Of Mice and Murderers

by John Stockmyer

  Pulling his glove out of his coat pocket, bending the program into a rounded V, he trickled an ounce of the granular material in his pocket.

  Tossing away the program, Z replaced the glove.

  If necessary, the police could determine the compound, comparing it to what Z's nose had told him was the same substance put into the milk in Susan's icebox.

  No need for chemical analysis, though. An additional moment to think, told him what the police report would say. Rat poison! The type of deadly powder vermin ingest by licking it off their fur.

  Why else would someone sprinkle a strong-smelling chemical along the walls of a basement room -- or any room, for that matter? (Part of the college's cleanup campaign?)

  Hot meaning replacing cold analysis, Z realized that Terbrugghen tried to kill Susan! Or (Z getting instant control of himself,) at the very least had plotted to make her sick -- as a warning to Z to drop the Bateman murders case.

  Lucas Terbrugghen. Another clue that said so.

  Standing, both knees popping loudly in the room's thick silence, glancing around the dismal place once more, Z found that the discovery of the toxic material ... hadn't satisfied him as much as he thought it should. In addition to the poison, there was ... still something about the room that ... wasn't right.

  Backing up the five steps it took to reach the foot of the stairs, checking around again, careful to observe the room itself as well as the room's contents, he noticed the eagle carved in the floor before the left wall, an eagle flying toward the phony, caster-equipped fireplace. He'd seen that bird the last time, too.

  What had Calder said about this eagle symbol?

  Z remembering it was from a legend of ancient Greece, a story about two eagles, one set loose from one edge of the world, the other from the world's opposite side, the eagles flying inland to meet at the earth's exact center. The Greeks had set up a marker where the eagles met, the myth said.

  Omphalos.

  That was the name for the stone marker placed between the approaching eagles.

  Only one eagle carved on this floor. Flying ... into the fireplace?

  Did that solitary eagle have something to do with the ... unease ... Z felt in the room?

  He stepped forward. Squatted down by the eagle.......

  Yes. It's direction would take it directly into the hearth.

  Could what was disturbing him be that there should be two eagles, a pair of eagles flying toward each other -- with the cross-hatched, bullet-shaped marker between them? (That was the way it had been in the plaster casting on the ceiling over the auditorium entrance above.)

  Could it be that Z was seeing a single eagle because the fireplace (just a prop, after all) had been rolled against the wall so it covered the second eagle?

  Standing, Z walked to the side of the fireplace to judge its depth. .... Finding the mantled firebox too thin to cover the missing Omphalos and the other eagle. Or so, it looked.

  No problem. On this point, at least, it would be easy to set his mind at rest.

  Never content with guessing when he could check, Z stepped to the side of the fireplace with its mock mantle attached and pushed on the prop to shove it down the wall out of the way. ...

  The fireplace didn't budge.

  Rusted casters.

  Bending, he put his shoulder to the side of the fireplace and pushed, gradually increasing the force until he was shoving hard enough to roll a heavy car. ..... The prop still didn't move.

  Strange.

  Z walked to the other side of the fireplace and tried to push the prop the other way, toward the stairs.

  Nothing.

  Giving up for the moment, sweat streaking his forehead, he came around the fireplace to stand in front of it.

  Reflexively, Z dug out his pill bottle; unscrewed the cap; tipped a few aspirin in his mouth, chewed and swallowed, twisted on the cap, and slipped the bottle back in his pocket. All the time "lost" in thought.

  Could the casters be that rusty?

  His medical routine completed, Z squatted to examine the nearest wheel, the caster not seeming to be all that corroded.

  He touched it.

  Oil.

  Someone had oiled that caster.

  Recently.

  Certainly a freakier discovery than if he'd found the wheel locked up by rust!

  Who would oil the casters on a fake fireplace prop in this hell-hole of a basement room?

  Furthermore, why wouldn't lubricated casters budge before the weight Z had thrown at them?

  Still squatted down, taking as much pressure on his good knee as possible, Z stared at the fireplace's front two casters...........

