Johnston stared at Nicky, speechless for the moment. Then he jumped up. “There’s bound to be somebody still in the office. I’m going to phone and check that bank statement.”
“There’s a phone booth in the hall outside,” I offered.
While Johnston was gone, we waited, Nicky and I, in silence. There were questions that I wanted to ask, but somehow it did not seem fair while Johnston was gone. Nicky seemed perfectly at ease, but I noticed that his fingers were drumming a steady tattoo on the arm of his chair.
In a few minutes, Johnston returned. “Pick up the marbles, Professor,” he said sourly. “The check was there all right.”
I could not resist a sly dig. “Then you mean, Nicky,” I asked innocently, “that Terry had absolutely nothing to do with it?”
But Nicky turned on me sharply. “He had everything to do with it.”
“What did he do?” Johnston and I asked in unison.
“He got out of jail, that’s what he did. That triggered off the whole thing. I imagine that Mister John was very much in love with the girl. He must have been to take the risk he did. I think they were happy together. I think that between the two, Terry and Mister John, Lily would probably have chosen the older man anyway. But Mister John could not know that. All that he could think of was that this handsome young man was back on the scene and that Lily might go back to him. So he asked her to marry him as a means of tying her to him. And when she told Terry, he probably realized that it was a fine opportunity for her. Being an intrinsically decent young man, he wished her luck and assured her that he had no hard feelings. And then he tried to see Mister John to assure him that he had nothing to fear from him.”
“Like the hero in a soap opera or a TV western,” Johnston sneered.
“Precisely,” said Nicky. “People like Terry get their ideas of morality and ethics, as do the rest of us, from the books they read and the plays they see.” He could not forbear to add with a frosty little smile, “You have to realize that, Mr. Johnston, in order to understand them.”
The Man on the Ladder
In the parlance of the undergraduate, Gentleman Johnny—more respectfully Professor John Baxter Bowman, Chairman of the History Department—was a swinger, with a taste and interest in clothes not usually associated with the professoriat. Though he lived at Mrs. Hanrahan’s, a roominghouse occupied largely by impecunious graduate students, his dress for that staid New England community was flamboyant to the point of eccentricity. He wore a fitted overcoat with an astrakhan collar, lemon yellow gloves, and was the only man in the university, perhaps in town, with a derby. For one who had been so long at the university, surprisingly little was known about his personal life other than that he had been divorced years ago and had a son he never talked about.
There was nothing eccentric about Johnny Bowman’s scholarship, however. His reputation was solidly based on countless papers and three bound books published by the university press. Then quite suddenly he acquired fame far beyond the limits of our town or the parochial world of scholars. His latest book, Growth of the Cities, won the Gardner Prize for Historical Literature which carried a cash award of five hundred dollars. But what mattered far more was that, because of the prize, the critics took another look at the book, or rather looked at it for the first time since none of the leading reviewers had bothered with it when it first appeared, and discovered that it was “a work of solid scholarship”: “a major contribution to the field”; and that he was “in the tradition of the great philosopher-historians.” Overnight the book began to sell, within a month another printing was necessary, and it even appeared one week on the best-seller lists. It goes without saying that at faculty parties, sooner or later the conversation got around to Johnny Bowman’s fabulous luck and to envious speculation on the size of his royalties.
I myself barely knew the man. He was rarely at the Faculty Club, and faculty wives had given up inviting him to parties long before I came to the university. And then I left the Law Faculty to run for County Attorney, so I saw even less of him.
Since the President had suggested I take an extended leave of absence instead of resigning, I was still officially a member of the faculty and as such was invited to the President’s annual Christmas reception for the faculty. I accepted not only because of past favors from Prex but because I assumed Professor Bowman would be there and I had a not unnatural desire to renew my acquaintance with a celebrity.
Traditionally, the President’s Christmas reception is held on the first day of vacation. Years ago when travel was less convenient and more expensive, most of the faculty spent the vacation in town. But nowadays faculty and student body alike flee the campus the moment the last class is over, so only a small group turns up. Nevertheless it is still held on the first day of vacation, rather than a day or two earlier when more might be able to attend. Tradition dies hard in New England.
I walked over to the reception with my good friend Professor Nicholas Welt. He was planning to catch the night train to Chicago where he would spend the vacation; but as the incumbent of the Snowdon Professorship of English Literature, the oldest and perhaps the most prestigious chair in the college, he felt he should put in an appearance.
We were greeted by Prex and his wife, dutifully nibbled the spreads and sampled the punch. Finding the last wanting, we began working our way to the door when we were hailed by Jan Ladlo. He entered with his new bride of a few weeks in tow. He introduced me; Nicky already knew her—she was a graduate student and had taken courses with him.
“And how does it feel to be Mrs. Ladlo instead of Mrs. Johnson?” he asked.
“Just fine,” she said and put her hand under her husband’s arm.
