Requiem for Ashes

by David Crossman

  He'd have to move soon.

  He grabbed a bag, some cans and jars from the refrigerator, and took them to the other room to see what supper was going to be: half a can of beer, flat, some frozen chocolate-chip cookie dough, and pickled onions.

  As he ate, he recalled his conversation with the two students. What would Holmes have made of it? Pregnant girl, irate father . . . and the guilty party? Dead. Even more incriminating, Alter was a biology professor. He'd know all about sulfites; and he'd have access to them. It was all there: motive, method, and . . . opportunity? That wouldn't have been a problem.

  Perhaps hehad learned something from Holmes after all. Something uncomfortable suddenly occurred to Albert: in order to prove Tewksbury innocent, he’d have to prove someone else guilty. If Alter did kill Glenly, he'd have to go to jail. What would happen to his daughter and her child? What would it be like to have your grandfather in jail for the murder of your father?

  Albert felt an overwhelming urge to sit down at the piano; to escape into his music, bathe himself in it. Life had always been a dilemma to him. Crime and passion and intrigue only made it impossibly complex. Everything affected someone. What was good for one person was bad for another; what would help one would harm another and everyone had other people, other lives in orbit around them who - in turn, had lives in orbit around them. Soon everyone would have to be affected, somehow.

  The bare bulb tossed shadows on the wall. The farther from the light, the more distorted the shadows became. There was an analogy in there somewhere, but Albert was too tired to dig it out. He fell asleep in the chair, the essence of pickled onions and cigarette smoke wafting through his brain, giving an edge of immediacy to his dreams.

  Chapter Four

  The next morning, following his new routine of personal grooming, Albert put on his other tie . . . the white one. It would be impossible to say what he thought of himself as he walked across the common, but he held his face right out front, his hands thrust purposefully in his pockets. His step - yellow woolen socks in black patent-leather shoes - was jaunty, and he cut an irresistible figure against the ice and snow. He wanted only directions to the nearest windmill.

  The recent change in Albert was the topic of no little speculation in the faculty lounge. The tropical fish of indeterminate species might have crawled out of their tank in the corner and taken up hairdressing at reduced rates and attracted less attention. Some things just didn't change. Yet there he stood in the doorway . . . suit, tie, matching socks. For the first time in his life, Albert was making a fashion statement of sorts. What, exactly, he might be saying was anybody’s guess, but he was saying it unequivocally.

  Conversation dissolved like venom in water. Everyone watched him through their eyebrows and over their glasses. Academic surveillance.

  Albert had never been in the lounge before. He bobbed and nodded in the doorway for a few seconds, prompting an anthropologist in the group to launch into a monologue on the mating habits of albatross in the Galapagos. Albert grinned at people whose eyes he met. Pretending to recognize them, he nodded harder.

  As he crossed to the coffee urn, the ponderous gears of conversation creaked and groaned to life again, resolving to a steady hum by the time he'd added his forth or fifth sugar. He smiled inwardly; blending in wasn't as difficult as he'd imagined. He was the soul of anonymity. He helped himself to a powdered donut.

  "You were a friend of his, weren't you?"

  Albert spilled hot coffee on his hand, but was too busy choking on his donut to notice. Someone slapped him soundly on the back, fixing the foreign object a little more securely in his throat. "Of course you were. Sorry, Maestro," said the Slapper. "Didn't mean to startle you."

  Albert managed to get the donut down the right hole finally and casually rearranged a small puddle of coffee with wax paper while he caught his breath. Sweeping up after social disaster was not unfamiliar to Albert. He hated being surprised. He hated the fact that everything surprised him. And he hated the silliness of acting as if nothing surprising had happened.

  "No, not really," he sputtered. "It wasn't your fault, I was just . . ." He turned to the speaker. The raspybasso profundocombined with the thrashing he'd just undergone had inclined Albert to suppose his tormentor was a man. He was, therefore, further disoriented to find it was a woman; very large and squat with a tiny head that seemed pressed down into the mass of flesh like the cherry on a sundae. Oddly enough, he had some remote sense of having met her before. His brain began a frantic search of its coffee-stained archives in an effort to turn up the name that went with it.

  "It's the artificial sweetener," said the woman. Miss . . . Miss . . . He almost had it. Agatha? Persephone? "It's a depressant, you know. Lord knows what else it does. Deadly to marine algae, no doubt. They put it in everything these days." Seeing Albert had nearly recovered, she peered into his contorted face with exaggerated concern. "Better?"

