It seemed the kind of night anything could happen and I didn’t want to miss any of it.
Oscar arrived first, wet from the light rain that had been coming down all day and breathing heavily after the trek up from the parking lot. I met him at the door. He’s forty-seven, but pushing fifty - hard. Not only has he lost most of his hair, which he always tries to hide by wearing some ridiculous hat, but he’s also maybe sixty pounds overweight and soft like a boxer gone to seed.
No sooner was he in the door than he patted the pocket of his checked shirt. Nothing there. He patted all the pockets of his loud plaid jacket. Fruitless. He scratched his bald dome, hidden until then beneath a blue and yellow striped peaked cap, the kind you’re supposed to wear in a pub or at a cricket match.
“Forget where you’ve hidden your cigarettes?” It was Mac, standing outside the entrance to the murder room. This was a not-so-veiled reference to Oscar’s well-known habit of pinching cigarettes from other people instead of buying his own. He thinks his eighty-two-year-old mother doesn’t know he smokes.
“Just show me where the body is and quit your clowning.”
Oscar owns autographed copies of all of Mac’s mysteries. It’s one of the great pleasures of his middle years to open each one as it comes out and chuckle over all the great howling mistakes of police procedure or criminal psychology that he professes to find inside. “Y’see, Mac, in the real world . . .” he likes to say. Mac is apt to reply that reality is highly overrated.
After seeing the reality that had overtaken our dinner guest, I was inclined once again to agree. This was the second bloody murder victim I had seen, but that didn’t make it any easier. Even Oscar was reduced to whispering in the presence of death. Of course, what he whispered was “Hell’s bells!” and the rest of it.
The others were still in the murder room, along with Lt. Ed Decker of Campus Security. After doing the requisite jurisdictional ballet with Decker, Oscar shook hands with Father Pirelli and Mac, both of whom he knew well, and with Hoffer and Ralph, whom he didn’t know at all. Ralph assured the police chief that no one had touched anything except the door knobs.
When he’d finished easing the chief’s mind on that point, getting a non-committal grunt from Oscar in return, Ralph asked me if we could speak privately.
“If the chief doesn’t mind,” I said. Please mind, Oscar!
“Just don’t leave the country,” Oscar said absently, bending down for a closer look at the corpse.
We went out into the larger private room just as Oscar’s troops were arriving - three officers, one with a camera and one with what I guessed to be a fingerprint kit.
“Is this your idea of a ‘public relations coup for the college,’ as I believe you described Peter Gerard’s appearance here?” Ralph asked as we watched the boys in blue trudge through the room on their way to the murder scene. “Do you realize what this is going to mean in terms of alumni contributions? In terms of student registrations? Do you have any idea how many parents pull their children out of a college when things like this happen?”
“You may find this hard to believe, Ralph, but homicide wasn’t supposed to be on the agenda for this evening. I mean, I didn’t plan this, for crap’s sake.”
“What you planned doesn’t matter, Cody. It’s what happened that counts. And what happened is a disaster from which this college may take years to recover. Your role in bringing this about, uncalculated though it may have been, will not go unnoticed in the appropriate quarters.”
His voice was low, bloodless. This was Ralph Pendergast at his most dangerous. “And as for Professor McCabe and his popular culture program - well, the evaluation committee can hardly fail to consider this tragic episode in making its recommendation about the future.”
So much for Peter Gerard’s appearance - and cash contribution - giving a boost to Mac’s cause. That hope had died with Gerard, it seemed, and now the outlook for Mac was blacker than ever.
Ralph sauntered away coolly. I followed him back into the murder room, cheerless and worried. One policeman was taking pictures of the corpse. Another was dusting for fingerprints. Oscar, Mac, and Officer Gibbons, one of Oscar’s best men, stood over the body. Oscar looked like Mt. Vesuvius on the brink of an eruption.
“What kind of crap are you trying to pull here, Mac?” he demanded. “That locked room murder stuff only happens in storybooks - the kind you write.”
