The Square Root of Murder

by Ada Madison

  “Did Dean Underwood ask you to clean out Keith’s office?” I asked Lucy as soon as I could reasonably broach the subject.

  “Uh-huh, but someone else got there before me.”

  Imagine that. I tried to second-guess the dean’s reasoning in asking Lucy to collect the material. Probably of all the faculty in Franklin Hall, the dean thought Lucy would be the least likely to be curious as to why the dean wanted the files in such a hurry. That would mean she didn’t know about the special relationship between Keith and Lucy. Not that it mattered, since there was no rule against faculty dating each other. In fact, during my tenure at Henley I’d seen two full-blown courtships that ended in marriage, one between fine arts and history and the other between biology and phys ed.

  “I wonder why the dean wanted the material so quickly after the police left?” I asked Lucy, all naïveté.

  “She said there were some sensitive files in his office and she wanted to be sure they were secure. She was very upset when I had to call her and tell her the drawers were empty.”

  I’ll bet. I made a mental note: check what’s sensitive to the dean. “Did you ever find out who took the files?” I asked, wondering if everyone in Back to the Grind noticed how shaky my voice was.

  Lucy shook her head. “Nope.”

  So the dean hadn’t broadcast the fact of my little trick. The only questions that remained: Who retrieved the boxes from my garage? And what material did the dean consider sensitive? I knew Lucy wouldn’t be able to help me with either.

  It was time to do what Bruce would call fish or cut bait. “Keith must have thought a lot of you,” I told her. “He told his cousin in Chicago all about you.”

  Lucy’s eyes brightened. “He did? Wow. Thanks for telling me. He wouldn’t let me mention anything to anyone around here.”

  “That sounds like Keith. I hope you didn’t argue too much over it.”

  Subtle. That was me.

  “Oh, no, I didn’t care, really. We loved the same things. We went to Boston most of the time. To the theater, the ballet, the MFA, the science museum. There’s nothing like that in my little Down East town, believe me.”

  Lucy’s eyes, fixed on a spot over my shoulder, told me she was traveling back a few weeks and reliving her excursions with Keith. I was amazed to hear that Keith had taken that much time to experience the arts and leisure Boston offered. Maybe all he’d needed was a companion who gave him a chance to show his better side.

  I wished again that I’d tried harder to understand him. And, as current wisdom had it, I was his best friend. Except for Lucy.

  “Lucy, did you see Keith on Friday at all? The day he . . . died?”

  Lucy came back to the current reality. “No, I went to the party and he was going to come down later. When he didn’t make it, I figured he was just too busy,” she said, blinking back tears.

  “Or, before Friday, did he mention anything unusual happening around him?”

  “The police asked me that, too. I didn’t tell them I was having a relationship with Keith outside of school, though. Do you think I should have?”

  Not unless you had a big fight and killed him. “That’s up to you, Lucy. If you think it will add to their ability to find his killer, then you should.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t see how it could help them, and I don’t think I have the energy right now.”

  So far I was batting zero on getting people to go to the police with what they knew of Keith or his death.

  “You don’t have to decide now,” I said. “You might feel like going in the next day or so, or you might think of something that would help them.”

  “Maybe.” Lucy looked at me and smiled, but once again she was smiling at the past. “Do you know how we started going out?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Actually our first date? I asked him. I had these tickets to the special Renaissance exhibit at the Gardner that my friends in Maine gave me as a going-away present. Everyone else I’d met up to then was married or in a relationship, so I asked him. I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to, that he was mean and all. I just thought it would be nice to have a friend who wasn’t hooked up either.”

  How simple it all sounded.

  Lucy’s eyes teared up. She brushed back her very straight, very shiny black hair. I could almost read her face: Now I don’t have a friend anymore.

  I couldn’t bring myself to put her through another minute of anguish. I took a small piece of paper from my purse and slipped it across the table to Lucy.

  “This is the address for Elteen Kirsch, Keith’s cousin in Chicago. In case you want to send her a note.”

