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

by Glen Ebisch

  “What was that?” he asked.

  Karen took a shaky breath and started over.

  “I know the last time we talked I suggested that we take some time to become friends before going out.”

  “That’s right,” he said with a sinking feeling in his stomach.

  “Well, the thing is Rachel asked me if I’d like to double date tonight with her and her boyfriend. That’s Rachel over there in the kitchen,” Karen said, pointing with her spoon.

  Charles followed the spoon and saw a slender woman in the kitchen struggling mightily to clean a large pot.

  “It wouldn’t be anything complicated. Just going to a movie and then out to dessert. The thing is I don’t have a boyfriend, but I didn’t really want to tell Rachel that. So I was wondering if you would come along just to sort of help me out.” Karen bit her lower lip. “I kind of told her already that you were coming.”

  Charles looked into her pleading blue eyes. Clubbing a baby seal would have been easier than refusing her, so Charles agreed. How bad can it be, he told himself? After all, we’ll be with another couple. It was only when he was breaking down the last table with John a half hour later that he realized how unlikely it was that Rachel would not have known Karen didn’t have a boyfriend. That was almost the first thing women come to learn about each other.

  Shoving the last table against the wall, he stood stock-still and gazed across the cellar at Karen who was carrying dishes into the kitchen like a proper, God-fearing housewife. A deadening feeling made his limbs grow limp, and his will to live seemed to leave his body. He had been scammed. He knew that he had been brought down by one of the lions of the Serengeti. For a moment he was tempted to walk across the room and tell her he had changed his mind. But he knew the look of disappointment in her eyes would be too much for him to bear. No, he’d lost this round, but he’d be sure not to have it happen again.

  Chapter Thirty

  After leaving the soup kitchen, he made his way to his office at the College. He sat at his desk feeling despondent about his upcoming date. He was angry with himself for being deceived by a pleading expression and an implausible lie. Two could play this game, he thought defiantly. Immediately, however, he realized that he disliked lying and his pleading expressions never rose above the pathetic. The only way he could survive this game was by running fast and far.

  He was slumped in self-loathing when Nora Chapman appeared in the doorway. He waved her into his office. She would at least prove to be a diversion. She gingerly made her way to the chair in front of his desk, hands on her back to balance the large bulge in front.

  “How goes the effort to secure your child’s inheritance?” he asked.

  “God. Don’t ask. Garrison’s family has come out of the woodwork now that he’s gone.”

  “I thought he didn’t have any.”

  “They’re second cousins, can you believe it. Everyone in England must be a second cousin to everyone else. How can that count?”

  “It certainly seems to me that his child would take precedence.”

  “Yeah, but we’ve got to prove that first, don’t we?”

  “You mean you need to prove that Garrison is the father?”

  “Right. We got to get some of his DNA before they put him in the ground, then have the baby tested as soon as she’s born. We won’t know anything for sure until then.”

  “Is there some doubt even in your mind?”

  “Of course not, I was so faithful to Garrison that it hardly matters.”

  Not sure how to interpret that, Charles stayed silent.

  “Anyway, I’ve got another problem that I need your help with. I’m hoping that if you tell the police they won’t be so angry with me for withholding information.”

  “What information have you withheld?”

  “One night shortly before he left to come here, Garrison happened to mention that he knew a woman at Opal College by the name of Marie. Since I didn’t know at the time that he planned to come to America and try to give me the slip, it didn’t mean much to me.”

  “But it must have meant something to you after he was murdered.”

  “Sure. However, the police were making sounds like I might have had an accomplice who had killed Garrison for me. And who would be better for that role than one of his former jilted girlfriends? I figured this Marie and I would be arrested as a package if I admitted to knowing about her. She killed Garrison and I knocked off Sylvia. Then we could divide up the estate together.”

  Charles had to admit that it sounded like a pretty good plan. Thorndike might be inclined to see it that way.

  “So what do you want me to do with this information?” he asked.

  “Share it with the Lieutenant. But tell her that I have no idea who this Marie person is, and I had nothing to do with either murder. She likes you, and she might listen if it comes from you.”

  “You might look more innocent if you told her yourself.”

  She shook her head. “Just the sight of me would have her reaching for her cuffs. No, do this for me, and I’ll be eternally grateful.”

  Once more he got a pleading expression, this time from a pregnant woman. How could he refuse?

  “You have no idea who this woman might be?”

  “Only that he got to know her the last time he taught in this country.”

  “The Lieutenant will still want to talk to you about this.”

  Nora pulled a card out of a pocket in her blouse. “She can reach me through my lawyer,” she said, suddenly looking less needy.

  When Nora Chapman had left the office, Charles looked down his list of faculty and staff. He’s always liked the name Marie because that had been his wife’s middle name. He found the only woman named Marie at the college was a Marie Faltz who worked in the financial aid office. Institutions of higher learning were not listed for members of the staff, so he had no idea of her education. He doubted she would be the person, but how could he be sure? He’d have to talk to her, but trying to do that conjured up all sorts of embarrassing scenarios. Never fully comfortable talking with staff members in the first place, since they tended to look down on faculty as being almost as clueless as students, he couldn’t think of a good excuse to pay a visit to this woman he didn’t know. Finally he decided that sticking as close to the truth as possible was the way to go.

