A Little Class on Murder

by Carolyn G. Hart

  Max wondered how his mother would describe Garrison’s karma. Creamy. A hot tub with the Jacuzzi on low. Satin sheets. Silk jockey shorts. Melted caramel on French vanilla.

  Garrison gestured benignly to the window on his right which looked out on glossy-leaved live oaks and a portion of a cypress-rimmed pond. “A small community, but dear to those of us who have devoted our lives to its nurture.” Pale blue eyes studied Max dispassionately.

  To see how it was playing in Poughkeepsie?

  “A community apparently suffering some strains,” Max observed.

  The professor puffed pensively on his pipe. “I’m not sure just how to explain us to an outsider.” This time the grin was engaging.

  “One word at a time,” Max suggested gently. A sharp glance, but Max too could maintain a bland expression.

  “I’m sure you’ve already talked to our chairman.” The pale eyes glittered coldly, but the voice remained suave.

  “Yes, I had an interesting session with Mr. Burke.”

  “An old-time newsman.” The faintest hint of derision. “Brusque. Combative. Aggressive. Well suited to chasing down stories on the police beat. Up front about his convictions.” Pipe smoke spiraled lazily up. “Very open. As he makes clear at every opportunity, he has no patience with the use of personal information that is not germane to a story. Strong sense of the importance of the right to privacy. So, of course, I am sure, Mr. Darling, that you are convinced that Mr. Burke could have had nothing to do with those unfortunate revelations in The Crier. And further, true to his principles, Mr. Burke hasn’t provided you with any personal, truly personal, information about his colleagues.” A slightly raised eyebrow underlined his skepticism.

  Max frowned uncomfortably. Actually, he had dismissed the possibility that Burke might have engineered the leaks. The chairman’s fury at Brad Kelly and his reiteration that he would never play games with people’s lives had rung true. And Burke had initially resisted talking about the members of his department.

  Satisfaction flickered in Garrison’s eyes. “Yes, our chairman is very open with his feelings. Almost,” he added silkily, “amazingly so. But I wonder, Mr. Darling, just as a point of information, did you inquire as to reasons the faculty might have for being unhappy with Mr. Burke?”

  “Yes.”

  “And, being an able investigator, I imagine you inquired further about the kinds of personnel problems that might soon be appearing on page one of The Crier.”

  Max nodded reluctantly. “Burke told me in confidence on the understanding that the information would go no further than Miss Dora.”

  “Of course, of course.” A pitying smile.

  Max felt a vein begin to throb in his neck. “He didn’t unload all the faculty dirt. In fact, he refused to go into the reasons for Mrs. Porter’s misusing those monies.”

  “Oh, really. Noble fellow. Determined to protect her memory at all costs, no doubt.”

  Max frowned. “But he hates having people think she was venal.”

  “So?” Garrison prodded.

  “There’s a press conference this afternoon. Kelly’s called it to announce that nothing will stop his exposé. He dared Burke to show up.”

  “Our stalwart chair will be there, I feel confident,” the professor observed with a dry smile.

  Max said thoughtfully, “Burke intends to decide by then whether to reveal Porter’s reasons.”

  Garrison laughed wholeheartedly, a man who’d heard a really marvelous joke. “Sounds as though you had a very informative session with our chair. Do you know what, Mr. Darling? If I were a betting man, I’d wager the world will learn the truth about Charlotte Porter this afternoon.”

  Annie could feel the beads of sweat above her mouth. A 10K road race would have been easier, but she felt confident she was now back in control.

  Of course, she had found it necessary to agree to a few changes in the reading list.

  It never paid to be stiff-necked.

  Henny made a final addition to her mimeographed sheet with a flourish. “Perhaps it would be well, if you don’t mind, Annie, to review it. Let’s see, for Mary Roberts Rinehart—”

  Annie interrupted. “I’ll put it on the board.”

  She turned, grabbed up chalk, and began to write:

  MARY ROBERTS RINEHART—The Circular Staircase

  The Red Lamp

  The Swimming Pool

  “So very pleased,” Laurel murmured, “at the substitution of The Red Lamp for The Door. Although it does seem to me that we can scarcely do justice to her light touch if we don’t read any of the Tish stories.”

