Final Exam

by Kluge, P. F.

  Then, the students: students who were suspended or asked to withdraw, who had major disciplinary problems or court appearances, who were convicted of felonies after graduation, who asked the college not to contact them. He had a list called “Town and Gown.” This was all the beefs that had arisen between college kids and locals, country boys who crashed fraternity parties, college kids who’d acted up in bars or shoplifted the local supermarket, messed up at the all-night diner. There was a local businessman who’d wanted to build a shopping center right outside town and another who’d broken ground for a trailer court at the bottom of the college hill.

  The next list was a shocker. Other colleges. That’s when I saw it, this look that passed between Sheriff Lingenfelter and one of the suits, the way the sheriff rolled his eyes and another guy kind of shrugged. So this was what he was up to, all this time! Graves was all over the place, advancing on all fronts, looking into everything in general and nothing in particular. It was like you walk into the doctor’s office with a knife sticking in your gut and he decides he wants x-rays, MRI, blood, urine and stool samples. Just then I sensed someone looking at me and when I turned I saw Tom, grinning at me, nodding towards Graves and rolling his eyes, then winking at me as if we both know better. Hint, hint, nudge, nudge. We shared a secret. We both knew I was pitching the high hard one to G-Man’s sister last night. But that was between us, our little secret. Meanwhile, we’d let Graves make a fool out of himself.

  “This college is a business and businesses compete,” he was saying. “These expensive liberal arts places most of all. Their market’s shrinking. Don’t take my word for it. Talk to people in admissions. Not what they say about themselves. Listen to them when they talk about that other college up the road. Here. Look at this.”

  He read from a printed-out e-mail that had been sent to Dean of Admissions Carstairs and forwarded by him to Graves. It was about a phone call an admissions officer at another college had made to California, to parents of a girl who was considering our college and his. Had the parents heard what was happening at our college? Terrible news and everyone hoped the culprit would be caught, but in the meantime, how safe could any parent feel, sending their kid to our place? Especially with a place waiting at a school that was, by golly, just as good.

  “I rest my case,” Graves said.

  When the meeting was over, a few people stayed behind, talking to Graves and most of the others just filed out, some shaking their head, a lot like after that first class of Hiram Wright’s. This was Professor Graves’ seminar, that he’d been wanting to teach forever. And I was enrolled. Our texts were these lists, text and syllabus all in one. Extra credit if you caught the killer.

  “Hey, Billy,” Tom called out to me. He’d been in the Graves meeting, so he must have been the first out the door. Now he was sitting on a bench at the side of the building, the smokers’ bench, taking in some autumn sun. “Sit down with me,” he said.

  I walked over and plopped down next to him.

  “So,” he said. “Are we having fun yet?”

  I shrugged, I wondered if he was ragging me about being with Lisa last night. Turned out I was wrong.

  “Why am I not surprised?” he said. “That was his whole idea...sit around and wait till another one happened...”

  I couldn’t argue with that. Martha Yeats was just the start. And who knew where the end was?

  “They’ll get someone, Billy. They’ll need to get someone. They won’t be fussy.”

  “Any idea who?”

  “Anybody. Push comes to shove, they won’t be particular. They’ll just want it over.”

  Just then, Sherwood Graves stepped out of the building, surrounded by a half dozen lawmen, some in uniform, some suits. He gestured for me to come over.

  “Nothing like autumn sun,” Tom said. “The way it warms you up on a cold day.” He closed his eyes, just sat there soaking it up. “Go get ‘em, Billy.”

  That same afternoon, Graves took over the whole back room of the Security Headquarters, evicting Tom who was moved out front, next to the switchboard operator. I had a desk in the inner sanctum, next to a guy named Wesley Coward, a three hundred pound, junk-food addicted computer guy Graves brought up from Columbus. It turned out Wesley was a hacker, a snoop, a wizard. If you gave him your driver’s license, he could come back with your whole life, the medicine in your cabinet, the magazine underneath your bed. Wesley worked mostly with Graves, all of it hush-hush. I was in charge of faculty suspects. That left the list of former students. We needed help with that. By Wednesday morning, my ex-wife was sitting there looking over the list.

