A Body In My Office (The Charles Bentley Mysteries Book 1)

by Glen Ebisch

  He looked up and saw Nora Chapman standing there, hands on her back helping to support her protuberant stomach. She entered without waiting for a reply.

  “Please come in,” Charles said unnecessarily, wondering if the woman was carrying a gun. It didn’t seem such an odd thing to wonder about given recent events.

  As she walked into the room, Charles decided she probably wasn’t armed. The hands pressed to her back were most likely empty, and she didn’t have a bag. He doubted she was in any condition to hit him over the head with something or use a knife.

  “I just came by to pick up Garrison’s stuff. I guess I’m the closest thing to a relative that he’s got, in this country at least.”

  “I’m afraid that Sylvia had already taken whatever he left in the office. I don’t know where it would be now. You’ll have to ask Lieutenant Thorndike.”

  Nora made a face. “I’d rather not deal with her. I have a feeling that Thorndike thinks I murdered Sylvia.”

  “You did seem pretty angry with her.”

  “Not angry exactly.” Nora patted her stomach. “I just wanted to make sure that Daphne here was going to get her fair share of her father’s estate. And even if I was angry, I’ve been angry with a lot of people, but I’ve never murdered anyone. The worst I would have done is shouted at her if she refused to recognize Daphne’s just claims.”

  “I see.”

  “Maybe you could talk to the Lieutenant and get her to go easy on me.”

  “Why would I have any influence over what Lieutenant Thorndike thinks?”

  “I saw the way she looked at you when she drove us to the police station. There was more than just police interest.”

  Charles felt his pulse rate go up and his mood lighten, but he tried to ignore it.

  “I doubt that.”

  Nora shook her head. “I’m good at picking up on things like that. She’s definitely got a personal interest in you.”

  “Well, even if she does, I’m certain she’s not going to let me influence the conduct of her investigation.”

  Nora’s face turned a blotchy red and her voice rose angrily. “It’s silly to think that I could have killed Sylvia. I’ve never handled a gun in my life, and where in the world would I have gotten one in less than twelve hours in a foreign country?”

  “There are ways,” Charles said vaguely, although secretly he agreed with her.

  “And I certainly didn’t murder Garrison. I wasn’t even in the country when he was killed.”

  “You could have had an accomplice,” Charles said. He regretted saying it as soon as the words left his mouth because he might have been giving away a line of thought Thorndike wanted to keep confidential.

  “An accomplice! What do you think I am? The head of a criminal gang?”

  She struggled to her feet and stood there staring venomously at Charles for a moment.

  “I’ve got a lawyer—an American lawyer—and I plan to get out of this god-awful country as soon as possible. And I will also see that little Daphne gets what she is entitled to have.”

  Turning as quickly as she could in her awkward state, she waddled out of the office. Charles sat there for a moment looking at the spot where she had been. She was certainly a mercurial woman: calm and reasonable one moment, full of angry self-vindication the next. He could easily imagine her hitting Underwood over the head in a moment of anger. Perhaps he would recommend to Lieutenant Thorndike that she double check on whether Nora was actually on the later flight or whether there was any way she could have arrived sooner.

  Charles heard a rumbling in his midsection and realized that he was hungry. Debating whether to go home or not for lunch, he finally decided to go to the faculty dining room. There wouldn’t be many people there in the summer, but just possibly there might be someone he wanted to talk to. Closing and locking his desk, a security precaution he had consistently followed over the years, and carefully locking his office door behind him, he headed toward the student centre.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The faculty dining room at Opal College had the appearance of a German beer garden. Dark beamed ceilings and shelves of ornate beer mugs were evident everywhere. Since the mandatory state drinking age was twenty-one, alcohol was never served on campus, except on special faculty/staff occasions, and then it was wine rather than beer. Charles had wondered what had inspired the decorations when he first came to Opal. Reading a history of the college, authored by a faculty member who had taught at the college for fifty years and was already ancient when Charles arrived, had told him that one of college’s late nineteenth century benefactors, William Dornmeister, had provided the funds for the student centre. A man who had studied in Germany, he was enamoured of all things Teutonic, and had designed the room to imitate the drinking halls of his youth. The sober, mostly non-Germanic faculty of today seemed to tolerate the room or at least lacked the passion to have it changed.

  Charles went down the cafeteria line selecting only a turkey on rye sandwich and a cup of coffee. Although several of the desserts looked good, he resisted taking one, concerned about his caloric intake now that he was no longer working. The thought of becoming the typical senior citizen with a bulging belly, wearing shorts and a tight t-shirt all summer, filled him with horror. Perhaps if his running program worked out, he would be able to allow himself some sweets. Life was always a matter of negotiating with yourself between what you wanted and what you should have, and Charles prided himself on having the discipline to do that wisely.

  Standing at the door to the dining room with the tray in his hands, he surveyed the room. In the far corner was a table where six administrators sat. Not getting the full summer off like faculty, they seemed to revel in having the dining room pretty much to themselves. Charles knew that administrators usually felt like they were the core of the college because they made most of the important decisions and knew the inner workings of the bureaucracy, as opposed to the faculty whom they regarded as rather lazy part-time employees. Charles was about to sit by himself on the other side of the room when he felt a hand on his arm.