  The chalk in Annie’s fingers broke in half. “The Tish stories were not mysteries,” she said through clenched teeth.

  “Might as well spend the semester reading Sayers’s Dante translations. Have as much application,” Miss Dora snapped.

  Annie hated to be in her debt, but she flashed an appreciative glance.

  “Wrong, wrong, wrong,” Henny countered. “Sayers’s nonmystery works are terribly important in understanding her. Mind of the Maker brilliantly examines the fundamentals of Christianity, and I feel it’s fair to say that we can never claim to have any insight into Sayers if we’ve not read any of her religious writings.”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Mitzi cried, looking from one to another in dismay, her braids beginning to slip sideways. “Look, I got scratches all over my reading list. Mind of the what? What’re we ’spose’ to read, for Pete’s sake?”

  Annie pointed at the board. “These three Rinehart titles and—” She wrote decisively, because it was over the Christie titles that the bloodiest battles had erupted.

  AGATHA CHRISTIE—A Murder Is Announced

  The A.B.C. Murders

  Appointment with Death

  Crooked House

  Murder for Christmas

  Murder in Retrospect

  The big jock next to Kelly gave a howl of distress. “Six books? Six? Plus three for Rinehart and three for Sayers?” His tone put the imposition of a twelve-book reading list right on a level with the kind of mayhem so routinely meted out in Mike Hammer novels.

  Miss Dora thumped her cane resoundingly. Jessup flinched. “Young man, reading is one of life’s greatest pleasures. Try it.”

  Swenson’s mouth opened, then closed soundlessly.

  Annie ignored them all and listed the Sayers titles:

  Murder Must Advertise

  The Nine Tailors

  Gaudy Night

  She swung around, lips compressed, and snatched up her notes before anyone else could interrupt. “Now, everyone has the correct reading list.” The substitution of The Nine Tailors for The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club infuriated her, but Miss Dora obviously would have thrown up a barricade and mounted it had Annie resisted, despite Annie’s bone-deep conviction that The Nine Tailors was one of the most boring books ever written. She swept the room with her gaze. Only Max Carrados would not have seen that she had reached her limit of endurance. (But the blind detective’s other senses were so well developed he likely wouldn’t have missed it.) “This morning, we shall discuss briefly the original and enduring contributions each author has made to the mystery field, beginning with Mary Roberts Rinehart. As everyone knows, Rinehart is credited with creating the Had-I-But-Known school of the mystery.” Affirmative headshakes from everyone but Morrison, who looked bewildered, then at her watch. “In these, the protagonist is recounting for the reader’s pleasure and mystification the occurrence of murders which have been solved but the reader receives the story as it happened with occasional comments by the protagonist on the order of ‘Then Maud appeared, and I remember waving them off and going back to my office, totally unaware that the first happy phase of my life at the Cloisters was over.’ ”

  “Ohh,” Laurel cried, “oh yes, of course. Dear Pat Abbott in The Great Mistake. Such a lovely girl and in such straitened circumstances.”

  What could Annie say? Wouldn’t any instructor be delig
hted at such recognition of and enthusiasm about the material by a student? She gritted her teeth. “Very good, Laurel.”

  Laurel half turned to face her classmates. “Of course, Pat falls in love with Tony—he’s Maud’s son—but there’s more to the story than that. He’s still married, for one thing, and there are hidden identities and such complicated relationships and greed, of course, all of which are often Rinehart themes.”

  “Laurel, Laurel. We’ll get into all of that later. Right now I’d like to discuss with the class Rinehart’s other contributions.”

  Laurel nodded agreeably. “Oh, certainly, my dear. Such a good idea.” And she watched brightly, as if she were the authority generously approving a neophyte’s performance. The middle-aged ladies with blue-white hair gazed at Laurel admiringly.

  Annie controlled her fury and managed to speak evenly. “Rinehart contributed four new elements to the field: one, the Had-I-But-Known technique; two, a strong love interest; three, humor; and four, the intertwining of two stories, that of the narrator who observes and reacts to the inexplicable happenings and that of the criminal who is actively engaged in a course of action, often one deliberately intended to destroy the protagonist.”