Mac shrugged. “My only defense is the truth, which I can but repeat: The door Peter came through - this door - leads off the room where we all ate dinner. The rest of us remained in that room after Peter came in here. Thus all five of us can assure you that no one else entered this room through that door. And the door to the hallway” - he pointed to where Karl Hoffer was now standing - is locked from the inside.”
Hoffer blinked and stuck an unlit pipe between his teeth. “I’m sorry, Professor, but it actually isn’t, you know. Locked, I mean.”
At first they were just words, absent of any meaning, quietly dropped into the middle of the conversation like small coins tossed in a wishing well. In their wake they left waves of silence that rippled for long seconds. Then Mac took it in, understood what Hoffer was saying.
“What!” he roared.
By way of answer, Hoffer turned the knob and opened the door into the hallway. “I tried it a few moments ago while you gentlemen were so passionately discussing what you called the locked room mystery. I suppose it’s not that anymore.”
Stunned, speechless, Oscar could only give Mac a withering look.
“Your suspicions are unworthy of you, Oscar,” Mac said loftily. “I was not joking, but apparently mistaken. Somehow the door must have jammed on me when I attempted to open it. I could have sworn it was locked.”
“It wasn’t so easy for me to open the first time,” Hoffer confirmed.
“So what we have here is an altogether different kettle of fish,” said Oscar, pacing back and forth behind the body as Officer Gibbons removed personal effects from the dead man’s pants pockets. “Without the locked room hanky-panky, it turns out to be a pretty simple murder. Gerard sat here, talking on the phone. Somebody came through that door” - Oscar indicated the one to the hallway - “and smashed his head in.”
“But who? And why in Erin?”
Every head in the room turned. It was a throaty new voice on the scene asking the hard questions, one of the voices I know best. Lynda Teal, wearing a fashionable khaki rain coat with a pair of blue silk pajama legs sticking out beneath, stood in the doorway Peter Gerard had come through something more than an hour previously. Her dark honey hair was in disarray, she had empty holes instead of earrings in her lobs, and her eyes - from what I could tell behind the rectangular lenses of her glasses - would have circles around them in the morning. She looked great to me.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Oscar demanded.
“It had to be me. My reporters don’t get paid enough to work overtime.” That sounded plausible, and might even be true. But I had a hunch that Lynda came herself instead of sending Bernard J. Silverstein, who covers crime as well as four or five other beats for The Observer, because she wanted the big story for herself. Ben had been known to work crazy hours in pursuit of a scoop.
“Don’t be a smartass, Teal,” Oscar replied with his customary diplomacy. “You know what I’m asking. How did you find out about this?”
“Maybe I listen to police calls on the scanner to lull myself to sleep.” Nice one!
“I’ll just bet. It couldn’t be that a friend of yours called, could it?” Oscar glared at me. I stared at the corpse, knowing that the corpse couldn’t stare back at me with his forever-closed eyes. At least I was better off than he was.
Oscar could eat me for breakfast over this. You must understand that the two kinds of people that Oscar doesn’t like being involved with prof
essionally are women and journalists. With two strikes against her going in, maybe Lynda would be politic enough to use a little tact.
“Don’t try to evade the issue by changing the subject, Chief,” she said. “My readers have a right to know what you’ve learned or surmised about this case.”
“We only just got here! Give me a cigarette, will you?”
“I’ll buy a pack just for you and carry it with me, I promise.” Maybe she should wear an “I Quit” button until Oscar gets the bad news etched into his memory banks. As Lynda talked, she was already folding back the cover on her reporter’s notebook and putting her pen to a clean page. “Now come on Oscar, give. This is the biggest story of my career - Peter Gerard dead in Erin.”
“He isn’t,” Officer Gibbons said.
Oscar swung around. “What the hell do you mean, Gibbons? I hope I never see anybody deader.”
Lynda peered over her notebook at the body and scribbled away. He wasn’t the first murdered man she’d seen, either.