  “How’s it, Billy?” she asked.

  “He hired you?”

  “You bet. That okay? You don’t mind do you?”

  “No problem,” I said. Linda looked happy to be in an office. Her jeans had a crease, her blue denim shirt looked good, I liked her turquoise necklace too. On the farm, it was old clothes. She’d dressed and, like they say around here, she ‘cleaned up good.’

  “How’s Robert?” I asked.

  “There’s some good news and some bad news,” she answered. “He came back from New York. He packed and left.”

  “What about that book of his? The Johnny Appleseed thing?”

  “Don’t hold your breath,” she said. We sat there for a minute, me and the woman I was still married to. Ever since she’d left me, ever since I knew her, she could have me with a wiggle of her finger. Until now. When I thought of women now, it was Lisa Garner I pictured, Lisa who drew me on and scared me. I’d thought of her all day long, while I worked for Graves, making phone calls, talking to people about a murderer. And all the time wondering if the murderer and his sister—maybe his partner—weren’t a phone call away. That was the call I didn’t make.

  “Did Graves say how long he’d be needing you?” I asked.

  “For the duration,” Linda said, wiggling her fingers to show she was quoting someone. A phrase from war movies. “He said he was looking for someone who knew the college and could handle people. What’s your specialty around here?”

  “Me? I’m a phone guy. Dial 1-800-UNHAPPY. Press #1 for tenure denial, #2 for no promotion, #3 for tenured and promoted but unappreciated. And if you got this kind of non-specific infection, just stay on the line and an operator will get to you.”

  “Where’d you learn all that?” she asked.

  “Graves ran through it,” I said. “Some of it I knew already. Mostly, you’ve got to be willing to lie a little.”

  “That must come hard for you.”

  “It’s getting easier. Graves trained me. Just yesterday, took a solid hour of his own time. He said I should just get people talking about the college and let him know if they say anything funny.”

  It wasn’t funny. It was a damn good thing we closed the office door, once we started working on the lists, because in no time at all the room got filled with a whole world of hurt. Close the door, this room was where the poison flowed, this was bad news central, this was where the chickens came home to roost, a graveyard, a Bermuda Triangle, a black damn hole. You saw the bad side of everything. Here’s me on the phone, Bill, not Billy, Hoover. I was a researcher employed by the college or, if it helped, someone “assigned” by the state to investigate the college. We were interested in the way colleges hired, oriented, promoted, tenured faculty members. Or didn’t. “Use the word mentor,” Graves suggested. “That’s the open sesame these days. Everybody needs a mentor.”

  Marshall Thackeray was one of the college’s first black hires. In the music department. Tenure track. So far as I could tell, he’d had it made, our Jackie Robinson. But after a while, he’d withdrawn, stayed at home, “recused himself.” After a year, he resigned. That, roughly, is what I knew, from the provost’s file. But it felt strange, calling someone up, offering a kind of reunion they weren’t looking for. These were smart, troubled people and the hardest part of it was pretending that the college remembered them, the college cared, the college
wanted to hear their thoughts, share their pain. It wasn’t an obscene phone call but it was in the neighborhood.

  There was a long silence out in California, after I said where I was calling from, but I could hear a kid rattling around in the background. More silence after I explained how I was looking into mentoring. When Marshall Thackeray spoke, he was cautious, he was choosing his words carefully.

  “Did you get a fair shake? Looking back?”

  “You mean did I leave feeling angry? Rejected? Hurt?”

  “Well...yes.”

  “Enough to come back and kill someone?”

  So much for my researcher impersonation. Now it was my turn to be silent. And ashamed.

  “We get newspapers out here, Mr. Hoover. And television. Are you a cop?”

  “Not really.”

