“Do we know what Professor Petty died of?” Simon asked Mack. “Can’t have been his heart. He didn’t have one.”
Petty may not have met the precise definition of a sociopath, but he came mighty close. He left bags of garbage in front of his neighbors’ houses on trash collection day. During election season he loitered around the neighborhood’s streets until folks left for work, then he’d sneak onto their front porches and leave homophobic and racist literature clipped to their mailboxes. He was nasty to the itinerant laborers who canvassed the neighborhood looking for odd jobs, calling the police on them whenever the spirit moved him. Girl Scouts and high school band members selling cookies or fruit learned not to knock on Petty’s door if they didn’t want it slammed in their faces, preceded by an obscenity or two. He opposed every initiative the neighborhood association favored. He made life miserable for his graduate students. Simon couldn’t think of a single person who would care to attend his funeral.
“There’s just one thing,” Mack said. “His front lawn is crawling with cops. Why do you suppose that is?”
Simon saw that it was indeed crawling with cops. And an ambulance, a City/County Bureau of Investigation van, and a couple of police cruisers lined the curb in front of Petty’s house. Simon recognized Petty’s son-in-law’s car, a sun-faded blue Volvo station wagon, parked in the driveway behind Petty’s Cadillac.
“You don’t suppose he’s been murdered, do you?” Mack said, joking. “Think of the suspects.”
Simon didn’t answer, but he watched the activity across the street with some disquiet.
“You’re in with the police,” Mack said. “Find out what’s happened. I’ve got to go to work. Call me.”
Simon was indeed “in” with the police. A tenured professor of history at Kenan College, a small liberal arts school nestled on a lovely campus nearby, Simon Shaw consulted with police departments on “cold cases”—murders so old his historian’s skills proved essential to their solution. He was a brilliant scholar and a fine writer. His first book, developed from his doctoral thesis at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, had won a Pulitzer Prize. He preferred teaching undergraduates to research and writing, though, which was why he stayed at Kenan.
Solving murders was Simon’s avocation. After some initial resistance he assumed the label “forensic historian” bestowed on him by the Raleigh News and Observer. When a profile of him appeared in People magazine, he acquired minor celebrity status. People recognized him at the grocery store and asked for his autograph. His friends accused him of relishing the attention.
Simon looked too young to be a full professor. He was a small man who dressed in blue jeans, drove a Thunderbird, and listened to rock music. His black curly hair was a little long, and his dark looks echoed those of his mother, a Jewish woman who hailed from Queens. Simon was a native North Carolinian himself. His father’s family had lived in the mountains of North Carolina for so long Simon joked that the first Shaw must have sprouted like a mushroom from the damp forest soil in Watauga County and built his log cabin on the spot. Simon grew up in Boone, where his father taught classics at Appalachian State University and his mother was a public health nurse.
Simon pulled on a T-shirt and jeans and joined the knot of neighbors gathered on the sidewalk opposite Petty’s house. The bright sun forecast another hot July day.
“You can’t guess, Simon,” said a barefoot young mother, her tiny baby snug in a carrier on her chest. “A police detective questioned us. About Professor Petty.”
“He got an earful, too,” said the retired librarian who owned the gingerbread Victorian around the corner, “but he wouldn’t tell us anything. It’s suspicious, don’t you think? If Petty had just up and died, would there be this much commotion? Petty’s son-in-law found the body. I saw him let the police into the house. He looked like death himself.”
“The detective who questioned you, what did he look like?” Simon asked.
“He was a big African American man,” the librarian’s wife said. “Middle-aged, short gray hair, handsome suit.”
“Sergeant Otis Gates,” Simon said.
“You know him?” the young mother said.
“Yeah,” Simon said. “He’s a homicide detective.”
For a half a minute the group was silent, then they all started to talk at once. The librarian raised his hand to shush them.
“For God’s sake, Simon, go over there and pump him for information,” he said. “We need to know what’s going on.”
Simon went. He was curious himself, and worried, for that matter. No one wanted a murder on the street, even if the victim was as unpopular as Petty.
