Murder Misread

by P. M. Carlson

  “Amazing. Half of Nick’s friends were extras in that. That was quite a movie.”

  “Yeah, I was glad to find that hat. Should go up in value too. The costumes seem to climb the fastest. That pinafore is worth hundreds already.” He met her blue eyes. “You had another question?”

  “Yeah. All of this stuff is connected with films.” She flapped a hand at the bookcases. “Where are the films?”

  He hesitated. They were pirated for the most part, illegal, and he could never risk showing her his secret collection. But she seemed sympathetic; he could let her see the room. He said, “On sixteen millimeter, mostly. I’m getting a good collection.” He jerked his thumb at the third bedroom. “Do you want to see?”

  “Sure.” She followed him eagerly. A floor-to-ceiling bookcase was filled in part with his books on film and video, but for the most part with his pirated films. A screen and a large television on a fireproof filing cabinet faced a scuffed sofa. Hastily he picked up a sock from the sofa and a couple of magazines from the floor and stowed them on the shelves. Maggie said, “This is impressive.”

  Charlie found himself grinning with pride. “It’s not all on display.” He unlocked the file cabinet and pulled a thick book from the top drawer. “This is my inventory.”

  “God, you’re well-organized.” She thumbed through it, then glanced around the room, head cocked like a robin’s, looking at everything.

  “Yeah. When Lorraine moved out I thought about getting a smaller place. Then I moved a TV in here, and the rest gradually accumulated.” He locked the cabinet, remembering. “This room used to be Lorraine’s office.”

  “Lorraine.”

  “My ex-wife. You wouldn’t have known her. She teaches at Queens now.” He stepped back into the hall and switched off the light as she followed. “She picked out this house. Liked the patio. But it’s pretty comfortable for a bachelor too.”

  “Yeah. Nice place. Hey, I’m starving! Let’s go eat, okay?”

  He followed her black Camaro into the valley and up the next hill. College Avenue was near the top. She swerved suddenly onto a side street and parked. There was a second available slot a few spaces up. They got out and walked the half-block to Plato’s.

  George Zikakis spotted Charlie and lumbered over to meet him, his round mustached face set in lines of sorrow. “Terrible, terrible!” he exclaimed. “I can’t believe it! Tal Chandler… he was like a brother, that man! A brother!”

  “Yes. Yes, he was.” Charlie allowed his shoulders to be clapped in hearty commiseration. Then he said, “Maggie, this is George Zikakis. Owner of Plato’s. This is Maggie Ryan. She’s here to work with me this summer.”

  George pumped Maggie’s hand. “Good, good! But I’m sorry you came at such a sad time.” He waved them into a booth and beckoned a waitress.

  “You were a friend of Tal’s too?” Maggie asked.

  “Of course! He came here often. Always with a happy story. Or a compliment for old George’s cooking.” He thumped his ample chest. “And my heart aches. A fine man! It’s the drugs, you know,” he added darkly. “These young people, they’re crazy on drugs. I tell the police to lock them up. It’s illegal, right? But they say they have to wait until they commit a crime. And then you see, they can’t find them! A fine man like Tal… and all they do is come in here, ask questions! Who did you see, what did you see, was there anything unusual?” He took the mugs of coffee from the waitress’s tray and placed them in front of Charlie and Maggie. “But the problem is, it’s not unusual! Crime is usual now! I told the police, even here we aren’t safe! A fine man like Professor Chandler… terrible!”

  “So none of you saw anything odd?” asked Maggie.

  “Nothing. I was in the kitchen, you know, didn’t even see Charlie here come in yesterday. In the kitchen it’s very busy. Sometimes I look out the window. Yesterday was a pretty day. But I didn’t see anything unusual. You want pancakes? Eggs?”

  “Scrambled,” said Maggie. “With extra toast and a large orange juice.”

  “I’ll have the same.” Charlie nodded. The coffee was hot and strong, George’s pride.

  “Good appetites,” said George approvingly.

  “Good food here,” replied Maggie. He beamed. She added, “So about yesterday, no one on the street saw anything unusual? Anyone hurrying?”

