I did the math. If Duncan, being dead, no longer counted as current faculty, the signatures Tweel had collected constituted a majority. It didn’t seem like Skipwith in all his indifference would make a trip to Grayford to vote on the appointment of a new dean.
Outside, I ran toward the little golf cart marked Security. “Do you think this thing takes keys?”
“It seems to,” Carly said. “They’re in the ignition.” She turned them and drove us seven miles per hour to the exit. “Where to?”
I directed her left on Lexington, right on Thurman, right on San Martin. Countless vehicles passed us on the left, holding down their horns.
“There should be a high-rise on the corner of Chester and Cornelius. Pull into the parking lot. Look for spot number eighty-eight.”
“Somebody’s in it,” Carly said.
“I thought there might be.”
We parked behind Mollie’s SUV and jogged toward the building’s entrance. A man with a thick voice and thicker body, judging from his lumbering footsteps, called after us.
“You can’t park there,” said the parking attendant.
I held the door for Carly and let it close behind me. Above the elevator call button hung a list of businesses and their respective
floors. I asked Carly to look for a realtor. Her finger made its way
down the list.
“Zerbe and Farnsworth,” she said.
“Any others?”
“I think it’s the only one.”
The parking attendant made his way into the lobby. We made our way into an elevator as the doors began to close. We got off on the fourteenth floor, Carly leading the way until we came to the office.
The receptionist was a tall kid in a double-breasted suit. He made sure we noticed him, standing up to block our path as we rounded his desk.
“We’re with Mollie DuFrange,” I said. “Which room is she in?”
The kid stepped sideways, making himself even with the framed picture of an American flag. “End of the hall,” he said, sounding as though we had hurt his feelings.
There were two doors at the end of the hall. The one on the right was open. The room held a pair of small tables and a humming refrigerator. I knocked “shave and a haircut” on the door on the left. Finding it unlocked, we went on in.
It was a rectangular room with a rectangular table. Seated around it were five to seven people. I didn’t have time to listen for a definitive count. Once I entered the room, after Sara Freyman the younger said, “It’s him, Miss DuFrange,” there wasn’t much to hear.
I extended my hand to the individual at the head of the table, whose shade of hair was the only one dark enough to be Mollie’s. “I don’t believe we’ve met, sweetheart. Francis W. Biggins. A little bit about myself: my son is a student at Parshall College, so you might imagine how I have a vested interest in this meeting.”
“We’ve met.” The disappointed bearer of this news was Theo Skipwith, seated to the left and one seat down from the dark-haired female who had not yet shaken my hand. Her reticence was beginning to remind me of Greta Garbo.
“Theo, you rascal. Of course I remember you. Let’s go around the table now. Who are my other new friends?” I paired my broad accent with broader gestures involving both arms. “First, let me introduce you to my secretary, Charlene. Say howdy, Charlene.”
“Howdy, y’all.”
One by one, they introduced themselves. Between Mollie and Skipwith sat Sara Freyman. To Skipwith’s left sat Stashauer. He called himself Richard, perhaps to match his formal attire.
“I believe we’ve met as well,” said Richard. It took him a while to let go of my hand.
“We have met, haven’t we? One of those little rooms in the back of the adult bookstore. Weren’t you holding a mop?”
The man across from Stashauer liked this. He was the only one who liked anything I had said. His patience suggested a man who didn’t do a lot of waiting. He had beige skin and a bald pate. He held out his calloused hand before I could offer mine.
The bald man had a Middle Eastern accent. “Kavasmaneck. Cyrus Kavasmaneck.”
“And what is it you do, Mr. Kavasmaneck?”
“Until you got here, Mr. Biggins, I was buying your son’s school.”
“Good for you,” I said. “I tell my boy the future depends
on education.”
Kavasmaneck laughed again. “I’m afraid I am rather more interested in the school’s land than its buildings, which will have to come down.”
“That’s rather disappointing to hear,” I said.
“You have our sympathy,” said Skipwith. “Now if you might be so kind as to let these interested parties—financially interested parties—return to the business at hand.”
“It sounds like a fun party,” I said. “What if I were to invite myself to the party?”
“This party has a cover charge,” said Stashauer with a clenched jaw.
“I see. What if I were to, say, offer more for the school than Mr.
Kavasmaneck.”
“I don’t think you have that kind of money,” said Mollie with a nervous laugh.
“Hold on,” said Skipwith. “Let’s at least hear the man out.”
Mollie stood up from the table. “Mr. Biggins, would you please join me in the hall?”
“Absolutely. First let me have a brief word with my secretary. Mr. Skipwith, you don’t mind if Charlene borrows your laptop? Excellent. Thank you.”
The pale screen was some sort of document. I performed the keyboard command for creating a new file. I typed brief instructions. Carly read them to herself and patted my hand.
“Be right back,” Mollie said and closed the door behind us. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but you need to be gone. Right now,” she said in a stage whisper.
“I’m not sure you’re in a position to make demands,” I said, maintaining my volume as well as my accent.
“Mollie?” asked a man in an open office several doors down. “Everything going okay?”
“Absolutely, Mr. Zerbe. Thanks for asking.”
