A Body In My Office (The Charles Bentley Mysteries Book 1)

by Glen Ebisch

  A new life without work. It wouldn’t feel strange in the summer because he’d always had those free, but he wondered what he would experience in the fall when the cool breezes began to blow and the leaves started to turn. Wouldn’t it seem strange not to be able to chart the season in relation to the semester’s work? But the more immediate problem, was what would he do right now? Even though he’d had summers off from teaching, he generally used them as a period for intense writing and research. But he’d lost that focus over the last three years, and now he had no reason at all to return to scholarship. He was completely at loose ends.

  Pushing such big life questions aside, he took a cup of the reheated coffee and The New York Times out on the patio with him. For the moment at least, he’d catch up on the news and watch the pool ripple. He’d started to doze off when the doorbell rang fifteen minutes later. He rose stiffly and walked down the hall. Opening the door, he found Lieutenant Thorndike standing on the front porch.

  “Sorry to bother you twice in the same day,” she said.

  “No bother. Unless you’ve come to arrest me.”

  Thorndike smiled. “Not this time.”

  They went into the kitchen and Charles offered her a cup of reheated coffee.

  “Even reheated it’s better than what I get at the station,” she said.

  “I was out on the patio. There’s a nice breeze there now.”

  “Let’s go.”

  They sat next to each other looking out across the pool and the lawn beyond.

  “Do you use the pool much?” Thorndike asked.

  “Never. It was more my wife’s thing. I can’t see the point in getting wet just to get dry again.”

  “But I can see you keep it clean.”

  “I keep everything clean.”

  “I’ve noticed that what I’ve seen of your house looks spotless.”

  Charles nodded. “I can be a bit of a clean and neatness freak. It used to drive Barbara crazy. She’d put something down in the wrong spot for a minute, then reach for it to find I’d put it away.”

  “That might bother me, too. But neatness in a husband isn’t such a bad thing. My ex would let his dirty clothes lie wherever he dropped them. I guess he thought there were elves that provided him with clean clothes every week. Of course, that was the least of his problems.”

  “There are worse things. I met Sylvia Underwood today. Apparently her husband was chronically unfaithful to her.”

  “I had a chat with her as well. Sounds like a marriage that would drive a wife to kill. Unfortunately she has a solid alibi for the time of death.”

  “Maybe she hired someone to do it,” Charles suggested.

  “She’d probably have had it done in England then, rather than over here.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that hired killer scenario with regard to the murderer being after me. And I doubt a hired killer would rely on finding something on the spot to hit his victim over the head with. He’d probably bring a gun or knife.”

  “Possibly. In fact, the reason I came over here was to tell you that the trophy had been wiped clean of prints, so yours weren’t on it. That makes you less of a suspect because I doubt you’d have volunteered that you handled it if you’d already wiped it clean.”

  “Unless I’m playing a deep game,” Charles said with a smile.

  “There is that,” Thorndike agreed cheerfully. “One other thing is that Underwood was hit on the back of the head, so most likely the attack came from someone he knew. We don’t usually turn our backs on strangers.”

  “I’m not so sure of that. Underwood impressed me as the kind of guy who would turn his back on anyone as a sign of disdain.”

  Thorndike thought about that for a moment and nodded. “Especially if the other person was a woman, and he didn’t feel threatened.”

  “Sylvia seemed to believe that his most recent girlfriend is a good candidate for the role of murderer.”

  “Nora Chapman. I’m going to interview her later on this afternoon. But apparently she only arrived in the country this morning.”

  “I suppose you’re going to check that out.”

  “Of course.”

  They sat, companionably drinking their coffee for a couple of minutes.

  “What are you going to do now that you’ve retired for the second and probably last time from Opal College?”

  “People keep asking me that, but I have no idea. It worries me that I might not have enough to do.”

  “Officers I know who have retired are always saying that they’re so busy they can’t imagine how they found time to work.”

  “Maybe they have hobbies. For me there was only my work and my family. Now my work is gone, and so is my family,” he replied gloomily.

  “You could visit your daughter more.”

  Charles made a face. “She has her own life. What would you do if you retired?”

  “Visit my sons once in a while. Otherwise, I’m not sure. I like my job, so I never give it much thought.”

  “You could always get together with the people still on the force that you know.”

  She shook her head. “Once you’re off the force, you drop out of the conversation because you’re no longer privy to daily events.”

  “You could see retired officers. Probably most of them stay in town.”

  “And reminisce about the past? I’m not sure that’s healthy. Do you plan to get together with friends from the faculty?”

  “Only Andrea Boyd. She’s been a friend of Barb’s and mine for a long time. Otherwise, I guess not. A faculty isn’t a team like the police; they’re more independent contractors. We don’t exactly have each other’s backs the way cops do. The camaraderie is much looser.”

  “Don’t you get any guidance on how to live from all those books you read?” asked Thorndike. “I would think the great writers talked a lot about the big issues of life.”

