A Knife in the Back

by Bill Crider

  “Thanks. I will.”

  He walked toward the door as fast as he could through the rain. He didn’t look back, but at least he wasn’t shuffling the way he’d been in the hallway at Talon’s. Sally backed out of the driveway and went home.

  Lola was waiting, bouncing around as if she were wired on caffeine.

  “Calm down,” Sally told her. “I’ll get your treat.”

  When Sally tossed it, Lola made a grab for it as usual, but she missed. The treat bounced off her nose and skittered under the table, where it came to rest near a dust bunny. Lola eyed the dust bunny with suspicion.

  “I’m not going to get the treat for you,” Sally said, “and I’m not going to mop the floor. If you want to eat, you’ll have to take the chance.”

  Lola overcame her hesitation and went after the treat, which disappeared into her mouth. The dust bunny, on the other hand, didn’t disappear. Sally wished that it would.

  She looked in the refrigerator for something to eat. There wasn’t anything that looked particularly appetizing, but there was some pasta salad that she’d made with Tuna Helper a couple of nights earlier. That would have to do.

  While Sally was eating, Lola hung around the chair winding herself in and out of the legs. Sally was sure that the odor of tuna was the reason rather than affection or desire for social interaction.

  “Lola,” she said, “you’re a beautiful cat.”

  “Meow,” Lola said, as if such self-evident facts didn’t need stating.

  “But you’re not much help when it comes to solving mysteries.”

  “Meow,” Lola said, looking up hopefully at the pasta salad.

  “You’re not getting any of it, so forget it,” Sally told her.

  Lola looked hurt. When that didn’t work, she wandered off and flopped down in front of the refrigerator, where warm air came gently out of the vent. She began to groom herself, a process that Sally knew could take a long time, unless Lola was very sleepy, in which case it wouldn’t take long at all.

  Sally finished her salad and rinsed off the plate before sticking it in the dishwasher. She thought for a second about calling her mother, but she couldn’t talk to her mother about any of the things she was thinking without going into a lengthy explanation.

  So she went into her living area and lay down on the couch. She hadn’t slept well, and she thought that a short nap would help her concentration. And sometimes in the past her unconscious mind had worked out problems while she was asleep, and when she woke up, she had the answers.

  She drifted off to the sound of the rain on the roof, and soon she was dreaming. In the dream, she was climbing a high mountain, but instead of snow there was desert sand all around, and instead of cold there was heat. The higher she went, the hotter she became, and in the thin air she could hardly breathe. She gasped for breath, but she couldn’t breathe in. It was as if some mighty weight were crushing her lungs.

  She awoke with a start to find Lola lying on her chest and staring into her eyes.

  “Lola!” she said. “Are you trying to suck my breath?”

  “Meow,” Lola said, implying that Sally should know better than to believe that old wives’ tale.

  Sally lifted Lola off her chest and set her on the floor.

  “Maybe you weren’t, then, but you’re so heavy that you nearly crushed me.”

  “Meow,” Lola said, highly insulted.

  “I’m sorry,” Sally told her. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”

  Lola sniffed and stalked away, heading back to the kitchen and her place by the refrigerator.

  Sally ran a hand through her tangled hair and turned on the TV set. She found a cooking show and watched that for a few minutes. She was always intrigued by how easy it all seemed until she realized that the chef had everything prepared beforehand and even had a complete meal ready to show the viewers only seconds after sticking the dish in the oven. What took thirty minutes on TV must have taken hours in reality. It would have taken longer than that if Sally had been involved. She was definitely cooking-impaired.

  She left the cooking show and surfed through the channels until she came to a movie made in the 1970s. All the men had bushy sideburns and wore bright paisley shirts with huge collars, along with bell-bottomed pants. The color was garish, and the overall look was cheesy. The look suited her mood, so she turned off the sound and tried to put everything she knew and surmised about the murders together in her head.