  “Nothing. Only Jack at the shoe store across the street, he saw that lady professor running. He noticed because she was in a suit, not jogging clothes.”

  “Nora Peterson?”

  “Yes, that one. And then a few minutes later Jack heard the shouts, that girl who found him. And Jack said some stranger flew out of the door here and went to help her.”

  “That was Maggie,” said Charlie.

  “You? It was you? I’m glad to meet you!” said George. “In that case you know what happened next.” He tapped his pad. “So maybe the old fat Greek should go scramble some eggs, eh? Maybe he should stop gossiping?”

  “We all want to find out what happened to Tal Chandler,” Maggie said.

  “Yes. A wonderful, wonderful man.” Shaking his head lugubriously, George shuffled back to the kitchen.

  Maggie drank some coffee and said, “So Nora running was unusual.”

  “Maybe. But that’s what we all do when we think we’re late, right?” Charlie observed. “I was running myself, yesterday morning.”

  “You sure were!” Maggie grinned, then sobered. “Have you been thinking about what enemies Tal might have had? Or you?”

  “Hard to think about anything else.” Charlie picked up his mug of coffee and discovered that he’d drunk it already. “But I can’t really pin down anything definite. Two general possibilities. It could have been—but I shouldn’t make accusations.”

  “Right, we’re just thinking aloud. General possibilities.”

  “Yes. Well, it could have been his wife.”

  “Mm. Any special reason you say that?”

  “Just… well, there are family conflicts sometimes.” Aunt Babs crying. Dad, stiff with disgust, walking out the door. Nine-year-old Charlie sobbing, “Wait, wait!”

  “True,” said Maggie, watching him. “Did you know of any problems between Tal and Anne?”

  He pulled his thoughts back to the present. “No. But it’s hard to know people really well. And I was thinking that she could have been there earlier than we saw her.”

  “Yes, that’s true too. What’s the second general possibility?”

  “What we were talking about yesterday. That Tal managed to learn something that someone didn’t want known.”

  “Have you thought of something?”

  “Just that some things are… not worse, really, but more of a problem in an education department than in other departments. Because we work with children.”

  “Like what?”

  “It’s just that no one gets excited any more if a math professor smokes pot or drinks himself to sleep every night. But people who work with little children can’t have even the ordinary vices.”

  “Right. Or suppose there was something… well, there have been stories in the newspapers about child molesters. If Tal knew something like that—”

  “God, nobody would—not in an education department! Kids are so fragile. We know that!”

  “Kids get molested all the same.”

  “Not by people who know kids. I can’t imagine—” Charlie shook his head. He’d never been able to understand how there could be people who would force such horrors on a child. Yet he knew such people existed. But not in the department! “Anyway,” he continued, “I didn’t mean anything like that. But good parents are very protective. They want the people who work with their children to be good role models even in small things, and that’s good. And you have to look out for the department’s reputation. But the main thing is the children. Each child is unique. Being drunk at the wrong time could so easily—” He was squeezing his empty mug ferociously. He eased his grip. “Well, adults can shrug things off. Childr
en can be hurt.”

  She looked at him silently a moment, the blue eyes so intent on his that he dropped his gaze. She said softly, “You were hurt, weren’t you?”

  He was saved by the arrival of the eggs and toast. The waitress was nervous, half her attention on George, who stood behind the bar with a critical eye on her. When she’d rattled the plates and cups into place Maggie made an OK sign toward the proprietor, who beamed. Then she drank her orange juice before asking, “Why does Cindy needle you?”

  “Cindy?” He broke off. The waitress was back with a coffeepot.

  But when she’d left again Maggie said insistently, “And you needle Cindy. It’s not just a game.”

  “Sure it is. Now it is. We had kind of a fight a few years ago, but we get along.” He shrugged.

  “What was the fight about?”

  “Nothing. It’s all blown over.”

  She forked in a mouthful of eggs and mumbled, “You don’t want to say what happened?”

  Charlie put jam on his toast. “No. Really, it’s not relevant. It’s over.”

