The Nine Mile Walk

by Harry Kemelman

  And now I thought I saw light. I suppose no university is really complete without a faculty feud. Ours was localized to the English Department, and the principals were our two eighteenth century specialists, Professor George Korngold, biographer of Pope, and Professor Emmett Hawthorne, discoverer and editor of the Byington Papers. And so bitter was the conflict between the two men that Professor Hawthorne had been known to walk out of meetings of learned societies when Korngold rose to speak, and Korngold had once declared in a sectional meeting of the Modern Language Association that the Byington Papers were a nineteenth century forgery.

  I smiled knowingly. “And Korngold is on the committee?” Professor Hawthorne, I knew, was at the University of Texas for the semester, as an exchange professor.

  Nicky’s lips twisted into a most unscholarly smirk. “They’re both on the committee, Korngold and Hawthorne.”

  I looked puzzled. “Is Hawthorne back?”

  “We had a wire from him saying that he had made arrangements to return north early, ostensibly to check proof on the new edition of his book. But I consider it most significant that we got the wire shortly after Bennett’s examination date was posted in the Gazette, and equally significant that he is due to arrive the night before the examination. Of course, we invited him to participate and he wired this acceptance.” Nicky rubbed his hands with pleasure.

  And although in the nature of things I did not expect to enjoy the proceedings quite as much as Nicky would, I thought it might be interesting.

  Like many an anticipated pleasure, however, the actuality proved disappointing. The candidate, Claude Bennett, failed to appear.

  The examination was scheduled for ten o’clock Saturday morning, and I arrived in good time—about a quarter of—so as not to miss any part of the fun. The committee had already assembled, however, and I could detect from the general atmosphere, and more particularly from the way the members were grouped as they stood around and gossiped, that Korngold and Hawthorne had already had an exchange or two.

  Professor Korngold was a large, stout man, with a fringe of reddish hair. His naturally ruddy complexion was exaggerated by a skin disorder, a form of eczema from which he suffered periodically. He smoked a large curved-stem pipe which was rarely out of his mouth, and when he spoke, the burbling of the pipe was a constant overtone to the deep rumble of his voice.

  He came over to me when I entered the room and offering his hand, he bellowed, “Nicky said you were coming. Glad you could make it.”

  I took his outstretched hand with some reluctance for he was wearing a soiled cotton glove on the other to protect, or perhaps only to conceal, the broken skin where the exzema had penetrated. I withdrew my hand rather quickly, and to cover any awkwardness that might have resulted, I asked, “Has the candidate arrived yet?”

  Korngold shook his head. He tugged at his watch chain and brought forth a turnip of a watch. He squinted at the dial and then frowned as he snapped the case shut. “Getting on to ten o’clock,” he rumbled. “Bennett better not funk it again.”

  “Oh, he’s been up before, has he?”

  “He was scheduled to come up at the beginning of the semester, and a day or two before, he asked for a postponement.”

  “Does that count against him?”

  “It’s not supposed to,” he said, and then he laughed.

  I sauntered over to the other side of the room where Professor Hawthorne was standing. Hawthorne was a small, tidy man, with more than a touch of the dandy about him. He had pointed mustaches, and he was one of the few men in the university who wore a beard, a well-trimmed imperial. He also went in for pince-nez on a broad black ribbon, and even sported a cane, a slim ebony wand with a gold crook. All this since his discovery of the Byington Diary some few years ago, during a summer’s study in England. He had been an ordinary enough figure before that, but the discovery of the Byington Papers had been hailed by enthusiasts as of equal importance to the deciphering of the Pepys Diary, and honors had come to him: a full professorship, an editorial sinecure with a learned publication, and even an honorary degree from a not too impossible Western college. And with it had come the imperial and the cane and the pince-nez on a ribbon.

  “George Korngold being amusing at my expense?” he asked with seeming negligence.

  “Oh, no,” I said quickly. “We were talking about the candidate. George said something about his having funked the examination once before.”

