Passion Play

by W. Edward Blain

  “Conversation,” said the coach. “What kind of conversation can you give me for something to wear? Something basic. We’re talking about getting back to the basics here.”

  “Coach McPhee—”

  “I need to talk to somebody,” said Coach McPhee. His voice was calm and level, and he was looking straight at Thomas as if they were having a theme conference in the classroom. But his face was still wet from perspiration.

  Thomas felt his own hair drip down his back. He continued to dry himself as the coach talked.

  “I’ve chosen you to talk to,” he said, “because we know each other. I used to talk to my wife, but she left. You knew that, didn’t you? Did you know that I went to Boston over the Thanksgiving holidays to see her? I flew from Washington all the way to Boston to see my wife and to talk to her, just to talk to her, and she wouldn’t listen. She wanted to do all the talking herself. She’s like you kids here, you guys talk a lot when you have a problem, but you never want to listen to anybody.”

  Thomas was dry now. He could feel a cold drop of sweat roll down his ribs, and he shivered. What kind of game was the coach playing?

  “All right,” said Coach McPhee. “Put on your underwear.” He threw the boxers at Thomas. They landed on his chest, where he grabbed them and quickly put them on. Then he put his towel on the bench and moved for the rest of his clothes.

  “Not so fast,” said Coach McPhee. “I’m not finished with my story. Did I tell you already we’re the only ones in the building? Dan Farnham used to live here, but he’s away now. He got arrested for killing Cynthia Warden and Robert Staines and Russell Phillips and that boy in the movie theater in New York. I never knew that boy’s name.”

  Why was he going through all this old business? Thomas felt his face go hot with dread. He was about to learn something terrible. He stood still in the locker room and listened.

  “The mind is a delicate thing,” said Coach McPhee. He picked up Thomas’s jeans from the bench and flicked the zipper. Thomas remembered the knife he had in the pocket.

  “A very delicate thing,” said McPhee again. “The rational part sometimes succumbs to the emotional part. My wife in Boston was very emotional. She was not rational at all. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Yes sir,” said Thomas. “I understand.”

  “Reason gives way to passion,” said McPhee. “My wife would not listen to reason. She said that she was going to leave me because of my abuse of her son. She said that I hit him too hard. Did you know my stepson?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Did you ever know him to have any bruises? Did he ever look unhappy to you?”

  Thomas could remember the broad-shouldered, pimply, quiet boy with the scraggly blond hair and the nervous eyes who turned away whenever you walked up to him and tried to talk. At lunch in the dining hall he would sit by himself.

  “Did you ever see him looking the least bit unhappy?” said McPhee again.

  “Yes sir,” Thomas said. Maybe he should have lied. But he had told himself that he was not going to lie anymore.

  To Thomas’s relief, McPhee said he was not surprised to hear that.

  “Michael was undisciplined. He was spoiled,” said Coach McPhee. “His mother spoiled him before I met her, before we were married. I told Angus about it. He was never married himself, old Angus. I never met my stepson until he was fourteen years old. By then it was too late. Diane had spoiled him. Discipline is a tough form of love, don’t you think?”

  “Yes sir.” Thomas just wanted to forget all this, to put on his clothes and get out of here. It was way after 6:00. Would anybody miss him at the Somervilles’ tea and come looking?

  “We disagreed over how to train that boy. Diane was too easy on him. I know the kinds of urges that young boys feel, and I know how dangerous they are. You need to discipline those urges out of them. You need to keep the filth out of their minds. Diane used to take him into town for Sunday night meetings at the church. And why? So that he could meet girls. Can you imagine? The boy’s own mother contributing to his corruption?”

  Thomas said he found it tough to imagine the Sunday night youth group at the Presbyterian church in Montpelier to be all that lurid an evening. Coach McPhee was not interested.

  “One day this past Thanksgiving break I found Michael in his room with a girl,” he said. “I blew up. In my own home on this very campus, this stepson of mine had imported some female playmate. I suppose I did shout at him. Is that so bad? Does your father ever shout at you?”

