by Donn Taylor
“I’m glad I’m not his wife,” the female composition specialist said.
Emory Estes looked confused. Mara had gone suddenly quiet when I mentioned marriage. Hers had been short and unpleasant.
“I hear you’re a weekend aviator,” I said to Estes. This wasn’t the place to question him, but I hoped to open communications.
“I was until Jerry Vaughan cracked up our airplane,” he said. “It will take us a while to build another.”
“Isn’t building one more dangerous than buying one off the lot?”
“They don’t keep them on lots like cars,” he said. “They keep used airplanes on ramps at airports.”
“Off the ramp, then.”
“That’s not always safe, either.” He scratched his head. “If you buy one used, you never know what’s been done to it. Some people treat their airplanes pretty rough. When a used car turns out to be a bummer, you pull it over and park it. But you can’t park defective airplanes up there in the sky.”
“So you guys built your own,” I said. “But it still quit on Jerry Vaughan. What do you think happened?” Mara gave me a don’t-go-there look.
“The accident investigation board said it was structural failure.”
“They found that the wing was not properly installed,” I said. “How do you think that happened?”
Estes’ eyes narrowed. “The board never figured that out, and neither have I. Look, Professor Barclay, that’s a settled issue, and it’s dangerous to go poking around in things you don’t have the qualifications to understand.”
“It just seems strange,” I said. “Jerry Vaughan and his fiancée both killed under mysterious circumstances within six months.”
“Coincidences happen,” he said. Anger showed in his eyes.
“Say,” said the female composition specialist, “you wouldn’t believe my students in Introduction to Literature. Some of them couldn’t figure out why Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne wore the scarlet letter.”
“Maybe she was a cheerleader for the University of Alabama,” I said.
That was an old one, apparently too old for the comp specialist to have heard it. Her mouth hung open. Emory Estes looked blank. Mara shook her head and suppressed a laugh.
Before anything else could develop, I felt a soft touch on the back of my neck. Everyone’s eyes focused on something above my head, and when I turned and looked up, I found a smiling Cynthia Starlington. Her hand moved softly on the back of my neck. Fortunately, she used her long fingernails to stroke rather than scratch.
“Hello, Press,” she said. “Have you found the murderer yet?”
“I’m not investigating anything,” I said.
Emory Estes broke in. “You were giving a good imitation of it a while ago.”
“Idle curiosity,” I said.
“I hope you catch him.” Cynthia gave a final stroke on my neck and left with her characteristic gliding walk.
“Gosh, Press,” said the female composition specialist. “You must be a real favorite.”
“‘A favorite has no friend,’” Mara quoted.
Incomprehension showed on everyone else’s face, but I knew exactly what she meant. She’d speared me with a line from Thomas Gray’s “Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat, Drown’d in a Tub of Gold Fishes.” I could almost feel my unhappy corpse soaking in the water.
Before I could answer, Mara stood up and said, “Excuse me. I have to get ready for class.”
“There’s something I need to tell you,” I said.
“Phone me at my office,” she answered. “I have to go.”
She did. With less drama than Cynthia but with equal attraction.
“What’s going on?” Estes asked, bewilderment written on his face.
“‘La donna è mobile,’” I said. But instead of that sprightly song, my internal orchestra played the pensive “Evening Star” from Tannhäuser.
I made my own departure then, leaving Estes bewildered and the two composition specialists in a life-or-death discussion of restrictive and nonrestrictive modifiers.
A new convoy saw me back to my office, where I immediately phoned Mara. “Sergeant Spencer says Mitra Fortier kept a handwritten journal. He says it chronicles a long affair between her and me, beginning several years before my wife died. It never happened, and I told him so. He said he had more and more trouble believing me.”
“So do I,” Mara said. “What is this supposed to mean to me?”
“I guess it’s the basis for Clyde Staggart’s accusing you of forming a triangle. I wanted you to know he has physical evidence we have to defeat to clear ourselves.”
“All right, you’ve told me,” she said. “Now I have to go to class.”
She rang off. I realized I still hadn’t told her about Bruno Pinkle trying to get into my computer.
CHAPTER 23
Despite my frustration, I marched myself into the classroom. The class was Western Civ, and I spent the period describing the intellectual developments of King Alfred’s reign made possible by the Peace of Wedmore. It must have gone okay, though I could never get my mind fully focused on King Alfred.
Afterwards, I retreated to my office for some serious thinking. There was no mistaking Mara’s anger with me, but what was its cause? She might believe I was dallying with Cynthia when I should have been investigating the threat to the faculty’s jobs. I hoped, though I had no right, that she was jealous over my response to Cynthia’s attentions. I admit I was attracted to Cynthia in a manner not entirely honorable. But I’d been alone for three years, so why shouldn’t I get back in the game?
Well, I was jealous, too—over Emory Estes’ apparent success with Mara. He wasn’t good enough for her, but that was her choice to make. I only hoped she wouldn’t regret her choice later. After that bad marriage in her teens, she deserved something better.
That brought me to my unsuccessful questioning of Estes. He’d told me nothing except to mind my own business. Was he only reluctant to talk to a groundling? Or was he hiding something about the aircraft accident? I did not know which, but there was one thing I did know. Estes was a former football player still in fine condition. I wanted no part of tangling with him physically.
