Red Queen's Run

by Morris, Bourne

  Stoddard nodded. “I agree. I should probably drag Worthington to see Phil Lewis, but we just received a fifteen million dollar donation from the McCloskey family for the med school and I don’t want to spoil Phil’s day. I was hoping to see this McCloskey story on the front page tomorrow. What do you think are my chances?”

  “Elaine Morgan will run with it,” I said. “Congratulations.”

  “And if Celeste or her father goes to the paper?” he asked as he walked me to the door.

  “Elaine will still run with it. Fifteen million deserves more than equal time with a sex scandal.” I tried to smile.

  Stoddard just whistled another sigh. “Red, make sure Worthington knows you’re giving him a break by not bringing him to a hearing. Tell him he’s on warning about this. If I hear about another female student and him, I’ll fire his ass out of here.”

  I left Stoddard and hurried back to my office. I still had to meet with the Faculty Senate. The senate meets on the last Monday of the month in a large paneled room at the back of the College of Liberal Arts.

  Still reeling from my day with Celeste’s father and Max and my meeting with Stoddard, I cobbled together a few comments about guest speakers we hoped to bring to campus next spring and prayed the senate would have a full agenda and not keep me long.

  I need not have worried. Nothing so grips the academic imagination as a vigorous discussion of parking space on campus. They went on and on.

  By the time they got to me, it was starting to get dark. I hoped that would work in my favor even though several senators still wanted the opportunity to express their condolences for the loss of Henry or inquire about the investigation into his death.

  “According to the paper, there is some suggestion his death was not from natural causes,” observed the senator from liberal arts.

  “There is no evidence to suggest he died of anything other than a heart attack,” I said, avoiding any speculative tone that might creep into my answer.

  “Doesn’t it make you nervous for your own safety?” inquired a blonde female senator who looked to be about twelve years old. The sign in front of her read, “Dr. Bridget Mason, Women’s Studies.”

  I took a deep breath. “I have not been given much time to worry about my safety, Dr. Mason. Truly, I have too much else to do.”

  “Well, I’d be terrified,” she said. So much for feminist courage.

  An envelope was sticking out from under my office door. Nell had gone home and most of the school was dark. The envelope was plain and lined, an inner office envelope with no postmark. No name was written on the outside. Inside, the note was short and looked as if it had been typed on a computer.

  “You are totally unqualified to lead this school. You lack perspective. You are disorganized, overly emotional, and devoid of objectivity. You must resign immediately. Henry was mad to promote you. His motivations were regrettably transparent. You are intellectually and morally corrupt and do not belong in this university. Leave before something dreadful happens.”

  No signature. My heart rate increased. Morally corrupt? Hell, I was an ethics professor. What did that phrase mean? Could this be Simon’s work? Blunt, insulting. Controlling. George? I could see his beefy fingers on the keyboard. But George was an egotist. He would have signed it. As for Edwin, the style was a tad literary. It could be Edwin.

  “Bring the note home. I’ll meet you at your house.” Joe’s voice on the phone was flat.

  I headed for the elevator. I had stopped taking the stairs. It was still too easy to visualize the landing where Henry’s body had been sprawled, broken and bleeding. Had Henry received a note before he was killed?

  As I drove through the snow, I tried to concentrate on not skidding. I wondered if I should be less worried about what had happened to Henry and more worried about my own safety. Should I take the dog to school with me for protection? Good God. I hoped Joe was already at the house.

  Joe arrived ten minutes after I got home. He looked flushed and irritated. He threw his coat over a chair and his woolen gloves on the kitchen table. Oh well. He’d warned me. This is the life of a homicide detective. They see all kinds of crap all day long. He pulled a pair of thin rubber gloves out of his pants pocket, put them on and took the note from me.

  “So you think this could be from Simon?”

  “It could be from anybody. But I suspect Simon or maybe George or even Edwin. Hard to tell. They’re all so awful.”

  “That’s why I want you to stay away from them,” he said, carefully putting the note back in the envelope.

  “Joe, I work with them. I’m their dean. It’s impossible to stay very far away.”

  “Just be careful, then. I’ll check this for prints tomorrow, but it’s unlikely we’ll get much. No signature means whoever wrote this took care to hide his identity.”

  I watched him pocket the note in its envelope. “Not a word about this to anyone. Even Sadie,” he said.

  “Can I make you a drink?” I tried to sound cheerful and ignore the fact that we both were distressed.

  Joe accepted a beer and folded his hands around the cold bottle. “I interviewed Simon Gorshak again today,” he said. “Christ, what a cagey bastard that guy is.”

  “Did you tell him what the blackjack dealer at Tahoe told us?”

  “Only enough of Bingham’s story to try to get Simon to tell me something. But it didn’t work. When I asked about his wife he told me it was none of my business. When I asked about his finances, same response. When I asked him—again—where he was the night Henry died, he said he couldn’t remember and challenged me to charge him or leave him alone.”

  “Simon knows how to stonewall.”

  “He knows we don’t have any hard evidence in this case. That’s what that son-of-a-bitch knows. That’s what all your people know. Henry had enemies. One of them probably killed him. Right now, my money’s on Simon.”

