Rhapsody in Red

by Donn Taylor

  “Such appropriate work for a philosopher!” I said. “What about Marcus Fischbach?”

  Giff paused as if wondering whether he should answer. The noise from outside kept getting louder.

  “The Fischbach thing wouldn’t have happened,” Giff said, “if you and your girlfriend hadn’t started snooping. I tried to warn you off with Socrates’ definition of justice: everyone in a community minding his own business. But you wouldn’t listen.”

  “You weren’t exactly minding your own business with that computer network.” I couldn’t resist the taunt, but it was a mistake. It hurt his pride and raised his anger with me.

  “You’ve heard of Nietzsche’s Übermensch, haven’t you, Press?”

  I nodded. “Some kind of superman, if I remember right.”

  Giff smirked again. “More or less, translated into layman’s terms. What it means is that people above a certain level make their own morality. That’s what I’ve done.”

  I remembered Mao Zedong’s claim that “People like me have only a duty to ourselves.” But I said, “What about Marcus Fischbach?”

  “When you and your blonde professor started meddling, my colleagues in Vegas sent in reinforcements. They thought you’d get the message if they worried you a little. So they stalked her. They only meant to plant a warning in your house—prove they could take you out whenever they wanted—but you walked in on them and they had to knock you in the head. But the two of you still wouldn’t back off. Even after they showed they could bomb your cars, you were too stubborn to quit.”

  “What does that have to do with Fischbach?”

  Giff shrugged, but the pistol held steady. “Nothing, except that Fischbach also snooped into something he shouldn’t. The powers that be called him to account for it. Then they got cute and tried to frame Professor Thorn for his murder. I tried to explain the difference between Wiccan practice and satanic rites, but they wouldn’t listen. As it happened, she was out of town when they killed Fischbach. So all they got was a mess.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It was messy for Fischbach, too.”

  Giff shrugged again.

  The crowd outside was getting close to the science center. We had to raise our voices to be heard above the din.

  “How did Brenda Kirsch’s blackjack turn up in my office?” I had to keep Giff talking.

  Giff clucked. His mouth made the motion, but the sound itself got lost in clamor from outside. “How did you know it was Brenda’s blackjack, Press? Did you violate the privacy of her office like you’ve violated mine? No, Press, Brenda had nothing to do with planting it on you. That was my idea.”

  “Very considerate of you,” I said, ignoring the ethical double standard he implied. “You should have taken time to have the blood on it typed. The lab test cleared me.”

  “We can’t have everything,” he said.

  “Not even as an Übermensch?”

  We were shouting now as the noise outside reached its height. No one could hear a pistol shot amid all that hubbub.

  “You ask facetious questions, Press.” Giff grimaced again. “But I’ve already wasted too much time on you.” He raised his arm and aimed the pistol.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “People know I’m up here, and you can’t explain shooting me. What will you do with the body?”

  Giff laughed. “Don’t be naive, Press. You’re an oddball, you’ve been in the Army, and you’re already in trouble. All I have to say is that a crazy veteran attacked me and I had to defend myself.”

  I started to say “They won’t believe you,” but my mouth never formed the words.

  The pistol leaped in Giff’s hand. Something hard slammed into my ribs. I doubled over as searing pain raced through my body.

  Dimly, as if from a distant planet, I heard the dull flat slap of the pistol shot.

  CHAPTER 46

  For a moment the pain blinded me. As it faded, my vision slowly returned, but everything moved in slow motion. Giff looking at his pistol in bewilderment. A male voice commanding “Freeze.” Sergeant Spencer standing in the door, both hands pointing a Glock 9 mm at Giff, who transferred his bewildered look from his own pistol to Sergeant Spencer’s.

  Time slid back into focus.

  “Put the gun on the floor,” Spencer ordered. “Now.”

  Robotlike, Giff complied. Spencer backed him away from the pistol and scuffed it into a corner with his foot.

