Death of a Survivalist

by Glen Ebisch

  “They can take the stairs down right off the lobby.”

  “Okay.” There was another pause. “I’m not happy about you’re being involved in another murder.”

  Charles sighed. “Neither am I, but it’s not my fault. It just happened.”

  “I suppose,” she said doubtfully. “I’ll see you soon.”

  After breaking the connection, Charles stood for moment wondering why, after years of living a peaceful and relatively violence-free life, he was suddenly being propelled into the center of so much turmoil. It was almost as though the universe had given him a certain number of decades of serenity after the war, and now the bill had come due.

  Joanna was as good as her word. Ten minutes after they had spoken, he saw her coming down the corridor with a uniformed officer at her side. She smiled briefly at Charles.

  “This is Officer Henley,” she said.

  The young man at her side gave Charles a nod and a hard look as if the finder of the body was always the most likely suspect.

  “Yuri told me that he brought the victim down here at noon, and the two of you came looking for him shortly before one.”

  “That’s when we came down.”

  “You didn’t see anyone else walking along this corridor?” Joanna asked.

  “We didn’t see anyone.”

  “You went in the room?”

  “Just four or five feet. Once we saw the body we stopped.”

  Officer Henley gave Charles a look like he didn’t believe him and thought he had probably trashed the place.

  “But you did visually scan the room?”

  “I suppose you could say that.”

  “Notice anything interesting?”

  “There’s an automatic lying in the middle of the floor. It looks to me like there’s been a struggle.”

  “Had you met the victim before?” Joanna asked.

  “He came to see me in my office earlier this morning.”

  “Why?”

  “His daughter is in my class, and I think he just wanted to talk.”

  By now Officer Henley looked like he was itching to grab his cuffs and slap them on Charles.

  Joanna nodded and reached for the door handle.

  “I guess we’ll have a look around. I’ll see you later.”

  Charles nodded as Joanna walked past him. Officer Henley gave him a lingering glance as if they’d definitely be seeing him later.

  Chapter 3

  Charles sat in the living room, trying to concentrate on his reading. But he frequently found himself staring across the room, lost in thought about Sebastian Locke. Although Charles had only met Locke once, he’d rather liked him despite their differences in politics and Locke’s hair-trigger temper. There had been something refreshingly direct about the man. You didn’t meet many people today who lived according to their beliefs, especially when those beliefs probably required some self-sacrifice. Charles wondered, if someone put a gun to his head, whether he’d be able to come up with a set of principles by which he governed his life. It didn’t say much for him as an intellectual and a scholar that he wasn’t sure he could. Perhaps scholarship was the study of people who had principles, which freed you from having to actually develop them yourself.

  The phone rang. What aggressive telemarketer could be calling him at ten o’clock at night?

  “Hello, Mr. Bentley, this is Nurse Riley at Dalton House.”

  Dalton House was the nursing home where his father had been living for the past three years. His father had dementia and went on occasional binges of loud behavior, which only Charles’ presence seemed able to subdue. These episodes frequently occurred at night, so he was accustomed to be asked to make nighttime visits.

  “I can be there in half an hour,” he said.

  Nurse Riley paused. “That won’t be necessary—he’s passed.”

  Charles’ mind drew a blank. Passed what: a kidney stone, his exams, then it suddenly clicked.

  “You mean he’s died?”

  “I’m sorry. He became agitated earlier this evening, and we were going to call you. But then he suddenly lapsed into unconsciousness and died. We had the doctor come, and he said that it was heart failure.”

  “Isn’t it always in the end?” Charles said.

  “Well, I guess that’s true,” the nurse said after a moment. “I realize this seems rather quick, but could you give us the name of the funeral home that you’d like to have take care of your father’s arrangements? They’ll come and remove the body tonight, which would be better all around.”

  Probably less disturbing to the other patients not to see a fellow sufferer carted out feet first in the middle of breakfast, he thought grimly. Charles gave the name of the funeral home that had handled his wife’s burial.

  “They probably won’t be here for a couple of hours. Would you like to come out to see your father one last time? He actually looks rather peaceful.”

  “That’s strange, he rarely did in life,” Charles almost said. Instead he replied that he didn’t think a final visit would be necessary.

  After he hung up, Charles sat down and tried to absorb what had happened and what he had to do. He’d see the funeral director in the morning, choose a casket, and arrange for a brief wake before having the body transported to the Connecticut cemetery where his mother was buried. The list of people to notify was blessedly short. There was his older brother Ed, named after his father, who lived in Palm Springs, California where he played golf with such a passion that he could never find time to travel to the east coast to visit his father in the nursing home. And there was his father’s younger brother Wally, who lived in Miami and fished with the same dedication as Ed played golf, and who also neglected to take time out for family. He would inform them both of his father’s passing in the morning, confident that neither would be able to fit in time to attend the wake. If he outlived the two of them, he’d treat their passing with the same respect.

