1 Picking Lemons

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1 Picking Lemons Page 4

by J. T. Toman


  “Was there a member of your faculty who disliked Edmund DeBeyer?”

  Walter snorted with laughter at the two policemen sitting on the other side of his desk. They hadn’t worked this out already? He was lowering their IQ estimate to 60.

  No. There was not “a member” of the faculty who disliked Edmund DeBeyer. However, there was “a faculty” that disliked Edmund DeBeyer. The closest thing he had to a friend was Jefferson Daniels. As he said before, they worked together.

  “How much did the faculty dislike Edmund DeBeyer?”

  Walter paused, trying to select an Edmund story that would make the situation clear.

  “Five years ago,” began Walter, “before Jefferson joined the faculty, Edmund ran for the position of Chair of the department unopposed. I was on sabbatical, in case you were wondering. Even without an opponent, Edmund lost. The by-laws state you have to get a vote to be appointed, and Edmund DeBeyer didn’t get a single one.”

  Walter could see the policemen had many more questions, but he escorted them rather impolitely out of his office. He did not have the time or inclination to provide the answers.

  Walter had been summoned to the office of the President of the University. Under any circumstances, Walter Scovill did not enjoy the company of men with more power than he. When he was on the defensive, it was intolerable.

  *****

  Stephen Choi spent the morning pacing back and forth in his small cupboard of an office. He was so confused. Yesterday was so confusing. He thought it would make everything better, but it had just muddled things in his brain. His friends had told him “confront your nemesis” and “face your troubles head on,” but it hadn’t worked out as he thought it would. Now he simply didn’t know what to do.

  Perhaps he should leave. Disappear. But that didn’t seem right somehow. He was sure running away would be frowned upon. What if he left a letter? Explaining everything. Then he could leave with a clear conscience. Better, but still...an apology. Multiple apologies. To everyone in the department. Stephen was beginning to feel like he had struck on a plan. That would atone for his actions. Then he could go.

  *****

  The President’s secretary gave Walter a pitying look. Her phone buzzed and she said “You can go in now, Professor Scovill.” Her look said, “You poor, poor thing.”

  Walter squared his shoulders. He had nothing to apologize for. A colleague had unfortunately been killed. It was a tragedy. He could talk to the President about it, man to man.

  Walter opened the heavy oak door of the President’s office and saw not one man, but three. Sitting in the office was the President, the Provost and the Dean of Arts and Sciences.

  “Walt! Take a seat!” boomed the President.

  Walter sat on the edge of a leather armchair. He hated being called Walt. Especially by someone he knew about as well as an airline ticketing agent on the phone in Bangalore. He grimaced at the President, trying to exude the required air of collegiality that he was incapable of feeling. To be fair, none of the other men in the room were invested in collaboration or team-building either, but they had perfected the art of faking it, hence their rise to prominent administrative positions within the college.

  This meeting had been called for one reason and one reason only. The death of Edmund DeBeyer had upset the administrative equilibrium at Eaton University, and all three men waiting for Walter were determined to ensure it was set right. The questions and instructions began to ricochet around the room.

  The Dean wanted to know Walter’s plan for having someone teach Edmund’s class for the rest of semester. “And what form of counseling are you offering the faculty and students, Walter? It is so important to be seen as caring, even if the therapy is crap. Get therapy dogs in for all I care. They look great on camera and everyone loves a dog-healing story.”

  The Provost was concerned about the impact on student recruitment and the faculty hiring they had planned in January. “What are your plans to overcome these issues, Walter? We need to get in a replacement for Edmund ASAP. Someone equally as notable and likely to win the Nobel. Harvard is ahead in the count, you know.”

  The President didn’t want there to be any negative impact on fundraising, or students being withdrawn by overly-concerned parents. “Now, Walt, how are we going to ensure this little incident that you have let happen doesn’t affect the bottom line for the university? Think of the endowment, son. Harvard’s still up on us by $10 billion, and, by God, I plan to overtake them during my reign.”

