by Donn Taylor
Her sigh sounded through the phone. “I’ll talk to Mark about it, Daddy. Right now I have to go help organize our defense.”
She said she loved me and rang off.
Few things weigh more heavily on parents than knowing their children are in trouble beyond their experience and that the parents are helpless to intervene. In her innocence, Cindy still thought she’d get a fair hearing, but I knew different. I’d watched for a couple of decades as administrators had either joined the political correctness mob or been intimidated by it. Universities’ “speech codes” and other coercive measures had been repeatedly struck down by the courts as unconstitutional, yet these same universities continued to misuse their administrative authority to suppress students’ right to free speech and peaceable assembly.
I knew that Cindy and Mark would be suspended, but I could do nothing about it. So I went home, picked up my old Honda, and drove to Goolock’s. Mara and Dr. Sheldon had not yet arrived. I ordered my usual grilled cheese sandwich and coffee.
Mrs. Lee cocked an eyebrow at me. “No lott’ry ticket?”
“Not tonight, Mrs. Lee.”
She showed me the same smile as always. “Goo’ lock anyway.”
During this exchange, Mara and Dr. Sheldon arrived outside, and she got him established in his wheelchair. After a casual wave to the Lees and me, he wheeled directly to a table facing the window. Mr. Lee went to the table to take his order.
Dr. Sheldon’s great voice roared out an order for a double cheeseburger and French fried onion rings—one of his periodic rebellions against his anti-stroke diet.
Mr. Lee showed a conspiratorial grin. “You order drink?”
Dr. Sheldon grinned back. “Sprite or Mountain Dew.”
Mara ordered her usual Reuben and Coke. Her averted glance told me I was still in trouble. We joined Dr. Sheldon at the table.
“Well, children,” he boomed, “what have you been up to?”
Mara’s blue gaze speared me from across the table, so I gathered it was up to me to answer.
“I have been brooding,” I said, “brooding unsuccessfully on how to fight scandalous rumors that have no basis in fact.”
Mara spoke in a metallic voice. “You might try thinking about how to avoid further scandal.”
“Children, let us not squabble,” Dr. Sheldon said. “We have more substantive things to think on. I have been gainfully employed with my little laptop.”
He paused for effect, but Mara and I were too busy glowering at each other to respond properly. Fortunately, our orders arrived and saved us the trouble. Dr. Sheldon’s drink came in an innocuous-looking pop bottle, but it smelled suspiciously like beer. It shouldn’t have because the Lees were not licensed for on-premises consumption. I learned later that Mr. Lee would give Dr. Sheldon a bottle of Heineken out of his personal supply, but he’d pour it into a pop bottle for camouflage.
Conversation waned while Dr. Sheldon made a starved-lion’s attack on his food. Mara and I were still eating when Dr. Sheldon took a final swig from his pop bottle, drew a satisfied deep breath, and launched into the evening’s lecture.
“I have researched the aircraft accident of Mitra Fortier’s late fiancé,” he said. “Jerry Vaughan was flying a home-built aircraft that he owned jointly with several other men. It seems he enjoyed aerobatics the same way some men enjoy golf. He’d successfully performed several rolls and a spin that day. But while he was pulling out of an ordinary loop, his left wing came off and the aircraft simply fell out of the sky.”
“Had he done aerobatics in that aircraft before?” I asked.
“Many times,” Dr. Sheldon said. “I phoned one member of the accident board. He said Jerry flew the aircraft every Saturday morning—always early, when the air was smooth. And he often performed maneuvers that placed greater stress on the wings than the one when the wing collapsed.”
“Then why didn’t the wing come off sooner?” Mara asked.
“Ah, my dear.” Dr. Sheldon launched into full lecture mode. “With that question we exceed the degree of precision of which accident investigations are capable. My informant says it’s next to impossible to tell when a particular part is going to fail. If the aircraft had been overstressed in the past, the likelihood of failure under lesser conditions is increased. The upshot is that no one knows if the aircraft had been overstressed. If it had, Jerry’s catastrophe could be easily explained. And there is no way to determine which of a hundred possible scenarios actually happened.”