  “Yes, I suppose Professor Korngold would regard Bennett’s request for a postponement as funking it,” Hawthorne said ironically, raising his voice so that it was just loud enough to be heard across the room. “I happen to know something about it. And so does Professor Korngold, for that matter. It so happens that Bennett was working on the Byington Papers. Our library acquired the manuscript just a few days before Bennett was scheduled to stand for examination. As a real scholar, naturally he wanted a chance to study the original manuscript. So he asked for a postponement. That’s what Korngold calls funking an exam.”

  From across the room the voice of George Korngold boomed out, “It’s ten o’clock, Nicky.”

  Hawthorne glanced at his watch and squeaked, “It’s only five of.”

  Korngold laughed boisterously, and I realized that he had only been baiting Hawthorne.

  When five minutes later the clock in the chapel chimed the hour, Korngold said, “Well, it’s ten o’clock now, Nicky. Do we wait till noon?”

  Hawthorne waved his stick excitedly. “I protest, Nicky,” he cried. “From the general attitude of one member of this committee the candidate has already been prejudged. I think in all fairness that member should disqualify himself. As for the candidate, I am sure he will be along presently. I stopped by at his hotel on my way down and found that he had already gone. I suppose he has dropped in at the library for a last-minute check-up of some point or other. I urge that in all decency we should wait.”

  “I think we can wait a while, Emmett,” said Nicky soothingly.

  By a quarter past, however, the candidate had still not arrived, and Hawthorne was in a panic of anxiety. He wandered from one window to another looking out over the campus toward the library. Korngold, on the other hand, was elaborately at ease.

  I think we all felt a little sorry for Hawthorne, and yet relieved, somehow, when Nicky finally announced, “It’s half-past ten. I think we have waited long enough. I suggest we adjourn.”

  Hawthorne started to protest, and then thought better of it and remained silent, gnawing on his mustache in vexation. As we all moved to the door, Korngold rumbled loud enough for all to hear, “That young man had better not plan on standing again for examination in this university.”

  “He may have an adequate excuse,” Nicky ventured.

  “The way I feel right now,” said Korngold, “it would have to be something more than just an adequate excuse. Only a matter of life and death would justify this cavalier treatment of the examining committee.”

  Nicky had some work to do at the library, so I went back to my office. I had been there less than an hour when I was informed of the reason for Bennett’s seeming negligence. He had been found dead in his room—murdered!.

  My first reaction, I recall, was the idiotic thought that now Bennett had an excuse that would satisfy even Professor Korngold.

  I felt that Nicky ought to be notified, and my secretary tried to reach him several times during the afternoon but without success. When, at four o’clock, Lieutenant Delhanty, our Chief of Homicide, accompanied by Sergeant Carter who had also been working on the case, came to report on his progress, she still had had no luck.

  Carter remained outside in the anteroom, in case he should be needed, while I led Delhanty into my office. Delhanty is a systematic man. He brought forth his notebook and placed it carefully on my desk, so that he could refer to it when necessary. Then he carefully drew up a chair and after squinting through his eyeglasses he began to read.

  “At ten-forty-five we were notified by
James Houston, manager of the Avalon Hotel, that one of his guests, a Claude Bennett, twenty-seven, unmarried, graduate student at the university, had been found dead by the chambermaid, a Mrs. Agnes Underwood. He had obviously been murdered. The call was taken by Sergeant Lomasney who ordered Houston to close and lock the door of the room and to await the arrival of the police.

  “The Medical Examiner was notified and came out with us. We arrived at ten-fifty.” He looked up from his notes to explain. “The Avalon is that little place on High Street across from the university gymnasium. It’s more of a boardinghouse than a hotel, and practically all the guests are permanent, although occasionally they take a transient. There was a car parked in front of the entrance, a Ford coupe, 1957, registration 769214. The key was in the ignition switch.” He looked up again. “That turned out to be important,” he said. He made a deprecatory gesture with his hand. “It’s the sort of thing a policeman would notice—a parked car with the key in the switch. It’s practically inviting someone to steal it. It made inquiries of the manager, Houston, and it turned out to be Bennett’s car.”

