This was the first time Z had been to Bateman Collage, Ms. Ogden doing business with him over her office phone or from her farmhouse. He'd had an itch to see where the lady worked, however; just not on such a cold day.
Approaching the college hill, following another Bateman marker, he turned onto a campus drive that led around the base of the Bateman "mountain," the road taking him past the college's athletic facilities -- stadium, track, gym -- then to a gravel parking lot on the back side of the hill, a large lot crammed with row on row of cars. Cars and more cars. New -- expensive -- foreign. Obviously a student, rather than a faculty, lot.
Luckily, he found an open "visitor's" slot in the front row at the base of the hill, the last place to park except for three government-mandated, handicapped parking spaces -- those slots likely to remain empty until Bateman College provided a helicopter to fly the "physically challenged" from this "below sea level" lot to "Mt. Mckinley" college high above.
Engine switched off, barely able to see through his rapidly "healing" peek hole, he groaned as he surveyed the steep stairs leading from base camp to summit.
Triggering the door latch, Z had to shoulder the door open to defeat a particularly strong gust.
Swinging out his bad knee, careful to keep the door from slamming on him, he wedged himself into a wind that was icy enough to slice flesh.
Pulling back on the door handle to counter the blast, he managed to shut the car door without wind damage, the little Cavalier rocked and rocked again as it hunkered down against the yellow-painted curb.
Dry grass swirled in wind-whipped waves at the hill's base. Farther up, stick-bare bushes wailed near the circular graves of interred flowers. Higher still, scarecrow trees waved bony arms to frighten Z away.
Turning his back to the wind, he pulled up his coat collar and made sure his glove tops were fitted into the coat's sleeves.
Surveying the dismal, wind-swept parking area, the only "life" he saw was a car that had just turned in at the near end of the lot, a sedan that, in the vain hope of finding an empty space close to the hill, had begun a slow spiral through the maze of lined-up cars. The driver had Z's sympathy. It was a poor day for hiking off across the tundra.
Scanning the lot, keeping his back to the wind as he jammed his scarf more firmly into the hollow between his collar and windpipe, Z saw the other car nose into a space at last, a blur of students piling out.
From a distance came the cold, crisp, wind-assisted slams of rolled steel doors.
Judging by how many parking spaces were filled, he figured most students were snugly in their classes up above, the newly arriving students -- girls by the loose-hipped outline of them -- missing their 1:00 o'clock class. Or maybe, to be wildly optimistic about today's youth, were early for their 2:00 o'clock.
Scuffing back his coat-cuff, he looked at his watch. One-forty-five. Fifteen minutes to climb the cracked, concrete steps at his back, find the Administration building, and locate Beth Ogden.
Z rolled his sleeve back down, his bare wrist already turned into an icy bracelet.
Pivoting, the cold crisping his nose and the leading edges of his ears, he stepped to the front of the Cavalier and over the lot's curb to shuffle through the dead grass on the parking.
Crossing a brick sidewalk to the stairs, he began to climb, griping the piece-of-pipe handrail to keep himself on course. (It didn't help his frozen frame of mind to be passed, halfway up, by the parking lot girls: Zip -- Zip -- Zip.)
At the top of the hill at last, Z followed a cement path past a small, solid-stone maintenance building. (Maintenance, because heavy power lines ran into it.)
Emerging on the other side of the hill, he was now on Bateman College's front walk.
Looking down the front of the hill, he saw two, more gently pitched walkways mounting the campus at either end, distant students climbing each stairway.
Near the center of a line of mostly red brick classroom buildings, he turned to face the only sizable structure on the hill. This building of limestone, a metal sign proclaiming it to be: Bateman Hall.
The building for which the school was named.
On closer observation, the college "Hall" was a gothic monstrosity of ill-fitting, water-stained blocks, nothing unusual about it, except for a row of ten, closely spaced columns supporting the old structure's two-story roof, columns with "asparagus" capitals??
To one side of the Bateman plaque was another metal sign, an arrow directing newcomers to: Administration.
