Death by Dissertation

by Dean James

  As the door closed behind me, I glanced around the hall. Logan’s office was at the same end of the hallway as Whitelock’s, and Dr. Farrar’s office was between the two. I wondered if she had observed anything. Had she heard Rob’s argument with Whitelock? And maybe she had heard anyone else who had talked with the man. If he had contacted his videotape partner, as we suspected he must have, he might have talked to one or more in person. Surely the police would be checking phone records. But of course, I didn’t have access to phone records. Maybe, just maybe, Dr. Farrar might have noticed whoever came in and out of Whitelock’s office the day before.

  I decided to wait until later to ask her about it. For once, her office was dark. Besides, Herrera wouldn’t be happy if he discovered I talked to her before he did.

  I glanced at my watch. It was already eleven o’clock, and I was getting pre-lunch munchies. I often reacted to stress this way. Since one of my few physical gifts was a metabolism that made binge munching of little consequence, I decided to look for Maggie and Rob and persuade them to join me. I didn’t have any set time to share my fingerprints with the campus police.

  I walked through the halls of the fifth floor, looking and listening, but didn’t catch any glimpse of them. A peek in the door of the department office earned me a dagger-sharp glare from Azalea. I grinned at her in defiance, then withdrew.

  Maybe the police had finished with them and they were both on the fourth floor. I took the stairs near the grad lounge. I was right. Maggie and Rob, along with Bella and Bruce, were huddled around Maggie’s carrel.

  “Are you kidding?” I heard Bella hiss as I approached. “She and Whitelock were screwing each other’s brains out!”

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Surely not,” Maggie protested, as I walked up. The others barely acknowledged my presence, they were so intent on what Bella had to say.

  “They were,” Bella asserted, looking to Bruce for confirmation.

  He nodded. “We saw them not long ago. We were down in Galveston with the mayor one weekend, and we saw the two of them together at a restaurant.”

  “Maybe he was just taking her out for a meal,” Rob offered, “to thank her for doing something extra for him.” Even he didn’t believe his own explanation.

  Bella sniffed. “Professors who want to say thanks to secretaries take them to the Faculty Club for lunch or send them a big bouquet. They don’t go all the way to Galveston on a weekend.” Her scorn was sharper than necessary.

  I decided I had waited long enough to find out who “she” was. “Who are you talking about, Bella?”

  “Azalea Westover and Julian Whitelock, of course.” She seemed surprised that I had to ask.

  I glanced at Maggie, then at Rob, the three of us trying carefully to seem nonchalant. None of us wanted Bella to know how important this information could be.

  “That’s why she overreacted this morning when she slapped you, Rob,” Bella concluded with smug satisfaction. “She thought you’d killed her lover.”

  That explanation made sense, and if Azalea had thought she and Whitelock were going to be the victims of blackmail at Rob’s hands, her reaction signaled the depth of her unease. Perhaps it was time to have a talk with the police and give Herrera a hint where to look.

  “I have to say, though,” Maggie interjected, “that they seem like an awfully odd couple.”

  “Chacun a son gout,” Bella observed, with an accent that sounded more Urdu than French, but we all got the point. “Besides,” she went on, her voice dripping with venom, “you don’t think that dear ol’ Julian contented himself with just li’l ol’ Azalea, now do you?”

  I had the impression that a theatrical gasp would be just what Bella wanted. Maggie obliged, with a quick wink in my direction. Bella liked to think that Maggie was slow on the uptake, and Maggie was usually willing to play along, for reasons of her own.

  “Really, Bella,” she whispered. “What do you mean?”

  “Selena Bradbury,” Bella replied, nodding her head. “I’ll bet you she’s logged a few hours in Julian’s bed.”

  “Oh, come on!” Maggie said, frowning. “Did you ever see the two of them together anywhere?”

  “Well, no,” Bella was forced to admit, the reluctance obvious in her voice. She thought for a moment, then brightened. “But they’d act kind of strange around each other. You know, like people who are more intimate than they want anyone to know. I caught them a couple of times in ol’ Julian’s office, and the air was distinctly heavy between them.”