“ABC,” said Mr. Zerbe.
“ABC,” Mollie said.
She pulled me into the room with the refrigerator. Across the hall, behind the office door, Cyrus Kavasmaneck’s reaction to Londell’s act suggested a future for Sanford and Son reruns in Middle Eastern markets.
“I don’t know what you think you know, Tate, but you’ve got to—”
“Ben’s dead,” I said. “F. Randolph Parshall is still living. I don’t know if either of those details puts a crimp in your plans, but I thought I would let you know.”
Mollie inhaled a deep, almost noiseless breath that seemed somehow to symbolize her seven-year marriage. She let it out. “It doesn’t. But thank you for passing that along.”
“I doubt that quote-unquote petition would stand up under scrutiny. Those signatures were gathered under false pretenses.”
“Every signature has already been notarized, actually. And who’s going to scrutinize them, Tate? You? Since when do you give a shit about this school? About anything at all?”
“You seemed to like my initiative until it opposed your own.”
“Your intentions, as always, are a bit less lucrative than mine.”
Across the hall, someone applauded as Sara Freyman took the stage on Skipwith’s laptop.
“That’s me,” said the live version of her prerecorded counterpart.
“What’s her relation, by the way?” I asked. “To the other Sarah.”
“Great-great niece. She was named after her aunt, not that she knows it. She’s here to sign paperwork for a fellowship that will pay her ten thousand a year for the next five years.”
“That hardly seems fair, compared to the commission you must be getting.”
“My commission,” Mollie said, “wouldn’t pay off my mortgage. But Sara’s share of the sale of the college, to which she doesn’t even know she’s entitled, well, that’s enou
gh to make a gal happy for the rest of her life.”
“How could she not know?”
Mollie smiled for the first time since my arrival. “I never thought I’d be grateful for my time at Parshall College, Tate, but all that practice confusing cretinous minds with big words finally paid off.”
“What did you say to confuse the detective in there into breaking so many laws?”
“He was in my composition class the year I taught at State. He couldn’t get into the writing program, so they put him in my class and told me to be encouraging.”
“So you’re the favorite teacher.” I manufactured a smile. “I can see how you might fall for him, Mollie. He’s a sensitive man.”
Mollie bowed her head. She reached for my hands. “I had sex with him once. It was rape by most definitions.” Her voice was so low it seemed she didn’t want to hear it. “He never left me alone. Ben wanted to get a restraining order, but what would that do? He is the law.”
“You had a better idea. Seduce him into covering up Simkins’s murder.”
“He used to write me these creepy letters from the desk of his wife’s secretary while his wife was working late. He wrote one of them on the secretary’s personal stationery. Ben thought the name sounded familiar. He did the genealogy, found out she was the next in line. We were only going to influence her vote, try to get Simkins fired, until I learned she had no clue what she was going to inherit.”
“She seemed to know a thing or two when I visited her boss.”
“Stashauer put a tap on Duncan’s phone. After he called the law firm, I told Sara to be on the lookout for a disgruntled professor wanting to file a lawsuit that could jeopardize her fellowship.”
“And the death of that great-great aunt?”
“Ben said she was dead when he found her, but I have my doubts.”
“Why blackmail Delilah? She couldn’t have stopped you.”
“Probably not, but we had those pictures lying around. Ben had been using them to get cost-of-living raises from Simkins each of the last three years. I like to think we were the reason he wasn’t going to be able to make his annual payment to Jefferson Totten. We were doing Scoot a favor, putting him out of his misery before scandal destroyed his reputation, such as it was.”
“Were you doing me a favor, trying to put me out of my misery?”
“You know that wasn’t my idea.”
Mollie leaned into me. Her lips felt stiff. It might have been all the talk about dead bodies. Her thumbs rubbed little circles into the backs of my hands. I used to think I could feel things others couldn’t, but Mollie’s hands felt no different now that I knew what they were capable of.
“Come with me, Tate. I’m going to the Caribbean. You can have Ben’s share.”
“I wouldn’t want to come between you and Richard.”
“Give me a break. The idiot thinks I’m going to move in with him.”
“I don’t know, Mollie. I’ve never been overly fond of handouts.”
The conference room across the hall opened. Carly spoke my name without Charlene’s accent. She stumbled with a gasp into the break room. Stashauer was behind her. He held her by the neck of her sweater, her midriff exposed. He threw her into me. The two of us tumbled sideways into the kitchen counter.
“Do you know what this bitch was doing?” Stashauer stood over us on the carpeted floor. His large hand pulled me up by my jaw.
“Stop it!” Mollie smacked the arm of her former student. “Whatever they’ve done can be undone. Just keep them here. I’ll
fix everything.”
The break room door closed. The conference room opened. Mollie’s apology and brief laugh were the last things we heard before there were two closed doors between us. Stashauer pulled out a gun and a piece of chewing gum. I asked if I could have a piece.
“No, you may not.”
“The force is going to miss you when you’re gone,” I said.
“I’m not going anywhere. You’re the one who’s going to be gone when I put a bullet in your head.”
