Lloyd stood up. “Cause of death appears to be general hypoxia caused by asphyxiation. I’d like to conduct an autopsy to find out more. Look for any clues to indicate he had difficulty breathing.”
I stepped forward. “There’s something in his tail pipe,” I said. The officers turned to me. “I’m a student here. His car was broken into, and the door wouldn’t stay shut. I helped him move his files and then gave him my scarf to secure the door. He appeared fine. I turned away to make a phone call, and when I turned back, he was slumped against the wheel.”
Lloyd looked inside the car and then straightened up and pointed inside. He said something to Ling. She looked inside the car and said something to Sue, who looked in the car and then stood upright. “You say you gave him your scarf to secure the door?”
“Yes. The door was bent away from the frame, and the scarf was intended to keep it tight. Why are you all focused on my scarf? Isn’t the blocked tailpipe the more suspicious thing here?”
“The car should have blown an obstruction out of the tailpipe. In a closed space, with the car idling, sure, carbon monoxide emissions might have seeped into the vehicle and caused suffocation, but if there was a gap between the door frame and the car, fresh air would have offset the danger.”
I gulped. “You mean if he hadn’t tied the door shut, he might still be alive.”
5
Ling left the medical examiner with the EMT and stood with me. “You couldn’t have known,” she said. “If that car door swung open while he was driving, it would have caused an accident. It’s rush hour. The number of cars on the road is at its peak. He could have caused a major pile-up that endangered many lives.”
It was little consolation.
Sue Niedermeyer, the stockier of the two Sues, walked the perimeter of the car. She held her cell phone in front of her and videoed the evidence. I waited a few feet behind her, unsure if she even knew I was there. When she finished, she and Ling exchanged a glance that contained an entire conversation. Ling nodded, and Sue turned to me.
“I assume you gave your statement to one of the officers?”
“Yes,” I said. “Officer Young.”
“Then you’re free to leave. We’ll be in touch with any additional questions.”
“I can’t leave,” I said. “Professor Gallagher parked me in.”
It was closing in on eight o’clock when I finally returned home. I parked alongside the hedges and used the side entrance. My number-one concern was Rocky, my fluffy caramel and white Shih Tzu who’d been cooped up for most of the day. He sat inside the door and stared up at me with giant apologetic eyes.
I found a pile of poop by the front door. I found an empty box of Peanut Butter Patties under the kitchen table. When I left, that box was full. The deposit Rocky left by the front door was just the beginning.
“We’re going out,” I said.
I clipped on his leash, grabbed my Nature’s Miracle pooper scooper, and left. The sun had set, and the muggy climate had cooled, leaving a wet chill in the air. I doubled back for a thin cardigan and pulled it on while Rocky sniffed the grass. We made it all of three feet before he made deposit number two.
As I engaged Nature’s Miracle, a Jeep rumbled down the street. The driver parked behind my Alfa Romeo, and Tex got out.
Whenever I saw Tex, I had a physical reaction. At first, that reaction had been instant animosity. He was roughly my age (after fifty, the lines blurred), physically fit, and aged in a good way. His hair color shifted between dark blond and light brown depending on the season and the sunlight, and his eyes were the blue of faded denim.
In Doris Day’s time, Tex would have been referred to as a cad. My first impression was a toxic bachelor with entitlement issues. He’d been overly confident, ordered people around, and treated me as if I knew nothing. I soon learned he was a local homicide detective and the setting for our meet cute was a crime scene.
Occasionally, extenuating circumstances forced one to recalibrate one’s first impressions.
Since then, I’d gotten to know him as an investigating officer then as a person. We became friends with an undercurrent of attraction. I denied it vehemently; what self-respecting independent businesswoman dated a man with a loyalty card from the local strip club? But in time, I dropped my preconceived notions and my emotional barriers and saw him for who he was: exciting, reliable, and smart.
“I didn’t know you were coming over,” I said.
“Shhhh.” He strode toward me and wrapped me in an embrace.
The journey to coupledom with Tex was awkward; his bachelor ways had left broken hearts and empty beds scattered all over Dallas. And me? I’d been defiantly single after a life-changing lie inspired me to flee my home state of Pennsylvania for Texas and start a new life with a knee injury. I started Mad for Mod, adopted a puppy, fell for my handyman, and then lost it all (except for the puppy). I wasn’t exactly batting a thousand in the relationship department either.
I relaxed into Tex’s chest and inhaled the scent of laundry detergent faint on his shirt. Rocky wound his leash around our legs. I leaned away and looked into Tex’s ice blue eyes. “Did you talk to Ling or Sue?”
“I talked to Lloyd. The Sues will fill me in tomorrow morning.”
“He told you about my scarf.”
“You couldn’t have known.”
I shifted my attention to Rocky, who was in the process of making another deposit dangerously close to my sneaker. I tried to step to the left, but the leash wound around our legs made it impossible. “Untangle,” I instructed. Tex took the leash and wound it around my back, behind his, and back to me until we were free. Sadly, I still managed to step in Rocky’s mess, and stinky brown poop squished under my sole.
