Teacher's Threat

by Diane Vallere

  “That’s a good discussion point,” the professor said, “and I’d like everybody in this class to be prepared to answer it in essay form. One thousand words. Due Monday.”

  Eric, who had been assisting the professor during class, leaned forward and said something to the professor. He nodded and addressed the class again. “You get a one-day reprieve. Monday classes were canceled out of respect for Professor Gallagher. Essays due Tuesday. And since you have an extra day, let’s make it eight hundred words. This isn’t English Lit. There’s a benefit to making your argument in fewer words, not more.”

  A collective groan went up around the class. “Thank you, Ms. Talbot. Class dismissed.”

  I remained in my seat and kept my eyes on Faye. Judging from the number of people who ignored her while streaming out of the class, she was persona non grata amongst her fellow students. I let the room clear out and then waited for her to pass me.

  “Faye,” I called out. She turned to me, and I added, “I’m Madison. We’re in Radical Business Strategy together.”

  “Oh. Yes. Sure.” She looked like she hadn’t gotten much sleep. “Are you going to say something too?”

  “About your question? No, I think it was valid. People who work for themselves don’t think about things like that, but if they plan to expand somewhere in the future, it’s probably better to know how to handle the situation earlier rather than when it comes up.”

  “Right,” she said, considering me in a new light. “You’re totally right. That’s what I wanted to know.” She rolled her eyes. “And now it looks like another all-nighter.”

  “It won’t take you all night to write that essay,” I said. “We can write them together if you want. After class tonight. We can critique each other’s and make them better before we turn them in.”

  She frowned. “I won’t be in class tonight,” she said. “I’m dropping out. Dean Wallace said I wasn’t a fit for the subject matter. It was either drop the class or fail it, and if I fail, I’ll lose my scholarship.”

  “Dean Wallace said that?”

  “He said he reviewed Professor Gallagher’s notes on the class, and it was in my file. I wish the professor had told me himself.”

  “Would it have been different hearing it from him?”

  “It might have made a big difference to both of us.”

  15

  Faye led the way out of the lecture hall. “Thanks for the offer, though. Good luck.” She ended on a surprising up note and disappeared into a swarm of students.

  My offer to meet with Faye hadn’t been completely for her benefit. I’d been hoping to talk about Professor Gallagher. Aside from the rumor of suicide, there’d been remarkably little said about him. It was as if the college mandated a confidentiality clause on the subject. It was probably somewhere on the student portal.

  The rest of my day passed in a blur of classes, coffee, and my ham sandwich. I bought a bag of chips to go with it, thus breaking my vending machine boycott. There were times when my willpower was undeniably weak.

  When Statistics ended, I stayed in my seat and worked on my essay. I didn’t know whether I would see Tex tonight or not, but being first in class felt like staking my claim on it. I felt adversarial, so I sat at the desk he’d occupied the day before, knowing it would force him to sit up front. The move was inspired in part by our class; required reading had included Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.

  As students filtered into the class, I watched the door. Tex and Eric rounded the corner together. Eric handed Tex a flyer. The images were familiar. It was what Eric had been copying that he hadn’t wanted me to see. I smiled to myself, remembering I had the master in my backpack.

  Tex was so engrossed in his conversation with Eric that he didn’t see me until he was a foot away from me. “You’re at my desk,” he said.

  “Last time I looked, there weren’t assigned seats.”

  He adjusted his stack of books and leaned down. “You’re not making this easy,” he said.

  Before I could respond, Hugo entered the class. “Take your seats, everyone.” He walked to the front of the class and looked at my empty desk then looked out at the room. When he saw me talking to Tex, he frowned. “Rex, come on up to the front of the class. Let’s give Madison the night off and dissect your business tonight.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Tex said.

  “Sure, it is,” Hugo said. “We rarely get the chance to use real live businesses for discussion, and in this class we have two.”

  “Three,” Eric said. We turned to him. “I manage an events company.”