  “Nineteenth century novels can be helpful in that regard, but from the twentieth century on most protagonists are struggling unsuccessfully to find solutions to the problems of life.”

  “Sounds depressing.”

  “That’s what makes great literature.”

  They sat there for a moment considering that. Finally, the Lieutenant got up to leave. Charles walked her to the door.

  “Well, thank you for letting me know about the lack of fingerprints. I feel slightly less threatened.”

  She smiled. “I wanted to let you know right away.”

  Charles wondered why she hadn’t just given him a call, but he didn’t ask because he didn’t want to embarrass her in case she had simply wanted to see him. And if that wasn’t the reason, why spoil his dream that it might have been true.

  Chapter Eight

  The next morning the alarm woke him at six-thirty for another run—so to speak—with Greg Wasserman. Greg was out front promptly at seven, and Charles reluctantly joined him. As they started up the street there was none of the euphoria of yesterday. Charles waited with dread the burning in the lungs and stitch in the side telling him he had reached his limit. Greg had told him it would get better, but although he pretended to agree, Charles secretly believed that these were irreversible signs of aging. The body of his youth was as gone as his full head of hair.

  When the gasping and the pain came, Charles had to admit that they weren’t as severe as yesterday, and he had managed to run five blocks more. Somewhat cheered, he stopped and waved for Greg to continue on. Greg, however, stopped and ran in place.

  “My wife, Ruth, will be waiting for you at the sidewalk by your house,” Greg said. “She wants to talk to you about working in the soup kitchen. I told her you were retired, and she immediately starting thinking about what you could do with your free time. Ruth’s a planner.”

  He said this as if it were a genetic condition, and stared sadly into the distance as if physicists could see that in the long run all human plans came to nothing.

  “Okay. But community service isn’t really my
thing.”

  Greg nodded as if he understood but considered the outcome inevitable. “Ruth can be very persuasive.”

  Turning, Greg continued on his run, and Charles began the walk back home, desperately trying to think of excuses that wouldn’t make him appear selfish or elitist for not working in a soup kitchen. He had no objection to welfare projects privately or publically funded, but he had no burning desire to actually participate in them. As he came near his house, he saw Ruth standing by the curb like a crossing guard waiting to escort him to the other side of his life. Squat, with an earth-motherly figure the physical opposite of her husband she waved to him as he approached.

  “I suppose Greg warned you that I was going to pressure you to work in the soup kitchen.”

  Charles nodded.

  “And for the entire walk back you’ve been trying to come up with reasons you could give me for not doing so.”

  Charles nodded guiltily.

  Ruth smiled. The smile turned her plain face into something almost beautiful, and Charles caught a glimmer of why Greg had married her.

  “I like your honesty. And I want you to know that I didn’t think of you just because you aren’t working anymore. I don’t know you well, but from what I’ve seen and heard, you’ve got a good way with people, and you’re not stuck up the way so many other faculty are. Also you’re not truly eccentric like my Greg, which can be off-putting with strangers.”

  “Thank you.”

  He’d always thought he had the common touch. He took pride in thinking it was one of the things making him different from his father. During college, he took humble summer jobs instead of the fancy internships most of his classmates wangled through family connections. He went into the Army when drafted and did a tour in Vietnam, even though his father thought he was stupid, telling him he wasn’t some ghetto kid who had no alternative, and he could easily get deferred. Even when Charles came home safe and sound, his father told him his behaviour was irresponsible, and it was foolish to risk a life such as his as cannon fodder. His father didn’t say all this while on some emotional jag, but calmly and eloquently because he honestly believed it.

  “What we’d want you to do is set up tables and work the line doling out food,” Ruth explained, forcing Charles back into the present. “There is one other man who can help you with the tables, but the rest of the workers are women. We really need another man to help with the heavier work.”

  So my life of the mind had become a life of the body, Charles thought, not completely unhappy with the idea.

  “How often would I do this?”

  “Three days a week: Monday, Wednesday and Friday.”

  Ruth stared at him expectantly while he considered the plan.

  “Okay,” Charles said, “I’ll give it a try.”

  Charles knew that if he’d declined, Ruth had further arguments up her sleeve she could have produced until it would have been churlish to refuse. Plus a part of him was curious about what his reaction would be to participating actively in charitable work.

  “Thanks, Charles, I think you’ll find it very rewarding,” Ruth said, as if completely certain that to give was better than to receive.

  Giving Ruth a parting nod, Charles went up the driveway of his home, picking up the New York Times lying there and tucking it under his arm. He went in the side door to the kitchen and poured himself a cup of coffee from the machine he’d put on before he went out to run, and got himself a bowl of cereal. Making two trips, he carefully put down a placemat on the patio table and brought out his paper and breakfast.

  On a shelf along the back of the house, he had three pots of annuals arranged in a row. Noticing that one seemed out of alignment with the others, and knowing this would bother him constantly, Charles carefully nudged it back in line with the other two. Then he sat down at the table, opened the front section of the Times, and began to read.

