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That Sleep of Death

Page 5

by Richard King


  Julian gave him a crisp military nod and strode off. He made a special point of stopping to say goodbye to Arlene, and I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but there were lots of smiles exchanged and I think he patted her hand as he took his leave.

  Casting a last glance over my shoulder at my friend Harold’s office, which I would probably never see the inside of again, I saw the cop closing the door and starting to tack up yellow passage-interdit tape across it.

  Arlene was sitting at her desk, pretending to be deeply absorbed in some papers she was typing into her computer. She looked harried. Her morning at a crime scene had taken its toll. Her normally well-coiffed hair was in disarray, probably from running her fingers through it nervously. Gaston went over and stood in front of her desk. Unwillingly, with her fingers on the keyboard, she looked up. “We’ll need your assistance, Ms. Ford,” he said. “No one is to go into that office. Will you see that they don’t?”

  She gave him the briefest of nods, and began to turn away.

  “And I’d like to ask you a few questions. It won’t take more than five minutes.”

  “Okay,” she said with a tone of resignation in her voice. It seemed that the hostility was finally draining out of her.

  I took up a position on the opposite side and behind her, leaning against the wall. Present, but not intrusive, out of the line of direct visibility.

  “What time was it when you arrived at the building this morning?”

  “Around nine, maybe a bit after, just like every other morning.”

  “Was there anyone else here when you came in?”

  “No. Well, just Sarah and Allan. Sarah Bloch and Allan Gutmacher. They are graduate students here. I saw them in the common room having a coffee when I walked by.” She pointed to a room just off the main entrance to the history department.

  “I thought you said the coffee had not been prepared?”

  “They brought their own. The graduate students tend not to drink the department coffee. There’s an etiquette problem. They worry that if they start making coffee it will become their job to do it every morning. Some of the professors are pretty arrogant and tend to treat graduate students like servants. So they bring their own coffee in and avoid the problem altogether.”

  “I see,” said Lemieux. “Are they always in that early?”

  “Only on Mondays and Fridays when they have ten o’clock seminars.”

  “Did you see anybody else?”

  “I did pass Jane Miller in the corridor. But she was walking away from the department. Probably heading to her office.”

  “Do you mean that she could have been coming from here?”

  “There’s no way I could tell that. The corridor outside the history department — that corridor,” she said, pointing out the department office’s door, “cuts across the hallway where the professors’ offices are.” Gaston and I both looked. We could see what she meant. Traffic in that corridor could come from three directions.

  “Does she teach here?”

  “Yes. She’s married to the dean of graduate studies, Fred More.”

  Gaston thought for a minute, then asked, “Do you feel up to giving me a statement now?” Indicating the common room, he continued, “Could we do it in there? Or would you rather wait?”

  Arlene stared at us for a while. She was obviously trying to decide which was the lesser evil: talk to him now and get it over with or put it off and have to face it later. Finally she sighed and said, “All right. But give me a few minutes. I want to freshen up and make the coffee. No one ever did make the coffee.”

  “I can do that for you,” I said, trying to be helpful and also to ensure that I would be included in the questioning of Arlene Ford. “Just show me where the stuff is.”

  While he waited for Arlene to return from the ladies’ room, Lemieux talked to the cop on duty, and I went into the common room. At the far end there was a counter with a coffee pot, coffee makings and a small bar sink. Most of the room was taken up by a large conference table. I noticed that there were two brown bags on the table and two empty, or almost empty cardboard coffee containers from the Second Cup café. I wondered what was in the bags so I took a peek and I found that each of the two bags contained another, unopened coffee from Second Cup. These cups were full, untouched and quite cold.

  “A lot of people try to avoid making coffee around here,” I mumbled to myself. Just as I finished making the coffee, I realized the significance of the four cups at the other end of the table. I called Gaston into the room and showed him what I had discovered and quickly explained what I thought the cardboard cups signified.

  “I’m sure the secretary said that the two graduate students were drinking coffee here when she walked in at nine o’clock. That would explain the two empty cups. But the two full cups mean that they arrived at different times, each bringing a coffee for the other, which means that for a while, one of them was here alone with Hilliard.”

  “… and therefore could have murdered him,” Gaston finished my thought. He stepped out of the room and beckoned to the CSU cop. A couple of seconds later he was taking a bunch of Polaroids of the table with the bags and cups on it, just the way I had found them. Lemieux then carefully removed the cups from the bags and had the cop take some more pictures of them. He then gave all of it to the CSU cop to take away with him.

  Just before the CSU cops left, Gaston called his forces over for an impromptu staff meeting — a staff dressing down as it turned out. Lemieux told them, in a clipped, cold tone of voice, that he expected nothing less than total professionalism from them at all times. He did not really care who they liked and didn’t like so long as they did their jobs properly, at all times, without gossiping about the department in public places. He considered it a lapse of police discipline for them to chat about it where members of the public might hear. That included times when they were standing guard or packing their equipment or whatever. In other words, Gaston had overheard their conversation criticizing him for not being one of the guys.

  The cops mumbled something about being sorry but I could tell from the hostility in their eyes that this exchange only proved to them that what they thought about Lemieux was correct and they would soon be reporting this tantrum to their friends and colleagues.