Jan Ladlo is a short, pudgy man with a round balding head, a bulbous nose and protruding myopic eyes. Nevertheless, as an associate professor in the History Department who was still on the right side of forty, he had been considered one of our most eligible bachelors by the faculty wives who are always on the lookout for their spinster sorority sisters.
“Have you been here long, Professor?” Ladlo asked Nicky and inquired if Johnny Bowman had shown up.
“Apparently not,” said Nicky. “I guess you will have to represent the department.”
I realized that only the older men presumed to call Nicky by his first name, the rest invariably addressed him by title. Not that Nicky is himself old. He is only two or three years older than I, in fact, but he has prematurely white hair—my own is just beginning to gray at the temples—and his gnomelike face is lined. But that’s not it either—Bowman, who is several years older than Nicky, is called Johnny by the youngest instructors. I suppose it’s Nicky’s general manner, the way he listens to you as he might to some luckless freshman asking for an extension on a term paper, that makes you feel young and callow in his presence.
“Oh, he’ll probably be along later,” said Ladlo. “And Bob Dykes said he was coming, so I guess the History Department will make a pretty good showing before the evening is over.”
“I heard Johnny was planning to give up teaching,” I said, “now that he can live on his royalties.”
Ladlo laughed. “He’ll never give up teaching. As a matter of fact, his royalties on Growth of the Cities won’t come to very much—certainly not enough to retire on. It’s the next book he expects will make him some money, big money. He’s known now and the reviewers will be watching for it.”
“How soon before it comes out?”
Ladlo shrugged his shoulders. “You know how secretive Bowman is. Bob Dykes has been helping him on it. He thinks it’s still a long way off. Oh, there’s Bob now.” He waved and called him over. “Where’s Laura? Isn’t she coming?”
“Oh, she’s off to Florida to visit her folks,” Dykes said.
“She went alone?” asked Mrs. Ladlo, unable to understand how a wife could leave her husband for even a few days.
“I’m going to try to join her,” said Dykes with a grin. “There was some work I was doing for
Bowman, and I felt I ought to stay until I finished it.”
Dykes is an assistant professor in the department, and although not yet thirty, is regarded as a comer. He is a handsome young man, tall and slim, with an aquiline profile and deep-set eyes. His mop of black hair is curiously bisected by a single lock of white which adds a somewhat romantic touch. Everyone liked Dykes. There was something of the small boy about him that disarmed criticism. He was a gadgeteer and a hobbyist with great enthusiasm for anything he happened to be engaged in at the moment—whether it was ham radio, or photography, or rock hunting. As he talked of them, their potentials would expand until you found yourself believing that his interest in ham radio was not just a love of gadgetry but a desire to expand his horizon through enlarged communication; and that his rock collection satisfied not merely an itch for ownership, but gave him a greater understanding of Mother Earth. And yet his interests also had a curious boyish practicality—he had sold some of his rock specimens to museums and even to our own geology department, and as for his camera, he claimed it had helped pay his way through graduate school.
“We were talking about Bowman’s new book,” I said. “Is it almost finished?”
Dykes smiled. “It could take another year. You know how these things are. I’m planning to spend the vacation working on it full time.”
“Not on the house?” asked Ladlo with a twinkle. Everyone twitted Dykes about his latest hobby—his new house. It was an old Victorian ark of a place that he had bought last year, and he never tired of regaling us at the Faculty Club with the wonders of the place—“built to last; not like the shoddy cracker boxes they’re putting up nowadays.” It was spacious and there was room to move around. And he had answers to all objections. It would cost a fortune to heat? He would seal off all rooms not in use. Repairs? He could do most of them himself and enjoy it. He might even consider cutting up the house into small apartments as his neighbor who had bought its twin across the street was planning to do.
“Well, there are a couple of small jobs around the house I may get around to, as relaxation from Bowman’s work,” he admitted with a smile. “Anyone seen him tonight?”
“Just coming in now,” said Ladlo nodding toward the door.
Bowman had a young man with him, a blond good-looking youngster in his twenties, and he steered him in our direction. “I’d like you all to meet my son Charles,” he said somewhat diffidently. “Charles is with a publishing house, an editor. He’ll be staying for a week or so and he’s offered to take a look at the manuscript.” He turned to Dykes. “Isn’t that splendid, Bobby?”
Dykes nodded slowly and then grinned. “We can sure use all the help we can get.”
Nicky glanced at his watch. “If I’m going to catch my train, I’d better get started. It’s a longish walk to the station.”
“Taking the eight o’clock?” asked Dykes. “I’ve got my car here. I’ll drive you over.”
“Very kind of you,” said Nicky.
As we started for the door Bowman asked Dykes if he were coming back. “I don’t think so. I left Duke in the car and I ought to take him home.” Bowman asked if he’d be around the next day, and Dykes said he thought he would. “Good, we might drop in on you,” said Bowman.