  “Yes. Be that as it may, let’s use Rex Allen’s company as our example. Rex, come on up here and give the class a thumbnail sketch of your business.”

  Tex walked to the front of the room and set his books on what had been my desk. He stood next to the dean and put his hands in his pockets. As angry as I was with him, I recognized how close he was to blowing his cover. I raised my hand. “Dean?” I called out.

  “Yes, Madison?”

  “I got a surprising amount of forward momentum based on the class discussions and would love if the class kept brainstorming about Mad for Mod.”

  “I’m sure you would,” Eric muttered loud enough for the class to hear.

  “We can talk about your business after class tonight.”

  If I gained sympathy by volunteering to take the bullet with Tex’s name on it, I’d never know. The mention of the dean meeting with me after class caused a dark cloud to pass over Tex’s features, and then his unreadable cop face slipped into place. It was like watching a person morph into a clone of themselves: there in physical presence but not in emotion.

  He stood with his feet shoulder width apart. His hands stayed in his pockets, just the fingers, and his wrists relaxed. For anyone who didn’t know him, he seemed like an everyday guy who suddenly was thrust into the spotlight. His acting wasn’t bad.

  I was so focused on Tex’s performance I didn’t realize someone had entered the room until I saw Tex stare at the doorway. I followed his stare and saw one of the homicide detectives, Ling, standing inside the door. She rapped her knuckles against the doorframe.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt your class,” she said. She moved her blazer to the side to show the badge clipped to the waistband of her black trousers. “Ling Tsu with the Lakewood Police Department. I need to talk to Madison Night, and I heard she was here.” Ling shifted her attention from Tex and Hugo at the front of the room to the rows of seated students. “Ms. Night?” she asked.

  Whether it was because I was in the back row or because Tex instructed her to pretend she didn’t already know me, she waited for me to identify myself. I raised my arm. “I’m Madison Night,” I said.

  “Can you get your things and come with me?”

  The request was routine. She was investigating Professor Gallagher’s murder, and I was the one who’d found the body. But she could have found me at any time during the day. Tex knew my schedule. This well-timed visit and request for me to leave accomplished one thing Tex wanted: it got me out of the classroom.

  I couldn’t help myself; I looked directly at him. Fortunately for both of us, Hugo was at the front of the room with him and mistook my reaction as seeking his approval.

  “Go ahead, Madison,” the dean said. “I’ll catch you up on the lesson plan when you’re done.”

  Tex stared at me. Most of the class stared at me, so Tex’s attention wasn’t suspicious. But it felt like a chess move and I was the rook. He’d maneuvered things so I was no longer in the game.

  Arguing would have raised questions I wasn’t prepared to answer, so I nodded and stood, packed my books into my bag and left. I joined Ling by the door, and she stood back and let me exit first. She turned back to the front of the room. “Thank you for cooperating,” she said. She closed the classroom door behind her.

  “Where can we talk?” she asked.

  “In here,” I said, pointing at an empty classroom.
It was the room where Ansel Benedict taught his drama course. He’d mentioned the grudge match between himself and Gallagher, but his involvement with the local theater would have kept him from teaching a course at night. I turned the knob and went inside.

  Unlike the classroom where Radical Business Strategy took place, Ansel’s room was a study in theater. Two floor-to-ceiling bookcases lined the back wall and were filled with bound scripts from classic productions. A row of mannequins in costume were positioned by the window, and the teacher’s desk was clean save for brass masks to represent comedy and tragedy. The chairs, instead of being set up in typical classroom formation toward the front, had been rearranged in a circle. One chair had a pink windbreaker draped on the back of it. College students were always leaving things behind.

  “Can they hear us?” Ling asked, pointing at the wall.

  “The professor who uses this room had it soundproofed.”

  “I’ve never heard of a classroom being soundproofed.”

  “You’ve never met Ansel Benedict.”

