Poisoned Pins

by Joan Hess

  I swallowed two aspirin with a sip of water. “I don’t want to go to the infirmary, but I would prefer to put this off for a day or two and go home to take a nap. Why don’t I call you when I’m ready to continue this? Maybe my memory will have improved.”

  “Let’s hope so,” she said mildly.

  Once we were in the car, I told her my address and then said, merely to make conversation, “How long have you been a detective?”

  “Since the report of your assault came in. I’m usually assigned to public relations, but the grown-ups were all responding to other calls, and poor Officer Terrance was stuck with me.” She braked at a crosswalk and waited as the students ambled by. “Actually, I’m on a joint task force with the local police department. We’re trying to find ways to cut down on property theft. During the last academic year, over a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of property was stolen on the campus. We recovered less than a third of it, but that’s close to the national average.”

  This wasn’t precisely the subject I’d introduced, but it was preferable to a discussion of my assailant. “Someone mentioned there’d been thefts in the dorms and Greek houses. I can understand how a kid leaves his door unlocked, thus inviting someone within the residence to sneak inside and grab whatever’s on the dresser. But how could someone steal a large, bulky computer from a busy office on the campus?”

  “We’ve had reports on computers, VCRs, speakers that were screwed to the walls, overhead projectors, photocopy machines-you name it. The problem is apathy. Someone strolls into, say, the biology department, announces that Professor Smith said to take the computer to the laboratory on the third floor, and carries it out the door. Professor Smith thinks a colleague must have borrowed it, and merrily goes away on his sabbatical for three months. In the next building, someone says he’s from the repair service, flashes a form, and takes the photocopier Not one grad student or secretary bothers to demand credentials, and the polite student who holds the door for the thief is too worried about his thesis to look at anyone’s face. Office and classroom doors are left unlocked at night. The storage building for the landscaping crew is in a lonely corner of the campus.”

  “How can you stop it?” I asked.

  She parked in front of my duplex. “We can’t, and it costs the taxpayers a lot of money to replace all these electronic toys. While we’re on the topic, I saw a report that might interest you, Ms. Malloy. A clerk at a boutique at the mall recognized Debbie Anne Wray’s face on the news and called us. Several months ago Debbie Anne went into the store and requested a refund on an expensive wool jacket. Although she didn’t have a sales receipt, the tags were still on the coat and it hadn’t been worn. Because the store makes every effort to court business from the coeds, it has a liberal return policy. The clerk was counting out the money when the manager returned from lunch and noticed it was a brand not carried there. When he said as much, Debbie Anne burst into tears and ran out of the store, leaving the coat behind. It was so odd that he and the clerk remembered her face.”

  ‘Why would you think this would interest me, Officer Pipkin?”

  “Just a hunch,” she said as she shifted gears. “I’d better get back for a meeting, Ms. Malloy. Please call me when you feel better.”

  Debbie Anne’s peculiar behavior would have to wait. I sat down on the porch steps and made sure my key ring was not hidden somewhere in the murkiest corner of my purse. My purse had been in my presence since I’d left my duplex in the morning. When Katie bit me, I’d dropped it, but it hadn’t burst open. Therefore, I thought with a sigh worthy of my daughter at her pinnacle of martyrdom, the key ring must have fallen out of my purse when I was attacked by my man in the moon. Pippa had gathered up the contents and replaced them, but had overlooked the key ring under a leaf or in a clump of grass.

  Well-organized people not only have spare keys, they also put tags on them and know exactly where they keep them. Others of us hazily recall the existence of spare keys, likely to be in a kitchen drawer crammed with junk… or m a little box along with foreign coins and insufficient postage stamps… or in a shoebox with expired coupons and postcards from unfamiliar people who’d wished we were there. I knew about well-organized people, having once been married to a man who sent in warranty cards, filed receipts, won arguments with the bank, and watched, in precise chronological order, every episode of Upstairs, Downstairs. He empathized with the latter group who made the household run smoothly and efficiently, while scorning those dithery sorts who were forever misplacing their parasols and white kid gloves.

