by Crider, Bill
Burns spoke up. "Aren't the directions on the instruction sheet given to the students when they pay for their stickers?"
"I don't know," the girl said in a soft, hesitant voice. "I didn't get an instruction sheet." She batted her long eyelashes as she spoke.
Burns felt compelled to point out that the sticker was stapled to the instruction sheet.
"Oh," the girl said breathily, "then I must have forgotten to read it."
"That can easily happen," Elmore said.
Burns couldn't believe it. "That's your only reason for appeal? That you forgot to read the instructions?"
"Uh, yes, I guess so. I just didn't know," the girl said.
"Of course not," Elmore said. "Dr. Burns, there's no need to taunt the woman. Anyone can make a mistake." He looked at the student with what he probably thought was a mixture of fatherly forgiveness and sternness. "I don't believe there's any need to send this little lady out of the room. I believe she's learned her lesson. Shall we vote?"
They voted, and Burns cast his first guilty vote of the year. He was the only one so to vote, however, and his faith in justice had been severely shaken.
"Maybe it was the pregnant woman," Burns told Clem. "If she ever found out about that little blonde, she'd be pretty steamed."
"No jury in the world would convict her," Clem said. "In fact, it's hard to think of a jury that would convict anyone that did Elmore in."
"It won't be easy to find an impartial jury," Burns said. "I do feel sorry for his son, though."
Clem squared off the stack of papers on her desk. "I suppose so," she said. "But have you ever had Wayne in class?"
"No, thank goodness. I've been spared that."
"Well, I haven't, and neither has Miss Darling," Clem said. "I suspect that it's just like certain classes in the 1950s were when spies from the John Birch Society sat in to take notes."
"How do you mean that?" Burns asked.
"I mean that I'm sure Wayne ran to his father with every little tidbit that he could. I mean he was a nasty little spy."
"Gee, Clem, if you didn't like the kid, just say so. You don't have to mince words with me," Burns said.
Clem laughed. "All right, I didn't like him. And he was a wimp. But to tell the truth, I'd put him right up there on the list of suspects if I were investigating this murder."
"Why tell me?"
"Well, you were closeted in with the police, weren't you? That's what everyone says."
"Good grief. Before long, people will be expecting me to wear a deerstalker and smoke a pipe. All I did was answer a few questions."
"Just the same, I know what I'd do," Clem said.
Burns's curiosity got the best of him. "All right, all right. Tell me why. You know I can't stand it."
"He treats that boy just like he treats us," Clem said. "That's reason enough."
"As you tell your freshmen, 'be specific.'"
"Oh, very well. This happened at the beginning of school, during the registration period. You know that our station is on the second floor of the Library?"
"I've worked there for years and years, every semester," Burns said.
"Well, I was going downstairs to get a soda from the machine. I took the back stairs to avoid all those students coming up the front. Wayne was bringing up a box of course plans for someone on our floor. His father was with him. I don't know exactly what happened, but maybe in trying to avoid me Wayne stumbled. He dropped the box, and course plans flew all over the place. His father called him, I believe, an 'incompetent bozo' and a 'lout.' I was quite embarrassed. I helped pick up the plans, but I wanted simply to disappear. And yet the boy appeared to be devoted to him. Why, I'll never know."
Burns didn't know either, but he said, "Sometimes people respond to that kind of thing. Look at the devotion Vince Lombardi's players had for him."
Clem looked at him blankly.
Realizing that Clem wasn't a football fan, Burns switched comparisons. "Look at Hitler. He was obviously crazy and brutal, but he had quite a following. And then there's Captain Ahab," he said, switching again, this time to literature. "He treated his crew miserably, but they followed him and believed in him."
"I suppose so," Clem said, "but it's sad in a way."
"Of course it is. But even children who are physically abused, and I mean severely physically abused, cry when they're taken away from the parents who abuse them."
"That's even sadder," Clem said.
Trying to lighten the mood, Burns said, "Besides, if everyone who was called a 'bozo' by Elmore got in line to kill him, the one at the end would starve to death before he got his chance."
