One Dead Dean

by Crider, Bill

  "I guess so," Burns said. "Tell me something. How long has Miss Darling been on the faculty here?"

  "Forever," Fox said.

  "Seriously," Burns said.

  "I don't know," Fox said. "I guess we could look in the catalog."

  "You have one in your office?"

  "Yeah. I'll get it." Fox balanced what was left of his cigarette on the Sprite can and went out. In a minute he was back with the HGC Bulletin. He handed it to Burns.

  Burns opened the catalog to the back, where the faculty members were listed, and ran his finger down the first page. "Here she is," he said. He showed Fox the details:

  DARLING, Alma Sue. Associate Professor of English. BA, Baylor, 1938. MA, Baylor, 1939. Tenured."

  "Tenured!" Fox said. "Tenured! I can't believe this. And she's an associate professor! But she doesn't even have her doctorate! What's going on here?"

  Burns knew what Fox meant. It was a well-known fact that no one at HGC had received tenure in the last fifteen years. Whenever there was to be a visit by an accrediting agency, the school's administrators would appoint a committee of faculty to study the matter and to recommend a tenure policy. Then, after the members of the agency's investigative team had left the campus, the administration would reject the policy, in fear that if too many people got tenure there would be no way to fire anyone in case of severe financial crunch. But Miss Darling was a special case.

  "Don't you remember that faculty meeting about ten years ago?" Burns asked. "We were both pretty new here, and President Rogers got up and announced that he was giving Miss Darling tenure just because he wanted to and because she served as president of the Faculty Club?"

  Fox slid his Bel-Air into the Sprite can and lit another one. "I remember now," he said. "We couldn't believe it. Of course, I'd believe anything now. It didn't take long to get used to stuff like that."

  "I guess that's how she got to be an associate, too," Burns said.

  "It must be nice," Fox said. "Alma Sue. Can you beat that?"

  "I wouldn't even try," Burns said. "See you later." He left the lounge and went back upstairs.

  In his office, Burns began trying to fit things into a pattern. Miss Darling, who was slightly flaky anyway, must feel an intense loyalty to the school that had given her a promotion that, according to the rules, she really didn't merit. Not only that, she had received tenure, something that no one else had accomplished in fifteen years. And here was Elmore, running the school straight into bankruptcy. Of course, Miss Darling had never spoken out in faculty meetings. That wouldn't be her style. But no doubt she had seen what was going on, and it worried her. The final blow must have been Elmore's plan to make the school a sort of degree mill. Miss Darling had gone to see him, probably only to discuss the situation. Something had been said, heated words exchanged, and Miss Darling had snatched up the paper-clip holder and lashed out at Elmore with it, not realizing that she was striking a blow that could kill.

  The more Burns thought about his reconstruction of events, the more plausible it seemed. But what about the pig's snout?

  All right, assume that Dorinda Edgely (and why wasn't she at the funeral?) actually had lost the snout in the ladies' room in Main. Miss Darling could have seen it there and picked it up easily enough. Maybe she was thinking of returning it. Or maybe she thought that Elmore was a pig for what he was doing to HGC. Anyway, she took the snout with her to his office and left it there rather than try to retrieve it from beneath his head after striking him.

  It was all plausible. It all fit. But Burns realized that he had really done exactly the same thing that Napier had done with Coach Thomas: he had built a fine tissue of assumptions and possibilities, without a single piece of factual evidence to support them.

  Burns thought again about Miss Darling's purse and how heavy it had been. Surely by now she would have managed to dispose of the paper-clip holder. But where had she put it? She wouldn't think like a criminal and throw it off the nearest bridge over Orchard Creek, surely. What if she'd hidden it somewhere in her office?

  Of course, assuming she did carry the weapon out of the building in her purse, she could simply have taken it home and put it out with the trash. Every block in Pecan City had a large metal dumpster situated in the alley behind the houses. Twice a week, the city's garbage trucks came by and hoisted up the dumpsters, pouring the contents into a large bin and crushing them before taking everything to the sanitary landfill, where it was dumped into a hole and covered with dirt by a bulldozer.