  She pulled out her phone and raised it to her face. “Talk to Ansel Benedict,” she said.

  “Voice memo?”

  “No. Sue’s listening in.” She held her phone up, and I saw “Sue Two” on the screen.

  “Is that ethical?”

  “Calling a friend? Sure, why not?” The sound of laughter trickled from the phone. “Captain Allen said you might put up an argument when I pulled you out of class. Sue wanted to listen in.” She held the phone close to her mouth and said, “I’ll fill you in tomorrow,” then she hung up.

  “You don’t have questions for me about Professor Gallagher’s murder, do you?” I asked. “That was just a way to get me out of the room.”

  “There are a few things you should know about Mr. Gallagher’s murder, and Captain Allen thought this was the best way to clue you in.”

  It wasn’t in Tex’s usual bag of tricks to keep me abreast of the findings in a murder investigation, and if he did want me to know what was going on, he could have told me. There was something else behind Ling’s visit.

  “Tell me what you saw when Mr. Gallagher died.”

  I recounted the memory. “There was something jammed into the tailpipe of his car. His passenger-side door wouldn’t stay closed because someone had broken into it, so I gave him my scarf to tie it down from the inside. About a minute after he did that, he slumped over his seatbelt and died.”

  “Here’s what we know from the toxicology report and early findings. Mr. Gallagher had taken a large dose of sedatives. Lloyd’s trying to establish a timeline, but the adrenaline he would have felt after finding his car vandalized would have increased blood flow and caused them to absorb faster.”

  “Then you can rule out suicide.”

  She held up her hand. “You saw something in his tailpipe. Normally, the car would have blown it out or stalled. The forensic automotive specialist discovered a hole drilled into his exhaust pipe and a hose that directed the exhaust back into the cabin of the vehicle via a second hole drilled into the floorboards.”

  I was more surprised by how on-the-nose Nasty had been with her working theory than I was with the facts themselves. I looked away from Ling and put the pieces together. “Someone rerouted the deadly emissions to the cabin of the car so he would die from asphyxiation. They drugged him ahead of time so he’d already be sleepy. But what about the vandalism? How does that play into everything? Surely if the car door wouldn’t stay closed, noxious gas fumes couldn’t build up and kill him.”

  “That’s where we’re having trouble too. If someone wanted him dead, they couldn’t predict you’d come along and offer him your scarf when you did. There might be a witness who saw what was about to go down and broke into the car to counter the effects of the gas, or a student who saw an opportunity to steal files from the professor’s car. The killer might have had second thoughts or a crisis of conscience. Right now, we’re swimming in theories.”

  “Couldn’t a witness—or a killer with second thoughts—just take the rag out of the tailpipe?”

  “That would make more sense than our theories, yes.”

  I sat silent for a moment, trying to understand the killer’s motivation. Had what happened to Gallagher been meant as a warning? Was this a scare tactic gone wrong? A murder plot with a regretful murderer? A lovers’ quarrel gone too far?

  “What now?” I asked. “The case seems far from solved.”

  “Now we shake trees and interview suspects. Captain Allen continues to work this thing from the inside.”

  “What about me?”

  “Captain Allen can’t tell you what to do, but he did want you to know from what we’ve figured out, every person in your class is under suspicion.”

  16

  I narrowed my eyes. “Are you here on official police business?” I asked Ling.

  “Let’s call it a favor for a friend.” She smiled. “Nobody wants to see you get hurt, Madison, least of all Captain Allen. He could have sent any number of detectives to the school to go undercover, but he wanted to do it himself. He has a reputation as a hard-headed dinosaur, but there’s a reason both Sue and I wanted to work for him.” She studied me for a moment and then added, “And there’s a reason you wanted to date him.”

  There was one thing you didn’t get with male cops: relationship insights.

  After the city’s first round of budget cuts castrated the Lakewood Police Department, Tex’s officers were spread too thin to get a handle on the rising crime rate. Petty crime rates rose because there weren’t enough cops to catch the perpetrators.

