When she answered, he said, “This is Chief Lanigan of the Barnard’s Crossing police. I’m calling because I think you can help us on an inquiry we’re making.”
“About Victor Joyce? I’ve already spoken to someone from your department.”
“Yes, Sergeant Dunstable. I’ve been going over his report and there are a couple of points I’d like to get cleared up.”
“I’m sorry, but I can’t talk to you now. I was just on my way out when the phone rang. But, look here, I’ll be at the college most of the day and—”
“I could come there.”
“Well, all right. I’ll be in and out of my office all day. If I’m not in my office when you get there, you can wait. I’m sure to be along in five or ten minutes. I’m just clearing up some last minute things.”
She was there when he arrived shortly before noon. She had her handbag over her shoulder and was evidently on her way out. He looked at her appreciatively and said, “I’m Chief Lanigan.”
“I was just going out for a bite,” she said.
“Can I take you to lunch?”
She looked him over, a small smile on her lips. “Why not? Best offer I’ve had today. In fact, it’s the only offer.” The smile broadened. “Do you want to grill me? That’s the term, isn’t it?”
He grinned at her. “I’m afraid I forgot to bring my rubber blackjack with me, so suppose we just talk.”
“Suits me. Do you have a restaurant in mind?”
“I don’t know the city very well, so you pick the place.”
“There’s a place around the corner where you can get soup and a sandwich, which is all I usually have for lunch. With classes over, it will be practically empty. All right?”
“Fine.”
They found a table in a corner, and when they had given their orders, she said, “All right, what do you want to know? It seems you people are going to an awful lot of trouble investigating a drunk driver accident. I suspect—”
“What do you suspect?”
“I suspect it’s because of Cyrus Merton. He’s the big noise in your town, I suppose—”
“Because he’s rich? We have quite a few rich people in our town.”
“Yes, but I imagine he throws his weight around more than the others. His son-in-law, or his nephew-in-law, or whatever you call him, gets drunk and wraps his car around a tree. That bothers him, so he’s trying to find someone to blame it on so he can tell himself it wasn’t Victor’s fault, or not all his fault. And you people—the police, I mean—have to go along. I suppose that’s the way small towns are. I come from one, so I know.”
“And what town was that?”
“Higginstown, Pennsylvania.”
“The same town that—”
“Mord Jacobs comes from. That’s right. I knew him from there. As a matter of fact, I put him on to this job. I heard there was an opening and told him to apply. He did, and got the job.”
“Because of your influence?”
“Oh no. I’m in psychology. What influence would I have with the English Department? No, he got it on his own. They were glad to get him. He’s a real scholar.”
“You meant that if he hadn’t got this job—”
“He would have got another,” she said promptly, “but he might have had to go way out west, or down south. See, he’s young—twenty-seven—and he’s already published half a dozen papers. And he’s an Old English man. That seems to mean a lot in English departments. I suppose because it’s all dull stuff. You take someone in modern or contemporary literature, the stuff he has to read he’d be apt to read even if he weren’t in the field. He’d read it for pleasure, if you see what I mean. But the Old English stuff, Anglo-Saxon, no one would read that unless he were involved in it. So the Old English people are apt to get preference because it’s presumed that they must be scholars.”
“Then he wasn’t anxious for tenure?”
“Of course he wanted it. Not only would it give him security here, but it would give him a leg up in applying for another job.”
“How about Victor Joyce?” he asked.
“Well, Victor was in a different situation entirely. He was older, in his thirties, and he hadn’t done much, very little publishing, if any. His only chance against Mord Jacobs was that Merton was behind him.”
“I don’t understand. What does Cyrus Merton have to do with it?”
She shrugged. “He was on the Faculty Committee of the Board of Trustees, chairman, I think. I guess they pass on faculty budgets and that sort of thing. I suppose the heads of departments naturally tend to keep on the good side of him.”
“How about the other members of the committee?”
“They could be important, too, but Merton is active. When there was a faculty raise a few years back, everyone thought it was he who pushed it through. They made him an honorary member of the faculty for it, a kind of joke, but they always invited him to the faculty dinner after that.”
“So that’s how he happened to be there.”
“Uh-huh. Usually he’d just put in an appearance for a couple of minutes, but that night he decided to stay. Maybe he hadn’t eaten yet and was hungry.”
“Maybe he came because Joyce was going to be there,” Lanigan suggested.
“Possible. He may have wanted to keep tabs on him. Victor was a chaser, you know.”
“A chaser?”
“That’s right. The gossip around school was that any coed who sat in the front row and crossed her legs in one of his classes was sure of a good grade.”
“You mean he was apt to make a pass at one of the female guests?”
“There were a few that he might be interested in, and it could be one of the waitresses, or—”
He smiled. “Did he ever make a pass at you?”
“Oh yes.”
“And?”
“Oh, there were several times when he spent the night at my place. Shocked?”
“I’ve been a policeman all my adult life, Miss Saxon. It’s not easy to shock me. But I wonder—you knew he was married.”
“Oh yes, and that his marriage was all washed up; that his wife was getting a separation and a civil divorce.”