  My side ached, but I found I could move. Still on my knees, I straightened my body up and took an experimental deep breath. I again became conscious of crowd noise from outside. It was fading as the students moved on around the circle.

  I moved my hand that was holding my side. Why did it show no blood? I’d been shot. There had to be blood.

  Sergeant Spencer had Giff facedown on the floor, searching him.

  Giff’s voice rose to a whine. “I had to defend myself. He attacked me.”

  “Sure he did.” Spencer spoke through clenched teeth. “That’s why he’s on his knees on that table.”

  Giff craned his neck to look up at me. “I had to shoot him. But why isn’t he—?”

  Spencer laughed. “Didn’t you know? He’s bulletproof. That was part of his Special Forces training.”

  Mara stood beside me, her face lined with anxiety. “Press, are you all right?”

  As the pain subsided, my anger rose. “Aside from getting shot, I’m in the pink of health.”

  She laughed, a desperate laugh belied by tears in her eyes. “You aren’t badly hurt if you can be sarcastic. I’m sorry we didn’t come in soon enough.”

  “Sorry you didn’t . . . You were out there all the time?”

  Her tears flowed. “Come down off the table, Press. Your present posture does very little for your professorial dignity.”

  “Dignity, my foot. I’ve been shot.” Nevertheless, I eased into a sitting position, then slid off the table to stand on the floor. To my surprise, I actually could stand.

  Vaguely, I heard Sergeant Spencer calling for backup. He kept Giff lying facedown on the floor while he gave the Miranda warning. When he finished, he threw a quick glance at us.

  “Don’t touch that bullet,” he said. “I need it for evidence.”

  “What bullet?” I asked.

  “The one on the floor by your table.” He spoke over his shoulder, his full attention remaining on Giff.

  I apparently wasn’t dying, so I asked Mara, “What’s going on?”

  “Sergeant Spencer had a falling-out with Captain Staggart over that last arrest warrant, and Staggart dismissed him from homicide.”

  “So what’s he doing here?”

  “He had no immediate assignment. He didn’t agree with Staggart’s warrant, but he felt obligated as a policeman to enforce it. He came looking for us on campus.”

  “He found you sitting in that car. That’s why your beep came too late.”

  “It didn’t come late. I blew the horn till I thought I’d run the battery down, but maybe you couldn’t hear it above the horns in the demonstration.”

  She was right. I had only heard it once the other horns faded.

  “Sergeant Spencer did arrest me,” she said, “but he agreed to play along when I explained what we were doing. We saw Professor Jessel enter the building and I beeped like crazy, but everyone else was blowing horns, too. So we came up to get you out of trouble.”

  “After I got shot, of course.”

  She waved that objection away. “We heard most of what was said, and Sergeant Spencer didn’t want to interrupt as long as you had Professor Jessel confessing.”

  “But I still got shot.”

  “I’m really sorry about that. The crowd noise got so loud we couldn’t hear the last few sentences. We hoped for more, but when we heard the shot, we knew we’d waited too long.”

  “A slight error in judgment.”

  Mara burned me with her gaze. “Don’t you understand what this means, Press? That confession clears us of both murders.”
r />   Sergeant Spencer spoke again over his shoulder, his attention still focused on the prone Gifford Jessel. “You’re both still under arrest, technically. But in the light of this new evidence they can’t hold you.”

  You’d think I’d be glad of the good news, but I still felt in a daze, still only halfway back from the dead and not sure anything was real. “What I’d like to know,” I said, “is why I’m not dead or at least bleeding. Giff hit me square in the ribs.”

  Mara suppressed something like a giggle. “That pistol in Jessel’s office was a clear violation of college rules. It didn’t mean he was any more likely to be the murderer than our other suspects, but it did mean he was up to no good. So several days later I replaced his cartridges with some I’d sabotaged—took the powder out and put the slug back in. All they had to drive them was the primer. They wouldn’t kill anything bigger than a mosquito.”

