by Donn Taylor
As I’d known him long ago, he was corrupt and vengeful but technically competent. So I had a formidable adversary in his accusation of an affair and in the attempt to have Bruno Pinkle pin a felony on me. So why couldn’t he solve the Laila Sloan murder last fall?
I sat and brooded about Staggart’s new accusation until full darkness sent the outside temperature nose-diving into a freezing Midwestern winter night. I had no idea where the accusation had come from or how to fight it. I’d never touched Mitra Fortier except perhaps to help her on with her coat. She was not a hugger, and she certainly was no flirt. On the other hand, plenty of people had seen her with Faith and me at concerts and dinners. So the campus gossips would interpret what they had seen as evidence of much more they had not seen.
Staggart’s accusation also raised a new possibility about my interview with Dean-Dean tomorrow. Just thinking about Dean-Dean called up my internal bassoon. Our glorious Vice President for Academic Affairs always believes the person who gets to him first, and no amount of evidence can convince him of anything different. Staggart had taken advantage of that last fall to plant several poisonous accusations against me.
I could do nothing about that, so I focused on the story linking me romantically with Mitra. I could find no reason the story should have started and no way for me to fight it.
Several hours later, I realized I really didn’t know much about Mitra Fortier. All the conversations I’d shared with her and Faith never reached beneath the surface. The two of them would chatter about other faculty members or about music, or maybe Mitra would mention a research project. But never once, so far as I could remember, had she ever talked about herself. For all I knew, her life might have begun the day she joined the Overton University faculty.
The one source where I could begin filling that vacuum was her college personnel record, but the only way I could examine it required unauthorized entry to the Executive Center. Getting caught would cost me my job, and the one time I’d done it, I’d almost gotten caught.
Once again, I felt unseen forces crowding me in a direction I didn’t wish to go. So I retrieved my running shoes from my closet and my black jogging suit from the washing machine. Last fall, the police had searched my house for that suit, hoping to prove I was the black-suited runner who’d violated crime-scene tape at Laila Sloan’s house. But they didn’t look in the washing machine. I still couldn’t afford for them to find it, so I kept it there, taking it out only when I washed other clothes. The latex surgical gloves I’d used then to avoid leaving fingerprints were still in the pockets.
At midnight, dressed in that black jogging suit and a black toboggan cap, I eased out my back door and through mid-block garbage-truck alleys to the walkway up to the campus. At the campus circle, I checked to see that the college’s one night watchman, Elmo Koonz, was nowhere in sight. Then I moved through unlighted areas to the back door of the Executive Center. My cheerful musicians accompanied me with the funeral march from Chopin’s B-flat Minor Sonata, which might turn out to be appropriate for my employment prospects.
The pass key I’d lifted from Dean-Dean’s office last fall opened the door without a problem. So far, so good. If I were discovered at this point, I could claim I found the door open and went to investigate. But that excuse would evaporate the second I entered Mrs. Dunwiddie’s office between the dean’s and president’s offices.
I took a deep breath and inserted the pass key into the office door. It turned easily, and the door opened without a sound. I silently thanked the janitor ... uh ... Custodial Associate, as he is called since the Great Renaming ... for astute use of graphite and oil. Gingerly, as careful of each step as I’d been long ago on night patrols, I eased into the office.
One step ... two steps ... three ...
Then everything happened at once. A dark-clad form leaped out of nowhere, seized my arm in a judo hold, and threw me face down on the floor. My breath went out with a whoosh. Before I could move, the assailant was on top of me with my arm twisted up behind my shoulders and a knee boring into my kidney.
A whispered voice hissed, “Don’t make a sound.”
Pain wrenched through my shoulder as my arm twisted higher and the knee dug farther into my kidney. My lungs struggled to draw breath but lost the battle. I sank into oxygen debt.
“Who are you?” the voice hissed. “What are you doing here?”
