He became aware that she had stopped speaking. He had been staring at her, an odd expression in his eyes, through at least thirty seconds of silence. She was looking right back at him with perhaps the faintest trace of satisfaction, and Sergeant Pursley was beginning to get embarrassed. Holder yanked himself out of his reverie. He had hardly heard the last several sentences, but “Cletus Hall” had registered.
“So you went to show this boy to Cletus Hall?”
“Yes.”
“And after you showed him where Cletus Hall was, what did you do?”
There was a barely perceptible pause. “I went home.”
“Home being—?”
“The Graduate College.”
“Did you see José Ez—whatever his name is—on your way there?”
“No, I’m afraid not.”
“Did you see anybody who knew you and can vouch for your presence at the Graduate College or on the road to it between nine-forty-five and ten-fifteen?”
Valerie was half-incredulous, half-amused. “Are you asking me for an alibi?”
“Well, they come in handy,” Holder retorted dryly, “when it’s a question of murder.”
Valerie immediately looked somber and cooperative. “Yes, I suppose you have to check out everybody who knew him, no matter how slightly. I’m sorry I can’t help you with your process of elimination, Chief, but I’m afraid no one saw me, so I can’t prove I went home and went to bed. But that’s what I did.”
“All right, Miss Powers. It’s probably no big deal, but we do have to ask, you know. One more thing.” Holder looked at her appraisingly; he decided he would stoop to a little flattery. “You strike me as a person who knows people, who understands them. And you’re obviously extremely bright. Do you think you’d be aware of—uh, undercurrents, so to speak? Things that were going on in the people around you that weren’t obvious to everyone?”
Valerie appeared to consider this a moment, then replied with a graceful touch of modesty that that was very nice of Chief Holder, and she thought she might just possibly be able to help him on something like that.
“Yes, I’m sure you can. Well, it’s like this: Just about everybody agrees that Mason Blaine was a ladies’ man, but nobody can tell me anything specific. Is there any woman—or women—that you know of who might have been involved with Blaine? Even casually, I mean, even just a flirtation?”
“Well, I hate to say anything that would just be repeating gossip…”
Holder made all the right encouraging noises.
“Well…” Valerie said with a fine show of reluctance, “I’ve heard, though I don’t know if there’s a thing in it, that Ellen Caldwell was, uh, friendly with Mason. And then—this may be nothing—in the library the other day I saw Mason go and sit on the edge of the table where, oh, what’s-her-name, she’s a first-year student, where she was studying, and he talked to her and they laughed a lot, quietly, and the way she looked a bit self-conscious, you know, I thought at the time that, well, there might be something going on there.”
“You can’t tell me her name?”
“No, but somebody else probably can. Just ask who the girl is with the flaming red hair and all the freckles.”
“Oh, yes, the one that’s in the seminar that met last night?”
“Yes, that’s the one.”
Holder asked if she knew anything else that might be useful to them; she did not. He thanked her, and asked her to speak to Carlos Barreda on her way out, and tell him they would ask him to come in in about five minutes. As she rose, Sergeant Pursley stood up too, and Holder, looking at his face, thought, I’ll be damned if he isn’t going to open the door for her. He did.
When he closed it, Holder told him, “Pursley, you’re a fool.” Pursley blushed, but offered no defense, and his superior magnanimously changed the subject. “So! Ellen Caldwell. That’s got promise, she’s married.”
“Yes, sir. Maybe we should see her again?”
“Of course. And, what’s probably more to the point,” he added in unwitting agreement with Patrick’s observation at lunch, “let’s see her husband.”
“Yes, sir. Ah, sir?”
“What?”
“I was just noticing, I mean, I guess it doesn’t matter, but, uh, I was wondering why you pressed her so hard about an alibi when you didn’t even ask the Spanish guy if he had one at all.”
Holder made a face. “Because I’m a fool,” he admitted. “I should have asked him, of course, but I just wasn’t taking it very seriously. The possibility that one of that group might have done it, I mean.”
“But you took it seriously with Miss Powers, and uh, maybe I’m stupid, but I can’t figure out what made you suspicious of her.”
