by Maddie Day
“Can’t stop that.” I tapped the pencil on the paper. “Maybe a local here in town killed Charles. Nobody has much good to say about the poor man. Or maybe there’s a professor or a student at the university who hated him. I should touch base with Lou and Zen again, anyway. I’ll ask them, even though Octavia should have done that already.”
Chapter 38
It was four before Octavia came back into the restaurant to interview me. I didn’t mind. I had bookkeeping to catch up on, orders to put in for later in the week, prep to do for tomorrow. I’d called a couple of locksmiths in the afternoon, but nobody had picked up, and Abe hadn’t either. All I could do was leave messages about needing a good lock on an outbuilding. My barn was still unsecured, but the biscuit dough was in the cooler, I’d wrapped fifty sets of silverware in blue napkins, and I’d prepped the dry ingredients for fritters by the time Octavia returned.
We sat across from each other at one of the tables. One of the festive strings of tiny white lights I’d left up after the holidays created an incongruous illusion sitting on Octavia’s head like a crown, even though it was several yards behind her on the wall.
“Get you a cup of coffee?” I offered.
“No, thanks.” Her cell rang and she excused herself, turning away after checking the display to answer it. Her voice was softer than the tone she usually used. She must be talking with Jim.
I heard her say something about “later” and “me, too.”
When she disconnected and turned back to me, pink tinged her cheeks. I was surprised by how this conversation didn’t bother me. Good. I must be over Jim deserting me for her.
She drew out a small notebook and a pen, but before she could speak, I said, “How was the murder investigation going before this popped up?”
“To be frank, more slowly than I’d like.”
Wow. She was finally sharing something about the case. I hadn’t expected her to answer me. “Any real suspects? I mean, besides Lou Perlman, who never would have killed Charles.” I knew the question was a long shot, but what the heck.
She cleared her throat. “Let’s get started.”
A long shot going nowhere, apparently.
“First, thank you for finding that thread,” she said. “I hope it proves useful. Any idea where the cloth came from?”
“No, not at all.”
“Have you been away from the property since you put the padlock on the barn door?” She observed me, her pen poised above the paper.
“I secured the door yesterday morning. Before noon, I think. But yes, I was out yesterday afternoon, then back, then out again last evening.”
“Give me as close to the exact times and locations as you can.”
“Let’s say I was out from one to three—”
“Where?”
“I went to the library and then walked around town for a while.”
Octavia cocked her head as if she didn’t quite believe me, but she didn’t comment on what I’d said. I didn’t think she needed to know about my conversation with Georgia. Or maybe I should tell her.
“Please go on.” She made a rolling motion with her hand.
“Then at about five I took soup and biscuits to Maude and Ron.”
“Stilton?” Octavia’s eyebrows went up. “You’re personal friends of theirs?”
“Not really. I simply thought it would be a nice gesture. As it turns out, Maude really appreciated it. She said no one else in town had even stopped by.” Which was pretty sad for a person who grew up in South Lick. Right in my building, in fact.
“What time did you get home?” Octavia asked.
“I went from the Stiltons’ to Abe O’Neill’s house for dinner. I got home around ten.”
“Long dinner,” she murmured as she jotted down the information.
I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t give a flying flamingo what she thought about the length of my dinner.
“You didn’t check the padlock when you got home?” she asked.
“No. It was late and I was tired. I usually park in the barn, but last night I left the van in the driveway. I didn’t see that the padlock had been cut, if it even was by then. Maybe they did it during the night.”
She sighed. “I’m going to need to have my guys check out where everyone of interest was during each of those times.”
Cool. She was talking about the case again.
Octavia checked her notebook. “One to three, five to ten, and overnight, of course. Is that right?”
“Yes. Does everybody include Georgia LaRue?”
“I can’t tell you that, Robbie. You must realize the way we do investigations by now—we don’t leak information to civilians. Especially not to people involved in the case, which you are.”
