Dying Voices

by Crider, Bill

  "Well . . . ," she said. "If you're sure."

  "I'm sure. Give George my love. Tell him I'll be at the game Saturday."

  "We're going to win this week," Bunni said, gathering up her books and hugging them to her ample chest. "It'll be a good game."

  Burns doubted it. "I'm sure it will. Now run on down and get that Diet Coke."

  "See you tomorrow," Bunni said as she left.

  Burns was already punching the "0" to get the campus operator.

  Burns parked his Plymouth outside the door of Melinda's room. There were plenty of parking spots at the Holiday Inn in the middle of the week. Pecan City was not exactly a tourist mecca, but the motels did tend to fill up on the weekends, usually with traveling salesmen.

  He got out of the car feeling a little weak in the knees and tapped on the door of Melinda's room. He'd thought he might do a jaunty "shave and a haircut," but his hand was shaking and he succeeded only in sounding like a woodpecker with some sort of nervous disorder.

  Melinda answered his knock on the door and stood aside to let him in. The room looked disconcertingly like the one in which Street had been killed, but Burns did not dwell on that likeness for long. He was distracted by Melinda Land's state of dress.

  Melinda was wearing a translucent white negligee. She turned slowly, like a model. Her hair was loose and covered her shoulders. She really had let it down. "Do you like it?"

  Burns's throat was dry. He wasn't sure whether she meant the hair or the way her figure was revealed by the negligee, but either way the answer was the same. "Ah, yes . . . very much," he croaked.

  The top of the negligee was cut quite low and exposed a generous portion of Melinda's breasts. While she did not have freckles on her face, as many redheads did, there was a light dusting of them across the white mounds that bulged over the top of the negligee. Burns found them fascinating. Both the freckles and the mounds.

  And her legs were even better than he had thought that afternoon. Of course, he was seeing a lot more of them now, since the negligee kept coming open in front.

  "Why don't we have a drink?" Melinda said. She turned to the bedside table, where there was a bottle of wine and two motel glasses wrapped in plastic.

  "Ah, . . . fine," Burns said. He was sweating, though the room's air conditioner was working well.

  Melinda tore the plastic from the glasses. The crackling noise was the loudest thing in the room, with the possible exception of the pounding of the pulse in Burns's temples.

  Melinda poured the wine into the glasses and handed one to Burns. "To a good time," she said, raising her own glass.

  Burns raised his glass as well. "To a good time," he rasped.

  Melinda sat on the edge of the bed and crossed her legs. The negligee slipped away from them and gave Burns an even better look, practically up to her thighs. She sipped the wine and looked up at Burns over the edge of the glass.

  "Why don't you get comfortable?" she said. "Sit down here by me and enjoy yourself." She patted the bed beside her.

  Burns walked over to one of the room's chairs, his knees threatening to give way at any moment. The sexual revolution had been a long time ago, as far as he was concerned, and he had missed most of it anyway. He didn't watch much daytime TV, either, so he was quite unused to scenes like this.

  He took a drink of the wine, but it didn't do much for the dryness in his throat.

  "So," Melinda said. "Have you found the book yet?"

  "No," Burns said, feeling calmer now that he was about as far from Melinda as he could get in the small room. "I don't really believe there is one."

  She waggled a finger at him. "Now don't start that again. I'm sure there's a book."

  "The fact that Street told you there was a book when you went to his room doesn't really mean that one exists," Burns said.

  "Of course it does. Why would he lie?"

  "Lots of reasons. Maybe he just wanted to impress you. A pretty young professor like you might be impressed enough to slip into a negligee for a real writer, someone who wasn't a has-been."

  Melinda put her glass down on the bedside table. It was suddenly very quiet in the room. Burns's pulse was no longer pounding, and he could hear the hum of the air conditioner.

  "You tricked me, didn't you?" Melinda said.

  "I guess you could say that," Burns told her. "I already had a pretty good idea you'd been to his room. I was hoping you'd confirm it, though."