  If Miss Darling had disposed of the cut-glass weapon that way, there was little chance that it would ever be seen again; and Burns thought that if he had been in possession of something that he had used to kill someone, he would get rid of it in just that way.

  But Miss Darling might not have been thinking clearly. The killing might have rattled her, and she might have done something foolish, like hiding the holder in her office.

  Burns decided to search her office.

  He realized that he was working on only one piece of information, the fact that Bunni had seen Miss Darling enter the Administration Building shortly before assembly. He knew that he wouldn't let a student get by with that sort of reasoning in an essay. But it all seemed so possible.

  Miss Darling never went to lunch, probably because she didn't want to have to walk down the stairs and then return. She always brought a sandwich and ate it in her office. Then she remained there, keeping office hours, until exactly two o'clock every afternoon.

  Burns puttered around his office, waiting for her to leave. He worked on an essay test for his American literature class and read some more Faulkner articles for his Tuesday night class. He was going to dazzle them with his knowledge of The Sound and the Fury this week. He just hoped that most of them, or even some of them, had read it. There was always a run on the bookstore's supply of Cliffs Notes when he started on Faulkner.

  Finally two o'clock came. Burns heard Miss Darling's door close and lock with a precise little click. The third floor was so shaky that he could feel the vibrations as she walked to the stairs. He waited until he thought she had had plenty of time to reach the ground floor. He was reasonably sure that she wouldn't be coming back up. As far as he knew, she never had.

  Burns walked to Miss Darling's door. As chairman of the department, he had a master key, in case one of the instructors was ill and he needed access to an office, or in case he needed to get in for some other emergency. He had never used the key for snooping before, and he felt slightly guilty about doing so this time, but after only a slight pause he slipped the key into the lock. It went in smoothly. He turned it to the left and opened the door, slipping quietly inside.

  Closing the door behind him, Burns flipped on the light switch. Miss Darling's office was as neat as she was. On the desk were a calendar, a picture of Miss Darling's cat, and nothing else. Burns, whose own desk was usually cluttered with papers, notes, pens, and books, thought that it was the neatest teacher's desk he'd ever seen. The books on the wall of shelves beside the desk were equally neat, arranged by size rather than in alphabetical order. Small books were with small books, large with large. Burns wondered how Miss Darling ever found anything.

  The neatness would certainly make the office easy to search. In fact, there was nowhere to look except in the desk drawers. Burns was about to step around in front of the desk and search it when the door opened at his back.

  Burns was humiliated. He could feel the back of his neck getting warm, and the blood was gathering in his ears. Clem's office door had been closed, and he had assumed that she was gone. Either he'd been wrong, or Miss Darling had returned.

  Burns turned slowly around.

  "I swear, Doctah Burns, what you doin' in here?" Rose asked. "Is Miss Darlin' been leavin' her doah open, too?" Rose stood there with her hands on her hips, looking at Burns. He could see the vacuum cleaner in the hall beyond her.

  "I . . . I, uh, yes. Yes. I noticed that the door wasn't quite closed, so I looked
in to see if Miss Darling was still here." Burns wiped his hand across his upper lip. "She usually leaves about this time, but I wanted to ask her about a committee assignment, so I stepped in."

  "Well, she better start lockin' her doah," Rose said. "Too much funny business goin' on around here."

  "Yes," Burns said. "Well, I think I'll be going back to my own office now. You can lock up when you're through."

  "I'll do that. You can sure bet I'll do that," Rose said.

  Burns eased by her and out the door. Her powerful sloping shoulders, no doubt a result of years of dragging the vacuum cleaner up the stairs of Main, made her look like a much more likely murderer than Miss Darling would ever be. If he hadn't been so intent on searching the office, Burns thought, he would surely have heard her coming.

  "Ain't nevah ler a doah unlocked in all my life," Rose said as Burns reached the hall. "Nevah have, nevah will. Say 'Rose, you ler that doah unlocked' all they want, don't mean I did it. No, sir."