  Traffic violations, once considered a nuisance, became the most reliable way for police departments to meet their income quotas. Tex didn’t go that route. He networked with wealthy residents and lobbied for donations. He didn’t just solicit the old-school Dallas wealthy either. He sent his officers out into the communities that had been growing among pockets of the Lakewood/White Rock Lake community, had them get to know the residents and found out what they wanted from their police. It was a bold public relation move that paid off. His precinct gained a reputation for acceptance and tolerance, and minority-owned businesses showed their support.

  In a chicken-or-egg scenario, the donations gave him the power to recruit, and the officers who answered the call were of a new generation. In the span of five years, the Lakewood Police Department had gone from the boys’ club that drove out Nasty when she was the sole female officer to one of the most diverse in the county. Ling Tsu and Sue Niedermeyer were part of that wave, and their success was better than any recruiting tactics Tex could dream up.

  “He could have told me he was going to be here,” I said.

  “No, he couldn’t. Telling you would have compromised the investigation.”

  “But you’re telling me now,” I said.

  “I’m the officer who took your initial statement. This is a follow-up conversation.”

  It made sense, but it didn’t make me happy. “The dean is looking into giving me course credit for my business experience,” I said. “If that happens, I’ll have one class left.” I pointed at the room next to us. “And if I drop that class, I’ll be dropping out of school completely.”

  Ling leaned forward and propped her chin on her fist. “If the school gives you course credit for your experience, doesn’t that indicate you already know what they’re teaching?”

  I didn’t know how to explain the rejections from the banks or the feeling that one dumb mistake had cost me everything. I’d charged headfirst into my business, and I made it work, but because of the lawsuit, I lost my confidence. Maybe that was it.

  “Do you know I was sued?” I remembered the saying I’d heard around the precinct when the two Sues got a confession from a criminal: you’ve been Sued. “I mean, the lawsuit. You’ve heard about it, right?”

  “We all heard about it. Madison, you lost your idol, and you weren’t thinking straight. You made a mistake, and it changed things.”
She sat up straight. “My grandfather used to teach me Chinese proverbs when I was growing up. He said, ‘He who returns from a journey is not the same as he who left.’ You’re not the same person who started your company ten years ago. You probably learned more in those ten years than you ever will at this school.”

  I thanked Ling, and we left the classroom together. I was surprised to discover how loud Radical Business Strategy was once we opened the door. Ansel was right to soundproof his room; the noise level would have been disruptive to a class of would-be thespians trying to get into character.

  Ling offered to walk me out to my car. I recognized the gesture as a thinly veiled way to ensure I left the campus, and I called her out on it. “I need to talk to the dean,” I said. “If I’m going to drop out, he shouldn’t waste his time fighting to get me course credit for my experience.”

  “Good point. Take care, Madison.”

  I sat on a bench outside class and listened to the discussion. If I just wanted to learn with no obligation to pay tuition or obtain a degree, I could audit the course from the hallway. The voices carried easily. They were discussing bold business moves that had paid off big for investors.

  Again, I felt a tingle of excitement. I opened my notebook, now filled more with notes for Mad for Mod than any lectures I’d attended, and I created a sample budget. What would it look like if I bought the property next to Thelma Johnson’s house? How deep in debt would I be if I kept the storefront on Greenville Avenue too? Could I afford to transition my lone part-time employee to a salaried position and train her to run the place in my absence? Did I want that?

  It had been a long time since my creative juices were flowing, and with no place else to go, they went into my plans. It was a brain dump, pure and simple. Unconnected thoughts flowed out of me and onto the page. Pro bono work in exchange for client testimonials. Adjunct location: specialize in bathrooms and kitchens? Danish Modern? Atomic? Rent out space for local artisans? Learn skills for business: reupholstery? Solicit referrals from existing clients.