The Musubi Murder

by Frankie Bow

  “Special order. Pharmacy.” Dan unscrewed the lid, shook out a handful of tablets and stuffed them into his mouth.

  “So when Vogel tells you to contain problems, what he means is me, the complaining professor. Not the cheating students.”

  Dan finished chewing and made an effort to swallow. “Thing is, our budget comes from tuition. If we kick a student out for cheating, that costs us real money.”

  “Oh, well. If that’s all we’re worried about, why not just pay us based on how many students get passing grades in our classes?”

  “Oh, you mean pay-per-pass. Yeah, it’s come up.”

  “What? That’s an actual thing?”

  “Don’t worry. Our accreditation people nipped that one in the bud.”

  I half rose to leave, and then Dan said, “Hang on. There was something else I wanted to talk to you about.”

  I sat back down.

  “Is it about me getting that interview with Jimmy Tanaka?” I asked. “I’m not getting anywhere with that. Maybe you guys should get someone else to write it.”

  “No, it’s not about that. Listen, this is not for sure. But in the near future, it’s possible that Bill Vogel may be unable to fulfill his duties as dean. If that happens, I’ve been asked to step in.”

  “Oh! Congratulations! That’d be such an improvement!”

  “So if I do that, someone from the Department of Management needs to fill in for me. That would be you.”

  “Me? But I don’t have tenure!”

  “You’d be the interim department chair.” Dan said.

  “The interim department chair still has to make unpopular decisions. I’d have to choose whose conference travel gets funded and whose doesn’t. I’d have to deal with all the grievances that get filed—”

  “You seem to have a pretty good understanding of what the job entails.” Dan seemed cheerful for the first time. “That’s a great start. Look, it’s been decided that you’re the best choice for the department. You haven’t made a lot of enemies.”

  “I haven’t made ‘a lot’ of enemies?”

  Dan shrugged. I gazed longingly at the pastel-colored antacid tablets scattered on the dusty bottom of the jar.

  “What about Rodge Cowper?” I said. “He has tenure! And sorry to say this, but maybe it would be a good thing if he had a little less free time on his hands.”

  “We don’t really have a choice . . .” Dan took off his glasses, set them on the desk in front of him, covered his eyes with his hands, and took a deep breath.

  “You’re the only person in our department who hasn’t been the target of some kind of grievance or complaint.”

  “Oh.”

  Dan was right. Hanson Harrison and Larry Schneider have been filing grievances against each other since Frederick Winslow Taylor was in short pants. Both of them regularly go after Dan as well, for either taking the wrong side or for not taking sides at all. As for Rodge Cowper, he’s in a category by himself. I heard that Human Resources has an entire file drawer dedicated to him, but that might have just been a rumor. “What exactly is going on with Bill Vogel, anyway?” I asked.

  “Maybe nothing.” Dan produced a chamois square from his desk drawer and polished his glasses. “But be ready to step up. Listen, one thing you can do? Call the plagiarists in for individual meetings. That usually scares them straight. But make sure you keep your door open when you have a student in there.”

  “Right. The Rodge Cowper rule.”

  “Forty-five-degree angle or greater,” he reminded me.

  “Got it.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I was meeting with the plagiarists one by one. Addressing them together in my office would presumably violate student confidentiality. Fortunately, I only had three of them to deal with. The rest had all dropped the class after I requested the individual meetings. This was promising to be a long, unpleasant afternoon. I made sure I had a full tissue box sitting on my desk.

  At least I had something to look forward to afterward. The university’s theater department starts each season with Stephen Park’s original work, The Drowning, and tonight was the dress rehearsal. This would be the first time that Pat, Emma and I would be attending since Stephen and I had broken up. It was a rare opportunity to dress up, something that people don’t do much here in Mahina. I hadn’t worn my vintage crushed-velvet slacks in at least a year, and I hoped that the dry cleaner hadn’t shrunk them too much. If I had to leave the top button open, that gold hapi coat with the embroidered dragons would cover it. Now the hard part was my hair . . . A knock on the door frame interrupted my fashion reverie.