  "How did you know?"

  "Something you said this afternoon when we were talking about the manuscript. You said you knew I didn't have it there at the school. How could you know that if you hadn't searched my office?"

  Melinda shook her head angrily. "I knew the instant I said the manuscript wasn't there that I was in trouble. But then you didn't mention it again and I thought maybe you didn't notice."

  "I didn't, not then. I was thinking of something else. But it came back to me. You also mentioned how much the manuscript would mean to you. So I called your department chair."

  "You didn't!"

  "I did," Burns admitted. "She told me a couple of things you forgot to mention about your situation there. Asked me if you had applied for a job, actually. She said that you were a good teacher, but a bit lazy about research and publishing. That you might do better at a small school where publication wasn't so important."

  "That bitch. Anyway, I told you that I needed to get an article published."

  "True. But you didn't say that you hadn't published anything in two years, that you were up for tenure this year, and that if you didn't at least have a credible acceptance, a highly credible acceptance, you were going to lose your job. 'Three years, up or out,' is the way your chair put it, I believe."

  Melinda picked up her glass and drank the wine straight down, all of it. "You don't know what it's like," she said when the glass was drained. "You don't understand the kind of pressure that there is in a place like that."

  "No, I guess not," Burns admitted. "I'm just surprised that you were ever hired."

  "Oh, I had published before. In the good periodicals. Enough articles to land the job, anyway. And I had good recommendations. I'm really not a bad teacher."

  "I'm sure you're not." She was a damned good actress, at any rate.

  "But lately I just haven't had any luck. The publications in the field are so snowed under that even if you get accepted it might take years for the article to see print. And the editorial boards have gotten incredibly picky. If you aren't Harold Bloom, you don't have a chance."

  "So you thought a seminar on Edward Street at some little backwater college like Hartley Gorman couldn't afford to be picky, and you sent them a paper. Well, it worked."

  "It wasn't enough for the department, though. They wanted something big—Twentieth Century Fiction, at least. I was going to submit the paper there after I read it."

  "You called Street after the dinner and told him about the paper you'd written. He probably invited you over. Someone at the dinner told you about the manuscript of a new Street novel, and you probably thought you'd hit a gold mine. What I don't understand is why you killed him."

  Melinda poured more wine in her glass. "You didn't know him very well, then."

  "You admit that you killed him?" Burns was amazed. He hadn't expected it to be so easy.

  "It was self-defense," she said. She drank more wine. "I find that pretty hard to believe," Burns said.

  "Well, it was." She pouted at Burns again, but somehow it wasn't nearly as cute as it had been that afternoon. "He was making filthy suggestions to me, telling me the things he'd like to do to me. He tried to rape me. I shot him."

  Burns didn't believe her. "He had a whisky bottle in his hand. How could he have been trying to rape you?"

  "He tried to feel me," she said. "He put his hands on my breasts. I shoved him away, and he got the bottle. I thought he was going to hit me with it, knock me out. I had to shoot him."

  Burns didn't believe a word of it. He said so.
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  She shrugged. "I really don't care what you believe. It's what a jury will believe that matters."

  Burns still didn't think a woman like Melinda would kill a man for touching her breasts. She wasn't dressed like the type.

  "You'd better buy a different outfit for the trial," he said, looking significantly at the negligee.

  "Count on it," she said.

  Burns had a sudden insight. "Street said he didn't read the papers that were submitted, but I'll bet he'd read them after all. And I bet he told you that yours was tripe." Burns had not known Street for long, but he knew what a sweetheart the man had been.

  Melinda's face reddened. "He said it was 'bullshit,' to be precise. He said he was going to say so at the seminar."

  "No publication, no tenure. Just embarrassment," Burns said. "No wonder you shot him."

  Melinda took a deep breath. "I told you. It was self-defense."

  "Of course it was. And you just happened to have a pistol."