Of course, the uniformed policeman watching the street out in front of Petty’s house wouldn’t let him by.
“I’m a friend of Sergeant Gates,” Simon said. “Could I speak to him? I live over there,” he said, gesturing across the street. “The neighbors are anxious, as you can imagine.”
“I recognize you, Professor Shaw,” the officer said. “But I can’t let you inside. You understand.”
Just then Otis came out of Petty’s house. He spotted Simon and raised his hand in greeting, then motioned Simon over to him. The policeman let him through the yellow tape barricade, and Simon joined Otis on the porch.
“Murder?” Simon asked him.
“Definitely,” Otis answered. “And no shortage of suspects, I hear.”
“He was an awful human being,” Simon said. “But still.”
“The ‘still’ part is my job,” Otis said. “Speaking of which, I could use your help. Have you ever been in the house? In the study?”
“Yeah,” Simon said. “several times.”
“Come inside,” Otis said.
Simon hesitated.
“Don’t worry, the body is gone already.”
Simon avoided corpses. Most of the victims in his cases had been dead a lot longer than Petty, and viewing their remains gave him a headache. He preferred to leave crime scenes and autopsies to the experts.
As he passed through the house, Simon noticed Petty’s son-in-law slumped on the living room sofa, his head in his hands. A female paramedic sat at his side, a hand on his shoulder, speaking to him quietly.
Inside Petty’s study a tarpaulin covered part of the floor, concealing the gruesome evidence of the murder. Otherwise the room was the picture of a scholar’s den. Hundreds of books shared shelf space with Greek and Roman memorabilia, including plaster busts of Claudius and Pyrrhus and a rearing bronze warhorse missing its rider.
“Is this stuff worth anything?” Otis asked. “Could robbery be a motive?”
“Reproductions, all of them,” Simon said. “And I don’t see anything missing.”
“And that,” Otis said, gesturing toward the full-size Greek warrior that stood in a corner. “Fake, too?”
“Yeah,” Simon said. “He ordered the stuff from a reenactment catalog.” The Spartan mannequin was poised for war. A horsehair-crested leather helmet protected his head, while a wood and bronze shield painted with a ferocious face shielded his body. He wore a canvas cuirass across his chest and bronze greaves strapped around his calves. A short iron sword with bronze fittings hung from his shoulder by a baldric, but his outstretched hand was empty.
“Where’s the spear”? Simon asked.
“Rammed through Professor Petty,” Otis said. “Pinned him to the floor.”
“Good God!”
“Yeah, and he didn’t die right away either. Lived for an hour or so, according to the crime scene guys. Died around midnight, they think.”
“Damn. No one deserves that.”
“This is what I want you to see,” Otis said, handing Simon a pair of latex gloves and stretching a pair over his own large hands. Gates withdrew a leather belt from a brown paper evidence bag and gave it to Simon, who inspected it carefully. It was an ordinary leather belt, with two exceptions: it was heavily stained with blood, and random letters, written in heavy black marker
, ranged fully across its length. The letters were: A M Z Q L D M X Y O M S T E.
“While Petty was lying pinned to the floor bleeding to death, he took off his belt and wrote these letters on it. We found the marker on the floor next to the body.”
“Hmmm.”
“Hmmm, what?”
“Nothing, really.” Simon said, giving the belt back to Gates and stripping off his gloves. “Could it be a code?”
“I thought of that. We’ll send it off to the forensic cryptologists at the FBI. Most likely Petty was half-crazy with shock and pain, and the letters mean nothing.”
Out on Petty’s back porch Gates scribbled in his notebook. He was about the only person Simon knew who still used a pencil. Simon waited for him to finish, inhaling the rich sweet odor of the red trumpet vines and honeysuckle that climbed Petty’s back fence, luring hummingbirds. Petty loved birds, which just went to show you that no one was all bad. The vine-laden fence divided Petty’s backyard from a bank parking lot. In fact, banks lined the entire street, buffering the old neighborhood from the noise and traffic of Cameron Village, a tiny urban shopping center that was home to trendy boutiques and restaurants.
