A Function of Murder

by Ada Madison

  Too late. “I’m on foot now, walking past the site,” I told him, realizing how rare that was for me. And if walking meant more sidewalk meetings like the one I’d just been through, I’d stick to driving.

  “Everything’s peaceful here,” Bruce said. “Except for a small riot in the western part of town, which the police determined had nothing to do with the mayor’s death. I think some people sit around and wait for an excuse to act up. No one was hurt this time, anyway. We practically begged the city to call us in so we could get out of this trailer, but they wanted us close to the base rather than stuck out in traffic.”

  “And no calls from the Bat Phone?”

  “A couple of people needing transportation from the hospital to rehab and back. The nurses arm-wrestled for the job.”

  We chatted until I reached the gate to campus, by which time I had things in perspective. It wasn’t the first time a student had complained about a grade. Just the first time thousands of people knew about it before I did.

  Times, they were changing.

  Stepping into Franklin Hall on a Sunday was always a bit creepy, but today I had the irrational, eerie sense that someone had died here. The sickening smell of the frosting from yesterday’s cake turned my stomach and caused the unpleasant reappearance of my Coffee Filter mocha.

  Get in and get out, I told myself, hurrying down the hallway to my office, my footsteps echoing as loudly as a dormitory boom box.

  I had my key ready and unlocked the door, surprised to see the room empty of either stale cake or a corpse. I could grab my robes and briefcase and split, or I could log on to Facebook on my computer and check out Elysse’s post. I wondered if I’d recognize any of her followers. What if I did? I decided I wouldn’t let Elysse bully me into panic, even in absentia; she and her post could wait until I was in the safety and comfort of my home office. So what if another two hundred people Liked Elysse before I got to see what it was they Liked.

  I picked up my robes, in their plastic garment bag, and draped them over my arm, then picked up my briefcase and shut the door behind me.

  Thump. Thump. Thump.

  I jumped at the sound, one that should have been familiar to me. I flinched at the sudden brightness from the hallway lights being switched on. Moments later, all was well. I’d never been happier to see Woody, driving his large barrel-on-wheels.

  Being on edge, on what was technically the first day of summer vacation, was not a good sign. I waited and greeted Woody as he and his supply train rumbled toward me. Did he ever go home? When his wife died last year, Woody started putting in extra hours at the college. Sometimes I thought he showed up for twice as many hours as the college paid him for. Lucky us.

  “Dr. Knowles. Didn’t expect to see you here.”

  I held out my robe-laden arm to show Woody the reason for my visit. “Thanks for helping me with Kira Gilmore this morning.”

  “No problem, Doctor. Sure is a shame about that young mayor. He was very nice to me.”

  “I didn’t realize you knew him.”

  “Oh no, I didn’t know him, met him jes’ the one time, when he came by here yesterday afternoon. Did you find what he left for you?”

  This may have been the shortest period of relaxation on record. Did I have another unexplained message from the mayor? Not what I needed. “I’m not sure I know what you mean, Woody.”

  “I unlocked your door for him. I didn’t think you’d mind, Dr. Knowles. Him being the mayor and all. I hope I didn’t do something wrong.”

  “Not at all. Did you say Mayor Graves left me a message?”

  Woody leaned his elbows on his barrel, his head landing even with one of his mops, giving him a strange new hairdo from my perspective. “He came by after all the speeches were over, and the diplomas were getting handed out, and he asked me if I could let him into your office. Said he had something he wanted to leave in there for you.”

  I thought of the mayor’s quick exit from the stage, pulling Nora with him. “Was his wife with him?”

  “No, he was by himself.” Woody stood up straight and looped his thumbs around the straps of the worn overall bib covering his chest. “There was another gentleman wandering around here, too, though, jes’ a few minutes after the mayor came by.”

  “Did you recognize the second man?”

  Woody shook his head, a slow no. “But I think he was up on that stage, too. Big man”—Woody ran his fingers over his hairless head and smiled—“bald like me, with some glasses, though. I don’t need any glasses unless I’m reading something small. Not bad for someone old as I am, huh?”