  Maybe Bella wasn’t exaggerating, for once, and Whitelock had been having an affair with Selena, as well as with Azalea. I had difficulty imagining the Ice Queen in bed with anyone, let alone with someone who liked his sex kinky. Then again, I mused, maybe that was exactly what Selena liked. I could easily see her as a control freak.

  A new voice broke into the discussion. “Don’t you guys have something bet¬ter to do than disturb the real scholars around here?” Dan Erickson had come quietly from his carrel and stood grinning. “What’s all this frantic whispering about, anyway?”

  “Gossip, what else?” Maggie replied, her voice cool. She and Dan had dated a few times, but then they stopped. Maggie hadn’t told me why, but she had been polite and reserved with him ever since. Dan pretended not to notice anything off-putting in her manner and always treated her with friendly courtesy. Their paths didn’t cross that much anymore, because Dan, in the final stages of his dissertation, spent most of his time writing, either at home or in his carrel—when he wasn’t working. I wondered again about his job at a gay and lesbian bookstore. Curious, to say the least.

  Bella failed to notice the coolness between the couple. Bent on spreading the dirt, she quickly filled Dan in on what we had been talking about.

  “How tacky.” He gave Bella a sardonic look.

  Maggie, unable to help herself, grinned at Dan, then quickly extinguished the grin when he grinned back.

  Taking for granted that Dan meant Whitelock, Bella said, “The man had all the self-control of Jell-O in the desert. He just couldn’t keep his pants zipped. You should have seen the way he leered at some of the freshman girls in his class!”

  Bella could cheerfully have sat all afternoon chattering away, but Maggie had had enough. “Well, guys,” she said, “I hate to shoo you away when we’re having such fun trashing somebody’s reputation, but I’ve got to go over my paper for this afternoon.”

  “Oh, no,” Rob cried, “I forgot you were reading your paper at the Medieval Club today!”

  I had forgotten as well, but we all had sufficient cause. Anyway, with the murders of two members of the group, composed of medievalists from the various disciplines around campus, the ranks of attendees might be a little thin. Then again, maybe not—academics were no less ghoulish than the rest of the population, and where better to gather the latest dirt?

  Bella stood up reluctantly. There was nothing she disliked more than a short session minding someone else’s business. “I guess you’re right,” she said. “Besides, I’m ready for lunch. All the excitement this morning has made me hungry.” With another goal now in mind, she disappeared rapidly, Bruce on her heels. Next to gossip, Bella adored food more than anything else. Fortunately for her dynamite figure, she had a metabolism even more active than mine.

  Maggie, Rob, Dan, and I stared after the other two, trying not to laugh. Thank God for Bella, I thought affectionately. Nobody else could invest the situation with quite that note of vulgar normalcy. Life must go on, and Bella would enjoy every minute of it.

  “Anybody for lunch?” Dan asked.

  “Might as well,” Maggie replied, as Rob and I nodded.

  The four of us spent a companionable hour at the cafeteria in the student center, discussing anything but the murders. Dan talked a lot about his favorite subject—the post-doc at Harvard for which he had applied. He never needed much encouragement; he couldn’t see why we weren’t as fascinated as he was by the topic. We also managed
, eventually, to talk about Maggie’s paper, which examined the role of Matilda, the queen of Henry I of England, as her husband’s regent in his frequent absences from England.

  Rob was skeptical about the subject of Maggie’s research. “You’re going to have a lot of convincing to do,” he told her. “Everything I’ve read paints a very consistent picture of her. She gave a lot to the Church, and that was her main claim to fame. Other than belonging to the old West Saxon royal family, that is.”

  “I know that’s the conventional view,” she answered patiently—for her. “But you have to realize that the standard portrait of Matilda has been painted mostly by men, some of them incredibly misogynistic, like R. H. C. Davis. He was downright waspish in the way he talked about her. But,” Maggie said with a feline smile, “if you actually look at the sources themselves—say, the chronicle of Abingdon abbey, or documents in the Regesta Regum Anglonormanorum—you find something different.”