  Davison Gonsalves, Donnie’s son, loomed in my doorway. I remembered him now from the first session of Intro to Business Management. He had strolled in ten minutes late, seated himself at the front of the room, and folded his hands behind his head at an angle that maximized the bulge of his biceps. For the remainder of the class, I had to look at his wiry black armpit hair. I blinked to clear the image from my mind. He was even taller than his father, and his bulky shoulders strained the seams of his hoodie. He had Donnie’s strong features, with a sprinkling of acne on his cheeks.

  “Davison,” I said. “Terrific. You’re right on time. Come in. Either chair is fine.”

  Davison dropped his backpack on the floor, and then plopped down in the more comfortable of my two chairs: the upholstered one left over from the last remodel of one of the Student Retention Office’s auxiliary lounges, not the plastic one with the crack across the seat.

  Two secondhand chairs might not sound like the height of luxury, but my visitors are relatively lucky. We have no budget for office furniture, so I’ve had to be resourceful about scrounging leftovers. Pat, who never misses a chance to make a statement, has furnished his office in the English Department with a pair of attached hot pink vinyl hairdryer chairs that he bought for $25.00 out of his own pocket when Tatsuya’s Moderne Beauty went out of business. The pitted chrome hairdryer bonnets are still attached. Emma refuses on principle to spend her own money to buy work furniture. If you visit her in her office, you have to stand and stare at that brain in a jar she has sitting on her file cabinet.

  As Davison made himself comfortable, I mentally composed an addendum for next semester’s syllabus: Attention male students:That toxic plume of drugstore body spray you’ve just wafted into my office will not compel me to accept your late paper or give you extra credit. What are you trying to do, gas me into submission? Why do you do this? Please stop.

  Of course I would never actually put that on my syllabus. Not before I had tenure, anyway. I pulled out a tissue and dabbed my watering eyes.

  “Eh, Professor,” Davison said, “I thought you might be hungry.”

  He reached into his backpack, produced a shallow, foil-lined cardboard box, and placed it on my desk, right on top of my stack of unopened mail. The box was filled with chunks of some kind of dried meat. I coughed to cover the sound of my stomach growling.

  “Thank you,” I said. “It was very thoughtful of you to bring this in. I’ll put the dish in the conference room so everyone can enjoy it.” We’re not supposed to accept gifts from students, but refusing can be awkward. Our solution is to share everything, thus dispersing the bribery. Or the poison, if it comes to that.

  “This is wild pig me and my friend Isaiah hunted,” he said. “We been hunting together since we was small kids.” Then with the condescending air of a tour guide, he launched into a lecture on feral pigs and the life cycle of avian malaria. He made sure to drive home the point that it was hunters (like him) who were the saviors of the native bird population.

  I glanced at my watch. Our allotted time was almost over. I noticed a kid in a green baseball cap lurking outside my door. It was my next customer, Isaiah Pung, whose paper was identical to Davison’s.

  “That was very educational,” I said. “Thank you for that. Now. Let’s set up a schedule for you to turn in your revised assignment.”

  “Professor,�
� he said, “I appreciate you letting me rewrite my paper. I enjoy your class a lot.”

  “Well, that’s very nice—”

  “Eh, you and Dr. Rodge, you’re my two favorite professors.”

  Rodge Cowper, or “Dr. Rodge,” as he tells his students to call him, teaches Human Potential (HP). Dr. Rodge assigns no homework, and requires no midterms or final exams. Instead, students get unfocused discussion sessions, funny videos, and the occasional inappropriate anecdote about Rodge’s personal life. His classes fill to capacity every semester, and I’ve never heard of anyone getting less than an A. The Student Retention Office adores Dr. Rodge.

  “Me and Dr. Rodge, huh?” I glanced at the flimsy wall separating my office from Rodge’s. “Well, that’s great.”

  “Barda, that a Podagee name?”

  “It’s not Portuguese,” I said. “It’s Albanian.”

  I took advantage of his confused silence to move us back on topic. “Here are the deadlines for your revised assignment. I need to get your literature review and outline first, then the draft, and then the final paper.” I wrote out the schedule and handed it to him. He took the paper from me and stuffed it into his backpack.

  “Eh, Professor, sorry about the misunderstanding, ah? I do good this time but.”