  Chapter 15

  Tired of worrying and just plain tired, I was grateful when Joe called later that week and suggested we go to a hangout that served good hamburgers. On a Thursday night in a university town, the bar was smoky and crowded. Many of the students seemed to be drunk, or well on their way.

  “Binge drinkers,” Joe said, leading the way ahead of me through the crowd to find a table.

  “They all looked over twenty-one,” I said as we sat in a booth in back.

  Joe fiddled with the menu. “Twenty-one or not, how can they get blasted on a school night? Don’t they have classes tomorrow?”

  “Upperclassmen are usually careful to schedule classes on Monday through Thursday. That leaves Friday open so every weekend is a three day weekend,” I said. “For that matter, try to get professors to schedule Friday classes.”

  “I had Friday classes,” Joe said. “I didn’t drink until Saturday.”

  We ordered cheeseburgers.

  After the waitress left, I caught sight of a familiar figure weaving through the room, taking the small baby steps of the seriously drunk. Celeste Cummings. She made it to a booth across the room from ours where she was loudly greeted by a boy and two others I could not see. Celeste did not look my way.

  After we finished our supper, we lingered over coffee.

  “You look wiped. I should get you back home,” said Joe.

  “I need the bathroom first,” I said. I calculated a path to the restrooms that would avoid Celeste’s booth. The bar was still noisy and crowded. On my way back I glanced in the direction of the booth. It looked empty. Then I saw a form lying under the booth’s table. It was female. I called to Joe and we tugged Celeste out from under the table. She moaned but didn’t open her eyes. Her clothes were stained and her hair tangled and oily. The manicured red nails that had drummed on my table were chipped. One was broken back to the quick.

  Joe called 911 for an ambulance. It came screaming into the parking
lot with two cop cars. The uniforms joined us to keep the curious away. The paramedics were somber as they worked over Celeste’s barely conscious body. They put her on a gurney and got her into the ambulance.

  “How serious do you think this is?” I asked, following them out to the ambulance.

  “Don’t know if she’ll make it,” said the medic, a gray haired heavyset man who shrugged and slammed the door. The siren sounded again as it raced away.

  Joe turned on the siren and put the flashing light on top of his own car. We arrived at the emergency room in time to see Celeste on a bed with two nurses and a doctor in attendance. A nurse pulled a curtain around the scene.

  We waited. We talked about our own experiences with drinking in college, although I gave him a somewhat sanitized version of my own. Joe had lost a good friend to drunk driving. His green eyes grew dark when he told me. “I still miss him.”

  “We thought we were immortal.”

  “My parents thought drinking was a normal part of college,” said Joe. “My dad used to tell stories about how drunk he got at football games.”

  “Most parents are like yours,” I said.

  “I don’t remember binge drinking,” added Joe. “We got drunk but usually because we were stupid and careless. Now these kids drink to get drunk. Deliberately. I can’t fathom their reasons.”

  Celeste may have had a reason, I thought, but kept it to myself. I knew that some of our students start binge drinking in high school. They may be unskilled freshman when they arrive at university but, as drunks, they’re pros.

  A doctor appeared from behind the curtain and we approached him. His eyes looked kind through rimless glasses.

  “I’m the dean of her school. How is Celeste?”

  “It’s bad,” said the doctor. “Probably the worst case of alcohol poisoning I’ve seen this year. Anyone know when she started drinking today? Or what she was drinking?”

  “No idea. Two hours ago she was with friends, drunk but laughing. It seems her friends just left her, passed out. Then I guess she slid under the table.” I felt a tremendous sadness for Celeste Cummings.

  “Good thing you found her. We’ll know more tomorrow,” said the doctor, and turned toward another emergency bed.

  In my freshman year at college, I learned to drink.

  I’d assumed I’d never drink liquor at all, much less drink too much. Wrong. I’d been told the children of alcoholics are genetically predisposed to alcoholism. I learned in my first semester just how susceptible I was.

  It started with Ivy, my roommate, who always managed to smuggle liquor into the dorm—usually tequila, occasionally vodka. Ivy was a tall, good-looking brunette who dated an upperclassman named Sid, the primary source of our booze. Ivy would mix the tequila with bottled orange juice we bought from the dorm vending machine. It tasted innocent enough so I tried it. After the first two months of school, neither of us went to bed completely sober.

  Ivy hated her father, who showed up once and hit on one of the blonde twins in the room next to ours. Ivy claimed her father had tried to abuse her when she was fourteen but she grabbed a kitchen knife and went after him and he never tried again. Ivy started drinking in ninth grade.

  Ivy was funny and brave and what people call wise beyond her years. She was kind and loyal to me. When we pledged sororities, she was invited to join three of the most popular. I received an invitation from one. Ivy stuck with me even though she could have gone to the top sorority at our university.

  So when Ivy asked me to join her for a drink in our rooms, or to go with her to a bar or a frat party, I rarely turned her down. We always had a couple of drinks before we went out. To “arrive buzzed,” as she said.

  I discovered that, if I only drank heavily on Fridays and Saturdays, I could sober up on Sunday and make all my classes during the week. I worked on my homework until ten every night before drinking. During the week, I managed to get buzzed without getting wasted.

