by Crider, Bill
"Well," Miss Darling said, "I had found the pig's snout in the ladies' room, and it reminded me of Dean Elmore."
So I was right, Burns thought.
"I remembered how much he enjoyed the contest each year," Miss Darling went on. "So I picked it up. But then I thought about how angry I was with his proposal to grant those degrees to people who hadn't even taken any course work. I thought I'd go and tell him about it, and I took the snout with me."
Sort of right, at least, Burns thought.
"He was very rude to me," Miss Darling said, her voice gaining strength. "He said . . . he said that I was old and behind the times, that perhaps it was time for me to move on. He said that I didn't know a thing about what was meant by 'modern education.' He said that the academic world had passed me by."
"That was certainly unkind," Burns said, hating himself for having had similar feelings.
"I told him that if he stood for modern education, then I was glad not to know about it," Miss Darling said with more spirit than Burns had credited her with. "I told him that I could still recognize a good sentence when I saw one, and a good paragraph, too. And that most of my students could when they finished one of my courses. I told him that I could still recite the first forty-two lines of The Canterbury Tales, and that if modern education was opposed to that, then I didn't think much of modern education."
"Well," Burns said.
"Yes," Miss Darling said. "And then I threw the pig's snout on his desk and left the office."
"I wonder why I didn't see you on my way over," Burns said.
"Oh," Miss Darling said, "that's simple: I decided that since I was already downstairs, I'd go to assembly. I went out the back door."
After Miss Darling had left, Burns thought about what she'd told him. It was all possible, and it explained the snout, which wasn't a comment after all, or not a direct one. He had forgotten the back door. The Administration Building had originally served as the school's library, and the back entrance was not convenient. It had been designed for use by the library employees, not for anyone who might be trying to sneak out with an unchecked book or magazine, and most students and newer faculty members probably didn't even know how to get to it. But Miss Darling knew, and the killer could have known as well, which would explain why no one had passed Burns as he went into the building.
Burns had no intention of telling Napier what he'd learned. Let the police chief work it out for himself. Miss Darling, he was convinced, was guilty of absolutely nothing, and two minutes with Napier would probably reduce her to a substance resembling Jell-O Instant Pudding.
Burns was happy to have solved the mystery of the snout, but he was no closer to finding out who was responsible for the murder of Elmore, or for the fire. Philip Marlowe would be ashamed of him. He thought about forgetting the whole thing, but then he remembered Napier's remark about his being a "wimpy English teacher," or words to that effect. He decided not to forget the whole thing.
Besides, he hadn't done too badly. He knew something Napier didn't know, and he had been at least as right as Napier about the possibility of a second attempt to burn Main. He'd had the wrong building, that's all; but so had Napier.
He tried to think what Philip Marlowe would do next. After a while, he reached for the telephone and called Wayne Elmore.
Elmore and his son had lived together in a white frame house in the older residential area of Pecan City. The house was well kept-up, and it had been painted within the last two or three years. It was surrounded by huge pecan trees, and there was a wide yard of St. Augustine grass, most of which was brown now. There hadn't been a really hard freeze, however, so there were still a few patches of green to be seen. Desiccated brown leaves covered much of the yard.
Burns parked his Plymouth and walked up the walk to the front porch. There was even a wooden swing suspended from the porch ceiling by chains hanging from two hooks. There was no doorbell, and Burns knocked on the door frame beside the screen door.
Wayne Elmore opened the inner door almost at once. "Hello, Wayne," Burns said. "I'm Carl Burns. I called a little while ago."
"Come in, Dr. Burns," Wayne said. His voice was light and breathy. He moved back from the door, opening it all the way in, as gracefully as a dancer.
Burns pulled open the screen and went inside. The house looked as if it had been furnished when it was built. There was a couch covered with a large floral print, a Duncan Phyfe coffee table with a glass top, two uncomfortable-looking wooden chairs with plump cloth-covered seats and inserts in their backs, and a large wooden art-deco floor lamp, its shade hung with heavy tassels. The hardwood floor was covered with throw rugs in front of the chairs. There was another rug on which the coffee table stood.
