A Crossword to Die For

by Nero Blanc

  Shawn shrugged. “Who knows? Princeton’s like ten or fifteen miles, tops. Guess he went somewhere else. Maybe the other guy knows where he went?”

  “The other guy?”

  “He had another guy with him when he returned the car. Didn’t do any talking, the guy didn’t … Seemed kinda steamed up about something.”

  “What did this other man look like?”

  “I don’t know … Regular. Just a regular white guy.”

  “How old was he?”

  “Kinda old, you know, maybe your age. He had a Yankees hat on, so it was hard to tell.”

  “I’m thirty-eight. Is that old?”

  “Wow, yeah, maybe he was younger. I don’t know. But hey, he coulda been bald under that hat, for all I know. Then he would have been real old, right?” Shawn chuckled.

  Rosco didn’t respond to the jest. Instead he posed another question, “Anything else you remember about this ‘white guy’?”

  Shawn shook his head. “Not really. He was the khakis-and-polo-shirt type … You know, the type of white guy that lives around Princeton. Probably works in New York or something … He didn’t give me the time of day. Wasn’t exactly nasty, but … Hey, you know the type.”

  “Anything else you can tell me? His height? Or weight?”

  “He was just a regular guy … maybe a little taller than you … but I don’t know … To tell you the truth, mister, I don’t pay much attention unless people are real nice—or real obnoxious. Mr. Graham was the real nice type.”

  “And this man wasn’t with my father-in-law when he picked the car up on the twelfth?”

  “Nope. Mr. Graham drove off by himself.”

  “Did the two men board the train together?”

  “Who knows? Once they walk through that glass door, they’re outta my life.” Shawn handed the fax back to Rosco. “Say, how did Mr. Graham die? If you don’t mind me asking?”

  Rosco saw no harm in telling Shawn the truth. “He had a heart attack on the train.”

  “Huh. And he didn’t have our rental agreement on him? Sounds kinda fishy, if you ask me.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Sliding behind the wheel of his Jeep, Rosco reset the trip gauge to zero. Although Shawn had insisted Princeton was less than fifteen miles from the Trenton train station, Rosco wanted the exact mileage, and a good idea of how long the drive could take.

  “Just catch Route 1 North,” Shawn had told him, “then grab the 202 exit, go through Lawrenceville, and Tiger-Town’s five more miles, max.”

  Twenty-five minutes, and fourteen miles later, Rosco found himself pulling into a shaded parking place in front of an upscale dress shop in the center of the college town. The window display consisted of three tailored women’s navy blue suits, a number of silk scarves, and a collection of leather handbags. Nothing was flashy; nothing was bold or remotely high-fashion. Self-consciously, Rosco considered his own attire. His fondness for not wearing socks would do fine in this classic Ivy League burg, but he suspected he just might be the only person shod in black shoes this side of New York City.

  He glanced at the trip gauge a second time. Fourteen miles to Princeton, and fourteen miles back: twenty-eight miles total. Belle’s father had driven a hundred and twelve miles. How, and when, had he added an additional eighty-four miles? According to the rental agreement, he’d picked up the car at 10:02 A.M. on the twelfth, and returned it on the thirteenth in time to catch the 9:27 A.M. train to Newcastle. Rosco opened the map of New Jersey. Calculating an eighty-mile round trip, he drew a circle that incorporated every area within forty miles of Princeton.

  “He could’ve gone anywhere—even Pennsylvania,” Rosco mumbled while sliding the map back into the glove compartment. “Well, let’s see what Tiger-Town can tell me.”

  Princeton had a reputation for being picture-perfect, and Rosco could find nothing to contradict the assessment. The main drag, Nassau Street, separated the village from the university; as the school had grown to the south, the town had expanded northward. The process had begun during the eighteenth century, making the town and college quintessentially Old School.