  “Bennett’s room was one flight up, just to the right of the stairs. The shades were drawn when we entered, and Houston explained that they had been found that way. Bennett was lying on the floor, his head bashed in by half a dozen blows from some blunt instrument. The Medical Examiner thought the first one might have done the trick, and the rest were either to make sure or were done out of spite. Near the body was a long dagger, the haft of which was covered with blood. A few strands of hair adhered to the sticky haft and were readily identified as the victim’s.”

  He reached down and drew from the briefcase he had brought with him a long, slim package. He carefully unfolded the waxed-paper wrapper and exposed to view a dagger in a metal sheath. It was about a foot and a half long. The haft, which was stained with dried blood, was about a third of the overall length, about an inch wide and half an inch thick, with all the edges nicely rounded off. It appeared to be made of bone or ivory, and was engraved with swastikas.

  “That was the weapon, I suppose,” I said with a smile.

  He grinned back at me. “Not much doubt about that,” he said. “It fits the wounds just right.”

  “Any fingerprints?” I asked.

  Delhanty shook his head. “None on the weapon, and only the ones you’d expect in the room.”

  I picked up the dagger gingerly by the sheath.

  “Why, it’s weighted in the haft,” I said.

  Delhanty nodded grimly. “It would have to be,” he replied, “to have done the job it did on Bennett.”

  I put it down again. “Well, a dagger like that shouldn’t be too hard to trace,” I said hopefully.

  Delhanty smiled. “We had no trouble with that. It belonged to Bennett.”

  “The chambermaid identified it?”

  “Better than that. The mate to it was right there hanging on the wall. Here, let me show you.” Once again he reached into his briefcase and this time came up with a large photograph showing one side of a room. There was a desk against the wall and a typewriter on a small table beside it. But it was the wall above the desk that attracted my attention, for arranged symmetrically on hooks was a veritable arsenal of weapons, each with a little card, presumably of explanation, tacked underneath. By actual count, there were two German sabers, three pistols, two weapons that looked like policemen’s night-sticks (at my puzzled look, Delhanty murmured, “Taken from guards of a concentration camp—nasty weapons—almost as thick as my wrist”) and one dagger, the twin of the weapon lying on my desk. But there was another card and an empty hook where the other dagger should have been, and it was just possible to discern its outline as a lighter area in the faded wallpaper.

  Delhanty chuckled. “G.I. trophies. My boy brought home enough stuff to equip a German regiment.”

  He drew a pencil from his breast pocket and pointed with it to the desk in the photograph.

  “Now I call your attention to this stuff on the desk to the right of this pile of books. It’s hard to make out in the picture, but I itemized it.”

  He referred to his notes again. “Loose change to the sum of twenty-eight cents, a key to the room, a pen and pencil set, a jackknife, a clean handkerchief, and a billfold. It’s the usual stuff that a man keeps in his pockets and transfers every time he changes his suit. One thing struck me as funny: the billfold was empty. It had his license and registration and a receipted bill for his room rent and a little book of stamps, but I mean there wasn’t a dollar in the money compartment.”

  “Nothing odd in that,” I remarked. “Students are not noted for their wealth.”

  Delhanty shook his head stubbornly. “Usually you carry some money with you. The change on the desk didn’t even amount to lunch money. We searched the place carefully and found no money and no bankbook. But in the wastebasket we did find this.”

  Once again he ducked down to rummage in his briefcase. This time he brought forth a long government-franked envelope.

  “That’s the kind they send checks in,” he remarked. “And do you notice the postmark? He must have received it yesterday. So we checked with the local banks and the first one we tried admitted they had cashed a government check for Bennett for one hundred dollars. The teller couldn’t be sure, of course, but unless Bennett asked for bills of a particular denomination, he would probably give him the money in three twenties, two tens, three fives and five ones.

  “Well,” Delhanty went on, “a young man in Bennett’s circumstances wouldn’t be likely to spend all that in a day. So that suggested to me that robbery might be the motive. And then I thought of the car parked outside with the ignition key still in the switch. It wasn’t left there overnight because it would have been tagged. That meant that it was delivered there this morning, either by a friend who had borrowed it, or, more likely, by some garage. We had luck on that too. We found that the car had been left at the High Street Garage for lubrication and was delivered around nine-thirty this morning. When I asked about the key in the switch, the manager of the garage was as puzzled as I had been. They always deliver the keys to the owner, he said, or make arrangments with him to leave them somewhere.

