by Donn Taylor
I raced out to the car. Before I got there, she’d gotten control of herself and popped the hood lock. Without thinking, I raised the hood. That was a dumb thing to do because anyone smart enough to bomb a car would be smart enough to set a booby trap for idiots like me. I stood there coughing as red smoke surged up from the engine compartment.
Lights blinked on in my neighbors’ houses, and people peered out windows. Mara could forget about getting away unnoticed, but I couldn’t worry about that now. Moving to one side, I looked beneath the still-cascading smoke to see what had happened.
“It’s a smoke grenade,” I said. “It’s fastened beside the engine block, and there are fragments that might have come from a big firecracker. Some of your wiring is hanging loose.”
Mara received the news with a stoical expression. She held up her cell phone and quirked an eyebrow at me. I nodded and she dialed 9-1-1. The situation had gotten too far out of hand to keep the police out of it. That blow to my head could have been a bullet to the heart. The smoke grenade in Mara’s car could have been a real bomb. We had stirred up something we couldn’t control.
The neighbors poured into the street while we waited for the police. I had all I could do to keep them from pawing over the car.
Pretty soon, Brenda Kirsch pushed her way through the crowd. She wore royal-blue warm-ups and moved with her characteristic strength and grace. I wondered what had brought her. She lived four blocks away, but was she moved only by curiosity about the explosion? Or had she known something beforehand?
She stared at the car and asked, “What’s all the fuss, Press?” Her eyes surveyed the crowd, then me, then Mara.
“Someone bombed Mara’s car,” I said.
The last wisps of red smoke threaded up from the engine compartment. The crowd muttered in the background. In the growing predawn light, I could see people still arriving a block away.
Brenda showed a knowing smile. “Strange that Mara could drive from her place all the way here before the bomb went off.”
I said nothing. Mara looked the other way.
Brenda laughed. “You said the words, Press. Friendship is a wonderful thing.” She pushed her way back through the crowd, still gliding along with that graceful stride.
I didn’t look at Mara and she didn’t look at me.
Fortunately, the police arrived. Four of them. More fortunately, Sergeant Spencer came with them.
“I thought you were detailed to homicide,” I said.
“Still am.” His voice was all business. His eyes scanned the scene. “When anything involves one of the suspects, someone from homicide tags along. What happened?”
While several policemen sealed off the scene with yellow tape, I briefed Spencer about Mara’s car but said nothing about my being attacked. To his credit, he didn’t ask what Mara was doing there. He called for the bomb squad, posted one man to guard the crime scene, detailed three to question the crowd, and led Mara and me into my house.
I learned later that questioning my neighbors proved futile. No one had heard or seen anything.
“All right,” Sergeant Spencer said when we were seated in the living room, “tell me the whole story. Not just the summary.” He may have been my former student, but his steady gaze showed he was in command.
I looked at Mara and she looked at me. Her barely perceptible nod gave me license.
“When I came home last night—around seven o’clock—someone slugged me.” I pointed to the knot above my temple. “The next thing I knew, Professor Thorn was waking me up.”
Mara took it from there, telling why she checked on me and explaining that my bullheadedness about seeing a doctor—her exact expression—caused her to stay and monitor my condition all night.
Sergeant Spencer’s face gave no clue as to what he thought of our story, but he made the obvious follow-up. “If you surprised a burglar, Professor Barclay, I can understand why he would knock you out before you recognized him. But why would he break into your house?You live in a low-crime neighborhood and, if you’ll pardon my saying so, professors are not the most lucrative targets for robbery.”
I shrugged. “That puzzles me, too.”
He turned to Mara. “Why would anyone want to put that whatever-it-was in your car?”
Mara duplicated my shrug and showed an admirably puzzled expression. It occurred to me that she’d have a promising career as an actress. In the silence, my internal musicians switched to something baroque that I couldn’t identify.
Sergeant Spencer clasped his hands in his lap. “This leaves us two possible motives: harassment or warning. You’re both connected with the Laila Sloan case, and strange things have been happening during our investigation—”
“What kind of things?” I asked.
He gave me a hard look, then sighed. “Your book that turned up in the victim’s office the second time we searched it. I made the first search, and I know it wasn’t there then. Not even Captain Staggart believes either of you wrote those e-mails.”
“He gave a good imitation of believing I wrote one,” I said.
Spencer looked away. “That’s just his manner. And someone broke into the victim’s house. Afterward, we found a few things that weren’t there on the first search.”
I’d intended that they find the safe-deposit box key and the two slips of paper, of course, but I didn’t dare ask what else.
“Staggart took my toolbox to prove I was the burglar,” I said.
“You fit the description a neighbor gave, but the lab says your tools weren’t used for the break-in.” Spencer laughed. “The technician thought they hadn’t been used in years.”
“They don’t help with teaching history.”
“I daresay.”
It struck me that he had a remarkable vocabulary for a policeman. Then I remembered how astute he’d been as a student. He sat there looking both curious and confident, and I wondered what he’d come up with next. I think Mara probably wondered, too, though she put on an admirable show of detachment.
