Final Exam

by Kluge, P. F.

  The dog sits motionless, just like the dog on the old records, listening for his master’s voice. But as soon as I move, the game is on again. The dog runs circles around me. Again, I wonder about driving away. But the students saw me. If that schnauzer winds up pavement pizza, they’d love reporting me, they’d be checking my tires for fur in no time. Alright. One on one, even up, level playing field, the dog could dodge me all night. But the leash makes a difference. I fake for the dog, step on the leash and watch the little bastard do a back flip onto the pavement. Then I reel the sucker in. The dog freezes and digs in, legs locked, so it’s like pulling a statue of a dog, something with no moving parts. At my touch, it trembles. Holding the flashlight with one hand, I turn the collar with the other, until some metal comes around, but I can’t read it because when I wipe at the surface my hand comes back, covered in blood. Now I see there’s blood all around the dog’s mouth and neck.

  “Holy shit,” I say. I wrap the leash around a fence post that marks the edge of the fraternity property, then step over to the jeep and radio my office. I call my uncle and ask him to get over here fast. Tom’s an old hand in security. Mr. Popularity with the students. They come to him when they need a break, a case of vandalism that doesn’t need writing up, if repairs are quickly made, eight kegs of beer at a party where four are permitted, well, anybody can make a mistake. Anyway, Tom is a piece of work. He got me this job, after I finished with the Army. I got married, he was my best man. I got separated, he let me live in his trailer. I cry uncle and there he is, stepping out of a college station wagon.

  “Hey, Billy,” he asks. “What’s with this dog?”

  “He was running around the road,” I answered. “Barking like crazy, going around in circles.”

  “Looks like he’s calmed down now,” he says.

  “Not really. You step close, you touch him. He shakes all over...”

  “Jesus, he’s got the shakes alright,” Tom says, hunkering down.

  “I told you. And...”

  “What the hell...” Tom withdraws his hand, rubs his fingers together. “This is blood.”

  “It’s blood. But he’s not bleeding. There aren’t any wounds.”

  “Tag?”

  “I didn’t get around to it...I just called...”

  “Well, shit,” Tom says. He yanks the dog forward, grabbing the collar, wiping some blood and dirt away. And coming up empty. “Just an inoculation ID. The vet’s name and number. This won’t do us any good tonight.”

  “It’s not the dog I’m worried about,” I say. “There was someone holding this leash when they started out together tonight.”

  I see Tom think it over. He glances toward the fraternity lodge, a handsome stone building that no one would mind calling home, if fraternities ever took the hint and went the way of the polo team, the flying club, compulsory chapel and the rest of it.

  “You drive up and down the road?” he asks.

  “Yeah. No one out walking. And from the looks of things, everybody’s all tucked in. There’s no parties in progress. No visiting cars or nothing...”

  “Well,” Tom reaches in for a ring of keys that hung from his belt, then nods towards the Psi U lodge. “Let’s just check.”

  “You don’t think...” I say. The lodge is dark, shutters down, door padlocked. It’s been that way all summer.

  “Listen,” Tom says. “Maybe not. But it’s a fraternity lodge. And fraternities are a womb of weirdness. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I say.

  “What would they say if we didn’t check?” Tom asks. “They’d say, dumb hicks. Tie up the damn dog, Billy. Could be... could be a raid from another fraternity,” Tom says. “A prank, like.”

  It takes him a while to open the door. I point the flashlight, while Tom tests one key after another. It feels like we’re wasting our time. But Tom has a point. We have to check the lodge. Now we step through the door, into a foyer. Tom feels along the wall, finds a light switch, flips it back and forth.

  “Power’s off,” I say.

  “You picked up on that, huh?” Tom reaches for his flashlight and now there are two beams of light. We step inside toward the main room. The place is eerie. It’s like one of those movies, a cop investigating a crime scene where the killer might, just might, still be around. Martin Balsam walking up those steps at the Bates Motel. Only he had a gun. College Security has flashlights, which now light up the main parlor. I see wood floor, wood beams overhead. A fireplace. Benches and chairs along the wall. Must and mold and stale air.