  CRACK!

  Charles jumped and heard something fall behind him. Turning, he saw that the flowerpot furthest from him lay in pieces on the ground.

  CRACK!

  As he watched, the second pot in the row seemed to jump in the air and simultaneously explode.

  Before the third shot was fired, demolishing the last pot, Charles was moving in a bent over, shambling run toward the door. Once inside the kitchen, he sat on the floor and leaned his cheek against the cool of the lower cabinet door waiting for his heart to slow. He imagined bullets flying by his head, buzzing like angry wasps, as they had in the distant past. After there were several minutes of silence, he crawled into the study on the other side of the house and called the police.

  Chapter Nine

  Lieutenant Thorndike sat in his kitchen, a cup of coffee in her hand.

  “It’s fresh,” Charles said.

  Thorndike smiled. “And I appreciate it. You said that you made sure those pots were in a straight row just before the shots were fired.”

  Charles nodded.

  “I still can’t get over how neat everything is around here.”

  “It’s a discipline. A cluttered space makes for a cluttered mind.”

  “I’ll ignore the insult.”

  “Insult?”

  “If you ever saw my office, you’d know that my mind must be a mess.”

  “I’m only speaking for myself. If the house were untidy, I’d be unable to think.”

  “So you were right in the line of fire for a minute or so, but the shots didn’t begin until you were seated.”

  “Correct.”

  “And the one furthest from you went first, then the next. By the time the last one went, you were heading in the door.”

  “Right. I got out of the way fast because I was the next in the row.”

  “But there were no further shots once you went in the house.”

  “None at all.”

  Thorndike looked out the kitchen window.

  “The shots must have come from out along the tree line. My people searched, but they weren’t able to find any signs of a shooter out there. But the person could have picked up their spent shells. We’ll talk to your neighbours, but someone could drive up the road and pull into the meadow and easily get away without ever being seen.”

  Charles nodded.

  “I don’t imagine you’re a hunter. Do you know anything about rifles?”

  “I was in the military.”

  Her left eyebrow arched in surprise. “Then you know it would be a pretty easy shot from the wood line to where you were sitting, less than a hundred and fifty feet. And you were a still target, just like those pots.”

  “So you’re saying the shooter could easily have hit me if he wanted to?”

  She nodded. “If he’d started with you instead of the pots.”

  “Why would he want to intentionally miss?” Charles said, taking a sip of coffee. He was drinking more coffee than he usually did in a day because of Thorndike’s visits, and felt slightly jumpy. But he wasn’t sure if that was a result of the coffee or getting shot at.

  “Perhaps he just wanted to frighten you.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Of course, maybe I’m wrong. Possibly someone wants us to think that you were the real target in the Underwood murder and send us off on a wild goose chase.”

  “There’s the contract killer theory again—I’ve always thought that was pretty weak. Maybe it was someone who really wanted to kill me, but he was a bad shot.”

  “He hit the three pots just fine.”

  “People aren’t pots. Maybe he’d never shot a person before and he froze.”

  The Lieutenant thought about that for a moment, then nodded.

  “That brings us back to why someone would want to kill you.”

  “Maybe it’s someone who thinks I killed Underwood and wants revenge.”

  “Who?”

  “His wife.”

  “You’ve met her?”

  Charles nodded.

  “Then you know she isn’t exactly heartbroken b
y his death.”

  “Maybe there’s someone who wants both Underwood and myself dead.”

  “Who would that be?”

  “Ernest Ritter.”

  Thorndike rolled her eyes. “Okay, I asked him about his whereabouts at the time of the murder, and he says he was on his way into the college when Underwood was killed. Of course, there was no way I can really check on that. But I will talk with him and find out about where he was today, if it will make you feel better.”

  Charles shrugged. “It’s hard to imagine Ritter committing a double homicide. He seems more a talker than a doer. But he is the only one with a motive to have Underwood and me both off the scene. I guess there could be two people: one who killed Underwood and the other who wants to kill me.”

  “Have you ever heard of Occam’s razor?” asked Thorndike.

  “Sure, it’s a principle that says always go with the simplest hypothesis that covers the facts.”

  “Well, I try to follow that. And two shooters is definitely not the simplest explanation of what has happened. Unless something different happens in the future to change my mind, we’re assuming one murderer. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Just play it safe. Stay inside and don’t go out unless you have to.”

  “I’m working in the soup kitchen at St. David’s.”

  Her eyebrow went up again. “When did this start?”

  “Today. My next door neighbour, Ruth Wasserman, talked me into it this morning.”

  Thorndike nodded. “No problem, you’ll be around lots of other people. That should keep you safe.”

  The Lieutenant got up and walked to the door. She stopped in the doorway and turned to Charles.

  “Are you sure you’re all right? Not too shaken up?”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  “You’ve been shot at before?”

  He nodded.

  She gave him a long look, then left.