  I thought maybe Gaston was overreacting, and I was having a hard time reconciling this military-sounding commander with the thoughtful, humorous person I knew. But I also knew how serious he was about discipline and the chain of command. I was beginning to see how the police force functioned. And that a thoughtful loner with an intellectual bent, like Gaston, would have to develop a pretty tough shell of some kind to prosper in such an environment.

  Ignoring their hostility, Gaston asked the CSU team what they had found in the way of prints. He was told that they had found more than enough to keep them busy trying to sort them out and make identifications for weeks. The leader of the team gave Gaston a brief run-down of where they had looked for prints in addition to Hilliard’s office. They had checked all the other offices and discovered that the doors were locked. Fingerprints were taken from all the door handles. It was unclear what they expected to find but at least they would have prints for comparison purposes. Finally, they gave the common room the once-over. The place must have been cleaned the night before because they found very few prints on the table and none on the coffee-making equipment.

  “So, what you are saying,” Gaston summarized, “is that there were lots of people in that office at various times and it will be difficult to determine who was there when. Correct?”

  “Oui. Vous avez raison,” he was told. “Mais nous allons faire notre possible.”

  Lemieux dismissed his troops and turned to stand in doorway to the common room; I was just inside. He turned to me and said, “Too many fingerprints are as bad as too few. But those coffees may be significant.”

  I was living a boyhood fantasy — playing cops and robbers, with real police. It had occurred to me that Le
mieux probably first approached me to help him collect and interpret evidence because on the face of it, it did seem that I might be involved in the murder. If I had been the murderer he would have to trick me into revealing myself somehow, and it would be better for him to keep me convinced I wasn’t a suspect. But I was pretty sure that he didn’t seriously think I killed Hilliard, and I was part of the investigation now. I wasn’t going to let him out of my sight if I could avoid it. I was having fun — and not only that, I wanted to be sure that suspicion didn’t fall on me again.

  Arlene Ford came into the common room just as the coffee was finished. “That smells good,” she said. “And I need another cup right now.”

  Seizing the chance to be of service (and to stay to listen to Gaston question her) I rushed over to the counter and said, “Sit down and I’ll get you a cup. How do you take it? You like yours black, don’t you?” I added, looking at Lemieux, who had just entered.

  He sighed, sat down at the table and said, “Yes, black, thank you.”

  “Milk, please,” Arlene told me and I poured coffee for them and a cup for myself and took a place in the corner of the room.

  Arlene looked a lot better, more relaxed. She had brushed her hair and pulled it back in a ponytail. We could see her not-blond roots but we also saw that she had washed her face and not replaced her heavy make-up. She was prettier without it. Her smile seemed more natural, less forced without the faded lipstick. She also smelled delicious: a tantalizing combination of spice and musk. I wanted to compliment her on her scent but I thought better of it. She also seemed to have come to terms with the fact that her unpleasant morning would turn into an unpleasant afternoon unless she made the best of the situation. I could see in her grey eyes that she had decided that she had no real choice but to answer questions and that she had best co-operate and get it over with.

  Gaston settled in his chair and said to Ms. Ford, “Okay. Let’s begin.”

  “I already told the other police what happened.”

  “I know. But I’m going to want more details. I need to know more about the victim. To start: Do you hap pen to know his address? I’m going to want to search his apartment.”

  “It’s 3519 Lefebvre, just a couple of blocks up the hill. His apartment is on the top floor.”

  “Thank you,” Lemieux said and made a note of it. That was interesting. I knew he had looked at Hilliard’s correspondence tray and his university staff emergency information and was already well aware of the professor’s home address. “How long had you known Professor Hilliard?”

  “I started working here about twelve years ago and he was here when I started so I’ve known him for twelve years.”

  “Was he well liked? Did his students like him?”

  “His students? No, I wouldn’t say he was popular with his students. He was impatient and never forgot that he was the professor and had authority over them. He never made any effort to be friendly with his students — with most of them anyway. He was a hard marker and rough on the kids who tried to hand their assignments in late. If one of them left a paper for him with me I had to write the date and time I received it on the first page so no one could slip a late paper in on him.”

  “What did you mean when you said that he made no effort to be friendly with his students, ‘most of them, anyway’? Did he have some friends amongst the students?”

  “Friends?” Arlene repeated the word as if she wasn’t sure of its meaning. “No, I don’t think he had any students as friends, exactly.”

  Lemieux, zeroing in on the way she emphasized the words “friends” and “exactly” and he asked, “Well, did he have any kind of relationships with any of his students, other than professional? Any kind at all?”

  “I don’t think I should answer that question. There are rumours, but that’s all.”

  I could see Gaston’s eyes focus tightly on Arlene. His question hit a target. It was not yet clear how many points he was going to get. “Rumours won’t hurt him now and they may help the investigation. You do want to help, don’t you?”

  “Yes. But, well, oh, OK. He made no effort to be friendly with most of his students but he did try to get very friendly with some of his women students.”