  “Well, hello, Charles, fancy meeting you here,” said Clive Bishop who taught French. “Shall we claim a table and provide at least a soupçon of academic respectability to the room?”

  Charles smiled. “You choose.”

  Clive led them to a table just outside hearing distance of the administrators.

  “This way they can strain without success to discover what we might be plotting,” Clive whispered.

  “My plotting days are over,” Charles said, taking his sandwich and coffee off the tray and placing them on the table.

  “Ah, yes, so I’d heard. Congratulations, I suppose.”

  “Yes, I’m not sure about that either. First I was pushed out the door. Then I was invited back in, and declined the invitation.”

  Clive asked for all the details, and Charles provided them.

  “The Dean should be thankful that someone bashed in Underwood’s head before he got the chance to teach,” Clive offered.

  “Why is that?”

  “Well, he taught in this country once before. Did you know that?”

  Charles nodded. “His wife, Sylvia, mentioned that he had taught in the U.S. about ten years ago. She said he went back home because in England he could make more of a splash.”

  “That may be the reason he gave her, but the direct cause of his leaving was that he got fired. He definitely left Yale under something of a dark cloud. I’m surprised the Dean wasn’t aware of this.”

  Clive speared some of his salad and chewed ruminatively.

  “You know Carruthers. His academic contacts, such as they are, incline more to the social sciences than the humanities,” Charles said.

  “Yes, he is rather insulated.”

  “What did Underwood get fired for doing?”

  “The specifics were always left rather vague, but it involved inappropriate behaviour with female students.”

  “He must have
been a bit old to have had any appeal to the undergraduates,” said Charles.

  Clive shrugged. “He was in his middle thirties and in the last glow of youth at the time. I remember him as quite a handsome man. As I recall, he thought his appeal was universal, extending across the spectrum from undergraduate to graduate students.”

  “I wonder if he made any long lasting enemies. Someone who would still bear a grudge ten years later.”

  “Probably most of the Yale English Department, a number of select administrators, and a wide swath of the female student population remember him with malice, but whether that would extend to murdering him I doubt. Maybe revenge is best served cold, but I believe most people murder because immediate circumstances impel them to do so. If someone was going to murder him because of his behaviour at Yale, I think it would have happened at the time.”

  Charles nodded, but wasn’t convinced. Some people, he thought, had to let an idea ripen before they could act on it. The hills of New England were rife with long simmering animosities that only years later burst into outright violence. The more he thought about it, the more he was inclined to think that a student would be more likely to bear a grudge. After all, they were the ones that Underwood had actually abused. This suggested that it might be worthwhile to see if anyone on the Opal College faculty had been a student at Yale while Underwood was teaching there. That should be easy to discover and might yield some new suspects.

  Chapter Eighteen

  When Charles got home he decided that the best way to find out whether any of Opal’s faculty had been at Yale was to go through Opal’s website and check out the standard information about each faculty member, which would include where they had gone to graduate school. It would involve making an educated guess about the age of a faculty member, but Charles had at least a passing acquaintance with many on the faculty. Their rank would also help determine their age. Anyone who had been studying at Yale ten years ago probably would be no more than an associate professor.

  He had just settled in at the desk in his study when there came a knock at the front door. Charles went down the hall and impatiently pulled the door open.

  “Hi Dad,” his daughter Amy said with a nervous smile.

  “Well, hello,” Charles replied after a startled moment, surprised to see her there since she never came without calling first. “I didn’t expect you.” He stepped back to let her into the hallway.

  “I just happened to be in the area and thought I’d drop by.” She patted her short brown hair into place and gave him a hug.

  “Why did you happen to be in the area?” Charles said, as they went into the living room and sat down.

  “There was a show at the Clark Museum I wanted to see.”

  “Enough to come all the way out here by yourself? That’s almost a seven hour round trip for the sake of art.”

  “Well, I also wanted to see you. I was a little worried about how you might be handling forced retirement.”

  “You wanted to see if I was hanging from the chandelier?”

  “That’s not funny,” Amy said. “You know I worry about you being out here all by yourself without Mom.”

  “I know you do,” Charles said soothingly. “But there’s no reason to be concerned. In fact, my retirement has gone from forced to voluntary.”

  Charles went on to give an account of his latest conversation with the Dean.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to go back to work?” Amy asked.

  “Positive. It’s time for me to move on to a new stage of life.”

  That sounded like a television sound bite and excessively optimistic, but he hoped Amy would at least partially believe it.

  “Doing what?” she asked, sceptically.

  “I’m not certain yet. New stages of life are not something to be rushed into.”

  Charles could tell she was going to press him on the subject, so he changed the topic in a way he hoped would pull her off track.

  “The criminal investigation of the Underwood murder is proceeding apace. But there’s been another murder.”

  “My God!”

  Charles went on to fill her in on the murder of Sylvia. He left out the fact that someone had tried to shoot him on the patio as being too alarming. He could see Amy physically dragging him back to Boston.