“Well, to tell you the truth, it was just that I remembered what my friend Kathryn Koerney said to me over in the Student Center. You weren’t standing close enough to hear, were you?”
“What was that, sir?”
It suddenly occurred to Holder that Kathryn might not want that remark repeated, so he said, “Never mind, it’s too complicated to explain. Probably doesn’t matter anyway.” He sighed. “I’d like to see something that does matter.” He looked at the short pile of papers under his hand. Nothing. Reports from Campanola and Wilson on the residents of Patterson Road. Had they seen anything suspicious or in any way unusual last night between nine and ten? Had they seen Professor Blaine—or anybody—walking along the street? Had they seen a parked car they didn’t recognize as belonging to a resident of the street? And a long list of negatives for answers. Well, that wasn’t really surprising. The houses were all set back a good way from the street; most of them had plenty of trees and bushes in their yards, some had high hedges in front; there were street lights only at either end of the block, and the middle of the block was dark as a tomb. It was a residential street that led nowhere in particular, so there wasn’t any traffic to speak of. Holder reflected bitterly that you could probably kill a half a dozen people in the middle of Patterson Road at that hour of the night, and as long as you were reasonably quiet about it, you could get away without a single witness.
This person had certainly done so. There were no witnesses at either end. If only the Newman girl had been just a little bit earlier…Of course, if Tracy had walked right into the fellow, he probably would have killed her, too, so maybe it was just as well.
But what had the murderer been doing over there where the Newman girl might have seen him anyway? Or in other words, back to the big question: Why had the body been moved?
And what about this car that had apparently driven around the body? Tom did not believe for a minute that a car had swerved in a curve off the church driveway at some other time, perhaps the day before, for no particular reason, and then by wild coincidence somebody had come along and put a dead body just in the spot the car had driven around. Apparently Tracy Newman had not been the first to see the body in the driveway. Somebody else had taken the shortcut before her, but in a car. Seeing the dead man, that somebody had chosen to drive around him and go on, rather than stop and notify the authorities. It probably had no meaning, Tom reflected, other than that there was an irresponsible citizen out there. Well, that was hardly news.
He sighed, and told Pursley to call in that other Spanish guy.
CHAPTER 9
After the honest charm of José Whatshisname and the silky allurements of Valerie Powers, Carlos Barreda came as something of a shock.
He burst into the room with a vulgar Spanish exclamation, and waved his hands at Holder. “You! You think I have nothing to do today? You say, come at ten minutes to two, and I come, I leave the library where I am doing important work, ay por Dios!—and I sit here not working and they say no, I cannot see you, you are talking to Valerie. Esta puta, ella vale mas que yo, si? Son cabrones, la policia!” He flopped into the leather chair and glared at Holder. “Pues vamanos!” he demanded, making hurry-up flutters with both hands. “Then do it! Ask me questions!”
Hold
er took a deep breath. He knew no Spanish, but it was obvious that he had been soundly cursed. It would be foolish to get mad. Besides, it might be the best thing that had happened to him all day. If this guy was half as nasty about his friends as he was to total strangers, he might be a gold mine. Not that it was gold Holder wanted. A little dirt would do. So he asked his graceless subject for an account of the events of the previous evening, and within sixty seconds he knew that he was not going to be disappointed. He hardly had to ask questions. Carlos just spouted.
“So the (untranslatable Spanish word) left and went home, and we said we would get beer, but then everyone said no, the (untranslatable Spanish phrase) all left, and me, I do not drink with that maricón, that Stanworth. It is O.K. if there are other people, but no, I don’t sit with that kind of man alone, it is bad for the reputation! So when la putisima goes off with her man and el estupido Jamie Newman, he thinks he will not go without her, there is only el Conde-Duque, Espronceda y Montalban, who is rich on the blood of the peasants, and that other, who is probably rich on the blood of American peasants, and I think, maybe I don’t go, then the Conde-Duque he goes, and I say, no! Señor Stanworth, he thinks to make me come, but I tell him to go chase Mucho-Nombre if he looks for fun, and he gets very mad—”
Holder judged it time to interrupt. Ignorant of Spanish though he was, there was nothing wrong with his brain, and he had kept up with most of it. He could tell by the context what Carlos’s objection to Stephen Stanworth was, though he did not know the word he had called him, and he guessed that what Carlos had called Valerie was equally insulting, though it implied no sexual abnormality—not precisely, anyway. Carlos’s tone had told him that the prefix to José’s name was an honorable description used sarcastically, but Mucho-Nombre was beyond him. He now reminded Carlos that he did not understand Spanish.