“Just in case, I’ll save you some time. When I was at the library and walking around town yesterday, I spoke with Georgia at the gazebo for half an hour. She was on lunch break and we walked back to the library together. She couldn’t have gotten over here, left a screwy note, and cut a padlock during that time.”
“All right, duly noted.” Octavia looked straight at me. “And no one that you know of was here when you were out?”
“Nobody I invited.”
Chapter 39
I parked a few blocks away from the sprawling Indiana University campus right before five and began my trek to Lou’s building. I hadn’t talked with her in a couple of days. Besides wanting to know how she was doing, I thought I could pick her brain about who else on campus was at odds with Charles. Being warned off the case by the note in my barn had produced entirely the opposite effect. I was determined to figure out the puzzle of who killed Charles—so I could feel safe again.
After I’d called and asked if we could meet, Lou told me to come onto campus and join the departmental Hump Day Happy Hour and then we could go out for a bite to eat. She’d said they gathered for a happy hour on the weeks they didn’t have the Friday night dinner. I’d switched on all the outdoor lights before I left and kept the inside of the store lit up, as well as my apartment. I’d also made sure the door to the passageway on the second floor was blocked by all kinds of heavy stuff. What else could I do? I didn’t have a remote camera, although that might be a good thing to set up.
Since I didn’t want to arrive at the happy hour too early, I wandered up a slope past Maxwell Hall with its Romanesque peaked turrets, around the little gazebo-type structure that was the Rose Well House at the edge of Dunn Woods, and wove between Kirkwood and Lindley Halls. It was the oldest part of the campus, with buildings named for the founders. Mostly built of rusticated limestone, or so Lou had told me, they featured tall windows and lots of steeply peaked roofs. Maybe rusticated meant bumpy, because the stones were irregular, not smooth blocks.
As I walked, I thought about what Buck had said while he read the paper. A suicide from thirty years ago that might be a murder? That was interesting. Maybe they’d done a DNA analysis, the kind of thing that wasn’t available back then. I’d have to check online when I got home, see if I could learn anything more about it.
I skirted the chemistry building before arriving at Ballantine Hall. Not a picturesque, graceful, nineteenth-century trustee of the campus, it was a huge unattractive set of stone building blocks that looked like something out of the former Soviet Union. The shadows stretched long, and the breeze was brisk, especially in the wind tunnel next to the ten-story building. I found my way up to the seventh floor and to an open door down the hall from which laughter and conversation spilled out. I wasn’t quite sure why I’d agreed to Lou’s plan. Did I really want to schmooze with a bunch of sociology scholars I’d never met, or that I’d only seen at the Friday dinners? I peered in. Maybe Lou would already be ready to leave. I wasn’t exactly an introvert and I usually enjoyed parties, but it’d been a long day.
“Robbie, there you are,” she called out from across the all-purpose room, which looked like it might usually host seminars or other meetings since it held long tables and regular chai
rs, not desks. “Come on in.” Her voice carried above the hum.
Heads turned and the conversation quieted.
Great. I pasted on a smile and gave a little wave. Lou pushed toward me through clusters of several dozen men and women from age twenty to seventy. Most held either a bottle of beer or a plastic cup of wine, although I saw a half-empty gallon of cider on a table by the door. Dress was academic casual—sweaters, tweed jackets, a couple red-and-white IU sweatshirts, the occasional skirt and leather boots, plenty of denim.
I was glad I’d changed into my own version—a fuchsia tunic-length sweater with skinny jeans and my low boots. A table near the door was piled high with coats, so I added my own to the collection.
After Lou hugged me, she said, “Wine?” and gestured toward the boxes of red and white next to the cider.
“Sure, why not? Red, I think.”
She handed me a cup of red. “And eats, too.” Another table held a platter of cheese interspersed with veggie nibbles. A basket of crackers and stacks of small plates and napkins sat nearby. Suddenly famished, I loaded up a plate with cheese and crackers.
“You know Tom.” Lou gestured toward her friend. “Let me introduce you to a couple more people.”