Clem smiled. "That's certainly true."
"Didn't he even call the chairman of our board a bozo in one of our monthly faculty meetings?"
"I believe what he said was, 'Just because a man is chairman of the board doesn't mean he can't be a bozo,'" Clem said.
"Maybe the chairman killed him," Burns said.
"Too many suspects," Clem said "Sounds like a good title for a book."
"Probably already been used," Burns said.
Chapter 7
Miss Darling called out to Burns as he tried to slip past her office, so he stepped in. Miss Darling wore a high-necked white blouse and looked a bit like a doll would look if dolls had old faces instead of young ones.
"I just heard about poor Dean Elmore," Miss Darling said. She was probably the only person who would refer to him that way.
Burns moved her purse out of the chair by her desk and sat down. He often wondered what women carried in their purses to make them so difficult to move. "Yes," he said. "It's very sad."
"There's no need to be sarcastic, Dr. Burns," Miss Darling said. "I know that Dr. Elmore has had his differences with most of the faculty, but his death is sad. Remember what Donne says: 'No man is an island.' Not even a department chairman."
Miss Darling was undoubtedly right, but somehow Burns did not feel diminished by Elmore's death. If anything, he felt as if his horizons had been considerably expanded. So he didn't say anything.
"Still," Miss Darling continued, "I did truly believe that his plan for the school was an evil plan. I'm glad that it will not be put into effect."
Burns agreed.
"I hope that your discovery of the . . . ah . . . corpse did not discompose you," Miss Darling said.
Burns was surprised to find that he was not in the least discomposed, nor had he been. One might have thought that he found dead bodies every day of the week, so little effect had the experience had on him. He wondered if he was particularly cold-blooded or merely normal. "No," he said. "I feel fine. Maybe I can only be affected by literature. The real thing doesn't seem to bother me."
"Pish," Miss Darling said. She was the only person Burns had ever known who actually said "pish."
"I'm sure that you feel as deeply for your fellow man as anyone does."
"I suppose so," Burns said, and maybe it was true. He didn't exactly regard Elmore as his fellow man, however.
They discussed Elmore's death a few minutes longer, but without any speculation as to who would take his place. Burns was sure that Miss Darling would fall right in line, no matter who it was. In fact, by the time a successor was appointed, Miss Darling might have forgotten the whole thing.
Back in his office, Burns decided to stay at school for the rest of the afternoon. Often he went home on Tuesdays, although he had to drive back in the evening for his once-a-week class in American fiction, which met at six o'clock. Today, the drive home didn't seem worth the trouble, even though it took only five minutes. Tonight's novel was As I Lay Dying, and Burns thought it might be a good idea to spend the afternoon looking over a few articles and skimming through the primary text again.
He spent two hours in study, then looked in his middle drawer for his lists. There were several that he had tossed in, including one on which he was trying to list the ten great American novels. This was a list that he'd tried more than once and never go
tten very far on. One day he wanted Huckleberry Finn in the top spot, and the next he wanted Moby. Dick. Then the day after that, he wanted The Sound and the Fury. At that point he'd usually decide that the list was too conventional anyway and toss it aside. He'd never gotten past the number five in any attempt he'd made.
The fact that he'd never finished didn't bother him, however. The purpose of the lists was relaxation and stimulation, not definitive enumeration. The lists were just something he did for fun, the way some people worked crossword puzzles or played bridge. Crossword puzzles generally bored him, and he could never remember how to respond if his bridge partner should happen to bid one no-trump. So he made his lists.
Today, however, he couldn't get interested. It had gotten late, most of the faculty had gone home by three or four o'clock, and it was now after five. The building was most likely completely deserted, and Burns sat listening to the sounds it made.
Occasionally the wind would rattle the windowpanes, which were quite loose in their frames. The putty that held them was shrunken and dried, and chunks of it had long ago fallen out. The rafters would creak, and every now and then the old radiators would pop and clang as the steam from the school's decrepit boiler surged and receded.