  “Well, where were you before you started calling up people like me?”

  “Campus Security, actually.”

  “Campus Security! Campus cop?” He laughed. “They’ve got you doing this?”

  “Yeah, it’s a hoot alright,” I granted. “But you wouldn’t laugh if you were here, Mr. Thackeray. Or if you were me. I found one of the bodies. It wasn’t so funny.”

  “Okay. Sorry.” After a while. “Am I a suspect?”

  “Not really. We’re just going through a list of people who left...who came here and changed their mind about the college. Or the college changed its mind about them.”

  “God, you must be desperate.”

  “We want to end it.”

  “Okay. Cross me off your list. I teach at a community college. I’ll give you the name and number. I’ve been teaching three courses all semester. I haven’t left the state. I haven’t left town. I don’t have time to commit a crime.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “They wanted me, they wanted a black on the faculty back there, okay? They treated me well, went out of their way. Good people. An A minus faculty, B student body. Better than the other way around, I guess. A good place, a little too high on itself, but good. But I wasn’t about to spend my life teaching rich white kids.”

  “Okay,” I said, ready to sign off. “I hoped it worked out for you.”

  “It did and it didn’t. Community college, you get all kinds—the little old ladies, ex-cons, welfare mothers, street kids, undocumented. Three classes, forty in a class, one semester after another. Their skills aren’t close to what your kids have. But they’re hungry. That’s what I missed out there. Difference between something you just do and something you need. Was there anything else you wanted, Mr. Hoover?”

  I crossed him off my list. One down. Or was it one up? Marshall Thackeray was a nice guy, over the phone and a call to his dean’s office confirmed he was in California all along. At that, it wasn’t much of an investigation. He could have gotten someone else to lie for him, could have skipped a class and flown to Ohio. But I had to move on. I talked to a visiting professor who’d been bypassed for a tenure-track position that got filled by another professor’s spouse. He was still pissed. “National search, my ass,” he said. “It’s bullshit. It’s like one of those Hollywood talent hunts that eyeball a jillion candidates to play Dorothy in the remake of The Wizard of Oz and when it’s all over, envelope please, the winner is...by golly, she was here all along...the winner is Tori Spelling!” Another tenure tracker was brusque, when I asked why’d he’d left. “Food and sex,” he replied. “Okay? I rest my case.” “I lied,” said a third. “I said how I loved the small college environment, I loved teaching, I was sure my research would be enriched if it were anchored in classroom teaching, et cetera, et cetera. Well, after three years in the hatchery, I flew the coop. I brought my graduate school professor in for a talk. I saw the place through his eyes. I saw myself. I was gone.” Next, a political scientist, denied tenure. “I hadn’t thought about the place for years, until the first murder,” she said. “It’s odd, Mr. Hoover. When you’re there, you think it’s the center of the world, the universe even. After you leave, hey, it’s just a little college in Ohio. It’s a place that fools you and deceives itself. It sounds like the place is under attack now. That’s crazy.” Why crazy, I asked. “Someone’s got it wrong,” she said. “It’s an institution. Institutions don’t have feelings. They don’t say thank you or I’m sorry, or you were right and I was wrong...” I let her go: she was off to lecture on a cruise ship. But she wasn’t done yet. “Institutions don’t go around phoning disgruntled employees, asking what it all meant to them and could it have been better. Do they?” “No, ma’am,” I told her. “They don’t.” I don’t suppose I fooled more than half the people I called. I’ll bet Mr. Graves knew that most of them would see right through me. It didn’t matter one bit, what I did, because there was no way he’d let me close to anything he thought was important. That’s why he let me chase after G-Man. That and all the rest of it, the phone calls, the records, it was homework. As for Graves, God knows what mattered to him. All I could see was he seemed happier. Sometimes he smiled, sometimes he even hummed a song I couldn’t recognize.

  “Hey, Billy,” Linda said, coming over to where I was sitting. “You working late?”

