by Glen Ebisch
Chapter Thirty-Nine
As Charles walked across the parking lot to the rear of the English Building, the door opened and Ernest Ritter walked out. In his tight fitting black suit and prancing walk, he reminded Charles for all the world of some concertmaster in a minor eighteenth century German principality: a big fish in a little pond and proud of it.
Ritter stopped to confront Charles.
“What are you doing here? I thought you were retired,” he asked suspiciously.
“Don’t worry, Ernest, I’m not here to take back my courses. I just had a bit of business to conduct.”
“Well, I’ve spent the morning in my office trying to straighten out your Seventeenth to Eighteenth Century Survey of American Literature. Your syllabus was hopelessly out of date. You spend far too much time on the Transcendentalists and not enough on Whitman. No one reads the poetry of Emerson anymore.”
“Perhaps they should. Anyway, it’s your course now, so you are free to structure it as you wish.”
“Has there been any progress in discovering who killed Underwood?”
Charles shook his head.
Ritter smiled maliciously. “Do they still suspect you?”
“I think I’m safely out of the picture.”
Charles thought again how pleasant it would be if Ritter were charged with the murder. Unfortunately he had been elsewhere rather than his office at the time of Underwood’s death. His office was right above Charles’, so even if he had been there that day he wouldn’t have had to pass Charles’ office to come and go. Therefore, he wouldn’t have even been a useful witness.
“I’m surprised. Especially since you were also on the scene when Sylvia Underwood was killed. And didn’t you also find poor Deborah Gould’s body yesterday?”
“I’m unlucky, not culpable.”
Ritter laughed. “Sounds like you’ve been talking with a lawyer.”
“I haven’t felt the need so far, Ernest.”
Ritter gave him a level stare. “Perhaps you should reconsider.”
Giving him a curt nod, Charles walked into the English Building and up the stairs to his office. Instead of going in, he walked several doors down and entered the English Department Office. The secretary looked up from her work and gave him a sympathetic smile.
“How are you? It must have been terrible finding Deborah Gould like that. Do the police have any leads on who did it?”
“Nothing very definite,” he replied. Not wanting to get pulled into a lengthy discussion of the murder, he turned toward his mailbox. Since his retirement was so new, it was full of mail, most of it no longer important to him. He threw a handful of it in the wastebasket. Yuri came out of his office and approached Charles.
“Ah, Charles, such sorrowful times. To have not one, or two, but three murders on campus within a week is most stressful.”
“Yes, it certainly doesn’t help the reputation of the college.”
“Indeed, Dean Carruthers was about to have puppies yesterday when he heard about Professor Gould’s death.”
“I believe the expression is ‘have kittens,’” Charles corrected.
Looking stricken, Yuri fumbled a notebook out of his shirt pocket and made himself a note.
“He was very distressed,” Yuri continued, safely staying away from colloquialisms.
“That’s understandable. Parents become nervous when they hear about crime on the campus where they are sending their sons and daughters to live.”
“I’ve heard rumours that the admissions office has received several phone calls from parents who wish to withdraw their children from this fall’s entering class.”
Charles nodded and tried to look concerned, although he really felt the problem was no longer his own.
“I met Ernest in the parking lot. He seems to be working hard at adapting my survey course.”
Yuri rolled his eyes. “I dread to think how many students will be in my office by the middle of next semester complaining about the low grades he’s giving them. The man seems to think that low grades are proof of good teaching. I think it is just the opposite. The man can’t teach, and he blames the students for not learning. I’d like to give all your classes to Andrea Boyd, but the Dean won’t let me. He says we need a tenured person teaching some of them. But Ritter? I tell you, the man is a mule.”
Charles thought he meant ass, but didn’t correct him. Tiring of the conversation, he edged away from Yuri.
“Well, maybe once the Dean sees how hopeless Ritter is, he’ll change his mind.”
Yuri nodded doubtfully. “But if you ever want to teach part-time, one course a semester, I’m certain I could get the Dean to go along.”
“I appreciate the offer, Yuri, but I think teaching and I have permanently parted.”
“Never say never,” Yuri intoned. “After all, you don’t want to build your bridges behind you.”
“I think that’s ‘burn your bridges,’” Charles said, and slipped away while Yuri was getting out his notebook.
Charles walked down the hall and unlocked the door to his office. The room smelled a bit musty, but the temperature was comfortable. Fortunately, during the last plant improvement campaign central air conditioning had been installed throughout the building. Generally he enjoyed the increased comfort, but Charles still remembered with some longing the long summer days he had worked in this office with the smells of summers wafting off the hills and in through his open window. Somehow he felt more in touch with the nineteenth century when he didn’t have all the creature comforts of the twenty-first.
He settled behind his desk and thought for a moment about what to do next. He reached over and picked up his desk phone and tapped in the code that gave him his voicemail. Nothing. He checked his watch. Adam had been meeting with his source over dinner last night. The fact that he hadn’t already called didn’t bode well. Perhaps the man had provided no relevant information. Not willing to waste more time in idle speculation, Charles picked up the phone and punched in Adam’s number.