“So we reach a dead end,” I said.
“Not quite.” Dr. Sheldon beamed. “Because the wing was improperly installed, the board found that to be the primary cause of the accident.”
“Do we know who installed the wing?” Mara asked.
“The board was unable to determine that,” Dr. Sheldon said. “All five of the owners helped put the plane together, and no one remembered who secured the left wing. Any one of the five might have done it.”
“Who were the owners?” Mara asked.
“One of them was Ralph Dornberg. He lives in Cloverdale, where the accident happened.
“I never heard of him,” I said.
Dr. Sheldon smiled as if he were announcing the winner of the Miss America contest. “The other owners were Jerry Vaughan, Emory Estes, Steven Drisko, and Gordon Samstag.”
Estes, Drisko, and Samstag again. They kept turning up everywhere.
CHAPTER 20
We couldn’t pursue that thought because the Lees’ son interrupted. Robert Sun Lee was as Americanized as a child of immigrants can get. His parents said they’d named him Robert, after the revered Confederate general, to emphasize how American they wanted him to become. I once asked Mr. Lee why he chose Sun as Robert’s middle name. He said it was because Robert was not a daughter. I asked no more questions.
Robert was about my height, five-foot-ten, but more solidly muscled from his student days as a gymnast. He had strong features and a broad forehead, and he kept his black hair cut short in the old-fashioned flat-top style. Now he stood between Dr. Sheldon and me, and spoke perfect English in a well-modulated voice.
“I heard you talking about Jerry Vaughan,” he said. “He was a good friend of mine.”
Dr. Sheldon seized the initiative. “Can you tell us anything about his plane crash?”
Something in Robert’s eyes shifted. “We were both CPAs,” he said. “Jerry had his own company, and when I worked for Overton Technologies he used to audit us.”
Drisko’s company. Drisko again.
“Past tense?” I asked. “I thought you still worked there.”
“Until last year. Gordon Samstag made me a better offer. Jerry audited several of his companies, too.”
“How about Emory Estes?” I asked. Might as well make a clean sweep of it.
Robert grinned. “If he ever had an audit, I never heard of it.”
“When was the last time you talked to Jerry?” Mara asked.
“We had lunch together about a week before he died. We talked some about the usual CPA stuff, but mostly about his engagement to Professor Fortier. Too bad he had to die before they got married. And now she’s dead, too.”
“Did Jerry say much about flying?” I asked.
“That wasn’t something we had in common.”
Dr. Sheldon cleared his throat like a thunderclap. “What was that ‘usual CPA stuff’ you talked about?”
Robert scratched his head. “He told me his audit schedule for the next month—three of the Samstag companies and Overton Technologies. The Samstag companies included Pegasus Industries, the one that had the rocket failure.”
A frown furrowed Dr. Sheldon’s brow. “No more details than that?”
“I don’t remember any.” Robert looked toward the cash register. “My parents need me.”
“One more question,” I said. “Why did you change jobs from Drisko to Samstag?”
Now Robert frowned. “Like I said: Samstag made me a better offer.”
; Something in his eyes said he wasn’t telling everything he knew. That was the second time tonight.
After he left, we three silently eyed each other across the remains of our supper. We didn’t know what to do with the information we’d received. Actually, Mara looked mostly at Dr. Sheldon. I was still in the doghouse.
“Well, children,” Dr. Sheldon said at last, “where do we go from here?”
Mara made a face. “Home, I suppose.”
“One thing first,” I said. “This morning, a big guy I’d never seen before bumped Arthur Medford and me in the hall of the Liberal Arts Center. He looked like he wanted to start something, but we got past him before he could.”
“Arthur Medford?” Mara showed her first smile of the evening. “That explains a lot. A tough-looking fellow I didn’t know gave me the evil eye today, but some football players cordoned him off, and I went on my way. I’ll bet Arthur has been fixing things again.”