  I realized I had no idea how old Woody was. I hoped we weren’t breaking any labor laws by keeping him on. “That’s wonderful, Woody. And it certainly sounds like a busy time for you while we were out there on that stage.” My mind worked to figure out which large bald man had been hovering around my office. Woody would know anyone who was regular faculty or staff. It was a long way to come for air-conditioning or a patch of shade, if all either of the men needed was a cool spot. “Did you speak to him at all?”

  “He wanted to know where the restroom is, is all, and I showed him. I didn’t let him go in anywhere, if that’s what you’re asking, even though he had on a suit and tie and all.”

  “No, I’m sure you didn’t, Woody.”

  “I wouldn’t usually do that kind of thing, Dr. Knowles, letting someone into a place that’s locked up. But like I said, when it was the mayor, I thought it was okay.”

  “Not to worry, Woody. You did the right thing.” I heard Woody’s long, relieved breath and felt bad that I’d put him in this stressful state with my questions, but I had a couple more. “Do you know what it was that the mayor wanted to leave for me? I didn’t notice anything in my office just now.”

  He scratched his head, then gave me another slow no. “Danged if I know, Dr. Knowles. He wasn’t carryin’ anything I could see. Nothing big like that.”

  Maybe his cell phone died and he wanted to make a phone call in private. Never mind that he just happened to duck into my building. “Did he want to get into my office in particular, or do you think any office in this building would have been okay with him?”

  “Your office, Dr. Knowles. He said ‘Dr. Knowles’s office.’”

  Clear enough. “Did he come out right away?” Woody looked anxious again and I figured I’d better stop interrogating him. “It’s okay if you didn’t notice,” I said.

  “Oh, I stayed around till he come out. Even though he’s the mayor, I wasn’t gonna let him walk out with the furniture, you know.”

  Good man, Woody. He risked a tentative smile and I gave him a broad one in return.

  “So how long would you say he was in there?”

  I heard a whooshing-and-thudding noise at the end of the hallway, the sound our heavy doors made when closing. Woody waved his arm in greeting. I turned to see who was there, but the person had already slipped out.

  “Who was that?” I asked, annoyed at my jumpy responses to every little sound today.

  “Don’t know, ’cause of the light coming in down there, but everybody in the building deserves a wave, don’t you think?”

  “You’re right, Woody.” I felt I was rushing the old man, and waited a beat before continuing. “Did you say how long the mayor was in my office?”

  “Not long, Dr. Knowles.”

  “Not long,” I repeated, mostly to myself.

  “Didn’t come out right away, either,” Woody added, scratching his head, helpful as always.

  I should have remembered that Woody was one of those nonquantitative types who shied away from exact numbers. I swept my free arm to indicate the roughly three-hundred-foot corridor we were standing in. “Long enough for you to mop this whole hallway?”

  “No, no. Not the whole hallway. I got about to the second lecture hall, I believe, when he waved good-bye to me and left.”

  I’d had enough experience seeing Woody mop the floors of Franklin Hall. I estimated it
took him ten minutes or so to work the patch between the end of the hall and the second lecture room. Which meant the mayor exited the building not much sooner than we all started entering it for the departments’ graduation ceremony and party. Was what he left related to his earlier message on my phone? Had he called to tell me what he was going to leave in my office? Maybe that would have been the end of the In the meantime sentence. In the meantime, I’m going to leave something in your office. But what—an envelope? a book? a disk? And where—up high? down low? in the front? in the back? I was dizzy.

  “You okay, Dr. Knowles?”

  Not really. “Yes, thanks, Woody. I’m glad you were able to help the mayor out. Thanks for letting me know.”

  My head was busy with questions, none of which our poor janitor could answer. What if Woody hadn’t been here? Did Mayor Graves have his lock-picking tools on him, just in case, or did he know Woody’s schedule? Maybe he’d been stalking both of us. He knew I was still on the stage, so he wasn’t aiming for a chat. At the time he was in my office, I was watching the Henley graduates accept their degrees. Well, more accurately, playing a word game with Fran.