  Charles left his office and walked up the left side of the College quadrangle. It was a beautiful summer day. The sun was shining brightly but there was a comfortable breeze wafting over the hills. Small clusters of students either taking summer classes or doing work-study were scattered around the campus, bright bursts of colour against the green. When he entered the administration building the dark shadows blinded him for a moment, and he struggled to read the directory that pointed the way to the financial aid office. He realized that he hadn’t been there since the days when Amy was a student.

  At the bottom of the stairs he entered a large office filled with desks at which staff, mostly women, were diligently poring over papers or studying computer screens.

  “Can I help you?” the woman at the desk nearest the wall asked sharply, as if to warn him that this was a place of business not window shopping.

  “I wanted to see Marie Faltz.”

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  “No. But I’m a faculty member, and I just wanted to ask her a question.”

  “You’re faculty?” the woman asked, as if he had just admitted to being on a sexual predators list.

  “Yes, in the English Department. It’s a quick question and won’t take up much of her time.”

  The woman stood up and slowly made her way across the room. She bent over the woman who must have been Marie Faltz and said something. Marie glanced over at Charles and shook her head. He shifted nervously from foot to foot as if worried that he’d failed some kind of test. They conferred a few seconds more, after which Marie gave a resigned shrug. The other woman motioned for Charles to come over.

 
; “What did you want to see me about?” the woman asked when Charles reached the desk. The other woman showed no intention of leaving. Perhaps, Charles thought, she expected him to make an improper suggestion and felt she might be needed as a witness. Now that he was close enough Charles could tell that this Marie was at least fifty, probably too old to be the woman in question. But he had no choice but to forge ahead.

  “A friend of mine who teaches at Yale recently mentioned to me that he knew a woman named Marie who had been a student of his ten years ago and worked here. He didn’t tell me the woman’s last name, but I wondered if you could be that person.”

  The woman stared at Charles as if he was making no sense at all, then she gave a sharp laugh.

  “I’ve been working here ever since I got out of high school over thirty years ago.”

  The other woman also began to chortle, and Charles knew that this would be a popular source of amusement around the communal lunch table.

  “Sorry to bother you. I guess I have the wrong person.” Feeling himself blushing, Charles turned on his heel and headed for the door. The only consolation he could take away from this embarrassment was that he hadn’t mentioned his name.

  As he approached the doorway, Wayne Ryder, the head of financial aid walked in.

  “Why as I live and breathe if it isn’t Charles Bentley. To what do we own this honour?” he asked loudly, clapping a meaty hand on Charles’ shoulder.

  Waves of white hair and a florid complexion made Wayne appear simultaneously dignified and dissipated. Charles considered him a hail-fellow-unfortunately-met.

  “Nice to see you, Wayne,” Charles said softly and tried to manoeuver his way around the man’s ample girth.

  “Found any more bodies lately?” he bellowed, and looked past Charles to see the reaction of the room to his attempt at humour. Charles heard a few sycophantic twitters.

  “Not today,” Charles said, making for the door.

  Wayne said something that Charles couldn’t catch but it caused a roar of laughter in the room. Charles scurried down the hall, away from the echoing sounds.

  Once back in his office and feeling relatively safe, Charles took a deep breath and called Lieutenant Thorndike. When he got through, he reported what Nora Chapman had told him. The Lieutenant definitely wanted to speak to Nora for herself, so Charles relayed her lawyer’s information.

  “Nora thought that you might suspect that she and this Marie were accomplices. Two angry girlfriends out for revenge.”

  “The thought crossed my mind,” Thorndike said.

  “The problem is that there is only one Marie working at Opal, and she has never been near Yale. I asked her.”

  “Maybe I should question her.”

  “Trust me. That is absolutely not necessary. She’s a local woman who’s worked at the college for thirty years,” Charles said, not wanting the Lieutenant to get a whiff of his embarrassing episode.

  “Okay,” Thorndike said, puzzlement in her voice at Charles’ insistence. “But I’m coming under some pressure from the Chief to arrest Wasserman. After all, he had means, motive, and opportunity. The only thing saving him is that he was teaching at the time Sylvia was killed. If I could find some way to link him and Nora together it would be ideal.”

  “That would be a peculiar couple. I think we’re making this more complicated than it has to be.”

  “Yeah, I guess so, but right about now the complicated is starting to look simple. Say would you like to go out to dinner with me tonight and discuss the case?”

  Charles paused, struggling to find some answer other than the truth.

  “Sorry, I have a date tonight.”

  “A date,” Thorndike said, as if she would never have associated the word with Charles.

  “Yes. With one of the women who works in the soup kitchen.”

  “Huh. Well good for you. We’ll make it some other time.”

  “Definitely. I’d like that.”