CHAPTER 11
“Who are you?” the voice hissed again. The knee ground deeper into my back.
My lungs broke the expansion barrier, and I gasped several deep breaths. The pain in my twisted arm and back held steady but did not increase. I took several more breaths and decided I would live.
“Who are you?” the voice whispered again.
“I’m Walter Gieseking,” I said. “I’m a concert pianist, and I’m looking for a Steinway grand piano.” As if on cue, my internal musicians drummed out the percussive opening to Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata.
“Press, you idiot,” whispered Mara’s voice, “Gieseking died in nineteen fifty-six.” Trust her to remember details like that.
“I’m his ghost,” I said.
“You’ll be a ghost if you keep burglarizing buildings and not paying attention to your surroundings.”
“I suppose you’re here on night watchman duty,” I said. “Now if you’ll give me back my arm and extract your knee from my kidney, let’s decide what we’re both doing here and get it done before we get caught and thrown in jail.”
The knee moved and the pressure disappeared from my arm. I sat up and tested my extremities. They all worked, so I decided I’d suffered no permanent damage. Except to my ego. I’d been pinned by a woman five inches shorter and fifty pounds lighter than I.
She moved, quick and lithe, into a kneeling position beside me.
“How did you get in?” I asked. “I’m the one with the pass key.”
“You lent it to me last fall. Did you think I’d be foolish enough not to duplicate it?”
“I stand corrected,” I said.
She laughed softly. “On the contrary, Cupcake, you are not standing. You are sitting, which is a promotion from your previous position.” She was as much a nit-picker for exact detail as I was. And she’d used the nickname given me last fall by a waitress who’d trumped my wisecrack with a better one. Another shot to my ego.
“Whatever we’re doing here,” I said, “we’d better do it before Elmo Koonz’s conscience prods him into making his rounds. I’m interested in Mitra Fortier’s personnel record.”
“That and maybe a few others,” she said. “You go first, and I’ll keep watch.”
My limbs creaked a bit as I stood, but Mara sprang up like an Olympic gymnast and took her post at the window. I put on my trifocals, which fortunately had been in a plastic case in my pocket, and I fished a penlight from another pocket. I’d put a red filter on it so as not to interfere with my night vision and to make it less likely to be seen from outside the building. I found the filing cabinet keys in Mrs. Dunwiddie’s desk drawer and soon had Mitra Fortier’s record in front of me.
Its contents were routine, nothing more. She was forty years old. She’d been born in Iowa but grew up and finished high school in Cloverdale, just south of Overton City. She’d earned a B.S. degree at our state university. Afterwards, she was out of school for a couple of years, then re-entered and worked straight through to her PhD in physics. All her recommendations came from graduate school, none from any employers during her out-of-school years. She’d joined the Overton faculty ten years ago, and that was that.
The only unusual item was that the surname Cochran had been added to her undergraduate transcript and then lined out. I knew she’d had a short marriage that ended in divorce, but I’d never heard any details. No documents in the file shed any further light on the subject.
I laid the file on Mrs. Dunwiddie’s desk and relieved Mara at the window. My musicians played something soothing with strings. The well-lighted campus circle sho
wed no movement, proving that even student night owls had sense enough to come in from the cold. I could hear the quiet sibilance of Mara’s shifting papers and the occasional opening of another file cabinet. She had a red-filtered flashlight, too—another relic of her military training, I supposed. She seemed to be taking forever.
“How many files are you reading?” I whispered. “If we stay much longer, we’ll have to pay rent.”
“Last one,” she whispered back.
I heard the file cabinet close. When I turned, I saw her returning the keys to Mrs. Dunwiddie’s desk.
“Look,” I said, “I know why I’m here, but why are you doing this?”
“I could ask you the same,” she said.
“I asked you first.” Trust me to find a brilliant comeback.
She sighed. “It’s complicated. But let me tell you now that I enjoyed working with you last fall. You’ve been a good friend, and—I’ll admit it now—I’m going to miss you.”