  What could he have left in my office that Woody wouldn’t notice? It must have been small enough to carry in his pocket. How small could one make a bomb?

  Woody seemed to have been ruminating at the same time that I was. He was ready to share his thoughts.

  “You know, I was thinking, that might have been the last thing our mayor did, Dr. Knowles. Saying good-bye to me.”

  Except for whatever motivated someone to stab him in the back with a letter opener later that evening.

  As soon as Woody turned the corner in the L-shaped hallway, I was back in my office, checking for anything added. Or subtracted. Or multiplied. Just because Mayor Graves told Woody he wanted to leave something for me didn’t mean his mission wasn’t to take something away or manipulate an existing entity.

  At first glance, my office always seemed fairly neat. I did my best to keep my physical files and books organized. I liked the look of an efficient place to work. And there wasn’t time in my day to shuffle through stacks of paper looking for the one sheet I needed, such as the 3-D analysis problem I’d spent an hour working out. In the end, organization saved time.

  My mother, who gave me my puzzle-maker pen name, Margaret Stone, and was quite familiar with both my home and school offices, called me a covert clutter-bug—neat on the outside, messy on the inside. Mom was probably referring to the fact that I still had copies of problem sets from my first year teaching and all the term papers submitted by the class of Y2K.

  My computer desktop was another story. I allowed myself a busy desktop image with a collage of Cape photos going back to a young Margaret and a tiny Sophie frolicking in the sand, all the way up to a mature Sophie and Bruce watching the sun set on Cape Cod Bay. My screen itself was cluttered with color-coded sticky notes—the software kind—and the icons for at least two dozen files, for easy access.

  I ran my hands around my equipment, searching for something different since the mayor’s entry. I checked the computer, DVD player, printers, scanner, electric pencil sharpener, electric stapler, and—my favorite—my paper cutter with a laser beam for alignment, a romantic gift from Bruce one Valentine’s Day. I came up dusty, but otherwise empty. I checked my bookcases. Nothing had been disturbed as far as I could tell. No extra books had been slipped in between Multivariate Methods by Tyler and Combinatorials by Wilson. I shook out an afghan Margaret made for me in shades of Monet blues and lavenders. Maybe Mayor Graves had tucked a slip of paper in its folds. Nothing. I searched smaller nooks for a disk or a flash drive. More nothing.

  I opened my file drawers. My shoulders sagged as I contemplated row after row of hanging folders, holding smaller folders, holding sheaves of papers. It would be an impossible task to sift through every single sheet of paper in one four-drawer and three two-drawer file cabinets. It seemed unlikely also that the mayor would have chosen that method of leaving me a message. Unless he intended to tell me where to look. In the meantime came back to bug me again. In the meantime, look in the folder marked “Grades Spring 2002” in the third drawer of the large file cabinet. But there was no such detail available to me, which sent me into a major funk. If the mayor had arbitrarily opened one of my ten file drawers and stuck a piece of paper, or any other small item, in one of the folders, there was no hope of finding it, short of a miracle.

  I had to switch gears.

  Since Woody hadn’t seen anything on the mayor’s person, whatever he’d left me was smaller than a breadbox. Look who was adopting qualitative measures. In the phone message, the mayor had been specific that he wanted to talk about trouble at the Zeeman Academy charter school. I was convinced he’d left a clue to that trouble, and that trouble had gotten him killed.

  I sat at my desk in front of my computer again and glanced over at my robes and briefcase on the rocking chair in the corner, where I’d dumped them after reentering my office. I’d been wearing my robes, which had no pockets anyway, when the mayor was in here, but my briefcase had been in my office from when I arrived on campus around noon yesterday until just a few minutes ago.

  I rushed over, grabbed it, and emptied the contents onto a clear section of my desk. Out came notebooks, class folders, a pad of graph paper, math textbooks, puzzle books, tissues, and an embarrassing assortment of pens, pencils, binder clips, chocolate kisses, and cough drops. No secret code ring or piece of microfiche. I consoled myself that there was no bomb, either.