  One of the things Wynona had mentioned was the rumor that Ralph Bostic had been involved in some scheme to steal cars and sell them in Mexico. Who better to work with in such a scheme than a car dealer? He would know what cars were available and where they were. Since he operated a dealership, he would have access to keys for every model he sold, and Roy Don Talon sold just about every model there was.

  So, she thought, let’s say that Talon and Bostic were working together. It seemed likely enough. But where did Ray Thomas come into the picture?

  She thought about what she’d seen in the school’s auto shop the previous afternoon, and about what she’d smelled. Fresh paint. And there had been a car there, all right. Suppose that Thomas was helping Talon and Bostic repaint the cars, maybe even doing some other kinds of things, like changing the engines? It made sense. Bostic was under suspicion, so he wouldn’t do the work at his own shop. What better place to have it done than the college? No one would suspect that stolen cars were being repainted in a college auto shop.

  Hal Kaul had strongly implied that Bostic and Thomas were working together to cheat the school out of money. Thomas was the one who’d recommended that Bostic repair the school vehicles. The stolen cars could be just another part of the deal.

  Where did Jorge fit into all that? Sally was sure that Jack hadn’t mentioned Jorge to Talon by accident. Whether he’d been aware of it or not, Jack had connected Jorge with the idea of problems at the dealership because Jorge knew about cars. He’d been a mechanic, after all. Besides that, he spoke fluent Spanish, and Wynona had said the stolen cars were being sold in Mexico. Jorge would have been the perfect middleman. His prison contacts might have been a consideration, too. Who could say what kind of people he’d met there and what they might be doing now? Maybe some of them were also involved.

  Thomas had worked in the prison, too, of course, and he’d been forced to leave because he’d brought contraband onto a prison unit. It was possible, then, that he and Jorge had both made contact there with someone who’d helped set up the whole thing, from stealing the cars to selling them in Mexico. Bostic might not even have been the one behind the scheme. It could have been Jorge or Thomas.

  And besides all that, Jorge would have been eliminating his rivals for Mae’s affections.

  Now that Sally had it all figured out, the question was, who had killed whom? If Fieldstone had found out that Thomas was running stolen cars through one of the school’s programs, maybe even using students to help, then Fieldstone couldn’t be ruled out, not considering his temper. He might even have killed Bostic because of the way Bostic had been ripping off the college. The old alibi-by-phone trick had been used often enough in movies for Sally to know it could be discounted. It was hardly a reliable alibi in the cell phone era, after all. Fieldstone could have called from anywhere.

  But what really worried Sally was the possibility that Fieldstone wasn’t involved and that Jorge might have killed either Bostic or Thomas or both. If things had begun to unravel, and if Jorge had looked like a convenient scapegoat (or scapecat, she thought), which he certainly would have, given his history, then he might have decided to take care of his partners before they took care of him. He had been very impressive when he had talked to Sally about the fact that he was never going back to prison again, and she had gotten the idea that he would do whatever it took to remain in the free world. She wasn’t sure if he would actually kill anyone, but, as people had pointed out, he’d done it before.

  Still, even after all that, Sally somehow di
dn’t think Jorge was guilty of anything at all.

  To take her mind off things, Sally turned her attention to the TV set just in time to see a car crash through a roadside barrier and tumble down the side of a mountain, bursting into flames at the bottom. She was pretty sure the burning car wasn’t the same model as the one that had shattered the barrier, not that she cared. A poorly executed car crash on TV couldn’t distract her for long.

  The trouble was that she didn’t want Jorge to be guilty of anything, even if he was dating Mae Wilkins, and that was clouding her judgment. But if he wasn’t guilty, how could she explain his late-night visit to Talon? She was convinced that there was nothing Talon wouldn’t do. After all, he sold used cars.

  On the other hand, maybe she was misjudging him. Maybe he was a completely honest man. It was just barely possible, she told herself, that she was stereotyping Talon based on nothing more than hearsay. She’d come down hard on her students if they did something like that.

  She told herself that she should call Jorge and talk to him, just come right out and ask what he’d been doing with Talon, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She was afraid of what she might find out. Besides, if Jorge turned out to be guilty, he’d have to kill her.