In a manner that clearly informed Holder that anyone who did not comprehend Spanish was an utter idiot, Carlos translated. “Mucho-Nombre, many names. Everett! Vergil! Mason! Blaine! Ay que (totally unprintable Spanish) es ese hombre!”
By the exercise of superhuman self-control, Holder managed not to look startled, or even very interested. “You suggested to Stephen Stanworth that he go after Professor Blaine if he was, uh, looking for action.”
“Si si si, Stephen will have much more luck with him than with me.”
“Professor Blaine was a homosexual?”
“Quién sabe?” Carlos shrugged. “But Stephen is his pet, Stephen curls up by Blaine and makes the noise of a fat cat, and Blaine he loves it, and he smiles at Stephen like they share a secret joke. And maybe yes, maybe Blaine he gets bored with Valerie, and Ellen, and maybe the little girl with red hair, she will not go to bed, so maybe he takes Stephen how do you say for kicks. He is evil, he is a very bad man. I am glad he is dead.”
Holder ignored both the main thrust of this speech and its conclusion, and jumped on the one item that tickled his current prejudice. “Was Valerie Powers having an affair with Blaine? At some point?”
“Ay la putisima.” Carlos made an exaggerated feminine gesture, then kissed his fingertips in sarcastic homage. “She likes the men so much, she has to have them all, so she starts at the top, what she thinks is the top, I think it is the bottom, she has Blaine. And when she is through with Blaine, or maybe Blaine is through with her, he takes Ellen Caldwell and she takes Jamie Newman. It is not nice, what she does there,” Carlos added, in an unexpected flicker of human concern. “It is bad for the little Tracy, she is injured, and she is a nice girl.”
Holder’s head was whirling. Mason Blaine had seduced Valerie Powers, or vice versa, or maybe it was mutual, then Blaine got tired of Valerie, or vice versa, or maybe it was mutual, then Blaine took up with a married woman, and Valerie took up with a married man, whose wife it was who had found Blaine’s body. He had wanted dirt, but he was beginning to think he was getting more than he could sift. And Carlos was still shoveling.
“—because he is like a poor little dog when he looks at her, and I think she gets bored a little, it is so stupid, to be like that for a woman, he is a smart man, Jamie, but he goes without brains when he goes to Valerie. So I say, she is bored I think, and she will not take him long, and then maybe he will go back to his wife, who is a woman very nice, not like Valerie.”
“You think Valerie might have wanted to go back to Blaine?”
“Oh, no, that is over, punto final. Blaine he does not know that she is there, he goes and smiles at Ellen and the girl with the red hair.” He smirked. “Maybe Valerie will go to the man who wanted to go to Cletus Hall.”
“I assume that’s a joke,” said Holder unenthusiastically. “Now, about Ellen Caldwell—”
“But no! It is not a joke! I mean it! You should see the way she looked at him! But to be fair,” Carlos admitted, with another brief lapse into humanity, “he looked at her the same way. Me, I don’t think he needed to go to Cletus Hall, he just wanted to talk to that girl with the hair. And he is fortunate. He is good-looking, more than Jamie, and taller, and when he smiled at her like that she forgot the beer with Jamie and went with him. Jamie, he looked like a man who is held by the cojones and can do nothing. But the fire in his eyes was like murder.”
“But the guy who got murdered was Mason Blaine, so maybe we should get back to that. What time did the seminar get out last night?”
“You waste my time! You talk already with the others, you know already Mason, he always ends the seminar at nine-thirty.” More hurry-up movements with the hands.