Wayne glided over to one of the chairs and sat down, neatly crossing one leg over the other. "What can I do for you, Dr. Burns?" he asked in his affected voice.
Without being asked, Burns sat on the couch. He was already beginning to regret having come. He had no idea why he was here, really. It was stupid to play detective if you didn't know what you were doing. Still, he was here, so he might as well see it through. "I'm sorry about your father, Wayne," he said.
"Thank you," Wayne replied. "I'm sure you mean that sincerely." He clasped his hands and hooked them over his knee.
Burns had not expected sarcasm. He decided to go along with it. "You're right, of course," he said. "I'm being hypocritical. Maybe I meant that I'm sorry for you. I know it must be hard."
"Ha. What do you know about it? You don't know the half of it, Dr. Burns." Wayne's voice took on a harder edge.
"I'm sorry. I . . ."
"Don't say it." Wayne unclasped his hands, uncrossed his legs, and leaned forward. "You're a hypocrite, all right, just like all the rest of them at that school. You come here pretending to be sympathetic, but you're not. You just want to throw more dirt. My father had more dirt thrown on him while he was alive than was thrown on his coffin after he died. And all of it was thrown by the good Christians at Hartley Gorman College. What a laugh!"
"That's not why I came, Wayne, not at all." Burns was feeling defensive now. "I simply wanted to ask if you knew of anyone who might have benefited from killing your father."
"You're trying to make me laugh again," Wayne said. "Please don't do that. I know you hated him. I know you all hated him. Do you think I didn't hear all the talk from the students? Sure, they all avoided me like I had cholera, but I heard. I got the message." He got up from the chair and walked over to where Burns sat.
"You want to know who killed my father? You did, and all the rest of the sanctimonious hypocrites at that school! You all killed him!" Wayne's voice rose, and he pointed his finger straight at Burns.
Burns was feeling as uncomfortable as he could remember ever having felt. He wanted to get up and leave, but he couldn't. Wayne was standing in his way. "I wish you didn't feel that way, Wayne. It's true—"
"It's true that you killed him!" Wayne said, his voice rising. "Oh, maybe you didn't get in the last lick, not personally, maybe someone else did that for you, but you're responsible, along with all the rest of the rumormongers and the snobs and the back-stabbers and the—"
"Just a minute!" Burns yelled. "You don't know what you're saying! Think of what your father did to the school!"
"He did what he thought was best!" Wayne said, his voice breaking. "And look what it got him! No one liked him, no one trusted him, no one took him seriously, no one ever—"
"Did you ever see the man in action?" Burns said. "The way he treated people; the way he humiliated them? The way—"
"It didn't matter!" Wayne said. "He was a wonderful man. He did what he had to to get his chance, and then no one appreciated him. Not even Rogers, the biggest, slimiest hypocrite of all. It didn't matter how my father treated people, or used people. He was still my father!"
Wayne backed away from the couch, and Burns took the opportunity to stand. "Don't you think you might be blinded by that very fact?" he ask
ed.
Wayne was back in control. His voice was light again. "No," he said. "No, I don't. And I'm sorry I let you come here, Dr. Burns. I thought you might really have something to say, but I see that I was wrong. Please. Just go now."
Not knowing what else to say, Burns went.
Chapter 17
Outside, Burns looked at the bare branches of the pecan trees scratching at the sky. He remembered a teacher he had taken a course from when he was an undergraduate, nearly twenty-five years before. The teacher, a widely feared member of the English Department, seemed to believe that the best way to impress a class and to motivate its members to learn was to use intimidation and terror tactics. He had entered the classroom the first day and doused the lights, teaching from then on in semidarkness and telling the students that the light bothered his eyes. He then proceeded to ask a few unanswerable questions of a girl sitting on the front row, harassing her unmercifully, and when he had broken her, moving on to someone else.
