by Crider, Bill
"How can you tell you messed it up?" Burns asked. Tomlin snorted.
"My pen leaked," Fox said. "I had to wash the shirt out in the lavatory."
Burns looked at Tomlin. "When did that happen?"
"This morning," Tomlin said. "But he taught his class. Don't worry."
"How?" Burns said, glad to hear that the murder hadn't disrupted the routine too much.
"He waited until after the bell had rung and they were all in there. Then he went in behind an opened umbrella." Burns turned to Fox. "Is he kidding me?"
Fox didn't say anything.
"I'm not kidding," Tomlin said. "One of the students told me all about it. Said Dr. Fox peeked out at the room from behind the umbrella now and then during the lecture. Hard to believe, right?"
Burns laughed aloud. It sounded exactly like something Fox would do.
"Kind of embarrassing," Tomlin said, "but I guess it beats finding a dead man in your office."
Then, of course, Burns had to tell them all about it.
"So we've got two dead bodies now," Tomlin said when Burns was finished. "And it's all your fault."
"That's what Miller seems to think," Burns said. "At least he hasn't fired me."
"Yet," Fox said. He had put the wet shirt back on. It didn't look much worse than anything he usually wore.
"What's Boss Napier going to do about all this?" Tomlin said.
"He didn't say. He did tell me to ask Rose something, though." Burns got up. "I'll see you guys later."
"Sure you aren't sneaking over to the library for anything?" Tomlin said. "Get your card stamped, anything like that?"
"Not today," Burns said. He knew he was going to have to take a bit of teasing about Elaine. That's why he had not said anything about Melinda Land.
He turned to leave and something on the radio caught his attention. "Turn that up," he said.
Fox reached for a dial and twisted it. The announcer's voice filled the office.
"This has truly been an unusual news day in our town," it said. "The murder at Hartley Gorman College is not the only event of note, as pigeons have been falling out of the sky all around the downtown area. One landed on the hood of a car parked outside a local jewelry store just as the owner was about to get out. The owner, Mrs. Merle Taupin, was so startled that she bumped her face on the steering wheel. Mrs. Taupin was treated for shock and a cut lip at Regional Hospital and released. In a related development, a dead cat was found beside the half-eaten carcass of a pigeon in an alley behind the Terrell Brothers Hardware Store. Authorities believe the pigeons to be toxic and warn that anyone sighting a dead pigeon should approach it with extreme caution. Anyone having information as to who might be poisoning pigeons within the city limits of Pecan City is asked to get in touch with local law enforcement officers. In other news—"
"You can turn it down," Burns said, and Fox twisted the dial again.
"You know anything about that?" Tomlin asked.
Burns was sure that Fairly was the guilty party. He had shot a few of the pigeons, but Fairly likely realized that he could never get them all that way. So he had put out poison. God knows how the attic would smell in a few days.
"Burns? What about it? You didn't poison those damn pigeons, did you?"
"No," Burns said. "Not me."
"But you know who did?"
"I'm afraid so," Burns said.
"Does it have anything to do with the murders?"
"Probably not," Burns said, hoping that he wasn't lying.
He found Rose on the first floor, where she was sweeping the front porch. She knew nothing at all about the moving of the materials on Burns's desk.
"No, sir. I didn't touch nothin' up there yesterday. I emptied your trash can in the mornin', but that was it. I didn't touch another thing."
Burns believed her. "Thanks, Rose. I was just wondering."
"Well, you don't have to wonder no more. And one othah thing. I don' think I'll be comin' up there for a while. I don' like bein' where no dead man's been."
"I could take care of the trash, I guess," Burns said.
"You can run the vacuum, too, if it gets done. I ain't goin' to be up there."
Burns didn't argue with her.
Miss Darling had been so shaken by the murder that she had asked for permission to go home early, but Clem was in her office, reading something in her freshman text and marking the page with a pencil. Burns waited until she had finished writing a marginal note before he asked why she hadn't mentioned her phone call from Street.
"Because I didn't get one," she said. "Is he supposed to have called me?"
"The police think so," Burns said. "They've probably checked the motel switchboard records for the numbers he called after the dinner Friday night."
"That's why I didn't get a call," Clem said, putting the book aside but holding on to the pencil. "I wasn't at home Friday night after the dinner."
Burns was surprised. Clem was his idea of the perfect old maid. She had never married and probably had never even considered it. She was a person who liked for everything to be done according to a schedule and for everything that had a place to be in that place. She did not tolerate any deviations from her routine, and she had the best course syllabuses Burns had ever seen. She never deviated from those, either, and she got truly furious when the former president of the school would dismiss all classes after ten o'clock on Friday if there was a big game coming up. The students and all the other teachers would be elated, but Clem would complain. Burns had never thought of her having a life outside of the school and her home. So where could she have gone after the dinner?
Clem noticed his look. "I was visiting a friend," she said.
Burns said, "I see."
"No, you do not see. I can tell that, Carl Burns. My friend is a member of the church. She had surgery, but she's home now. Her husband can't afford nursing care, so some of us have been taking turns sitting up with her until she's fully recovered. Friday night was my turn. If Edward Street called me, he didn't reach me."