  Thomas said yes.

  “Diane wouldn’t listen to reason,” said McPhee. “She defended them. She said they were doing nothing wrong. But that was typical of a mother, don’t you think? To defend her child? She said they were simply having an innocent visit in a quiet place. But in his room? They were fully dressed, yes, at that point they were dressed, but they were touching each other. She was sitting in a chair in Michael’s room, and Michael was brushing her hair.”

  Thomas felt as though he ought to understand how serious that was, but he could not.

  “So after I hit him, Diane took him with her to Boston,” said Coach McPhee. “I was wrong to hit him, I admit it. So I flew to Boston to apologize and to ask her to come home, for both of them to come home. And they refused. They simply refused. I was humiliated, and I sold my plane ticket and went to New York. I got a ticket for the biggest, loudest musical I could find. It was terrible, nothing but noise and spectacle. I know a lot about theater, you know. I was an English major in college. I would have graduated with distinction if one professor hadn’t hated my honors thesis.”

  “Yes sir.” Thomas could not see why he needed to hear all this right now, but if Coach McPhee wanted to talk, he would listen.

  “You see, the traditional way of reading the story of Adam and Eve is that Eve tempted Adam into sin. But I don’t believe it was Eve’s fault. Women can’t help being sensual or attractive. That’s just the way they are. It’s up to the man to maintain control, to hang on to his self-discipline, to resist the temptation. I argued in my thesis that Adam could have lived forever in paradise if he hadn’t wanted Eve to be anything more than a companion. That’s all Diane and I were. We lived in separate bedrooms. I insisted, because to have been in the same room with her I may have been tempted, like Adam. And then Michael the serpent came along and ruined everything. It was perfect companionship until we argued over him. I dreamed one night about breaking his neck and throwing him off the gym roof.”

  A dreadful suspicion shook Thomas, a suspicion so inconceivable that he could not articulate it. Farnham was the killer, wasn’t he? Farnham was the one they arrested. Farnham was the one with the bad temper and the bloodlust. Not someone else?

  “When I saw the boy outside the movie theater in New York he reminded me of my stepson a little. Or maybe not. Maybe he reminded me of somebody else. This boy in New York was performing unspeakable sex acts for money, and when I saw him, I don’t know, I just went after him. I was going to stamp out sexuality at its source—not the females, they can’t help it, but the males, the undisciplined adolescent males. I twisted his neck. And you know, I imagined that I had solved a problem for just a little while. Put on your pants.”

  He threw the jeans to Thomas, who missed the catch. He was trembling, though he was not even conscious of being afraid, only of needing to flee. Maybe he could break the glass in the door and get out that way. What could he use? Everything in the locker room seemed to be bolted down. He fumbled for his trousers and felt for the knife as he pulled the jeans up over his boxers.

  “Are you missing this?” said McPhee, who reached into his own hip pocket and pulled out Thomas’s knife. He flipped open the largest blade. “You have to be careful with these little pocketknives,” he said. “You can cut in only one direction. If you try to pull the blade back and forth, it will close on you.” He lunged forward and grabbed Thomas’s towel off the bench. McPhee punctured the towel with the knife and pulled th
e blade along for a few inches.

  “It’s sharp,” he said. “That’s good.” He threw the towel onto the floor.

  “Do you understand what kind of danger you are in?” he asked.

  “Yes sir.” Thomas sobbed once, trying to fight off the tears. He understood all at once that he was going to be killed here by a man who he had thought was his friend.

  SCENE 8

  At a few minutes past 6:00 in the evening Carol Scott stood in the living room of the Homestead and told the Somervilles what they had found.

  “It’s not a long tunnel,” she said, “maybe twenty feet. It probably does come out in the boiler room of the gymnasium, but I can’t get through. The other side seems to be sealed off the way yours was. We can search for the door on the gym side before we resort to breaking it down. Whoever did it must have killed him outside the tunnel and then dragged him inside. We could see where he was dragged. So it was somebody who knew that this tunnel existed.”

  Benjamin Warden sat silently and listened.

