by James Yaffe
“You’ve been teaching here for nearly forty years, haven’t you? How do you deal with these terrible tensions?”
“Through hobbies mostly. Recently I’ve become a total convert to the electronics age. I used to be something of a Luddite in my attitude toward machines. But since my dear Louise’s passing, I’ve acquired a VCR, a tape recorder, a word processor—and I plunge myself into them, I read and study enthusiastically—I even have a workshop in the basement—”
“I’ve been told that Professor Russo was the English department’s second choice for this tenured job. Is that true?”
“No doubt of it.”
“Why was he the second choice? What did your department think was wrong with him?”
“Why, nothing at all. Mike is a splendid teacher. As a matter of fact, in terms of popularity with students, his classes have had substantially higher enrollments than Stu’s classes. Though the academic enterprise, you understand, should never be turned into a popularity contest. As far as scholarship goes—publications and so on—Stu and Mike are pretty much equal.
“In the end, we had to make the choice on very elusive grounds, on a certain—well, call it a fit—between the man and the institution. Mike is first-rate, but there’s just a smidgen, just the smallest element of—what shall I call it?—roughness about him. His edges haven’t quite been polished as finely as Stu’s. It’s not Mike’s fault, God knows—a man certainly isn’t responsible for the kind of background he’s been brought up in—but since we did have to choose—” Van Horn made a delicate little palm-spreading gesture.
“You told the two men about the department’s decision, I suppose?”
“Oh, yes. I had them both into my office Tuesday afternoon. The day before the murder.”
Which explained why Mike, at the poetry reading Tuesday night, had looked like a man who’d just had the roof cave in on him.
“As a matter of fact,” Van Horn was going on, “this situation has presented me with a most perplexing quandary. Dean Bradbury has asked me to arrange a memorial service for Stu—it’ll be held in the college chapel Saturday afternoon at two. His mother and his sister are flying in from Providence Friday night. Nothing religious, of course, in the denominational sense. Just some brief readings, by Stu’s colleagues, from various literary works of an appropriate nature. My own contribution will be a few lines from Gray’s ‘Elegy.’ The quandary is, should I or shouldn’t I ask Mike Russo to join in on the service? Since he is going to be tried for poor Stu’s murder, it might seem to be in rather poor taste—On the other hand, a man is assumed innocent until proven guilty, so if I leave him out of the service, won’t it be interpreted as a prejudgment on my part—”
“I wonder if it’s occurred to you,” I said, “that Mike Russo might not be guilty?”
He blinked at me politely. “You think so?”
“Well, after all, since there are so many seething tensions in an academic community, why couldn’t there be somebody besides Mike Russo who has a reason for killing Professor Bellamy? You don’t happen to know of anybody like that, do you?”
“Somebody else with a motive? Now let me see. Stu, as I said, was always the gentleman, scrupulously polite and sociable. He wasn’t the most forthcoming person in the world, of course. There may have been a certain lack of warmth, a certain reserve. But I hardly think it could’ve been sufficient to drive anyone to kill him—” He broke off, frowning harder. “There was that student, of course.”
“What student?”
“It was several days ago—Monday afternoon, to be exact. Toward three o’clock, I was on my way out for the day, I passed Stu’s office door. And I heard this terrible row from inside. Loud voices, raised in anger. One was Stu’s voice, very deep, easily recognized. The other voice was high-pitched, definitely a young voice. It was difficult to make out what either of them was saying. Then the door of the office opened, and this boy came stamping out. Then he turned in the doorway, and I heard him yelling, ‘You’ve got no right to do this to me! All those fancy things you’re always saying, and you can still do something like this?’
“Stu made some kind of an answer. I could hear his deep voice, but once again I couldn’t make out the words. It seemed to enrage the boy even more, and he yelled, ‘You’re going to be sorry for this!’ And then he stamped over to the stairs and was gone. I stayed where I was for a few moments longer, until Stu closed his door again—”
“They couldn’t see you, where you were standing?”