  “Ever been in here?” Tom asks.

  “No. Just outside. Checking IDs and stamping hands.”

  “In your student days, I mean,” Tom says. “Such as they were.”

  “They invited me...” I say.

  “But you didn’t go,” Tom answers for me. “Withdrew incomplete. They put it on your transcript. You’re not careful, they’ll put it on your gravestone.”

  I stay quiet. Every now and then Tom turns on me. He says hard things, gets this look in his eyes, this dead look that makes me think I don’t count for much. This only happens once in a while and only when it’s just the two of us. It’s not the real Tom, though. It’s not the best of him, not the most of him. It’s just another side. And it scares me.

  “Christmas party is something else,” Tom says. “Wassail. This big old bowl of wine and vodka and cinnamon and pine cones and I don’t know what. Kind of stuff, girls drink it. ‘Oh, wow, it’s like Kool Aid only warmer, can I have some more?’ Next thing, they’re swinging from the chandeliers, they’re projectile vomiting across the room. That’s after the faculty leave. Some damn scene. Next day—next week—they decide they got raped.”

  While he talks, Tom shines the flashlight around the room, covering every surface, painting the place with light. We’re both relaxing, knowing the place is empty. But the dog still sits outside. The bloody dog. Tom locks the door. The lodge is behind us and that’s a relief. “I’m going to walk up and down the street,” he announces.

  “I’ve been up and down,” I remind him.

  “I’ll walk it,” Tom counters. “You see more when you walk.” He means, he sees more than I do. “Just check around the lodge until I get back. Then we’ll call the sheriff and leave a message for the morning shift. Over and out.”

  “What about the dog?”

  “Take it in to the office, I guess. The morning guys can drop it off at the pound.”

  “Let’s you and me go for a walk,” I tell the dog after Tom leaves. I worry about the pound: a long-odds lottery with a death sentence at the end. My trailer’s right next door almost, I see what goes in and what comes out. I can count. Leash in one hand, flashlight in the other, I head around the side of the building. Four steps along, a dark shape slumped against the wall turns into a garbage bag full of beer cans, Old Milwaukee and Old Style, cheap beer that the students call Old Mill and Old Swill. We move around the back of the building, into a parking area at the end of the driveway. And then—suddenly—the dog is straining at the leash, pulling like a husky—yelping, tugging me off the bench towards the edge of the driveway where I see something that isn’t going to be another garbage bag. It’s someone sitting against a tree, like those college students in brochures, reading books in nice weather. Only tonight is dark and the dog is straining, yelping, and I follow along, and find a woman seated against the tree—a woman who has graying hair pulled back into a bun, who wears wrinkled slacks and polo shirt—a woman covered with blood that comes out of a hole torn in her throat that I can’t look at, that hurts me to see. It’s like another mouth that vomited blood.

  “Don’t touch anyfuckingthing,” Tom says from behind me. I hadn’t even seen him come.

  “I should check to see if there’s a pulse,” I say.

  “She’s dead. Trust me on this one, Billy.” Tom steps around to the back and calmly points his flashlight. “Shot in the back of the head, looks like. Came out the throat. Came out big time.”

&
nbsp; “You know her?”

  “Seen her. Academic processions.”

  “She’s...faculty?” I ask. I’m ashamed of the way it sounds, hushed and reverent, as if a dead professor is more important than a dead, say, hairdresser. Then again, this is a college not a beauty salon. I can imagine a beautician getting killed: bad debts, angry boyfriend, crime of passion, all the stuff you hear about in country songs. Who’d want to kill a professor?

  “Just go to the jeep and call the office. Tell them to get the sheriff here. And an ambulance. Tell them to tell the ambulance no sirens. No rush. This is over.”

  Tom is digging around in a blue canvas tote that’s all covered with buttons and slogans like GO VEGAN and WIMMYNS POWER and there’s one he laughs and holds up, so I can share the joke. The button had a picture of our college president, Dr. Warren Niles, with BIG PRICK, TINY DICK printed across it. That about takes my breath away, disrespecting the president like that.