That brought me back to Dathan Hormah’s opinion about love, which he’d spoken almost immediately after my class on the Imagination. His reductionist view did not accord with my marriage experience with Faith. Continuance of the species may have hovered in the backs of our minds, but the rich and ever-growing harmony of complex personalities far transcended that view. Our imaginations created the wonderful possibilities that Faith and I explored together, but we brought those possibilities to life in the real world.
Actually, Dathan Hormah himself had taken a gigantic leap of Imagination to picture a world limited to physical forces and pre-programmed biological drives. Or was he just whistling past a darkness his philosophy could not penetrate?
Apparently, the Imagination is a force that can create great good or great evil. I wondered how much of our imagined perception of the world actually matched hardcore reality. Was my claim that “I just teach history” grounded in reality, or was it a fantasy I’d formed to shield me from a more complicated life?
I got no further, for Brill Drisko suddenly stood in my door. I noticed again that she moved with restless energy and the balance of a skilled dancer. She wore black tights that emphasized the fullness of her figure, along with a V-neck blouse that was undoubtedly non-nuclear but nevertheless placed her in imminent danger of fallout. I never discovered what kind of shoes she wore.
She marched in without asking and said, “You wouldn’t come to me, Professor Barclay, so I came to you. We have things to talk about.”
I circled my desk to meet her and said, “Have a chair, and we’ll talk about them.” My internal musicians swung into a fast-paced two-step.
“I don’t have time to sit down,” she said, leaving us standing in the middle of the floor. “I’ll be honest with you, Professor Bar
clay: There are things in my life I’d just as soon people around here didn’t know about. And the way you’ve been investigating, they’re bound to come out. They would make me a social outcast and might hurt my husband’s career.”
“I don’t gossip,” I said.
Her small black eyes focused on mine. “You don’t have to gossip for the wrong kind of things to get out. Your poking into it is enough to make people talk.”
“I’m not poking into anything,” I lied.
“That’s not what Emory Estes says. He says at lunch today you put him through a real— what d’you call it—imposition …”
“Inquisition,” I said.
“Whatever it was, he says you put him through it, and he didn’t see why you wanted to talk about that airplane crash when some official board had finished with it. He thinks you’re out to make trouble.”
She moved a step closer, and I took a step back.
I thought it was time to file a disclaimer. “I’m not interested in people’s personal lives, Brill. Professor Fortier was a friend of my wife’s, and I’m trying to come to grips with her death.”
“You say you don’t gossip,” she said, taking another step closer and holding her gaze on mine. “I think I can trust you, so I’m going to tell you what I’m afraid of.”
I took another step back. “Don’t tell me anything I might have to repeat if someone put me under oath.” She was making no sense at all, and I was beginning to feel like an animal being stalked. I read once that circus lion tamers cracked their whips only for show, that what made the lions back up was the lion tamers’ invading their space. It worked as long as the lions were well fed. I didn’t consider myself well fed, but Brill’s invading my space certainly made me uncomfortable.
She took another step forward. I stepped backward and to the side. She matched the sideward movement and remained confronting me.
“I’m afraid people here will find out I was a showgirl,” she said. “They’ll leap to all kinds of wrong conclusions. But there’s nothing wrong with being a showgirl, is there?”
“It depends on what kind of show,” I said. I took another step back and found myself backed up against the desk with no more room to retreat.
“It wasn’t that kind of show.” Brill’s gaze bored into mine. “I didn’t like showbiz, but Steven took me out of all that. I’ve made him a good wife, and I don’t want anything to spoil it.”
“I can understand that,” I said. I didn’t see how anyone could not know Brill had been a showgirl. But if she wanted to entertain the fantasy that they could, I wasn’t going to disillusion her.
“So when you go stirring up trouble,” she continued, “it threatens my marriage and my husband’s career. Making people angry like you do could be dangerous to you, too. Someone’s likely to get mad enough to do something about it.”
“Is that someone you, Brill?”
She took a step closer, almost touching me now. Her perfume smelled expensive, but she must have poured it on by the cupful.
“I’d rather be nice to people,” she said. “I can be very nice to people who don’t threaten my marriage.” She put her left hand on my right shoulder and smiled into my face. She was almost my height, which put her face so close to mine that I could see the grains of her makeup. My desk ground into my backside, leaving me no room to retreat.
“I don’t want to threaten your marriage,” I said.
“That’s very nice of you, Press,” she said, “so maybe we can be nice together sometime. My husband is away all day at work.” With her right hand she reached into the V-neck of her blouse and brought out a small card. She waved it under my nose so I could tell it was perfumed, then deposited it inside my coat in my shirt pocket. Her hand lingered there a bit, then moved to my left shoulder. We stood there a few moments with her hands on my shoulders and her gaze boring into mine.
“That card has my phone number,” she said. “We could be very nice together.”
It occurred to me that she gave a new definition to “being nice.” I preferred the old one.
High heels sounded in the hallway, but Brill ignored them. The heel-clicks stopped and Mara Thorn stood in the doorway, an angry expression on her face. Brill did not turn. Mara’s lips tightened, and she moved away up the hall. The click of her heels faded quickly.
