by Donn Taylor
“. . . bet my laptop no student will sign it,” a voice was saying. “It’s ridiculous to require anyone to support any political idea, good or bad, before he can be certified to teach. It’s like my making students commit to subjective epistemological monism before they can pass my course.”
Yes, the speaker was Gifford Jessel. And Bob Harkins, for once, joined in the speeches: “I think I’ll make my students certify the superiority of acids over bases.”
Brenda Kirsch also broke precedent by calling the question, and one of the coaches moved for a secret ballot. Dean-Dean had ballots ready and named faculty from both sides of the issue to count. The counters withdrew and returned presently to announce that the education department’s mission statement had failed by a vote of 26 for, 31 against.
When Dean-Dean called for a motion to adjourn, one of the nurses asked when the faculty would vote on the question of establishing coed dorms.
Dean-Dean drew himself up to his full five feet eight and huffed, “That is a purely administrative decision and not subject to faculty vote.” He called again for a motion to adjourn, which was duly made, seconded, and passed unanimously. For once, perhaps exercised by the failure of the education department’s motion, he failed to adjourn us sine die.
As we left, I saw President Cantwell ease out the back door. Whatever his reason, he had stayed to hear the speeches.
Except for my musical flight on Victor Young’s magic carpet, I’d kept an eye on our designated murder suspects during the meeting. Bob Harkins endured it silently with a worried expression until his one speech. He also made a point of not seeing me. Until she called the question, Brenda Kirsch simply looked out the window. Gifford Jessel, of course, followed the discussion with relish. Yes, I watched Mara, too. She seemed surprised by the vitriol in what should have been a reasonable discussion. I guess she hadn’t yet learned about college faculties.
After the meeting, Mara hesitantly agreed to search Brenda’s office while Brenda and I had tea—provided, of course, no one was hanging out in that hallway of the gym. There shouldn’t be, for team practices would occupy coaches and athletes. Mara’s frequent workouts in the gym meant no one would question her being there in warm-up clothes.
I think disappointment was creeping into both of us. All the risks we’d taken had turned up truckloads of dirt, but they had brought us no closer to finding the murderer. Still, with Clyde Staggart breathing down our necks, we had to keep trying.
We agreed to meet later at Dolt’s.
I don’t know what Mara did for lunch. I grabbed a quick one in the grill, then headed for my afternoon class, one tiny thread of normality in the vast web of insanity that had entangled us. But today even teaching brought no relief.
For reasons I couldn’t define, the thought of having tea with Brenda Kirsch filled me with apprehension.
CHAPTER 21
I admit being curious as well as apprehensive when I knocked on the door of Brenda Kirsch’s house. I’d known Brenda only as instructor of exercise classes where women hopped around to full-volume rock and rap music. I already wondered at the contradiction between Brenda’s trendy image and the austere furnishing of her office. The decor of her house provided another contradiction.
Her living room was rather dark, furnished with an ancient divan, an overstuffed chair, and a number of small tables that looked like antiques. That much was unremarkable. But the surface of every table was covered by intricate lace doilies and filled with displays of delicate ceramics. And I do mean filled. Every square inch of horizontal surface was crowded with fragile china plates poised on pedestals. Each plate possessed its own elegant beauty, but they were crammed so tightly together that the total effect was a hodgepodge of undifferentiated crockery.
Several lighted candles gave a heavy odor of musk.
The sitting room where Brenda served tea had a similar decor. Everywhere I looked were displays of paper-thin ceramic, and a chinafilled end table stood so close by my chair that I hardly dared breathe for fear of breaking something. It looked like Martha Stewart gone mad and catapulted a century backward into the Victorian era. I half-expected the ghost of Faulkner’s Emily Grierson to materialize with her hand-painted china.
Remembering that Emily poisoned her beau didn’t make me feel any better.
