When Susan raised her throaty voice, her sound could shatter glass. If there'd been a crowd in the food court, everyone would now be staring. Fortunately, the only other couple in the sunken dining area was seated on the far side of the noisy fountain. The Laotian waiter and the cash register woman were over by the serving line, too distant to hear.
What could Bob Zapolska do? He might not know what women wanted, but he did know enough about Susan to realize he'd better give Susan more information than he normally would.
So, reluctantly, he told her. About the unstopped bottle of perfume. About suspecting the director. About the casters. ...
He failed to mention the condition of the director's body, of course, hurrying to explain how he'd tipped both Ted and Addison as soon as he'd gotten back to his room in the Happy Hollow, arranging for the two of them to make a joint discovery of the secret passage. How, earlier that morning, he'd deliberately left the fireplace door ajar so that, even if the cops didn't notice the casters, they'd be able to locate the tunnel. He finished with what she already knew, how he'd checked Susan out of the Inn.
"Thank you, Z," Susan said when both he and his voice were finished, Susan reaching across the table to cover his hand with her soft tapered fingers. "That wasn't too bad, was it?"
God, that girl was a peach! When she looked at him that way ... he swallowed hard to get his throat to work.
"No. Not too hard," he lied.
Maybe the secret of getting along with women was to tell them whatever they thought they wanted to hear. Make up things when there was nothing much to tell. He was slow, but he was learning.
"I've been thinking about something else, too. In our relationship, we've had only one thing in common." Susan at least had the grace to smile so he'd be able to tell she was mostly kidding. "And I know that with me going to school, we haven't had much time together. I'd like to see more of you. Have more ... talks."
"I'd like that, too." And he would. He enjoyed watching Susan while she talked -- except when she was going on about how wonderful that young MW prof was. Anyway, after Susan had talked awhile, talk always led to ....
"What I've been thinking is that maybe we could take a night course together this summer."
Something about the way Z looked must have registered opposition. "I've already learned a lot this semester." Susan, being dead serious. "I've learned a lot about myself. That I'm smart, for one thing. That I can compete with the kids. More than compete. And I've gotten new ideas to think about. My job doesn't do much for me and I've been worried that my brain's rotting." A concern, Z noted to himself, that Susan hadn't "shared" with him.
In a way, though, he knew what she meant. Knew it because of Professor Calder, the man saying interesting things, going on about ideas Z hadn't thought about.
"I was frightened when I first went back to school." The restless tapping of Susan's fingertips on the round, glass-topped table-for-two confirmed what she was saying. "I hadn't done much the first time I tried college right out of high school. But when you're older, it's different. You want to learn. You've got the discipline to study."
"I don't know if I ...."
"Yes, you could! And that's another point I wanted to make. You're the smartest man I know. The whole city's looking for the missing Monet and who finds it?" He shrugged. Finding the painting was an accident. "It's just that you don't think you're smart. And you're never going to be convinced until you take the risk of finding out." If Bob Zapolska knew anything, it was that the peculiar flip of Susan's shaggy hair meant that Susan's mind was made up.
Actually, Susan had a point, if not about how "smart" he was, about how it would be good for the two of them to see more of each other. Going to class with her in the evenings would get them together. He'd also be by her side to discourage lecherous young profs.
"OK."
"OK? Just like that?"
"You're right."
Z would remember Susan's smile. It was brighter than the one she gave him when he took her to his apartment later that evening and presented her with her gift. Brighter than any smile he'd seen from Susan for a long time.
Not that this success at communicating mean you told civilians everything. In this case, as a "for instance," he'd been careful to leave out an important detail, one that hadn't even occurred to him until he'd gotten a good ten hours sleep the day following his discovery of the director's body. (It was odd how you sometimes got ideas just as you were waking up. The mind was mysterious. Even exciting. With Susan pressuring him to go to college, perhaps he could get Susan to take a course with him that he might like; psychology, for instance. If she'd switch schools, they could have Professor Calder ....)
The insight? Nothing less than the solution to the problem of why Terbrugghen's fan had failed to ventilate the director's secret room.
What made the fan's malfunction a problem was that, on Wednesday nights for weeks, the fan had worked. Z knew that because the director was down there on those nights, the prof's halogen lights reflecting through the vents to become the "ghost light" in the northwest turret. Yet on that particular Wednesday night two weeks ago, Terbrugghen had suffocated as a result of the build-up of carbon monoxide fumes from his heaters. (People had seen the director around the school Wednesday morning, Terbrugghen not "disappearing" until that Wednesday night.)
By the time Z found the body a week later, though the halogens still worked, the director's fan had frozen up, the kerosene heaters cold because they'd run dry. About the fan, Z had tried to tell himself it had jammed because of an over-heated bearing, the stopping of the fan causing the director's death.
