Failure is Fatal

by Lesley A. Diehl

  “Ryan Cleates never showed today, so I called the frat house to chase him down. It seems he’s disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?”

  “They tell me he’s cleared out. Cleaned out the things in his room, and he’s gone. Time for a get-together with all the guys. I’m on my way to the frat house now. I told them this was a matter of murder.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  “I kind of thought you would. Make it quick and you can ride over with me.”

  *

  By the time Der and I entered the fraternity house, the brothers were congregated in the living room. In contrast to our earlier visit to the house, there was no one drinking, and it even looked as if the guys made some attempt to clear out the old beer bottles and pizza boxes. The television was off, and the mood was subdued. The mention of murder changed the party atmosphere for these usually rowdy boys.

  “Let me cut right to the chase. We’ve been investigating the murder of a coed from your campus. I’m here because Mr. Cleates was to meet with me this afternoon to turn over some information he had that could lead to solving that murder. The information he possessed involves this fraternity, and I know people here have that same information.” Der paused. His speech certainly got their attention; no one moved and all eyes were on him.

  “We know that this fraternity was creating stories that they asked subjects to use in Dr. Murphy’s research,” he gestured toward me, “but we need to know some specifics, like who wrote the stories and whose idea this was originally. I’m not going to go into the details of how the information relates to the murder, but I can tell you that it’s to your advantage to tell us all you can so the fraternity can be cleared of any criminal charges.” Der’s eyes met the eyes of each of the guys in the room when he finished speaking.

  One of the young men cleared his throat and said, “Look, I don’t know what the hell is going on around here, but some Black girl and me were each given a story that we were told to write on the response sheet in Dr. Murphy’s research. It seemed harmless and I didn’t ask why I had to do it. I was pledging, and it was just one of those things that pledges are asked to do. The girl made a real fuss over doing it. I was gonna keep my mouth shut, but with Ryan disappearing and all, well, I don’t want to be involved in any murder, I can tell you.”

  I recognized the guy speaking as the one who threatened Der with a lawyer in the meeting with the research subjects. Murder seemed to wipe away most of his arrogance.

  Although he already knew the identities of the fraternity brothers who gave the stories to Abby and this young man, Der said, “Just who were the individuals who gave you the stories?”

  The young man’s eyes shifted nervously to Adam Stokes and then back to Der.

  “Adam and Ryan called us into the office and gave us the stories. It was just a prank, harmless. You know that, Dr. Murphy.” There was a note of pleading in his voice.

  Of all the guys in the room, only one, Adam Stokes, managed the old nonchalant, frat boy attitude that Der and I witnessed in the earlier encounter with the boys in the house. Adam’s smug expression and superior attitude toward Der’s questions never wavered as he spoke.

  “It’s really very simple,” he said as if he were explaining the most obvious situation to a group of first graders. “Fraternities do this all the time. They choose some prank to play on a professor on campus. It’s usually something that embarrasses the person. Like last year, another fraternity created letters and made phone calls offering a position at Yale to someone in the Chemistry Department. The guy was so taken in that he showed up at Yale for an interview. It was very funny.” Adam looked at some of the guys in the room, but few returned his smile.

  “So this year, you were on the hot seat, Dr. Murphy, and you didn’t even know it. We made up stories we thought would make good endings to your sexual harassment story. It was a silly little piece of research, and we all knew it, so we thought we’d shake it up a little.”

  “So you made up these sexually detailed stories in the beginning of the year…,”I began, but stopped when I saw the puzzlement on Adam’s face.

  “Those might have been our next stories. We haven’t had a chance to use them yet. How do you know what...? Oh, right, you’ve got that folder so you know what stories we were going to develop. It was a great idea for a long-term project. We had just begun on it. And there’s certainly nothing criminal about it.”

  “Exactly when did you begin this little ‘project’ as you call it?” Der said.