This was the time of day that Burns liked the building best, when it was almost as if it belonged to him. He thought for a second about the pigeon shit above his head, and then he wondered if it were symbolic. He looked up at the ceiling tiles that Mal Tomlin assured him were all that lay between Carl Burns the man and Carl Burns the guano statue. There was an ominous dark stain on one of the tiles, as if the roof had leaked and the water had run through some vile substance before soaking into the tile. If he stared at the stain long enough, it assumed the shape of a pigeon.
He'd been reading Faulkner too long, he thought. He picked up As I Lay Dying again and began to thumb through it. "My mother is a fish," he read.
The class went well, no students being moved to ask about the death of Dean Elmore. Most of them even appeared to have read the book, and a few even had intelligent questions to ask. The only problem was that at about seven-thirty the heat began to fail. The builders of Main had never really heard of the benefits of insulation, so by eight o'clock most of the class had on their coats and sweaters. Burns dismissed them before it got so cold that they were distracted from the discussion.
After class, Burns locked his office and visited The Rat. The Rat was in the men's room, located on the second floor. Main having only one restroom per floor, the first and third floors had gotten women's rooms.
The Rat had first appeared in late summer, shortly after one of Rose's periodic campaigns to wipe out the rodent population. It was easy to keep up with these campaigns because when they began green and white boxes of poison would appear in both likely and unlikely places. There were usually several in the history lounge, and there were always plenty in the restrooms.
The Rat, Burns speculated, was a victim of one or more of those boxes. At first only his tail appeared, discovered by Earl Fox as he opened the door to one of the two toilet stalls in the men's room, which had not been noticeably improved since it was first used by Hartley Gorman himself. There was a good inch of space between the floor and the back wall, and the toilet crouched crazily at a slightly tilted angle. There was a wide, thin board attached somehow to the back wall, which was of the original stone. All this had been painted white, a color that did little to take away the stall's resemblance to a medieval torture chamber. Burns always half expected Torquemada to leap out at him when he opened the door.
The Rat had never leaped at anyone. It was too dead for leaping, but its tail was enough to scare Fox into the screaming meemies. He had exploded out the men's room door yelling incoherently and disturbing classes not only in Main but probably in every other building on campus. Burns had been in the history lounge at the time, and he had run out to see what had happened.
Fox was standing in the hall, his knees together like September Morn, one hand in his mouth and the other pointing at the men's room door. Burns went in and opened the stall door. The Rat's tail was hanging straight down from behind the board attached to the back wall. The tail looked tough and leathery, and it was banded like a snake.
No one ever figured out how a rat, which must have been of considerable size, since Mal Tomlin measured its tail precisely at eight-and-a-half inches in length, could have gotten between the board and the wall to do its dying, but it was indisputably there.
And there it remained. Rose adamantly refused to touch it. "I ain't 'bout to touch no dead rat's tail," she informed Fox and Burns when they told her about it. "I ain't gone touch it even with gloves on, and that's all they is to it. Let 'em fire me if they want to."
Burns and Fox didn't blame her, and being firm believers in the chain of command they didn't go over her head to her supervisor. They just left the rat there as a conversation piece, and it came to be known as The Rat.
As summer wore into fall, The Rat began to dry out and slip a little lower down the wall. Burns figured that maybe in a couple of years it would finally slip completely out and fall to the floor. At the present time, however, only the tail, part of its rump, and its two back paws could be seen. It gave a man something to reflect on as he faced the commode for relief. There had been no urinals in Hartley Gorman's day, and there were none now.
Having paid his respects to The Rat, Burns went downstairs to his car. Tonight, sitting on the frigid vinyl seats was like sitting on a glacier. But the car started immediately, and the heater would be working after a few blocks.
Burns liked to stop for a pizza after his night class, so he drove to the Pizza Delight, a local, non-franchise establishment that was generous with its toppings and not too heavy on the sauce. It wasn't too heavy on decoration, either, and the interior was mostly rough wood. There were a number of plain tables with Formica tops and no cloths, surrounded by metal chairs with hard wooden seats. Burns ordered a pizza with everything, except anchovies, which he hated, and looked around for a place to sit.