  I looked at her in wonder. “How’d you know to do that?”

  For the first time since I’d known her, she beamed. “You once asked me what I did in the Army. I was an ordnance technician.”

  That explained her secret smile when I asked her the question. She must have remembered the dirty trick she’d played on Gifford Jessel.

  Before I could say anything else, Sergeant Spencer’s backup arrived and we all got hustled down to the police station. For the next couple of hours, detectives questioned us and took our statements. After we signed them, they told Mara and me we were free to go as long as we didn’t leave town. No word of thanks, no other comment: just free to go.

  Through all of this, Clyde Staggart was conspicuous by his absence. For obvious reasons, I suppose. But on our way out, I saw Dogface sitting at a desk with a pile of paperwork before him. He looked up at us with a baleful eye. My resentment of Staggart rose up within me and focused on him. In all the times I’d seen him, he’d never spoken a word. I wondered if he could.

  So I walked over in front of his desk and said, “ ‘Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter.’ ”

  His baleful glance did not change, but he spoke in a mellifluous voice, “‘. . . therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; / Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d, / Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.’” He grinned. “I’m glad you like Keats, Professor Barclay. Have a nice day.”

  Mara was kind enough not to laugh until we got outside. But once inside our rental car—one of the policemen had driven it to the police station—we both erupted into laughter as we had out west after the cupcake incident. We must have laughed for five minutes before I was steady enough to drive.

  It was almost one thirty when I parked in front of the executive center. Time for us to exchange pleasantries with the faculty hearing committee.

  We found its members already assembled in the conference room: two from the nursing faculty who’d been wanting my hide ever since the vote to keep chemistry in the curriculum, two other female faculty who’d snubbed Mara all along, and Dean-Dean rubbing his hands together at what, in a court of law, would have been the prosecutor’s table. The defense table stood empty, awaiting our presence.

  No one greeted us, so I broke the ice.

  “Dean Billig and distinguished members of the faculty hearing committee,” I said, “I regret to announce that your chairman, Professor Jessel, is unable to attend. It seems he has a previous engagement with the homicide police.”

  CHAPTER 47

  The faculty hearing committee’s response to my announcement was more dramatic than I expected. You could approximate the same result by dropping a cougar into a chicken yard. Dean-Dean tried to make the ship go faster by running along the deck, but this time he only ran in circles while my cerebral musicians accompanied him on the bassoon. And his ship remained firmly tied up at the dock. Eventually, he ordered that the committee adjourn—yes, sine die—until one thirty the following Wednesday.

  That was two weeks ago, and the committee has yet to reconvene. Much has happened in the interim. Some I learned from Richmond Seagrave, more from Sergeant Spencer.

  Gifford Jessel is in jail pending indictment for murder, attempted murder, and a menagerie of other criminal actions still under investigation. It turns out he possessed a sizeable bank account in the Cayman Islands, but that has now been frozen.

  Even before I found Giff’s laptop, Seagrave had convinced President Cantwell to bring in the FBI. My discovery and the involvement of local police preempted the president’s decision because the locals had to ask for federal help anyway once Jessel mentioned organized crime.

  According to Sergeant Spencer, Giff’s laptop contained some of the records the FBI had failed to find in several raids. When he last heard, the feds were rolling up the syndicate’s organization one cell at a time. Staggart was still captain of homicide, Spencer said, but his failure to solve the two murders got him a counseling session with the police commissioner.

  From FBI photos I identified two of the six gunmen who’d targeted Mara and me, including the one who got his haircuts in a mop factory. She identified two more. All were professional hit men. When I last heard, two had been arrested in Vegas. DNA comparisons with evidence from the Marcus Fischbach crime scene are pending.

  We still do not know the significance of Laila’s safe-deposit box key or the enigmatic fragments of paper we found in her house. Nor will we ever know, for we can’t ask anyone about them without admitting that we violated a crime scene.