“He told you that?”
“You’re thinking it was a variation of the ‘my wife doesn’t understand me’ ploy.” She shook her head. “No. Helen Rosen, who lives next door to the Joyces, is a very good friend of mine, and we talk on the phone two or three times a week. She told me. Maybe if you ask the widow, she might be willing to confirm it.”
“Maybe I’ll do that. And do you have a—a romantic interest in Jacobs?”
She laughed. “Hardly. I babysat with him when he was a youngster.”
“Yet he was with you all through the dinner.”
“Sure, we’re good friends, very good friends. He didn’t want to go to the dinner at all, but I persuaded him, so the least I could do was sit with him.”
“Why didn’t he want to go and why did you persuade him?”
“He didn’t want to go because he thought it would be a drag. He didn’t go last year either. But Professor Sugrue, the head of his department, was on the banquet committee, and I thought Mord could score more points with him if he went. He’d been invited to a Bar Mitzvah for that same night, but I persuaded him to go to the faculty dinner instead. He left early because he saw that Victor had already left. So he felt that since his rival had gone, there was no reason why he should remain.”
“But he did set out for the Bar Mitzvah.”
“Oh yes.”
“And he didn’t get there because he got lost. At least, that’s what he told the Lerner girl.”
“Yes … Knowing Mord, it’s not hard to imagine his getting lost. But I’m inclined to think he didn’t spend too much time trying to find the place.”
“Why not?”
She thought for a moment and then said, “You’ve got to know Mord Jacobs to understand. He’s old-fashioned, and small-town, and—and very young. In his min
d, to come to dinner and meet a girl’s parents is tantamount to announcing that you’re planning to marry her.”
“And he isn’t?”
“Oh, I expect he is—when he feels he can support her and ensure her of financial stability.”
“You mean when he got tenure?”
“Yes, I think that would do it.”
“But he was planning to go to the Bar Mitzvah,” Lanigan insisted.
“Ah, but that was different. It was a big party and there’d be all sorts of people there. So he agreed to go, and then I persuaded him to go to the faculty dinner instead.”
“And he left the dinner early.”
“Yes, and my guess is that it occurred to him that he’d be arriving late and alone, and that that would be interpreted as having the same significance as going to her house for dinner.”
“Then why did he bother? Why didn’t he just stay on at the dinner, or go directly back to Boston?”
“Because he’d promised the girl, so he had to make the attempt.” She glanced at her watch. “Goodness, I’ve got to be getting back. Did you get all you need? Investigation narrowing down?”
“Investigations tend to expand,” he said. “It’s only at the end, when they’re almost over, that they narrow down.”
They walked back to the school together, and as she was about to turn away to enter the building, he said, “You know, you don’t seem particularly upset over the death of—of—”
“Of someone I’ve slept with?” she finished for him. She smiled faintly as she considered. Then she said, “If the sexes were reversed, if I were the man and he a woman I had slept with, would you be surprised if I weren’t terribly upset a week after he’d been in a fatal accident?”
Lanigan smiled. “I see. He was just a—a pretty face you picked up.”
“That’s about it.” She smiled and waved and then turned to enter the building.
In his chair, tilted back and a foot braced against a protruding lower drawer, President Macomber leafed through the morning paper. Then an item in the back pages caught his attention and he straightened up and drew a line around it. He rang for his secretary and showed her the penciled item. “We must have got some notice of this, Janet,” he said.
She glanced over the item and said, “Oh, I’m sure they sent us a notice, but it would probably have gone to the Anthropology Department, or if it came to the university, it would have been sent over there for posting.”
“I don’t suppose anyone is in the office now, but if they posted it on the bulletin board, it’s probably still there. Look, would you run down and see if it’s there? Oh, and bring it back with you if it is.”
She was back in a few minutes to report that the bulletin board of the Anthropology Department had been cleared. “Should I check the one in the Faculty Room?”
“No, don’t bother. This calls for a little detective work. It says here that Professor-Emeritus Cotton of the University of Chicago is to be awarded the Dreyfus Medal. Now it’s important that I get in touch with him. So call the Anthropology Society and find out where he’s staying, and call him.”
In fifteen minutes she was back to tell him. “He’s being put up at the Harvard Club. I then called there and they said he hadn’t checked in yet, that they weren’t expecting him until Sunday. I left a message for him to call you.”
“Well, that’s fine, but he may not ask if there are any messages for him, and they may fail to tell him. So if he doesn’t call back by Monday morning, you try them again. It’s important.”
34
Back in his office, Lanigan sat at his desk with the file on the case spread out before him. He went over everything in the file, from the notes he had had the desk sergeant make of his recollection of what Dr. Gorfinkle said when he called in to inform the police of the accident on Pine Grove Road, through Dunstable’s reports of conversations he had had with Gorfinkle, Professor Saxon, Clara Lerner, and the various people he had interviewed at the club. There were his own notes on his first meeting with Margaret Joyce, of his talks with Nellie Marston and Cyrus Merton, and the hurriedly penciled memorandum of his conversation with Professor Saxon, made as soon as he got back to his office. He also had the file on the theft of Merton’s car, if only because Cyrus Merton was involved in both, and they both had occurred on the same night.