“Come to think of it, I had a convoy, too,” I said.
“But what does it mean?” Mara asked. “It’s like the mob threats against us last fall, but we haven’t done anything since then that would justify it.”
“From what I hear,” I said, “they don’t take revenge this long after the fact. And if they did, they wouldn’t just bump into us. They’d bump us off.”
Mara showed a pained expression at my archaic pun.
“Be careful, children,” Dr. Sheldon warned. “Don’t assume that anyone would act according to logic.”
“I don’t understand any of this,” I said. “Mitra Fortier warned us about losing our jobs, so she must have heard a hint about Dean-Dean’s game with our contracts. Maybe she didn’t hear the whole story and thought we were getting fired. But it looks like that got settled when we received our contracts.”
Alarm showed in Mara’s face. “Not just our jobs. Her exact statement was, ‘We’re all going to lose our jobs if something isn’t done.’”
I whistled. “That’s a horse of a different dolor.”
Mara slapped the table. “That’s enough of your puns, Preston Barclay. If Professor Fortier was right, we’re dealing with something that affects the entire college.”
“University,” I said. “But you’re right. It has to be a much broader problem.”
Mara burned me with another blow-torch gaze. “And while everything goes smash around us, you sit in your office and play hands and ... and whatever with that ... that brunette Lorelei.”
“I wasn’t sitting,” I said. “We were both standing, and we weren’t playing hands.”
I knew when I said it that I shouldn’t have. Mara’s face reddened. I feared I was going to get the star heat I’d feared that afternoon.
“Now, children,” Dr. Sheldon began. “Let us not—”
He got no further, for a grim-looking Robert Lee returned. He spoke in a low voice. “Don’t look out the window, but there’s a car full of tough-looking characters hanging out across the street. They keep looking this way.”
CHAPTER 21
It taxed my willpower to keep from looking out the window. In contrast, Mara managed it without a trace of strain. She smiled up at Robert Lee and said something about the winter weather. Dr. Sheldon beamed up at him as if he’d announced apple pie for dessert.
Robert grinned as if making polite conversation and said, “My dad has called the police to check them out. He thinks they’re waiting for you to leave before they rob the place.”
Dr. Sheldon made a ceremony of drinking from his empty pop bottle, then said, “What we need is a joke. Press, I’ve never known you to be short of one.”
I searched for one but came up empty. Still looking at Robert Lee, I shrugged.
Dr. Sheldon looked at Mara, who duplicated my shrug.
“All right, then.” The older man assumed the attitude of a storm-tossed sailor taking the helm when the rest of the crew fell seasick. “Press, what were some of those notices you posted on your office door in the old days?”
He referred to the days when he was still active and Faith was alive.
“I don’t remember,” I said.
“Well I do.” Dr. Sheldon rapped on the table. “There was one that said, ‘Turtles crawling under high tension wires may suffer from shell shock.’”
A look of wonder crossed Mara’s face. “Press, did you actually do that?”
“When I was young and foolish,” I said.
Dr. Sheldon rapped the table again, obviously enjoying my embarrassment. “There was another one. ‘Naked steam engines may be arrested for indiesel exposure.’”
Mara suppressed a laugh. “That’s definitely coloring outside the lines.”
“The administration thought so,” Dr. Sheldon said. “Dean-Dean called him on the carpet, and that was the end of his office-door levity.”
The police saved me further embarrassment.
Dr. Sheldon had the best view. “That was neat,” he said. “Two police cars sandwiched the other car between them before they turned on their flashers.”
“You’d better leave while the cops keep them busy,” Robert said.
Mara led, Robert wheeled Dr. Sheldon’s chair after her, and I brought up the rear.
“Goo’ lock you all,” Mrs. Lee called after us.
Robert and I stood by while Dr. Sheldon hoisted himself into Mara’s car. Then we folded his chair and tucked it onto the floor behind his seat. Mara backed out of the parking space and drove toward the assisted living center. She did it hastily but without squealing tires.