“Oh, no, I ducked around the corner as Stu’s office door opened. It would have been most embarrassing—for them—if they had realized they were overheard.”
“What did the boy look like?”
“I never saw his face, his back was toward me throughout the whole scene. It didn’t last very long, you understand. I could see the back of his neck, and I could see he had dark hair, and he was short, probably no more than five feet six or seven, and—yes, he wore an earring.”
“In which ear?”
“Well, both of them, now that I think of it.”
It flicked through my mind that this was definitely food for thought. But I had no time to chew it over at that moment.
“But this student wasn’t familiar to you in any way? You didn’t get the impression he was somebody you’ve had in class?”
“I’m truly sorry, I just can’t say about that one way or another. Is that all you have to ask me? Well, then—”
Van Horn got to his feet, so I did too. “I certainly wish you luck in your investigations,” he said. “Mike’s case seems to be in good hands. If somebody else did kill Stu, I’m sure you’ll find out who it was. I must say, I’m rather glad that the finger of suspicion can’t possibly fall on me.”
“Not that it has,” I said, “but why do you think it can’t?”
“Well, I couldn’t have killed poor Stuart even if I had wanted to, could I? I was in my house, at my party, talking to him on the phone when he died. What’s the popular expression again?” He gave his little cat laugh. “Yes. An airtight alibi.”
CHAPTER 13
AFTER I LEFT Van Horn’s office, I went down the corridor to see if anybody else I wanted to talk to was around. There was no light shining through any of the transoms. So I left the building and went back to my car in the Llewellyn Hall parking lot.
The snow was still coming down full force, and my car was loaded down with the stuff. It was four-thirty already, no point fighting this blizzard to drive back to my office. After brushing the snow off my windshield, I headed in the other direction, to my house. And I found Mom waiting for me, practically pushing a cup of hot coffee into my hands as I walked through the door.
Before I started drinking it, though, I checked in with Ann at the office. She was back from court, and told me, with a definite edge of satisfaction in her voice, that the judge had agreed to let Mike out on bail.
“We had a stroke of luck. The judge was Sam Winslow, he’s a graduate of Mesa Grande College and also happens to have been an English major. George Wolkowicz didn’t like it too much. You would’ve enjoyed seeing his face.”
“So Mike is out of jail now?” I asked.
“Free as a bird—until he goes on trial.”
That made me happy. I had no idea how things would be for him at the college, but at least he wouldn’t spend the next few months rotting in one of the county’s cells. It’s funny, in the days when I was a cop I sent people off to those cells by the hundreds and never gave it a second thought. Now that I’m on the other side of the fence, the very thought of such a place makes my blood boil.
I told Ann about the earring I’d found under Bellamy’s bookcase, and about the student who was fighting with Bellamy and who also wore earrings. She just grunted noncommittally at all this. Wild bursts of optimism were never what you got from Ann. “Okay, follow it up,” she said. “It certainly won’t hurt.”
She hung up, and I turned back to Mom, and saw that she had brought
out a plate of schnecken for me to munch on while I drank my coffee. Schnecken, with nuts and raisins, sticky and delicious! I hadn’t tasted anything like it since my last trip to New York.
“Mom, where did you find a bakery in town that makes things like this?”
“Who needs bakeries?” she said. “You’ve got an oven, and I had a little time after I got back from my bridge game.”
Now I realized that the house was full of that lovely schneckeny smell. It filled the soul with contentment.
I sat back in my favorite easy chair in the living room, the coffee cup in my hand and a piece of schnecken in my other hand, and I asked Mom about her afternoon. She told me she’d had a nice couple of rubbers of bridge at the YMCA. Met some nice people, too, and one of them was picking her up tomorrow and, if the weather was better, showing her the mountains.
“But Mom, when you’ve seen one mountain, you’ve seen them all.”