  That left only his daughter Amy, her two little boys, and her husband, Jack the Philistine, as Charles mentally referred to him, who did something with money in Boston. Amy would certainly want to come. She had always liked her grandfather, never having had to be his child, and Charles had to admit that his father had always treated his only grandchild with more affection than he’d shown to his own offspring. Perhaps he’d never considered Amy to be a reflection of himself, so he hadn’t held her to as high a standard as he had his children. Charles decided that he would call her in the morning as well.

  Charles sat for a long moment reflecting on his troubled relationship with his father, and wondered if he could have done more to bridge the gap. He doubted it. His father had never listened enough to what he had to say to consider a rapprochement. Only his mother could have helped mend fences, but she was too passive, too locked into her role as wife to give enough time to her role as mother. It was one of those marriages that had rattled along in a vaguely dysfunctional way: never really a success, but never enough of a failure to lead to divorce.

  But, Charles thought, with a sudden ache in his heart, who was he to criticize another’s marriage when his own wife had died in a snowstorm while returning from a lesbian liaison with one of his own colleagues? That was virtually the poster child for a bad marriage, although for most of the time it hadn’t seemed bad at all to him, in fact it had seemed quite good. How well do we ever understand our closest relationships? With those somber thoughts on his mind, Charles decided to go to bed.

  Chapter 4

  The next morning Charles went out for his morning run with his next-door neighbor, Gary Wasserman, who was a physicist at the college. They had gone about a mile; with Charles savoring how much easier it had become for him to run after only a few months of practice. His breathing came so much easier that he could actually converse, although Gary, being rather laconic, usually made this unnecessary. This morning he surprised Charles.

  “Did you hear about someone being murdered on campus?”

  “Y
es. In fact I found the body.”

  Gary gave him a small smile. “You seem to attract dead bodies the way dark matter attracts itself.”

  “If you say so.”

  “But I guess it’s not surprising this guy got murdered. He was some kind of survivalist nut, wasn’t he?”

  “I take it you don’t agree with survivalism,” Charles said, surprised by Gary’s attitude, since he had always seemed to Charles to be a bit of an eccentric loner himself.

  “We have to work together to improve society, not go off into our own little communities living like hermits.”

  Charles wondered if this was Gary’s own thinking or ideas put into his head by his wife, Ruth, the woman who had manipulated Charles into working at the soup kitchen for the good of society.

  “I do think it’s a bit ironic that someone who devoted his life to being ready to survive the coming cataclysm would die so young and so violently,” Charles said.

  “People like that are always expecting to find violence, so they attract it everywhere they go,” Gary replied. “They’re so prepared to defend themselves that they make other people aggressive.”

  Charles mumbled a response, surprised that Gary, more interested in particles than people, could be so perceptive.

  As Charles turned around and headed back at the two-mile mark—Gary continuing on to do another couple of miles—he thought that Gary’s comment might very well be right. People who expect to be attacked often overreact to the least sign of hostility from others and cause a situation to escalate into a violent confrontation. Let a man carry a gun and he’s more likely to be shot himself.

  Charles increased his speed when he was a block from home. He was almost sprinting when he turned into his driveway and found Joanna Thorndike leaning against the back of the police SUV parked next to his side door.

  “Looking good, Charles,” she said, smiling as he walked up the driveway. “Why I remember only six weeks ago when you’d have been grinding to a halt a half mile before you reached home.”

  “Thanks for reminding me,” Charles said, grinning.

  Joanna turned serious. “But really, I admire you for sticking with this. Not many men in their late sixties would be out there running every morning.”

  “It takes a lot of running to stay a step ahead of death.”

  “I don’t think you’re quite that desperate. Didn’t you just have a physical a couple of weeks ago and get a clean bill of health?”

  “The doctor implied that I was in good shape for someone living on borrowed time.”

  Joanna laughed. “Okay, be that way. Can you offer a girl a cup of coffee while she fills you in on an investigation?”

  Charles nodded and they went up to the side door and into the kitchen. He poured two cups of coffee and popped some bread in the toaster. After a few minutes they were settled around the table sipping coffee and munching toast.

  “Seems like old times,” Charles commented, surprised at how comfortable he felt having Joanna sitting across the breakfast table from him.

  “You mean like a few months ago when you were involved in another murder, and I used to come see you most mornings? Forgive me, but I much prefer the quiet dinners we’ve had the last couple of months when you’ve stayed out of trouble.”

  Charles smiled, telling from her expression that she really didn’t hold him responsible for the situation.

  “Have you found out anything new?” Charles asked.

  “A few things. The gun we found was registered to Locke.”

  “So no one came to the meeting with a gun intending to kill him?”

  “No. And Locke’s knife is missing, and that’s important.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he was stabbed.”

  “I figured he was shot.”

  She shook her head.

  “How do you know Sebastian Locke had a knife?”

  “He had a sheath for it attached to the back of his belt. Looks like it was a large hunting knife or some kind of commando weapon. We figured that his attacker knocked the gun away from him, and Locke pulled the knife. Then the struggle continued and he got stabbed. The killer took the knife, so we wouldn’t have it for evidence.”