Someone motioned to him from the dimly lighted rear tables, and he walked back. It was Mal Tomlin and his wife. Burns joined them.
Mal was smoking a cigarette, as usual. "I was just telling Joynell about you finding the dear dead dean," he said as Burns sat down.
"It must have been horrible," Joynell Tomlin said. She was a direct contrast to the compact muscularity of her husband, being somewhat tall and chubby. Her face was round and soft, like the Pillsbury doughboy's, and her hands were fat and pink. She didn't powder her hands. She was also given to blonde wigs that were nearly as spectacular as those worn on stage by Dolly Parton, though the wigs were where any resemblance ended, except possibly in the mind of Joynell.
"It wasn't so bad," Burns said. "I guess I was too surprised to be shocked."
Joynell uttered a disconcerting titter. "Oh, no," she said. "I didn't mean that you'd be shocked. I bet nobody is shocked. That man was bound to get killed, just by being who he was. I just mean it must have been a horrible sight."
"Let's not talk about it while we're eating," Mal said. He and Joynell had already gotten their order, a large pepperoni pizza, most of which had probably been consumed by Joynell.
"Oh, we've just got to talk about it," Joynell said. "Tell me, Carl, did you ever hear about what Elmore tried to do to Mal?"
"Uh, I'm not sure," Burns said. Elmore had done so many things to so many people that it was hard to keep up with what he'd done to whom. Or tried to do.
"It's ancient history," Mal said. "Let's just forget it. 'De mortuis nil—'"
"None of that Latin stuff, honey," Joynell said, reaching for the last slice of pizza lying on the round metal plate. She turned to Burns. "He was going to strip Mal of his chairmanship and put Clark Woods in."
Burns was amazed. "You're kidding," he said, laughing. "Not Clark Woods, the Young Philosopher. Why didn't you tell me about this?"
Joynell took a huge bite of pizza
and chewed meditatively, leaving Mal to answer. "It wasn't anything, really. I don't think anything would ever have come of it even if they hadn't found out about Woods."
What "they," meaning Elmore, had found out was that Woods had been seducing coeds with some regularity. He was a good-looking young man, around thirty, who looked like a younger version of Frank Gifford and who in fact had been quite a collegiate football player. He also looked exactly like a "real" college professor should look, as opposed to someone like, say, Earl Fox. Woods wore tweedy jackets with leather patches on the sleeves, and fisherman's knit sweaters, and Clark's desert boots. He was always quoting Dewey or Piaget, gaining his nickname from his frequent reference to their works. After one girl's husband had complained about him to the administration and produced certain incriminating evidence (rumor had it that the evidence was his wife's tearful, tape-recorded confession), Woods had departed the campus for groves of academe unknown.
"I can't believe it," Burns said. "The Young Philosopher."
"Believe it, kiddo," Joynell said, having finished off the triangular wedge of pizza in about three large-size chomps. "I thought Mal was going to have a stroke when he told me about it."
"It was a long time ago," Mal said, "right after Elmore took over as dean. I'd almost forgotten about it."
"I bet," his wife said, wiping her mouth with a paper napkin.
"What were you supposed to do? Quit?" Burns asked. Mal mashed his cigarette in the ashtray. "Nothing like that," he said. "I'd just become a regular faculty member. No reduction in salary, even. Of course, Woods would have been my boss."
Joynell had reached under her chair for her purse, opened it, and found a tube of lipstick, which she was applying generously to her pouty mouth. "You can imagine how much Mal would like that," she said, never missing a stroke.
Burns leaned back in his chair. "But why? I mean, what did Woods have that you don't have?" He paused. "I mean besides looks, sex appeal, and a full head of hair." Tomlin was sensitive about his thinning hair, and Burns regretted having said anything as soon as the words had left his mouth. Tomlin didn't seem to notice, however.