“That’s true. But Mr. Bernstein’s enthusiastic about them, and what’s the point of hurting people’s feelings?”
“Mr. Bernstein? You’re going to the mountains tomorrow with a Mr. Bernstein?”
“You didn’t think they had any out here? They’ve also got a synagogue, did you know that? I’ll bet you never set foot in it, even on the High Holidays. Tomorrow night I’ll be going out there for Shabbat. They asked me to make some chocolate-chip cookies for the reception afterward. You wouldn’t like to join me for the services, maybe? Don’t answer, I know already what you’re going to say.”
Mom talked a little more about Mr. Bernstein, who used to own a clothing store in town but sold out to a big chain a few years ago and was enjoying his retirement on the income. His wife had been dead for five years, and he had three grown daughters, all married and living in other parts of the country. He spent most of his time at bridge tournaments to keep from feeling lonely.
“Don’t worry, don’t worry,” Mom said, evidently noticing something on my face. “Bernstein’s a nice fellow, but definitely not my type. He’s very sweet, if you follow me. That’s the trouble, all that sweetness, I can take it in small doses but for a daily diet it would give me diabetes.”
Social formalities were over now, and it was time for me to lay out the events of my afternoon for Mom. There’s no such thing in this world as free schnecken and coffee. So I told her everything that had happened to me since my noontime lunch with her, and I showed her the little red earring.
Mom held it in her palm for a while, peering down at it. Then she handed it back to me, saying absolutely nothing at all.
“Well, what do you think?” I said. “Any chance we’ll be able to trace the student from that?”
“Why shouldn’t you trace him? You already got a good description of him.”
“I don’t see that at all. Van Horn didn’t see his face and didn’t recognize anything about him.”
“Except he’s got dark hair, and he’s short—and he’s a he.”
“There are probably a few hundred students at the college who fit that description.”
“And he’s taking one of Bellamy’s classes right now.”
“How do you figure that, Mom?”
“Because he yelled at him, ‘You’ve got no right to do this to me!’ What can a professor do to a student unless the student is taking one of his classes? What other way has the professor got for putting pressure on the student? Outside the class the professor is nobody, inside the class he’s Adolph Hitler.”
“All right, let’s assume this student is taking one of Bellamy’s classes. The professors teach three courses per semester, that’s anywhere from sixty to a hundred and fifty students. At least twenty or thirty of them will be short, dark males.”
“Who wear earrings?”
“Lots of males wear earrings nowadays, especially college-age males. You’d be surprised, Mom.”
“Surprised I wouldn’t be. The way people behave stopped surprising me a long time ago. Anyway, you want to narrow it down a little more? How about that this student is a Chicano?”
“A Chicano!”
“This is what they’re called out here, isn’t it? People that are Mexican-Americans? If I’ve got the wrong expression—”
“The expression is right. But why should you assume the student is a Chicano?”
“You remember what he said to Bellamy, and Van Horn overheard it? ‘All those fancy things you’re always saying, and you can still do something like this? What did he mean? What fancy things? What was the professor always saying which seemed to contradict what he was doing to this boy?”
“Mom, we can’t possibly know!”
“We do know. He was an expert on books about black people, he wrote articles on the subject—isn’t that so? So wouldn’t you naturally assume, a man who specializes in such a subject, who’s always talking about it, who tries to get students to care about this type literature, he wouldn’t be prejudiced against minorities himself? But to this student in his class he does something that looks like it’s prejudiced, and the student is amazed and yells out, ‘All those fancy things you’re always saying, and you can still—’”
“Wait a second, Mom. It was black literature that Bellamy was an expert in. So why would you figure that the student who yelled those words is a Chicano? Isn’t it more likely he’d be a black?”
“Maybe—only we’ve got other evidence he wasn’t.”
“What evidence?”
“Van Horn gave you a description what this young fellow looked like from the back. He saw his earring, his dark hair, the back of his neck. If this had been a black young fellow, wouldn’t you expect Van Horn to mention it? So he wasn’t black. So there’s only one other oppressed minority that you have out here. Chicanos.”