  Walter smiled, nodded, and murmured such phrases as “I’ll work up a plan” and “I’ll send you a memo” and “I’m so glad you asked.” All the time thinking “How can it be that you get paid five times more than I do?”

  *****

  Mary Beth went down to New York after the police allowed her to leave the office the previous night to have a special “mourning mani” done on her nails. Gone was the cheerful red of autumn. Now she was displaying a jet black, with Professor DeBeyer’s initials (P.D.) in electric pink on each nail surrounded by a heart of white tears.

  Paired with her outfit of black, knee high, shiny, vinyl boots and a Ross Dress for Less, Imitation-Designer, black mini, Mary Beth felt that today was the day that her efforts would comfort Professor Daniels into a marriage proposal.

  True to form, Jefferson stopped by just before eleven, protein shake in hand, on his way to coffee time in the faculty lounge. While Jefferson Daniels made nice with his colleagues (and their influence in getting grant money) during coffee time, caffeine never polluted his body. The rest of the faculty was happy to wash down Dunkin’ Donuts with Mary Beth’s finest brew. But Jefferson only drank protein shakes, herbal teas or wheatgrass smoothies.

  “Oh, Professor,” Mary Beth gushed, “I am so, so, so sorry. Such a dear friend. Such a great man.”

  Jefferson bowed his head in acknowledgement. “Thanks, Mary Beth,” he said somberly.

  “And it’s not like he just died, natural like. He was murdered. And we don’t know by who. Maybe, like, one of us. It’s so creepy.”

  Jefferson looked pained, but it wasn’t clear if that was from grief or Mary Beth. He patted her hand. “I’m sure it was just an Elm Grove gang thug. No one we knew or that will bother us again.”

  “The police don’t seem to think so. I guess Edmund wasn’t really a gang type. Though he could be kinda mean sometimes.”

  Jefferson, not his usual flirty self, was moving away from Mary Beth’s desk.

  “Were you questioned by the police?” asked Mary Beth, desperate to keep Jefferson a few minutes longer. “I was. They were, like, so interested. I told them that I took my lunch at noon, as usual. I walked down to Bruegger's Bagels and took the latest Stephanie Plum novel with me. I just love those books. Maybe I should be a bounty hunter. What do you think?”

  Jefferson looked like he thought he had spent too much time listening to Mary Beth.

  Unaware that reliving the events of yesterday was not the best way to console the man, Mary Beth continued recounting her tales with the police. “I told them that, just as I was finishing lunch, I saw Stephen walking towards downtown. I was sitting in Bruegger's at, like just before one. He looked so darn secretive I reckon he has a paid ‘lunch date’ at the Motel 6. I mean, the man has been here six years, and we’ve never seen a girlfriend. It’s unnatural to go that long without some nooky.”

  Jefferson interrupted the girl, suddenly interested. “What did you say about Stephen?”

  “I saw him yesterday, going downtown, at about one o‘clock.”

  “And you told this to the police?”

  “Of course. Why?”

  “No reason,” said Jefferson, thinking back to Stephen telling everyone he was in his office yesterday at one. “Please. Carry on.” He smiled an encouraging smile at Mary Beth.

  Giggling, Mary Beth continued. “Well, then I went back to my desk, as my lunch ends at one, you know. I can see, like, so much from my desk, as the window looks out on
to the street, and I can see out the door too. I don’t think people realize. I saw C.J. sitting outside in a lawn chair from, like, noon, when I left for lunch, until two. I mean, I didn’t see her the whole time, because I was off eating lunch for some of it. But she kept getting up and writing down stuff that was on the parking meters and sitting back down. Totally weird. Is that, like, really research?”

  Jefferson made consoling mutterings. Yes, some research was outrageous. And clearly useless. No, he had no idea why it was funded either.

  “Of course, I told them that I saw you,” said Mary Beth.

  Jefferson looked up. “Sorry?”

  “Going out for your run, silly. Just before I left for lunch. And I did mention that you were getting much faster, because normally it takes you like two hours to run the two loops around campus you do, but yesterday, you got back by, like, one-ten. So I said to the nice policemen, ‘That doesn’t surprise me. Professor Daniels is wonderful at everything he does. I bet he is going to become an Olympic marathon runner as well.’”