“Anyone else hate this guy besides the neighbors?” Otis asked.
“Every student he ever had. He was picky, contradictory, and just plain mean. He was an emeritus professor at State, so he still served on an occasional thesis committee.” Simon knew of two former students of his who were struggling with Petty’s scathing last-minute comments on their final drafts. He saw no need to volunteer their names to Gates. He’d find them out for himself when he interviewed Petty’s colleagues at State.
“Petty had one married daughter,” Gates said, consulting his notebook.
“Nice young woman,” Simon said. “She has three children, I believe. Her husband runs the Italian bistro in Cameron Village.”
“I’ve been there. Great calamari. He found the body, you know. The son-in-law, Mark Lozano. Dropped in on the old man this morning.”
“I saw him in the house. He looked shell-shocked,” Simon said.
Simon called Mack Smith at his office and reported what he had learned.
“You know what,” Mack said. “When I got to work I heard that Petty’s house was already for sale. One of our guys has the listing. He just hadn’t put the sign out front yet. Petty told our agent he was moving to Italy. Had you heard anything about that?”
Simon hadn’t, which was a surprise. The academic grapevine was usually swift and accurate. Petty must have kept his plans very quiet.
Simon wasn’t teaching this summer; he was working on a new book on the coastal history of North Carolina, but he liked to drop by the history department to eat lunch with the few faculty who stayed in town to teach summer school.
Sophie Berelman, with her long dark hair wound into a thick braid and wearing her trademark cat’s-eye-shaped glasses, was forking up salad, dieting after the birth of her first child. Simon’s close friend Marcus Clegg, acting chair for the summer, was eating lunch with her. Clegg could pass as a refugee from the sixties, if he’d been old enough, with his shoulder-length brown hair, John Lennon glasses, and brown lunch bag of healthy sandwiches and fruit.
Simon joined them with his satchel of fast food. He stuck a straw in the super-sized Coke and drained half of it.
“We’re listing suspects, Simon,” Sophie said. “We’re up to 157.”
“That’s not funny, Sophie,” Marcus said, turning to Simon. “Your friend Otis Gates was on the phone to me this morning. Seems a couple of our former students are only too glad that Petty is dead. I think you taught both of them?”
Kenan didn’t offer graduate degrees, but many of its graduates went on to study further at nearby universities. Simon knew exactly whom Marcus meant: Amber Marie Hardy, a doctoral candidate at State, and Rufus West, a master’s candidate there. Both of them were desperate to finish their degrees, and both had been driven to distraction by Petty’s criticisms of their theses.
“Sergeant Gates was surprised you hadn’t mentioned them to him this morning,” Marcus said.
“I figured he’d find out about them soon enough.”
“I talked to a friend of mine at State this morning,” Sophie said. “Petty’s house was for sale and he was moving to Italy. Met an Italian woman there when he was on vacation last year.”
Rufus West poked his head into the room.
“Hi, Rufus,” Marcus said. “Come on in.”
“I need to talk to Professor Shaw,” Rufus said. He looked desperately at Simon. “In private,” he added.
“Sure,” Simon said. “Of course.”
Rufus shut the door of Simon’s office and slumped into a chair. He clumsily lit a cigarette.
“I haven’t smoked in years,” he said. “But it’s this or major drugs. When I heard this morning that Petty was dead, you can’t imagine how happy I was. The next thing I know, there’s a giant police detective at the door, quizzing me, and I realize I’m a suspect!”
“Did he say so?” Simon said.
“Not in so many words. But he’d heard how Petty was screwing me over. I’m on the fifth draft of the damn thesis. Petty still hated it. I just wanted the degree so I could make a few thousand more a year teaching, maybe work up to principal one day. Can’t do that without a master’s anymore.”
“Relax,” Simon said. “Motive doesn’t prove murder. You need opportunity, too.”
“I’m trying to tell you,” Rufus said. “I was at Petty’s last night! Half the neighborhood was out walking their damn dogs when I pulled up to the house! I came to thrash it out with him. We had a huge argument. He said I had no academic talent at all and that he wasn’t going to initial my thesis. Ever!”
