Majoring In Murder

by Jessica Fletcher

  “Why do you think Phil would kill Wes?” Harriet asked, having finally accepted that a murder had taken place. “He was injured in the storm, too.”

  “Maybe he wanted to die,” Parish said, knowing that the words still to come would shock. “After killing his second victim.”

  The room erupted in chaos, everyone talking at once. Two uniformed officers who’d been waiting outside rushed into the room, hands on their holsters.

  “Enough!” Parish yelled. “I want it quiet in here.” He waved the officers back into the hall.

  Adler was slumped in his wheelchair. He raised his head and looked around. “I did want to die,” he said. “That’s why I stayed there during the storm. But I didn’t kill Wes, or anyone else.”

  “We found the body of your wife in one of the bomb shelters underneath the building that housed your office,” Parish said. “She had a crack in her head, too. A coincidence, huh, that they both died the same way?”

  “You don’t have to tell him anything, Phil,” Durbin said to his friend and neighbor. “We’ll get you a good lawyer.”

  “No, Larry, it’s over,” Adler said. “I’ve been waiting a year for this to happen, and now I’m glad it finally has.”

  “How did she die, Phil?” I asked.

  He sighed heavily. “She fell down the stairs and hit her head.”

  I looked at Parish, who raised his eyebrows as if to say, Likely story, but remained silent.

  “We’d been fighting again,” Adler said, his voice weary. “It was pretty loud. She was threatening to leave, and I just ... I just lost it. I screamed at her to get out. I threw her shoes at her. She threw them back and one hit me in the head. I got so angry I pushed her. She was standing right near the top of the stairs. I saw her start to take a step backward and I made a grab for her. She must’ve thought I was going to push her again and she moved back—and went down the whole flight headfirst.” He shuddered. “I can still hear the sound of her skull hitting the edge of the steps.”

  “Why didn’t you call the police?” Harriet asked. “It was an accident.”

  “Who was going to believe that? Every neighbor on the block could testify to the fights we’d had. I didn’t want to be charged with murder and have my life ruined. Lord knows she ruined it enough.”

  “Why did Wes want to meet with you?” I asked. “Did he know about Kate’s death?”

  “I thought he’d found out. All he said was to be there and make sure I had all the financial books ready. I thought he was going to blackmail me, get me to steal from college funds to keep him quiet.”

  “You assumed that,” I said, “but he never actually talked to you about Kate, or demanded money from you, did he?”

  “No, but he would have. I know it. I was so relieved when the storm killed him, but I was disappointed that it left me alive.”

  “How did you get her body down to the bomb shelter without anyone seeing you?” Parish asked.

  “I helped him,” Durbin said.

  Everyone gaped at Durbin.

  “You helped him?” some said in unison.

  “Not kill her,” Durbin said. “I helped get rid of the body, that’s all.”

  “No, Larry. You don’t have to do this,” Phil said.

  “I’m afraid I do, my friend. I helped you get rid of that wretched woman because she was making your life miserable. Don’t misunderstand. I don’t advocate murdering those who cause us pain on a daily basis. Divorce would have been far preferable. But since you did the deed, and since it was an accident, I felt it only right for me to lend a hand. As the bard so nicely put it in The Merchant of Venice, ‘The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven.’ I gave of my own free will, Philip, old chap, and would do it again.” He laid a hand on Adler’s shoulder and addressed us: “I was the one who told him the cops would never believe it was an accident. My wife and I had heard them fighting. Melissa had even said it sounded like they were killing each other. She made me go over to see if they were all right.”

  “You didn’t answer my question,” Parish said.

  “We rolled her into a rug and brought her over to the bursar’s office the next afternoon,” Durbin said. “We did it in broad daylight, figuring if anyone saw us bringing in a rug, it wouldn’t look unusual, but if they’d seen us skulking around at night, it would have raised suspicions.”

  “Is that the rug that’s rolled up in your upstairs storage room?”

  Adler looked at me sadly, and nodded.