  Shop signs were carved from wood and painted in subdued shades of green, brown, blue, and red, with attractive gold-leaf lettering. A bookstore appeared to offer only an assortment of orange-spined Penguin Classics, while the music seller exhibited an ancient Victrola, with an antique RCA dog perched alongside—thereby almost camouflaging the racks and racks of CDs lining its interior walls. The men’s clothing shops offered variations of herringbone, houndstooth, tweed, khaki—and the requisite Ivy League blue blazers. However, each display had the addition of at least one orange and black Princeton University trinket—coffee mug, pennant, toy stuffed tiger, etc.

  The heat of the August afternoon made the fall garments seem out of place, but Rosco realized that the average male student probably arrived with a collection of shorts and T-shirts. By October those same students would be freezing—leaving little option but to scoot across Nassau Street with Dad’s credit card and get with the program. He figured the girls would be better prepared; girls usually were.

  He dropped a handful of quarters into the parking meter and turned his attention to the university. The buildings were primarily brick and graystone, the architecture neo-Gothic, Tudor, or Georgian; and each edifice was covered with the requisite splotches of thick and glossy ivy. The scene was almost too idyllic.

  Crosswalks painted in white and yellow led the way into the campus; as Rosco entered one, all traffic came to an abrupt halt. He strolled across Nassau, and passed through an archway that seemed to be the only vehicular entrance to the university. A uniformed campus policeman sat in a guard booth poring over a newspaper. As the majority of the student body wouldn’t be returning until later in the month, the school grounds were noticeably deserted, and the guard decidedly unconcerned.

  Rosco approached the booth and rapped on the window. “I parked on the street … But should I have driven onto the campus itself?”

  The guard regarded him thoughtfully. “Wilson School?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Are you looking for the Wilson School?”

  “Ah, no … No, I have an appointment at the Anthropology Department.”

  The guard nodded slowly. “Anthropology, huh? … I would have picked you for Diplomacy. They’re the only ones who wear black shoes around here. Anyway, if you’re checking into a dorm, you can drive onto the campus. But only to unload, because there’s no unattended parking. We tow … You registering?”

  Rosco chuckled. “I’m a little old for college, don’t you think?”

  “You wouldn’t think like that if you’d been here as long as I have. Hey, we’ve got geezers who’ve been studying for forty years. After a while, you can’t tell them from the professors.”

  “Right. Anyway, I’m not planning to study at Princeton, I have an interview with Professor Araignée—”

  “Don’t know him.”

  “According to the secretary, it’s a her, not a him.”

  “Ahhh.”

  There was a long silence while the guard returned to his paper and Rosco gazed at the expansive campus. “You don’t happen to know which building the Anthropology Department is in, do you?”

  “Aaron Burr Hall.”

  After another pause, Rosco cleared his throat. “Actually, I’m a visitor here. Could you point me in the right direction?”

  “It’s easier to go back out to Nassau.” An abbreviated gesture accompanied the words. “You make a right there … After about three hundred yards, you come to an intersection. It’s on the corner. Can’t miss it.”

  “Thanks.”

  “The building’s got ivy growing on it.”

  Rosco raised an eyebrow. “Thanks for the tip.”

  CHAPTER 15

  The first thing Rosco had noticed was the skull. No, that was the second. The first had been Marie-Claude Araignée’s husky French accent—followed by Marie-Claude herself: a wom
an almost vibrating with sensuality, a woman who’d been around the block more than a few times and who knew what she wanted and how to get it.

  “Teddy?” she repeated in a guttural drawl. “Of course, I knew Teddy. And to think he can be dead … C’est impossible … Impossible!… Of course, I read the—how you say it?—obituary in the local newspaper …” She sighed. “C’est terrible… Teddy …” The way she spoke the name made Rosco think of a soft and much-loved stuffed bear. Marie-Claude sighed again, lit a cigarette, glanced at Rosco as if insisting that only the most boorish of males would deny her permission to smoke, then added a coquettish, “You Americans are so silly about this tobacco. La vie est … Pardon… Life is too brief to worry about the small things. Obviously, far too brief. Look at Teddy …”

  Rosco didn’t answer, but his eyes inadvertently strayed to the skull atop Marie-Claude’s desk.

