Final Exam

by Kluge, P. F.

  “No,” I said. Caroline Ives was gone. And Martha Yeats. And the younger faculty, most of them had melted away. In the end it came, it came back to us. An odd trio, any day. The daunting professor, Wright. Ave, the epitome of the gentleman’s C. And me.

  “We’ve talked,” Ave said. “And we decided that, if this college stands any chance at all, we have to do something. Act, not react. We can’t just...” He gestured at me, or out the window at the sunset, “...sit.”

  “We want you to call in Sherwood Graves,” Hiram said.

  “I see,” I said. “What shall I tell him, when I call him?”

  “Oh, Warren,” Ave said. “Just make the damn call. You’re the president.”

  Chapter XII

  BILLY HOOVER

  Nasty weather. Slushy ground and cement colored skies. But I was sitting out in front of the post office with Sherwood Graves when the end came. He was talking to me about Ave Hayes and where did I think a man like Hayes would go, if he wanted to hire a killer, and I was dumbfounded, wondering what to say to a man who was getting weirder by the minute, when Wesley Coward came over and said the President called and Graves was wanted in Stribling Hall, right now. My guess is that Graves knew what was coming. He stayed quiet a while, nodding to himself. Then he asked me to go with him, for no reason I could see. Maybe he just wanted company.

  Looking back, I suppose everybody was surprised when we entered Niles’ office. Graves expected Niles but what were Wright and Hayes doing there: president, provost, trustee? And those three were surprised to see me trailing behind. Just a mild surprise. All of them wanting to be thought of as regular guys, they let me stay. I wasn’t worth bothering about.

  “Sit, Mr. Graves,” Ave said, as if bringing a dog to heel. “We decided it was high time we had a talk. Six months after Martha, five or so after the two students, two weeks after that poor high school kid. Time to talk. This is unofficial, confidential, off the record, all of those words. Would you mind talking to us that way, sir?”

  “I’m not sure,” Graves said, a cautious response which Ave was ready for.

  “Not sure. Well, don’t talk then. Try listening. Hiram?”

  “‘Looking everywhere,’” Wright quoted. “‘Leaving nothing to chance.’ Those are your words—virtually your only words to the press. Fine principles, Mr. Graves. They could guide a scientist to the Nobel Prize. But you are not a scholar. You are a law official investigating crimes. Can you tell us, sir, about results?”

  “I don’t report to you,” Graves said. “You know that.”

  “Let me report to you then. It comes to this. Four people are dead and buried, the college closed and still you are here, in residence...”

  “Doing what?” Ave added. “On what kind of schedule? Reporting to whom? Waiting for what?”

  “World-historical books, pioneering theses have been written in less time,” Wright complained. They sounded like a tag team. It was Ave’s turn.

  “I supposed that, the longer Mr. Graves stayed, the more information he would have,” Ave said. “Perhaps I was wrong.”

  “Not all my students are mendicant scholars,” Wright said. “Some are men of affairs, down in Columbus. I’ve been chatting with them. I shared our concern about the progress—no, excuse me—the status of this investigation.”

  “I made some phone calls too,” Ave said, “and no scholars on my list, that’s for sure. But the governor, he’s a left-handed relation of my wife’s, I don’t know if you knew that. I knew that kid before he had a pot to pee in. Anyway, he’s concerned. Believe it or not, Graves, he doesn’t like the idea of the state’s crown jewel of a college going out of business. He seems to think maybe we need a whole new team on this job. Nothing personal...”

  Hayes and Wright worked well together. As for Warren, he was about as useful as a referee in a pro wrestling match.

  “Now, it’s up to you, what you say or don’t say,” Ave said. “But before we go further, let me ask—it’s only fair—is there anything you want to tell us? Anything you’ve got. Or think you’ve got?”

  “I’ve got you, Mr. Hayes,” Graves said. I guess he couldn’t help himself, blurting out like that. It wasn’t a professional speaking. It was the dead professor’s son. We all just sat there a minute and it was real unpleasant. Warren had his head in his hands. Wright studied Graves, pleasantly, like you smile when your opponent in a card game makes a dumb move. And Ave just nodded, almost like he agreed with what Graves had said.