  “I’ve heard enough,” said Parish. “You’re under arrest, Philip Adler, for your wife’s murder. As for you, Professor Durbin, you’re facing a charge of accessory to murder.”

  “Wait a minute, Lieutenant,” Manny Rosenfeld said. “We still don’t know who killed Wes Newmark.” He sat next to Mrs. Tingwell, holding her hand, a parent consoling a child. Rebecca was on the other side of the department secretary. President Needier perched on a side chair chewing the inside of his cheek, while Harriet continued to stand by the fireplace. I took in each of them before turning back to Needler. There was silence as we locked eyes, saying nothing, but our thoughts were as plain as though we had spoken.

  “No!” he said suddenly, his face glazed with anger. “I was at my meeting. You promised you wouldn’t raise this topic.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “You told me you’d been at your Gamblers Anonymous meeting—but you weren’t. All meetings of that kind at the hospital were canceled because of the storm. I have that on very good authority,” I added, thinking of Eunice Carberra, my friend from the hospital gift shop.

  Needler drew up to his full height and assumed a patrician pose. “So I didn’t attend my meeting,” he said, glowering at me. “You’re not my keeper. How dare you challenge my authority.”

  “I find it interesting,” I said, “that whenever you’re in trouble, you attack. Where will you say you were now?”

  “I drove up north to Lake Michigan.”

  “You got any witnesses?” Parish asked lazily from the doorway.

  “No, I was in my car all day. Never got out, just drove around.”

  “How do you explain the cobwebs that were all over the back of your coat?” I asked. “No, President Needler, you spent the afternoon in the tunnels, waiting for a time to leave without anyone seeing you.”

  “That’s preposterous.”

  “Jessica, why would President Needler want to kill Wes?” Lorraine asked.

  “Because Wes and Harriet were gathering evidence to oust him. Isn’t that right, Harriet?”

  “Oh, Jessica, I was hoping against hope that Wes’s death had nothing to do with our investigation. Unfortunately, it did.”

  “What kind of evidence were you gathering, Dean Bennett?” Parish asked.

  “He’s been using college funds to pay off his gambling debts. Over the years he’s cheated Schoolman out of more than two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

  “That’s nonsense,” Needler muttered.

  “Wes was going to get Phil to review the budgets for the last five years,” Harriet continued, “to find out how Needler had stolen the money.”

  “That’s a lot of money,” Manny said. “Our president doesn’t look like a rich man to me.”

  “That’s because he lost it all in poker,” I said. “And a good chunk of it in one particular game.”

  I went to the mantel and picked up one of the books that had been left there. “You may be interested in this,” I said, looking at Needler. I removed the dustcover of a popular novel. Under it was an old book with a deep red morocco binding.

  “That’s mine!” roared Needler, reaching for it.

  Parish grabbed him by the arm, and the two other officers rushed in behind to subdue the college president.

  “It’s mine!” he wailed as they wrestled him to the floor. “He stole it from me, the bastard.”

  “He won it from you, you mean,” I said.

  “He deserved to die. I
’d kill him all over again if I could. That book is mine.”

  “What is it, Jessica?” Rebecca asked.

  “A first edition,” I said. “A very rare first edition.”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  “I always save the files for my books in two places to be safe,” I said. “I figured he would, too.”

  “What do you mean, ‘to be safe’?” Rebecca asked.

  “What if my computer crashed or I lost the disk? Then all the work I’d done would be lost. Don’t you save the articles you write in two different places?”

  “I haven’t before, but I will now.”

  Rebecca and I sat in the Langston Apartments with Letitia Tingwell and Manny Rosenfeld three days after the arrests. I’d put Lorraine Newmark in a limousine to Chicago that morning. She was scheduled to return in a month to settle her brother’s affairs.

  “You know, Vernon mentioned to me that he’d written the book on his summer break,” said Rebecca, “and I never questioned how he could write so fast.”

  “Not to mention time out for a vacation in Italy,” I added.