  To discover that, in addition to the casters recent oiling, something else was wrong with them. ....... Something about their ... placement.

  Could it be that what was bothering him was the way the casters were positioned on their off-center pivots -- each wheel pointing straight back at the wall?

  A little imagination was in order.

  If someone had rolled the prop along the wall from the stair side of the room, the casters should be pointing back toward the stairs. In like manner, if the prop had been wheeled into place down the wall from the room side, the casters would be facing away from the stairs. Someone maneuvering the fireplace prop into its present position, by pushing it straight back from the center of the room until the prop hit the wall, would have the casters facing out into the room. That was the law of casters. Casters trailed behind the direction they were moving. (Rather like the tail of a fish points back along the path the fish has been swimming.) Change direction and casters swivel about, ending up pointing back along the new direction they were being rolled.

  And yet ... this prop had its front two casters pointing straight back at the wall.

  To check on the position of the back casters, he stood; walked around to look at one side of the fireplace, then the other.

  Same position as the front ones. Pointed straight back.

  A direction that could only mean .......

  But that didn't make sense!

  Z paused to think through what he knew about caster direction; came to the same conclusion he'd reached before. That casters always point backward.

  With the fireplace casters positioned the way they were -- pointed at the wall -- there was no escaping the conclusion that the fireplace prop had been moved into its present position ... from inside the wall, out. The "Law of Casters" said so. Casters trailed behind the direction they were traveling.

  Feeling foolish in spite of what reason said "had to be," Z walked to the front of the fireplace.

  Putting his hands on the mantle, he pushed ... to feel the fireplace give ... at the same time hearing a grinding sound.

  Letting up, Z looked down to see what had produced that noise. ... Of course! As the fireplace had begun to move into the wall, the fireplace's casters had swung around on their swivels; were now facing directly out into the room.

  The secret of the prop revealed, Z pushed again, the fireplace giving ... until he'd rolled the prop back into a space behind the wall, Z now seeing something else that "had to be." There! On the floor! The Omphalos and a second eagle behind it.

  Looking past the fireplace -- no longer a theater prop but a door to conceal a passageway -- he saw that a rough tunnel had been carved through living rock.

  Farther on, around a turn, light streamed through the aperture from its other end, a gleam of light, an electronic humming sound, and ...

  Odor!

  Big Bob Zapolska knew that smell, first facing it when finding the teenager's body on a farm in rural Johnson county.

  The girl dead a week.

  Just another runaway. Another young girl missing -- this time, from the Northland. It was Z who'd had to tell the girl's parents (the father hiring Z to look for their daughter) that the girl was dead. Told them while sparing them the grim details. The Zapolska Code.

  Steeling himself, pinching his nose with thumb and forefinger
, Z ducked to enter the passage, the sub-basement's bare bulb lighting this end of the tunnel.

  Sidling past the fireplace doorway, hunching toward the interior light, ten yards and a sharp left turn brought him into an expanded cave of native stone: eighteen-by-twenty-five; a seven-foot ceiling; a rocky vault ... brightly lit.

  Choking on the putrid smell that thickened as he approached, using both hands to filter his nose and mouth, a sweeping glance tied up a month of frayed loose ends.

  Faced away from him, slumped in a moth-eaten upholstered chair, was Terbrugghen ... built as Calder had said, blond hair aging into gray ... a sketchy, but adequate description under the circumstances.

  Lucas Terbrugghen. Very ... dead.

  On an end table flanking the director's chair: a nearly empty bottle of gin. No glass.

  Was that what killed him? Drinking so much, so fast, that the booze had poisoned him? Could it be that, knowing Z was closing in, the director had chosen this way to commit suicide?

  One thing for certain; Z didn't begrudge the job of the coroner whose task it would be to find out.

  Beyond the dead director was a picture. Mounted on the wall. The room's only decoration.

  Set back from the wall's base were three, floor-mounted halogens, vividly lighting the rocky wall, heavy-duty cable strung from the lights to a ragged hole in the left wall, spliced there into the school's power grid.