I thought it over for a few seconds and decided she had a point. The problem of digging up the mysterious student suddenly looked a lot simpler. All we had to do was go through Bellamy’s current class lists and pick out the Mexican names. There couldn’t be more than two or three of them, and if one of these people was short and dark haired, was having troubles in Bellamy’s class, and wore earrings—and if he turned out to have lost one of those earrings recently—
That was when the phone rang.
I picked it up, and a voice said my name.
“You’re talking to him,” I said. “Who is it?”
“Never mind who this is,” said the voice, and I noticed now how peculiar it sounded. Low and muffled, as if it was talking through some thicknesses of cloth. I couldn’t be sure if it was a man or a woman. “Have you seen what’s on your front doorstep yet?”
“No—”
“Better go see,” said the voice, and the phone clicked at the other end.
I went across the living room to the front door. A blast of cold air came at me as I opened it. The snow was still coming down, though a little less thickly than earlier, and the lawn gleamed white in the moonlight. On the doormat at my feet, sheltered from the snow by the arch of the doorway, was a white rectangular envelope.
I didn’t see any footprints, either on the mat or coming up to the house from the sidewalk. There wouldn’t be any, of course, if the envelope had been left there half an hour or more earlier; the snow would have covered them up.
I picked up the envelope and opened it in the hallway, as soon as I had shut the door against the cold.
The envelope itself had a printed return address in one corner: “Mesa Grande College.” Inside it was a folded sheet of white paper, regulation typing size, and the message on it had been neatly typed on a word processor and printed out on a dot-matrix machine. I could check it in the morning, but I had a feeling the college was full of dot-matrix printers, every one of which produced characters that looked exactly like these. And since it was a common brand, there were thousands of them all over the city, too.
“So read it, read it,” Mom said, bustling up to me in the hallway.
What I read began with my name and continued as follows:
/> I am a student at this institution. Because I am usually broke, I supplement my income by doing a little pilfering. Last night I was going through the second floor of Llewellyn around ten o’clock when I made a very interesting discovery in one of the offices. I didn’t understand what it meant when I ran across it, but this morning I read about Professor Bellamy’s murder, and now I know what I’ve got.
I’ve got conclusive evidence of who the murderer is.
I’d like to give this evidence to you, because the public defender is handling Professor Russo’s case, and this evidence will clear him. Of course you can’t expect me to perform this civic duty without recompense. If you want to talk this over with me and come to some agreement on the terms, go to Manitou Park at midnight tonight. Sit down on the bench in front of General Wagner’s elm tree, and I’ll be in touch with you shortly.
I’ll talk only with you. If more than one person shows up, or if you tell the police about this, or if you have the park watched or make any other effort to find out who I am, the deal is off, and I’ll throw my little discovery off a mountain.
So please don’t blow it.
Sincerely yours,
Zorro
“Zorro, what kind of name is that?” Mom said, returning to the rocker in the living room. “It could be some kind of nut, some kind of psychological killer—”
“More likely it’s a college kid, and this is his idea of a joke.”
She looked at me for a long time. A very familiar look. I had seen it often back in New York, from the day I started working as a policeman. “You’re going, I suppose?” she finally said.
I told her it was my job.
Another moment, then the look disappeared, and a smile took its place. “All this talking,” she said, “I hope you worked up a good appetite. I’m giving you potted chicken for dinner.”
CHAPTER 14
DURING THAT DINNER—a potted chicken that took me back to some of the happiest moments of my childhood—neither of us said a word about Manitou Park. Mom filled me in on the people she was close to back in New York—neighbors, friends, tradesmen. Some of them I’d known, some of them I hadn’t, but her stories about them never failed to fascinate me. It’s amazing the complicated and ingenious ways that human beings can think of to screw up their lives and everybody else’s.