“Oh, he’s dead, all right,” Gibbons told the chief. “But he isn’t Gerard.” The officer held up the dead man’s wallet. “I’ve been going through his effects. Every ID in here, from his driver’s license to his library card, indicates this man is somebody named Rodney Stonecipher.”
The Morning After Murder
My sister Kate, the most sympathetic of human beings, appeared distressed at her husband’s demeanor at breakfast the next morning. Mac’s hairy face, which normally glowed like that of an innocent boy on Christmas at the mere thought of his morning calories, appeared lost in solemn thought.
“By thunder, it is a classic detective story situation come to life,” he muttered as he cut into his cholesterol-laden sausage. “Who was the intended victim? Did the murderer really mean to kill this Rodney Stonecipher person? Or was he or she deceived by that little masquerade last night - meaning that Peter Gerard was supposed to be the one on the morgue slab this morning? This is a conundrum right out of Ellery Queen or Agatha Christie!”
Was it deliberate that he didn’t say “right out of Sherlock Holmes”?
“Detective stories!” I snapped. “Is that all you can think about at a time like this?” I’d gotten home late and hadn’t slept well.
“We are, after all, talking about a human being who was murdered, Mac,” my sister said as she spooned a third helping of oatmeal into my bowl. (Even Kate can’t mess up oatmeal, and it’s loaded with fiber.)
“Of that I am all too aware,” Mac growled back, not bothering to look up from his plate.
Kathleen Cody McCabe stands five-eleven and has long copper hair, neatly gathered atop her head that morning with only a few wild strands, and large green eyes. In other words, we look alike, except that she is prettier. She was wearing a yellow and burnt orange dress, autumn colors, tied at the waist.
Kate is an illustrator, mostly of children’s books, but her artistic talent doesn’t extend much to the culinary. Mac eats a lot, but that doesn’t mean he eats well. Maybe that’s why I don’t eat with the McCabes on weekdays as a regular thing, even thought I live right next door in the carriage house of their hundred-and-fifty-year-old home. Or maybe I just like to be by myself most times.
But this was not one of those times. I wanted to be with people, live people. There’s nobody more alive than the McCabe children - Rebecca who is twelve and admits she likes boys; Amanda, who is ten and pretends to hate boys; and Brian, who is seven and all boy. Mac sometimes calls them his Half Moon Street Irregulars. So I invited myself in for a noisy breakfast before they were off to school at Our Lady of Knock. Now that they were gone, after having gulped down their food, the conversation had turned to the grim subject that dominated the front of The Erin Observer & News-Ledger (both web and wood pulp versions) and even rated about forty seconds on “The Today Show.”
“I keep thinking of the poor victim’s family and friends,” Kate said.
“Not to mention the victim himself,” I added. “You saw what he looked like, Mac, that pulpy mass of tissue and blood and hair.” The horrible image stuck in my head had kept me awake most of the night.
Sebastian McCabe spread out his hands like a papal blessing. This was the conciliatory McCabe. “I assure you both that I am not insensitive to the death of this man, ending all his hopes and dreams. Indeed, I am guiltily aware that I bear a certain responsibility. Life is tragic, and death is the final tragedy. Every Irishman knows that, although we also have our ultimate hopes for eternity. Until eternity arrives for me, I see no alternative but to play the hand I am dealt. Right now the cards are rather surprising.”
This was just too much for me. “This may all be a game to you, Mac,” I said with some heat. “Lord knows everything else is. But I bet whoever killed Rodney Stonecipher didn’t ask him first whether he wanted to play. Who was Rodney Stonecipher, anyway? Why the masquerade? How the hell did he manage to fool you, somebody who’s known Peter Gerard for years? How did he even know Gerard was supposed to be here? And what happened to the real Gerard?”
“I’m impressed, Jefferson! You ask excellent questions.”
“How about some excellent answers?”