  Sally laughed aloud. The idea that Jorge would kill her was ludicrous. Jorge could never kill her, and he could never have killed Thomas or Bostic, either. Therefore someone else must have done it. Talon. Fieldstone. Or someone she hadn’t considered yet.

  She tried to think who that could be. An idea tried to nudge itself into her consciousness, but she couldn’t quite dredge it up from the depths where it was hiding.

  Then it came to her. Hal Kaul. Maybe that was what was bothering her—something about Hal.

  What had Jack said when they drove up to Hal’s house last night? It was something about Hal being paid a lot more than the instructors at the college. Sally knew that wasn’t true, in spite of having joked with Jack about it. Kaul didn’t make much more than she did.

  So how did Hal get that big house on the golf course? Could he have been lying to her and Jack about things? What if Thomas hadn’t recommended Bostic to him at all? What if Hal had been the one in league with Bostic instead? Jack’s attack on Bostic at the board meeting would have made it clear that things couldn’t continue as they had been, and Bostic could easily have threatened to make Hal the scapegoat (or cat, as the case may be).

  Kaul knew about the knife, too. Framing the one who’d caused him so much trouble would be an excellent way to keep anyone from suspecting him.

  Now that she thought of it, Sally wondered if Hal hadn’t been just a little too glib, if he hadn’t come up with his story about Thomas and Bostic just a little too easily. It would explain a lot.

  Sally thought it might be time to pay Hal another little visit. But this time she was going to be very careful.

  She turned off the TV set and went into the bedroom to get her pistol. It wasn’t as if she could go into Hal’s house brandishing a weapon, but she could keep it in her purse, just in case.

  Lola stretched, got up from her comfortable spot in front of the refrigerator, and followed Sally into the bedroom.

  “You can’t go, Lola,” Sally told her.

  “Meow,” Lola said, not seeming to care one way or the other.

  Sally loaded the pistol and tried to put it in her purse, a hopeless task.

  “One of these days I’m really going to have to clean this thing out,” she said.

  Lola meowed in agreement.

  “Nobody asked you,” Sally said, and started to remove used tissues, empty gum wrappers, various painkillers (aspirin, ibuprofen, Tylenol), nail files, a small bottle of hair spray (as if it would ever help), a roll of Turns, a calculator, four tubes of lipstick of various colors, and her cell phone.

  Can’t leave without the phone, she thought. She stuck it in the back pocket of her jeans. It wasn’t comfortable, but that didn’t matter. She could take it out and put it somewhere in the car.

  “That ought to do it,” she said, satisfied.

  “Meow,” Lola said in agreement.

  Sally fit the pistol into the bag and hefted it, looking at herself in the pier mirror.

  Not bad, she thought. Anyone seeing her carrying it might think that she just had a natural list to the right. Or to the left, if she switched hands.

  “See you later, Lola,” she said. Then she added, in her best John Wayne voice, which was none too good, “A woman’s gotta do what a woman’s gotta do.”

  “Meow,” Lola said doubtfully.

  “No, I’m not going to call Weems,” Sally said. “He wouldn’t listen.”

  “Meow,” Lola said in agreement.

  “I’m right about this,” Sally said. “I know I am.”

  “Meow,” Lola said.

  31

  Jack wasn’t hungry, but he told himself that he had to eat something. He was sure that he wasn’t going to do well on prison food once he was locked up because he probably couldn’t bring himself to eat it.

  When he’d taught at the prison, which most of the HCC faculty had done at one time or another, he’d heard too many stories about the cooks spitting in the mashed potatoes, licking the meat after it was cooked, and a few considerably worse things that he didn’t even like to think about, none of which contributed to a healthy appetite. Or to any appetite at all, for that matter.

  He made himself a grilled cheese sandwich. Wouldn’t be getting any of those when he was behind the twenty-foot fences topped with razor wire.

  He ate the sandwich and went into his den. The house was cool, and he could hear the rain rushing off the roof. He wondered again about the air-conditioning in prison.