Sergeant Spencer took a deep breath. “That brings us back to your problems last night and the motive for them. It had to be either harassment or warning. I vote against harassment.”
He leaned forward and delivered his own bomb. “Now: just what have you two been up to that would provoke that kind of warning?”
CHAPTER 26
I considered pretending innocence or giving Sergeant Spencer the French salute, but something in his gaze said if I ducked the question he would cook my goose. In any other situation that might have been an interesting figure of speech, but not here.
“We’ve poked around some,” I said. “Captain Staggart should have known those e-mails were bogus, but he acted like he intended to use them against us. While he wasted time harassing us, he might not catch the real murderer. So we made our own investigation, beginning by learning all we could about Laila Sloan. That’s about it. We’ve been asking questions.”
“What did you learn?” Spencer’s set expression gave nothing away.
In answering, my historian’s skills in sifting reams of data and remembering its sources served me well. I couldn’t very well say, “Now that you mention it, Sergeant Spencer, we committed a few burglaries, but we did it for a good cause.”
So I told him what we knew about Laila, but omitted what we’d learned from personnel records and from searching her house and office. I finessed the high school annual source by saying that Bob Harkins had admitted his affair with Laila, and that Threnody had confirmed it and added the fact of his expunged conviction. I mentioned Pappas’s jail time, Laila’s brief marriage to Gifford Jessel, Brenda Kirsch’s evasions, Threnody’s confrontation with Laila (minus her threat against Laila’s life), and the fact that all of them had warned us against continuing our investigation.
Mara then described the computerized warnings that later disappeared, and added her belief she was being stalked. Sergeant Spencer noted her description of the alleged stalker, and I described
the two toughs Dr. Sheldon had pointed out to me.
“The stalking and last night’s attacks on you are new to us, of course,” Sergeant Spencer said, “and you’ve added a few details we didn’t know before.”
I started to ask which details, but he cut me off. “Thanks for sending Penny Nichols to me. Because of her we know why Laila mailed so many packages.”
That brought Mara and me to the edges of our chairs.
“Laila was involved in a small-time racket,” Spencer said. “It works like this. Someone answers one of those work-in-your-own-home ads and finds all he has to do is receive packages and mail them to new addresses, mostly overseas. It’s easy work: he gets maybe three or four packages a month and he gets paid fifty dollars a package, so he doesn’t ask questions. That way he doesn’t know he’s fencing stolen property—like that notebook computer Penny Nichols brought in.”
Mara interrupted. “I drove Laila to mail three packages the afternoon she was killed. She said she’d had trouble with a clerk at the western branch post office, but I wondered why she went all the way to the eastern branch when the central was closer.”
“Laila wasn’t content with small-time,” Spencer said. “We’ve found three students besides Penny who received mail for Laila, each under a different name in a different post office box. Laila spread out her transshipments among the three local post offices and several in neighboring towns. She played the market for all it was worth.”
At that point I almost let the felonious cat out of our bagatelle. “That explains—”
“. . . why Laila chose that particular post office.” Mara cut me off.
“My exact thought, Mara,” I said. I’d almost said that explained how Laila could afford all her expensive electronics, which we couldn’t know about without having been in her house.
Sergeant Spencer gave each of us a sardonic look, then spoke deliberately to the wall beyond us. “I’m glad you haven’t done anything you shouldn’t have. Well-meaning citizens sometimes blunder into breaking the law, and then there isn’t much we can do to help them.” He looked at each of us in turn. “What will you do now?”
Mara and I exchanged glances but said nothing.
“What would you suggest?” she asked after a pause.
“You’re not obligated to do anything,” he said. For the first time since his arrival, he grinned. “But something you did provoked a reaction from someone. It could be dangerous, but if you keep doing the things you’ve been doing—within the law, of course—you might shake something loose.”
“It might shake my head loose from my body,” I said.
“Just a thought.” He rose to leave.
A plainclothes policeman we hadn’t seen before entered without knocking and spoke to Sergeant Spencer. “I’m Robinson from the bomb squad. We’ve taken samples for analysis, but I’m certain there was nothing but a jumbo firecracker and the smoke grenade.” He turned to Mara. “You’re lucky, ma’am. It could just as well have been a bomb. The wiring was sophisticated—the work of a professional, not some rube prankster. By the way, your car will need a lot of work before you can drive it.”
Sergeant Spencer thanked Robinson and asked Mara if she wanted him to have her car towed.
“Not now,” she said. “I’ll take care of that later.”
I knew she couldn’t afford the tow or the repair, but she wasn’t going to admit it. She accepted Spencer’s offer of a ride back to her apartment and left without so much as a glance in my direction. By this time I knew her well enough to recognize her inner tension. She’d lost her transportation and was strapped for money in a strange city. Beyond that, she had to decide whether going on with the investigation was worth the risk. The same decision had me tense, though I didn’t have her financial complications. I hadn’t mentioned it, but past experience with the college administration told me we’d soon have other problems. Regardless of how innocent you are, it doesn’t pay to have your name connected with scandal.