  “Two stories!” Morrison bleated. “You mean each one of those Rinehart books has two stories?”

  Henny took up the cudgels. “The story behind the story. Think of the apparent story as a straight line and the second story as a series of peaks and valleys. The peaks protrude above the horizontal plane when the criminal’s activities are apparent.”

  “Well posited,” Miss Dora said grudgingly. “However, Rinehart’s works never attain the brilliance and symmetry of Sayers’s.”

  Morrison’s gaze moved from Henny to Miss Dora with a look of sheer stupefaction tinged with panic.

  Responding to Miss Dora’s attack on her flank, Annie said sweetly, “Our novelists are not in competition with one another, Miss Dora. Rather, as a class we will come to appreciate the individual genius of each.”

  “Only Agatha Christie can be termed a genius,” Henny trumpeted intemperately.

  Annie clutched the lectern as the class exploded in acrimony.

  Max rattled the knob to Malcolm Moss’s office door. Despite the posted sheet giving office hours that included ten to twelve on Tuesdays and Thursdays, no light shone behind the frosted glass upper panel and the door was locked.

  The faculty offices filled the northwest quadrant of the second floor. A narrow corridor bisected the area and four offices were on each side. Garrison’s office was at the far end next to a rear corridor leading to the central west stairway.

  On the north side were offices for Garrison, Moss, Porter, and Tarrant. Across the hall were Norden, Diggs, Crandall, and one vacant office.

  Whom should he talk to next? He needed a clearer perception of the department and its members. Had Burke played Max and Annie like a drum? Could Garrison’s suggestions be trusted? Was he likely to find an unbiased observer among this lot?

  Max surveyed the closed doors, tossed a mental coin, and turned toward Josh Norden’s office.

  Annie felt as stressed as Christie’s appealing detective, Mr. Satterthwaite, upon being plunged into the middle of a mystery by the enigmatic Harley Quin. She shot a covert glance at the wall clock. The hour—thank God that really meant fifty minutes—was almost over. At least she’d made most of the points she’d intended: Christie’s brilliance with plot, her delight in turning the reader’s assumptions against him, her clever use of clichés, her unsurpassed skill at sleight of hand, her Victorian conviction that evil exists everywhere, and, finally, to Miss Dora’s satisfaction, a description of Sayers’s great gift of language and her introduction into the mystery of finely drawn characters and plots concerned with intellectual integrity which Sayers saw as “the one great permanent value in an emotionally unstable world.”

  “So,” Annie said in conclusion, “we have before us in the next few weeks the pleasure of discussing in more detail the works and attitudes of three superb and sharply differentiated mystery writers. Now, for next week, I’d like for everyone to have read the three Rinehart titles.”

  “Three books by next Tuesday?” Swenson’s voice rose in panic. He must have known instinctively that Cliffs Notes would be no help here.

  Miss Dora thumped her cane. “A philosophic inquiry.”

  The other class members were learning. They looked at her in respectful silence. Even Swenson subsided quietly into a lump of misery.

  “Knowledge for the sake of knowledge is, of course, a respectable intellectual equation.” The wrinkled parchment face was benign. “However, I should be quite pleased if the instructor would deign in our remaining minutes to give us a personal expression of her views on the usefulness of our study.”

  “Usefulness?” Annie parroted.

  “Practical application to the problems of life,” Henny proffered. But she didn’t look at Annie, and her voice was a mumble.

  Unease prickled the back of Annie’s neck. She looked from Miss Dora, as bland as Charlie Chan, to Laurel, nodding expectantly, to Henny, assiduously avoiding her eye.

  Later, she would ascribe the outcome to her fatigue (very little sleep and a class filled with unexpected pitfalls and challenges) and to her beleaguered status (one against three was never fair).

  At the moment, she took a deep breath and committed herself to, she would soon realize unhappily, the very worst position she could have taken.

  “Practicality? Certainly. This is a very practical course.”

  “How about another foot-long?” Max urged. “Be glad to go get it. With double chili?” He leaned forward, poised to hurry back to the Student Union to the fast food carryout window.