  I went across the street and trudged toward the library, promising to abandon my slothful ways if I found my keys. Classes seemed to be over for the day; only a few students were sitting on benches outside the library or waiting for the stoplight to change across from the student union. It was not a dark and stormy night, however, and I was more concerned about my keys than about potential muggers in the bushes.

  They were nowhere in the grass around the tree. I searched methodically in a fifteen-foot radius, then leaned against the trunk and considered every action I’d taken since unlocking the front door of the Book Depot at nine o’clock. I had not removed my keys from my purse, and it had been in my possession-with the exception of the few minutes when it had been propelled out of my hands. Along with sweet dimples, indignant dimples, and enthusiastic dimples, it seemed possible that Pippa had among her repertoire a few larcenous ones. I glumly contemplated the ramifications of not having a car key, a house key, a bookstore key, or any of the other odd keys that I kept religiously, year after year, in ease I ever remembered what they fit.

  Clearly, I needed to have a word with Pippa, and a round of fisticuffs if necessary. My reluctant relationship with the Kappa Theta Etas had caused nothing but a series of headaches, of both the literal and figurative variety. I’d been bitten twice, thrown in jail, hurled into a tree, and exposed to several bizarre subcultures that had thus far existed quite successfully without any intervention-or interest-on my part. My resolution to defend Debbie Anne to the bitter end was melting away like a scoop of ice cream.

  I continued to allow it to melt for about three steps, faltered, and veered toward the sidewalk that went past the agri building. My assailant was not likely to be dallying behind the shrubs, but I hadn’t done noticeably well in predicting his behavior to date. I circled the building, staunchly ignored a pair of coeds who giggled at me, and headed in the direction he’d purportedly taken.

  The journalism building appeared deserted, as did a squatty structure that I thought housed philosophy and other cerebral, and therefore non-marketable, majors. Secretaries were now leaving for the day, replaced by the custodial staff, a few humorless students, and a rare faculty member with a bulgy briefcase and the obligatory leather patches on his or her elbows.

  It was approaching five o’clock, which meant Caron was likely to be working herself up to a fine figure of a snit. My meandering had deposited me at the door of Guzman Hall, home of the law school; unlike the other buildings, it was lighted, and students were visible inside a lounge and a library. I decided to hunt up a pay telephone to tell Caron that she could close the store-if she could find a key in the drawer below the cash register or in any of my desk drawers, or in the box of junk on the filing cabinet, or in a similar container in the cramped bathroom. If she had no luck on this jolly little treasure hunt, she’d have to call a locksmith and wait until he arrived. My head began to throb steadily as I imagined her response to the final option.

  I entered the building with the due caution of a civilian entering a lion’s den. The students brushing past me appeared normal, even nondescript, but I was keenly aware of their chosen careers and kept my face averted as I prowled for a telephone. The main office, an adjoining room apparently used for moot trials, and the dean’s office beyond it were all dark. No one was home to offer aid at the legal clinic. I heard distant laughter from around the corner of the hallway, and surmised it came from the lounge I’d g
limpsed through the window. Surely there was nothing in the corpus juris of the library worthy of a laugh, or even a tiny chuckle.

  A lounge was the logical place for vending machines, uncomfortable furniture, merriment, and telephones. I turned-and gasped as I found myself once again confronting the eerie white face of the man in the moon. My eyes wide and my mouth flapping mutely, I recoiled into a water fountain before I realized it was only a portrait attached to the wall, the last in a string that decorated the hallway like pretentious ancestors.

  Once I’d regained my composure, I went to the portrait and managed to make out the words on the brass plaque beneath it: John W. Vanderson, Dean of the Guzman Center for Law, 1983-. I frowned at this, and then at his depiction, trying to convince myself that I was muddled, addled, mistaken, in the throes of a concussion, just plain crazy. But I wasn’t. His face was distinctive and easily recognizable, although in this case he was beaming genially at me from behind a broad, uncluttered walnut desk, with bookcases, framed diplomas, and an American flag in the backwound.