The interesting thing was that the man's tactics worked very well for many members of the class. Burns himself had studied like mad every night in case he was to be the next day's victim. He memorized huge chunks of long poems so that he could quote them verbatim on tests. He took scrupulous notes and studied them over and over. He checked books out of the library and read them through, even though they were not required.
Maybe Elmore had been like that, honestly trying to motivate the faculty members to excel and to build up the school through fear and trembling. If so, he had failed. Those methods didn't work any longer, not even with Burns, who would never have dreamed of such an approach in his own classes. Maybe that period of time known as "the sixties" hadn't changed much, but they had changed that.
Of course, they hadn't changed it for everyone. There was always someone around who would perform rather than suffer abuse and who, when abused, would work even harder rather than rebel. Maybe Wayne Elmore was like that, trying to please a father who couldn't be pleased but never ceasing to try. Maybe he really had admired the man and thought everyone else was in the wrong. It certainly wasn't impossible.
Burns got in the green Plymouth and drove away, oddly disturbed but not quite able to say why.
That night Burns had a dream. He had recurring dreams that were probably like those of most teachers. He often dreamed of a particular class that he had once taught, except that in the dream the class was much worse than in reality: students climbed on desks, spoke openly and rudely aloud, threw wads of paper, spit on the floor. As the dream progressed, Burns would find himself growing more and more impatient, more and more frustrated. It always ended with Burns striking a student or hurling a book at one of them. It was not a pleasant dream.
Another dream was of his own student days. He would dream that he was late for an important final exam, and his car wouldn't start. He would begin to run, but he never seemed to arrive anywhere. If the dream went on long enough, he would eventually be walking, then finally crawling, but he would never, ever, arrive for the exam. He would wake up in the mornings after that dream feeling as tired as if he had run a marathon in his sleep.
This dream was different, and in the morning, hanging over his basin and brushing his teeth with mint-flavored Crest, Burns could recall only bits and pieces of it. Wayne Elmore was in it, and his father, but they weren't together. There were doors in the dream, too, lots of doors that kept opening; but Burns could never see what was on the other side of them. Or at least he couldn't remember having seen.
Burns spit the Crest foam into the basin and washed his mouth out with cold water. Then he washed his face and shaved. The menthol shaving cream was cold, and the razor scraped his Adam's apple, as it always did. As an English teacher, he was a firm believer in symbolism. He knew that the dream had a meaning. Maybe it would come to him later.
Thursdays were Burns's easy days, only one class, and that one at eight o'clock in the morning. Once that was out of the way, he had the whole day free to read or think or write, or even to go smoke cigarettes in the history lounge. Today, he decided to think.
He was mulling over his list of suspects when he realized that there was one important fact that he had neglected to check. It was a fact that probably had no meaning for Elmore's death, but it was still a fact. Miss Darling's purse was heavy.
Without hesitation, Burns headed for Miss Darling's office. Clem was next door, grading. "Miss Darling in class?" Burns asked, knowing full well that she was.
"Yes," Clem said, making a mark on one of the papers with a red pen before looking up. "You need her for something?"
"No, no," Burns said. "I was just going to borrow a book from her. I'm sure I can find it myself. I'll just have a look."
Miss Darling's office door was open, and Burns stepped in. Because of an unfortunate incident that had occurred several years before, he knew exactly where Miss Darling kept her purse while she was in class. It would be, he was sure, in the bottom desk drawer.
No one at HGC ever locked his or her office door during class hours; it just wasn't done. Everyone trusted everyone else, a system that had worked fairly well for years and years. There had been only one minor deviation in Burns's years at the school—the time when money began to disappear from purses left behind by female teachers. No one mentioned it at first, because no one was really sure that money was disappearing. The thief was not taking all the money, only some of it. A woman might go to the store; reach in her purse to pay for her purchase, and discover that her wallet contained only seventeen dollars instead of the twenty-one dollars she had thought was in there. However hard she might think, she would never be able to remember where the other four dollars had been spent.