  “We only had time to do a couple of stories. I’m sure you saw them, Dr. Murphy. They were written by our pledge here, Mr. Bronco, and that silly girl from the sorority, the one with the funny accent.”

  “You know, those stories weren’t clever. They were really kind of creepy and written in such a way that I find it hard to believe that a frat boy wrote them. Ryan said you had help from someone, a faculty member, perhaps,” I said. I knew I was putting my own spin on what Ryan had told me about the faculty member, but it was worth a try.

  “Yeah, we had a little help, a ghost writer you might say. Ryan took our suggestions to someone in the English Department. It could have been a faculty member or a student; I don’t know who it was,” Adam said.

  Chapter 14

  Adam had plastered an innocent look on his face, but I felt he was anything but innocent. He was hiding something.

  “And you never met this person?” said Der.

  “Nope.” Adam shrugged.

  The brothers in the room began to shift around in their seats.

  “Okay, who else in this room was in on this scheme?” said Der.

  “Well, the Pledge Committee knew about it. That would have been Ryan, myself, Martin, and Ralph,” said Adam. Everyone in the room turned their eyes to the two young men named.

  “Okay. For now I want to talk with the Pledge Committee and with Mr. Bronco in the office. The rest of you can go about your business, although I may want to talk with you later.” Der got up from his chair and headed toward the office.

  Relief seemed to sweep the room clean of the frat brothers as the young men returned to their rooms. I thought some of them probably would have liked to turn on the large television, but felt uncomfortable doing so while Der and I were still around.

  Once in the office, both Adam and Der headed for the large chair behind the desk. With a dramatic flourish, Adam swept his arm toward the chair and said, “Please take my chair.”

  “I had intended to,” Der said. He eased himself into the chair. Adam looked anything but pleased, but he slung his body nonchalantly across one of the upholstered chairs in the room, leaving the others, including me, to seat ourselves on less comfortable ones.

  “Oh, did you want this one?” Adam said to me, but he looked as if he had no intention of unfolding himself from its depths.

  “Oh sure, thanks.” I crossed the room to claim the seat Adam was occupying. I settled myself with a smile, noting a dark red flush was spreading across Adam’s face. The pledge, Mr. Bronco, got up from his chair and gestured to Adam.

  “I’ll stand,” Adam said. Bronco appeared to know that somehow Adam would see this entire episode as his fault and that he would have to pay some pledge price later. He looked shaken by the thought of what it might be.

  Der carefully reviewed with them the fraternity’s role in developing the story endings found in my research. Martin and Ralph confirmed Adam’s story that as members of the Pledge Committee along with Adam and Ryan they developed the suggestions for stories, and that Ryan had taken them to someone to begin writing the scripts. Two scripts were used, and only two according to them. I showed them a copy of the story endings and Adam indicated they were the ones produced by the “ghost writer.” Mr. Bronco, whose first name was Dennis, “Den” for short, indicated that the longer one was his. He admitted taking a copy of it into the testing session and throwing it into the trash in pieces at the end of the testing. He claimed that the phone number
written on the bottom of the sheet was already there when the story was handed to him. And even though Martin and Ralph, and to some extent Dennis, all agreed with Adam’s version of the events. The most important witness to all of this was Ryan, and he wasn’t around to confirm or deny the truth of Adam’s story. And I thought Adam very capable of lying. I was just unsure what part of the tale he spun for us was the truth and what was not. Was he capable of murder? He was a very unpleasant young man—cruel and uninterested in anyone else’s welfare. It was possible.

  “That’s all for now. I’ll be in touch in the near future with more questions and will want to interview you each individually. If you think of anything else you might want to tell me, here are my cards.” Der left the cards on the desk as he left the room.

  He turned back to the frat guys in the doorway. “I’d like to go through Ryan’s room.” With that Der turned and mounted the stairs to the second floor. I lingered a minute before following him. In that moment I heard Adam warn the others, “Just say you don’t know when you talk to the detective. Don’t tell him anymore than we already have.”