  “An interesting example that, oui?” She held the cigarette in her lips and lifted the skull, rolling it admiringly in her hands. “It is one of the prizes of the collection …” Another slow drag on her cigarette while the “prize” was gently returned to the desk. Marie-Claude gazed provocatively at Rosco. “The infamous nineteenth-century murderer and cutthroat, Bobby Sutcliffe … He makes interesting company, non? Of course, Bobby belongs in the case with the others. But what can I say? One of the privileges of power … I have Monsieur Sutcliffe with me all the day long …”

  Rosco was about to return to his previous question about Belle’s father and his most recent connection to Princeton’s Anthropology Department, but Marie-Claude cut him off. “You must see many corps… corpses in your line of work, Mr. Polycrates.”

  “Fortunately, no.” Rosco tried to smile.

  “Tant pis… too bad … They make such fascinating subjects … But, of course, you must desire to see the fameuse Bartell Collection.” Marie-Claude stood abruptly, her very unprofessorial high sling-back heels and clingy silk dress making her look as if she were ready for an evening soirée. “Everyone wants to view the Bartell heads … Teddy, of course, adored them. Real bone, you know, instead of the stone statues he was intent on writing about. Real people who were once truly breathing …” She sighed for a third time.

  “So, you knew about Professor Graham’s most recent work?”

  “But, of course! … And how typical of Teddy to adopt a subject that was so—how you say?—Physically challenging … It is not easy to journey into Central and South America if one refuses to board an aeroplane.”

  “But he—” Rosco began.

  But Marie-Claude had already left the room, beckoning to Rosco as she stood within the doorway. “We have specimens dating from as early as the seventeenth century … Bartell was a most unusual benefactor; a Renaissance man dwelling in America in the mid-1800s. He collected the various crania we now have on view, bribed ship captains to smuggle them into the country … bribed executioners, aussi, I am thinking … Then he measured each one, filled the brain cavities with sand in order to weigh them and determine volume. He hoped to understand the individual’s capacity for intelligence … But you must know this information—?”

  Rosco, following behind, merely answered, “If Professor Graham refused to fly, how did he accomplish his fieldwork?”

  “Je ne sais pas … I don’t know and he never offered to tell me. Ahh, I have no answer.” She led the way through a dimly lit and poorly air-conditioned interior exhibition hall. “I was comfortable knowing he had … places in his life in which I had no part.”

  “Did he ever mention a man named Horace Llewellen?”

  “He might have … but I don’t remember … Teddy and I talked of many things when he visited … including the skulls … many times the skulls.”

  “Were they part of Professor Graham’s studies?”

  Marie-Claude laughed slightly. “Well, not precisely … This latest craze of his was more archeological than anthropological, you know … When one is not bound by an institution such as this, one can indulge in a side trip every now and then.” She snapped on a light switch, and a vast relic of a mahogany display case began to hum with a bluish neon glow. “Voilà … We also inherited the specially constructed étagères our benefactor designed for his display …”

  Rosco avoided looking into the row upon row of gaping eyesockets, the jawbones from which protruded brown and broken teeth. “I’m not sure I understand, Professor Araignée … Why do you mean Theodore Graham wasn’t ‘precisely’ studying the Bartell collection?”

  In response, Marie-Claude turned a high-voltage smile upon him. “Do you know what the word araignée means in French, Mr. Polycrates? Spider … Black widow was what some vicious people said behind my back when my poor husband disappeared … So mean, you Americans can be sometimes … Teddy was such a confort in those days … a comfort—”

  Rosco felt as if he were spinning in circles. He pulled out his notebook in hopes that the lined paper could bring order to this peculiar conversation. “And when was that?”

  “When darling François disappeared?… Pardon, Franklin … although I always called him François. Frank is such a Teutonic name … so nasal—”

  “I was referring to the days when ‘Teddy’ proved such a ‘comfort.’”