  Jefferson looked confused and then caught sight of the watch on Mary Beth’s wrist.

  Analog.

  He flashed his best smile and asked, “Mary Beth, sweetie, does the big hand point here at 1:10?” as he pointed to the ten on her watch face.

  Mary Beth scrunched up her face. “Umm. I think that’s right. Yeah. Did I do something wrong? Numbers are so darn confusing.”

  Jefferson patted her on the hand again. “No, not at all. But I’ll let the police know that I’m not trying out for the Olympic squad any time soon.”

  *****

  By one that afternoon, Walter was back at his desk, looking across at Charles Covington III. After all of this was over, Walter would appeal to the Dean for a pay increase. An extra fifty thousand dollars a year was insufficient to deal with all the hassles of being Chair. Walter knew that Charles had not turned up his hearing aids, and he was not going to spend the next forty minutes yelling at the man.

  Silently, Walter got out a piece of paper and wrote in large letters “TURN ON YOUR HEARING AIDS. WE NEED TO TALK.” He slid the paper across the desk and waited.

  Charles read the message, scowled, and finally relented.

  “Good,” said Walter. “Conversations are so much easier when both sides can hear.”

  “I’m not retiring,” Charles retorted truculently.

  “Fine. You teach economic history. It’s a meaningless subject that no one cares about. If you want to teach it, that saves me the hassle of hiring someone new. That’s not why I asked you here today.”

  Charles’s scowl deepened.

  “Charles. I need to know about the ladder,” Walter said simply.

  “What about it? It’s my ladder. It’s not hurting you.”

  “Did you bring it to work yesterday?”

  “Sure did. If you did your job properly, I wouldn’t’ve had to.”

  “What did you do with it?”

  “What business is it of yours?”

  “It was leaning against the window of a murdered man’s office. The man was murdered in my department. Now, unfortunately, because of that small detail, your ladder is my problem.”

  Charles harrumphed into his mustache. “Well, since you put it like that, I was cleaning out the leaves in the gutters. They were terribly over-full. Could’a damaged the gutters or the drains or worse still, the roof.”

  Walter stared at Charles. Leaves? There was a ladder up against the window of a murdered man’s office because of leaves? There was no point in arguing that leaves in the gutters were the job for the maintenance men. “When were you on the roof?”

  “Dunno. Before lunch, because I had lunch at home with Mildred yesterday. So I’d be guessing somewhere between eleven and midday.”

  Walter nodded. If Charles were telling the truth, the ladder was leaning up against Edmund’s window, unattended, between one and two. Anyone could have used it to get in and out of Edmund’s office. “Why didn’t you take the ladder home with you?”

  “Well, don’t be telling Mildred, but I got a touch of the vertigo while I was up on the roof, so I couldn’t finish the job. So, I just left the ladder there, went home for lunch and rested there for the afternoon as I didn’t have any teaching yesterday and figured I’d just finish up the job today.”

  Walter closed his eyes. The feelings of Charles’s wife, Mildred, were the least of his concerns. Images of the elderly professor plunging to his death from the roof because of a vertigo attack flashed before him. That was just what he needed. The Dean, the Provost and the President would definitely want to meet again, if that were to happen.

  “Charles,” Walter spoke slowly and loudly. “Do not go on the roof again. You could fall off. Let me be clear why this is so important. The injuries you would sustain are inconsequential to me and almost everyone on the planet. The damage to my career, however, would be catastrophic. That is why you need to stay on terra firma.

  “But,” Walter continued, transitioning smoothly into an effortless lie, “to make you feel better, I will make sure someone looks at those leaves. Today.”

  Charles nodded and got up from the chair slowly. As he left the room he wondered why the Lord made such nasty people. He guessed the same reason the Lord made mosquitoes. As a little reminder that we no longer live in Eden. But it sure was comforting to know that his Creator had a plan for each and every one of the Walters on this earth, and the end for them wasn’t going to be pretty.