  He nodded. Who was this woman? He intentionally coughed and sputtered a few more times, like an airplane in a stall. Bertha? Melody? Juliet? Juliet! English! She was Geraldine Abercrombie, English Lit. He nosed over and the horizon spiraled into sight. "I'm well, Miss Abercrombie," he said. He'd remembered! He was ecstatic. Who knew what other nuggets lay hidden in his memory?

  " Moodie," said the late Miss Abercrombie.

  Then who was Miss Abercrombie?

  "You've seen this, I suppose?" said Miss Moodie. She had an English accent, but it wasn't real. Albert knew accents. It was a familiar affectation in academic circles, music circles, too, come to think of it. She thrust a newspaper at him and indicated an article on the front page.

  Albert had developed a revulsion for newspapers. He held it by the corners, as if had recently been extracted from a birdcage, and let it fall open. The same old photograph of Tewksbury stared dully from the page. Why didn't they use a more recent picture? They'd taken thousands at the trial.

  The arrangement of letters that captioned the picture went straight to Albert's stomach. "I.Q. Murderer Attempts Suicide in Cell." His knees seemed to give way. He tottered to a chair and eased himself into it. The newspaper fell to the floor.

  "I'm so sorry," Miss Moodie proclaimed as she picked up the paper. "Seems I've given you a double dose." She refilled his coffee cup and brought it to him. "I assumed you'd heard."

  "No," said Albert. "Is he . . . ?"

  "Oh, he'll survive," said Miss Moodie, folding the paper. "I doubt if he really wanted to . . . " she continued, filling in the blank with her eyes. "I expect he just wanted some attention. He must be very . . . yes. I should think that's what it was."

  Moodie had the habit, common among academic women somewhat beyond middle age, of failing to finish sentences, leaving the listener to complete the thought for himself. True or false? Multiple choice? Life was a pop quiz. Albert hadn't done well in English.

  "When?"

  "Last night. He's at the hospital now."

  Miss Moodie waited for the music teacher to ask themodus operandi. He didn't. "Razor," she volunteered. He looked at her blankly. His eyes were still thick with tears from choking on the donut. She nodded in mute agreement with something she imagined in his expression.

  "Razor?"

  She slit her wrist with her fingernail. "Lord knows where he got it. I guess in prison . . . well . . . " That sentence, too, picked up its lantern and tottered off in search of an ending.

  General conversation among the faculty had taken a decidedly Albertian turn in consequence of his choking and shock at the news of Tewksbury's suicide attempt. Art class had convened and everyone was drawing conclusions. Curious fellow, this former prodigy. Must give the Administration a great deal to overlook in their determination to boast a genius in residence.

  "Men don't normally do that," Miss Moodie said. "They jump from great heights or shoot themselves. Hari-kari, that sort of thing. Much more dramatic. Women slit their wrists. Take pills. Stick their heads in ovens. It leaves lots of time to be found before it'
s too late. Sympathy factor, don't you know."

  Albert didn't respond except to look at her as if she was a visitor from a distant and frightening planet.

  "It's all in Agatha Christie," continued Miss Moodie, determined to supply the questions that never came with all the answers she could muster. "He was going to be shipped to Walpole tomorrow. Must have been depressed."

  "I'll have to go see him," Albert said at last.

  "He's at St. Mary's, I think," Miss Moodie offered, sifting through the article. "Here it is. Yes. St. Mary's." She read on. "But he's in Intensive Care. You won't be allowed to see him till he's out of there, I shouldn't think. I'm sure, in fact."

  Albert felt impotent. The situation seemed to be slipping from doubtful to hopeless. Holmes would know what to do, but Albert didn't.

  "I wonder what they'll end up doing in ancient history?" said Miss Moodie, taking up both sides of the conversation. "Young Strickland's taken over for the time being."

  Albert didn't know young Strickland. He had been Glenly's protégé, said Miss Moodie and, "strictlyentre nous he's shown more than a healthy interest in Glenly's daughter. In fact, at this moment they’re . . . "

  “He had a daughter?" Albert interrupted.

  "Stepdaughter, really," Miss Moodie replied, not unaware of the eyes upon them. Her company would be a coveted commodity that evening. "They didn't get along." Her sturdy fingers wrestled a rebellious bra strap into place. "Not that anyone got along with Glenly much in the first place. Strickland did, it seems, but . . . "

  Another nugget wriggled loose from Albert's store of knowledge. "Mrs. Glenly died, didn't she, Miss Moodie?"