  Lucy let out a little gasp. “Thank you very, very much, Dr. Knowles.” She put her hand, warm from the mug of hot chocolate, on mine. “It’s so good to have a friend,” she said.

  I felt like a heel.

  It was now close enough to ten o’clock so I went to the police station to meet Virgil. I hoped he didn’t expect me to simply hand over my bag of samples. In my mind, he and I sat at a table that was anywhere but in Interview Two and worked together, comparing loops and slants until one of us shouted, “Eureka!” And then Virgil would go out with handcuffs and an arrest warrant and bring in the killer. Bruce and I could go away to the Cape for a few days and I’d be back to prepare fall syllabi and lessons as I always did in August. I longed for reuniting with my steady, well-behaved math majors.

  A girl can dream.

  Once again I found myself in the waiting area of Henley’s police station. I tucked the paper bag of handwriting samples near my legs, checked my email using my phone, and replied to a few students with applied statistics questions. Then I resumed my practice of staring at the bulletin board across from me, with its wealth of memos and flyers.

  Last time I’d focused on the fascinating stats about my hometown. This time I looked at the material around the charts. Wanted and missing persons flyers. A bicycle and pedestrian safety notice. A policy statement regarding abandoned vehicles. A bright orange “buckle-up” bumper sticker. I chuckled at a little cop humor: a cartoon picturing one policeman giving another the Heimlich maneuver while a doughnut pops out.

  I remembered that two simple themed crosswords were due to one of my children’s puzzles editors in a couple of weeks. Why not use the surroundings for inspiration? I whipped out a small pad and pen. My vast experience in waiting rooms like this during the past week told me I had plenty of time before I was summoned. Working on puzzles would be a good release of the nervous energy coursing through me.

  For the first level puzzle I sketched out a simple grid with four across and ten down and only nine common letters. I drafted simple fill-in-the-blank clues like “A (blank) is pinned to a police officer’s uniform” and “A policeman’s car is often called a (blank).” The next level would have a much larger grid. I’d use my standard fifty across and fifty down. I started making a list of words I’d fit into the intermediate level grid. Beretta. Miranda warning. Canine. Search warrant. I looked at the bulletin board for ideas. Mug shot. Home security.

  The background noises of chatter and ringing phones didn’t bother my concentration. But a sudden burst of screaming startled me. Two officers had entered the front door. The inordinately loud yelling came from an old man with a leathery face and a long, unkempt gray ponytail being dragged between the uniformed men.

  “I know my rights. Check your own laws. I did nothing wrong,” I heard between yelps of “police brutality.”

  Virgil came out of the office area at the same time that the old guy was spitting out terms like “fuzz” and “pigs,” epithets I thought had died with the sixties. The man himself was a throwback to photos I’d seen of “the good old hippie daze,” as my mother called them, spelling out the last word for me each time.

  “It’s Dweezil,” Virgil said to me. “He’s harmless.”

  “I take it this is a repeat performance?”

  “Oh, yeah. There’s a little settlement on the west
side of town. A bunch of people who were in college in the sixties and haven’t quite adjusted to real life. They have their own little pot farm out there.”

  “I thought marijuana was decriminalized a couple years ago.”

  “They go back and forth, the state legislature. Right now a small amount of marijuana is just a ticketable offense, except Henley passed a town ordinance prohibiting smoking it in public. The state law is so complicated and basically unenforceable that most uniforms ignore it, unless someone makes a nuisance of himself.”

  “Like Dweezil.”

  Virgil nodded. We walked back to the office area where it was significantly quieter.

  “Funny how different people turn out,” Virgil said. “My dad has newspaper photos on his office wall of himself and his buddies with their arms locked, protesting this and that. You can tell they’re yelling at the cops and you know my dad must be pretty proud of his past or he wouldn’t be displaying the pictures. But probably a couple of years after the pictures were taken he goes to law school, then he marries my straight-arrow mom and ends up a prosecuting attorney. He’s probably the same age as Dweezil.”