  Davison fist-bumped his friend Isaiah on his way out and whispered something to him. Isaiah approached my desk, set his backpack down quietly and sat down on the edge of the plastic chair.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “We never tried to hide nothing, Miss,” Isaiah mumbled into his lap. A soap-green baseball cap shielded his plain, round face. “We thought it was okay to work together.”

  Of course he had heard the whole conversation through the open doorway. Thanks to the Rodge Cowper no-closed-doors rule, and so much for the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.

  This is what I wanted to say to Isaiah Pung: You were lucky this time. Local working-class kids like you don’t usually get a second chance. If anything like this ever happens again, your entitled pal Davison Gonsalves will be fine. You won’t.

  But this is what I said: “Isaiah, I’m going to ask you to revise this, and in the future don’t let anyone else claim credit for your work. Make sure to proofread your paper for spelling and word usage. I found a few errors.”

  “Like what, Miss?”

  “Let’s see. Integrity only has two t’s. The phrase is ‘hammer and tongs,’ not ‘hammer and thongs.’ And Plutocracy doesn’t really have anything to do with planets. I’ll write up the schedule for your revisions.”

  He glanced up at me quickly and then back down at his lap.

  “Okay, Miss.” He folded the paper neatly and tucked it into the pocket of his backpack. “Thank you, Miss.”

  “By the way, Isaiah, are you related to someone named Salvador Pung?”

  “Yeah. Was my dad.”

  “I see. I’m sorry.” He sat, waiting for me to dismiss him.

  “Thanks for coming by, Isaiah. I see someone else is waiting to talk to me.”

  He nodded, picked up his backpack and left. Poor kid.

  I wasn’t going to make it through the next meeting without taking a break first. “I’ll be right back,” I called back to my final visitor as I hurried out the door and down the hall.

  When I returned, she had made herself comfortable in my office, and was occupying my good chair. I sidled back behind my desk and lowered myself carefully onto my yoga ball. When I plop down too fast I bounce right back up and bang my knees under the desk.

  Honey Akiona was a substantial young woman, with waves of black-and-gold streaked hair cascading over large gold hoop earrings. Multiple gold bracelets of varying widths and weights, adorned with black gothic script, stacked halfway up her sturdy forearms.

  I briefly returned her smile, then set her paper down on the desk, facing her, next to a printout of the Wikipedia entry from which it was derived. The identical passages were highlighted. “Ms. Akiona,” I said (I’m not always this formal with students, but her first name was Honey, and I simply couldn’t bring myself to call her that), “your paper appears to be copied directly from Wikipedia. As it says on the course syllabus, plagiarism is a very serious—”

  “I never copied that from Wikipedia,” she interrupted.

  I raised my eyebrows, speechless.

  “I never!” she insisted. “I got ’em from Dr. Rodge.”

  “Dr. Rodge. How did that happen, exactly?”

  “He handed it out in class. Said we could use it. No charge, he told us. He likes to joke around li’ dat. Professor’s a reliable source, yah? An look, I cited ’em, right down here in the footnote.”

  And so she had.

  “Yes, Dr. Rodge does like to joke, doesn’t he,” I said. “I didn’t see that. This assignment called for a bibliography, not footnotes.” I declaimed for a bit on the rules of citation and quotation, wrapping up with a stern warning about checking the credibility of sources.

  “You should know all this already,” I said. “Who was your comp instructor? It wasn’t Pat Flanagan, was it?”

  Pat has a complicated relationship with the English language. His intolerance for sloppy communication is continually at war with his anarchist sympathies. I’ve seen him correct a student for violating a grammatical rule and immediately go on to denounce the same rule as hegemonic.

  “Nah,” she said, “I never took intro comp here. I get AP English credit from high school. Eh, Miss, you going on one trip or what?”

  “Oh, the suitcase? No. I’m not going anywhere. Look, you need to do this assignment over, and you might as well do it right. Is there anything on the topic of integrity or ethics that interests you?”

  “Yeah, there is,” she said, which surprised me, in a good way. Usually that conversation goes like this:

  Is there any topic that interests you? Not really. Why did you choose this major? I dunno. Why are you in college? Shrug.

  “I forget what it’s called,” she said, “where people do the right thing ’cause they don’t want to get punished, and other people do the right thing cause it’s the right thing? Like you should want to do the right thing. The other kine, you just like one puppy doesn’t wanna get smacked.”

