Rhapsody in Red

by Donn Taylor

His jaw tightened, which made it tremble a bit. “That is not an option. There is more to Christianity than mere symbols.”

  Mara torched him again. “You might start with ‘judge not, that ye be not judged.’”

  Dean-Dean must have realized he was out of his depth with Mara. He struck the desk with his palm. “Enough! You are both suspended until further notice. You’ll appear before the faculty hearing committee next Wednesday afternoon at one thirty.”

  “Thanksgiving holidays start at noon that day,” I said. “Won’t committee members be out of town?”

  “I have authority to name additional members as necessary,” he said.

  That meant he could stack the committee with people who’d do what he told them.

  “That’s hardly due process,” I said.

  “Enough!” He struck the desk again. “Just be there at one thirty on Wednesday.”

  Mara wasn’t letting go. “What is the charge? Being a Good Samaritan? Being victims of burglary, assault, and car bombing?”

  Dean-Dean stood up, signaling dismissal. “Conduct bringing discredit to the college is good enough for now.”

  Mara did not budge. “I demand to speak with President Cantwell.”

  “That’s not possible.” Dean-Dean shifted from one foot to the other. “President Cantwell is away on a fund-raising mission.”

  “Perch or bass?” I asked.

  Dean-Dean glowered at me. “That will be all. You’re both suspended pending the faculty hearing committee’s action. Your charge, Professor Barclay, will include giving false information on your application for employment. I have a witness.”

  I could have said, “I have documents,” but I decided to save that for the faculty hearing committee. Dean-Dean had tipped his hand with the business about my application. That revealed the machination of Clyde Staggart behind this episode. As I’ve said, Dean-Dean always believes the first person he hears. Changing his mind after that is like trying to reinstate Adam in the garden.

  So I said nothing and stood up. Mara stood with me and we exited together. Mrs. Dunwiddie showed a worried expression and followed us with her eyes. When I winked at her, she looked away.

  Outside, Mara gave me a look like Vesuvius gave Pompeii just before the eruption.

  “Not now,” I said. “Let’s get out of here before Dean-Dean realizes he forgot to place any restrictions on us.”

  Her gaze held mine as we walked toward the liberal arts center. “What kind of restrictions?”

  “He could have barred us from the campus or told us to hold ourselves available. The fact that he didn’t gives us more freedom than we had before.”

  “Freedom to do what?”

  “Further our investigation without having to work around our class schedules. Laila’s letters of recommendation came from Insburg and Bi-County Consolidated High School. She and Gifford Jessel were married in Insburg. She, Bob Harkins, and Brenda Kirsch all grew up near the western border of the state. Somewhere in that area is a link that should tie this whole thing together. I intend to go out there and look for it.”

  Mara’s blue torch downsized from blast-furnace to charcoal burner. “I’m in this for the duration, Professor Barclay. You’re not going one step without me.”

  “Okay,” I said. My internal musicians broke into a sprightly polka.

  I didn’t know what we’d find out west, but it ought to be an interesting trip.

  CHAPTER 27

  We left Dean-Dean’s office about eleven thirty, and by two we were on the interstate heading toward Insburg. Leaving town together would have provided more fuel for slander, so Mara took a taxi to the bus station and caught a bus to Sprague’s Crossing, the next town west of Overton City.

  For my part, I backed my old Honda into a covered position beside the house, hauled my suitcase out my back door, and loaded it into the trunk. Even my nosiest neighbors wouldn’t know I was leaving town. I trailed the bus until it let Mara off at a Sprague’s Crossing gas station, and I picked her up there. She had changed from the pantsuit she wore on campus into a pair of jeans and the same deep-violet blouse she’d worn on her first visit to my office. She threw her winter coat into the backseat on top of mine. I wore the brown suit I’d slept in, mainly because I’d forgotten to change.

  “What is it you know that I don’t?” Mara asked when we were westbound on the interstate. She’d been holding the question ever since we left Dean-Dean’s office, and she looked ready to burst.