“Hello,” Adam answered, sounding distracted.
“This is Charles Bentley, sorry to disturb you.”
“Oh, yes, Charles. Sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner. But I woke up this morning with a completely new take on how to approach this article I’m doing, and I wanted to get right on it after lunch.”
“You have to strike while the creative juices are running,” Charles said, suspecting he’d jumbled his metaphors. “Did you learn anything from your dinner guest last night?”
There was a long pause while Adam seemed to be searching for the thread of the conversation.
“I believe you were having lunch with Christian Geller.”
“Of course, what a charming old boy.”
“Did he have any information to add about the Underwood scandal?” Charles asked a shade impatiently.
Adam’s voice came closer to the phone, and he sounded more focused when he said, “He couldn’t remember the name of the female student who was most involved. He thought her name was Marie something. But he did remember that after the scandal broke she left to go to school in California.”
“Is that all you learned?” Charles asked, disappointed.
“Yes, sorry. Apparently only a few senior people were involved in the proceedings, and all of them are either dead or retired. I suppose I could get the names of those who retired and give them a call. However, they’d probably be reluctant to talk to me about something of a disciplinary nature. Confidentiality is emphasized a lot today, as you know, because of legal liability.”
Charles sighed. “Well, thank you for looking into things.”
“No problem. Let me know if you ever get it all figured out.”
“That’s a promise. And maybe we can get together if you get up here for an alumni event.”
“I’ll plan on it.”
After hanging up with Adam, Charles gave the Lieutenant a call and reported what he had learned.
“The name Marie ag
ain. And there’s no Marie on the faculty,” said Thorndike.
“Correct. The only Marie was in personnel, and she certainly wasn’t the one.”
Charles again remembered with a blush his experience there.
“It stands to reason the woman might have changed her name if she stayed in the field,” Thorndike said. “People tend to know each other in English literature, don’t they?”
“Well, there are a lot of people teaching college English, but when you get to the more elite levels like Opal and Yale, people would know each other from conferences and publications. If you want to be successful, it’s hard to remain anonymous. So she might have changed her name. But it doesn’t matter, we don’t have a last name anyhow.”
“How about female English faculty of the right age who got their degrees from California universities?”
“I know where everyone in the English Department went, and none of them are from schools in California.”
A sound of exasperation came down the line. “I think this person has put some effort into concealing her background.”
“Maybe, maybe not. When there’s a disciplinary action involving a faculty member and a student, the school would try very hard to keep the student’s name confidential. When she left Yale, she could have wandered around for a while. Sometimes graduate students do that.”
“Maybe I’ll go down to New Haven and have a chat with this Adam Sussman. See if he has any more ideas about whom I could talk to. I might even try contacting retired members of the disciplinary board. This is a murder case after all, and there are limits to academic confidentiality.”
“It’s worth a try. I’m afraid I’m out of ideas. I’d hoped for more from Adam.”
“Probably it’s for the best that you stay out of the investigation from now on. Remember, someone is still gunning for you. A low profile might be the safest.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
“I’ll let you know if I turn up anything.”
“Thanks.”
After hanging up, Charles sat behind his desk feeling thoroughly disappointed. Just like the question of why Barbara had been out on that snowy road late at night had remained unanswered, so the matter of Underwood’s death was threatening to become another mystery that would continue to haunt him. When the Lieutenant had asked him whether any of the female English faculty had gone to school in California, a name had bounced around at the edge of his memory. He started up his computer and went to the faculty listing that gave people’s degrees. He had been right. No one in English had listed a degree from a California school. Just to be diligent, he checked the entire faculty roster. Aside from one fellow in chemistry and another man in history, there were no other degrees listed as coming from California. Opal tended to favour those with Eastern degrees.
Charles wondered if there was anyone else who might know if someone had studied out there. He went out into the hall and looked in the direction of Andrea’s office. The door was open, so he wandered down the hall and looked inside. She was sitting behind her desk working busily on the computer and didn’t see him in the doorway until he cleared his throat.
“Hello, Charles. You seem to spend as much time on campus now as before you retired,” she said, turning away from the screen.
“I’m gradually weaning myself off of academic life. A sudden withdrawal might be too much for me,” he said, settling into the chair in front of her desk.
“That’s probably wise.”
“The reason I stopped by is that I was wondering if you knew of any female faculty member who went to school in California. Adam Sussman said that the woman involved with Underwood at Yale went out to California after the incident. Her first name was Marie.”
Andrea stared into space. “I don’t know anyone on the faculty here named Marie. I’m trying to think if anyone went to school on the West Coast.”
“I checked the faculty roster. There are only two male faculty who list degrees from out there.”
