by Bill Crider
“It’s about that purchase order to Thompson’s Crafts,” he said.
“What about it?” Sally asked.
“That’s what I want to discuss with you,” Fieldstone said.
Sally said that she’d be right over. She knew what was going to happen. Now that the furor about Val’s death had died down, someone was going to have to take the fall for the purchase order, and Sally knew who that would be.
It wouldn’t be her, but that didn’t make her feel any better. Amy Willis was the one who would be fired, though Naylor had as much as said she wouldn’t be. That, however, had been when Sally had the upper hand and was protecting Amy. Now, Fieldstone was going to try again.
On her way to see Fieldstone, Sally stopped by Amy Willis’s office. Amy was cleaning out her desk, tossing things into a box that had recently held paper for the photocopier. She didn’t seem to care whether the things fit in the box neatly. She didn’t even seem to care whether the things went in it at all. A framed photo of her son hit the edge of the box and bounced onto the desk. Amy didn’t bother to pick it up.
Sally did. She said, “I’m sorry, Amy.”
Amy looked around. She was nervous and distracted. Her hands went to her hair, as if she were reaching for the pencil that was usually stuck there. Today, it was gone.
“I knew it was coming,” she said. “I knew they wouldn’t let me off so easily. But it wasn’t my fault. It was Val’s fault.”
“I know that,” Sally said.
And then a number of things clicked into place in Sally’s head. She knew how meticulous Amy was, and she remembered what Amy had said in Fieldstone’s office, about how she’d known there was a mistake, but she had waited too long to figure it out. Sally wondered now if that was true. And while Amy was naturally the nervous sort, since Val’s death she’d been about three times as nervous as usual.
There was something else, too, something that Amy had said—or hadn’t said—in Fieldstone’s office. Thinking back on it, Sally believed that Amy had been about to say, “That’s what I wanted to know,” but she’d changed the verb to the present tense. That was something an English teacher should have thought of sooner.
Sally said, “Amy, did you go to Val’s office and ask Val about the purchase order?”
Amy stiffened. “Me? Why are you asking me that?”
“Because it seems like the kind of thing you’d do. You wouldn’t call me first. Dr. Fieldstone mentioned the other day about how conscientious you are. You’d check that purchase order out. You’d ask Val. You did ask him, didn’t you? And the next day, you called me to cover for yourself.”
Amy sat down. She wasn’t nervous now. She was hardly moving.
“No,” she said. “I didn’t do those things. I should have talked to Val, but I didn’t.”
“I think you did,” Sally said. “If you did, someone saw you going over to the Art and Music Building. Douglas Young, maybe. He sees everything. Or maybe Coy Webster. He might have met you as he was leaving that day.”
Amy’s eyes dropped at the mention of Coy’s name. Sally knew that Coy must have seen her, but not while he was in the building. He’d been leaving it and hadn’t thought anything about someone from the Business Office being on the way in. He might not even have remembered it.
“The police have your fingerprints, too,” Sally said. “They were on the statue you hit Val with.”
While the faculty members had to be fingerprinted, the members of the staff did not. They weren’t required to go to the prison. So if Amy hadn’t committed any other crimes, her fingerprints weren’t on file anywhere at all.
Amy started to sniffle. “It was just that Val didn’t seem to care. I told him I was probably going to lose my job, and he just shrugged. He told me that he had problems of his own and that my troubles didn’t amount to a thing compared to his. I lost my temper then. That little statue was right there, and I grabbed it and hit him with it. I was angry, and I meant to hurt him, but not to kill him. I never meant to do that.”
“I believe you,” Sally said, reaching for the telephone.
* * *
Later that day, after a long session of Minesweeper, Jack Neville went by Sally’s office.
“The news is all over campus,” he said. “About how you caught the killer, that is. You don’t look too happy about it, though.”
“I’m not,” Sally said. “Amy didn’t intend to kill anyone. Now she’s going to prison, and it’s my fault. What’s going to happen to her son?”
“First of all,” Jack said, “it’s not your fault. You didn’t kill anyone. There’s plenty of blame in this thing, but none of it’s yours. Blame Val if you want to. He’s the one who let himself be blackmailed. Blame Ralph Thompson for blackmailing him. Blame Tammi for getting involved with Val. Blame Vera or Ellen for not telling you about Val sooner. But don’t blame yourself.”
Sally tried to smile. “You’re right,” she said.
“Of course I am. And as far as Amy’s son goes, her ex-husband has been trying to get custody for quite a while. He’s always been a good father.”
“But what about Amy?”
“She might not go to prison. There are lots of possibilities. She could plead temporary insanity, for one thing. She was pushed over the edge by the faked purchase order and her fear of losing her job and her son. It’s the kind of thing that might sway a jury.”
“Maybe,” Sally said, though she didn’t really believe it.
“You need something to take your mind off all this,” Jack said. “There’s an, ah, oldies concert this weekend, headlined by the Platters. There might even be one or two of the original members left.”
“So?” Sally said.
“So, ah, would you like to go with me?”
Sally thought about it.
Would she like to go with him?
Yes.
Should she?
Probably not. It was against her policy. Besides, dating a member of the department was a lot worse than dating anyone else at the college.
On the other hand, maybe it was time to take a chance.
“I’d love to,” she said.
Also by Bill Crider
The Texas Capitol Murders
Blood Marks
PROFESSOR CARL BURNS MYSTERIES
… A Dangerous Thing
Dying Voices
One Dead Dean
SHERIFF DAN RHODES MYSTERIES
Death by Accident
Winning Can Be Murder
Murder Most Fowl
Booked for a Hanging
Evil at the Root
Death on the Move
Cursed to Death
Shotgun Saturday Night
Too Late to Die
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
MURDER IS AN ART. Copyright © 1999 by Bill Crider. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Crider, Bill.
Murder is an art / Bill Crider.
p. cm.
“Thomas Dunne books”—T.p. verso.
ISBN 0-312-19927-9
I. Title.
PS3553.R497M86 1999
813'.54—dc21
98-41786
CIP
First Edition: April 1999
eISBN 9781466847200
First eBook edition: May 2013
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