  I told her what I thought had happened. “Staggart must have been the first to tell Dean-Dean about last night. He’d play up all the sordid implications he could and downplay the fact that both of us were attacked. I caught on when Dean-Dean mentioned my job application. Staggart is the one who raised that issue with him.”

  She turned toward me as far as her seat belt allowed. “What’s wrong with your application?”

  “Nothing. I listed my Army service as Infantry. It was true: that was my basic branch. The application didn’t require anything more. But Staggart convinced Dean-Dean it was false, that I should have listed Special Forces.”

  Mara said nothing, but turned back to the front. I listened to the engine’s low growl and the hum of wheels on pavement as the endless gray highway slid past. My internal musicians cavorted along with a rollicking something in 12/8 time.

  Mara turned toward me again. “You promised to tell me why Staggart hates you.”

  I looked out at the long, empty highway ahead of us. I wouldn’t find a better time.

  “Staggart and I served with Special Ops in Honduras during the early eighties. We were helping the Nicaraguan Contras against the Communist Sandinista government. In case you don’t remember, it looked like the Sandinistas would give the Soviets military bases in Nicaragua. That would have caused all kinds of trouble.”

  “You don’t have to justify the mission,” she said. “What happened?”

  “I was a lieutenant and Captain Staggart was my commander. I suspected he was taking kickbacks on weapons for the Contras and maybe a few bribes along with them. For a long time I looked the other way because our mission was vital to U.S. interests and its cost seemed less important. Then proof of the kickbacks fell into my lap. That meant I had to decide what to do about it—whether upholding the law would jeopardize the mission.”

  I thought I’d squeezed the emotion out of those memories long ago and left only a dry set of historical facts. But now my hands gripped the steering wheel so hard I thought it might break.

  Mara’s voice came softly. “I can understand the problem.”

  I grimaced. “I don’t know what I would have decided. Before I made up my mind, a team from the inspector general came and put all of us under oath. I told what I knew and nothing more. So did another lieutenant—Richmond Seagrave, the guy who debugged our computers.”

  “And what happened?”

  “Staggart was allowed to resign his commission in lieu of a court-martial. He swore he’d get even with Seagrave and me for ruining his career, though he’d ruined it himself. Seagrave and I brushed it off as an idle threat. And so it was. Until Staggart showed up as captain of homicide in Overton City and I got involved in a murder investigation.”

  The blue eyes softened. “I’m sorry I got you involved.”

  “Not your fault,” I said. “I’m sorry I got you tangled up in Staggart’s revenge.”

  Her chin lifted. “All right, so we’re both sorry. Now who are we going to see in Insburg?”

  The question was timely, for we were entering the Insburg city limits. The lump on my head still throbbed, but I refused to give in to it.

  “We’re looking for one William Murphy, president of Insburg Tool and Trucking, Inc. He wrote a letter of recommendation for Laila.”

  We pulled off the interstate and stopped at a convenience store with an outside phone booth and, miraculously, a reasonably intact telephone directory. According to the yellow pages, Insburg Tool and Trucking was located on the acce
ss road near the next exit. That was fortunate: afternoon shadows were already lengthening, and I had no wish to stay the night in Insburg.

  The company had a large fenced parking lot where eighteen-wheelers and local delivery trucks vied for space around the dispatch point of a single warehouse. The dispatch looked busy as an anthill, so we bypassed it and parked beside the warehouse near a sign that said “Offices.”

  When we asked inside for William Murphy, reluctant clerks passed us to more offices manned by more reluctant clerks. Eventually we arrived at a bare office that contained a single desk. Behind it sat a woman of perhaps fifty who looked like she could lift an eighteen-wheeler with one hand and repair it with the other. Her name sign read “Blossom Harlow, MRS.”

  She looked up warily from the papers on her desk and chewed three times on her wad of gum. “What y’all want?”

  “We’d like to see Mr. William Murphy,” I said.

  She took a moment to decide whether I was a housefly or a cockroach. Given my rumpled brown suit, she probably chose the latter. Whatever her decision, she took three more chews on her gum and said, mimicking me, “You’d like to see Mr. William Murphy, would you? So would all them idiots out there loading trucks.” She looked back to the papers on her desk.