“I just assumed you’d be joining Mollie in the Caribbean.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m sorry, Rick. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
He closed the gap between us. I smelled his spearmint breath. The barrel of his gun found an uncomfortable home under my chin.
“Spill it, Cowlishaw.”
My jaw opened the quarter-inch permitted by his gun. “Maybe she meant it to be a surprise. Do you have a birthday coming up?”
The gun barrel made real headway into my chin. “No, I don’t.”
The fridge kicked off.
Stashauer shoved me onto the floor beside Carly. “Spill it!”
“You really should hear it from Mollie.”
Stashauer backed away from us, still pointing the gun. He fired it at the spot of wall between our heads. The gun had a silencer. The bullet did not.
Stashauer went into the conference room holding the gun, or so I assumed by the shriek of Parshall College’s newest, most oblivious trustee. I stepped into the hall. The sharply dressed receptionist spotted me and asked what was going on.
“We’re negotiating,” I said, rubbing my chin where the gun had left a dent. The receptionist returned to his desk.
“You know how to reach me,” said Mr. Kavasmaneck, parting ways with his considerable patience. “Give me a call when these criminal matters are resolved.”
A second chair after Kavasmaneck’s wheeled backward from the table. “I also must confess to a great deal of confusion,” said Skipwith.
“Sit down, both of you.” Stashauer’s voice went left. “When were you going to tell me about the Caribbean?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mollie said.
“Don’t lie to me, Mollie!”
The receptionist was talking to someone other than me. His inflection rose and fell, settling rapidly into the same umbrage he had taken when Carly and I breezed past him. The footsteps came softer than fast footsteps tended to. The receptionist sat down again, talking to himself.
“There he is,” I said, though I had a good idea who it was. “Where have you been?”
“In the trunk of my partner’s car,” Thayer said. “Pardon me if I’m not my freshest. I was sharing the space with an old woman’s corpse.”
“How did you know where we were?”
“I asked questions. A cop with a gun and a head wound gets quick answers.”
We shut up and listened to the escalating voices of Mollie and her erstwhile suitor.
“Give me that,” Mollie said.
“Those weren’t Benjamin’s plane tickets, were they?”
“Of course they were.”
Thayer pulled a gun from a holster on his back. “Where did you find that?” I asked.
“My partner left me for dead. I’m sure he didn’t think I’d use it.”
Stashauer’s voice broke a little. “I’m the reason you know her She’s my ex-wife’s secretary. Mine. Not yours. You’d only have the commission if it weren’t for her ten million. And don’t forget I was the one who took care of Musgrove.”
In a frightened little voice that wouldn’t have reached the first row of the Grand Ole Opry, Sara Freyman asked what was going on. “Miss DuFrange, you said the second you heard me sing that I was good enough to win the fellowship.”
“Yes, Rick, thank you for quote-unquote taking care of everything. Your attention to detail throughout this process has been nothing short of mind-blowing. If you weren’t so careless, maybe your atrocious novels would approach the vicinity of halfway readable.”
“You said I was good. You said I was the best writing student you ever had.”
Thayer stepped toward the conference room.
“Give them another minute,” I said. “They might tell us where they stashed Lindbergh’s kid.”
The talking stopped. The frantic repetition of elongated N sounds didn’t se
em like a search for the right words. Thayer returned his gun to its holster and turned the door knob.
“Take the gun out of her mouth, Stash.”
Mollie coughed. A body, presumably hers, collided with the wall I was leaning against.
“You’re not supposed to be here.” Stashauer sounded more surprised than angry.
“The newer models of squad cars have trunk releases. You could have let me have the newer model,” Thayer said, “but you’ve never been the most generous partner.”
“You weren’t breathing. I checked.”
“I’m a good actor. You’d know that if you ever came to one of my plays.”
I considered going in, but Thayer would be the one closest to the door. Stashauer would probably shoot me well before I saw him.
“I suppose one of us isn’t leaving this room alive,” said Thayer.
“One of us has a gun,” said Stashauer.
“That’s pretty easy math.”
“That hardly seems fair. How about if we arm wrestle?” Stashauer laughed with every corner of his lungs.
“You know you can beat me, Stash. I’d just like one last chance to show you what a little person is capable of when he puts his mind to it.”
Stashauer laughed again. It might have been the same laugh’s second act. “Okay,” he said. “You two, move.”
Carly said my name. The door of the break room opened a few inches. I pulled it shut. Carly opened it again. I smelled Mollie’s almond shampoo, though it was Carly saying my name.
“Tate, behind you!”
The break room door swung open. With my eyes fixed uselessly on Carly’s, I noticed her pointing to the floor. The door of the conference room opened no more than a foot. Out of it crawled Mollie on her elbows.
Carly stepped past me, grabbing Mollie’s arm as she stood. Mollie slapped her in the doorway of an open office.
“Mollie,” said Mr. Zerbe. “What is going on?”
Mollie kicked off her heels and ran. She had a hand on the door handle when she turned around, saw me coming, and waited for me to reach her. “Come with me,” she whispered. “It will be different. I need you now. It’ll be different because I need you.”
I wanted to believe her. Part of me always did.
Stashauer cackled at the end of the hall. “You never had a chance, little man.”
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