He studiously stirred some sugar into his coffee. His voice was low. “As soon as I realized it, I hated him. But you see the same thing every day. Movie stars, athletes. People worship them, people copy them. People want to be an extension of somebody else’s personality. Now just imagine what the world would be like with your superman running around.”
Tanner sat there and felt the fear damming up within himself again. To a lesser extent it was exactly how he had felt on the pier. Run over, flattened, an extension of somebody else’s personality. DeFalco had done an excellent job of describing it.
DeFalco drained his coffee and made a face. “People would only come in one model then. God knows I don’t think too much of the human race sometimes but I would be willing to kill a man to avoid that.”
Tanner studied him carefully. “Would you be willing to kill him if I told you who it was?”
DeFalco stared at him and Tanner felt his teeth want to chatter; he gripped the table to keep his hands from shaking. The intense dark eyes and the sullen, brooding face.
And behind it … ?
“You know, I suppose.”
“I think John Olson knows. I think that’s why Olson was scared to death yesterday morning.”
DeFalco’s face showed nothing. “So all we have to do is ask John, is that what you’re driving at?”
“That’s right. That’s all we have to do.”
“You haven’t run into Marge or Petey or Karl or any of the others today, have you?”
“I haven’t been around.”
“Well, you won’t be able to ask John Olson about it. Not tonight or tomorrow or any time.”
He suspected what was coming. “Why not?”
DeFalco’s voice was flat.
“Because John died at three o’clock this morning.”
4
HE checked in at the neighborhood YMCA early Sunday night, when there were still people on the streets.
The night clerk was a little too prim and uncooperative. “I don’t know, sir. We don’t ordinarily rent rooms to people without baggage.”
“It’s only for one night. I … haven’t any other place to stay.”
The clerk’s eyebrows arched slightly and Tanner guessed what the man was thinking. He could try to bribe him, he thought, but it would be expensive and the clerk impressed him as the type who would scream for the police.
“My wife,” he said, looking sheepish. “We had an argument and you know how it is. Locked out and I don’t want to call the cops and let the whole neighborhood know. By morning it’ll probably blow over but right now …”
The clerk studied him a moment longer, then relented. He passed over a card for Tanner to sign and took a key off the rack behind him.
“It’s on the sixth floor. Bathroom down the hall and there’s a telephone by the stairway.”
He took the elevator up and padded down the deserted hallway to his room. He went in, locked the door and jammed a chair in front of it. Then he switched off the light and stood to one side of the window, staring down at the street below. A few couples drifting by on the sidewalk, two or three customers in the delicatessen on the corner. But nobody in the shadows across the street, watching. Nobody in a parked automobile looking up at his window.
He opened the box of sleeping tablets and juggled one in his hand, debating whether or not he should take it. He was dead tired but he had so much on his mind that he wouldn’t be able to sleep without it. Then it occurred to him that once asleep he might be easy prey for the questing mind that had almost driven him off the pier.
But nobody knew he was staying at the Y, did they?
It’s a gamble, he thought. They could check his apartment and once they discovered he wasn’t there, it wouldn’t take too much trouble to track him down. But on the other hand he had already been one whole night without sleep and he was riding the rim of nervous exhaustion. He couldn’t last it out another evening.
He took the pill.
When he awoke in the morning it was with a splitting headache and a confused recollection of a nightmare about the lake.
But the important thing was he was still alive.
He was jittery, he didn’t want to go back to the campus. But there were classes to be taught and a salary to earn and in broad daylight his courage was several notches higher. And he didn’t want to give in to the fear that he felt.
There were the same gray, gothic buildings and the same tired ivy crawling up them but somehow the campus was different. It wasn’t hard to put his finger on it. The difference was in the students. Little knots of quietly gossiping collegians fell silent and stared at him with a bright-eyed curiosity as he walked past. A few feet away the whispers started up again and he knew they were rehashing every time he had said something to or about John Olson.
Whether he liked it or not, he was going to wear Olson around his neck like an albatross. Olson had been on his committee and Olson had been about the same age, so it would naturally be assumed that he had known Olson fairly well.
And that was one of the rubs. He had known Olson hardly at all.
Petey was sitting at her desk in his shoe-box office on the third floor, staring stonily out the window. Her hands were folded in her lap and her face looked as if it had been hewn from granite. Her hair had been pulled back into an even tighter bun than usual and she was wearing a black dress with a high, starched collar and long sleeves. The only touch of color was in the two pink, plastic combs in her hair, and that just made the rest of her seem more forbidding.
Petey in mourning, Tanner thought, looking ten years older than she actually was.
“You didn’t have to come down, Petey.”
“What else could I have done?” Her voice was mechanical and precise, without inflection. “There was nothing I could do at home or over at the Van Zandts’. The police told me that. So I came up here.”
He wondered what she was actually seeing, staring out the window. Not the scenery, he was sure of that.
“I wish I could think of something clever and sympathetic, Petey. I guess all I can say is that I’m sorry.”