I put my hands on Brill’s shoulders and gently prevented her advance while I escaped to the side. She dropped her hands and turned to face me but made no attempt to follow.
“Being nice is all very fine,” I said, “but several things are threatening my job. That’s why I have to look into them.”
“It’s looking into them that may threaten your job,” she said. “My husband is a trustee.” The small black eyes stayed focused on mine, and I wondered if she ever had to blink.
“Where did you work as a showgirl, Brill?” I asked.
“Find that out at your peril.” The black eyes flashed as she turned toward the door. “It’s dangerous to keep making people mad at you.”
My musicians abandoned the two-step and launched into a can-can.
Brill left me wondering about her intentions. Nothing she said made sense. She claimed to be worried about people finding out she’d been in show business, but her manner of dress would force that conclusion on them. She claimed to value her marriage, yet she’d used seduction as a bribe to make me stop asking questions. And her ambiguous threats made me wonder if they only pertained to my job or involved physical harm.
I didn’t wonder long, for a herd of heavy steps sounded in the hallway and Captain Clyde Staggart barged into my office, followed by Bruno Pinkle and the Keats-quoting detective I’d always called Dogface. I remembered Mara’s saying his name was Duggan Hahn, and that he’d looked pained at some of Staggart’s methods.
Staggart started to speak, but then sniffed a couple of times. “Phew!” he said. “Press, you smell like a French hotel. I didn’t know you used perfume.”
“It’s for my double life as a can-can girl,” I said, thankful for once for my mental musicians’ prompt. Now that Staggart mentioned it, I realized that I reeked. Brill must have perfumed her hands as well as that card.
“That’s not the double life we’re interested in,” Staggart snarled. “We have your dean’s permission to search your office.”
He nodded to Pinkle, who made a beeline for the desk drawer where he’d planted that CD.
“Search away,” I said. “You won’t find any drugs or automatic weapons.” I was glad I’d moved the fingerprint recognition device to my car. I wanted to switch on my voice recorder, but Dogface held me constantly in his baleful gaze.
Pinkle looked up with a puzzled expression, then held my three well-labeled CDs up for Staggart’s inspection.
Staggart blinked, but recovered quickly. “Search the rest of the office,” he ordered.
“It will save time if you tell me what you’re looking for,” I said.
Staggart scowled. “Never mind. Just open up that computer.”
“I’ve forgotten how,” I said. “These new-fangled gadgets like doorbells and computers keep me confused.”
He turned to Dogface ... uh ... Duggan Hahn ... and ordered, “Take his hard drive.”
Hahn greeted the order with a scowl but moved to comply. I again tried to switch on my recorder, but now Staggart was watching me too closely. Detective Hahn crawled under my desk, disconnected the computer and lifted it onto the desk. He proceeded to open it and remove the hard drive. Meanwhile, Pinkle busied himself removing books from the shelves and looking behind them. He re-shelved the books haphazardly.
“Of what heinous crime am I suspected?” I asked.
Staggart’s lips drew back in a snarl. “Your affair with Mitra Fortier makes you a person of interest in her murder.”
“There was no affair,” I said.
Staggart laughed. “We have evidence to the contrary. I don’t doubt that you lead a double life, Press boy, but not as innocent as a
can-can girl.”
“I insist on the can-can,” I said.
Fortunately, Staggart did not request my dance steps, which in fact were nonexistent. He was too taken up with Pinkle’s ending his search with a shrug and another confused expression. About that time, the reluctant Dogface/Hahn held up my computer’s hard drive for his inspection. Staggart nodded and jerked his thumb toward the door. Both of his subordinates exited.
“That’s all for now, Press,” Staggart said, “but we’ll be back.” He concluded with his characteristic charge, “Keep your nose clean.”
I answered with my stock reply. “I always do. I thought you’d remember that.”
As their heavy steps retreated down the hall, I surveyed the mess they’d left behind. I put the three CDs back in my desk drawer, shoved the now-useless computer back under the desk, and postponed straightening the sloppily re-shelved books until later.
Outside, the early winter night had fallen. I straggled down the narrow walkway to my home with the wind from the plains gnawing at my neck and ears while I reviewed the disastrous events of the day. I’d alienated Freda Broyles to the point of receiving veiled threats. I’d received not-so-veiled threats from Brill Drisko. And Clyde Staggart and his henchmen were trying to frame me with heaven only knew what. I still had no way to refute the false accusation of an affair with Mitra Fortier. Worst of all, I’d twice offended Mara Thorn, my only real friend on campus. And my class on Imagination had me wondering how much of my own life was real and how much was fantasy. I didn’t see how things could get worse.
At home, I opened the front door and carefully checked the hallway before I entered. It was empty except for a piece of paper on the floor.
I turned on the light and picked up the paper. It was a computer-printed note:
STOP THE INVESTIGATION BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE.
CHAPTER 24
A familiar chill ran through me as I read the warning note. I had no way of guessing who left it: Everyone I’d talked to lately had warned me to quit asking questions. But someone had no trouble breaking into my house.