  Burns wasn't sure whether he was being addressed or whether Rose was talking to herself, so he sidled down the hall and back to his own office. He was both embarrassed and ashamed, embarrassed to have been caught snooping, and ashamed to have been snooping in the first place.

  Still, there was the nagging thought that he just might be right about Miss Darling. He decided to snoop again, but later. After everyone, including Rose, had gone home.

  By a little after five o'clock, Burns was convinced he was alone in the building. The feeling of emptiness with which he was so familiar had settled over the third floor, having worked its way up from the ground.

  Once more Burns entered Miss Darling's office. He didn't pause to look around but instead went straight to the desk and pulled open the thin middle drawer. It was as neat as the top of the desk. Typing paper was in one stack, notebook paper in another. There was a grade book and an assortment of pens. That was all.

  The desk was not as large as the one in Burns's office, having only three drawers on one side. Burns opened the top one. Index cards, note pads, a box of paper clips, a stapler, a box of staples. That was all.

  Burns opened the second drawer. Student essays, neatly stacked and held in groups by red rubber bands. Nothing else.

  The third drawer was equally neat and equally unproductive. It contained thin stacks of lecture notes, written in a dedicated, crabbed hand on yellow legal-sized paper. Burns picked them up and looked at them out of mild curiosity, but not seeing any lists he put them back down.

  There was nowhere else to look. Burns went back to his own office and sat down. He stared at the rows and rows of books on his own shelves; they were arranged more or less according to subject and therefore didn't have the neat appearance of Miss Darling's. Myths of the Greeks and Romans, The Greek Way, The Roman Way. Love and Death in the American Novel, Studies in Classic American Literature, The American Novel and its Tradition. Burns liked to look at the spines and think about the contents. The books were like old friends to him.

  He propped his feet up on the desk. He wondered if Miss Darling had ever read Love and Death in the American Novel. Probably not. She'd probably never heard of it. Not that he thought that mattered.

  Well, he thought, if Miss Darling killed Elmore, I'll never find it out for sure. Let Napier catch her. It's his job, after all. My job is to teach William Faulkner. He picked up The Sound and the Fury and started to reread the Benjy section. Soon he was so involved with the problems of the Compson family that he had completely forgotten Miss Darling, Dean Elmore, and the cut-glass paper-clip holder. It was going to be a good class. He was looking forward to Tuesday night.

  Chapter 15

  When Burns entered graduate school in the 1960s, he had no real idea of what the academic world was like. He had a vague idea that it was full of gentleman scholars who spent their spare time debating (in a calm and judicial manner, of course) the merits of blank verse, or perhaps exchanging ideas on the identity of the Pearl Poet.

  He was completely wrong, as he soon found out. There was more backbiting, favor-currying, intellectual snobbery, and intellectual dishonesty than he would have believed had anyone told him that it existed. The fights for tenure among faculty members at the school he attended were particularly vicious. As one of his professors had put it, "It's like getting your balls caught in a sewing machine."

  And since it was, after all, the 1960s, there was a lot more going on outside the classrooms than was going on inside them. It was hard for many professors to get interested in the environmental themes to be found in the Leather-stocking Tales when the university administration had decided to bulldoze the trees along Waller Creek. Burns himself hadn't staged sit-ins in any trees, but several of his professors had. And several of the graduate students had been a lot more interested in scoring dope than in talking about the distortions of time in Catch-22, while others spent most of their time marching on the state capitol or protesting the invasion of Cambodia.

  Burns had enjoyed being a part of it all, and he had sailed through graduate school with the naive idea that if he kept his nose clean and his hair short, he'd be able to get a job anywhere he chose, and name his own price. He had a vague picture in the back of his mind of walking into the office of the department chairman at, say, Harvard, announcing that he had earned his Ph.D., and being warmly welcomed into the fraternity of scholars. Perhaps the other members of the department would drop by for a little wine and cheese and discuss the effect of Zola on the novels of Frank Norris.