Following the sign, he was pleased to find that the Administration building was the next one over, shorting what was becoming an increasingly freezing hike.
Turning up the Administration building's walk, Z arrived to pull open the brick structure's heavy wood door, entering to find himself in what a sci-fi book would call an "air lock," a bare, cream-colored, five-foot-long hall with a single door in front of him.
All that mattered at the moment, though, was that the hall was warm.
Pausing in the short entrance to thaw out -- no one there to bother him -- he thought about the lady he was going to see.
When Ms. Ogden called in answer to his security ad, he'd made the deal over the phone. No other way to do it. A lady living alone (as she'd described herself) would never have hired him once she'd gotten a look at him.
He'd worked on installing window guards and peepholes at her place for several weekends before she'd come out of hiding; sometime after that, had gained the courage to talk to him. (She was lonely, he guessed; enough so to date a serial killer on short acquaintance.)
Getting used to Z at last, she'd followed him from window to window, telling him about her job as secretary at Bateman College.
Though he'd never seen her at work, he supposed he'd find her much the same as she was at home in the country, a competent, precise kind of women -- but shy. Timid, really. And, coming full circle, that was why she'd hired him to install a security system for her.
Ms. Ogden was what you might call attractive, Z supposed, had regular features topped by dark blond hair-turned-under-at-the-neck with wrinkle-hiding bangs above blue eyes.
He'd heard how her husband died a year ago, her husband's death followed closely by that of her Father and Mother. After inheriting her parent's weathered, clapboard farmhouse in the country, she'd moved in, she'd said; was living alone in the house's three "gingerbread" stories (plus basement and attic) the house standing in the middle of flat fields. Not even a ramshackle barn to keep the faded old place company.
"Remote" was the word that came to mind when -- after he'd laid a trail of dust and gravel down five miles of private drive off north 40 -- he'd first seen Ms. Ogden's farmhouse.
He remembered her saying her nearest neighbor was three miles the other way.
Just the lady and her much-loved cat, a scraggly inside cat. Missy. Never allowed outside for any reason because a previous owner had all of Missy's claws removed. (The house was also far enough in the country to have foxes and coyotes, Missy a one bite lunch for a squirrel.)
There were days, more of them recently, when Z wished the solution to his problems was a pet. Pretty sad, though, to be down to your last cat for company.
The Ogden business reviewed, tingly feelings coming back to most of his extremities, Z approached the second door, took a deep breath, and pushed through into a wide entrance hall.
The first thing he noticed, spaced out at eye level to either side of the foyer's vanilla walls, were thick-framed, faded photographs of severe-looking men, each dressed in a turn-of-the-century, ill-fitting three piece suit, most of the elders tricked out with dangling watch chains draped across antique vests. To a man (all men) they wore oval, wire-rimmed granny glasses. Each head propped up by a celluloid collar.
Clearly, these were blowups of the school's patriarchs, their zombie eyes glaring down at anyone unlucky enough to pass by.
Except for the daguerreotypes, the entrance area had been modernized, its walls and ceiling newly decora
ted. The floor had deep pile, wall-to-wall carpet of palest blue, inset with a six inch, azure border.
Maple benches were spaced along both walls. Down the right wall a long, walnut, end table sported full-color brochures, a pot of leafy vines, and a blue and white striped decorative lamp.
The hall's light came from florescent tubes in the ceiling, the harsh flicker of that light softened by honey-combed diffusers.
Not counting the fierce, not so dearly departed elders impaled on the walls, the place had the look of success; also of a building where everybody worked, the hall as empty as a cathedral on a Tuesday.
At the far end of the vestibule, beyond a bisecting corridor, was a double wide door of thick, clear glass, vertical lines of print running down it (unreadable at that distance.)
Walking softly down the center of the empty hall, Z had almost reached the lobby's end when a severely dressed young woman charged out of the right corridor to bang into him.
Bouncing off his solid bulk, she gave him a disrespectful toss of her nearly hairless head and a goodbye-forever frown, the woman?? ramming herself in front of him to drag open the glass door and fling her bony body into the space beyond.