Her words struck like hammer blows. I struggled for calm as I asked, “Which one of us is going somewhere?”
Another sigh. “Didn’t you know? Faculty contracts were in the campus mail office yesterday. I didn’t get one, and I’m meeting with Dean-Dean at ten Monday morning. It looks like I’ve been terminated.”
A familiar hot brick took up residence in my stomach. “I’m meeting with him then, too. I didn’t check my box Saturday.”
Even in the dark, I could tell she spoke through clenched teeth. “I haven’t been this angry since he accused us of ... of you-know-what.”
I did know what—Dean-Dean’s Staggart-inspired accusation that we’d had a one-night stand at my house. But a different thought occurred. “I don’t think Dean-Dean has nerve enough to fire both of us in the same meeting. Not even with handpicked witnesses. Let’s take a look.”
My pass key opened Dean-Dean’s office, and I moved to his desk. It was not locked, and I opened the main drawer. It contained two nine-by-twelve manila envelopes, fastened with clasps but not sealed. One was addressed to me, the other to Mara.
I gave her hers without comment. Each of us withdrew the contents and studied them with our filtered lights.
“I’m new to this, Press,” she said. “What does it mean?”
She handed me some papers, and I made a hurried glance through them. “It means we’re both contracted for another year,” I said. “Both contracts are signed by President Cantwell, and they’re binding as soon as we sign them. They even gave us the ten percent raise the trustees voted for faculty last week.”
She breathed angrily in and out. “So Dean-Dean is making us think we’ve been fired, and then on Monday he’ll give us a warning and hand us our contracts. I’d ... I’d like to catch him in a dark alley.”
I had never seen her so angry. I knew she’d studied judo and karate, but I’d never seen her use either until my ill-fated encounter with her tonight. Thinking what she could do to Dean-Dean, I could almost pity him. Almost, but not quite. I was as angry as she was.
“I have a better idea,” I said. “These contracts are binding the minute we sign them. So we sign them now, keep our copies, and put the return copy in the campus mail office first thing tomorrow … uh …” I looked at my watch, which showed one-thirty. “... Uh, this morning. Our contracts will be returned with everyone else’s, and who’s to say someone didn’t slip up and put ours in the mail office?”
Mara laughed, quietly. “That plan is worthy of Machiavelli.”
I joined the sotto voce laugh. “He said it was better to be feared than loved …”
“Because ‘men love as they please,’” she quoted, “but ‘fear as the prince pleases ... ’”
Trust her to be able to quote anything she’d ever read.
We signed the contracts and returned them to their envelopes, then restored the dean’s office to the condition in which we’d found it.
“We’re pushing our luck,” I said. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
“All right,” she said, “but there’s something else you need to know. Staggart is spreading the most awful story about you and Professor Fortier.”
The hot brick in my stomach turned to lead. “He questioned me about it earlier this evening. I pled the Fifth.”
Her voice grew earnest. “I need to talk to you about it. I have to know what’s going on.”
I knew better than to ask why, and I felt time and our chances of escaping undetected ticking away.
“Not here,” I said, “and I know you’ll rule out my house or your apartment. So where and when?”
I could hear her breathing impatiently. “Go to the alley behind your house. I’ll pick you up there in about twenty minutes.”
“All right,” I said, “but why does Staggart’s story that I had an affair with Mitra Fortier have you upset.”
Her voice grew impatient. “That’s easy. He claims I was involved in it.”
CHAPTER 12
My ears were only half frozen when Mara drove up in her used Buick. Some of the trustees had gotten together to replace her car that the mob destroyed last semester. They may have been intimidated because the students held a mass demonstration in her favor, but in any event they gave her wheels. They told her to choose any car on the lot at Emory Estes Experienced Autos, owned by the trustee the lot was named for. She rejected the Cadillacs and BMWs and chose a five-year-old baby Buick.