  “If Tal had learned about it would Cindy be worried?”

  “No! There’s your proof, you see. Tal knew! Tal showed me! It’s been years since… well, anyway, it’s not relevant. Not worth stirring up.”

  “But there’s a lot of emotion around it still.” She munched for a moment, then asked, “Okay, Charlie, what would you do if you found out someone in the department was using coke? Or maybe sleeping with his students?”

  “Nobody’s doing that!”

  “We’re just supposing. What would you do? Report it to Walensky?”

  “No. It would depend. The chairman, maybe. Yeah, I’d probably go see Reinalter.”

  “And what would Reinalter do?”

  “He’d… I don’t know. Call the person in. Maybe go to the police. He’d make sure it stopped but he’d want to keep it quiet so the scandal wouldn’t rub off on the rest of us. And it would, you know, if it got out.”

  “But the person involved still might lose his job, maybe go to jail.”

  “Yeah. Depends on how bad it was.”

  “Okay. Now, this thing with Cindy that’s not relevant, does Reinalter know?”

  “No.” Charlie could feel his jaw muscles clenching.

  “And if he did, what would happen to Cindy? Would he say, it’s all over, it’s not relevant?”

  “Maybe.”

  Her gaze sharpened. “Look, I’m trying to help. I can’t help you figure out who’s framing you if I don’t know anything about you or your possible enemies or the enemies of your enemies.”

  Hell, he’d thought this high-powered consultant was on his side. Now she reminded him of Aunt Babs, nagging at him to find out why he was late getting home from hockey practice. He thumped his mug down onto the table so hard that coffee splashed out. “Damn.” He swabbed at it angrily with a paper napkin. “Okay, look, Bernie Reinalter is really into appearances. It’s good for the department, I suppose. But you’re right, he might come down pretty hard on Cindy, even after all this time.”

  “Okay.” She sipped some more coffee and leaned back in the booth. She’d finished her breakfast, he saw. He picked up his own toast. She continued, “Next awkward question. Can you tell me about Lorraine?”

  “Lorraine?” He ducked his head to hide his growing anger.

  “Charlie, I’m sorry. Look, maybe we should just leave it to the police.”

  “Good idea!” But the fears were nibbling again. The murderer. And almost as bad, Hines with his neutral questions and obsidian eyes. Charlie drained his coffee mug and said in a more conciliatory tone, “Look, Lorraine is at Queens now. Not around here. How could she be involved?”

  “I know. It’s probably crazy to suggest that she may be trying to get back at you after all this time.”

  “Not only that—she was very fond of Tal. She wouldn’t—”

  “Charlie, everyone was fond of Tal! You yourself suggested someone who was so fond of him she married him!”

  “Oh, hell. I know.” He leaned back in the booth, arms crossed, glaring at the sugar container. “Yeah, okay, go ahead. I’ll try. What about her?”

  “Well, for starts, there’s usually some bad feeling when there’s a divorce.”

  “Some.” He kept his voice neutral, trying to look at it objectively. “But we respect each other. We’re adults. It just didn’t work out the way we expected.”

  “You thought she’d be different than she turned out to be? Or you thought you’d be different?”

  Charlie took off his glasses, rubbed his nose, blinked nearsightedly down at his plate. “Some of both. You start these things with a vision, you know? How great the world is going to be. Who can tell what goes wrong? Lorraine and I helped each other a lot at first. This project I’m working on now is partly her doing. She said, you’ve got all these sophisticated ideas about skilled reading. Why work with beginners? Doesn’t it make sense to make sure that’s really the way skilled readers do it? And she’d heard about someone using video techniques. She put me onto that line of research. She was right: I’m damn good at it. Smart woman, Lorraine.” He replaced his glasses. “But personally… well, it just didn’t work out. Hell, if I knew why I’d have fixed it! After a while we just stopped pretending.”

  “What was her relationship to Tal?”

  “Friendly. No, more than that, really. She took a class or two from him when she was a student here. And after we were married and she got her degree, he hired her at the instructor level. Part-time. Not a great job, but of course there was nothing full-time in her field around here. And it gave her time to finish some research projects. That’s what really got her the tenure-track job at Queens.”