“Everybody’s sorry,” she said slowly. “It’s too bad that people don’t feel sorrier for each other when they’re alive.”
Tanner felt uncomfortable. “I didn’t know John very well.”
“Nobody did.”
“How did it happen? Do the police have any leads?”
She turned away from the window. “Leads?”
“Leads on who killed your brother,” he said, watching her face carefully.
The look of granite crumbled at the edges. “Who said anything about John being killed?”
He felt like he was in one of those conversations where you talk with somebody for ten minutes and then discover that each of you is talking about something else. But it shouldn’t have been like that this time, he thought. They should have been talking about the same thing.
About who had murdered John Olson.
“Tell me about it, Petey.”
She wet her lips. “I don’t know too much about it. Susan Van Zandt found him—the body—at seven in the morning. He had set the alarm so he could go to Mass and it went off and rang and kept on ringing. When nobody turned it off, Susan went up and knocked on the door. There wasn’t any answer so she used her key and went on in.”
While she was talking, Petey tightened her fingers around a crumpled wad of handkerchief, twisting the cloth until Tanner thought she would tear it. Her fingers looked thin and hard and scrawny.
“John had been sitting at his desk, writing a letter. He never finished it. He was slumped in his chair, half lying on the desk. Later on, the police said he had been dead for four hours, that he had died at three in the morning.”
“Stop it, Petey. I’m sorry I asked you.”
“The detective said there had been no struggle,” she continued with a horrible, dry-eyed composure. “John hadn’t been shot or knifed or blackjacked or strangled, he had just
…”
“Petey, do you have any friends who might be home today?”
The starched face nodded silently.
“Then take the day off and go and see them. Come back whenever you feel up to it. Next week, maybe two weeks …”
After she had left, he went to the window and stared out, trying to regain his sense of proportion. There was the green grass three stories below, the ivy that trailed up the broken brick to frame his one window, and the small, industrious spider that had cast its web in the upper left-hand corner. Two flies buzzed futilely just outside the pane: the first signs of summer. In a nearby tree, a squirrel chittered angrily at him and on the lawn below, a student stretched out to doze and forget the worlds of Chaucer and Shakespeare.
There was nobody watching the building, nobody at all.
He brewed himself a cup of scorching hot, black coffee, then went to class and lectured to a suddenly wide-awake audience that was far more interested in the death of John Olson than in anthropology. He bluntly parried questions about it, dismissed the class, and went to lunch.
Early in the afternoon he dropped in on Susan Van Zandt.
The house that John Olson had died in was an old-fashioned, white clapboard affair that had been built around the turn of the century. It was a landmark the university had acquired in a will and promptly turned into a faculty home. It was set far back on a huge corner lot. Two oak trees stood sentry duty near the front walk while a small row of shrubs ringed the sides of the house. The shrubs were a tired, speckled green, dusted with small flakes of white paint that had chalked and run off the clapboards during the rainy season.
The interior of the house looked incomplete. A wall had been knocked out between the living and the dining rooms to make one room that was much too large for the furniture it contained. Worn oak flooring showed at the edges of a large, floral-patterned rug that hadn’t been quite big enough. It barely crept under the edges of a sagging sofa by the window and lapped just over the edge of the brick apron of a fireplace that had been painted white in an attempt to make it look modernistic. A black-oak tea table sprawled in front of the sofa, half hidden beneath dog-eared magazines and a square, glass ash tray that had been emptied but not washed so a fine crust of gray ash still clung to the bottom.
A desk stood by the fourth wall, under guard of a straight-backed, wooden chair with a hand-hooked woolen seat cushion of roses against a background of blue. Next to the desk, along the wall, was a radiator with a tin cover, green paint peeling in spots. A small coffee tin of stagnant water stood on top of it.
A lived-in, rumpled room that somehow reminded Tanner of Susan Van Zandt herself.
She had let him in, smiled a dutiful smile, and relaxed gratefully back on the couch. She still had her bathrobe on and Tanner knew there would be dust on the mantel, dishes in the sink, and an icebox full of slowly souring leftovers. Her thick, brown hair wasn’t brushed and her eyes had the faintest suggestion of circles beneath them. She had been slim and attractive at one time, he thought, but after marriage she had slipped easily into an early middle age and had let motherhood coarsen her. She hadn’t regretted either one.
“I don’t think John ever roomed anyplace else,” she said nervously. “Central Housing sent him over here as soon as he showed up on campus. I think he always liked it here.” She waved her hand around the room. “It’s comfortable and then he had his own key and could come and go as he pleased.”
“Did he ever go out much?” Tanner asked. “Did he ever have any friends that he went out drinking with, anything like that?”
“No, he never had many friends.”
He lit his pipe and toyed with the match a moment before letting it fall into the tray. “The night he died. Had he had any visitors earlier that evening? Anybody who might have stayed behind for a good part of the night?”
“No, I don’t recall any. He went out for a walk and when he came in he told Harold and myself that he was tired, that he was going to do some reading and write a letter or two.”