  “It was an interesting generation,” I said, my mind wandering to my own mother and her political activism in her heyday.

  Then my renegade mind wandered farther from home. To Dean Phyllis Underwood. There had to be some important reason why she wanted whatever was left in Keith’s office. Could her motive have to do with a crime that Keith found out about? She did, after all, belong to the generation that was known for activism that sometimes led to violence.

  I ran the numbers. How old was she, other than the one hundred and ten years old she seemed to most of us? I remembered a discussion at a faculty meeting about extending the mandatory retirement age for administrators. I wished I’d paid more attention. My best recollection was that the dean, a case in point at that meeting, was in her early sixties, making her now about sixty-five or–six. That put her smack in the late sixties as a college student. The college website would give her year of graduation.

  What if she did something back then that wouldn’t look so cool now for a college dean? Something she wouldn’t be proud of or want shown off as Virgil’s dad did? I pictured the young, if she ever was, Phyllis Underwood. Smoking pot, protesting, maybe even getting arrested. I would have laughed hysterically if I weren’t surrounded by cops who might misunderstand my behavior and carry me away.

  Virgil and I took seats at a small table in Interview One. Whew. My ex-student Terri had been right about the difference between this room and Interview Two. Interview One was air-conditioned, even cooler than the outside areas, and the chairs stood even on four good legs.

  “Are arrest records available to the public?” I asked Virgil.

  He raised his eyebrows. “Anyone in particular?”

  “Just curious.” I pointed to my bag of cards and notes. “It’s about another matter entirely.” Maybe, maybe not, I said to myself.

  Virgil sat back. “On the arrest records, yes and no. You have to have a ‘need to know’ such as the press would have, but your average citizen would not. The press is entitled to the report for factual information, like name, age, date and time of the arrest, but we can limit what else they can see.” He gave me a questioning look. “Does that help?”

  “A ‘yes’ would have been more help,” I said.

  “Well, there are some exceptions, like with Megan’s Law where you can find out if someone has been arrested for certain sex crimes. In fact, you can check that on the Internet. But if your car is stolen and the police recover it being driven by someone they arrest, you’re entitled to the theft report but not to the arrest report. Once the case was charged by the DA’s office for a criminal prosecution, it used to become a public record, but not anymore. There’s this thing called ‘probable cause’—”

  I held up my hand. “Thanks. Any more is too complicated.”

  “And you teach math.”

  “Trust me, the Chi-square test is much simpler.”

  It flashed by me that breaking into a police department or courthouse records office would be harder than slipping into Keith’s office in Franklin Hall. I’d have to come up with another way to dig into the dean’s past.

  CHAPTER 22

  I couldn’t fault Virgil for his pleasant cooperative attitude. He’d mounted the crime scene photographs on a small bulletin board that he’d propped up on the table. We sifted through card after card and note after note. Some were easy to dismiss.

  I’d found only one sample of Lucy’s handwriting, on a sign-up sheet for the picnic potluck in the middle of June. Why the month-old sheet was stuck between other notes, I had no idea, except to guess that I’d scooped up and moved a pile of pages to be filed from my campus office desk to my home office desk, making the latter even messier.

  What Lucy had written was: “LUCY BRONSON—MEDIUM SIZE MACARONI SALAD.” Lucy had capitalized all the words describing her offering, with great flourishes for the Ms and the Ss. Like both Casey Tremel and Liz Harrison, Lucy had used tiny circles to dot her Is. None of the three samples were even close to the red markings on Rachel’s thesis pages.

  Fran Emerson had a tiny scrawl of a style. No match. Robert, Keith’s chairman, had such widely spaced words in the sample that I made a note to check with Ariana about what it meant, besides the fact that Robert Michaels hadn’t tampered with Rachel’s yellow pages.

  Dean Underwood’s handwriting checked out also as “no match.” If she did have an embarrassing blot on her resume it wasn’t enough for her to kill him. But maybe enough to snatch away what was in his files about her while she had the chance.