Andrea gave him a sad smile. “I’m afraid I can’t help you, then. But let me repeat what I asked you last time, is it really so important that you find out who killed Underwood? He doesn’t sound like very much of a loss to me.”
Charles nodded. “I only met the man for a few minutes, and I disliked him intensely. I’m certainly not doing it for him. But I want to know.” He paused, not sure how much he wanted to reveal himself to Andrea. “You know that night Barbara died, she was late getting home from work. There was never any explanation as to why she didn’t arrive home two hours earlier. Well, that’s been bothering me ever since. And I just don’t have the room for two mysteries in my life.”
He was about to go on when his cell phone rang. He excused himself and answered.
“Hi, Dad,” Amy said.
“Hello, Sweetheart, I’m in Andrea’s office right now. Was there anything you wanted to tell me?”
Amy hesitated. “Well, you asked me if I knew of any faculty members named Marie. It just came to me yesterday that Mom once mentioned to me that she and Andrea had the same middle name: Marie.”
Charles struggled to keep his face blank.
“Okay, Amy, thanks for the information. But I guess it doesn’t matter anymore. Remember, I love you.”
Without giving her a chance to respond, he cut the connection. He sat staring at the floor for a moment as a memory came rushing back to him. It was also something Barbara had said about Andrea one night just before they went to sleep. She mentioned that Andrea had commented on how conservative Berkeley had seemed when she was there as compared to what she had heard about it in the sixties.
Charles looked up. Andrea still sat behind her desk, but now she had a gun pointing at the middle of his chest.
“I’m afraid your face is an open book, Charles. It always has been.”
Charles shuddered. “I’m afraid I can’t say the same about yours.”
She smiled. “I’ve learned over the years to be a bit opaque.”
“How did you ever end up getting intimately involved with Garrison Underwood in the first place?”
“You thought I’d have better taste?”
Charles nodded, never taking his eyes off of the gun.
“It was blackmail pure and simple. I had Underwood for a graduate class. I wrote a paper for the class, and I really wanted to impress him. I came across this very obscure book on the Romantic Movement in England and took one of its major theses for my own. I figured no one else would be aware of the book. It looked like it hadn’t been touched in fifty years.”
“So you took the idea without attribution?”
“Not a footnote in sight. I know, the cardinal sin of scholarship. Unfortunately, for reasons I was never clear on, Underwood had read the book and remembered the ideas. He threatened me with expulsion for plagiarism if I didn’t have sex with him. What choice did I have?”
“Are you sure you really didn’t want to?”
“Don’t be silly, Charles,” Andrea snapped. “That isn’t even my sexual orientation.”
Charles glanced at her face, surprised.
“Another area in which I strive to remain opaque.”
“But eventually what Underwood was doing became public.”
“Yes, he approached too many women, and eventually the department found out. Enough people knew I was involved that I couldn’t cover it up. The department was actually rather kind, they chose not to expel me for the plagiarism and wrote me a nice letter of recommendation for Berkeley.”
“But you didn’t stay there.”
“No. I guess what we’d call today post-traumatic stress made me restless. I left at the end of the year, took the next year off, and then eventually made my way to the University of Chicago, where I stayed to get my degree. Like you, I had preferred my middle name, but while there, I started using my real first name to throw people off the scent. Then I got the job here and everything was rosy.”
“Until Underwood showed up.”
&nb
sp; “And called me immediately to say that things were going right back to the way they were. And if I didn’t like it, he would tell the department about my history of plagiarism. It might not get me fired right away, but it would probably prevent my getting tenure. I went to see him that day, to plead with him to not do this again. But he just laughed at me and turned his back. That’s when I picked up the trophy and hit him over the head. I knew right away that he was dead.”
“And you saw me in the parking lot and encouraged me to have it out with Underwood. You tried to put me in the frame.”
“I didn’t think you’d be in trouble for long. I figured you’d quickly be cleared. But at least it would confuse things enough that I wouldn’t be an obvious suspect.”
“Why did you kill Sylvia Underwood?”
“I happened to see her on campus the day after her husband died. I could tell she half recognized me. She’s been with her husband at Yale, and we’d met. I figured it was only a matter of time before the penny would drop and she’d go to the police. I had no choice.”
“And Deborah Gould?”
“That was very sad. She also recognized me from Yale. I was Underwood’s graduate assistant for her course. I asked her not to tell anyone that I’d been there because it was embarrassing to me. She promised, but had second thoughts once the killing started. I could tell she was ready to cave and talk either to you or the police.”
“And you had no choice but to kill me either.”
“The first time, on your patio, I was just trying to misdirect the police into thinking you were the intended victim. The rat in the car was meant to scare you off the case. Finally I had no choice but to shoot to kill. I tried to get you to leave things alone, but you can be persistent.”
“You missed. Did you have second thoughts?” Charles asked hopefully.
She shook her head. “Your friend moved at just the wrong time, too bad for her. We Texas girls usually hit what we aim at. You may not believe me, but I’m glad she didn’t die.”