With a good bit of hustling and in spite of my headache, I got to my nine o’clock class on time, though I forgot to change out of yesterday’s rumpled brown suit that I’d slept in. I couldn’t tell you what I taught that day. All I know is that somehow I dragged through it. Afterward, in my office, I took more aspirin and tried to forget my headache by grading research papers.
The early crop of papers is usually good, and I love to see young minds grappling with facts. There were a few minor problems. One on eighteenth-century European culture was flawless except for a passing reference to “Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nacktmusic.” I debated with myself if it was a genuine mistake or if the student was trying to slip one by me. In the end, I wrote sp over the word Nacktmusic and made a marginal note: nacht = night; nackt = naked. It’s for distinctions such as this that we spend years in graduate study.
I was still massaging these philosophical lucubrations when Marcus Fischbach knocked at my office door. A senior now, Marcus still presented himself as he had as a freshman: scraggly beard, shoulder-length ponytail, and baggy pants that sagged under the heels of his unlaced Reeboks. In his first year he’d aced my Western Civ course—what students call “getting required courses out of the way.” Having removed that barrier to intellectual progress, Fischbach concentrated on business and computer science. So I hadn’t seen much of him.
My mind still on research papers, I moved around the desk to sit facing him. I opened with the usual routine questions.
He mumbled the usual vague answers. Then he said, “Professor Barclay, there’s something I want you to know.”
That and his earnest expression brought me instantly off autopilot. “Why me? Why not someone in your major department?”
He squinted and pulled at his beard. “They might, like, be involved in it themselves. Besides, I know I can trust you.”
“Hold on,” I said, now on red alert. “You can only trust me to do what I think is right.”
“You don’t have to do anything,” he said. “I just want you to know I think there’s something, like, funny about the campus computer network.”
“Then you need to tell Mr. Heggan, the network administrator.”
Marcus sniffed. “Earl-George? He couldn’t find the problem if he’d put it in the pocket of his overalls. No, I won’t tell anyone else till I find out what’s going on.”
This was getting nowhere, so I said, “You’d be smarter to talk to someone in the computer department.”
He squinted again and started to say something, but my phone rang. I stood and answered it from in front of the desk.
It was Mrs. Dunwiddie. “Professor Barclay, Dean Billig wants to see you in his office immediately.”
“I’ll be right there,” I said. I hung up and tried to sort things out. Dean-Dean must have heard I’d gotten slugged, and he’d give me what-for for not being the first to tell him. Well, I’d been chewed out before. Afterward, I could get back to grading papers and teaching classes.
“I’m sorry, but I have to go,” I said to Marcus. “All I can tell you is not to do anything illegal.”
He laughed and stood. “There’s nothing illegal about, like, running computer programs. I just wanted somebody to know what I was about.”
After locking the office door behind us, I walked to the executive center. I do mean walked. My head ached and my internal musicians were grinding out something hideous from what Faith used to call the mid-twentieth-century “ugly-is-beautiful” movement. The last thing I needed was a confrontation with Dean-Dean.
I found Mara waiting in Mrs. Dunwiddie’s office.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Dean Billig will see you now,” Mrs. Dunwiddie said in her most officious voice. She opened the door to Dean-Dean’s office and ushered us in. I noted with pleasure that the place still smelled of mothballs.
Dean-Dean looked up from his desk and motioned us into two chairs placed facing him. He did not rise. My internal bassoon honked three times and shut down.
Mrs. Dunwiddie shut the door from the inside and retreated to a chair behind us. To take shorthand notes, I guessed. This was no routine expression of Dean-Dean’s displeasure.
Dean-Dean assumed his most authoritative manner, the effect of which is always undercut by his squeaky voice. He cleared his throat and said, “It has come to my attention that you two have been involved in unsavory activities. As you both know, unsavory activities by faculty members will not be tolerated.”
What was he talking about? Had he found out I’d stolen his passkey?
Mara’s blue eyes blazed. “Dean Billig, I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”
Dean-Dean blinked before her onslaught. His eyes bounced back and forth without focusing anywhere in particular. Then he drew himself erect and said, “I refer to what you two did last night, of course.”
“Like my getting slugged in the head?” I asked. “Or her car getting bombed?”
“It has come to my attention that certain things happened between the two events.”
“Like what?” Mara asked.
“Please.” Dean-Dean held up one hand. “Professor Thorn, reliable sources say you spent the night in Professor Barclay’s house.”
Now my temper was up. “Of course she did. She came to check on me when I didn’t show up on schedule at Dr. Sheldon’s. He couldn’t very well drive over in his wheelchair. She found me unconscious on the floor. She did what you’d have done if you’d found her in that condition. She put ice packs on my head until I was able to take care of myself.”
“What I might have done is immaterial,” he said. “Your neighbors must know she was there all night. Overton University is on the annual budgets of more than one hundred churches. Even if nothing untoward happened, we have to avoid even the appearance of unsavory conduct.”
“If you want to impress the churches,” I said, “you might try putting the crosses back on the entryways.”