"You didn't have to tell me that," Burns said. "I believed you." He didn't want to ask the next question, but he did anyway. "Why didn't you tell me the story about Street and Dick Hayes's current wife?"
Clem sniffed. Very few people could sniff effectively, but Clem was one of them. "That would be repeating gossip. You know that I don't like to repeat gossip. You're getting as bad as those policemen."
"Have they talked to you already?"
"Yes. And I didn't mention Dick Hayes to them, either."
That was all right with Burns. "Have you remembered any connection between Street and Mr. Fairly that you didn't tell me about earlier?" he asked. Then he added quickly, "That isn't gossip, I mean."
"Anything I said on that subject would be hearsay," Clem said.
"Is that as bad as gossip?"
Clem almost smiled. "It's close."
"Can you tell me anyway?"
Clem thought for a minute, toying with the pencil. Then she told him about the swimming pool.
Chapter 13
Burns had heard any number of stories about the HGC swimming pool, but never the one that Clem told him now.
The indisputable facts were that there had once been an outdoor pool enjoyed in the proper season by faculty and students alike and that there was no longer such a pool.
No, the last fact was not indisputable. Actually, the pool still existed; it was simply impossible to enjoy it because it had been filled with dirt and covered up.
Summers in Pecan City were hot; so were springs and falls, usually. A pool could be used for quite a few months of the year, often from May until the end of October, and Burns had heard the stories of the faculty get-togethers held around the sides of the pool just before the beginning of school each year. He had heard of the fun the students had there, relaxing after a hard day of studies. (That one was a little more difficult for him to believe, but maybe students had studied harder in the days when the pool had been operat
ive.)
All of that had come to an end, however, with the filling and the covering of the pool.
Burns had asked about it when he first arrived at HGC, and that was when he had first heard the stories. All of them agreed on one in particular. President Rogers had the pool filled, and the official story was that it had developed a leak that would cost thousands of dollars to repair. The school could not afford to waste money on such frivolous enterprises when money was desperately needed for the serious business of instruction, so the pool was simply disposed of.
Hardly anyone bought that story, and many other explanations for the pool's disappearance had sprung up. One such explanation held that parents visiting the school had been scandalized by the fact that male and female students were associating in the near-nude and had demanded the closing of the pool before there was a repetition of the Sodom and Gomorrah incident that they had read about in their Bibles.
Another, somewhat similar, version of the story had it that an irate mother had come down on the president's office like Byron's Assyrian, though without any gleaming cohorts, and threatened to sue the school because her daughter had been impregnated by the water in the pool.
It seemed that her daughter was as pure as a prairie flower and as innocent as the look in the eyes of a new-born doe; in short, she was a girl who had never known a young man, in the Biblical sense. Or so she had told her mother, who had then become convinced that the girl must have been somehow invaded by the rampant sperm in the college pool. How these itinerant sperm came to be there, the mother had no clear idea; but with impressionable young men swimming about, their heads filled with lustful thoughts, and scantily clad young women lounging around, anything would seem to be possible.
Burns liked both stories and would have been willing to believe either one of them, but to tell the truth neither of them struck the right chord of authenticity. However, the one Clem told sounded like it might be the correct one.
"Mr. Fairly was new here, it was his first year. He was young, as I think I told you earlier, and had never been to college himself. He did good work for the maintenance crew, though, and he did some of the odd jobs around this building, too. That's how he got to know Street."
"Nothing wrong with that," Burns said.
"No, but there were rumors that there was more to it than just a casual friendship."
Burns was astonished. "You mean to say that Street and Fairly were . . . were. . . ." He had to stop. He couldn't put his suspicions into words, not to Clem, despite what had happened only last year.
"Don't look like that," Clem said, slapping the pencil down on the desk. "I didn't mean to imply anything sexual."
Burns closed his mouth, which he realized had been drooping open. "What then?"
Clem looked sour. "The rest of this is purely gossip," she said, her lips thin.
"Tell me anyway. You've gone this far."
"Very well. The rumor was that Street, who was thought of as the campus radical in those days, occasionally smoked marijuana and that he offered to share some with Fairly. Fairly accepted. They weren't smoking in the building, mind you, but somewhere on the campus. Anyway, the story is that Fairly got rather high and offered Street a ride in the school's dump truck. This was in the winter and the pool had been drained. They were tooling around in the truck and Fairly lost control. It tore through the fence around the pool and kept right on going. Landed nose down in the shallow end. That's what cracked the pool."
"So the pool really is cracked?" Burns asked.
"I couldn't say. All I know is the story. You've heard the others?"
"A couple of them at least," Burns said.
"Maybe one of them is right. But you were asking about Street, so I told you."
"I don't understand, though," Burns said. "Why would that be something for Fairly to worry about? It wasn't his fault any more that it was Street's. In fact, Street was the one with the marijuana."
