The Bloodied Ivy (The Nero Wolfe Mysteries Book 3)

by Robert Goldsborough

  The blonde, whose head barely reached my chin, apologized again and turned to Cortland. “Excuse me, Professor, I didn’t mean to interrupt. I wanted to see you before your class, about my paper—the one on Socialism and monetary policies in Germany between the wars.”

  “Certainly, Gretchen,” he said to her. “I’d like to have you meet an old friend of mine…Arnold Goodman, who’s up here scouting the school for his nephew. Arnold, this is Gretchen Frazier, a graduate student—our star graduate student, I might add.”

  Gretchen blushed prettily, then turned to me, smiling and holding out a hand. “I’m happy to meet you, Mr. Goodman. And again, I’m sorry. I’ve got to learn to slow down and look where I’m going.”

  “Only if you promise not to lose your enthusiasm in the process,” I said. “Walter, I’ll leave you now; I know how busy you are.”

  “Fine, enjoy your look around, and I’ll meet you after my ten-thirty class. It’s in Bailey, room two-sixteen. We usually let out about eleven-twenty.” I said good-bye and left the professor and the star student, who already had started in on him with rapid-fire questions about her paper as I walked down the hall.

  If anything, the morning had gotten even nicer, and the air was filled with those woodsy smells you never get in Manhattan unless you’re daring enough to explore deepest Central Park. Using Cortland’s map, I made my way along a path toward the library, passing boys in everything from coats and ties to attire better suited to guerrilla warfare, and girls in the full range from skirts and heels to cutoff jeans and thongs. For the first time in years, I wondered, if only for a second, what I missed by not going to college.

  I found the library easily enough—it was done in the same academic architecture as most of its neighbors, except larger and with more columns across the front. I swung around the left side of the building, as Markham had done on his evening strolls, and sure enough, there was the Old Oaks area. Cortland was right, the big trees here looked as if they’d be prime candidates for firewood before long. There were five of them, grouped more or less in a circle about a hundred feet across, and their branches all came together up high, forming a sort of vaulted shelter. I walked along a paved path covered with fallen leaves, stepping aside for an occasional biker with a backpack, and spotted the place where Markham must have gone over the edge; it was about thirty feet off the path. There was a sign, all right. You’d have to be legally blind to miss the eight-inch letters, which said: BEWARE! UNSAFE—NO FENCE. However, undoubtedly because of what had happened, a fence was being built. Metal posts had been driven into the ground, and rolls of chain-link fence were piled nearby.

  I walked to the edge and peered down into Caldwell’s Gash. The sides were steep, but they had a lot of undergrowth clinging to them, and the ravine was heavily wooded at the bottom. It was easy to trace the route of Markham’s fall. Several of the bushes at the edge of the Gash had a ragged look to them, as though something had hit them with great force; a number of branches were cleanly snapped off. A bridle path was barely visible through the trees and brush more than a hundred feet below at the bottom of the ravine. I backed up with a shudder, remembering that the Times story had said a horseback rider discovered the body a little after dawn the morning after the fall.

  A plunge that far could easily kill someone, even with the trees slowing the body down, which made me wonder why a fence hadn’t been put in years ago, after the old one had rotted away. Maybe they figured it would destroy the unspoiled look about the Old Oaks; more likely some pencil pusher thought it was too big an expense. I walked along the rim of the Gash for several hundred feet until I found the stairway shown on the campus map. It was wooden, with railings, and it zigzagged down the steep side of the ravine. The only thing I could hear was the chirping of birds as I made the long trip down and walked along the bridle path, which was hemmed in on both sides by vegetation. The Gash itself was barely twenty feet wide at the bottom.

  A couple on horseback wearing riding clothes trotted by and gave a “Hi!” and they didn’t seem surprised to see someone on foot. I worked my way along the path to where I figured Markham had landed. Broken branches and bushes marked the spot and a circle about seven feet in diameter had been trampled and cleared of underbrush, probably by the police and the crew that took the body away. I wasn’t expecting to find anything and I didn’t. By next spring, the area would be totally overgrown again, with no sign that a man died there.