  Well, that confirmed my concern over whether or not Adam had told the entire truth. Obviously he had not.

  Adam followed us up the stairs and stood in the doorway to what was his and Ryan’s room. Der walked over to the door and firmly closed it in Adam’s face with an “excuse us.”

  After carefully examining the contents of the dresser drawers, the desk, closet, and even the bedding on Ryan’s bed, Der said, “There’s nothing much here.”

  “You’re right. Nothing. It’s too clean. There are no notebooks or papers of Ryan’s. He certainly would have had old tests, papers, and notebooks with class notes in them. Why take those if you’re in a hurry to leave, and it sounds like he was. And no computer. Every student uses a computer these days,” I said.

  “Would you leave a computer sitting around in this bus terminal? You saw how easy it was to get into the house and into all the bedrooms,” Der said. “And there’s something else that’s bothering me,” said Der. “How did these guys know the details of your research? How did they know subjects would be asked to write stories about sexual harassment?”

  “We ask subjects not to talk about the research, but many of them do and tell others what the research was about. Word gets out.”

  “Maybe.”

  Believing we found all that the room had to offer, we opened the door to leave. Adam Stokes still stood outside the room.

  “So where’s all of Ryan’s stuff?” I said.

  “What stuff?”

  “Notebooks, papers, books, his computer,” I said.

  Adam shrugged.

  “Did someone remove his stuff?”

  “I don’t know. I came back this afternoon and found the room just as you see it. All of his stuff was gone. I don’t know who took it, but not me,” said Adam. Another lie, I wondered? “Can I get back in there now? You know it’s my room too.”

  “All yours,” Der said and we turned to go down the stairs.

  When we pulled away from the frat house, Der said, “I’m gonna get a search warrant for the contents of the frat office.”

  I leaned back into seat and thought for several moments. “Ryan’s disappearance coupled with your mention of Marie’s murder certainly got the fraternity to reveal their role in playing around with my research, but there’s no evidence pointing a finger at anyone of them for her death. I don’t trust Adam. I think he’s lying or hiding something.”

  “We need to track down the person who did the ghost writing of those story endings,” Der said. He pulled into the parking lot beside headquarters.

  I got out jingling my keys in my hand, still deep in thought. I waved an absent-minded goodbye to him and got into my car. It was a while before I started the car and pulled out of the drive to head for my campus office. I paid no attention to the small car that pulled onto the roadway behind me.

  *

  The light on my answering machine indicated a message was recorded while I was away. I punched the Play button and waited, tapping a pencil rhythmically on the desk while I propped up my head in my other hand.

  “Dr. Murphy, it’s Ryan, Ryan Cleates.” I leaned forward, shocked to hear his voice. “I thought about our conversation yesterday, and I know I should talk with the police, but I just can’t. I know some stuff about the murder that I’m afraid to tell, so I think it’s better if I just get lost for a while until this whole thing settles down. I cleaned the important stuff out of my room, and I’m leaving it with a friend. The other stuff is just junk, so I left it.” There was a pause in the recording. “Gotta go. I’m really sorry about everything.” I heard the line go dead.

  He must have called soon after I left the office earlier today. There were noises in the background that sounded as if he were calling from his room in the fraternity house, which meant, I was afraid, that anyone could have overheard his call. He cleared all the important stuff from his room and left the rest? Hmmm. Then someone finished the job of removing items for him and probably searching through everything before we got there. Who? And what did he consider important stuff that he left with a friend, and what friend? I picked up the phone and dialed Der’s number, but he didn’t pick up. I decided not to leave a message. I felt as if Der and I were in the middle of a maze—too many paths that might lead us out, but no clue as to what was the better turn to take. I shook my head and tried to start at the beginning with the murder. An attractive and intelligent college woman, no boyfriend though. Why not?