  “Nobody knew about it,” said Horace Somerville.

  “Farnham must have,” said Carol Scott. She had on jeans and a brown sweater and looked like someone from Middleburg who might have been out for a canter. “The place was just like his apartment. Too clean and tidy. No cobwebs, no dirt balls, no bugs to speak of.”

  “Maybe Angus knew,” said Horace Somerville. “He liked to keep everything in the gym clean.”

  The police had telephoned a mortician in town who would take the remains of Angus Farrier away in a heavy rubber bag. They were airing out the basement of the Homestead. “He’s been dead for several days,” said Carol Scott. “I’m sure he died on the same night he disappeared. The night of the Staines boy’s death.”

  Horace Somerville asked if it was another broken neck. “No,” she said. “I think Mr.Farnham strangled him.” She held up to them a clear plastic bag. Through the film of the plastic they could see a thick cord crusted with brown. At the end of the cord was the dull metallic shine of a whistle.

  “Angus Farrier was garroted with this cord. Does it look familiar to you?”

  It was a coach’s whistle on a thick corded loop. They could see the crust clearly. Benjamin Warden turned away.

  “I’m sorry about its appearance,” said Carol Scott. “It was stuck to his neck. Do you recognize it?”

  Horace said he’d never seen Angus wearing a whistle.

  Whistle. Warden could remember something about a whistle, somebody speaking, somebody complaining . . .

  “Patrick McPhee lost his whistle,” said Warden.

  “When?”

  Warden was not sure. “I heard him mention it when I went to play practice. That was the day Cynthia died.”

  “That’s it, then,” said Carol Scott. “Farnham stole McPhee’s whistle and used it to kill Farrier. Maybe the old man caught him killing the boy.”

  Horace Somerville liked Carol Scott but did not like her reasoning. She was typical of young people, always wanting to finish the job in a hurry.

  “Carol,” he said, “I would ask you to reconsider. How could Farnham have stolen this whistle when McPhee had it around his neck almost constantly?”

  No one said anything for half a minute.

  “I suppose he could have misplaced his whistle,” said Kathleen.

  “Patrick McPhee has been on the scene of every death on this campus,” said Somerville.

  Carol Scott had interviewed McPhee. He had flown to Boston over the Thanksgiving holidays. She had seen the records. Had she seen anything about his flight back? How far was it from Boston to New York?

  “He lives on this side of the gym,” she said. “Could he have known about this tunnel?”

  No one spoke.

  “Your wife’s handkerchief,” she said. “The one we found in Farnham’s apartment.”

  “What about it?” said Warden.

  “The girl Katrina Olson was using it to wipe her face. That was in Mr. McPhee’s apartment. Farnham wasn’t there.”

  They looked at one another.

  “I wonder why Pat McPhee never complained to anyone about the smell around his apartment,” said Somerville.

  “Perhaps I’d better talk with Mr. McPhee,” said Carol Scott. “What is he doing now?”

  SCENE 9

  “It’s the mind,” said McPhee. “I’m observing myself and knowing how much I’m scaring you and hating myself for it. I like you, Thomas, and I don’t want you to be afraid. But there’s a passion in me that keeps welling up. Welling up, that’s an old-fashioned expression, but that’s the only term I can think of. Sometimes the passion takes over, and once it starts, once it becomes dominant, then I have a hard time getting my control back. Is this making any sense at all?”

  “Yes sir.” Thomas stood with his jeans on and trembled.

  “The worst time was right after I got back from New York. I was so calm at first, taking the train back to Washington and then catching the Metro out to my car in the airport parking lot. But I was like an alcoholic on a binge. Russell Phillips was just there, with tales of sexual conquest and his flippant attitude. It was his hair, you know? It looked so long and brushable. Russell was already corrupted, he needed to go. I figured I was bound to get caught after Russell, and I should have been. But they thought somehow he had killed himself—should have known better, don’t you think? I was ashamed of myself and hoped maybe I could stop. Saturday night I went back up to the wrestling room just to punish myself, just to remind myself of what I had done, and I admit, maybe to relive the moment a little, maybe to try to recapture that sense of satisfaction, of knowing that I’d made the world a little cleaner. Then Cynthia Warden came upstairs and had sex with Robert Staines.”