  “Wonder how she found out?” Tom says. Now he’s rustling around inside the bag. He pulls out a book—one of those pocket-sized calorie-counting guides.

  “I guess she was trying to lose weight,” I say. It comes out dumb but it’s sad, seeing someone who was trying to make herself better getting interrupted, just like that, when she’s trying to get in shape. All those skipped meals wasted.

  “Yeah, well,” Tom says, giving me this look. “She’ll be down to skin and bones in no time now.” He opens a wallet that we found inside her tote bag, finds a driver’s license.

  “Martha Yeats,” he says.

  The next day, Tom drags me to a meeting in a conference room on the second floor of Stribling Hall, where President Niles and Provost Ives have their offices. I know Hartley Fuller from History, at least I recognize him, and Ave Hayes, the trustee who lives on a gentleman’s farm outside of town. He’s dropped in on me more than once, asking do I want to sell my land. I can understand why they’re here. And Willard Thrush is no surprise: he’s a shoot-from-the-hip kind of smartass who heads up the development office, which is about raising money. The question is, why did Tom wake me up and bring me along? I’ve got no business here. I found the body, is all.

  “A bad time for Martha to get herself killed,” Thrush says. “Right before college, right on campus.”

  “Excuse me?” It’s Hartley Fuller. “You’re suggesting she should have picked a better time and place?”

  “Well...”

  “She was murdered!” Fuller looks like he’s about to jump out of his chair. Tom glances at me as if to say, see, I promised you an interesting day. In the nick of time, Sheriff Don Lingenfelter comes through the door, escorting this tall grim-faced guy who looks like a coroner. But it turns out his name is Sherwood Graves and he’s a detective with the State of Ohio.

  “How’s life in Security, Tom?” Ave asks, calming things down. He’s that kind of guy. “President Niles just invited me to look in on things,” he says. Informal as hell. But the man’s got deep pockets and deeper pedigree. Rutherford B. Hayes, 19th president of the United States, was a graduate of this place and Ave is his great-great-something or other. “I’ve been looking for a little part-time work,” Ave goes on. “You get to go to all those parties.”

  “Forget it,” Tom says. “They don’t get going until after midnight. And they’re a hell of a lot noisier than they used to be.”

  “Oh...”

  “You want the same experience, just go down your cellar, turn off the lights, turn up the radio and drink beer until you’re sick.”

  The door opens again and I’m expecting Warren Niles, our president. He knows my name. It’s always, “Hi, Billy,” and he’s proud of it, on a first name basis with the hired hand. But it’s not Warren. It’s Caroline Ives, the provost. She doesn’t know me from Adam.

  “Maybe we should get started,” she says, the way those spokesperson women do at the start of press conferences, coming on like one of the boys but not much liking the boys she’s with. “The President has asked me to convey our commitment to cooperate in every way with this investigation. He wanted me to make that clear from the very start.”

  “Uh...” said the sheriff, pulling up his sock and rubbing his neck, all at once. “Where is he?”

  “President Niles thought it would be appropriate for me to represent the college,” she says and now I’m pretty sure she’s not happy being here. I see Willard Thrush rub a hand over his face, like he’s scratching an itch. My guess is, he’s hiding a smile.

  Next thing, the provost lady goes around the room and everyone introduces themselves and says where are they from. It comes my turn, I say “Security.” It sounds flat. “I found the body,” I add. Provost Ives gives me this funny look, like was I here to claim a reward? Then she invites the sheriff to brief us.

  “I’ll tell you what we know,” the sheriff begins. “No surprises. Professor Martha Yeats lived alone in a bungalow a half mile from where we found her. She walked her dog a couple times a day and where she died was on one of her routes. Folks there were used to seeing her. But no one saw her last night. No mess, nothing unusual, at her place. Salad on the counter and some wheat crackers. Table set for one. No guests staying, no company expected...”

  Now Lingenfelter pauses and reaches into his shirt pocket for the kind of scuffed, spiral-bound notebook people use to record gas mileage on long car trips.