He was looking for possible leads. His eyes narrowed at the desk sergeant’s note that there was no answer when he had called the Joyce residence the first time they learned the name of the injured man. He made a note to question Margaret Joyce about it. Again, in going over Dunstable’s report on the people he had interviewed at the club, he noted that the checkroom boy had gone off shortly after Joyce had left. The young man was a student at Windermere, and Miss Saxon had said Joyce was a chaser. What was it she had said about the school gossip to the effect that a coed who sat in front and crossed her legs in his class was sure of a good mark? Was there some connection between Joyce and the young man of the coatroom? Was there perhaps a coed he was sweet on that Joyce might have made advances to, which he might have resented? He made a note to have Dunstable go up to Breverton and interview the young man again.
He sat back and tried to think of what other lines he might follow. It occurred to him that it might be helpful to talk to Jacobs in Higginstown, and he reached for the phone. He had no trouble getting the number from Information, and when he dialed, it was Professor Jacobs himself who answered.
When Lanigan identified himself, Jacobs asked, “Is it about Victor Joyce?”
“And why do you think that, Professor?”
“Well, there was someone, a sergeant, who came to my friend Clara Lerner with questions about him.”
“I see. Well, we are making a few inquiries about Joyce,” Lanigan admitted.
“And how can I help you?”
“Well, you see, you left right after him, the faculty dinner, I mean. Did he say anything to you? Did you agree to leave early? Did you two talk about leaving early?”
“We didn’t talk at all. I may have said hello, but that’s about it. We were friendly enough, but hardly pals. The story around school was that he left because the barman refused to serve him. And I left because I had another party to go to. And it wasn’t right after him. It was some little time after.”
“Just what time was it, Professor?”
“It was pretty close to ten. Not that I looked at my watch and decided it was time to leave, but as I was standing on the porch about to go down the steps to the parking lot, a former student of mine, who had been running the coatroom, joined me. He said he got through at ten and that one of the waitresses was taking over. So, if he left at ten, then I must have. We talked for a few minutes and then went to our cars.”
“Oh yeah, what did you talk about?”
“School stuff. Primarily, he was concerned about the mark I had given him.”
“Thought he should have got a higher mark?”
“Well, his girlfriend had taken the same course, but in Joyce’s section, and she had gotten a higher mark. And he thought he should have got the higher mark because he had answered all the questions and she hadn’t.”
“So what did you tell him?” asked Lanigan.
“Oh, I explained that it was an essay-type test and the marking is pretty subjective. I have given A’s on occasion—rare occasions, to be sure—to students who answered only one question of the half-dozen in the test. You see, they get so involved in the subject matter of that particular question that they spend the whole hour on it, and it’s not bulling—you can always spot that. To me, that’s apt to demonstrate a superior knowledge, and interest, I might add, of the subject matter of the course. So I give him an A.”
“You explained all that to him?”
“More or less.”
“And then you got in your car? It must have been quite a little while after ten that you started out.”
“I suppose it was. Maybe ten after or a quarter after.”
“So when did you get to Barnard’s Crossing?”
“Around a quarter of eleven, I suppose.”
“Kind of late to go visiting, isn’t it?”
“It was a party, and I wasn’t expected until late.”
“Why didn’t you go by way of Pine Grove Road? That would have got you to Barnard’s Crossing a lot sooner.”
“I was planning to. Clara Lerner had suggested it, but I missed the turnoff, and I didn’t want to turn around and go looking for it. To tell the truth, I wasn’t terribly anxious to get to the party at all.”
“No? Why was that?”
“Well, coming in at that hour, it occurred to me I’d be rather conspicuous.”
“And you didn’t want to be. Then why go at all?”
“I’d promised,” said Jacobs simply.
“I see. Look, I may have a lot more questions in the next day or two. I’ll be able to reach you at this number, won’t I?”
“No, I’m coming back to Boston. I’ve got a meeting Monday that I’ve got to go to.”
“You’ll be able to drive up Monday morning and get here in time for your meeting?”
“Oh, I wasn’t going to drive. I was planning on flying up.”
“But your car—”
“I’m leaving it here. It’s an old car and I barely made it to Higginstown. And it’s a nuisance in the city. It was useful when I was living in Cambridge, but after I moved to Beacon Street, I really had no need for it. So I plan to leave it here and sell it when I come home after summer session. Or maybe I’ll trade it.”
“Then I’ll be able to get hold of you in the city.”
“Oh yes. I’ll be available all through the summer.”
Lanigan teetered back and forth in his chair as he thought about the conversation. It all seemed straightforward, and jibed with what he had heard from Professor Saxon and what Dunstable had reported of his interview with the Lerner girl. It occurred to him that perhaps it jibed too well. Had Professor Saxon called Jacobs as soon as she had returned to her office after lunching with him, to tell him what she had said and what he should say if he were interrogated? It might be worth checking phone records.
The Day the Rabbi Resigned Page 18