  There could have been a number of other reasons why she had no boyfriend. I would be the first to admit that a relationship was not absolutely necessary for success in a young woman’s life. But I was curious about the life of this particular woman. It might provide the string to lead us out of the maze.

  I called Der from my office and again got no answer. Momentarily baffled as to how I could get the information I needed, I considered abandoning the project until the next morning. A knock on my door changed my mind. As usual, the building was relatively deserted this time of the evening. Most of the classes scheduled let out at nine o’clock. It was after that now.

  “Who’s there?” I said.

  “It’s me, Dr. Murphy. Paula.”

  “C’mon in.” I was glad for some friendly company.

  “Hi! I just got out of class where I heard about Ryan Cleates’ disappearing. I took a chance you might be in and saw a light under your door as I was coming down the hall.” She dropped her book bag on the floor and wearily dropped into the chair opposite my desk.

  “We don’t know where Ryan is or why he left. I came back here to do some work and think. Maybe you can help me.”

  At this suggestion Paula perked up, straightening in her chair and leaning forward. “Sure. What can I do?”

  “How well did you know Marie Becca?”

  “Not well. I’m not certain anyone knew her very well. She was a good student, that I know, and she spent most of her time in the library studying. Didn’t socialize much, although she often drove people downtown to the bars or to the mall because she had a car and most of us don’t.”

  “What about her roommate?”

  “Not real close, I guess, but she did have a friend in Bates Hall. I guess you would call them best friends. She might know more.”

  Paula gave me the name of the friend, and we talked for a bit longer, Paula reviewing with me some of the issues surrounding the research she was designing.

  “I’ve got to run,” Paula said. “Jeff and I are studying together for a test tomorrow.” She and I shared a smile as she left my office.

  I skimmed through the student directory and found the name Paula gave me—Lainie Kost. I glanced at my watch. Nine-thirty. Not too late to give her a call. Lainie picked up and sounded as if she had a cold. She registered little enthusiasm for a visit from anyone, certainly not a faculty member she didn’t know well.

  “I talked with that detecti
ve already. It’s been weeks now since Marie’s death. I’d really like to move on.” She sniffled into the receiver. I waited. “Alright, come on over. I’m in room four fifteen.”

  I chose to drive my car across campus to the residence hall area to avoid the cold wind that swept through the center of campus this evening. Now I had the problem of finding a place to park. All the slots were designated student parking places, and I knew that if I parked in one of those I would have a ticket when I returned. Unfortunately, the nearest faculty parking places were halfway back across the campus near the library. Driving past an empty student-parking place, I swung my car into it and decided to take a chance I could talk my way out of a ticket.

  I surveyed the lot to look for a Campus Security car cruising the area. Seeing none in the vicinity, I locked up the SUV and made my way to the entrance of the residence hall. Hoping that the weather would dissuade a patrolling officer from leaving the warmth of his car, I was betting a ticket wasn’t in my future this night. Another car was circling the lot also, but appeared to give up the search as it pulled away and headed down the hill.

  I entered the residence hall and paused just inside the door. Several people sat in front of a television, looking hypnotized by the images on the screen. Some of the students, recognizing me, called greetings as I punched the Up button. The elevator shrugged its way upward, depositing me with a whump! at the fourth floor, its doors groaning as they opened to a hallway bathed in institutional yellow lights. This was one of the residence halls up for refurbishing this summer, and it desperately needed a visit from the folks at the HGTV station.

  The door to room 415 stood open. I looked into the room and saw, seated cross-legged on the bed, a young woman with chin-length brown hair, a heart-shaped face, and large brown eyes. Her nose was very red and a box of tissues sat beside her on the bed. The used ones were thrown in a wastebasket at the foot of the bed. She missed the basket on some of her throws, and tissues littered the floor beside it. She wore a long terry cloth robe of faded blue pulled tightly around her, and she leaned back against the wall with a book beside her on the bed and a notebook in her lap.