  Kerosene heaters at the director's feet completed the tableau.

  The irate buzzing?

  Looking up, Z saw a ventilator fan mounted to the ceiling, its blades frozen, the fan's frustrated motor humming angrily.

  Before its blade bearings had burned out, the fan had blown air into a home made, metal conduit, the duct work from the fan patched into the school's cold air return.

  Why cobble up a fan to connect with the school's ventilation system? ....... Because of the kerosene heaters, grouped before the dead director. Though none of the heaters seemed to be working now, when lit, they provided heat for this chilly crypt. Heat ... and deadly fumes that must be vented.

  A jack hammer lay against the wall to the left. Used ... to drill holes through the walls to reach the school's electric lines -- lines that provided power for the auxiliary fan-ventilation system and for the halogens.

  No doubt about it, the director had transformed this place into his private drinking room, a space -- using the fireplace prop for a secret door -- that he'd taken extraordinary measures to conceal.

  Z now at gag-point, swallowing desperately, he thought he could reconstruct the Wednesday night Tommie Victor died.

  The school's administration ordering the custodians to heroic cleaning efforts, the janitor had come down here to start. And seen ... what? The fireplace ajar? Terbrugghen about to enter the secret passage?

  Whatever Tommie Victor witnessed, had meant his death. Though it made no sense, Terbrugghen had been willing to do anything -- literally -- to protect this private place.

  Going further, what had the director's girl, Ms. Ogden, discovered about this secret room? ... Whatever it was had been too much.

  Pinching his nose tighter, Bob Zapolska forced himself forward and around the body, an insane desire driving him to look into the murderer's face. To know the murderer's soul. .........

  A disappointment. Nothing there but bloated skin, mottled in slick red patches surrounded with cottony tufts of moldy gray.

  Turning, almost retching, Z stooped to examine the kerosene heaters the director had lined up before his chair.

  Not working, but why?

  Holding his breath, Z unscrewed their fuel caps.

  Upended each heater, in turn.

  No fuel in any of their tanks.

  Standing quickly, running out of air, Bob Zapolska tried to filter another strangled breath through his hands as he retreated to the back of the room to give the secret place a final sweeping glance, this time noticing a red five-gallon can beside the right wall, a can with a goose-neck nozzle; certain to be the heaters' kerosene supply.

  Stepping over, he picked up the metal container by its wood-and-wire handle. Felt it slosh. Set it down with a high-pitched hollow ring.

  A good two gallons of kerosene still in the can.

  And yet ... no fuel in the individual heater's tanks.

  What had happened here?

  And what about that red look to Terbrugghen's swollen face?

  Days ago when the man had died -- a week ago to the day, was Z's belief -- the man's face would have been a cherry red, red the result of carbon monoxide poisoning, carbon monoxide the gas that made automobile exhaust so dangerous.

  Sick of the world? Close your garage door, stuff up the cracks, sit in your car, start the engine .....

  A suicide? Or had Terbrugghen's ventilator fan failed, with the resultant build-up of lethal gas.

  Eventually, the heaters had run out of fuel. Too late to save Terbrugghen's life.

  For the director to have failed to notice his fan had stopped, he must have been asleep.

  What was troubling was that, when blowers of that type went dry, they squealed a warning -- for hours, sometimes for days -- before their blades locked up. Why the director hadn't noticed that characteristic, dry bearings, high-pitched, fingernails raking on the blackboard screech ... was anybody's guess.

  And what was Terbrugghen doing down here, anyway, in this cold and clammy place? Surely, it made more sense to drink himself to death in the comparative comfort of his own apartment.

  Just sitting here, drinking. ......... Drinking and ... staring at the picture hung before him on the brightly lighted wall?

  For the first time, sighting past the dead man's back, Z paid attention to the cheaply framed painting.

  But only for a moment, the nauseating odor of rotting death finally defeating him.