  “I asked to look at their records to see who delivered the car. Well, it’s only a small place and they didn’t keep any such records, but the manager knew that it was a young apprentice mechanic they had there—fellow named Sterling, James Sterling. He does most of the lubricating work and delivers cars when necessary. The manager couldn’t be sure, but he thought Sterling had delivered Bennett’s car to him several times before. I considered that important because it would show that Sterling knew Bennett’s room number and would be able to go right on up without making inquiries.”

  “I take it,” I said, “that there wouldn’t be any trouble getting into the hotel without being noticed.”

  “Oh, as to that, the place is wide open. It’s not really a hotel, you see. There’s no desk clerk. The outer door is kept open during the day, and anyone could come in and out a dozen times without being seen.

  “I asked to speak to Sterling,” Delhanty went on, “and learned that he had gone home sick. I got his address and was just leaving, when I noticed a row of steel lockers which I figured were used by the mechanics for their work clothes. I asked the manager to open Sterling’s and, after a little fuss, he did. And what do you think I found there, tucked away behind the peak of his greasy work cap? Three twenties, two tens, and three fives. No ones—I suppose he figured he could have those on him without exciting suspicion.”

  “You went to his home?”

  “That’s right, sir. He may have been sick before, but he was a lot sicker when he saw me. At first he said he didn’t know anything about the money. Then he said he won it shooting crap. And then he said he had found it in Bennett’s car, tucked down between the seat and the back cushion. So I told him we had found his fingerprints on the billfold. We hadn’t, of course, but sometimes a little lie like that
is enough to break them. His answer to that was that he wanted a lawyer. So we locked him up. I thought I’d talk to you before we really put him through the wringer.”

  “You’ve done an excellent job, Delhanty,” I said. “Quick work and good, straight thinking. I suppose Sterling thought that leaving the key in the switch would indicate that he hadn’t seen Bennett to deliver it to him personally. And you went him one better and figured that his leaving the key in the switch was in itself an indication that something was wrong. Finding the money clinches it, of course. But it would be nice if we found someone who had seen him. You questioned the residents, of course?”

  “Naturally, we questioned everybody at the hotel,” Delhanty said. He chuckled. “And it just goes to show how sometimes too much investigating can hinder you by leading you off on a tangent. I questioned them before I got a line on Sterling, and for a while I thought I had the logical suspect right there in one of the residents of the hotel. You see we had gone through all the residents, and Houston, the manager, and had drawn a perfect blank: no one had seen anything; no one had heard anything. Then we called in the chambermaid. We had left her for the last because she had been kind of upset and hysterical, what with finding the body and all. Well, she had seen something.

  “She had started to work on that floor at half-past eight. She’s sure of the time because the chapel clock was just chiming. She was just going into the room at the other end of the corridor from Bennett’s when she saw Alfred Starr, who occupies the room next to Bennett, leave his room and knock on Bennett’s door. She watched, and saw him enter. She waited a minute or two and then went on with her work.”

  “Why did she watch?” I asked.

  “I asked the same question,” said Delhanty, “and she said it was because Starr and Bennett had had a fearful row a couple of days before, and she wondered about his going in now. When I had questioned Starr earlier, he had said nothing about having gone into Bennett’s room. So I called him in again and asked him about it. At first he denied it. That’s normal. Then when he realized that someone had seen him, he admitted that he had visited Bennett that morning, but insisted that it was only to wish him luck on his exam. Then I mentioned the row he had had a couple of days before. He didn’t try to dodge it. He admitted he had had a fight with Bennett, but he claimed he had been a little tight at the time. It appears he had brought his girl down from Boston for a dance at the Medical School a couple of weeks ago. He had been tied up in the morning and had asked Bennett to entertain her. Then he had found out that after she had gone back to Boston, Bennett had written her a couple of times. That was what the fight was about, but he had later realized that he had been foolish. Bennett’s coming up for his exam gave him an opportunity to apologize and to wish him luck. He hadn’t said anything about it because he didn’t want to get mixed up in anything, especially now with final exams on.”