  "I carry it in my purse. You've never been on the University of Houston's University Park campus, have you? There have been any number of rapes and assaults there in the last few years. I bought a pistol for protection."

  "You don't teach at that campus," Burns pointed out.

  "I taught an extension class there, at night. To earn extra money."

  She might just get away with it in front of a jury, Burns thought. She was certainly pretty enough, and a college professor, besides. Even now, knowing what he knew, he was strongly attracted to her. There were a couple of problems, however.

  "What about Duncan?" he asked.

  "I had to shoot him, too. He tried to attack me."

  "You seem to have a powerfully negative effect on men," Burns said.

  "It wasn't the same as it was with Street. I was in your office, looking for the manuscript. I thought you'd taken it. It was supposed to be scandalous, and I thought maybe you were trying to save the reputation of your school. Duncan came up there for the same thing and caught me in the office. He threatened to turn me in if I didn't . . . go along with him. He was a terrible man. I refused, and he attacked me. He must have thought I had the manuscript. So you can see I had to kill him."

  "How did you get in my office?" Burns said. He was a little hurt that she had ditched him early just to get to his office. For a while there, he'd really thought she liked him.

  "I used a credit card. It was easy."

  Even the story about Duncan might be believable, but there was one more thing.

  "What about me?" Burns said. "Why did you shoot me?"

  "You? I didn't shoot you." Melinda finished off her second glass of wine and looked at him with innocent green eyes.

  Burns still had taken only one swallow of his own drink. "Yes you did. You followed me to the warehouse and shot me."

  "I didn't intend to shoot you. You scared me."

  "Sure I did. And I didn't have what you wanted, so you just left me lying there. You didn't even bother to call an ambulance."

  "I thought you were dead," she said. "Why should I call an ambulance?"

  He couldn't believe it. How could she sit there calmly and tell him all that?

  "I'm going to have to turn you in, you know," he told her.

  "No you're not." Melinda slipped her hand under the pillow, and when she pulled it back out she was holding a small pistol, probably a .32 if Napier was right. Burns himself didn't know anything about guns, but he could see that hers was an automatic and that her finger was on the trigger.

  Suddenly things were not as simple as they had been.

  "You, ah, you . . . ." he said.

  "You shouldn't have come here and tried to rape me," she said. "You really shouldn't have."

  She stood up. The pistol was quite steady in her hand, and Burns found himself thinking suddenly of thousands of old paperback books he had seen. The scene before him would have been perfect on any of them: a cheap motel room, the bed slightly rumpled, a half-empty wine bottle on the bedside table, and in the foreground the scantily-clad redhead leveling a pistol at the poor klutz in the chair.

  And he was the poor klutz in the chair. He had come there thinking he was some kind of Sam Spade. He had almost been able to picture the scene. He would lay it all out, just as Spade had done for Brigid O'Shaughnessy, and she would plead with him, and he would tell her that he was going to have to send her over. Then she would tell him she loved him, and he would laugh and say that when she got out of Goree in twenty years, then she could come and see him. And then he would call Napier, who would take her away, and that would be that.

  She wasn't supposed to be standing there holding a gun on him. It wasn't part of the script.

  "You might get away telling a jury there were two attacks on you," he said. "They'll never go for the third one."

  "They might," she said. "I'm sorry, Carl."

  She wasn't nearly as sorry as he was. Maybe he was in some other book, the one where the cops would bust the door down right about now.

  Unfortunately, he had still been upset with Napier and had never called him. There weren't going to be any cops, not this time. It was up to him.

  He remembered an old Peanuts strip that showed Charlie Brown on third base, deciding to steal home.

  "It's hero time!" he yelled, throwing himself out of the chair and rolling forward in an awkward somersault. He heard the pistol go off, though it was surprisingly muffled, and heard something thud into the back of the chair he had just vacated. He also heard something pop in his neck, but he ignored that as he hit Melinda's very nice legs and made a grab at them.