  *****

  Tuesday afternoon had begun to fade into an early dusk when the economics faculty, or to be precise, the available faculty, began to drift slowly in for what Walter Scovill had claimed in his email to be an “urgent and important faculty meeting.” While the economics faculty at Eaton University numbered over forty at full count, once you subtracted the emeritus, those with research grants, and those on sabbatical, only twenty or so were expected to be in Elm Grove for any given semester.

  Gathering Eaton’s great thinkers for any meeting was like herding megalomaniacal cats. Each professor proclaimed it was vital that the meeting start on time, but would then arrive whenever convenient to his or her individual schedule, often thirty to forty minutes after the proceedings were slated to begin. Important research or squash games, could not be delayed because of trivial details like student complaints, the university’s latest effort to rebrand itself as an elitist college accessible to the masses, provided, of course, that the masses had a spare $80,000 a year, or, as it turned out, the death of a colleague.

  Today, Stephen strode into the conference room first, only minutes after the scheduled start time of five p.m. His panic of earlier was gone. In its place was a confident man. Why should he skulk at the back with the junior professors? He, Stephen Choi, should have been awarded tenure. He damn well was going to sit up with the tenured professors where he belonged. What was the worst thing they could do? Fire him? Stephen snorted at the irony of it.

  Walter walked in next. He was surprised to see the milkweed was sitting in the tenured faculty seating. A little Rosa Parks revolution in his final days? Well, he, Walter, was on a first name basis with the President of Eaton University. He wasn’t going to demean himself by fighting about the location of Stephen Choi’s butt.

  Walter noted with irritation that the entire faculty, excluding Stephen, was late. The fact he himself had just arrived almost twenty minutes after the hour did not lessen his irritation. It was understood that Walter’s time was invaluable. If he was not here, it was because he was somewhere else, attending to Very Important Business. Unlike his lesser colleagues, who just hadn’t learned the basic concepts of professional courtesy and punctuality.

  With the suffering air of a middle school teacher on a hot Friday afternoon, Walter approached the front of the room and began to look over his notes. He would give them ten more minutes, and then he would begin the meeting, regardless of who was in attendance.

  After just a few more minutes, the room beg
an to fill up. It appeared, unlike yesterday, at least three-quarters of the twenty or so available faculty would be in attendance today. Apparently Edmund was a bigger draw card dead than alive.

  The seats were laid out in a giant horseshoe, and the junior faculty was sitting at the back, appropriately subordinate (except, of course, for Stephen). The tenured were towards the front, laptops out. This gave the impression they didn’t have a minute to waste, an image somewhat tarnished by their frequent coffee breaks in the faculty lounge.

  In truth, faculty meetings were typically so boring that the hour was frequently spent catching up on correspondence, poking old friends on Facebook, or writing salacious emails with promises of what was to come later that evening to graduate students, research assistants, or, for the very lucky, nubile, young undergraduates. There had been a memorable six months when the younger gentlemen on the faculty had been addicted to World of Warcraft, raging wars while hunkered down in their offices throughout the day. This may have gone on indefinitely, or at least until the publication review panel met, except a faculty meeting had convened at an inopportune time. Undeterred, the bright young professors just brought their laptops with them. Cries of “oh, you dog” and “nooooo” gave the game away.

  Jefferson came in, out of breath and dressed in very short running shorts and a why-bother singlet top, dripping with sweat and drinking another one of his vile looking smoothies. He took a seat on the right-hand side of the horseshoe, at the front, next to Stephen.

  Really, that man is insufferable, thought Walter. How long does it take to towel off and put on a pair of pants? We get it. He has the body of Adonis. Not that big a deal. We all could look like that if we wanted to waste time at the gym.

  Next stomped in Charles, hearing aid volume set at zero.

  Nothing in this room worth the price of those darn expensive hearing aid batteries. Just a bunch of pussies wanting to hear themselves talk, thought Charles irritably, as he settled into a seat on the left side of the horseshoe.

 

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