  Gagging, turning, stooping, he staggered back through the low tunnel, careened past the fireplace-prop, floundered into a far sub-basement corner ... and threw up.

  No longer able to keep the smell of death at bay, the stench following him into the prop room like an unlaid ghost, Z vomited again.

  And again.

  Dry retching himself into exhaustion.

  Only when he'd stopped heaving up the void at the center of his being -- weak, faint, hollow – did Big Bob Zapolska finally stumble on the truth.

  Terbrugghen had designed this limestone vault to guard ... the "Boulevard des Capucines"!

  * * * * *

  Chapter 23

  Shaking, sick, dizzy, Bob Zapolska stumbled up the endless basement stairs, then lurched through miles of thick black corridors.

  Somehow, he got out of the building, the frigid night air helping to stabilize him enough so he could stagger down the hillside campus stairs.

  In his car below, sweating great drops that burned his face like lumps of sliding ice, he fought for control.

  Dimly, he remembered using his final burst of strength to pull the fireplace back to fit into the wall of the basement room -- to block away ... the smell.

  Slowly reviving in the steel embrace of the Cavalier, Z came to himself.

  He had shut the secret fireplace door. ...

  Good.

  That meant he could follow his first impulse, which was to ......

  Run! Distance himself physically and mentally from the decaying ghost in the abyss of Bateman Hall!

  The fireplace closed, no one would stumble across the concealed entrance. Even the smell that had shrieked after him into the sub-basement room would dissipate in time. All would be as it was before; the director "missing"; no one guessing at the ugly truth.

  For how long?

  Perhaps forever.

  Considering forever, Z wondered, dully, what would happen if he simply blanked the discovery from his mind. Told no one.

  The secret room's ventilator fan had already frozen solid. From the sound of it, the motor would burn out within the week. The halogens would only last so long. Then, no more "ghost li
ght" to attract the attention of the superstitious. (As for the tower light, there could no longer be a doubt that it was the result of the powerful theater lights echoing up the ventilation duct to the third-floor turret room.)

  His mind veering off on tangents, he theorized that Terbrugghen had deliberately spread the word that Wednesday was the director's night to drink. More fact than fiction, Terbrugghen had let it be known that he was "indisposed" on Wednesdays, this semi-fiction allowing the sly showman to slip off to the basement room.

  Back to ... the problem.

  If Z told no one of the hidden cavity, the process of decay would continue until Terbrugghen's body was reduced to bone, the close fit of the fireplace door sealing in the putrid smell of the director's decaying corpse. (Even if a whiff of death's putrescent-sweet odor found its way into the school's cold air return, it would do nothing but prompt complaints that, because dying rats had crawled off to decay in the building's walls, poisoning them had been a bad idea.)

  Z shuddered.

  Three deep arctic breaths helped fight back his gorge.

  He had to think of other things.

  Like ... noting that the windows of the Cavalier were quickly frosting out the world.

  At low ebb, Z was grateful to his little car for providing the sanctity of a crystalline cocoon.

  Feeling better presently -- though still shaken -- Z forced his mind back to the decision of what to do.

  Letting the room be Lucas' crypt ... seemed fitting.

  But what to do about the painting? ...........

  Anything he liked!

  Drained as Bob Zapolska was, the thought of the "Boulevard des Capucines" excited him.

  If his shattered mind would only work .......

  Z pressed icy fists into his distended temples. Hard. To contain the pressure in his head. To keep his skull from cracking. .........

  One option was to smuggle out the painting. Put in a call to Ted, telling him of Terbrugghen's whereabouts. It wouldn't be easy for Ted to fake-up a story about how Ted had "figured out" Terbrugghen was in a secret compartment off the sub-basement in a campus building called Bateman Hall -- but Z could help. Displaying the "initiative" it took to "find" Terbrugghen's body might get Ted another promotion. That's what had happened five years earlier after Z had put a bug in Ted's ear about the location of the Hoffstetter kidnapper. Without that bust, Ted would still be policing rat infested alleys.