  “So,” he summed up, “None of this really involved me in any way. I just happened to be among the first to find the body in both cases. I was a sort of helpless first responder.”

  “Maybe you should stay in more,” Amy muttered.

  “The campus of Opal has always seemed safe enough until now.”

  There was another knock on the front door.

  “I seem to be exceedingly popular,” Charles said, standing.

  “Make sure it’s someone you know before opening the door,” Amy warned.

  Charles pulled back the sheer curtain that covered the window in the door, and saw Karen Melrose standing on the front porch with a package in her hand. She saw him before he could let the curtain drop and gave a big smile. Short of being obviously rude, he had to open the door.

  “Hello,” Karen said with a sort of breathless nervousness. “I was baking a Bundt cake and the recipe made two. I thought maybe you’d like one.”

  She thrust the bundle towards him like it was a baby he’d abandoned.

  “How did you get my address?” Charles asked, not reaching out to take the cake.

  “There are only two Bentleys in the book. You’re the only Charles,” she said, still holding the cake out in front of her.” Tears were starting to well in the back of her eyes.

  “Thank you very much for the cake. It was very kind of you,” Amy said, edging past her father in the doorway and taking the cake. “Would you like to come in? I’m Amy, Charles’ daughter.”

  Karen stepped inside and Amy invited her to come back to the kitchen, leaving Charles standing at the end of the hall. He heard the animated female voices coming from the rear of the house. There was something soothing about hearing female voices again. The house had been far too silent for the past three years. Yet he couldn’t get past a certain paranoia with regard to a woman who would so blatantly pursue him. He knew he should go into the kitchen and join in the conversation. It was boorish not to do so, but by the time he’d made up his mind to forge ahead, Karen was coming down the hall toward him with Amy close behind.

  “Thanks again for the cake. It was very thoughtful,” Amy said. “Wasn’t it, Dad?”

  “Very thoughtful,” Charles mumbled.

  Karen gave him a valiant smile.

  “Well, I’ll see you tomorrow at the soup kitchen.”

  When Charles didn’t respond right away, she gave him a second glance.

  “Won’t I?”

  “Yes, of course. And thank you,” Charles amended, speaking slowly as though he were learning a foreign language.

  Once Karen had left, he turned to face Amy, whose expression indicated that she was less than pleased.

  “You were very rude to that woman,” she said.

  “I don’t like being stalked. I hardly know her and she shows up at my door waving baked goods around. There’s no privacy anymore.”

  “You make her sound like a psychopath. She’s just a nice lady with a Bundt cake.”

  “That’s how it works. Don’t you understand? You know which zebra on the Serengeti becomes dinner—the slowest—and that’s the one that’s had too many high calorie desserts. Gain weight, get slow, and soon a lioness is pulling you down. Yesterday a blueberry crunch, today a Bundt cake, it’s all part of the plan.”

  “And would it be so bad if you got pulled down?” Amy asked with a smile.

  Charles stared at her in horror.

  “After all, it’s been three years since Mom died. Don’t you think it’s time to start dating again?”

  He shrugged.

  “Mom would certainly not want you to be alone for the rest of your life. And you’re still a fairly attractive man, althoug
h a bit cranky and obsessive compulsive. Why don’t you ask Karen out on a date and see where it leads?”

  “I know where it will lead, deeper into the tangled web of relationships and commitments.”

  Amy paid no attention to him and looked over his shoulder into the distance.

  “I kind of thought you and Andrea might get together after Mom died.”

  Although Charles’ heart sang at the idea, he scoffed. “She’s only in her thirties. Hardly any older than you.”

  “I didn’t say it would be a good thing, only that you were always attracted to her.”

  Charles grunted. He knew Amy had never liked Andrea. He always suspected she was mildly jealous because Andrea had replaced her as a sort of surrogate daughter.

  “And if you don’t want all that blueberry crunch, Jack and I will be happy to eat it. It’s one of his favourites.”

  Torn between two unpleasant alternatives of eating the crunch himself and making Jack, the Philistine, happy, Charles marched out into the kitchen and put the crunch in a plastic container, which he thrust at Amy.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to keep some?” she asked.

  “Take it.”

  “Thanks. Since when have you been working in the soup kitchen?”

  “Just recently. Ruth Wasserman, next door, talked me into it.”

  “I doubt anyone talked you into anything. Probably once you heard the idea, you really wanted to do it.”

  “Why would I want to?” Charles asked, genuinely curious.

  “Because of your good Protestant ethic—a day without work is a day wasted.”

  “Don’t be silly. I can be as lazy as the next fellow.”

  Amy laughed. “Only if the next fellow is as driven as you are.”

  Charles made no comment.

  “Well, I guess I should be getting on to what I came out here to do.”

  “You’ve already done that. You’ve checked on me.”

  “I meant going to the art gallery.”

  “Yes, you’d better hurry if you plan to beat the rush hour traffic into Boston.”

  Amy hugged Charles and kissed him on the cheek.

  “Please promise me you’ll give some thought to what I said.”