  I went back to my desk and tried to imagine what Mayor Graves had been doing in my office for ten or fifteen minutes. Probably not trying to work the countless puzzles scattered around the various surfaces, or admiring my poster with the timeline of women in the history of mathematics. The somber look of Maria and her “witch of Agnesi,” matched my mood right now. Poor Maria, born May 16, 1718, just missed a Franklin Hall party this year, since commencement weekend intervened. I doubted the mayor noted the piece of historical trivia.

  Maybe he changed his mind after he entered my office and kept the item to himself. Maybe the mayor did simply want to make a private call, or have a few quiet moments in my rocking chair, which begged the question of why he’d lie to Woody. It wasn’t as if my office was the most convenient place for a break. He’d had to walk across campus, past the tennis courts and the parking lot, to get here. The college library and the back wings of the Administration Building were much closer to the stage and would satisfy any ordinary need.

  And where was Nora Graves while all this was going on?

  At some point, I needed to pay a visit to the grieving widow, whether Virgil liked it or not.

  Before I packed up, I gave one more thought to logging on to Facebook to read Elysse’s posts and see what her Friends were saying about me.

  I chucked the idea. One thing at a time was enough.

  I took my robes and briefcase and left my office.

  I knew barely enough physics to pass the required courses for my degrees in mathematics, but I could have sworn the fountain at the center of campus had magnetic properties. I left Franklin Hall by the front door, facing the campus, drawn first to glance at the fountain, still wrapped in crime scene tape, then to walk toward it.

  I stepped along the pathway in front of the tennis courts, keeping my eyes on the low concrete wall where Bruce and I had enjoyed our ice cream for a few minutes. I felt a shiver and imagined that I heard the mayor call out for me.

  As the awful scene came back to me, the strangest, most unimportant details were vivid, like how I’d tossed my chocolate shake aside. I wondered where it was now. Where was Bruce’s waffle cone? I knew he hadn’t finished it before the mayor came stumbling toward us. Had the crime scene techs taken the ice cream for evidence? Of what? And would I ever get my white sweater back? As if I would touch it again, let alone wear it. Another shiver ran up my back.

  I looked over at the faculty offices wing at the back
of Admin, where humanities and assorted other disciplines were housed. I recalled that on Saturday night, a window was lit, on the ground floor. It seemed to blink at me now, like a faulty neon light. Whose office was that? If it had been Woody in there, or any of the other maintenance crew, the main lights in the whole wing would have been on until he was finished.

  It hadn’t hit me squarely on the night of the murder, but what if the mayor and the person who occupied that office had been in there, arguing, for example? Could it be that simple? Someone in humanities, unhappy with the mayor, reached into his pencil holder, pulled out a letter opener, and stabbed him?

  I squinted, the better to count the windows from the end. I’d constructed puzzles like this. Now I pretended this was the same task. A brainteaser exercise: Match the outside window of the building to the correct interior office.

  The window in question was second from the corner, which meant it belonged to the second office in from the eastern end of the building. I committed the location to memory, as if I had just left my car in a large parking structure. Ground floor, east end, second office.

  I visited the faculty wing often enough. I should know the seating chart without marching up there with my briefcase and robes on a Sunday. I closed my eyes, traveling in my mind. Enter the building across from the fountain. Turn left on the cracked, worn marble floor, pass the large music room, pass the half flight of steps that led up to a corridor of classrooms, arrive at the faculty section. Oops, it would have been easier to count backward from the end of the hallway. I should have gone in the entrance on the east side of campus. It’s a good thing I hadn’t expended any physical energy on this puzzle.

  In my mind, I saw the corner office, which belonged to Jack Peterson, chair of the English Department. Jack’s office had only one window facing the fountain. It was the office next to Jack’s that had been lit up on Saturday night, and it belonged to…I felt my whole body slump…Beverly Eaton, English prof, who’d taken off early, before graduation, for several weeks in Oxford with a few of her majors. Her office would have been locked with a key that fit all the offices in the wing. In other words, anyone on the faculty or staff could have been in Beverly’s office on Saturday night, certain that she wouldn’t show up and surprise them.