Five of us had been chatting for several minutes, me mostly eating instead of talking, when the name Charles floated out of a conversation nearby. I glanced at Lou, whose shoulders sagged. The fellow grad students we’d been talking with reacted, too. One shook her head as if in sorrow, and another pursed his lips.
“It’s a real shame,” Tom said. “Stilton was brilliant.”
Lou opened her mouth and then shut it again. I didn’t blame her. Brilliance didn’t excuse bad behavior, and speaking ill of the dead was in equally poor taste.
I spied Zen across the room talking to an older man. “Excuse me,” I said to Lou. “I want to say hi to Zen.” I set down my plate on a chair under the window and approached Zen.
“Robbie,” she said in a surprised tone. “What are you doing here?”
“Lou and I are going out for dinner, and she told me to come by here first. Hope you don’t mind.”
Zen laughed. “It’s good to have fresh blood around here. Especially a non-academic.”
After the guy she’d been talking to excused himself, I said, “How are you?”
She stopped smiling. “You mean, are the police still harassing me about the murder? Sort of. It’s a real pain.”
“That isn’t quite what I meant. But what do you mean, harassing?”
“Trying to get me to say where I was that night and morning.” She turned to look out the window next to her.
I looked, too, at the campus spread out in front of us. With no leaves on the trees the view from the seventh floor went on and on with points of lights in all directions piercing the dusk. I turned back to her. “Is there anybody else on campus who would have gone so far as to kill Charles?” I kept my voice low enough so no one around us would hear, but the background buzz took care of that, anyway.
Her gaze traveled around the room. “Nobody and everybody. The guy was a jerk. Sure, if you dug deep, a shrink would probably say he was unhappy with his own academic standing. Who knows, maybe with his physical stature, too. No matter the reason, he took it out on others. But kill him for it?” She focused on me. “Would you kill someone simply because they were unpleasant and mean?”
“Of course not.”
“Me neither. Same goes for most human beings, right?”
“I believe so.” I took a sip of wine.
A woman in a jacket so professorial it even bore leather elbow patches beckoned to Zen.
“My two cents?” Zen stared at me. “I think the police should quit trying to involve Lou and me. They need to look closer to home.”
Chapter 40
“Ready to get out of here?” Lou asked a few minutes later.
I’d given up on socializing and was examining the view, which really was stunning. “Sure.” We headed to the coats table.
Zen was slipping hers on when we got there. “I’ll walk out with you guys.” She zipped up a red hip-length coat in a puffy down and pulled on a red-and-white fleece hat.
We filed into the elevator a moment later, with me following Zen. I laughed. “Nice repair job.” I pointed to the back of her coat sleeve, across which was plastered a piece of gray duct tape.
Zen shook her head. “Got too close to the woodstove. Fabric like this just melts.” The floors dinged by until we landed at G with a bump.
Had the fabric melted? The thread I’d found was red and pretty close to the shade of her jacket. Surely, she wasn’t my intruder, the author of my threatening note. Or was she? I wanted to shake off the dark cloud that seemed to surround my view of the petite marathoner, but it wasn’t that easy.
We made our way out of the building and back into the wind tunnel, which felt even colder after being in the overheated building. Lou unlocked her around-town bicycle from the rack. I tugged on my fleece beret, but kept my eyes on Zen as she talked with Lou. If it was her, why would she have talked about Charles’s killer like she had? That answer was easy—to throw me off the track.
Lou laughed. “I thought that meeting would never end.”
Zen glanced at me. “We were both in an interminable School of Social Sciences meeting yesterday. Went from noon to almost six.”
From noon to six. That cleared Zen for the earlier hours in the day, but what about the evening? She still could have come by, cut the padlock, and left the note.
“Good thing those meetings are only once a year,” Lou said.
Zen nodded. “I’m heading home. See you.” She turned and walked with a brisk step, disappearing around the side of the building.
I watched her go. Huh.