  I doubled back along the bridle path, this time passing a lone rider who didn’t bother to return my greeting, and puffed my way up the stairway, reminding myself to step up my morning exercises. At the top, I checked my watch. Nine-ten. Plenty of time to catch my breath before going to Ted Greenbaum’s class.

  The Bailey Hall auditorium had theater-type seats sloping gradually to a stage, which was bare except for a lectern and a blackboard. The room was about half-full when I went in at nine-twenty-eight and took a seat, midway down on the far-right aisle. My closest neighbor was an attractive Oriental about three seats away. She looked at me without interest when I sat down, and did not return my smile. So much for engaging puckishness.

  A bell somewhere in the building rang promptly at nine-thirty, and a very tall, stooped, slender specimen with a thin face and salt-and-pepper, Ollie North-style haircut strolled nonchalantly onto the stage, nodded, and got behind the lectern. Putting on a pair of half-glasses, Ted Greenbaum looked out into the audience as if preparing to address a funeral gathering.

  “As I said Monday, we will devote today’s hour to the disintegration of the Whig party,” he began in a nasal voice, gesturing toward the blackboard—actually it was green—which had the words DEATH OF THE WHIGS printed neatly on it in chalk. “The American Whigs had a relatively short life span,” he went on, pronouncing each word precisely, as if his listeners were hard-of-hearing. “The reasons for the party’s demise are several. First…”

  As he continued, I turned and looked around the hall. About half the students were scribbling madly in their notebooks. Most of the rest looked bored, and a few had slumped down in their seats with their eyes shut. One was clearly asleep.

  Greenbaum’s delivery was far from snappy, but then, I don’t know how even David Letterman could make the Whigs sound like party animals. I digested a few phrases and some names like Harrison, Tyler, and Taylor, making a mental note to bring up the Whigs to Wolfe at dinner sometime, maybe tossing in a couple of reasons why they self-destructed for his edification. After about twenty minutes of listening to him drone on, I’d seen and heard enough of Greenbaum the orator. I could only hope Markham had been a more interesting lecturer.

  Nobody seemed to pay any attention as I rose and walked up the aisle and out of the auditorium. On the steps of Bailey Hall, I paused and tried to figure out how to spend the rest of the morning when who should I see scurrying along the sidewalk but the hyperactive little blonde in the jumpsuit who had almost collided with me at Cortland’s office. “Hello, Miss Frazier,” I called out. “Remember me?”

  She put on the brakes and turned, tilting her head to one side. “Oh! Mr.…Goodman, isn’t it? Are you getting a good look at the school?”

  “Fair,” I said with a shrug. “I’ve just been sitting in on Professor Greenbaum’s lecture.”

  Her nose wrinkled. “Oh, there are so many better people to hear. I suppose it isn’t nice of me to say that, though, is it?”

  “Why not? Honesty’s frequently the best course. That way, you never need to worry about keeping your story straight. Say, do you mind if I ask what you’re doing for the next, say, half hour?”

  “Heading back to my room to work, what else?” She sighed, letting her shoulders sag. “The life of a doctoral candidate is far from exciting, I’m afraid, Mr. Goodman.”

  “If you can spare the time, I’d like to buy you a cup of coffee,” I said. “I haven’t met any other students, and I think I might get a better idea of this place from you than from going to a dozen lectures.”


  “Certainly if they’re Ted Greenbaum’s lectures,” she said, laughing. “I don’t know how much help I can be—I’ve only been here as a graduate student, but…okay, I guess it would do me good to talk to someone who comes from the real world for a change. The nearest place for coffee is the grill in the Union Building.”

  “Lead the way,” I ordered, and less than two minutes later, we were seated in a booth in the oak-paneled grill, which was deserted except for a baby-faced redhead who was almost hidden by a pile of chunky textbooks and a forest of empty soft-drink bottles.