  “You’ve got me? Care to elaborate?”

  “Not now,” Graves said. But it was too late for that.

  “Now,” Ave said. “Right now. I’ll tell you what you’ve got. Connections, relationships, contingencies, privacies. I confess. Want me to say the damning magic words? Here goes. Senior Years.”

  Graves flinched when Ave mentioned the name. He was supposed to be the one to bring it up, when the time was right.

  “That’s right,” Ave said. “Senior Years. Say it loud, say it proud. My idea and I’m not ashamed to mention it. It’s not a criminal enterprise. I have an interest in seeing that the college controls and develops land around the campus. In conjunction with those initiatives, I’ve been looking into buying land myself. The college would profit. So would I. But...in our moment of greatest need...I think we should consider the Stribling Tract. Does this incriminate me?”

  “Your brilliant idea—you never even put it up for a vote,” Graves said. “You knew you’d lose. Trustees weren’t as keen as you were about condos in the cornfields.”

  “There was opposition,” Niles said. “But there was also some feeling that the project might be revisited at another time.”

  “And now, it’s time,” Graves said. “I wonder how that happened?”

  “Ah, I see,” said Hayes. “So that’s my master plan. Murder people to move my project along. Did I tiptoe around the campus executing people myself?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Graves said. “I never dreamed you’d do the dirty work. You’d pay someone. In cash. I’ve looked at your bank withdrawals.”

  “Now I get it. Smoking gun evidence. Mysterious cash withdrawals. God, Graves, you must hate me.”

  Graves sat there. Waiting. He didn’t deny the hating. “Twenty thousand dollars,” he said. “In cash.”

  “It hurts to let you down,” Ave answered. “I mean it. This means so much to you. And it’s so mundane, in the end. Listen, Graves. We have these people around here who shun electricity. They wear black hats and plain shoes and pants with no zippers. They drive horses. They hire out as carpenters. They build fences, repair barns. They work for cash. Names and dates available. I hope you don’t scare them to death. They’re plain folk, Amish.”

  “Let me add a point,” Warren said. “There are people around here, more than we like to admit, who resent the college. We’re snooty, we’re spoiled. In contemplating Senior Years, in considering adding to what might be in the Stribling Tract, we needed someone who was not a college official. Someone we could approach as a partner and friend. And what better friend that someone who has left us his estate...Really, Mr. Graves...we’re his heirs!”

  “After he pays his debts? After he revises his will?” Graves kept firing but he sounded desperate, like he was rushing to finish a lecture to a class that was already leaving the room.

  “You’ve got nothing,” Ave pronounced. “Am I right? Warren?”

  Warren nodded.

  “Hiram?”

  “Agreed.”

  “Billy?”

  That startled me. I never expected to be included and now they were all watching me.

  “Think out loud, Billy,” Hiram Wright said. It took a while but they were patient. Interested, even, not knowing what I would say. I didn’t know either.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, turning to Graves. He was a goner already. “But it never felt like...”

  “No need to apologize, Billy,” Wright said.

  “Definitely not,” Hayes sa
id. “Because we haven’t gotten to the point, have we Graves? Do you want to tell them? Or should I?”

  Graves didn’t answer. But, with the slightest nod of his head, he signaled Ave to go on.

  “I did a stupid thing once,” he said. “Oh, I’ve done a lot of stupid things. But one in particular. I was a student, of sorts, when Rudolph Graves taught here. I belonged to a political club, more or less Republican, that was called the Edwin Burke Society.”

  “Actually, Ave,” Wright said. “It was Edmund...Edmund Burke.”

  “There you go!” Ave said. “I thought maybe something was wrong there. Well, this Burke crew mostly drank beer and talked about what was in the papers. Kind of dull. I took it up a notch. We marched in a few parades, protesting a professor they called ‘Red Rudolph.’”

  “They called...” Graves protested.

  “I guess I made ‘Red Rudolph’ up. You know how it is with nicknames. Sometimes they just stick. Well, Mr. Graves, I’m sorry about your dad. If he were here, I’d say as much to him. Now I’m saying it to you. It was just a campus flap that escalated. It wasn’t the end of the world.”