“You didn’t kill him, Rufus!”
Rufus dragged his hand through his hair, scattering cigarette ashes around his shoulders.
“No,” he said. “Of course not. He was alive when I left, about 10:30, I think it was. I’ve got sort of an alibi, though. Amber pulled up to the house right after me. She was livid. She’d just got back what she thought was her final draft with Petty’s comments. She said it would take another semester to rewrite. That job offer she got from Meredith College depends on her having her doctorate by the fall.”
Amber was a single mother, struggling through graduate school after her young husband died in the Gulf War. She needed that job.
“You don’t think Amber could have murdered him, do you? Is she strong enough?”
“Oh, she could have done it. She works out, and Petty was a little old man.… But I’m sure she didn’t kill him. I mean, I hope she didn’t.”
Simon hoped so, too.
“She told the police that Petty was alive when she arrived and still alive when she left,” Rufus said. “But, of course, we could have been in it together.”
“Just tell the truth, both of you, and sit tight. Otis is a fine detective. He’ll get to the truth.”
“Can you help us, Simon? Amber and me, I mean. Isn’t Sergeant Gates a friend of yours?”
“I don’t know,” Simon said. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Rufus left Simon’s office, lighting another cigarette as he went.
Simon felt sick. He liked both Amber and Rufus. He thought of Rufus’s wife, his three children, his broken-down minivan, and his love of teaching high school. Then he recalled Amber when she first arrived at Kenan, an older student out of place in a flowered Lilly shift and pink Pappagallo flats. She quickly adapted, changing to jeans and putting her toddler to bed on a pillow on the library floor so she could study at night.
Simon rooted around in his drawer, found a Goody’s headache powder, and stirred it into his Coke. He wondered if it was likely that either Rufus or Amber, both normal, law-abiding people, could have murdered Cecil Petty.
Of course it was possible. It was more than possible. It seemed certain. Either Rufus killed Petty and Amber covered up for him, or Amber killed him herself. It woul
d have been so easy to knock the old man down and ram the warrior’s spear into him, solving so many problems. Of course Petty didn’t lack enemies, but only Rufus and Amber had been seen at his house the night of the murder. Then there was the writing that Petty had left behind. Simon had no doubt it was a message of some kind. Petty had lived for an hour or so. He wouldn’t have missed his chance to implicate his murderer. Simon wondered what the FBI would make of the random letters scrawled across Petty’s belt.
“Rufus West has changed his story,” Otis said.
“Really,” Simon said, shifting the telephone receiver to his other hand so he could finish his peanut butter and peach jam sandwich.
“Now he says he waited for Amber outside Petty’s house and that he saw Petty alive before she left, when he showed her to the door. Then, according to this fairy tale, he and Amber talked for a few minutes before they both drove off.”
“What’s his excuse for changing his story?”
“He says that at first he wanted to shift blame to Amber, to keep from being a suspect, then got an attack of conscience.”
“It could be true.”
“Baloney. One of those two, or both of them, killed Petty.”
“You don’t have any other options? What about the family? Aren’t they always prime suspects?”
“Well, gossip is that Petty and his daughter and her husband didn’t get along. According to the staff Petty would come eat at the restaurant, for free, and then criticize the food. But they’re in the clear. Petty’s daughter left the restaurant and got home right at six, according to the babysitter. Her baby had a temperature, and she’s on record phoning the pediatrician on call several times during the evening. Her husband was at their restaurant until well past one. His routine was the same as always. The restaurant closes at eleven, and then he and another chef prep for the next day. The staff confirms it. Besides, you’d think they’d be happy Petty was selling up and moving to Italy where they’d be rid of him.”
“What are you waiting for, then?”
“We don’t have any direct evidence that Rufus or Amber is the murderer. I’m hoping that the report from the FBI cryptologist will clear things up. If those letters are a code revealing the murderer’s name, the FBI will crack it. There are no unbreakable codes.”
Tar Heel Dead Page 8