  Gretchen Frazier had girl-next-door good looks and the kind of complexion that didn’t need much help from cosmetics, which she fortunately knew. As the waitress took our order, I asked where home was.

  “Illinois. A suburb of Chicago that you’ve probably never heard of,” she said. “I went to the big state university in Champaign for my bachelor’s degree, and I’ve been here for a little over two years.”

  “Going for a doctorate, you said?”

  She smiled and nodded. “In political science.”

  “How did you happen to come so far from home?”

  Her face, which had been mostly smiles up to this point, darkened. “Prescott has a good reputation in poli sci, and…and it had Hale Markham.”

  “He was really well thought of, wasn’t he?”

  “Mr. Goodman, he was a genius,” she said, with a quaver in her voice. She looked down at the coffee that had just been put in front of her.

  “I take it you had him for some of your courses?”

  She nodded. “Yes. I was working very closely with him. I admired his views a lot—long before I ever met him. When I was an undergraduate at Illinois, I read everything he had written, at least everything I could get my hands on. I even went up to Chicago from school once to hear him speak. He thought the way I do, Mr. Goodman. He was the main reason I came here,” she said with intensity as tears formed in the corners of her eyes. “But you want to know more about Prescott. You certainly didn’t come here to hear me talk about Hale Markham.” She swiped at her eyes and smiled at me bravely.

  Little do you know, I thought, but I allowed the conversation to turn to the school in general—its students, the caliber of its faculty, its facilities—before I steered back toward Markham. I may have hit a vein of gold, if only by accident, and I didn’t want to lose it. Soon I had her going strong on her idol again. It turned out that Markham had not only been her idol, he’d been her adviser, had worked closely with her in seminars and on independent studies, and had even helped her to plan her doctoral dissertation.

  “I feel so lost now that he’s gone,” she continued woefully. “Not that Professor Cortland and a few others haven’t been good to work with too, but I’d just like to quit and get away from here. But I know Hale would have wanted me to go on.”

  I sipped my coffee and looked at her. “I seem to remember reading that he accidentally fell down a ravine. Does that happen often here?”

  She shook her blond head and gnawed her lower lip. “Never, that I know of. Every few years, or so I’ve heard, a student commits suicide by jumping into the Gash or one of the other ravines. But the school paper wrote that this was the first time anyone had fallen into one by accident and died. It seems ironic that it was Hale of all people.”

  “Why?”

  “He was so…physically fit. He walked a lot, took care of himself. He was seventy-three, but he looked and acted much younger.”

  “Might it have been suicide, Miss Frazier?”

  “Oh…I suppose that’s possible, of course. I hadn’t thought of that before you mentioned it, honestly. Nothing was ever said about a note, and I can’t imagine why Hale would have wanted to…you know. But I guess that’s a possible explanation.”

  “How else do you explain what happened?”

  Gretchen shook her head, and this time a tear spilled down her cheek. “I can’t, I can’t, except to go along with what the police think happened. He must have stumbled and fallen.” She looked down at her coffee cup and I reached across the table, squeezing her hand for solace. She had been close to Markham, no question about it. Was it simply a student’s admiration for a strong teacher, or had there been something more between them? Remembering what Lon had said about Markham’s proclivities—and using the uncanny perceptions about women that Wolfe claims I have—I put my money on the latter.

  SIX

  I STAYED IN THE GRILL WITH Gretchen Frazier until we’d both finished our coffee and she had dried her eyes. She was embarrassed and started to apologize, but I told her never to regret a genuine show of feelings. Then we shook hands and she scooted off to study while I walked back to Bailey Hall to meet Cortland. I got to two-sixteen, which was my idea of a typical classroom, at eleven-fifteen, and quietly slipped through a door at the rear. Cortland was standing next to a desk up front, facing about twenty students. I took a seat in the back.

  “…and so,” he was saying, “with Theodore Roosevelt newly in his grave, the Republicans, supremely confident of victory in the nineteen-twenty election, turned to a virtual nonentity from Ohio named Warren Harding.”