  Annie considered his offer as she took the last bite of her hot dog (pretty good but not enough onions) and sucked the final suds from her root beer. Max, of course, was trying to make her feel better. Usually he was pressing her to eat broiled scrod or baked halibut. But not even her favorite foods could dispel her current outrage.

  She didn’t bother to lower her voice because there was no one nearby to hear, unless you counted the alligator who’d arisen from his fall slumber to find a lone patch of toasty sunlight on the west bank. “My class,” she cried. “My class!”

  Max slid closer and patted her shoulder. They had the gazebo to themselves. Although they were probably no more than one hundred yards from the journalism building, they might have been one hundred miles from habitation. The live oak avenue split to circle around this enormous lagoon, leaving a huge, dim pocket of greenery in the center of the campus. Actually, she wasn’t surprised at their privacy. It sounded charming, of course, a gazebo constructed upon an artificial island in the middle of a cypress-rimmed lagoon with masses of blooming japonica and hibiscus affording total privacy. But this place would never make it as a passion pit, not with dorm rooms and car backseats so readily available. Secluded, yes. Remote, yes. Gloomy, in spades. Although it was a sunny, mild day, the temperature in the sixties, the tall, dark, knobby trees, nuzzled by weeping willows and shrubs, blocked away almost all of the sunlight, so the gazebo was chilly, damp, and dim, but not, fortunately, a murder site as in The Gazebo by Patricia Wentworth.

  Annie glared impartially at the dark water, the alligator, and the two wooden bridges that arched to the shore.

  “Friggin’ school,” she muttered.

  “Now. Annie, love, you can’t blame it on the college.”

  She transferred her glare to him. What a loathsome, avuncular tone.

  “Maybe some fried okra,” he suggested hastily.

  “I don’t want anything else to eat,” she snapped. “What I want—I’d like to get—” Her hands twitched.

  He couldn’t help being defensive. “It sounds to me like it’s Miss Dora’s fault. If it’s anybody’s.”

  “Laurel set me up.” It was a simple statement, laden with rancor. “Oh, I know,” she said impatiently, “it was Miss Dora who asked the
question, got it all started, this nonsense about how practical the class was. My God, I didn’t know what they were leading up to. I want to tell you, this damn thing was orchestrated. And I know by who. Whom.” Drat, was it ‘who’? She continued to glare at the culprit’s son. My God, he looked more like Laurel every day, the same dark blue eyes, such ingenuous damn blue eyes.

  “A banana split? Double chocolate?”

  “No.”

  “But, honey, it’s really not such a bad deal. Everyone will learn a lot about mysteries.”

  “They could have learned a lot listening to my lectures.” She quivered on the bench. “Do you know what it’s like to lecture to a room with those three in it? It would be easier to teach physics to a Montessori class. No, they have to horn in. And what could I say, after I’d said the damn thing was practical. There was Laurel all wide-eyed and sugary.” She mimicked her mother-in-law’s husky voice. “ ‘Annie dearest, how wonderful that you are urging us to become involved in the mystery of life around us and here is Chastain College with such a mystery. Who is behind the revelation of faculty secrets? Who is spreading misery and unrest among both students and faculty? Who is Chastain College’s very own Deep Throat?’ ”

  “Wait a minute. Wait a minute,” Max demanded. “It can’t all be Mother’s idea. Annie, I assure you she was oblivious to Watergate. She was living in an ashram in New Delhi at the time.” He paused, frowning thoughtfully. “Or was it a casbah?”

  “I didn’t say the three of them didn’t connive,” Annie admitted grudgingly. “But Laurel was the motivating force, I’m certain of it. Why, Henny was positively embarrassed about the whole thing.”

  “Bet she wins, anyway.”

  “Making it a contest!” Annie exploded. “Whoever turns in the most clues to Deep Throat’s identity gets extra credit. What does that have to do with the Three Grande Dames of the Mystery?” she demanded wildly. “But they came at me from every direction and then the rest of the damn class got into the act, beside themselves with excitement at their ‘opportunity to rival the detective exploits of some of the greatest sleuths of all time’!” Her fists clenched. “You know who said that, don’t you?”