  He paused, shook his head. “No, wait, that’s wrong,” he said. “Cynthia was there by herself, and then Angus found her, and Staines showed up later with that other blond girl. So many blondes. Staines showed up with a girl and had sex with her right there on the pad. Can you imagine? He had no self-control whatsoever. He just took that girl on the floor, showed no respect for her at all.”

  Thomas thought of himself with Hesta in the chapel.

  “I didn’t deserve to get caught for Staines’s death. He was entirely too undisciplined. So I got Angus and choked him and that worked just fine, especially when I hid my train ticket in Angus’s desk so the police would think he’d been to New York. But then I got wrapped up in the play. I went over and watched them trying to block Desdemona’s death scene, and I gave myself away. I said they ought to do it with Desdemona kneeling, and the only time Cynthia Warden had knelt was that night in the wrestling room. She had been up there before Staines arrived, and I had watched her from my hiding place among the mats rolled up against the wall. She guessed that I’d been there. In fact, when I showed back up at the theater she was expecting me. She knew I was going to kill her. I think she wanted it.”

  He threw Thomas a white tee shirt. Thomas could barely hold it because of his trembling.

  “I wouldn’t have gotten mixed up with the play if it hadn’t been for you,” said Coach McPhee. “You needed someone to walk over there with you.”

  “Coach McPhee,” said Thomas. “Please let me go.”

  “I will,” said McPhee. “I won’t hurt you. If I can possibly help it.”

  Thomas would run if he had to. He didn’t have any shoes on, but he would kick at the glass door if he could get to it.

  “I want you to hear the entire story, Thomas. And then I want you to answer a question for me. The answer to the question is very important. Would you do that?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Would you care to sit down? You’ve been standing an awfully long time. I’m almost finished.”

  “That’s all right,” said Thomas. “I’ll stand.”

  “Sit down,” said McPhee. “Sit here on the bench.”

  Thomas sat.

  SCENE 10

  Carol Scott pulled on her mittens and h
er knit hat and walked in the cold with two of her men from the Homestead to the gym. The main entrance was locked.

  “Try the other doors,” she said to the men. “I’ll try the outside entrance to McPhee’s apartment.” She circled around the building to her right, past the chimney at the end of the building, and knocked at the darkened door to McPhee’s apartment. There was no answer. She tried the knob. It was locked.

  This had been a bitch of a day for Carol Scott. One of her kids was sick with whatever flu was going around, and she still hadn’t done a bit of Christmas shopping; she’d asked for some time off, but Stuart had called at noon saying that they were two cops down and that he needed her to check out a burglary out on Blue Ridge Drive. It had been one nagging little thing after another all afternoon, then the call from Montpelier School. Crap. This was her first murder case since her maternity leave, and she was pleased at the way it had gone, even with that headmaster bitching at her. Now there was a chance she had a false arrest on Farnham. That would be just groovy. Eldridge Lane would be all over her butt if she’d arrested the wrong man. She would hate to give him that satisfaction.

  It couldn’t be McPhee. It had to be Farnham. She just needed to find out how he got that whistle.

  But she was a good enough cop to admit that the whistle, if it did turn out to be McPhee’s, weakened her case. It couldn’t be McPhee, could it? He’d said he was asleep when the Staines boy got killed.

  She walked back to where she had left the men. The campus was quiet and cold, lights on in the buildings but not many people about. Why should anybody be out? It was freezing. She should be at home herself, instead of begging the flu bugs to assault her.

  The men returned from different directions in a couple of minutes.

  “Every door locked,” said the older one.

  She thought for a minute. “Do you think anybody’s even in there?” she asked.

  The younger one said he’d seen a light on down in one of the window wells.

  “A locker room,” she said.

  She told them to wait and watch the building in case McPhee came out. She herself would return to the Homestead and call Felix Grayson, who had a pass key to the gym.