“I’ll take Rock around the block,” Tex said. He hadn’t anticipated the rhyme, and we both laughed. I left him with the leash, ruffled Rocky’s fur, and tossed my sneaker in the trash before going back inside.
By the time Tex and Rocky returned, I was surrounded by textbooks. Rocky, happy to be off his leash (and probably a pound lighter), took off up the stairs.
Tex got a beer out of the fridge. “How was your first day of class?”
“Not what I expected.”
I lived like I decorated, and just after my fiftieth birthday, I’d completely overhauled my kitchen. It was a study in yellow and white, cheerful to a fault. The last thing I’d done was swap out my existing diner-style dining table with a walnut one that lacked designer mark or provenance. I surrounded it with a set of American of Martinsville walnut and cane high back dining chairs I’d found missing their cushions by a Dumpster in Irving. I remedied that problem with fabric from my vintage stash and foam from Joann Fabrics, and now the buttery-yellow chenille fabric matched perfectly.
Tex dropped into one of the chairs. “C’mon, Night, it’s been a long time since I dated a coed.” He grinned. “Work with me.”
I shook my head in pretend disgust. “My first class was Radical Business Strategy. The professor was like an attack dog. I thought colleges encouraged higher learning after they got your money. He acted like I wasn’t good enough to be his student.”
“Radical Business Strategy doesn’t sound like an entry-level course.”
“It’s not. It’s part of Van Doren’s accelerated program. Solid schedule of classes Monday through Friday. I audited entry level courses all last week as a refresher, and they’re old hat. This course got me going, and now it’s all going to change.” I set my pen down.
“Why?”
“I imagine they’ll bring in a replacement to teach the rest of the course, but there was something about Gallagher that fired his students up.”
Tex set down his beer. “Night, I don’t want you going back to that class.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake, it’s a college that’s been operational since 1956. I talked my way into an accelerated five-day course load and I’ve already paid my tuition in full with money I should have saved for upcoming rent on
my empty studio. Besides, the campus is probably going to be swimming with cops now that this happened.”
“Why would you think that?”
“Any time there’s a murder, you increase police presence in the area as a deterrent. Why would this be any different?”
“We still don’t know whether this was murder or a college prank gone wrong. The jammed tailpipe should have caused the car to stall out, not fill the cabin with carbon monoxide. I had my cousin Mickey tow the car to the impound lot, where it’s going to sit until we can get an automotive forensic expert to give us a full report of what happened.”
“But it’s a campus filled with students. You can’t ignore the need for heightened police presence.”
“That’s right, it is a campus, and they have campus police. And frankly, my department is too thin to assign officers to surveil parked cars.”
“The campus police will be beefed up, right? A professor is murdered at the college. That’s going to make people nervous. They have an obligation to provide a safe environment.”
“That safe environment extends to the dorms and the frat parties. Safe environment means something totally different to an eighteen-year-old college student than it does to you.”
“You’re saying nothing is going to change?”
Tex and I stared at each other. My question became rhetorical by default. Finally, he offered up the same caution as earlier. “Just be careful, Night. We know how Professor Gallagher died, but we still don’t know why.”
Tex offered to stay the night, but I declined. We both had a full agenda come morning, and I was far from caught up with my coursework. We agreed to check our respective schedules tomorrow after work and try to act like normal people. I often wondered if that was as alien a term to Tex as it was to me.
The next morning, I woke early and packed for a morning swim before class. It was blissfully uneventful. After finishing an hour-long set, I showered and changed from my bathing suit to a lavender T-shirt with purple trim and matching purple A-line skirt. I pulled on purple Keds, powdered my face and applied a perky pink lipstick, and left.
When the decorator who lobbied and won the lawsuit against me took possession of my inventory, he dismissed my vast clothing collection. My unique business plan of acquiring estates in full had left me with more vintage clothes than I could wear in ten lifetimes. Instead of fully incorporating the clothes into my closet, I kept them organized by original owner complete with their obituary. It wasn’t intentionally morbid; it was my way of honoring the women who first owned the items I loved.
To appropriately get into the spirit of going back to school, I stayed with my education-themed wardrobe choices. Today’s outfit first belonged to Gwendolyn Yeary, a kindergarten teacher from Oak Lawn during the civil rights movement. Chasing five-year-olds around a classroom had taken its toll on her clothes, and a few remained unstained by what I liked to imagine was juice. Her estate included a scrapbook filled with newspaper clippings of political speeches and events around town and even a bus ticket to Montgomery, Alabama. She had taught at the school for twelve years, leaving to start a family in the early seventies.
I arrived at the school early enough to drop off my signed paperwork from yesterday. Considering the state of Professor Gallagher, it felt like I was trying to get away with something.
An older woman was behind the counter. She had gray hair cut short and curled professionally. Her shirtdress was a practical choice for her figure. A thin self-belt of matching white cotton was tied around where her waist might have been. She had excellent posture and a take-no-prisoners attitude.