  Seagrave also told President Cantwell the reason for Clyde Staggart’s enmity toward me. Cantwell then overruled Dean-Dean’s proposed actions against me and, for good measure, those against Mara. Our identifying Laila Sloan’s murderer increased our credibility enough for Cantwell to believe our story on why she stayed overnight at my house. We knew better than to mention our equally innocent stay in the motel.

  President Cantwell also has taken the coed dorm issue off the table and ordered the return of the crosses to the campus entryways—small steps toward leading the university back to its original values. This will be a difficult process, and the degree of his success remains to be seen.

  Changes have occurred among some of my acquaintances, while others remain the same. Luther Pappas continues in custodial services, unharmed by the administration’s knowledge of his prison record. Outwardly, Bob and Threnody Harkins maintain their appearance as an ideal couple, but the climate between them makes Nova Scotia seem a tropical paradise. Earl-George Heggan has resigned his staff position and found full-time employment in computer repair, for which he is eminently well qualified. And yesterday I received a wedding invitation from Penelope Nichols with the handwritten notation, “Thanks for your good advice, Professor Barclay. It worked.” Once in a long while, a professor actually wins one.

  The campus rumor mill says that Brenda Kirsch and Brice Funderburk have been seen holding earnest conversation at a candlelight dinner for two in Overton City’s most prestigious restaurant. I wish them well. May he never dislodge one of her china cups or, if he does, may there be no two-by-fours within reach!

  Mara and I were reinstated on faculty, of course. The student demonstration for Mara thoroughly cowed the administration, which lives in constant fear of losing students. And Arthur Medford, who organized it, is the leading candidate for student body president next year.

  Cindy arrived home that Wednesday evening, bubbling over with her decision to move out of the university residence hall (with its residence life education program), move into an apartment, and look in a nearby church for friends who share her values. She expressed pride in my role as homicide investigator, though the details remained as distant to her as the Battle of Midway.

  She and I shared Thanksgiving dinner with Mara and Dr. Sheldon at a family-oriented restaurant. Dr. Sheldon dominated conversation with his plans for online history courses, though Mara and Cindy apparently shared some girl talk during the sacred rites of nose-powdering. Whatever they said, Cindy seemed to accept Mara as my faculty colleague and nothing more. />
  Between answering police questions and catching up on our classes, Mara and I have seen little of each other, and neither of us has mentioned the brief interlude when we colored outside the lines. For that matter, we haven’t seen much of other faculty members. They don’t know what to make of our unacademic escapade, so they find it easier to leave us alone. The religion faculty took a wait-and-see attitude toward Mara’s reconversion to Christianity, but she is visiting regularly with Pastor Urim Tammons. I’ve begun attending church again, surprised that people treat me as myself, not as the Grieving Widower or the Prodigal Son. At morning worship last Sunday I saw Mara across the sanctuary, but we did not connect afterward. She will pursue her spiritual journey in her own way.

  I’ve been reflecting on my own journey, of course, especially my sense of that unseen force closing in on me. I’d thought it malevolent when it drove me into deeper and deeper trouble, even into mortal danger. But in the end it did not just drive me into difficulties; it drove me through them. Nor did I solve the murders by my own efforts. The solution was given to me through my hallucination of the Victor Young music score. As Pastor Tammons said, God wasn’t—isn’t—through with me yet.

  Looking back, I’m thankful for this purging and awakening. I still grieve the loss of Faith. But my spiritual numbness is gone, replaced by a deep inner assurance that stands unmoved beneath the transient anxieties churning above it.

  Campus life has resumed its normal patterns. Today Dean-Dean published a memo, replete with the usual comma splices, forbidding the use of cleaning materials that smell like mothballs. I suppose he was responding to my salting his office with them again last night. (That passkey still comes in handy.) Otherwise, I’m feeling more and more like a professor. In my Western Civ class today I’ll try to describe the miraculous shift in methods of thought that occurred in Europe between AD 1600 and 1660. I hope no one asks me to explain why it happened.