“I didn’t know they made Buicks this small,” I said as we drove away. My musicians launched into something tempestuous from Gustav Mahler.
“This car does everything I need,” Mara said.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Where we can talk without feeding the Blatant Beast.” She drove across the river and up the eastern hills. There she turned into the familiar park at the edge of the bluffs, the one with a magnificent view of town and river valley and the university in its commanding position on the opposite hills.
“I think you’ve been here before,” she said as she parked facing the view of the valley. It now showed only scattered lights on a blanket of black.
Credit her with understatement. I’d brought her up here last fall for a take-out donut breakfast between the two burglaries we committed en route to solving the Laila Sloan murder. I’d introduced her to the view and my dream of a highly visible cross atop the planned fine arts building, and she’d explained Wicca to me with chocolate donut smudges on her face. There’d be no donuts now at two-thirty in the morning. The park had a few lights, but I saw her only as a silhouette against them. My musicians abandoned Mahler and shifted into some playful pizzicato by Benjamin Britten.
“Tell me about you and Mitra Fortier,” Mara said.
I made a face, not that she could see it in the dim light. “All I know is that Staggart accused me of having a long-standing affair with Mitra. I denied it and then took the Fifth Amendment. That’s all I know.”
She turned to face me, her tone accusing. “But you told Dr. Sheldon and me that you and she and Faith often went out together.”
“Mitra was Faith’s friend. That’s all there was to it.”
“Staggart made it sound like a ménage à trois.”
“Faith wouldn’t have put up with it if Mitra had ever flirted with me.”
Dimly visible in the faint light, Mara pointed her forefinger at me. “You swear that there was nothing between you and Mitra?”
My anger surged. “I swear there was nothing untoward between Mitra and me—or between Faith and Mitra, for that matter. And if you keep bugging me about it, I’m going to swear like you never heard before.”
She laughed and settled back in the driver’s seat. “I didn’t think there was, but I had to know.”
My anger still spoke. “All you know now is that I’ve denied it.”
She grew serious. “No, Press. I know you’re telling the truth because I know you.”
A deep basic honesty in me wanted to argue that she didn’t know me that well. In
an absolute sense, there’s a lot of dishonesty in me. Maybe that’s why I struggle so hard to learn and teach what is actually true instead of what I would like to believe. And in this fallen world, there’s scarcely a day I don’t have to suppress jungle impulses. But this was no time for total confession.
So I said, “Now tell me how Staggart thought you were involved.”
“It’s so silly.” She shook her head. “He claimed again that you and I had an affair last fall and Mitra got jealous. He said she confronted me, we had a shouting match, and I threatened her life. I don’t have to tell you that none of it ever happened.”
“What did you say to Staggart?”
“I asked him which insane asylum he visited to get those ideas. He laughed and said he had good evidence. I told him he couldn’t have evidence of something that never happened, and then I took the Fifth.”
“He’s not above manufacturing evidence,” I said. “I suppose he brought Dogface with him?”
“The man who quoted Keats to you?”
“That’s the one. He not only looks like a dog, he follows Staggart around like one.”
“You’re too hard on him. He looked pained while Staggart was questioning me, and at times I thought he would intervene.” Her voice softened. “His name is Duggan Hahn.”
“How did you find that out?” What I really wondered was why.
“I asked Sergeant Spencer. When a Homicide detective can quote Keats, it’s worth knowing who he is. Spencer says he’s a good man who doesn’t go along with everything Staggart does.”
I grunted. “If he doesn’t, he gives a good imitation of it. Look, we need to figure out what this new situation means for us.”
Even in the dark I could tell she looked away. “It means the Blatant Beast is loose, and there’s nothing we can do to cage him. Staggart will leak those stories. People will invent other things beyond that …”
“There’s one thing we can do. We can find out where Staggart got his information. We started that at the only place we knew to start—Mitra Fortier’s personnel records.”