Brenda herself, graceful and athletic, sat serenely modern in the midst of the accumulated antiquity. Another musky candle burned on a table at her side. She wore a silken red blouse under an open black jacket, with close-fitting black slacks that called attention to her shapely legs. The blouse’s spot of crimson among all the black reminded me of a black widow spider. Brenda’s glittering black eyes and her lipstick the color of old blood did not help.
Still, her heart-shaped face showed a welcoming smile.
We sat facing each other, a few feet apart, with a tea caddy on a table at her side. She poured from a vintage pot that President McKinley might have used, and she served me tea in a cup of eggshell china about the size of a thimble.
“Lemon, cream, or sugar?” she asked.
“None, thanks,” I said. “I take mine barefoot.”
She laughed at my inelegant expression as if she hadn’t heard it before. Then she poured herself a cup, leaned back in her chair, and crossed one nicely curved leg over the other.
“Now, Professor Barclay,” she said, raising one eyebrow, “what did you want to talk about?”
I took a sip of tea and said, “I want you to tell me all you know about Laila Sloan.”
She looked thoughtful. “I really don’t know very much. She came from the same part of the state that I did, and I’d heard good reports about her teaching. That’s why I recommended her.”
“Where did you come from?”
“It’s a tiny farm village called Prosperity.” She laughed. “It’s so prosperous that half of its people have moved elsewhere.”
If she was trying to steer me away from Laila, I wasn’t having any. “Did you know Laila there?”
She looked at the wall beyond me. “I ran up on her a few times here and there. I never knew her well, but I remember everyone talking about how sweet and considerate she was.”
“So sweet she got convicted of burglary,” I said.
Brenda changed stories without batting an eye. “I heard she had a wild side, too, and a way of entangling people so they did whatever she wanted.”
“That sounds real sweet and considerate,” I said. “What was she like in school?”
I’d set a trap with that question—a lead to talk about Bi-County Consolidated High School—but Brenda didn’t fall into it. She didn’t even pause to think before answering.
“I really don’t know. I never had any classes with her.”
“What was her reputation around the school?”
Brenda turned one palm up in front of her shoulder. “I don’t know that either, Press. Oh . . .” She looked at the floor, then up at me through her eyelashes. “Do you mind if I call you Press? ‘Professor Barclay’ sounds so formal.”
“I don’t mind.” The room temperature suddenly rose about ten degrees, but I pushed on. “Wasn’t there any peer talk about Laila? Most schools are drowning in that kind of gossip.”
She shook her head and looked sad. “There wasn’t time for it. We spent hours on buses to and from school, and no one from her age group rode my bus. I’m afraid I’m not much help to you, Press. Would you like more tea?”
“No, thank you. I really ought to be going.” I hadn’t been able to break through that false facade, so this was another interview going nowhere.
“One more thing.” Her black eyes glittered. “The campus rumor mill says you and Professor Thorn think you can solve Laila’s murder. That could be dangerous.”
So much for my cover story about writing a memorial.
“You shouldn’t believe everything you hear,” I said. I found an unoccupied square centimeter on the table by my chair and eased my cup and saucer onto it. “I real
ly do have to go.”
We stood together. She escorted me to the front door and turned to stand facing me. I wondered what else she was going to say, but she said nothing. She smiled with those lips the color of old blood, put her arms around my neck, and kissed me.
It was not a china-cup kiss. It was more like a mug of black coffee that had fermented on the stove all day and been reheated for the occasion.
Her embrace started down around the ankles and gradually wound its way up to the kiss, inspiring visions of being cuddled by pythons or pumas. I couldn’t decide which was more apropos.
After a few minutes she pushed back a step, hands on my chest, and gave me a coy glance.
“I’m glad we’re going to be friends, Press.”
“Friendship is a wonderful thing,” I said.
With commendable concentration, I managed to find my way outside. I sauntered casually down the block and around the corner, acting like nothing unusual had happened and silently cursing my internal musicians, who mocked me with more Clyde McCoy blues on a wahwah muted trumpet.