  Of course the classrooms were air-conditioned. And he’d been to graduation several times in the chapel of one unit. The chapel wasn’t exactly icy, like Talon’s showroom, but it was acceptably cool.

  Jack was pretty sure, however, that the cell blocks were cooled only by buzz fans, which didn’t help at all in the summer when the temperature reached well into the nineties and sometimes into the hundreds on the outside. In the cells it would be even hotter, and the fans would just make things worse, moving the hot air around and practically cooking the inmates as if they were in a convection oven. Jack wasn’t going to like that at all.

  He shook himself and tried to laugh. He couldn’t afford to spend the rest of the day sunk in self-pity. He knew that if he did, he’d never be able to put his mind to the things he should be concentrating on, like grading papers and trying to figure out who was really guilty of killing Ralph Bostic. It wouldn’t do to worry about spending his life in prison, or the fact that Sally Good wouldn’t go out with him.

  After all, if he was going to spend the rest of his life in the Graybar Hilton, what difference did it make if Sally wouldn’t go out with him? He’d probably be able to find plenty of dates behind bars. On the other hand, maybe not. He wasn’t as young as he’d once been.

  Stop it! he told himself. That’s not funny!

  To cheer himself up, Jack put Dolly Parton’s bluegrass CD on the player. Sure, some of the songs on it were supposed to be sad, with titles like “Endless Stream of Tears,” but Jack just couldn’t be unhappy when he was listening to Dolly’s clear soprano soaring over the banjos, mandolins, and fiddles. In fact, after only a couple of songs, he found himself smiling and humming along.

  He got himself a glass of Pepsi One, put his feet up on the coffee table, and settled back to savor the songs. After listening to “Silver Dagger,” he picked up his green pen and the student papers on the coffee table. He tried grading the one on top, but he couldn’t get past the opening sentence: “I have read Flannery O’Connor’s story in which I found it to be very interesting.”

  His put the papers back down, and his mind wandered. He found himself thinking of the murders and who might have committed them. He wondered what Weems was doing, not that it mattered. Weems was looking at the wrong suspects. Jack had on
e big advantage over Weems: Jack knew that he wasn’t guilty.

  But who was guilty? That was the big question.

  Sally seemed to think she had some kind of idea, but she wouldn’t tell him. Probably because it had to do with Jorge. That was just fine with Jack. He hoped Jorge was the killer. That would take care of the competition for life, because if Jorge went into prison again, he wouldn’t be coming out, especially if he was guilty of murder.

  The more Jack thought about that, however, the less he liked it. Sally might prefer Jorge to him, but that was no reason to want a guy to be stuck in prison for the rest of his life or, even worse, executed. And to tell the truth, Jack didn’t really believe that Jorge was guilty. He’d worked with Jorge, and he liked him. It didn’t matter that Jorge had once killed someone. Jack was convinced that had been a matter of sudden rage, or maybe it had even been justifiable homicide. Jack didn’t know. No one did except Jorge, as far as Jack could determine. But that didn’t really matter. Somehow Jack just couldn’t see Jorge as someone who would kill Bostic and Thomas.

  He tried sorting through everything he knew, or thought he knew. He’d heard what Sally had heard, so he should be able to reach the same conclusions she’d reached even if he didn’t have a Ph.D.

  But the more he thought about things, the less clear they seemed to him. It was too bad his hunch about the initials hadn’t worked out.

  On the other hand, maybe Sally had brushed off that idea all too quickly. True, Weems could have easily gotten copies of the rolls for the knife-making class, but what if he hadn’t known the knife was handmade?

  That wasn’t possible, though. As much as Jack had admired his own craftsmanship, he knew he was nowhere near good enough to have made a knife that looked professionally constructed. There was a difference in a knife that was put together in a class by a first-time hobbyist and one that had been custom-made by an expert craftsman.

  Weems had probably checked with the registrar, just as Sally had said, and that was that.

  Thinking about the knife, however, gave Jack another idea. It hit him like a ballpeen hammer right between the eyes. He considered it carefully and turned it over and over in his mind. The more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that he was right.