  “That’s exactly what it was,” Graves fired back, glaring at Hayes. I suspect he felt cheated. A nonchalant and slapdash apology like that. Something he’d been waiting for, that didn’t satisfy him.

  “Regrets aside, Mr. Graves, I still wonder what on earth you’re up to here. I’d be tempted to call your investigation purposeless but that wouldn’t be fair. There is a purpose. The purpose was revenge...”

  I waited for Graves to counter, to come back with a declaration, an accusation, anything: suspects identified, arrests imminent. But he stayed silent as a punished schoolboy. He had nothing to say. And just then I was certain we would never know what happened to us. At least, we’d never learn it from Sherwood Graves.

  “What strikes me,” Hiram Wright offered, “is how much your techniques resemble the ones that brought your father down. Your father was still alive when I came here. Not teaching, but in the neighborhood. I met him more than once. He’d been badly treated, no doubt, but to the end, there was a courtly, gentle nature about him, something almost...sweet. I don’t believe he’d have wanted you to revenge him in this way.”

  “The hell with it,” Hayes said. “I’ll tell you what bothers me. Every minute Mr. Graves diverts himself with me—my offshore this, my silent that, my undisclosed this and that—is a moment the murderer breathes free. The case Mr. Graves makes against me is false. The case I—and this college—have against him is true. Malfeasance, misfeasance, the whole drill. Of course I hope it doesn’t come to that. But it’s there alright. It’s only a phone call away.”

  There was no doubt about it. Now I felt sorry for Sherwood Graves. What son wouldn’t want to return to a place where his father had been ruined? There, there, I wanted to tell him. It’s alright. But now wasn’t the time. It wasn’t my meeting.

  “Now, Mr. Graves,” Hiram said. “Let’s talk about your investigation. I know you have been looking into wounded, grieving faculty. No question, we have some of those. But...do you have a bona fide suspect?”

  “No,” Graves said.

  “And what about unhappy students and graduates? Every kennel has sick puppies. But rabies?”

  “Not that we found.”

  “And the fabled friction between town and gown. Lots of fights over the years. Even a shooting death, I’ve heard.”

  “That was years ago,” Graves said. “There’s nothing I could take to the D.A. A lot of things looked promising for a while...”

  “Not as promising as me,” Averill Hayes couldn’t resist interjecting.

  “That’ll do, Ave,” Niles said, but Graves overrode him.

  “No, sir,” he conceded. “No one looked the way you looked to me.”

  “Oh...well, you looked wrong,” said Hayes.

  “I’m not done looking. Fair warning.”

  “Look away,” Hayes said. Something seemed funny to him. Then he started to sing, echoing “Dixie”— “Look away, look away...”

  “That’ll do,” the President repeated, a little more firmly. “Is there anything else that we should...”

  “Alright,” Graves interrupted. “I’ve listened to you and now it’s your turn to listen to me. Okay?”

  “Please,” the President said.

  “A killer moves quickly, moves randomly...it’s the hardest thing in the world to solve. Also...happily...the rarest. Most murders solve themselves. Not this. There were no connections, no trails to follow. It was all about the college. It was where I wanted to look, look into everything, anything...”

  “And nothing!” Ave burst out. “Six months of snooping and this is all we get?”

  “That’ll do, Ave,” Niles repeated, taking control now that it was over. Wright and Hayes sat there, satisfied with themselves, looking to have a jolly post mortem, replaying the punches they’d thrown and how they landed. Graves might have had more to say but he decided not to bother. He got up out of his chair, nodding goodbye, and I followed him towards the door.

  “Actually,” Warren said, “I’d like a moment with Mr. Graves.”

  “Okay,” Graves said. “And Billy.”

  “Fine,” Niles said. “And Billy.”

  Hayes and Wright left, not saying a word, not so much as a nod to Graves.

  “Sit down, both of you,” Warren said. “Sit here.” He gestured to the chairs where the provost and trustee had sat, right next to his desk.