"That's right. And here's where the story gets hard to believe. According to what I heard, Street took all the blame. Fairly wasn't even there when Dirty Harry arrived on the scene. There was no one but Street in the truck. He had sent Fairly away and told him not to worry. Street claimed to have taken the truck himself and accepted sole responsibility for the wreck."
"I'm surprised Street wasn't fired," Burns said.
"So were a lot of other people," Clem said. "Knowing what we know now, I wonder if he had something on President Rogers."
It was certainly possible, Burns thought. "So if Street was really writing a book about HGC, he might have included the whole story and told who really wrecked the truck."
"It would be just like him," Clem agreed. "He would be in the book, of course. I can just see it—a noble, selfless young teacher, full of ideals, saving a poor, downtrodden member of the lower orders by doing a far, far better thing."
"Street was a regular Sidney Carton, all right," Burns said. "I'd really like to see that manuscript."
"I expect a lot of people would," Clem said. "I wonder where it is?"
Suddenly, so did Burns. He went looking for a telephone that he could use privately. He couldn't use his own office. The police weren't sure they were through in there, yet. Miss Darling was gone, so he used his pass key to get into Miss Darling's office. He was sure that she wouldn't mind, but he would tell her anyway. He knew he could have gotten in easily enough with a credit card, having gotten into his own office that way more than once, but he wanted everything to be on the up and up. That was always the best way.
"No, we didn't find any bunch of typing paper in Street's room," Napier said in answer to Burns's telephone query. "I've called the police where he lived and they've searched his house there, too. They found a lot of stuff, but nothing like you're talkin' about."
Burns should have known. He'd underestimated Napier again. This time, Clem had told the police chief about the letter she had received from Street, and the Boss had already checked it out.
"Do you think Street had it with him?" Burns asked. "That whoever killed him took it from his room?"
"You think I'm one of them psychics that get big bucks for readin' minds?" Napier said. "Is that it?"
"Well, no, but I—"
"Yeah, I know. You was wonderin' about it. You don't wonder, Burns. Leave that to me." Napier paused. "You know what I think?"
"No," Burns said. "What do you think?"
"I think maybe that's what Duncan was looking for in your office. You were the last person to see Street, as far as anyone knows, and someone could've told Duncan about the book."
Burns had not thought of that. "You mean Duncan thinks—thought—that I killed Street?"
"Nope. But he might've thought Street gave you the book. You're an English teacher, after all."
"Well, he didn't give it to me," Burns said. "Besides, Duncan probably didn't know about the book."
"You don't know that. You don't know what that guy knew. He might've found out. He was a reporter, wasn't he?"
"Yes," Burns admitted.
"So he could've known. But I'll tell you something else. I don't even think Street wrote another book. I think he just started that rumor to scare people."
Burns thought about it and realized that Napier could be right. It made sense, considering the kind of man Street was, and it showed that Napier was a shrewd judge of people, even though he did not seem to be. The police chief was full of surprises.
"You've got a point," Burns said.
"Hell, yes, I do," Napier said. "From everything I hear, that Street was a real bastard. I'm just surprised somebody didn't kill him sooner."
"Me too," Burns said. "I wish they'd done it somewhere else, too."
"You said it," Napier agreed.
After Burns hung up he sat and doodled on a piece of scratch paper, trying to make sense of things.
Mary Winsor had not told him about her call from Street. Why? Or did she even get a call? Clem had been gone, and it was possible that the Winsors ha
d been out as well.
Fairly had a connection with Street, all right, but it was a tenuous one. After all these years, who would care if a young member of the maintenance crew had smoked marijuana with Street and wrecked a truck in the school's swimming pool? Fairly did have a gun, however, and there were all those dead pigeons falling around Pecan City to demonstrate his disregard for at least one form of life.
And what about President Miller? Were those books on his shelf the ones that were missing from the library? If so, why were they there? Burns thought there might be a way he could get a look at them later if he had to. There was something else about Miller that was bothering Burns, too, but he couldn't quite pin it down.
Dick Hayes was another matter. He was not one of Burns's favorite people, simply because he was so relentlessly cheerful. He made Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm look like Lizzie Borden; he made Norman Vincent Peale look like John Calvin. But he had made a successful marriage with the much younger woman who had taken his wife's place. Burns wondered if the rumor about the death of Hayes's wife had any validity, and he wondered if Street had indeed been the one to start it.
Burns decided it was time to have a talk with Dick Hayes, though he dreaded it. Hayes's unswerving good humor caused in Burns a constant desire to throw up whenever he had to spend more than two minutes with the man.
The Business Building was across the street to the north of Main, so Burns went downstairs and outside. There was a dead pigeon lying on the sidewalk, and Burns kicked it aside. He was going to have to talk to Fairly, too.
Melinda Land was getting out of a rental car when Burns reached the street. She was wearing a green dress that matched her eyes and clung to her in all the right places. Burns felt a long-forgotten stirring.
"Hello, Carl," she said, looking at him steadily with those eyes. "I thought you might call me today."
"Uh, I've been a little busy."
"Yes, I'm sure you have. I heard about poor Harold on the radio."