  And so it went, with biology chair Judith Donohue and student leader Pam Noonan, and others who frequented Franklin Hall on a regular basis.

  Until we came to the samples from the newly anointed Dr. Hal Bartholomew. Virgil and I agreed that of all the samples, Hal’s was closest to the markings on the sheets strewn over the crime scene. Besides the overall appearance and slant to the letters, Hal’s strangely curved capital A on his postcard with “All’s well in Bermuda” looked like a perfect match to the A in “Awful Data,” written on Rachel’s thesis. This, combined with a couple of other unique strokes, caused us to set aside Hal’s samples and create a new pile. When we’d gone through every card and note, Hal’s were the only samples in the pile.

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” Virgil said. “Neither of us is a professional, and we might be way off base.”

  I wasn’t exactly hoping that Hal was a killer. What had I been thinking anyway, isolating all my friends as potential murderers? Now that it seemed one of them might actually be guilty, I was devastated.

  I forced myself to skip past the high probability that Hal might have killed Keith. Whatever it meant, I was more than ready to see an end to the investigation. No matter what Virgil had said about how long he spent on a murder investigation in Boston, four days were enough for me.

  Hal’s motives were legion. Over the years, Keith had ridiculed him, voted against a bonus for him, and challenged his eligibility to take a turn as physics department chair, to name a few affronts. Even Hal’s glee over receiving his doctorate was sullied because of Keith’s constant reminder of how many times Hal had had to redo the experiments his dissertation was based on.

  I breathed a long, heavy sigh. “What’s next?” I asked Virgil. I meant “for Hal.”

  “I’ll get our expert to look at this. I don’t see any reason to give him the whole bag, but I’ll pick a couple out of the pile and add them, just as a kind of control.”

  “It sounds very scientific,” I said.

  “Don’t tell anyone, okay?”

  “I’d never want to spoil your image.”

  I stuffed all the “no” votes back in the grocery bag and headed out to my Fusion. I turned on the A/C and sat for a couple of minutes with my phone, checking emails and messages. The most exciting news was a “thumbs up” text from Bruce ab
out his medical tests. I texted back, “Good 4 U. CU.”

  On par with that was a text from Rachel: “Home again. THX.” Maybe the handwriting angle convinced Virgil who convinced Archie that Rachel was innocent. I was tempted to call and say THX to Virgil, too, but I didn’t want to be presumptuous. I did keep my phone on in case he called me with his expert’s results. I wondered if the turnaround time for handwriting analysis was as long as Virgil claimed it was for fingerprints and DNA evidence.

  I hoped both Rachel and I had seen the last of the Henley police building.

  Hal Bartholomew’s handwriting seemed to be scrawled across the heavy, humid sky over Henley, Massachusetts. I couldn’t imagine the mild-mannered physics teacher planning out a murder. And it was clear that Keith’s murder was not a spontaneous crime of passion. You didn’t just happen to have a needle with a lethal dose of poison in your pocket and use it in a moment of anger.

  I thought of Hal’s family—hard-working Gillian and five-year-old Timmy, who adored his father—and the effect Hal’s conviction would have on them.

  Maybe I was jumping the gun. I secretly hoped our amateur handwriting analysis was way off, like a data point on a graph that misses the average curve by orders of magnitude. It would mean back to square one, however, which might be where Rachel was standing. It seemed a no-win situation.

  A few more minutes and I’d have been able to convince myself that the handwriting expert would tell Virgil he’d never seen a poorer match in all his years of experience. I stopped short of thinking what that would mean for Rachel or for finding the real killer.

  What to do next?

  With the afternoon free for research, a good mathematician would immerse herself immediately in her field. Follow-up papers weren’t expected sooner than eight to nine months apart, but even that schedule required steady application to the work. I told myself I could afford a short break, having mailed my latest differential equations paper so recently. And what better way to keep research skills sharp than to comb through decades-old newspaper articles?