  “Thus proving they could win with anybody,” piped up a guy in a turtleneck sweater, drawing a scattering of laughs.

  “The humorous aspects notwithstanding, you make a salient point, Mr. Andrews,” Cortland said with a thin smile. “The truth was, with World War I just ended and the country sated with sick old Wilson’s sanctimoniousness, not to mention Europe’s problems and the League of Nations, the party could indeed have picked almost anyone. Next time—” He was interrupted by the bell. “Next time, we’ll look at the dynamics within the Republican party that led to the nomination of Harding. Be ready to discuss it. And prepare to step into the Roaring Twenties.”

  After the students had clomped out, I walked up to Cortland, who was stuffing papers into his briefcase. “Now, I grant that my history and political science knowledge is pretty skimpy,” I told him, “but along the way, I’ve learned a little about Harding—after all, I do come from his home state. What I want to know is, how are you, a faithful conservative, going to be able to make him look good to your students?”

  Cortland let out one of his tinny chuckles. “I don’t even try. There are limits to historical revisionism, Mr. Goodwin—or I guess I should say Arnold, shouldn’t I?” He whinnied again. “I’m glad nobody’s here with us. Believe me, I won’t err during lunch, I promise.”

  “What’s the lunch program?” I asked.

  “The faculty dining room is in the Union Building. It’s a short walk.”

  “I was just there,” I told him. “Having coffee with Gretchen Frazier.”

  “Oh?” He shoved his glasses up his nose and eyed me with interest.

  “I ran into her after sitting in for awhile on Greenbaum’s lecture. I thought I’d get her impressions on the school, and guess what?—we ended up talking about Markham.”

  “I’m not surprised,” he said dryly as we walked out of Bailey Hall and into the sunlight. Two students dashed by, arguing about Madonna.

  “Why?”

  Cortland pushed his glasses up again. “Gretchen is a good student—indeed, a superb one, as I said when I introduced you to her—although perhaps somewhat shallow intellectually. But she’s also a coquette, and she flirted plenty with Hale—among others, I might add. But her frivolity backfired on her—to the point where I’m afraid she ended up quite infatuated with him.”

  “How did Markham feel about her?”

  “He was fifty years older than she!” he rasped indignantly. “Hale always has been…drawn to good-looking women, but they tended to be considerably older than Gretchen Frazier.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about Miss Frazier before, when you came to New York?”

  “I didn’t think it was very important; I still don’t,” Cortland sniffed.

  “You also said she flirted with Markham among others. Who were the others?”

&nb
sp; Cortland colored slightly. “I feel as though I’m trafficking in gossip.”

  “Look, you can call it what you want to, but the fact is we’re trying to find a murderer, remember? This was your idea, and if you expect to get anything accomplished, you’re going to have to talk about things you may find distasteful.”

  “All right,” he said, inhaling deeply and steeling himself. “There was talk at one time last school year that Gretchen might have been…er, involved…with Ted Greenbaum.” He took another big breath, like a kid who had just unburdened himself of a terrible secret.

  “An unlikely combination,” I observed.

  “Not much more unlikely than she and Hale,” Cortland said.

  “Except that I gather Gretchen and Markham were philosophically simpatico.”

  “Gretchen is a fine student—a scholar, make no mistake about that,” he said, “but I’ve yet to be convinced of her commitment to conservative philosophy. Her dalliance with Ted last year—if indeed it was that—would seem to indicate an intellectual instability on her part.”

  “It would if you equate political views with libido,” I said. “Is Greenbaum married?”

  “Yes.”

  “Happily?”

  “I don’t know!” Cortland wailed in exasperation. “I’m really uncomfortable talking about people like this.”

  “Then I’ll probably make you more uncomfortable,” I said offhandedly. “You mentioned that Markham was drawn to women. If not to Gretchen Frazier, to anyone in particular?”

  “Yes.” Cortland nodded grimly. “Elena Moreau is her name. She’s a tenured professor in the History Department.”