  She tumbled on top of him and tried a couple of smashes at his head with the pistol. One of them hit his ear, which felt as if it were on fire. He hadn't known an ear could hurt so much.

  He shoved her off and tried to get up.

  She was raking his face and gouging at his eyes with the fingernails of one hand, and then she hit his nose.

  He forgot all about the ear.

  He yelled at the top of his lungs, and then the pistol went off right beside his head. This time, the sound was not muffled at all.

  She hit him in the head with the pistol, and he fell to the side. She rolled him over and got on top of him. He felt her weight on his back and realized that he was now face down. The barrel of the pistol ground into the back of his head.

  This wasn't going well at all. It was one thing to get your nose broken by a grown man wielding a book; it was quite another to get beaten to a pulp and then shot by a woman wearing a negligee.

  He rolled violently to the side, just quickly enough to avoid a bullet in the brain. The pistol went off again, but Melinda's hand was thrown up and to the side as she was tossed off Burns's back. The bullet slapped the wall.

  Burns got to his knees and turned to face Melinda, who was bringing the pistol up again. He knew things were going to look bad if she did manage to kill him. She might even get away with her story of the rape, since there was certainly going to be evidence of a struggle.

  He slapped at the pistol, deflecting it just as Melinda fired again, into the bed this time. He grabbed her wrist with his right hand and with his left jerked the bedspread from the bed. As Melinda struggled with him to get the pistol in firing position, he tried to throw the bedspread over her.

  She fought it with her left hand, swinging wildly to keep the spread from covering her face, but Burns was just lucky enough to get it over her head.

  He let go of her wrist and seized the spread with both hands, pulling it around her like a bag. He gathered it and wrapped her up in it as the pistol fired once more into the floor.

  There was nothing to tie her with, and Burns did not know what to do. He didn't want to hit her.

  Then he wondered why he didn't want to hit her. He was pretty much of a male chauvinist, he supposed, but it was time he liberated himself.

  He judged where he thought Melinda's chin might be and hit her as hard as he could. He felt something snap in his hand,
but Melinda crumpled to the floor in a satisfactory heap.

  Burns sat there panting for a few minutes.

  There was someone pounding on the door.

  Burns went wearily to open it. Boss Napier stood there looking at him.

  "I thought that was your heap outside, Burns. Disturbing the peace now, are you?"

  "I didn't know you answered nuisance calls like that," Burns said.

  "Only when they come from motels where there's been a murder recently, and only then when gunshots are involved. You look like hell, Burns. Who beat you up?"

  "That woman in there," Burns said, pointing to the orange pile on the floor.

  Chapter 19

  It had been a busy night after that.

  Napier told Burns a few things and then made Burns go through everything that had happened. He made Burns tell it three times or more, but he seemed satisfied that Burns was telling the truth, in spite of Melinda's contentions. Melinda's pistol was in her possession, and it was almost certainly the same gun that had killed Duncan and Street.

  "Anyway, the ballistics report will be in sooner or later and we'll know for sure," Napier said. "For right now, we got enough to charge her." He gave Burns a hard stare. "You sure you didn't try to rape her?"

  "Of course not," Burns said. "I'm a wimp English teacher."

  "Right. She beat you up pretty good, didn't she? You better go to the hospital and get yourself checked."

  The emergency room wasn't crowded this time, and after getting his hand bandaged—broken knuckle—and his face treated with antiseptic, Burns went home and called President Miller.

  "Congratulations, Burns," Miller said after Burns told him most of the story. "You didn't have to mention the, uh, the unfortunate incident in the library, I take it."

  "No," Burns said. "That didn't come up."

  "Excellent, Burns, excellent. I'll remember this. You did a fine job."

  Burns thought about asking for a day or two off, but he thought better of it. He also thought about asking when, exactly, Miller would remember this, but he thought better of that, too.

  "Thank you, sir," he said. Then he hung up.