  I made sure I was alone, then sat down on the opposite side of the hall and gazed up at John W. Vanderson, dean of the law school, husband of the Kappa Theta Eta house corps president (whatever that was), parlous pedestrian, and skilled prowler. Despite my efforts to the contrary, I could produce not one flicker of doubt that he was the man who’d stopped in front of the Kappa house to rub his jaw, the man who’d looked down at me from the third floor the next night, and the man who’d only a short time earlier knocked me into a tree and fled. He was the leading candidate for the anonymous caller

  I rubbed my jaw much the way he had as I tried to make sense of this, but I might as well have been sharing my secret whistle with him. I understood why Winkie had recognized him from my description; she would have met him when he escorted Eleanor to alumnae functions at the sorority house, or at the Vandersons’ house. Her reticence was more difficult to understand, but for all I knew, it was based on a dictum from National or arose from an anagogic rite of sisterhood.

  Clanks, clatters, and bits of conversation from the direction I’d come caught my attention. I stood up, and after a parting frown at Dean Vanderson, retraced my path to the main hail. Offices that had been dark were now lit, and within the nearest I saw a man emptying a wastebasket into a large plastic container, and a second wheeling a bucket into an inner sanctum.

  The door of the dean’s office was ajar. If he could prowl, so could I, although I chose to do so with a great deal less impunity. I waited until the custodians were both out of sight, then darted into the office. I froze behind the door, and only when my heart stopped bouncing did I smugly conclude I had accomplished this minor intrusion unnoticed and unchallenged. What I now intended to do was a good question, but I saw no reason to pester myself with such paltry details.

  The reception room contained a desk, a computer covered with a plastic hood, filing cabinets, and two straight-backed chairs on either side of a small table with journals and a bowl of mints. The door on the far side was closed, but not necessarily locked, I told myself cheerfully as I glanced at the still-deserted hallway and hurried across the room.

  Seconds later I was inside Dean Vanderson’s private office, gripped by a sensation of déjà vu until I realized his portrait portrayed the room right down to the leather accessories on his desk and the diplomas on the wall. Beyond the windows was an expanse of lawn, and in the distance Farber Hall rose imposingly above the treetops.

  I willed myself not to compare it to the tiny, crowded, dusty office at the back of the Book Depot, where I’d always wondered how the cockroaches fared in battle against the mice in the wee hours of the night. Beside the desk was a table, and on it sat a telephone. As long as I was in the midst of a crime spree, I decided there was no reason not to compound the felony and save myself a dime.

  I dialed the number and leaned against the desk to brace myself for a barrage of outrage. “Hi, dear,” I began as soon as Caron picked up the receiver. “I’m going to be a little late, so why-”

  “A Little Late? We are talking one hundred and fifty-seven minutes late, Mother. I told you we had to do our hair before we went to Rhonda’s. I called her earlier to tell her I wasn’t going to limbo if she paid me, and she said Louis and some other guys on the football team are coming by after they go to a movie. Do you want me to walk in there as if I’d arrived on a watermelon truck? It’s bad enough that…

  She may have added quite a bit here, but I wasn’t listening; I was staring at a sliver of pink paper visible under the computer at the other end of the table. The color was familiar evoking unpleasant sensations not tin-like chilblain.

  “Lock the store when you leave,” I said, hung up the receiver and cautiously edged toward the computer. I was not tampering with evidence, I told myself as I tried to coax out the insidious pink cat. Not one of the police officials, campus or local, believed my story that I’d seen John Vanderson on previous occasions. Therefore, there could be no evidence because there’d been no crime, even of the lex non seripta variety. Half an hour in Guzman Hall and I’d already prepared my first brief, I realized, increasingly irritated that I couldn’t get enough fingernail on its edge to pull it out.