  “That’s right! I thought the guy must be a genius, while I’m just a struggling academic trying to get my work published in a respectable magazine. And all the time it was Wes who was the genius while Vernon just coasted along.”

  “What I don’t understand,” said Letitia, who had finally asked me to call her by her first name, “is why Professor Foner didn’t report the murder when he came upon it.”

  “He didn’t want to be connected with the missing manuscript,” I said. “Since he was aware he’d stolen it, he was sure someone else would notice it was gone if he was the one calling the police.”

  “My question,” said Manny Rosenfeld, “is why Harriet chose Wes to work with in the first place to prove Needier was stealing school funds. Wes didn’t know a lot about finances.”

  “But he knew all about Needler’s gambling losses, and how to entice him into a couple of high-stakes poker games. Harriet asked Wes to put financial pressure on Needler to see if they could force him into a compromising situation, make him do something impetuous to cover his losses. She figured Wes would know how to beat him at cards, and that he would enjoy the challenge.”

  “Isn’t that entrapment?” Manny asked.

  “If it involved the authorities, it might be,” I replied. “Harriet called it a sting. Wes was able to get Needler to bet more and more, and Needler, who had to get money from somewhere, padded the budget, privately selling off Schoolman property and keeping the funds. Initially, his intention was to pay off the markers.”

  “Pardon my ignorance, but what’s a marker?” Rebecca asked.

  “It’s a promise to pay what’s owed,” I said. “And Wes was getting quite a few of Needler’s markers.”

  I didn’t tell them that when Wes passed along Needler’s markers to Harriet, he sometimes made a game out of it, hiding them behind pictures, or putting them in the freezer. There was something unsavory in the way he and Harriet had toyed with the college president. Harriet must have enjoyed the irony of asking Needler to bring her the framed photograph of Wes, because Needler didn’t know that one of his markers had been slipped behind the smiling face of Wes Newmark.

  “What was that book Lorraine gave to the police?” Letitia asked.

  “It was a ledger in which Wes kept track of money paid to him by Vernon Foner for ghosting his books, and money owed to him by Lowell Needler. I have a copy of some of the pages.” I pulled out the folded sheets I had spent many an hour poring over and handed one to each of them.

  “What’s this mean?” asked Rebecca. “It says ’N minus fifteen M minus FE.’”

  “I think those minus signs are dashes,” I said.

  “I bet I can figure it out now,” Manny said. He looked over Rebecca’s shoulder. “It means Needler dash fifteen thousand dollars dash first edition. Needler must have gambled more than he had, and Wes took books from his collection to cover the value of what Needler lost.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “But Wes couldn’t help showing off a little. And that’s what sealed his fate. He took Needler to a particularly high-stakes game, and when Needler lost, Wes demanded his most precious book. It was too deep a wound. Needler collected rare books all his life, and Wes had taken away his prize possession in a poker game.”

  “What was that book, Jessica?”

  “A first edition of David Copperfield, Rebecca.”

  “That doesn’t sound so rare.”

  “This one was,” I said. “It was a specially bound presentation edition, dated and signed by Charles Dickens himself. David Copperfield was Dickens’s favorite book. He considered it his masterpiece. This one contained an inscription dedicated to another author he admired, Nathaniel Hawthorne. In addition, inside the cover was a bookplate with the name Theodore Roosevelt on it. It had been a gift to him from an admirer.”

  “That’s quite a provenance,” Manny said. “How much was the book worth?”

  “I don’t know what Needler paid for it,” I said, “but I understand in today’s market, it could fetch upward of one hundred twenty-five thousand dollars.”

  “Oh, my,” said Letitia. “I knew the book must have been important. I saw Wes put the cover of another book over it. I thought he just wanted to protect it from the dust or the sunlight. I’m glad I didn’t know what it was worth or I would have been a nervous wreck leaving it in the house.”

  “Wes was clever, leaving the book in plain sight,” I said. “Needler never thought to look for it there. He took several volumes from Wes’s bookcase in the study, but he wasn’t able to find the one he really wanted.”