  Mara marched up to the desk and leaned on it with both hands. Startled, Mrs. Harlow stared up at the woman towering over her. I couldn’t see Mara’s eyes, but I knew from hard experience what it felt like on the receiving end of that gaze.

  “We want to talk to Mr. Murphy about a former employee,” Mara said. “One who got herself murdered last week.”

  Mrs. Harlow blinked. “I didn’t know you was police,” she said.

  “We are investigating,” Mara said. “Now would you take us to Mr. Murphy?”

  The woman rose and lumbered heavily to a closed door in the wall behind her. She pounded on it. A voice within yelled “Yeah?” and she yelled back, “Two guys to see you, Bill.” Without further ceremony, she opened the door and motioned us in. I didn’t realize she’d followed us until she said, “They’re cops, though he don’t look like it.”

  William Murphy was a red-faced man of about sixty who wore a white dress shirt with rolled-up sleeves and an orange tie loosened at the neck. His bulging muscles testified to years of manual labor, and his bulging stomach testified to recent years behind a desk. The mass of papers scattered on his desk showed his distaste for office work, and the wadded paper balls on the floor beside his wastebasket showed that his aim left something to be desired.

  He gave us a jaundiced look and asked, “What d’ya want?” He did not rise from his chair.

  Before I could speak, Mara seized the occasion. “We’re investigating the murder of a former employee of yours. We hoped you could tell us something about her.”

  For a few seconds he chewed on something I hoped was gum, then shifted it into one cheek and said, “It’s been ten years or more since I had any female employee except Blossom.”

  Mara didn’t let go. “This would have been about twenty years ago. The woman’s name was Laila Sloan, or she might have called herself Dee Sloan.”

  If he’d shaken his head any harder it would have fallen off. “No such woman ever worked for Insburg Tool and Trucking.”

  I resisted the temptation to add “Incorporated” and said, “Mr. Murphy, eight years ago you wrote Laila Sloan a letter of recommendation. I saw it in her personnel file at Overton University.”

  If Blossom Harlow, MRS., had tried to decide whether I was a housefly or a cockroach, William Murphy looked at me as if he’d decided. “I never wrote her no letter,” he said.

  “It was on your letterhead stationery,” I said, “and it had your signature.”

  His opinion of my status appeared to descend from cockroach to something considerably lower in the Great Chain of Being. “That letter may have had a signature,” he said, “but it sure as shenanigans warn’t mine.” He waited for that to sink in, then added, “’Cause I don’t write letters of recommendation. Someone lists me as a reference, they gives my phone number. People want to check up, they calls and I tells ’em what they wants to know.”

  By that time I was certain Murphy hadn’t written the letter in Laila’s file. It was well-written and grammatical, and nothing we’d heard from Murphy showed him capable of writing it. Score another point for Laila’s manipulations.

  Mara still wasn’t satisfied. “Are you absolutely sure a Laila Sloan or Dee Sloan never worked for your company?”

  Murphy’s face reddened. “You ask ‘Am I sure?’” Deliberately, he reached in his hip pocket and pulled out a misshapen wallet, from which he removed a laminated card. “I’m as sure of that as I am that my name is William J. Murphy.” He slammed the card down on the desk in front of Mara and leaned back, his face radiating satisfaction.

  Without expression, Mara picked up the card and showed it to me. It was a driver’s license identifying our host as William J. Murphy, complete with a mug shot taken while he wrestled with a particularly indigestible meal.

  Mara spoke as if the others were not present. “This says he’s William J. Murphy.”

  I returned her deadpan gaze. “Then I expect he probably is William J. Murphy.”

  This was a Mara I hadn’t seen before. I didn’t know quite what to make of it.

  She gave Murphy back his card and said, “Thank you for your time. I’m glad you’re William Murphy and not Laila Sloan. If you were Laila, you’d be dead.”

  Murphy was still trying to figure that one out as we left. Blossom Harlow, MRS., escorted us back into her office and closed Murphy’s door. I decided to make a gracious exit.

  “Thank you, too, Miz Harlow,” I said.