  When he got his diploma, after five years of course work, qualifying exams, minor orals, major orals, writing and defending a dissertation, Burns found out how naive he had really been. Not only was he not welcomed at Harvard, he was hardly welcomed anywhere. It seemed as if everyone in the country had, in about 1966, gotten the urge to take a Ph.D. in English. There were hundreds of applicants for every position that opened, and thousands if the position was a particularly good one. Even worse, there were very few positions that opened.

  Burns laboriously typed hundreds of letters of application. He studied the Chronicle of Higher Education and the MLA's job listings. He began to pay close attention to the obituaries.

  From many schools, he received no response at all. From some, he received form letters stating that there were simply no openings. From others, he heard that, while there was indeed an opening, it was not likely to be filled by a graduate of a provincial state university in a provincial state like Texas. One school even sent a long letter listing all the terrible attributes of the city in which it was located, a clever ploy to discourage all but the most determined.

  And from some schools, Burns received a favorable response. Most of them were small denominational schools whose personnel officers were probably quite pleased to see the photo of Burns on his vita sheet. They probably didn't get many applicants with short hair in those days, and Burns had often speculated that under more recent conditions, when photos were not included on applications, he might not have gotten a job at all.

  Several of his friends didn't get jobs, at least not in teaching. One of them had become a technical writer. One was working his way up the management ladder of J. C. Penney's. And one had tried short-order cooking, cab driving, and banking. The last Burns had heard from him, he was selling insurance. Burns had bought a ten-thousand-dollar term policy from him.

  The funny thing (to Burns) was that none of his friends envied him his job. They let it be known quite clearly that they would rather have been reduced to running the sewage sifter in the water treatment plant than teach at Hartley Gorman College, their idea of academic purgatory.

  Burns didn't mind. He had a job—though it didn't pay very well—doing what he wanted to do, and there was no fight for tenure, since HGC didn't have tenure. He would never become famous for his pronouncements on the first canto of Don Juan, and the editors of academic journals might sniff when he sent them articles with HGC as a return address, but he could be satisfied that he was doing a good job
of teaching some unworldly students about worldly literature.

  Besides, Burns had found friends at HGC. He liked most of his co-workers, particularly Fox and Tomlin, and his departmental duties were not much of a burden. He would never make much money, and even his pension would be small, but, he had been forewarned by one of his professors that there was a serpent in every Eden, and that the serpent in denominational schools was money.

  Obviously the professor had never known Elmore, a snake if there ever had been one. The dean had driven away the students, alienated the local supporters of the school, and destroyed the morale of the faculty. Even now, deader than the aurochs, he was still stirring the cauldron. Coach Thomas had been thrown in jail, Main had almost been burned, and Burns had become so suspicious of people around him that he'd made a list of people who might have killed Elmore and then let his thinking become so warped that he'd even begun to suspect Miss Darling of the murder.

  What really galled Burns was the thought that Elmore would have loved all the confusion and uncertainty. He was six feet under, mouldering in his grave, but he would have loved knowing that his legacy was more chaos for the faculty of HGC.

  Burns wondered what it really was that had gotten Elmore killed. Whoever did it must have had a temper to match Elmore's own, or else had been provoked in the extreme. It could never have been Miss Darling, and Burns repented his suspicions of her. He remembered that once, at a faculty meeting, Elmore had gotten so angry that he seemed about to explode. Literally. His face had suffused with blood, his neck had become engorged, and even his ears had seemed to swell. Burns had thought that at any second Elmore might burst with a disgusting pop and spread parts of himself all over the chapel walls and ceiling. It hadn't happened, but it had seemed likely.

  The episode had become famous as "The Case of the Locked Door," and it had been Clem who was responsible. She had a student who was habitually ten or fifteen minutes late for class. The girl would straggle in, walk in front of Clem, and betake herself to a seat in the rear of the class. As soon as she was seated and had arranged her books satisfactorily, she would raise her hand and, not waiting for acknowledgment, say something like, "Hey, I'm sorry I'm late, but my ride didn't pick me up on time, you know? Could you go over what I've missed?"