  “I’m a glib man, everybody says,” Warren told Graves, who was sitting like a kid called into a principal’s office, a basically good kid who’d messed up. “But I’m not sure how to say what I have in mind. Would you give me a minute?”

  Warren clasped his hands in front of his head, thinking, or looking like it. This meeting, which had begun in the late afternoon, had continued into early evening. A few strokes of deep purple were all that lingered in the west. The office was dark; no lights turned on. Night claimed the abandoned campus, the president’s office.

  “You came to us highly recommended. The people we called in Columbus believed—still believe—that there was no one better to help us out of our predicament. And I don’t doubt them. And...if you went off the track here...it’s for reasons that I understand. That I honor. One of the discoveries I make as I grow older is that I think more and more of my father. The older I get, the more he’s with me. It doesn’t make sense. He’s been dead so long. And every day that passes adds another day to all that time that’s come between us. I had thought of him as a figure on a horizon, moving away from me. Now something is bringing us together, closer and closer. A paradox, I guess. I’m older now than he was when he died and yet he’s in my thoughts. I don’t understand why this should be. And I don’t know how many other people feel this way. But I wanted you to know that I understand what brought you here...loyalty and love and righteous anger...”

  Another pause for thought. I noticed the deep, grainy polished wood in the president’s desk, the carpet under my feet that had the college seal woven into it. I liked what Niles said about the connection between fathers and sons, how it doesn’t wear away with time, it stays, it even gets stronger. I was impressed by him, just then.

  “You had an apology of sorts from Averill Hayes. I don’t know what it meant to him. To you, it cannot have been other than disappointing. But what happened to your father here was wrong. And I wouldn’t want you to leave this office without hearing from me, the president, these words: I apologize. I am sorry.”

  He came out from behind the desk, reached his hand out to Graves.

  “I’m sorry,” he repeated.

  “Thank you,” Graves said. They shook hands. “I’m sorry too.”

  Tom was waiting for us outside the Security office. He knew what had happened, it was written all over him. Glancing through the door, I saw that Graves’ world had been dismantled, the computers, maps and files all gone. Wesley Coward was a memory, some fast fo
od cartons and silver foil envelopes of mustard and soya sauce were all that was left of him. Linda was gone too.

  “Wild goose season is over,” Tom said. He gestured across the alley, at a college vehicle, then glanced at Graves, who was standing next to me. “Take him back where he came from,” Tom said. “And come straight back. You’re on the night shift.”

  So, after a stop at the Motel 8, we rode through the village, turned right onto the road that goes down the college hill, into the river valley, past fields of corn and soy, brown and stubbled now with half frozen puddles between last year’s rows. On River Road, we passed Hiram Wright’s place. Hiram was keeping his personal college in session; our latest class was filmed by a TV crew, some cable series called “People Who Make a Difference.” There were TV trucks still in the driveway, cars along the road. A few miles later when we found the road that runs south to Columbus, Graves finally spoke.

  “Relax, Billy,” he said. “I’m not mad at you.”

  “Yeah, but I’m still sorry it wound up this way.”

  “My fault. I made a mistake here. I wasn’t working for the people who got killed, the way I usually do. Those are the ones who employ me, dead strangers, at least that’s how I think of it. But when I came to this place, I was working for my father. And that means I was working for myself. I took on the whole college. You were there. I was convinced that what was going on there was deep and complicated. It’s what I believed and what I wanted to believe. Well, I turned up stuff, all kinds of stuff. But I didn’t have a killer. At the end, I was just waiting to catch a break, waiting to get lucky. Waiting for the killer to kill again. That’s sad. But the saddest thing of all is, I wasn’t wrong. If this is ever solved, it’ll turn out to be complicated and deep. And, I guarantee, it’ll involve more than one person.”

  “A hired killer?”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “This isn’t hit-man-comes-to-campus. A hit man wouldn’t last five minutes, nervous as this place is. No, it’s not that. It’s a coincidence of interests, a manipulation. An alliance. Call it that. Possibly a very unlikely one. I didn’t find it. But I guarantee you one thing. The killer is local. Has to be, to move around campus. The killer is local and so is his boss. You’ll know them both, if they’re ever caught.”