  “Do you think Dean Bennett will become college president now?” Rebecca asked.

  I shrugged.

  “It’s already happened,” Manny put in. “The board appointed her acting president this morning.”

  Then she got what she wanted, I thought, but at what price?

  We were about to leave when Eli appeared in the open doorway, smiled, and waved to me. The group split up and I joined my student in the hallway, certain he’d been eavesdropping.

  “Hi, Professor Fletcher, got any time to talk with me?”

  “Of course, Eli. I was just going to leave for lunch. You can walk me to the Student Union. Give me a minute.”

  “Cool.”

  I gathered my papers, tucked them in the top drawer of my desk, and bade my colleagues farewell.

  Eli and I walked downstairs, through the beautiful reading room of Sutherland Library, and out into a sunny Indiana day.

  “If you’re really good,” I said, “I’ll treat for lunch.”

  “That’s ‘cause you owe me one, right?”

  “If you’re thinking about the fireplace poker, yes, I do owe you one for that.”

  “Did they find Needler’s fingerprints on it?”

  “No. But they did find evidence that it was used in the murder.”

  “So are they going to have a hard time pinning the rap on the president?”

  “I rather doubt it, considering he’s signed a confession.”

  “I bet his lawyers try to have it overturned.”

  “You may be right.”

  “I liked working on this case with you.”

  “My friend, the sheriff of Cabot Cove, says you should consider a career in law enforcement.”

  “Yeah? I kind of think I’d rather write about solving mysteries instead.”

  “You have time to make up your mind. You need to finish college first.”

  “Edgar says he’s applying to Princeton’s graduate program.”

  “Good for him.”

  “He’s a really sharp guy. I bet he gets in.”

  “I hope he does.”

  “Are you teaching here next semester?”

  “No. Dean Bennett asked me to come back, but I miss my friends in Cabot Cove, and I have another book under contract.”

  “Would you mind if I wrote to you ev
ery so often?”

  “It would be my pleasure.”

  “Cool.”

  We parted after lunch, and I took a long, leisurely walk around the perimeter of the campus. The murder of Wes Newmark had been solved, as had the disappearance of Kate Adler. There was a certain satisfaction to that. At the same time, the idyllic atmosphere of Schoolman College that I’d taken to immediately upon arrival had been replaced by something decidedly less sanguine. Of course, a tornado had the ability to change happiness to terror in the blink of an eye.

  But there was an insular quality to life on this campus—probably in most college settings—that seemed to foster excessive introspection, men and women focusing so intently on their own academic passions and need for recognition that larger issues could be lost in the process.

  The scandal created by two murders had certainly placed Harriet and the school in the public eye. Whether that would hurt the college’s future was conjecture. Chances were it would enhance interest in Schoolman and perhaps even boost enrollment. As the old public relations adage goes, “Say what you want about me, but spell my name right.” Such is the state of our society.

  The experience of helping solve the murders had taken the edge off my initial pleasure at being there. But that was balanced by the satisfaction I took from my students, bright and ambitious young men and women seeking to carve out their paths into adult life and beyond. I had no doubt that Eli would keep in touch, and that one day I’d receive from him a manuscript, his first murder mystery novel, and that it would be pretty good. At least I hoped it would be. I hate having to respond negatively to young people’s early attempts at writing.

  I also knew that my relationship with Harriet would never be the same. Oh, yes, we would remain friends while I continued to teach there, and after I’d left, too. But it would be different because we were different people, with different agendas and dreams. Of one thing I was certain: She would accomplish at Schoolman what she intended, to turn it into a financially solvent institution of higher learning of which she, and her staff and the students, could be proud.

  I ended my walk back at my small but comfortable apartment, where I made tea and settled in to prepare for the next day’s class, which I looked forward to. At the same time, I knew I would not be sad when the semester was over and I would leave Schoolman College. It wasn’t that I didn’t like it there, even with the complication of two murders. But the contemplation of being back where I truly belonged, Cabot Cove, Maine, made me smile. It always does, no matter where I happen to be in the world.