  Charles bit into his toast and chewed it ruminatively. “Locke was carrying two weapons. He was certainly prepared for trouble.”

  “Apparently not prepared enough,” Joanna replied. “We checked out the numbers he called on his cell phone since he’s been down here. One he made on the night before he died was to a woman named Lavinia Cole. We called her. She was at Locke’s residence in Vermont; I guess they were a couple. According to Cole, he called to tell her that he’d arrived safely. Another call, this one made on the morning he died, was to his brother, Reginald. He called him at his office in Boston. According to the brother, Sebastian was planning to drive from here to Boston on the afternoon he was killed. He wanted to see his brother about some business matters.”

  “They were in business together?”

  Joanna nodded. “They own a construction company in the Boston area.”

  “Locke also made one call on the day he drove down here. It was to his daughter.”

  “Victoria.”

  Her eyebrows went up. “Of course, she’s your student.”

  “And that was part of the reason why Locke dropped in to see me that morning.”

  Charles summarized his conversation with Locke.

  “So he was pretty mad at this Professor Carlson for inviting his daughter to dinner?”

  “Mad at Carlson, and protective of his daughter. In Locke’s case a combustible combination.”

  “Do you think he had a genuine grievance?”

  “Professors shouldn’t be asking their students out on dates. I’d have been angry if someone had tried that with Amy.”

  “Then Carlson sounds like someone I should have a chat with. Lavinia Cole is coming down from Vermont tomorrow to answer questions. Would you like to meet her?”

  Charles frowned. “I might be tied up with my father’s funeral.”

  “Funeral? I’m very sorry to hear that, Charles,” she said, the shock obvious in her voice. “I didn’t know he was so ill.”

  “Apparently it was quite sudden, but considering his condition, it was only a matter of time.”

  “When will the wake be?”

  “Tomorrow afternoon, but only for an hour. It’s for family. Actually I don’t expect anyone aside from Amy.”

  “I’d like to come, if I may. I’d like to meet Amy.”

  “That will be fine, if it fits in with your schedule. I know you’re busy with this investigation.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll make it fit in.”

  Charles sipped his coffee and drifted off into thought, examining how he felt about having his relationship with Joanna move to another level with her participation in an event as family oriented as a funeral. And although Amy had suggested several times that perhaps it would be nice if she met the woman he was dating, Charles had avoided the issue with offhand comments about how it had not reached the level of seriousness where Joanna had to officially meet the family. Now he wasn’t so sure. They were rapidly reaching that cusp where things were either going to become much more serious or come to an end. He wasn’t completely sure which he preferred to have happen.

  “What time is it tomorrow and where?” Joanna asked, smiling as she watched him come back to the present.

  “O’Brien’s Funeral home at two o’clock. But like I said …”

  “Only if I can fit it in.”

  Charles nodded. Feeling that he had just been outmaneuvered.

  Chapter 5

  That afternoon Charles sat in his office, preparing for the class he had to teach in an hour. However, he found it hard to concentrate because his mind was filled with caskets, burial vaults, and obituaries. He had decided to place his father’s obituary in the local newspaper, even though no one in Opalville had known his father, wondering if it was a sort of va
nity to want people to know about your loss, even when you weren’t allowing them to offer comfort by coming to the wake. Charles also decided to run an obituary in the New York Times because those who knew his father when he worked in Manhattan’s financial district would read it.

  Writing the obituary had proven challenging. In summing up his father’s life, the only positive point Charles could think of to say was that he made a lot of money for himself and his clients. Although the funeral director who sat with him while he formulated the obituary, maintained a professional poker face, Charles thought he detected a slight pursing of the lips as if to suggest that this wasn’t the right note for an obituary. Charles had to admit that it hardly fit the description of a well-lived life by any philosophical or religious standard that he was aware of, but honesty kept him from saying that his father had been a loving husband and father. Out of guilt, he added a couple of vague platitudes about his father’s love of the theatre and his involvement in the community.

  In the end he felt dissatisfied, hoping that he hadn’t been vindictive because his father never approved of his serving in Vietnam, calling him a fool for not taking the son-of-a-rich man exemption, or because he had always dismissed Charles’ profession as spending time reading worthless books and talking about them with teenagers. About the best he could say about his father is that he had always liked Amy, perhaps because she was his only grandchild. He had also, not so surprisingly, approved of her marriage to Jack the Philistine, although he thought Jack was wasting his mercenary gifts in the backwater of Boston and should relocate to New York where real money was to be made on the margins of the law. Ending the obituary on a positive note, Charles threw in the comment that his father was a loving grandfather. Even that was a bit of an exaggeration, but Charles appeased his conscience with the thought that the obituary genre was probably rife with benevolent exaggeration.

  Charles was forcing his mind back to his notes, when Victoria Locke appeared in the doorway. Although anxious to prepare for class, he didn’t feel he could rightly turn away a student who had just lost her father, especially to violence, so Charles motioned her into his office. She settled into the wooden chair in front of his desk, and nodded patiently as he expressed his condolences.