Once out of Brenda’s sight, I used my handkerchief to wipe the lipstick from my mouth. On her it had seemed maroon-and-black, but on my handkerchief it just looked black. My hands bore a faint aroma of Brenda’s perfume that I hadn’t noticed among all the musk. I half-remembered that she’d made some reference to it as I was leaving. I tried to wipe the smell off my hands with my handkerchief. Then I wadded up the handkerchief and stuffed it as far down in my pocket as it would go.
When you start an investigation, I guess, you never know what will turn up.
Later, in Dolt’s, I found Mara waiting at the same table we’d shared before. Her blue warm-up suit emphasized the blue of her eyes and contrasted nicely with her ivory complexion. Under the subdued lighting, every movement of her head put dancing highlights in her blonde hair. But the set of her jaw and her scorched-earth gaze warned me I’d find this interview no easier than the one with Brenda.
“This place isn’t as loud as usual,” I said. It was still loud enough, for my eardrums already hurt. The other tables were filled with the usual flocks of students who’d come here together so they could yell into their cell phones at people who were somewhere else.
Mara glowered at me and said nothing, so I asked, “How did your search go?”
“All right.” She gritted out the words. “And your tea party?”
“I didn’t come away with anything we can get our teeth into.”
“That’s not the complete truth.” Her eyes focused on the left corner of my mouth. “You didn’t get all of it off.”
I wiped my mouth again with the polluted handkerchief. She stared at it in disbelief while I finished the job.
“There,” I said. “How’s that?”
“Okay on the outside. You missed a spot on your number twelve bicuspid.”
“On what?”
“It’s a tooth. The first one behind your eyetooth, left side.”
“Upper or lower?”
“Upper.”
I covered my mouth with my other hand while I used the handkerchief to sanitize the disgraced tooth. When I finished, I asked, “How did you learn the names of teeth?”
“I used to work for a dentist. If you’d shown her that tooth, she’d have wiped the lipstick off with a drill. Down to the nerve.”
“Aren’t we getting off the subject? I thought we were conducting an investigation.”
She looked right through me. “Are we investigating the same thing?”
I returned her hard look. “I’m investigating a murder, and I’m not going to get sidetracked by red herrings.”
“They’re not red.” She threw a furious glance at the handkerchief still clutched in my hand. “They’re a lot closer to black.”
“All right.” I struck the table, but not hard enough to call attention to us. “So she kissed me. So what?”
“And you fought her off desperately to protect your virtue.”
“Sometimes we have to make personal sacrifices to achieve our objectives.”
“Some sacrifice!” She sniffed a couple of times. “You reek of her perfume.”
Mara wasn’t going to be thrown off the scent. Literally, in this case. But I tried anyway. “Her perfume was pretty strong,” I said. “I think she called it Euphoria.”
“On you it smells like euthanasia.”
“All right,” I said again and raised my hands in surrender. “I plead guilty to all counts of moral turpitude. Now. Do we go on with the investigation together or do I go it alone?”
She smoldered a few seconds and muttered, “Together. . . . But don’t you get sidetracked again.”
By this time I was smoldering, too, but I kept my voice calm. “All I learned was that Brenda is hiding something. What did you find in her office?”
She sighed. “I found a blackjack in her desk drawer.”
“One of those things they call a ‘sap’?”
“Yes.”
“Why would she keep a sap in her office?”
“Why would she take one home with her and kiss him?”
“You’re changing the subject,” I said.
Her eyes flashed. “You could use a little changing yourself.”
I’d been holding my temper in check, but now it blazed. “I thought we were going to go on together, but if you keep—”
Mara started and grabbed at her pocket. Her hand emerged with a visibly vibrating cell phone. She answered, then listened silently. Her face grew grim.
The noise level of Dolt’s music seemed to jump about ten decibels, and my internal musicians countered feebly with Brahms’ “Lullaby.”