“Hello,” I said. “I’m Madison Night. I’m an MBA candidate. Professor Gallagher signed my request form yesterday morning, but I didn’t have time to turn it in.”
“Radical Business Strategy?” she asked.
“Yes. How did you know?”
“I’m Barbara, the executive assistant to the business school.” She held her hand out and bent it forward several times. “Hand over your paperwork so I can process it,” she said.
Barbara was a battleax. Strong, efficient, and no-nonsense. They were the perfect qualities for someone running the admissions office, especially when interacting with students who were in that awkward phase before entering the workforce and discovering there was no such thing as extra credit in the real world. I understood why she maintained her gruff exterior; I just didn’t know why she maintained it with me.
I pulled the signed papers out of my backpack and gave them to Barbara. She was acting as though she hadn’t heard about what happened. I’d been so busy combing over my textbooks and prepping for today that I hadn’t turned on the news, but I couldn’t imagine how the school would try to keep something like this to themselves.
“Anything else?” the woman asked.
“No, but do I need to wait for a copy?” I glanced at the clock on the wall. “I have a few minutes before class starts.”
“Your class is at seven o’clock tonight.”
“Tonight? No, there must be some mistake. Class is at eight o’clock in the morning. I attended it yesterday.”
“That was before the professor left us in the lurch. If there’s a problem with your schedule, talk to the dean.”
6
I hadn’t expected the executive assistant to malign the professor so soon after his murder. “What did the professor do?” I asked.
Barbara set down my papers and looked at me over the tops of her reading glasses. “Now, don’t go gossiping this around, but Professor Gallagher committed suicide yesterday.”
“Suicide?” My surprise at the word trumped my ability to play it cool.
“Shhhh.” She patted the air between us to accompany her librarian-worthy shush. “A student found him in his car in the parking structure.”
“Who?”
“The police aren’t releasing her name. Probably that blonde that’s always meeting with him after class.”
I didn’t tell her she was talking to the blonde in question. “The professor was full of vitality just yesterday morning. It seems hard to believe.”
“He was a blustery fellow, that’s for sure. Has a whole file of complaints against him. Between you, me, and the display case, the college is better off without him.”
Barbara carried my signed forms to the copy machine and opened the lid. A piece of paper lay face-down. Her face scrunched up in consternation. “What’s this?” she said to herself.
“I think that belongs to one of my classmates,” I said quickly, remembering Eric using the copier. I held my hand out. “I can take it to him.”
“Sure,” she said. She handed me the flyer and made copies of my application then handed me the originals and filed the copies in a large gray metal cabinet. Her efficiency was a marvel.
I backed away from the desk and read the piece of paper. It was an announcement for Bongo Night at Kanin’s, a local after-hours club. The illustrations appeared to have been lifted from vintage men’s magazines, equal parts copyright violation and a demonstration of poor taste. I folded the flyer and slid it into my bag.
I called the police department, hoping to catch Tex there. A female voice answered instead.
“Hello,” I said cautiously. “This is Madison Night. Is Captain Allen available?”
“Madison! It’s Imogene. Long time no chat.”
Imogene was a mystery writer who answered the ad for a civilian desk manager, greeted me. Being a volunteer meant she worked as much as she wanted, and being a writer meant she embraced excuses not to actually write.
“How are things at the station?” I asked.
“Quiet,” she said. It was an unusual response considering they were investigating a homicide, and I said as much. “Not that kind of quiet. Quiet around here. When I started volunteering, there were cops around. Made my research easy. Now the best conversations I get are between Captain Allen and the police commissioner.”
“Are they there now?”
&n
bsp; “They just left.”
Imogene, in addition to showing up on time and understanding how the archaic telephone transferring and hold system worked, had a near-obsessive interest in police matters. Tex once told me she asked more questions than a conspiracy theorist in a room filled with politicians. Her book-in-progress was multi-layered thanks, in part, to what she picked up from volunteering at the precinct. We were all a little afraid she might get it published.
“If you want, I can transfer you to his cell.”
“Sure,” I said. I thanked her and wished her luck with her research, and then waited while she put me on hold. A few seconds later, Tex answered. “It’s me,” I said. “Not an emergency.” It wasn’t a common greeting but considering his role as the captain of the police and my role as finder of dead bodies, it worked for us.
“Hey, Night. How’s my favorite college student?”
“A little overtaxed, if you want the truth. The college moved my eight o’clock class to seven tonight, so I’m going to have to cancel dinner.”
“Isn’t that the class Gallagher taught?”
“Yes.”
“What’s it called again?”
“Radical Business Strategy.”
“Right. Who’s going to teach it now?”
“I don’t know. The admissions desk receptionist said he committed suicide. Did Lloyd change the cause of death?”
“Haven’t heard from Lloyd yet today, but there’s no reason to think the college would know something we don’t. Probably just gossip nobody wants to correct.”
“I almost corrected her,” I said. “It felt wrong to hear her imply he inconvenienced the college by dying.”
Teacher's Threat Page 4