Carlos, like all the others, verified that Professor Blaine had set off in the direction of Prosper Street by 9:35 at the latest. He then launched into a series of speculations concerning the time each member of the group had subsequently parted from the others. These reflections were fleshed out by enthusiastic, if negative, descriptions of Carlos’s companions, from which Chief Holder and Sergeant Pursley were at liberty to conclude that Valerie Powers was a cheap whore, Jamie Newman a fool, and José and Stephen insufferable snobs—and Stephen was a maricón to boot. Mason Blaine was simply unspeakable: “So bad there are no words to say it.” This fact, of course, did not discourage Carlos from employing such words as were at his meager command. Holder, no prude, began to be thankful he couldn’t understand most of them.
One fraction of his brain caught Carlos’s time estimates as they flew past, checking them against the ones he’d already heard. The major portion of Holder’s thinking processes was dedicated to keeping up with Carlos’s bilingual slanders, and trying to decide how many of them were going to be useful. Having met the supposedly insufferable José, Holder was taking most of Carlos’s opinions with a grain of salt. But even salted down, might there be something left over worth looking at?
“So then everybody was gone except you and Mr. Stanworth—”
“Si si si, and he said come drink beer, and I say no, I do not want to, and he keeps talking, and I say it is late and I start to go, and he says, no, it is still early, and he looks at his watch, and he says, see, it is not even ten o’clock, and he puts a hand on my arm. I throw his arm off, and I tell him to go after Blaine if he wants that kind of company. He is very angry, and he turns to go away.”
“Did you see the watch yourself? Do you remember exactly what time it said?”
“Yes, he waved it in my face. It was just after nine forty-five.”
“Then he went away. In which direction?”
“Through Cedar Hall, you know how you can walk through under the arches, well, that is the way you go back to the Graduate College.”
“Did you see him go back there? Were you walking behind him?”
“No, what do I care where Stephen went, the (unprintable)! He went through Cedar Hall, and I went the other way.”
“Where were you going?”
“Nowhere. What difference does it make? I walked.”
“Where did you walk?”
“(Unprintable), anywhere! Who cares? There is nowhere to go, if I go
to the Graduate College I catch up with that maricón, so I go somewhere else. I walk down to Prosper Gardens, then I go back to the Student Center to see if there is anyone there I want to talk to, and there is no one, and you want to know, did anybody see me so they can say I was there at that time, and not running over to that church to meet Mucho-Nombre and kill him, and the answer is no. I did not kill that (untranslatable), and I cannot prove it, and I am glad, because if you think I killed him it is an honor! I wanted to kill him, oh, many times! Now somebody else has killed him, and I am glad!”
“You wouldn’t have any idea who that somebody else might be?”
“Que question! Yo no se! Who can know? And I am glad he is dead, so why should I tell you, even if I know, who killed him? But I tell you this: there are many many people who do not like Blaine, you see that already, this you know. There are all the women, claro, and maybe there are men because of the women, you understand? And probably you think it is like that, but me, I think it is not for that, not the women, that Blaine is killed. I think it is because of what he does in his job. He is important, you see, and he has power, and other people they do not have that power.” Carlos looked knowing, and Sergeant Pursley threw Chief Holder a glance that was nothing less than smug.
“So you think Blaine was killed by Jo—by somebody who was jealous of his power?”
“No, not jealous, no, more like afraid. I see that you do not know about Edward Drew, if you did you would know immediatamente what I say. Edward Drew, he is good, he is very good. He writes books, two of them are published, and he is only thirty-three. But Blaine, he is jealous. He was good, too, when he was young, now he drinks and does nothing but look for pleasures. So he sees the young man rising, the young man who comes to take the fame and the reputation of Mason Blaine, and Blaine hates him. Entonces, que pasa? Blaine talks to people, he uses his power, and mira! Edward Drew will not get tenure. Everybody knows it. And Edward, he is afraid. He is intelligent, yes, he is a good scholar, he will be a great scholar, but he has no courage. He cannot go out into the world and make another place for himself, if he loses his place here. And also there are no other places as good. This department, it is the best in the country, maybe the world. If he is fired here, it will be bad for him.”
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