  “Well, clearly that was when I found François gone.” She spun back to the display case. “Look, here we have the head of a male … a German giant from the late seventeenth century—so the information tells us. Beside him is the cranium of a girl from the same region, most probably in her late teens … very petite, she was purported to be when living … although, as you will note, not in the least malformed—”

  “And your husband—excuse my bluntness—your husband deserted you, Professor Araignée?”

  “Deserted …? Ah, non … François simply vanished.”

  Rosco frowned and wrote her words in his notebook.

  “We were in Guatemala, Monsieur Polycrates. Four years ago, last winter. The police there sent out his photograph, contacted airports, and so forth. He’d been piloting his own plane, you know … Being Latin men, the local gendarmes reasoned that it is not uncommon for a man to forsake his wife for a younger female … They also spent time theorizing that he might have been murdered, and the corps, well … you are a detective. You may supply the words.” Her words crackled with anger, then the rage subsided, leaving her tone pensive and subdued. “François’s body was never found. Nor was his aeroplane … So quick, he was gone … Nothing like his darling last name … Mossback … a dear slowpoke of a turtle … Slowpoke, Yes? That is the correct expression?”

  A dozen questions sprang into Rosco’s brain, but he warned himself to stay on track. It was Theodore Graham’s final days he was investigating, not Franklin Mossback’s.

  “And that’s when you met Professor Graham? When he became such a comfort?”

  “Oh, no. I’d met him before. François and I both knew Teddy.”

  “You knew him when he was teaching here?”

  “Non … non … Teddy had already retired from academia when we three were introduced. He’d become a wanderer … an intellectual vagabond… free of the tiresome constraints of faculty life. You must understand, though, François was very keen on Teddy … It was not until … well, later that—”

  “I understand … It’s Professor Graham’s most recent history I’m interested in. Specifically, what he did during the day and evening of August twelfth—”

  “Oh, but the latter part of your question is so simple! He stayed the night with me! I took him to hear a lecture given by this president of—how you say?—the Savante Company. No, no … Savante Group … It was a subject far from Teddy’s sphere: energy production, fossil fuels, and so forth, but he was extremely anxious about drilling practices in Veracruz, in Mexico. That was the habitat of the Olmec peoples. I’m afraid he became rather aggressive in his questions after the talk, and there was a bit of a dust-up. That is an expression, no?”

  Rosco considered her remarks. A
public argument seemed out of character for someone as outwardly restrained as Ted Graham. And Belle had often mentioned that he’d never raised his voice. “What sort of ‘dust-up,’ Professor Araingée?”

  “Oh, Teddy was concerned with potential damage to Olmec sites … that sort of thing—pollution of the land and seas. He finally stated that oil producers ‘manifested barbarous insensitivity.’”

  Rosco raised his eyebrows. “That must not have sat well with the president of Savante.”

  “It didn’t.” Marie-Claude laughed. “But Teddy could be so wonderfully … viril when he chose to be. ‘Damn the polluters!’ … That sort of rousing speech … His argument with Savante certainly proved an inspiration.”

  Rosco remained quiet a moment. “So … returning to Professor Graham’s arrival on the day of the twelfth. What time was that?”

  Marie-Claude chuckled again. “You Americans! So precise about the hours! He arrived when he always arrived … at six or seven in the evening … something like that—”

  “And he left you at what time?”

  “Monsieur Polycrates! You realize that I am an adult … Consenting adults, I believe your expression is? Teddy left me in the morning. The sun was up. You may supply the rest.”

  “And you don’t know what he did before appearing on your doorstep? He apparently took an eighty-mile drive. You don’t know where he might have gone, do you?”

  “Teddy was also an adult, monsieur.”

  Rosco stifled a frustrated sigh. International diplomacy wasn’t proving to be his strong suit—black shoes or not. “Is there someone else in Princeton who might be able to supply additional information?”

  Marie-Claude squinted her eyes. For the first time, Rosco noticed they were very green. Like emeralds glowing with an interior light. “As I said, Teddy was retired when we met. He was no longer part of the université, and his sojourns here after François was gone, well, I will be discreet … They were not times of man-to-man chitchat. He did, however, still possess one comrade from the old days … one friend with whom he talked on occasion.”