  “Oh! Kohlberg’s stages of moral development. At the highest stages you get into interesting questions about whistleblowers and heretics and . . . protesters. Is that what you’re thinking of?”

  “Eh Miss, you thought of da kine real quick, but,” Honey said. “Smart, you.”

  “Well. We were just discussing Kohlberg’s framework at a department meeting, so it was on my mind.”

  Hanson Harrison and Larry Schneider had been engaging in a spirited exchange when Harrison accused Schneider of being a “Kohlberg level one.” Schneider had responded to Harrison’s critique by pointing out that Harrison was a jackass.

  “You said protesters,” Honey Akiona said. “You mean like what happened with da kine, at your meeting? Jimmy Tanaka?”

  “What did you hear about that?” I asked.

  “Lotta people don’t like Jimmy Tanaka,” she said.

  “Do you know anyone who doesn’t like him?” I asked.

  “You know anyone who does?” she retorted.

  “We did appreciate his gift to the college. It’ll be nice to have money for things like fixing the air conditioning.”

  “I’ll do my paper on Kohlberg,” Honey said. “Stages of moral development. Sounds perfect. Mahalo, Dr. B. You’re right about the AC. It’s way too hot in here.”

  She plucked a morsel of smoked pork from the tray, popped it in her mouth, and sauntered out the door.

  The cafeteria was closed by now, and the conference room was locked. I did a quick mental inventory of the provisions at my house: vodka in the freezer, pickles in the fridge, a rust-speckled can or two of olives in the pantry. I supposed it wouldn’t hurt to try one piece of that smoked pork.

  I crumpled up the empty foil tray and stuffed it into the trash c
an. Davison’s peace offering had disappeared with surprising speed, and I was uncomfortably full. I realized that I hadn’t yet written his father a thank-you note for coming to speak to my class. An official letter on letterhead would have been ideal, but it was impractical. I’d have to fill out the requisition with Central Supply and wait two weeks, and even then there was no guarantee I’d get that precious single sheet of official college stationery. An email would have to do.

  I started to type:

  Dear Mr. Gonsalves:

  I wasn’t sure that struck the right tone. Too formal. Dear Mr. Gonsalves: I regret to inform you that your son is a cheating suckup. But I did eat all the food he brought in as a bribe, so who am I to judge? Sincerely, Amalia Barda, Ph. D.

  Tinny music played in Rodge Cowper’s office next door. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to listen to Pachelbel’s Canon rendered on what sounded like an eight-bit sound chip. But good for him, getting reacquainted with the classics. Different strokes, and so forth.

  Dear Donnie,

  “I walk with confidence,” announced a male voice in an unconvincing monotone. “Women are irresistibly drawn to me.”

  Rodge was playing self-affirmations, I realized. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to concentrate.

  Dear Donnie, I have come to the conclusion that this Davison creature cannot possibly be your son. You seem perfectly nice, and he is terrible. Love, Molly.

  No, Dear Donnie didn’t sound right either.

  Aloha Donnie,

  That would do.

  Thanks again for coming to talk to my students.

  I finished typing the message in and sent it. I refreshed my inbox to see if Officer Medeiros had sent any news about the plastic skull that my student had found in the wastebasket, but there was nothing.

  “I am a self-assured, confident, sexual, and dominant male,” intoned the voice from Rodge’s office. The cheesy music swelled, even louder than before. It was time to leave. I’d walk the long way to my car, so I wouldn’t have to pass Rodge’s door and risk embarrassing us both.

  I shut down my computer, picked up my bag, and stepped into the hallway. As I eased my door shut, the door to Dean Vogel’s office burst open and two police officers strode out. Not our campus security guards, actual police officers. They nodded a curt acknowledgment to me as they clanked by. They were a matched pair: young, stocky, black hair clipped short. Their badges and weapons and other shiny bits flashed in the dim flicker of the inadequate fluorescent tubes. Rodge’s office door was closed. I stood alone, still staring down the hallway, when the echoes of their footsteps had faded. I wondered what could have brought Mahina’s Finest to Bill Vogel’s office. Crimes against education?