  "Goodness, yes," said Miss Moodie. "Call me Gert," said Gert. "Just after homecoming three years ago." Pause, eyes on the ceiling. "Or was it four? No. Three years. Yes. Three years, I'm sure. Not more than four."

  Albert looked at the ceiling, too. He half expected to find something written there. Moodie waited for him to ask how she died. "Hit-and-run driver," she said when he didn’t, "just as she was getting out of . . . goodness, you just never know, do you? One minute you're here and . . . " She brushed some donut crumbs down the precipitous slope of her ample bosom. "You remember, don't you?"

  He'd forgotten but, once reminded, it came back vividly. It was impossible to keepeverything out, no matter how hard you tried. Now and then things seeped through. Vietnam. The Kennedy assassinations. Men on the moon.

  Mrs. Glenly had been much younger than her husband. Very pretty. Sad and misplaced. Even Albert noticed. He didn't know the daughter, though. There were so many girls, and they were all the same. They talked the same, dressed the same, giggled and talked behind their hands and always went to the lady’s room in bunches.

  Tewksbury could tell them apart.

  "I remember."

  "Poor child," said Miss Moodie. Her sympathetic voice was even deeper than her normal voice, musty from late nights in one-sided library debates. Albert imagined it got that way from overuse. Actually, she'd smoked long, thin, black cigars once, much in vogue among liberated ladies of her generation. She gave them up when her doctor predicted throat cancer. A relief, it was, since she’d always hated the damn things.

  "What happens to her now?" asked Albert. One question was leading to another all by itself. All one had to do was pay attention to the conversation.

  "Who, dear? The daughter? Catherine?" Moodie sat back in her chair, tucking in her chin till it all but disappeared and elevated her nose and her eyebrows at once, as if to get them as far from the following words as biologically possible. "I hear she's taken up residence at Strickland's," she said. "Not the kind of behavior that's likely to do much for the school's reputation, should it get out. Tuition-paying mummies and daddies back in Newport or what-have-you take exception to the notion of their daughters being deflowered by the hired help."

  "No," Albert agreed, not bothering to wonder what gardening had to do with anything. "She's all right, though?"

  "If you mean is she grieving . . . you needn't trouble yourself on that score. There's no black crepe on the windows, if you take my meaning. Nor 'round her heart."

  Albert's coffee was cold, so he drank it at a gulp. "They didn't get along?"

  "Nobody got along with Glenly." Either Gert had taken up ventriloquism or someone else had joined the conversation. The latter proved to be the case. A tall black man in gray pinstriped pants and multicolored suspenders was leaning on the back of Albert's chair. Albert began to stand.

  "No, no. Sit," said the man, adding his name and subject in response to the desperate look in Albert's eyes. "Walter Lane, Political Science." Albert responded in kind. Lane smiled at Miss Moodie, but she didn't smile back. Her franchise was in jeopardy.

  "I was just getting some coffee and couldn't help overhearing," said Lane. "May I?"

  He took a seat next to Albert, across the table from Miss Moodie. "Nasty business, that," he said, nodding at the paper. "Poor Tewks couldn't take the heat."

  Miss Moodie twisted herself into an exclamation of reproof at the remarks, but Lane took no notice. Neither did Albert.

  "Heat?"

  "From Glenly," said Lane. "He was an ass."

  "Glenly?"

  Lane shook his head and blew an exclamation point through his nose. "How well did you know him?"

  "Glenly?" said Albert. His mental pants were around his ankles. "Not much," he said. "Not at all," he confided. "I don't remember exactly who he was, I mean, what he looked like. The pictures in the paper didn't look familiar."

  Lane and Moodie exchanged a look that Albert wasn't supposed to see. He did. But it was a familiar look. "I'm not very good with faces," he explained. "I remember what his wife looked like." Come to think of it, he didn't really. All he remembered was that she was blondish or brunette, and that she’d struck him as pretty. "She was pretty."

  "They weren't very good pictures," said Lane.

  Miss Moodie remarked that he'd been dead in most of them.

  "He wasn't a nice person," said Lane.

  “You shouldn't say that," said Miss Moodie. "The man's dead, after all."

  "And there's joy in Mudville," said Lane unapologetically, then, seeing Miss Moodie inflating herself to object, added: "Come on, Gert. You can't tell me you're brokenhearted to see him gone."