There was a good reason why she couldn't remember. The twenty-one dollars had become seventeen not because of unrecalled spending but because of theft. One of the student secretaries, Fox's secretary, in fact, had been the culprit. She would casually walk down the hallways during classes, and if a woman was teaching class and had left her purse behind in plain view, the secretary would slip into the office and dip into the purse for a few dollars.
It was a racket that could have gone on forever without detection, or so it must have seemed to the secretary. But she got unlucky. Two women began talking one day in the rest room, and one mentioned the fact that she couldn't seem to keep up with her money. The other, to their mutual surprise, said that she had the same problem. They mentioned the problem to others and discovered that it was epidemic. They became watchful and hid their purses.
Miss Darling began hanging her purse on a hook attached to the back of her office door, which seemed like a good enough place. One day, her students were working on an in-class theme, and Miss Darling returned to her office to do some grading and catch up on her class preparations. She didn't notice that her open door was not pushed quite so close to the wall as it generally was.
She graded several papers and read over some class notes. She told Burns later that she must have been in the office for twenty or thirty minutes. Then it was time for her to go back to class. She noticed the door for the first time and pushed on it to send it back to the wall. It didn't move far, and there seemed to be something resilient behind it.
Miss Darling looked behind the door. There stood Fox's secretary, still clutching three dollars that she had taken from Miss Darling's purse.
Miss Darling didn't scream or make a scene. She simply took the three dollars from the girl, who tried to tell some story about having found it in the hall—"I was only trying to return it to the rightful owner," she had said—and sent her to the dean of students.
The girl, of course, lost her job and soon left school. Ever after, Miss Darling had hidden her purse in the desk drawer. "Imagine how that poor child must have felt," she told Burns. "Hiding there, hoping that I would leave or that I wouldn't notice her. It must have been terrible. I'll never let anyone go through that again."
Burns, feeling a little like that secretary must have felt on certa
in occasions, opened the desk drawer. The purse was there. He hefted it. It surely seemed unnecessarily heavy to him.
"Did you find that book?" Clem called from the next office, nearly causing Burns to drop the purse.
"I . . . ah, yes, it's right here," Burns answered. "No problem." He set the purse on Miss Darling's desk. It was genuine leather, black and well-worn. A few cracks in the leather allowed its natural color to show through.
He opened the clasp. Inside there were numerous tissues, a compact, lipstick, a wallet, various odds and ends, and a man's cotton handkerchief. The handkerchief was wrapped around something and the corners were knotted together.
Burns lifted out the handkerchief and its contents. It was quite heavy. He untied the knots.
He was both ashamed and amused when the knots came undone. He almost laughed aloud. The handkerchief was full of coins, mostly quarters. He wondered how many times he had stood in line at the supermarket and been behind a little old lady like Miss Darling. Especially when he was in a hurry. It was then that the little old lady would want to pay her entire bill with change, and she would take what seemed like days getting it out of the purse, untying the knots in the handkerchief, and counting out the exact amount required.
Burns retied the handkerchief, returned it to the purse, and returned the purse to the drawer. He snatched a book off the shelf and walked out, brandishing the book at Clem's doorway. "Got it," he said.
Back in his own office, Burns berated himself unmercifully. He had known Miss Darling was innocent. How could be have made such an ass of himself? At least no one had seen him.
Going over his list of suspects in his mind, they all seemed at least as unlikely as Miss Darling. Coach Thomas? Even Napier had let him go. Dorinda Edgely? Burns knew where the snout had come from, and Dorinda was in the clear. Fox? Tomlin? Clem? Swan? Ridiculous. Somewhere the pattern that he was seeing was flawed. He was going to have to try again, or forget the whole thing.