“Thanks, Robert,” I said. As I moved to my Honda, I threw a quick glance at the parked car. The police had the attention of its occupants, with the exception of one mug who gave me a malevolent look. That told me his group had no plans to rob Goolock’s. He was the guy who’d bumped me in the hall.
With commendable self-discipline, I managed a quick departure without leaving rubber on the pavement. At the first corner, I turned in the opposite direction from my home. Then I circled back to cross their street behind them and make sure the police still had their attention. They did, so I headed direct for home while my internal pianist gave a reprise of Schumann’s Carnival.
Appropriate, for my life was becoming a carnival, complete with sideshows.
But why would those toughs be interested in me? They looked like underworld strong-arm types, but how could I be a threat to organized crime? If they wanted revenge for last fall, they’d simply shoot me and be done with it. Yet their actions thus far looked more like an attempt to scare Mara and me off.
Scare us off from what? So far as we knew, we weren’t looking into anything connected to organized crime.
I half-expected some surprise to be waiting for me at home. I inspected my front door carefully before I opened it. When I did, nothing happened. One night last fall, I’d walked right in and gotten slugged by an intruder. So this time I let my eyes check the entryway before I let my body enter.
The entryway was empty, and the house was quiet. The only noise came from inside my head, where a music box was tinkling away at “The Anniversary Song,” one of Faith’s favorites. Inside, I locked the door behind me and checked every room before I relaxed. Only then did I realize how fully my life had changed.
In our home territory, we tend to take personal safety for granted. But one hallway bump and tonight’s stakeout had made that assumption obsolete. For reasons I couldn’t fathom, people I didn’t know were trying to frighten me.
They were doing a good job of it.
For a distraction, I turned on the ten o’clock news. When the graphics quit scrambling around the screen, Francie LaBouche announced that police had released further information about Professor Fortier’s death. The cause of death was a massive overdose of cocaine, but the autopsy also revealed traces of chloroform around the mouth. The police, therefore, had declared her death a homicide. They were now questioning the deceased’s close acquaintances, Francie said, especially those known to have spoken with her o
n the night of the reception. Police declined to name names, but Francie remedied that deficiency by announcing that Mara and I were surely among them.
My premonition of things closing in on me seemed to be working out in real life. Too real. To avoid brooding about it, I saturated myself in routine. I took off my brown suit and camouflaged the frayed cuffs with a brown marker pen so it would be ready for the next brown-suit day. That done, I turned in and, remarkably, fell instantly asleep.
I woke on schedule in pre-dawn darkness with my internal musicians playing Prokofiev’s “D-Minor Toccata.” To be charitable, it sounds like an army of jackhammers performing at random inside a boiler factory. I ignored it, swallowed my ham-sandwich-and-coffee breakfast, and headed up the hill for my nine o’clock class, Renaissance History of Ideas.
Two sleepy-looking football players met me at the point where the walkway begins at the foot of the campus hill. Both grunted a “Good morning” and I replied with the same. They followed about ten feet behind me.
At the top of the hill, I stopped and beckoned them forward. “I appreciate what you’re doing,” I said, “but I’m not sure one bump in the hallway merits this kind of precaution.”
They showed pseudo-puzzled expressions.
“I don’t know what you mean, Professor Barclay,” said one. “We was just out breathin’ the fresh morning air.”
“And I’m the reincarnation of Benjamin Franklin,” I said.
The other one showed a discreet leer. “I heard you had several things in common with him. But like Jeb says, we was just out takin’ the morning air.”
I laughed. “Have it your way, but make sure this word gets around—if you see anybody carrying a weapon, run the other way. I don’t want anyone hurt on my account.”
They both looked remarkably innocent, and the first one said, “Okay, we’ll do it. But I still don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.”
We walked together into the Liberal Arts Center, where neither one of them had set foot since “getting his required courses out of the way,” and we parted amicably at my office door.