  Miss Moodie became the personification of offense. She lowered an eyebrow and examined the hem of her skirt. "I'm not going to say Glenly was an Apostle, if that's what you mean, Professor Lane," she said frostily. "Neither do I find it necessary to defame him."

  "What she's trying not to say is that you were fortunate not knowing him," Lane interpreted. "He was overbearing, arrogant . . . loved to play with people's brains."

  "Brains?" said Albert.

  "You know," Lane replied. "Mind games. His favorite trick was to connive his way into your confidence - get you feeling he was as empathetic as Dear Abby, then he’d subtly prod, pry . . . "

  "Cajole," Miss Moodie said, without looking up from the hem of her skirt. "Insinuate."

  "That's the perfect word, Gert. He'd insinuate himself into your confidence and search out your secret."

  "Secret?"

  "We all have our secrets, Professor. That little peach pit of sin that makes us human," said Lane. His eyes settled on something that wasn't there.

  "We all do," Miss Moodie affirmed softly, still not raising her eyes.

  "He had a talent for recognizing people's weak spots; their greatest embarrassments, biggest failures, fears . . . like a maggot in an open wound. He'd wait for the most damaging possible moment to turn the screws, then he'd sit back and watch you fall apart."

  "Like that Special Ed undergrad," said Miss Moodie, who was making a noble effort to overcome her aversion to speaking ill of the dead.

  Lane shot Miss Moodie a searching glance which she didn't seem to notice. "Daphne Knowlton," he said, his voice suddenly quiet.

  "Daphne Knowlton! That's it!" said Miss Moodie. "I've been tr
ying to remember it ever since Glenly . . . It's a good thing she wasn't around when it happened, orshe'd be the one in jail."

  Two suspects in two days. Albert's heart added a jazz riff at the possibility.

  "Don't be absurd," Lane snapped.

  "Nothing absurd about it," Miss Moodie protested. "After what he did to her? I think she's to be commended for not, well

  . . . setting him on fire."

  Albert had lost the tail of the kite, and it was sailing away without him. "What happened?"

  Moodie and Lane conferred with their eyes. Lane turned away.

  "It was unforgivable, really," Moodie began. "I mean, the last thing I want to do is speak ill of the dead but . . . " She lost her chin entirely in the folds of her neck. "Surely you heard? It happened not a year ago, in this very room. There was a party, I forget the occasion . . . lots of grog. Unfortunately. Most of the faculty was here." She quizzed Lane. "You were here, weren't you, dear?" Lane grunted, stood up and walked to the coffee urn with his hands in his pockets. He was agitated. "Yes, of course you were. I remember now. You got there later. Glenly, as usual, had had too much to drink. That's when he was worst.

  "I can see him now, sitting by the fire being witty and charming."

  Albert's ears caught on the discord. "Witty and charming?"

  "Oh, he could be the most ingratiating."

  "That was the set-up," said Lane, who had meandered back into the conversation. "That’s how he wheedled his way into your confidence."

  "He was a very charismatic man. People gathered round him like flies around . . . Well, that's what he was, if truth be told." Miss Moodie formed a flying buttress of her elbows on the chair arms, to support the sagging bulk of her edifice. Her shoulders were thus elevated to her ears and her neck disappeared altogether. "That's what made him all the more horrid. It wasn't as if he didn't know what he was doing."

  "He'd build people up, set them on a pedestal then take a sledgehammer to it," Lane said. "It was sport."

  "We digress," said Moodie, reining to the narrative's inside rail and applying the whip. "She was an intern. Very shy. Not a beautiful girl, I wouldn't say, but very . . . pleasant?" She tossed a silent question mark at Lane for approbation. He declined comment. "Full bodied, she was,” said Moodie, who was about as full-bodied as was permitted by the atmosphere in an enclosed space. “Anyway, Glenly paid her special attention that night. He was ingratiating and gentlemanly, coaxing her out of her little shell . . . by degrees. Plying her with drinks. I'm sure she'd never been made such a fuss of. Well, before long . . . I'm amazed we didn't see it coming . . . aren’t you, Walter?" There was a moment of self-conscious silence. "The upshot was, she ended up on the coffee table, with her shirt unbuttoned, dancing as they clapped and goaded her to undress. Glenly at the head of the percussion section, naturally. Of course, she had no idea what she was doing. Probably the first wine she'd ever had outside communion."