  I didn’t get behind the wheel of a car when I was drinking. But I rode in the back of cars while others drove drunk. One night, the car I was in skidded into a truck. I woke up in the hospital with a broken arm. The driver of the car needed four plastic surgeries on his face before he could return to college.

  And still I drank.

  In the spring of my sophomore year, I caught a bad case of flu. I was in the infirmary for two days and in bed for the week following. Ivy tended me like a nurse. Sometimes her boyfriend, Sid, would show up with fresh fruit as well as booze. I did not drink that week because I was taking too much medication and I felt like hell. On the sixth night, I woke up to find that Sid had removed my pajama pants. He was naked from the waist down and standing over me with a bottle of vodka in one hand and an erection in the other. I asked for Ivy. “She’s out,” he said and pushed my knees apart. He ran his fingers down the inside of my thigh. I was too weak to resist him and too loyal to Ivy to tell her later anything about what Sid and I had done.

  The next day, I went back to drinking.

  The last afternoon of February my sophomore year, Ivy and I went to a bar together after Friday classes. Sid was there, avoiding me and making elaborate declarations to Ivy. Clearly he had a good headstart on the drinking. I switched to ginger ale after one beer, but Ivy matched Sid glass for glass. After an hour and a half, I was ready to go home. A girl from our sorority offered me a ride. She and I got into her car and, as we were pulling out of the parking lot, I saw Ivy and Sid lurching toward Ivy’s car. I rolled down the window and called out to them. “For Christ’s sake, don’t drive. You’re too wasted. It’s getting dark and the roads are wet.”

  I asked the girl if we could please follow Ivy and Sid and she agreed. We saw Ivy’s car up ahead. As we approached the bridge spanning the river, Ivy was driving too fast and the car spun out in the middle of the bridge. It crashed into the bridge supports and plunged into the river below. It all happened in seconds.

  The girl who was driving our car stopped abruptly and reached for her cellphone. I got out and made my way down the icy riverbank. I could see Ivy’s car being buffeted by the current and sinking.

  By the time I reached the river’s edge, only the top of Ivy’s car was visible in the fading light. I stood shivering until the police car pulled in beside me. I could hear the sirens of the ambulance coming from far away.

  The next day, after I identified their bodies, the coroner’s assistant told me the bones in Ivy’s hands had been broken by her fierce pounding on the car window. Ivy’s blood alcohol level registered three times the legal limit when she was autopsied.

  I stopped drinking.

  My junior and senior years were lonely but productive. My grades improved dramatically. I was accepted into two good graduate programs and didn’t drink alcohol again until I went home to visit my father after my mother died. He offered me a glass of Bordeaux. I sipped it very slowly and decided I could probably handle wine in small doses. I never told him about my drinking at college. He had enough heartbreak with my mother.

  Now, I don’t drink hard liquor, only wine—cautiously. The children of alcoholics have to be careful.

  The next morning, I was due to meet with a major donor to the school of journalism. Benjamin Howard had given us five million dollars for computers and television equipment and had helped renovate the top floor of the building after a serious roof leak. He had talked of giving us more before the end of the year. It was a conversation I should not miss. But I called Nell and asked her to track him down and postpone the meeting. “Tell Mr. Howard we have a desperately ill student I need to see. Henry always described him as a good guy. I hope he’ll forgive me for standing him up.”

  The morning was crisp and bright. Snow from last night’s storm had melted on the street but still frosted the trees and bushes. Several houses were already decked out with Christmas decorations. The car radio, tuned to the university
station, played medieval carols and, all the way to the hospital, all I could think about was the possibility that my decision to expel her was the reason Celeste drank too much last night.

  She’d been moved to a private room. The sunlight streamed through the sheer curtain at the window washing the faces of those in the room. Clark Cummings stood by the window hands shoved deep in his pockets. It was obvious he had been weeping. A blonde woman with a tired face sat in the chair on the right of Celeste’s bed, holding her daughter’s hand. On the left side, a young man sat in a chair, the boy who had been with Celeste in the bar. His fingers played idly with the cord leading to the equipment monitoring Celeste. His eyes found mine and closed in pain.

  “How is she?” I found the courage to ask.

  Clark Cummings turned from the window. “About the same,” he said sadly. He put his hands on his wife’s shoulders. “Irene, this is Dean Solaris from Celeste’s school.”

  The woman rose and came toward me.

  I was sure all the guilt I felt about Celeste must show in my face and that she was going to scream at me. But instead she held out her hand and said, “You’re the one who got Celeste to the hospital. The nurses told me you found her unconscious on the floor of the bar.”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you for saving her life.”

  Clark Cummings stared at me. The man was devastated.

  “Yes, Dean Solaris. Thank you,” he said so softly I could hardly hear him. “This is Thad,” he said, indicating the boy on the left. “Thad’s the hero who left my daughter to die last night.”

  “I told you before,” said the boy without looking at any of us, “Celeste told me to leave her. She told us all to leave. She said she never wanted to see me again and I should get the hell out of her life.”

  “Did she tell you how she planned to get home?” I said.