“Lots been happening in your department,” I remarked, as we went outside. “Bowman getting a best-seller, Ladlo getting married—”
“And she’s a nice girl, too,” Dykes interjected quickly.
“Appears to be.”
“Some of the wives of my colleagues haven’t been over-kind.”
“Oh?”
“You know how it is here. They were seen together while she was still a married woman. She was getting a divorce, of course, but they didn’t know that. And then when the divorce came through and they got married, there were some that thought she ought not remarry right away, as though she had just been widowed.”
We neared the car and a dog began to bark vehemently. Dykes smiled. “Good old Duke. He knows my step.”
He had acquired the dog shortly after moving into the new house; ostensibly, to provide protection and companionship for Laura when she was alone. But it was obvious to anyone who knew Dykes that he had bought Duke because, like any boy, he wanted a dog. He had spent hours training him—the usual tricks: to heel, to come on call—and for the last, he had acquired one of those silent whistles which he wore on a cord around his neck. Duke was no ordinary dog. He was a briard, a Belgian sheepdog, a huge creature with a long rough iron-gray coat, the shaggy fur covering even his face so that you wondered how he could see. I remember when someone observed it must cost a small fortune to feed the beast, Dykes replied that although the dog did eat a lot he was thinking of getting a female and breeding her and selling the puppies. It struck me as a perfect Dykesian solution.
Without question the dog was well trained. After expressing its obvious joy at seeing his master, he sat sedately besides Dykes in the front seat and Nicky and I got in back. As we drove, much to Nicky’s annoyance—he is always nervous in cars—Dykes kept turning around to give us examples of the dog’s intelligence, and we were relieved to arrive at the station without mishap.
We saw Nicky off and then Dykes asked if I’d like to stop for a minute and see his place. But I begged off.
“Some other time. I really want to get home now.”
“Okay, some other time it is.” He seemed hurt at my refusal.
We drove in silence until we reached my door. I thanked him for the lift and remarked it seemed a shame he had to stay in town during vacation, what with his wife away and all. “Is the book so far along that these few days will make a difference?”
He shook his head. “We’re a long way from finishing, but Johnny was insistent. Maybe he’s right, because he’s got plenty of trouble on this one.”
The next day whatever trouble Johnny Bowman might have had with the book was over. In fact, all his troubles were over. Johnny Bowman was dead.
His death seemingly was the result of idle curiosity. The university was excavating the foundation of a new dormitory. At the crest of High Street where the excavation comes to within a few feet of the roadbed, the police had set out a roadblock and lanterns. Bowman must have gone to peer over the edge to see how the work was progressing. We had our first snowfall of the winter that morning, and although it was light, less than an inch, the ground was slick. The drop at that point was a good thirty feet, and either he had slipped, or the ground at the edge had given way and he had fallen to his death.
Since it was Saturday, there was no one working on the site, and for that matter with vacation, no one was around. A college town becomes a ghost town during the Christmas vacation. The workman who filled and lit the lanterns found him crumpled at the foot of the drop, his derby a few yards away. The body showed the expected contusions, and the medical examiner gave it as his opinion that he had died within minutes of striking the bottom.
Of course the police held an investigation since the death was not due to natural causes. And as D.A., and because of my connection with the university, I felt I ought to take part.
I questioned Mrs. Hanrahan, Bowman’s landlady, but learned only that he had slept late that morning and would not have left until sometime around noon.
He stopped at the history office. Professor Ladlo was there, but he had little to offer.
“I must have been the last person to see him alive,” he remarked. “Johnny came in around half past twelve, and we chatted for a few minutes. Then he left saying that he was going to drop in on Bob Dykes, but I’ve seen Dykes and he said he had been in Norton all day Saturday.”
“Had he expected to find Dykes here at the history office? Is that why he came?”
Ladlo shook his head. “I don’t think so. When they work together, it’s mostly at Dykes’ house. No, I guess he came here as a matter of habit as much as anything. He gets his mail here for one thing. Besides, if he were going to Dykes’ place, this is on the way.”
&n
bsp; I questioned Dykes, who confirmed he had not seen Bowman. “I didn’t really have an appointment with him,” he said. “You heard him. I said I’d be home and he said he might drop around. It was that kind of thing, nothing definite. We’ve been working here because there’s plenty of space and we’re not likely to be interrupted, and I have the manuscript and all the notes. Normally, I would have hung around all day. Lord knows I’ve got plenty to do here. But with Laura gone, I felt kind of restless and I decided to go into Norton to do some last-minute shopping. I left here around eleven and when I got to Norton, I just wandered around the stores. I had a bite and then decided to really make a day of it and I went to a movie—right in the middle of the day,” he added wonderingly. “First time I’ve ever done that sort of thing—go to a movie in the daytime, I mean. And just think, the first time I do something out of the ordinary it results in the death of Johnny Bowman.”
“How so?”
“Well, it stands to reason if I had been at home, we would have worked on the book and I would have driven him home.”
The Nine Mile Walk Page 12