“Sue.” He hesitated a moment, wondering how he should phrase it. “Do you know if anybody on campus hated him enough to kill him?”
The heavy-lidded eyes flew open. “Oh, no. He wasn’t killed. The police said there were no signs of a struggle or a fight. He had been writing a letter when it … happened.”
“Can I see the room?”
She pulled her faded bathrobe tighter around her stomach and led the way to the second floor. Olson’s room was a door down from the bathroom. She worked a key in the lock. “I don’t know why I keep it locked up like this but the police asked me not to touch anything and I guess this is the best way.” She was suddenly doubtful. “Maybe I shouldn’t let you in.”
“Don’t worry, Sue, I won’t disturb anything.”
She opened the door and he walked in. The windows were closed and the room smelled a little musty. Sunlight slanted through faded curtains, highlighting a miniature of the downstairs rug and a small, blue throw rug by the side of the bed. The bed was neatly made, the pink, tufted chenille spread smooth and unwrinkled.
“Did you make up the bed?”
“No, I guess he just didn’t sleep in it.”
“About what time did he get in?”
“About an hour after you called. Midnight, I guess. Van and I were watching TV”
John Olson had come in at midnight and died at three, Tanner reasoned. For three hours he had sat in his room—doing what? And then he had put on his bathrobe and sat down to write a letter. To whom? And what about?
One thing was almost certain, however. He could eliminate Van. It was hardly likely that Olson would be living in the same house if Van …
Or was it? Van Zandt had been watching Olson like an eagle in the seminar room. Waiting for Olson to say something? To give him away?
He glanced at his watch and breathed a little easier. Van Zandt had classes all afternoon; he wouldn’t be around.
“Is the letter still here, Sue?”
“No, the police lieutenant has it. I … never got a look at it.”
He glanced around the room again. A small, oak bureau with a dust-soiled dresser scarf on it. A desk by one side of the window, a half-open closet door showing a few hangers with a drab gray suit, a gray topcoat, and a rack of small-figured, dullties.
There was a blue blanket tacked on the wall over the desk. In the middle of it was a large gold felt “B,” with “Basketball” embroidered on it in small blue script.
It didn’t fit.
“I never knew John went in for sports. He never seemed like the type.”
“I don’t think he was, either. He never talked about them and never seemed to have any interest in them.”
“But he still won a letter in basketball.”
She was standing by the window looking out into the back yard. She was watching her two boys play in the yard, he guessed. Already John Olson was fading when compared to the really important things in her life.
“It doesn’t add up, does it?” she said absently.
Tanner walked over to the desk. It was a plain desk, varnished a dark, almost black, color. A photograph on top caught his eye. It was a picture of Olson and Petey at a faculty picnic earlier in the spring. Petey was, as usual, a little too carefully dressed for a picnic. But at least she was smiling at the camera and with what seemed like a genuine smile.
Her brother wasn’t smiling. But then John Olson never had, as long as he could remember. A plump, serious face with strands of blond hair hanging limply over his high forehead. A suggestion of a slouch in his shoulders and he could even tell from the photo that Olson was pale and soft under his sport shirt. He guessed that John had been worried about getting sunburned and was getting ready to give Petey hell for having dragged him out there.
“Do you know much about him, Sue? Much about his background?”
She tore herself away from the window and walked over to the chair to sit down, the robe swaying against her flanks
and her slippers making small slapping sounds against the rug.
“Give me a cigarette, Bill.” He gave her one and lighted it. “He came from a small town in South Dakota. Brockton, I think. His people were farmers. He lived there until he was eighteen when he went away to college.”
“That doesn’t tell me much about him.”
She spread her hands. “That’s all I know. He never talked much about himself.”
“He had a pretty cold personality. Any reason why?”
She closed her eyes and frowned, as if trying to remember were hard work and she wasn’t quite up to it. “Who knows? I think maybe somebody hurt him when he was young. I always got the impression that the only real emotion he felt for anybody was hatred for somebody back in his home town.”
“Did he ever talk much about it?”
“I told you he never talked about himself at all.”
“Anything else?”
“Nothing moved him very much,” she said finally. “Other people’s problems didn’t interest him at all, probably because he was so wrapped up in his own. He was … cold … and he had no sense of humor. And I think he was frightened of something.”
“Any idea what of?”
“No, except it was some person. Maybe the same person in his home town that he hated. And I could be wrong on that score, too.”
He looked around the room again. Dusty little room. The bed, the bureau, and the bookcase, shelves jammed with textbooks. If you went away for a day and let the dust settle you wouldn’t think anybody had lived in it for years.
“Was he pretty much the intellectual?”
“Yes and no. He was interested in psychology, but then that was his field. I would say he was more interested in the offbeat side, though. Hypnotism, things like that.” She walked over to the window again and ran her fingers slowly down the curtains. “I’m sorry that he’s dead.”
It was the thing to say, Tanner realized. But he hoped when he died and somebody said it, that they would say it with more emotion.
Power, The Page 4