  She bristled. “Mizziz Harlow.” She turned to Mara. “Honey, Bill didn’t get things exactly right, or maybe he don’t want to remember.” She paused.

  Mara favored her with a smile. “Yes?”

  “’Bout nineteen, maybe twenty years ago there was a girl worked in this office with me for three days. On the first day I caught her looking through desks and warned her. Caught her again on the third day and let her go. But her name wasn’t Sloan. It was Jessel. Yep, Dee Jessel it was. But there was more.”

  “More?” Mara leaned closer.

  “Lots more.” Blossom Harlow showed a satisfied smile. “On the second day, Bill caught her makin’ up to his son—the one what runs our branch up in Omaha nowadays. So we checked up on her. Turned out she was working nights in one of those places they call a ‘gentleman’s club,’ though no gentleman would be found dead within a mile of one. Out there she was known as Dee Luscious. At any rate, Bill said find a way to get rid of her, so when I caught her lookin’ through desks that second time, I sent her packing.”

  Mara beamed. “So she might have stolen letterhead stationery from one of the desks?”

  “She might’ve,” Blossom conceded, “and I wouldn’t put it past her to forge Bill’s signature. So someone finally gave her what-for, huh?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Mara said. “Do you know anything else about her, Mizziz Harlow?”

  “No, honey. I’m afraid that’s all.”

  Mara showed her another smile. “Thank you very much. You’ve been really helpful.”

  With a frown, Blossom scrutinized the knot on my head and asked, “Buster, is your head just naturally shaped like that?”

  “Only when I’m growing horns,” I said.

  We left her puzzling over that and retreated to my car. I admit the treatment I’d received left me somewhat deflated. I thanked Mara for salvaging a situation I’d written off as hopeless.

  “You dominated a woman twice your weight, and on her own territory,” I said as we reentered the interstate. “Where did you learn that?”

  She showed me a smile and laughing eyes. “I was a sergeant in the Army. You should have learned that when you read my personnel file.”

  Uh-oh. I felt lower than Blossom Harlow’s cockroach. “So you knew
that, too.”

  “I’d have done it in your place,” she said. “Besides, you stayed in the executive center long enough to read every faculty file backwards if they were written in Chinese.”

  Her eyes gave me a mild scorching, then turned to the highway ahead. “What’s next in our investigation?”

  I glanced at my watch. “Towns are scarce west of here. Let’s grab an early supper while we’re still in civilization. Then it’s on to the wide-open spaces of the western border.”

  We’d found a few surprises in Insburg. I wondered what others we’d find in Laila’s home territory. But there was one thing I didn’t have to wonder about. We’d better find something fast, or Staggart and Dean-Dean would put us in a worse fix than we were in now.

  CHAPTER 28

  Supper proved grim but edible. On the outskirts of Insburg we found Brimstead’s Family Restaurant, where the fluorescent lights were decorated with flyspecks left over from summer. Or maybe they were antiques. A hefty waitress with a western twang took our orders: ham sandwich for me, BLT for Mara, coffee for both. Mara wanted a Reuben but was afraid to risk it here. For once, she didn’t ask for separate checks. Her finances must have been pretty tight.

  We ate in silence and I spent the time brooding. I’d come off rather badly at Insburg, and I couldn’t blame it all on the brown suit. Truth to tell, I’d hit a stone wall with Blossom Harlow, MRS., and I’d fared no better with William Murphy. Without Mara’s newfound skills, we’d have come away empty. On top of that, Mara had zapped me with peeking at her personnel file. On campus, she’d deferred to my knowledge of the territory, but out here we were on an equal footing. Or maybe she was better equipped for it than I was.

  I also worried about what Staggart and Dean-Dean might be cooking up. My internals were playing a nice string quartet, but every time I thought of Dean-Dean a bassoon would bleat in on top of the strings. Nothing like that had ever happened before, so maybe my hallucinations were developing new tricks.

  To lift the gloom, I tried a bit of levity. When I paid the check with my credit card, I gave the waitress a serious look and asked, “Do I sign your name or mine?”