  “Had she done anything… well, like Cindy, anything that Tal knew about and that might hurt her career?”

  “Lorraine? God, no! Sometimes she smoked pot on weekends. That was it. So did I. So did you, I bet!”

  Maggie grinned. “Touché. And I agree, that’s not a dark enough secret to inspire a crime, because these days the consequences are about zero. Unless you want to work for the CIA, maybe. Even Bernie Reinalter probably expects his younger faculty to have a little pot in their background.”

  “Yeah. Nobody’s trying for security clearance.”

  “Good. Is Lorraine’s specialty reading too?”

  “No, cognitive development. She was doing some work on semantic categories and took my reading seminar the first year I taught it. That’s how we met.”

  “I see. Do you ever talk to her now?”

  “Hardly ever. We see each other at conventions sometimes.” He pushed his plate away. “Look, if you’re finished, let’s pay George and get on to campus.”

  She smiled sunnily. “Good idea. Let’s go.”

  10

  The basement of Van Brunt Hall was even blander than the ground floor: white ceiling, white walls, white doors, white vinyl tile. Charlie unlocked his experiment room and switched on the fluorescent lights. Maggie glanced around curiously at the worktable, cardboard boxes of supplies, terminal, and curtained experiment area. “Sorry to put you to the trouble,” she said, “but I do a much better job of interpreting scores when I have some idea of what people were actually doing to get the scores.”

  “Sure,” said Charlie. “It’s good that you’re interested.” He’d planned on giving this demonstration yesterday afternoon, after he’d finished introducing her to the computer personnel and explaining his own coded data sheets. But then Tal—Don’t think about that now, it’ll just choke you up. He turned away, switched on the TV and selected a tape. He cleared his throat. “Let me double-check that we’ve got the right printer attached. Good. The other one’s been acting up. Maybe I can get it fixed this afternoon. Okay, now, that’s where the subjects sit.” He gestured to a chair before the TV.

  “I see.” Maggie looked at the screen. “Now, I’m a subject. What am I supposed to do?”

  “You’ll be reading s
everal short paragraphs, and afterward you’ll see a set of words, one at a time. You’ll press this button if it was one of the words you read. We call it the Yes button.” He indicated the bright red button on the remote control fastened to the arm of the chair.

  “Got it.”

  “Now, you sit here and wear these fancy goggles. Pretty much like having your eyes examined.” He indicated the chair as he clamped a fresh bite board into the head frame. “This gizmo in front of your nose is a bite board. You bite it.”

  “Bite it?”

  “It keeps your head still. It’s important because we’ll be photographing and measuring your eye movements by bouncing a light off your cornea and into the camera. If your head moves, it’s impossible to tell which letter you were looking at.”

  “Okay.” Maggie plunked herself into the chair and checked the location of the Yes button.

  “You see the bite board is coated with wax? Your teeth make an impression, so if we have several sessions with the same person we can get things calibrated more quickly.” He was adjusting the equipment to her height. “If that feels all right, push the Yes button.”

  She raised her eyebrows, seemed to decide it wouldn’t get any better, and pushed the button.

  “Okay, now I’ll calibrate the camera. Look at the dot on the screen. As soon as you’ve fixated it, push the Yes button. That tells the computer the exact coordinates of your individual corneal reflection for that spot. Then it’ll show you a new dot. Same thing, look at the dot and push the button.” He watched carefully as she responded to a series of dot positions on the screen. Finally the screen read “Thank you!” and Charlie said, “Good. Now, if you’re ready to begin, push the Yes button again.”

  She signaled yes.

  “Here we go, then. Read as rapidly and as normally as you can. I know it’s hard in this contraption, but try.” He started the tape. The short paragraphs, all in capital letters, blinked on and off in sequence. Each was followed by the appropriate set of test words. After ten minutes the tape was done.

  “Well,” said Maggie, leaning back in her chair, “I like George’s cooking better than your bite bar.”