Just another young lady, he thought, who, with malice aforethought, had turned herself into a loutish version of the kind of man she most despised.
Z extra careful to look both ways, a little spooked by this time, he "crossed the T" to approach the transparent door that had "absorbed" the mannish woman.
Leaning forward to look through the glass, he saw that the room back of the doors, while large, was partitioned by diagonals of beige dividers.
Backing away a step, Z read the door's black letters:
College President
Dean of Continuing Education
Dean of the School of Business
Dean of Arts and Sciences
Academic Dean
Certain he'd come to the right place, Z pulled back the door's vertical steel handle and stepped into the room. To find what he thought he would, a maze of five-foot-high, nubby-cloth, L-shaped panels defining secretarial stations.
Glancing into the open ends of the work spaces as he shuffled past, he saw the standard office furniture: imitation wood desks, lower echelon chairs, female secretaries, buff filing cabinets, and computers-on-stands.
Sometimes, two women worked in larger shells.
Though providing little privacy, these work units were better than the secretarial "pools" where Susan's insurance company kept its bond-slaves chained.
Glancing at each cubicle's name plate as he went past, he eventually saw .... Ms. Beth Ogden.
Underneath the Ogden plate, a second rectangle of white-lettering-on-shiny-black-plastic saying: Ms. Ingrid Nielsen.
Stepping from the hall to the open side of the Ogden L, Z looked in to see, faced away from him at side-by-side desks, two women, one of them Beth Ogden -- dressed in a navy blue suit with a starched white collar, an outfit that featured her shoulder-length brown-blond hair. She was doing -- what else? -- typing.
Beth's hairless-headed cell mate tipped him to who she was. The female?? who'd muscled her way past him in the hall.
"Ms. Ogden?" Z whispered, careful to keep his voice at its least frightening burr.
"Oh!" Swiveling smartly, the Ogden woman looked up, and up some more, to see him standing awkwardly in the cubicle's opening.
"Though I can't make it this Saturday, I'll have your deadbolts installed by the end of next week, Ma'am," he said. "Then you can put your chairs back under the table."
Already recovered from seeing Z-in-the-flesh, she smiled wistfully. "I'm afraid I don't need but a couple of dining room chairs anymore.
"Oh!" She stopped as if pole-axed. "This is Ingrid. Ingrid Nielsen," Beth said, smiling as she indicated the other woman, the woman twisting just enough to give Z a vengeful glare before turning her back on him.
Women's lib gone wrong.
While Z believed in equal pay for equal work, he also believed in birching bitches.
With a practiced motion, Beth wheeled back her chair, then "footed" it over from the computer extension to the knee-hole in her desk.
Reaching down, pulling out a ball bearing-suspended drawer, she lifted out her flap-top imitation-leather purse, putting her pocketbook on the desk before her. Popping the snap, flipping back the top, she fumbled inside the sundries-stuffed handbag and took out a green plastic checkbook. "I believe that I owe you $800?"
"That's right, Ma'am. Thirty dollars for the two locks and for my labor installing them. And that finishes your payments."
It was the first time, Z realized, that the lady had paid him by check. Always before, she'd dribbled out cash for the supplies he'd needed and for their installation. (Part of his "satisfaction guaranteed" promise was that he didn't accept money for the job he'd done until he'd finished it.) Cash before this. He supposed, to help him dodge the tax man. Which wasn't a part of his deals, no matter what other people thought.
"You can't know how much better I feel with you fixing the house like you did." Even in her workplace, the lady's voice was thin.
Picking up a ballpoint on the desk, she wrote as she continued speaking. "After living in town all those years, a lot of other people around me, being alone way out there ...." She did concentrate on recording the check in the back of the checkbook. Check number. Date. Amount.
Finished, rolling around neatly, she tore out the check and handed it to him, Z taking it, glancing at it casually ......
Looking more closely, saw that Beth Ogden had not signed her name. Instead, had signed Beth Walters, even the check not seeming to be hers since at the top, the printing said Hiram B. or Beth O. Walters.
