likely to be dismissed as welcomed. At least, by many. Which is when Émile’s spirituality knocks on the door. Accepting a random, fleeting, and elusive thought as potentially valid requires the lost art of faith. For Cinq-Mars, faith is the least understood virtue. Shunned as being an excuse for superstition, or as a means of admitting ignorance into a religious catechism, further denuded by the adjective blind when in his mind faith requires acute vision, it is anything but ignorant. The contrary, faith is meant to be a resource for insight and thoughtfulness into what is temporarily or permanently inexplicable, or merely beyond one’s ability to fully fathom or articulate. Which is what he was searching for in the quiet serenity of the tower. Insight into inexplicable murder. An unfathomable homicide reduced to its mechanics. Others might imagine he was listening to the walls speak or attuning himself to the distant voices of victims, when all he was doing was exercising patience. Thoughts knitted together a myriad of notations pertaining to evidence, then were mixed with a phalanx of possibilities. In turn, this abstract stew is spiced by suspicion and the whole batch cooked in the pot of his experience. Allowed to cool and set, the concoction, if it’s a good one, might offer up a singular possibility. If one’s faith in the process holds. Or not. In the tower, he was listening. To himself. Letting everything simmer. Giving it time. In the depths of a solitude.
At a bare minimum, no interruptions.
The quiet elegance of the clock tower, emphasized by the steady shhlunka-shhlunka of the mechanism, demanded that he be there alone, and in that vacuum he hears what he himself thinks, not the walls. How does he weigh an inexplicable murder where the victim is dressed up and presented, like a debutante at a ball? To understand any of that he lets himself slip back in time and space, sequestered in the tower but also in that part of his mind that is capable of not only fathoming but of engineering such a thing. He must believe himself capable, he must believe himself gripped by such a terrible impulse. He must allow himself to be irredeemable and loathsome and celebrate what is vile and secreted in every man’s nature. None of that is easy in this circumstance for he remembers more the vitality of the bright young woman who was the victim here, and it’s hard to get her out of his mind and draw the perpetrator of this crime into his consciousness instead. Details about what might have occurred do not rise willingly. As they trickle into his head, he finds them so troubling, ruthless, and intricately sick that he comes to doubt himself, his ability to do this, and entertains instead the notion that the walls, witness to this malady, this crime, are indeed speaking to him, shouting out in pain, for he cannot possibly be talking to himself.
If it was the walls or a distant voice or his own core brain at full throttle, he did listen, he did interpret what he heard, and Émile in the tower found himself growing increasingly troubled.
When Roberta, less patient, called up, perhaps to ascertain that he’s still alive, a spell was broken, and for once he was glad of that, even though he hadn’t lingered there long enough nor immersed himself deeply enough in this morass. He knew, as he came down the stairs, that he’s on the run, that he’s intent on escaping.
Roberta was expecting to go up, to take a turn in the clock tower.
“Another time,” Émile instructed her instead, and the timbre of his voice, something in his overall attitude, convinced her not to protest. She passed up the chance to climb the stairs on her own to admire the view.
Coming away, Cinq-Mars carried a few revelations with him. Specifics he’ll mull over time. One tells him that, beyond the usual horror that accompanies murder, the events that occurred there were intricate and more unsettling than the usual run of sordid crimes. He also learned of a surprise more mysterious and daunting. Namely, that he’s afraid. He’d forgotten how deeply fear can slide inside a man. That reminder distressed him. He wanted to be back in the countryside. Out on the farm. To be breathing clear air.
SEVENTEEN
Upon his return,
Émile finds that Sandra hasn’t made it back from her sad errands. He warms leftover meat loaf for himself, enjoys a tossed salad, and washes it all down with a cold beer. The afternoon drink feels indulgent. On the job he’d rarely do that, and yet, as he tells himself, this is his bona fide retirement. Each sip warrants a smile, even if he is neck-deep in a case.
A case. Imagine that. At this time in his life.
This one’s a puzzle.
A matter that confounded him in the clock tower was the primitive aspect to the space, which would have imposed limitations on any perpetrator. The stairs, railings, and platforms are of sturdy construction, meant to be functional rather than attractive. The angles are harsh, the wood unfinished, inhibiting movement. Even as a mere observer, he felt clumsy. At the apex, he dwelled upon the physical reality of a man who intends to commit rape and murder in that environment. Any attack would leave more traces of blood than were found and should have resulted in more obvious bruising on the victim. The perpetrator, if located, ought to show damage on his person, too, given that the rough edges and blunt ends to the woodwork are never more than inches away during the commission of his violence. Yet the victim, as far as he’d been able to see, showed only strangulation marks, and those were minimal. No cuts, no further bruising. How was that possible? In the narrow confines, a young woman was assaulted, probably raped, then murdered. She was undressed, then dressed again in different clothes. Judging by the chalk circles on the highest platform, forensics had discovered blood spotting and seminal or other fluid residue there—the state troopers would know, but he doesn’t—which confirms that the attack had been carried out that high up. Yet it would appear that only trace amounts were found. Anyone being assailed and choked would have kicked and lashed out, causing injury to herself and to her attacker. Why was there no such evidence on the body, that he discerned? No cuts, no splinters, no scrapes to indicate that she’d been mauled and dragged across the rough-hewn floors. Why were blood smears not apparent on the posts, railings, and stairs? Somewhere? Anywhere? As he sat high up in the tower, suspicions arose all through his assessment, and Cinq-Mars wished he had the medical examiner’s report in hand. He was working with only a fraction of the available knowledge and being deprived in that way was getting the better of him.