Mara folded the phone and returned it to her pocket, her face deadly serious. She spoke in a voice scarcely audible above the surrounding din.
“That was Dr. Sheldon. He says Laila Sloan was married to Gifford Jessel.”
CHAPTER 22
Dr. Sheldon’s bombshell left us speechless for a moment. Then Mara explained: “On a hunch, Dr. Sheldon checked the Insburg marriage records for Dee Laila Sloan. We already knew she and Gifford Jessel overlapped one year at the college there. Dr. Sheldon found they’d married in the fall semester and divorced six months later in the spring.” She showed a sardonic smile. “Contrary to Tennyson’s opinion, in the spring that young man’s fancy turned away from thoughts of love.”
I would have scored another point for her erudition except that the quotation was too common. Besides, my temper was surging up like a thermometer in an oven. No one likes to be lied to, and now we’d caught every one of our suspects in either an evasion or a bald-faced lie. Pappas had concealed his time in prison. Bob Harkins lied about his teenage fling with Laila, and heaven only knew what Brenda had hidden beneath the web of fabrication she’d spun for me before she tried to bribe me with a kiss. Now Gifford Jessel had joined the liars’ brigade. He’d said “I hardly knew the woman” when, for heaven’s sake, he’d been married to her.
To further confuse the issue, three of the four suspects had warned me of danger if I pursued the investigation. How could I tell which ones were afraid I’d learn embarrassing facts about their pasts and which were afraid I’d learn who committed the murder?
“What are you going to do?” Mara asked. From the concern on her face, I realized my anger must have showed.
I checked my watch. “Giff still has office hours today. If I hurry, maybe I can catch him.”
“Watch your temper,” she said. “I don’t think he’ll let you off with a kiss.”
“He’d better not try,” I said. That was a dumb thing to say, but I couldn’t think of anything better. And I couldn’t blame Mara for being angry with me. She’d risked her job by searching Brenda’s office, and she had every reason to think I’d been playing more than drop-the-handkerchief with Brenda.
“Before you go, I want you to know one other thing,” Mara said. “Several times lately I’ve been watched by a man who doesn’t look like a studen
t. That began soon after all our suspects saw me coming out of the science center. I’ve wondered if there’s a connection.”
“You need to call campus security,” I said.
“I’m not ready for that. Men have stared at me before and not meant anything by it.” Unexpectedly, she blushed. “When I’m sure I’m being stalked, I’ll call security. Not before.”
Her mind was made up, so I drove to the campus and parked in front of the science center. I climbed the stairs again to Gifford Jessel’s eyrie and found him at his desk. When I entered, he clasped his hands before him and twiddled his thumbs. The high table still occupied the left-hand wall and the one hardwood chair the right-hand.
Without invitation, I sat in the chair and asked, “What would Socrates say about that gesture?”
Giff twiddled some more. “Not being foolish, Press, he wouldn’t waste his time on it. What brings you up here again?” He emphasized the word again.
“Last time I came, you didn’t tell me you were married to Laila Sloan.”
The twiddling stopped, but his hands remained clasped on the desk. “Were married? That’s a sloppy use of tenses, Press. I didn’t tell you I had been married to Laila because it was none of your business. Speaking of which, I suggest you mind it.”
“You made that suggestion last time by way of Plato’s Republic. I’d be happy to oblige, except that Captain Staggart keeps trying to pin Laila’s murder on me. That being the case, I have to keep filing a non-concurrence.” For some reason I felt obligated to sound just as stuffy as Giff. But to move things along, I added, “The quickest way to get rid of me is to tell me about you and Laila.”
“No, that’s not the quickest way.”
He showed a smile I didn’t like, and I remembered Mara’s finding a pistol in his desk.
“But I’ll let it serve in this case,” he said. “I’ve already explained this to Staggart, and he was very understanding.”