  “I didn’t think teachers still did that.” I remarked, remembering my own student days in a less sensitive time. “Wasn’t he afraid of being charged with harassment?”

  “If he was he never showed it. I don’t know if he was ever charged with anything. He was careful in that he never tried anything here, in his office.”

  “Then how do you know that he came on to his female students?” I asked. I thought I knew Harold pretty well, as a customer, at any rate. But I did not know the person Ms. Ford was describing, and I began to wonder whether her hostility to him had some basis in her own feelings.

  “Certain of his women students would visit him in his office and then go out with him for a meal or coffee. They never spent all that long in his office but coffee breaks could take a long time and who knows what happened when they met him late in the day as he was leaving? I’m pretty sure he was up to something with some of them — and I’m not the only one who thinks so. He had a reputation.”

  Arlene was looking down at her hands as she told us this but now she glanced up, first at Gaston, then at me. Maybe to see whether we believed her. I tried to keep the skepticism off my face. Hilliard was undoubtedly demanding as a customer and I supposed that was the way he was as a person and a scholar, but he had always seemed to me to be a fair-minded sort of fellow, not the self-absorbed predator that Arlene Ford made him out to be. I made a mental note to share my suspicions with Gaston.

  “Was he involved with anyone at the moment?” he was asking her now.

  “I don’t think so. For a while I thought that he was interested in Sarah Bloch. But I was sure she wouldn’t break up with her boyfriend, and she didn’t.”

  “Sarah. Who was here this morning?” Lemieux asked, flipping back through his notes.

  “Yes. Sarah Bloch and her boyfriend Allan. They’re graduate students and teaching assistants here. I already told you.”

  “Did he have any interest in women closer to his own age?”

  “I don’t think so. Not since Jane Miller at any rate.”

  “Jane Miller? That’s another familiar name.” Lemieux had his thumb in his notebook where he had recorded the names of the people he would be wanting to see the next day and he flipped back to that page and said, “She’s the other person who was here this morning. Seems strange that three people who had some kind of relationship with the deceased were here early this morning. Tell me about his relationship with Jane Miller.”

  “Well, he actually seemed serious about her. She was an undergraduate here and after she got her PhD at the University of Toronto he was instrumental in getting her her job. The department does not like to hire its graduates for their first jobs. It prefers that they get some experience elsewhere. Jane is really ambitious and she got Harold to help her. He was chair of the hiring committee and made a strong case for her. The committee went along with it. They seemed very involved with each other. We all thought they might even get married.

  They started going out soon after she started here full time and they were together for about two years. They seemed to love each other almost as much as they loved themselves and their careers, and believe me that’s saying something. Then about two years ago they suddenly broke up and Jane started dating Fred More. She married him about a year and a half ago. Harold changed after that. He was always pretty arrogant and self-centred. He thought his Harvard PhD made him superior to everyone else. After he broke up with Jane he got even harder to deal with. He went back to his old ways of hitting on the women students. And also, that’s about the time the rumours about Jane started.”

  “Rumours?” Lemieux prompted.

  “Yes. Suddenly there were these rumours that she had stolen, you know plagiarized, part of her thesis. No one really believed them, but
things like that can really hurt someone’s career. I suspected Harold was the source — to get even with Jane. Hell hath no fury like a man scorned, right?” She gave a dry chuckle at her own weak joke.

  “I see. So now we have three possible motives. Love, unrequited or over-requited, jealousy, or robbery.”

  “Robbery?” asked Arlene.

  “The computer,” responded Gaston. “His computer is missing. Can you describe it?”

  “It’s just a laptop. It’s white, Japanese, Toshiba, I think. He jokingly called it Clio. I think he wrote Clio on the top of the case.”

  “Cleo? Like Cleopatra?” asked Lemieux.

  “Not Cleopatra; the goddess of history.” Arlene explained.

  “She was the muse of history. It’s spelled C-l-i-o.” I piped in.

  “Very clever,” Gaston commented. He turned to Arlene and said, “You’ve told me a bit about his relations with some of the people around here and how his students felt about him. Can you tell me how his colleagues saw him?”

  “Well, other professors liked him a lot better than the students did. Male professors, that is. Women didn’t trust him. Men were a little in awe of him. He had a Harvard PhD and he published lots of articles and book reviews. He was extremely good at getting grant money so he could do research in France. His field was the French Revolution. And even though he was full of himself his male colleagues tended to think highly of him. It’s a guy thing I guess.”

  “I take it that you didn’t think much of him.”

  Arlene looked at Gaston for a minute or two before she responded, as if she was trying to decide how to answer the question. Finally she took a deep breath, exhaled it, then said, “Look, he’s dead and I don’t want to say things about him when he can’t defend himself. But I didn’t think much of a forty-two-year-old professor who tried to take advantage of his women students. Some of them were only eighteen years old. He could be a real sleaze. You said you had three motives for killing him. Forget robbery. No one would have killed anyone for that computer. Maybe you should be looking for a husband or boyfriend of one of his women … friends. I’m sorry,” she said softly. “It’s been an awful day. Someone I worked with for twelve years has just been murdered and I’ve said some horrible things about him. It’s too much. I want to go home.”

 

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