“As to how the murder victim might fool me, that is by no means the near-miracle you seem to imagine. I have to remind you that I have not had an extended conversation in person with Peter for perhaps fifteen years. We have e-mailed regularly and talked by telephone, but our actual meetings - primarily at the annual Bouchercon mystery convention - have been brief.
“As to your other questions - ” He shrugged. “Why ask me?”
I sighed, shoving aside the half-full bowl of oatmeal. “Desperation, I guess. You usually seem to have answers for everything, whether right or not. And you’d better think up some damned good ones for our friend Ralph. I don’t think just taking your department away from you is going to satisfy him after this episode. Burning at the stake may not be feasible, but I bet he tries to blackball you at every Catholic college and university in the country.”
“I could always go to another country. I have done so before. However, your colorful description of my predicament is unduly pessimistic, I assure you. Ralph will change his malevolent tune once I solve the murder.”
My sister dropped her jaw and a buttered biscuit. “No. You can’t mean it, Sebastian.” Calling him by his first name was a sure sign that she was deadly serious. “Please tell me you’re not going to get involved.”
“I already am involved!”
Kate ignored that. “Solving murders is fine for amateur detectives in books, but not for overweight college professors who write the books.”
“Oh, ye of little faith,” Mac huffed. “Well, somebody has to solve this one, and it surely is not going to be Oscar Hummel.”
“Why not?” I demanded. “The man’s been a police officer for almost twenty-five years.”
Mac nodded. “Indeed. Doubtless he was a fine desk sergeant in Dayton, but he has no imagination. He is not the man for the job.”
“What makes you think you are?” Kate asked.
“The question almost answers itself,” her husband retorted. “Modesty prohibits me from pointing out who solved the last murder in Erin, but you will recall that it was a certain overweight professor that writes books - not our beloved police chief.”
“Yes, Sebastian, and I also recall that there was almost another murder right in our living room!”
“Almost does not count. There was never any real danger.”
Putting the earlier murder back on my radar screen wasn’t improving my day any. The case hadn’t gone to trial yet, but when it did Court TV was going to be camping out in Erin and all three of us, plus Lynda, were going to be on the witness stand. I wasn’t looking forward to it.
We kept arguing for a while, with Kate and me holding up the “leave it to Oscar” si
de of the table. But my heart wasn’t really in it. Reference to the mess last spring had reminded me that for a brief time Oscar was mentally measuring me for a jailhouse jumpsuit. That did not inspire confidence that I was arguing on the right side.
After breakfast, Mac and I left Kate at the back door with both of us promising not to do anything foolish. Mac even kept a straight face.
“Care for a ride?” Mac asked as we walked toward the garage below my apartment.
“I’ll pedal, thanks.”
He knows I always do, weather permitting. The offer of a lift was his way of showing contempt for a mode of transportation that looks suspiciously healthful - and is. Riding my bike the ten minutes from the McCabe house to work really gets the juices flowing for the day. And as the wheels turned over that morning, so did my thoughts:
Solving murders was no business for amateurs. I’d argued that to Mac a thousand times when there was nothing more serious at stake than the plausibility of gentlemen sleuths compared to private eyes in fiction. The consequences of my own efforts in that direction last spring - consequences that included Lynda getting a painful conk on the head - only confirmed my long-held belief. But was solving murders any business for Oscar Hummel, who ate, smoked, and possibly drank too much? Not without help. And the fact that Mac had had some success didn’t convince me that he was the one to provide it.
That was how I convinced myself to take a run at figuring this out myself. There was little downside and a big upside - good publicity for St. Benignus (“COLLEGE PR DIRECTOR SOLVES MURDER”) and for me, a mystery writer in search of a publisher.
But where could I start? I didn’t have access to the physical evidence Oscar’s men had gathered - the fingerprints, the photographs, the crumbs of potential evidence picked up by the powerful police vacuum cleaner. I didn’t even know anything about the victim. There was only one way to remedy all of that: I had to go see Oscar.
First, though, I had to put in at least a token appearance at work.
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