  Charles hung up the phone feeling lower than he had since his forced retirement. He had to go on a date with someone who had tricked him into it, rather than with a woman whom he actually had some interest in getting to know. He had made a fool of himself in front of a room full of women of around his own age. And he felt for the first time that he might actually never come to find out who had killed Garrison Underwood and Sylvia.

  Feeling an utter failure on so many fronts, he locked his office and retreated home.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Charles pulled up in front of the neat cape cod. Although rather small, it appeared well kept, and the two garden beds on either side of the front porch were filled with early summer annuals, which he knew were high maintenance because they had to be replaced every year. Charles preferred perennials that with a little maintenance came back under their own steam providing satisfying results, while requiring little care or attention. He wasn’t surprised that Karen would put in annuals. She struck him as the kind of person who would enjoy the process of gardening and rise to the yearly challenge.

  Karen appeared at the front door wearing a colourful purple blouse with light tan slacks. She looked so put together that Charles felt self-conscious in his baggy chinos and threadbare shirt. Since Barbara’s death, he hadn’t bought much in the way of new clothes, only shopping at all when Amy visited and insisted on dragging him along to the mall. To offset his embarrassment, he thrust out his right hand holding a small bouquet of flowers. It had been so long since he dated that he didn’t know if a man gave a woman flowers on a first date, but Karen had seemed traditional enough that he didn’t think he could go wrong. Charles wondered what his male students presented to girls on first dates, probably nothing or perhaps a lid of marijuana. He wasn’t sure how much a lid was, but it sounded intriguing.

  “Oh, how beautiful,” Karen exclaimed over the flowers, while Charles found himself smiling with inordinate pride. “Let me just get them into some water, and then we can go.”

  Charles followed her down the hall into the kitchen. Compared to his kitchen, it was very modern, with granite countertops and stainless steel appliances.

  “Your kitchen is very contemporary,” Charles said, not sure whether that was meant to be a compliment or not.

  “Thank you. It was my first big project after Stan died. I’d wanted to do the kitchen for a long time it was sort of stuck in the seventies but Stan always said that he was happy with it the way it was. After he passed, I decided there was nothing stopping me from having it the way I wanted.”

  Charles nodded. He wondered how many changes Barbara would have made if he had been the first to go. Unlike his approach of settling for everything as it was, he had a feeling she would have modified the house and her way of life significantly. Would she already have remarried? He could easily imagine her doing so now that he thought about it. On the other hand, she might not want to be tied down again to someone with competing interests and goals. She’d have been free for the first time in over thirty years to be herself. The idea that he might have been a drag on Barbara’s spontaneity momentarily depressed him.

  “See. Don’t they look nice?” Karen asked, holding up the flowers in a cut glass vase. “I’ll put them right on the dining room table.” She darted out of the room and returned a second later. “I guess we’d better go. We’re supposed to meet Rachel and Jim at seven-fifteen.”

  The drive to the theatre only took ten minutes, and one compliment about her flower garden spurred Karen into talking about gardening for the whole journey. Charles was pleased to note that he had been right, she was someone who gardened because she enjoyed the activity and was not just motivated by the colourful end result.

  They found a place in the parking lot next to the small movie theatre, which was in the centre of the downtown of Opalsville. One of the few independent movie houses to survive, it got by because of the patronage of Opal College students and faculty who made it almost a point of pride to walk on its sticky floors and sit in the lumpy seats.<
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  On the street in front of the theatre stood Rachel, whom Charles had last seen scouring a pot almost as large as she was. Next to her was a big man, at least six two, who had a girth to match his height. His personality also had apparently developed to meet his size because when he was introduced to Charles as Jim, he grabbed Charles’ hand in a rock-hard grip and said he was pleased to meet a college professor.

  “A retired professor,” Charles pointed out.

  “I’m sure they never take the professor out of the man. It’s like me I’m in construction, and I still work but even if I got out of the business, a contractor is what I would always be. It’s the way I see the world. They can never take the contractor out of the man.”

  “I’m sure that’s true,” Charles said cautiously.

  “But that doesn’t mean I’m not happy to mix with all kinds,” he said, beaming at Charles, as if he were a mongrel being allowed to fraternize with the show winners.

  “So am I,” Charles agreed.

  Jim looked a bit uncertain at that but then smiled as he studied the marque.

  “Seems like the girls have got us going to a romantic comedy. Not exactly my cup of tea, but maybe it’s more yours,” he said, looking askance at Charles.

  “No, I prefer serial killer movies. I like the challenge of trying to discover our common humanity.”

  Jim appeared puzzled, then brightened. “Yeah, I like those action flicks myself.”

  Charles and Jim purchased the tickets, and they went into the lobby. Jim made a beeline to the refreshment counter and purchased the largest bucket of popcorn, asking for extra butter, and got himself a huge cup of soda. Rachel shook her head at the offer of soda, and Jim looked hurt.

  “Rachel worries about Jim’s health,” Karen whispered.

  “I would, too.”

  “He’s already had one coronary event.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “But whenever she says anything, he just brushes her off and says that you only live once.”

  “Trite but true,” Charles said. “Still it doesn’t prove his point.”