The trouble with that theory was that Lucas Terbrugghen, while a drunk, was a brilliant and meticulous man. He had to be to have built his secret room; to execute the gallery theft. So painstaking was the director that it was difficult to believe he would fail to check his systems before beginning his solitary Wednesday night party in his own, very private gallery.
It was after Z had the rest he needed that the solution to the "fan" problem had come to him.
It was not because the ventilator fan had locked up that the director died. (Not meant to be run twenty-four hours a day, day after day, the fan's bearings had frozen sometime during the following week.)
Early that deadly Wednesday evening, everything was working in the director's secret room -- heaters, lights, fan.
What had caused Terbrugghen's death was something that had happened later that same Wednesday night, an occurrence the paper had reported as an electrical failure throughout the Bateman campus, a campus-wide black-out that had shut off all campus power, including the hidden room's ventilator fan, the director already passed out, so not noticing that the room was -- too quiet.
Since the kerosene heaters didn't run on electricity, of course, they'd kept putting out both heat and poisonous fumes, the lethal gas continuing to build up for the rest of that night. (After completing their deadly work, the heaters had finally run out of kerosene, of course, all four of them dry by the time Z found the hidden room.)
With electrical power restored the next day -- Terbrugghen already dead by then -- the director's fan and lights had come back on, the fan seizing up later that week.
A brilliant man, the director. An excellent artist -- painted the substitute Monet. Hell of a set designer. Also able to make his murders look like either suicide or "accidents." He'd everything planned to the last detail, starting with the lifting of Beth Ogden's husband's billfold at a campus party so Terbrugghen could steal the rental equipment to modify the secret room: jack hammer, halogens, wire, kerosene heaters......
And yet, it was sometimes true that, "The best laid schemes o' mice and men gang aft a-gley." That's what Z's Mother would have said.
In the end, all Terbrugghen's planning had "gang aft a-gley" because of an "accidental" power failure on the Bateman campus.
And Big Bob Zapolska knew another thing. No matter how talkative he became in the future, why the power at Bateman College
had shorted out that fateful Wednesday night was not the kind of thing a P.I. told his girl!
###
Author's Note
While Of Mice and Murderers is set in Kansas City, Missouri (largely in Kansas City North), the book is a work of fiction -- all the way. For instance, while the book's detective suggests a way to steal a painting from the Nelson Art Gallery, neither he (nor I) know anything about gallery security. Nor did I attempt to learn about how the Nelson guards its collection in case, trying for verisimilitude, I might write something that would give someone the idea they could rob the gallery.
Fiction in this book also means that, in addition to the characters being fictitious, so are many aspects of the city. While major roads, shopping centers, theaters, restaurants, etc., appear in the books, the reader will find that little is "as it should be." The roads don't go where they should; buildings that don't exist have been "created"; actual buildings sometimes changed and/or relocated. (One of the joys of fiction-writing is that you're not bound by the truth.) Besides "manufacturing" locales where I needed them, I also "rearranged" the city to keep readers with nothing better to do from trying to find the detective's home or his office, or the homes and businesses of friends. (People are still writing to Sherlock Holmes at Number 221 B Baker Street -- because it is an actual address!) What this means is that no one will be annoying you by showing up at your house or place of business to ask stupid questions about your connection to Big Bob Zapolska.
* * * * *
About the Author
John G. Stockmyer is an individual whose irrepressible creativity has manifested itself in many ways: as a poet, teacher, produced playwright, author, co-owner of an educational materials business, creator of a time-machine simulator, and, more recently, as a podcaster and producer of eBooks. During his career he has received awards for scholarship, numerous teaching awards and, as a writer, was a Thorpe Menn finalist.
He is the co-author of three non-fiction books: Unleashing the Right Side of the Brain - The Stephen Greene Press, Life Trek: The Odyssey of Adult Development - Humanics, and Right Brain Romance - Ginn Press. He is also the author of over 20 works of fiction, including the Crime/Hard-Boiled "Z-Detective" Series, and the Science-Fiction/Fantasy "Under The Stairs" Series. He has also written a quirky vampire novel titled, The Gentleman Vampire.
John G. Stockmyer is now semi-retired from a 40+ year career as an Ancient/European History Professor at Maple Woods Community College, but still teaches and writes part-time. He currently lives in Kansas City, Missouri with his wife Connie.
For more information about the author, and to download or purchase Print Books, eBooks and Audio-Books from the "collection," please visit the John G. Stockmyer "Books" Web site at: www.johnstockmyer.com/books
If you enjoyed Of Mice and Murderers, you'll probably also like Book #2 in the Z Series: Good Lord, Deliver Us. Book #2 (eBook) is currently free to download. . . so why not check it out?
To send questions or comments to the author, send an e-mail to: [email protected] (all e-mails are screened/forwarded by the author's son: John L. Stockmyer)
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Of Mice and Murderers
Of Mice and Murderers Page 27