“Earth to Robbie?” Lou said, jostling my arm. “Where should we go? Bears, Nick’s, somewhere else?”
“Sorry.” I smiled at her. “I read about a brewpub called Function Brewing. It’s up on Sixth. Want to try that?”
“Let’s do it.”
We walked briskly back the way I’d come onto campus. Lou, rolling her bike beside her, told me about working with Zen as her adviser. “She’s pretty cool. I think it’s going to go so much better than trying to work with Charles. Not that that’s a possibility anymore, anyway.”
“I’ll bet she’ll be a lot better than Charles.” If she wasn’t arrested for murder, I didn’t add.
A clutch of students walked toward us, mostly clad in pajama bottoms, red IU hoodies, and Uggs, all but one staring at her phone. At the last moment they veered around us to the right. Cell phone radar, maybe?
“So who was Maxwell, anyway?” I asked as we passed that building on our right.
“Father of the university, they say. He got the state legislature to approve buying land to start a state seminary back before the Civil War. The seminary turned into the university.”
“Nice. I wonder if any of his ancestors still come here to study. Maybe they get a free apartment in Maxwell Hall.”
“Ha. I doubt it,” Lou said. “I heard there was a Maxwell grad student in linguistics, but that was a while ago. So what did you and Zen talk about?”
“She says the police are still harassing her about the murder. She stopped by the store yesterday and said she can’t tell them where she was that night and the next morning. What’s up with that?”
“Maybe she was with a lover. Maybe a female lover. And doesn’t want her cover blown.”
“I suppose,” I said as we waited to cross busy Indiana Avenue. “Is Octavia still calling you?”
“She didn’t yesterday. I guess that’s an improvement. Anyway, now she has to go through my lawyer.”
“I also asked Zen who else on campus, even in your department, might have killed Charles. Or at least disliked him enough to think of killing him.”
“Like all of us? Robbie, you can’t follow up on everybody who disliked Charles. That’s what the cops are for. Right?”
She stopped short in front of Nick’s English Pub and turned toward me. “That’s scary.”
“Dude.” A burly male student and his friends nearly bumped into us as they stepped, reeking of beer, out of the pub. “Gotta share the sidewalk, y’ know.”
“Sorry.” I pulled Lou to the curb and out of their way. “Yes, it’s totally scary. But it made me even more determined to figure this thing out.” We started walking again.
“I get that. But you have to be careful. Like, really careful. Did you get a new lock yet?”
“No. I was supposed to, but I couldn’t get hold of any locksmiths. Octavia said they’d send officers around to patrol every hour.”
“Yeah. And the bad guy comes on the half hour. That’s stupid. You should spend the night with me.”
“Thanks, but I can’t. I have to cook in the morning.” I supposed I could call Abe. No, that would be way too wimpy. “I’ll be fine. Listen, I’ll park my van in front of the barn door, and I’ll leave all the outside lights on until daybreak.”
“You know what you should do?” Lou flashed a wicked grin. “Stretch razor wire across the drive. At knee level and at throat level.” She made a slicing noise across her throat. “They’ll never know what hit them.”
Chapter 41
Man, was I glad I’d left all the lights on, inside and out. When I drove up after eight, it was way dark. I did what I’d promised Lou I would—I pulled up in front of the barn door and parallel parked, getting the passenger side as close to the door as I could. I’d stuck another padlock on there before I left, but it wasn’t any bigger than the previous one. Whoever wanted to get in would, if they were determined to. At least parking so close would make it somewhat harder. I definitely needed a decent lock, though. So far, not a single locksmith had returned my calls.
I locked the van and turned toward my apartment, sizing up the dozen yards to the back door. A cold breeze picked up and rattled the branches of the oaks, the walnuts, and the maples, setting the few remaining leaves to chattering. I cocked my head. That was only wind in leaves, wasn’t it? Was there another sound? My skin prickled, my feet instantly rooted in cement. My back was to the van, the big, heavy, metal van, but crossing the open space to my apartment would expose me.