"Oh ... the check," the lady said, noticing his confusion. "I haven't changed my account at the bank. I've been so busy I couldn't seem to do the routine things. It's just that, after my husband died, I began using my maiden name again ... Ogden. But don't worry. The check is good, signed the way it is."
"Of course, Ma'am," Z said, hitching his coat in back to drag out his billfold, putting in the check, returning the billfold to his back pocket.
Instead of being satisfied with that answer, however, Z was ... troubled. (Dr. Calder wasn't the only one who had insights.) What the lady said about being busy made a kind of sense. What didn't was her taking back her maiden name. A divorcee would reclaim her maiden name on the day her divorce was final -- if not before. The question was, why would a widow revert to her old name? To say nothing of doing that so soon after her husband's death?
Thoughts along those lines triggered another consideration. Her husband's first name. Hiram. An uncommon name, Hiram. Hiram Walters.
Then, he knew! "Ma'am, may I ask a question?"
Turned to put away her checkbook, she spun back again. Gave him a puzzled look. "Certainly."
"I think you know I'm a private investigator as well as a security installer."
"Yes."
"Just over a year ago, I was working on a case where some equipment had been stolen by someone using a Hiram Walters' driver's license. There can't be too many Hiram ...."
"I remember that. My husband did lose his billfold with his driver's license in it. The police questioned him about it. Something about someone else using it to steal something. Rental equipment, I believe?"
"That's right. I interviewed him myself at his place of business. He told me he'd lost his license at a party."
"Yes." Said with a razor voice and eyes as cold as polar ice.
She folded her hands in her lap. Squeezed. Her knuckles white. "At a staff party. Bateman staff. My husband ... drank ...." Remembering Hiram Walters' red-veined nose and sickly yellow skin, Z could believe it. "Those days were not a good chapter in my life. Now that we're divorced, I wanted a new start." She shook herself like a person flinching at spider webs. Smiled wanly. "So, what better way to do that than become myself again and move out to the country. What I didn't figure on was being so ... jumpy ... all
by myself. Not that I wasn't by myself most of the time I was married to ... him."
"Yes, Ma'am."
Though the woman's explanation didn't solve the missing rentals case, Z was glad to see another piece of the stolen equipment puzzle click in. It also pleased him to be able to lock in a sensible explanation for why an anxious lady like this was living in the country.
As for Ingrid Nielsen, she just had time to give him another spiteful look between goodbye ... and gone.
Backing out of the secretarial station, grumping his way through the large room, pushing through the glass door and tramping down the hall, all Z could think of was that a day would come when a less sensitive man would detach this Ingrid "person's" head; then use it for the purpose for which it was so obviously intended: a bowling ball. ... At least until the head bit off the bowler's thumb!
Able to calm himself by the time he'd arrived at hall-end, he was ready for the second of the day's "adventures" – the Calder meeting -- Z launching himself through the double "airlock" doors to the outside, Ms. Ogden-Walters check in his billfold helping to shield him from the cold.
* * * * *
Chapter 8
The trouble with life was that, when you had a fifty-fifty chance, things went against you seventy-five percent of the time. Knowing this to be a law of nature, Bob Zapolska was not surprised when he reached the end of the line of campus structures without finding the Social Science building. On the other hand, a man didn't have a right to complain if all it took was effort to nullify bad luck.
Occupying himself with these thoughts as a way to avoid thinking about the wind and cold, he backtracked past Science and Technology, Student Services, Administration, Bateman Hall, Continuing Education, and Humanities -- coming, at last, to the farthest building at the other end of the line, its wind-oscillated metal sign lettered: Social Science.
A change of wind blowing Z down the connecting walkway, he was soon inside his second ugly-brick-building-of-the-afternoon, finding himself in a wind break duplicate of the Administration "air lock," going through the second door into an out-sized corridor that had also recently been remodeled, the Social Science building's walls hung -- not with pictures of disapproving elders -- but with framed prints in several styles of art ranging from Piranesi etchings, Sunflowers, an oil painting of a French boating scene, to the photo realism of Don Eddy.
Of Mice and Murderers Page 7