  Turned slightly away from Maggie, Rob winked and said, “If you say so. Though I’m going to take more than a bit of convincing.”

  I should have warned her that Rob could be a terrible tease when he liked someone. Obviously he was feeling more and more comfortable with her, or he wouldn’t string her along in such a way.

  Maggie seemed to catch on, though. “I’m not worried,” she said, sure of her research. “Just you wait and see!”

  After lunch, Maggie and Dan returned to the library, while Rob and I made the trek to the campus police office. Lieutenant Herrera needed Rob’s fingerprints as well, so we went off together to do our duty. We assured Maggie that we would do our best to be finished in time for her paper.

  Half an hour later, our fingerprints taken, Rob and I were leaving, when Lieutenant Herrera stuck his head in the room and asked us to come into his office. He waved us into two chairs in front of his paper-strewn desk, and we sat down. For a long moment, he didn’t speak. I was tempted to say something—anything—to break the unnerving silence, but I kept quiet, as did Rob.

  “You two have been pretty busy,” Herrera finally said, his tone sarcastic. “Stumbling over dead bodies, finding mysterious videotapes, and so on.”

  Rob and I stared mutely at him. What did he expect us to say?

  “When someone is as involved in a case as you two seem to be, that makes me suspicious. Why do you keep turning up every time there’s trouble?” he mused.

  “Bad luck?” I said, the words slipping out in spite of my best intentions.

  Herrera stared at me. “I would have thought so, because I couldn’t figure a good motive for either of you to kill Charlie Harper or Professor Whitelock.” He reached into his desk and drew out a thick set of papers, stapled in one corner. “Take a look at this,” he ordered. “Don’t worry, it’s a photocopy, not the original.”

  Hesitantly, I took the document from his hands. Rob and I had just put our heads together to examine them, when suddenly I felt Rob’s body go taut. So did mine.

  Herrera had just handed us a copy of Charlie’s will.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Stunned, Rob and I stared at each other, not saying anything. If Charlie’s will contained what his letter to Rob had hinted at, then the shit had hit the fan.

  “Where did you get this?” I finally managed to ask Herrera, my voice thin and strained.

  “Anonymously,” he replied. “It popped up in my interoffice mail this morning. Aren’t you going to read it?” He gestured at the papers I was still clutching. “Or do you already know what the will says?”

  Rob and I shook our heads.

  “No, I don’t know,” Rob said, his voice firm and controlled. “I’ve never seen it before.” He pulled the papers out of my hand and shoved them back on the desk. “How the hell should I know what’s in Charlie’s will?”

  Herrera laughed. “According to our anonymous benefactor, Harper’s will was in his desk, where anyone could have found it. And obviously someone did, or it wouldn’t have been sent it to me.”

  “Doesn’t that make you suspicious, Lieutenant?” I asked indignantly. “It looks like someone is trying to point the blame away from himself or herself and at Rob instead.”

  “Why do you assume the will points a finger at Mr. Hayward?” Herrera riposted smoothly.

  I sat there, my mouth gaping open.

  Rob stepped in, his voice steely. “Andy makes a logical assumption. You wouldn’t be interrogating us if that will didn’t contain something to do with us.”

  Herrera nodded. “According to this will, Harper left the bulk of his estate to you, Mr. Hayward. You’re the chief beneficiary of several million dollars in trusts and real estate holdings.”

  Rob went very still in his chair, and I struggled for a deep breath.

  “That is,” Herrera continued, “if you’re not convicted of murder.”

  “I didn’t kill Charlie,” Rob said flatly, “and I didn’t kill Julian Whitelock. I knew nothing about this will, I swear to you. I didn’t have any reason to murder anyone.”

  In a conversational tone, Herrera went on, “I see the case like this: You, Mr. Hayward, lived with Harper for a while, all comfy and happy. But next door to you was an old friend, another gay man. Something happened, and you rekindled your relationship, and the two of you, knowing that Harper was going to leave all his money to you, decided to get him out of the way. In order to divert suspicion from yourselves, you came up with these videotapes and other false leads to encourage me to look elsewhere. But all the time, you two plotted the whole thing.”