  “This is a summary of what the medical examiner gave me over the phone. Professor Yeats was shot at close range—a yard, say—from behind. Death was immediate. No signs of a struggle, no other wounds. We don’t have a weapon—a handgun, for sure. But we have the bullet that killed her.”

  “What caliber?” Thrush asked.

  “If you don’t mind,” Graves said, “We don’t think you need to know that right now.”

  “Okay,” Thrush conceded, “I guess not.”

  “So anyway,” the sheriff resumed, “there’s a chance she got killed nearby. Her shoes—it’s not for sure—suggest maybe she got dragged. And there are some parallel tracks in the gravel leading to where we found her. Coming in off the road...”

  He flips through a few more pages, then looks back up at us. “That’ll do her.”

  “How...” the provost lady scans the faces across the table, our two officers, the sheriff, the state investigator. “How can we help you?”

  Again, the sheriff looks at the investigator. Sherwood Graves. Like the name of a cemetery. And it fits. The man is tall, gangly, bony, ugly. If he were a U.S. president, he’d be Lincoln. Failing that, he’s just plain odd. His face has been scarred by some youthful condition, acne probably. Once more, Graves nods to the sheriff, who continues.

  “We get two, three murders a year in this county and they’re not exactly head scratchers. Half the time the killer turns himself in, even waits for us at the scene, phones us up and gives us directions. Drug stuff, alcohol, domestic...”

  Lingenfelter’s voice trails off, as if he’s picturing memories he decides not to share. But I can picture them. Trailer courts with torn above-ground swimming pools. Tired clapboard shacks where white-painted truck tires border dead gardens. Down at the heels garden apartments with video dishes searching heaven for excitement. Parking lots where pickup trucks outnumber cars and country western music feels like truth.

  “These things are ugly,” the sheriff says. “They surely are that. But they’re not real hard for us. Now what happened with your Professor Yeats is different... This killer didn’t stick around. He did the job and left. And maybe he moved the body. Only he didn’t move the body to hide it. The purpose was to...I wouldn’t know what to call it...”

  “Display it,” Sherwood Graves says. He leans forward from his side of the table, planting bony elbows that could put a hole in a tablecloth. “Display it,” he repeats. “You might want to think about that.”

  “We could get lucky,” Lingenfelter says. “It happens. We connect a bullet to a weapon. We find the weapon and we connect it to someone’s h
and. Sooner or later someone talks. The killer, the killer’s boyfriend or girlfriend or ex-partner or cell mate. And it gets back to us. It’s not like we solve the case. We just stick around and wait for people to be their shitty selves.”

  “This is Martha Yeats!” Hartley Fuller bursts out. “I hired her. I mentored her. I mourn her. This whole college is in mourning, sheriff. When something like this happens, it doesn’t just destroy an individual life or a single career...a very promising one at that. It challenges our whole enterprise. What we do and what we are. And, perhaps most of all, where we are. It violates...”

  “Oh, give me a break,” Willard Thrush interrupts. “Martha was a loud-mouth and a flake. She got out of bed in the morning and she went to bed at night planning how to piss people off. I’m sorry she’s dead but I’ll bet it has nothing to do with the college. And everything to do with her sorry, kinky self. So I think the sheriff has a point. I don’t see any reason we should turn ourselves inside out.”

  “If I may.” Now it was Averill Hayes’ turn. “I’d suggest you do what you can. But do it carefully.”

  That’s when I notice the way Sherwood Graves is leaning forward, almost out of his chair, staring at Hayes. Hayes is a chummy, clubby kind of guy, a jolly good fellow. And Graves is the opposite, all angles and edges.

  “Do what you can and do it carefully,” says Graves. “That’s our mandate?”

  “We’re all together on this,” the provost adds. She senses an ending, I guess. Tired of the bunch of us. She’d make Warren pay for his absence, I bet. She was that kind. On the best day you ever had, moonlight and roses, she’d have this list of all the little ways you let her down. A list that only got longer.