  “Yeah, I’ve got calls out,” I said. “And a call to make.”

  “So let’s eat.”

  “What if a call comes in?”

  “There’s answering machines,” she said. “And how long did it ever take you to clean a plate?”

  “Okay,” I said, not sure I was ready for her now.

  “You really sweep a girl off her feet,” she said, kind of teasing me, but just barely. As a matter of fact, she was looking grim. As soon as we get done ordering food, she reached out for my hand, squeezed hard, like something is wrong.

  “He called me,” she said. “The G-Man called me.”

  “When?”

  “Friday night.” Friday night. The weekend of the killings. The night his sister had me every which way. Homecoming Weekend.

  “I pick up the phone,” Linda said. “‘Is this Linda Thorne?’ ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘This is someone out of your past. Guess who.’ I say I don’t know, then he gets me. ‘Sangy Girl,’ he says. I go, ‘G-Man?’ ‘I hear you’ve been asking about me.’ I say yes and how I have nice memories of him and I’m half expecting him to say, yeah, well, do you always walk down memory lane with a campus cop at your side? But no, he keeps calling me ‘Sangy Girl’ and says maybe it’s time we had a reunion and I ask when and he says ‘next time I’m in the neighborhood...’”

  “Next time?”

  “Right. Does he get up here much, I ask and he says ‘when I’m in striking distance.’ On business or pleasure, I ask and he says ‘it’s all the same to me.’ He’ll try to let me know but maybe he’ll just pop in and surprise me...”

  “Was there any...could you tell if it was a local call?”

  “Can’t say. It didn’t sound long distance to me...” Then she got what I was after. “Oh my God, you think he was here that night the kids got killed...you think...”

  “Did you tell Graves?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m still rooting for the guy. I don’t want it to be him. And I would like to see him again. Even though I’m scared to death. I’m scared, understand? It never bothered me, living in the country, living alone in a farm house, until he called.”

  I looked at her, I got the cue. This was where I was supposed to say, well, maybe I should move back in, at least until this blows over. But I didn’t say it, didn’t say anything. I just looked at her because I knew we’d come to the moment that would change things forever.

  “Okay, Billy,” she said. “You want me to say it? You know you’ve changed. You’re livelier, more thoughtful than you used to be. You read people better. You’re more interested. And...more interesting.”

  “Well, nothing like some time in a trailer court to shape a guy up. That and a ton of rented movies.”

  “See? That’s what I mean. You’re faster.
You make wisecracks. You went from movies to books to Hiram Wright’s class.”

  “And from parking violations to triple murders. Yeah...All trends are up. And maybe, maybe I’m worth your time now Linda. But I really want the farm back.”

  “Billy, you can have it back. Of course you can.”

  “Okay. Good.”

  “And...me.” Soon as I heard it, I knew she’d never forgive me for making her say it.

  “I’ll just take the farm, thanks.”

  “What?”

  “The farm. That’ll do just fine.”

  “Just the farm?” She couldn’t believe me.

  “That’s all I want,” I said. I thought I was being low-key and gentle but this see-saw we were on, if I were down on the ground, that only meant she was up in the air and angry.

  “You’ve found someone else.” It didn’t sound like a question, so I didn’t answer. Silence meant yes. “That…oh, Billy...that girl behind the screen door...that junkyard bitch from Dogpatch...is it her?” Silence again from me. At least I wouldn’t say anything I’d regret. “Have you fucked her?” she asked. And answered. “Of course you have. What does courtship amount to for someone like that? Sharing a six pack in the back of a pick-up truck?”

  “Don’t,” I said, raising my hand. “Don’t do this.”

  “She is so...” She stopped and began to lose it. “She is so...unworthy of you.”

  “Sooner or later, we get what we deserve,” I said, reaching for the bill.

  “Is that so?” she asked, in an oh-really tone. She had her edge back now.

  “You want to make an honest woman of her, right?” Then she snorted. “That’ll be the day.”