  Stunned, Rob and I just sat there, staring at him. Herrera was nuts, I thought. He surely couldn’t think Rob and I were so devious and twisted.

  But as my breathing returned to normal and my thoughts settled down, I could see that the situation made a mad sort of sense. Given the evidence at hand, Herrera, by twisting everything around slightly, made Rob and me look attractive as the murderers.

  “If someone were to take that interpretation seriously,” I said—and my tone of voice made that doubtful, “he would also have to prove that either Rob or I knew the contents of Charlie’s will. Since we didn’t know what the will contained, we certainly would have had no motive to kill him.”

  Herrera nodded. “As you say, I’d have to prove that you knew about the will. That might be tough. Just as tough as you proving that you didn’t know about

  He had me there.

  “Well, gentlemen,” Herrera stood up. “Thanks for dropping by. I’ll be in touch when I have further questions for you. And, by the way, don’t leave town.” He smiled wolfishly as he offered this last bit of instruction.

  Rob and I stumbled out of his office. As we walked across campus toward the library, I asked him the questions running through my mind: What kind of game was Herrera playing? Why, if he was convinced of his own little scenario, would he stop the interrogation and just let us leave? And why did he question us together, rather than separately? Was he simply trying to upset us?

  “Maybe he doesn’t really believe all that about the will,” Rob said, as we approached the front doors of the library. “Maybe he’s trying to warn us that someone wants to implicate us in the murder.”

  “Maybe,” I said doubtfully.

  Rob stopped in the shelter of the library’s cloistered walkway and looked at me intently. “You and I had better try to save our own asses. Whatever he’s after, we have to do what we can to figure this thing out. I don’t want to be arrested, and neither do you.”

  I nodded emphatically. “I’m with you on that.”

  He smiled. “Good. But now, of course, I’ve got work to do before we go hear Maggie’s paper. I hope I’ll be able to concentrate.”

  I followed him inside, and we parted ways on the fourth floor. It was only two o’clock. That little interlude with Herrera had seemed to last forever, but we’d been in his office less than thirty minutes. The Medieval Club gathering wasn’t until four, but, too restless to work in my carrel, I trotted up to the fifth flo
or to see what was going on.

  Lindy and Thelma were busy typing in the department office, but Azalea wasn’t in, and I wasn’t unhappy about that. Facing her from now on was going to be difficult, and not just because of what had happened between us a few hours earlier. I wasn’t sorry about blasting her, but I had to figure out a way to get through the days until the murder investigation was complete. In the meantime, she had been tainted forever in my mind by my suspicions.

  As I stood irresolutely just inside the doorway of the office, Selena came in with Wilda Franken, one of the junior professors in the department. In her vivid clothing, Wilda—as she insisted everyone call her, abhorring academic titles as pretentious—presented quite a contrast to Selena, though both had blonde hair and a compact, athletic figure. Maggie swore that Wilda got her fashion tips from music videos on MTV, and I couldn’t argue with that. The colors she wore made my head ache.

  Her clothing made Wilda stand out in person, and the courses she taught made her stand out in the college catalog. Every year the history department fielded countless questions about the courses with titles like “The Politics of Menstruation in Preindustrial Societies” and “The Symbology of Female Castration in the Western Historical Tradition.” The department’s resident Marxist and radical feminist historian, Wilda thrived on being the center of attention, usually controversial. But her courses were popular with the undergraduates, and her scholarship was generally considered impeccable by her peers—the three or four people in the scholarly world, that is, who actually understood what she was talking about. And cared.

  Wilda and I had had one tense encounter, my first week on campus, when I mistakenly opened the door to the library for her. I had to endure a ten-minute lecture on the insult I had offered her. When she finally ran out of breath, I told her—with remarkable calm, I thought—that only an idiot would mistake common courtesy for chauvinistic behavior and that I would have opened the door whether she had been male, female, eunuch, or gerbil, simply because I had reached it ahead of her. If she had reached it ahead of me, I continued, then I fully expected her to hold it open for me. Even Miss Manners would approve my calm response in the face of such provocation.