  I poked at it with a pencil borrowed from dear John’s leather cup, but it was pinned firmly by the weight of the computer. Honest soul that I was, I replaced the pencil, studied the computer for potential handholds, and had hoisted it up a few inches when a cold, unfriendly voice said, “Put that down.”

  I did.

  “Whaddaya think you’re doing, lady? If you want a computes go buy one at the store instead of stealing it from the college.”

  I looked back at a middle-aged man who wore a gray uniform and brandished a mop. His expression was as unfriendly as his voice. “I was not stealing this,” I began, paused to clear my throat, and with more assurance than I felt, continued. “It does look odd, doesn’t it? I feel awfully silly being caught like this, but all I was trying to do was… well, what may appear to be..”

  “You work on it while I call the campus cops,” he said, shaking the mop so hard that drops of water rained on the floor. “Every time one of you steals something from the law building, the cops come sniffing at me. I need this job, lady. I’ve got a family just like everybody else, and three kids to put through college.” He glowered at me as if I’d announced an increase in tuition. “Three kids, all wanting to be something more than a janitor”

  “I understand,” I said soothingly. “I have a fifteen-year-old daughter who’s demanding a car at the end of the summer. And the cost of four years of college is enough to-”

  “Just stay there, okay?” He went into the front room and reached for the telephone.

  I had all of ten seconds to lift the computer, grab the construction-paper cat, stuff it into my pocket, and rush into the front room before he hit the final button. “Wait!” I said as I grabbed his wrist. “Please don’t call the police. The computers still attached to everything; there’s no way I could have moved it more than an inch or so without undoing cables and unplugging it. I swear I wasn’t stealing it.”

  He did not appear any more impressed by my logic than he had been by my previous attempt at parental camaraderie. “That’s what they all say, lady. What were you doing? Moving it so you could dust? I don’t remember hearing you’d been added to this building’s crew.”

  It hadn’t occurred to me that I needed to concoct an explanation before I made my unauthorized entrance into the dean’s private office. Unlike glib characters in mystery novels, my mind went as blank as the top of John Vanderson’s head. “I’m not-no, well-it’s obvious that I’m not on the crew,” I managed to stammer.

  “No shit, Sherlock.” He disengaged my hand and began to redial a number that would result in a veritable morass of complications for me.

  He was on the sixth digit when I finally thought of something. I pushed down the button to disconnect him lifted my eyebrows, and said, “I think D
ean Vanderson will be very displeased if you bother the campus security department. Since I am his wife, I am more than entitled to be in his office. In fact, he asked me to come by and pick up a file for him. He thought it might be under the computer but he was mistaken.”

  “His wife?”

  “I am Eleanor Vanderson,” I said, articulating carefully and wondering what to do if he’d met her in the past.

  We seemed to clear that hurdle, but we encountered the next one with dizzying speed. “You got any identification?”

  “My dear man,” I said with the imperiousness of a Kappa Theta Eta alumna interviewing a rushee over tea, “I most certainly do have identification, but I have no inclination to show it to you. On the other hand, I will be happy to call the dean and explain that I was delayed because of your petty suspicions. We are due at a faculty engagement at six o’clock sharp. It’s at Thurber Farber Manor home of the president of the college. I have no quarrel with you, but I can only hope the dean doesn’t file a complaint with your supervisor. I should hate for you to lose your job with those three college-bound offspring.”

  He continued to entertain his petty suspicions for a long while, but at last he shrugged and said, “I dunno about this, lady. If you’re really the dean’s wife, you would have said so in the beginning, instead of acting like a thief caught in the act. But I got work to do, and I’d like to catch the end of the ball game when I get home.” He picked up the mop and went to the door “I’m gonna lock this office. Next time you come by on an errand for the dean, plan to show proper identification.”

  “I shall impress the dean with your cooperation,” I said, still caught up in my role. I swept past him and sailed out the door of the Guzman Center for Law, and only when I was on the far side of the agri building did I sink down on a bench and allow myself to revel in the absurdity of the scene. I had no qualms about awarding myself an Oscar Best actress in an ab libitum role seemed apt.