Stump Speech Murder

by Patricia Rockwell

  “The more that people from your husband’s campaign try to intimidate me into quitting my efforts to help James, the more . . . .”

  “What people?” Brewster asked suddenly. “Has someone other than me said anything to you about this?”

  “You mean, your husband didn’t send you here?” asked Pamela.

  “No, Dr. Barnes,” responded the mayor’s wife. “Believe it or not, this was my idea. And, Dr. Barnes, I ask you again. What other people from my husband’s campaign have asked you to stop helping James Grant?”

  “For starters, Mrs. Brewster,” said Pamela with a sigh, coming from behind the lectern and stepping down a level to the floor where she could face Katherine Brewster nose to nose. “For starters, your husband’s right hand man, Victor Baines, stopped my car in the street yesterday and pounded on my car window demanding that I stay out of the investigation.”

  “He did?” she responded, aghast and then as the implications set in, somewhat deflated.

  “Yes,” said Pamela, “and I also received a threatening phone call a few days ago. That may have been Baines, but maybe not. I don’t know.”

  “I don’t know what to say,” replied the woman, noticeably shaken. She stepped over to one of the student desk chairs and collapsed into it. “Dr. Barnes, I’m really sorry. My purpose in talking to you today was to try to reason with you–not strong arm you. I had no idea that anyone from my husband’s campaign had been harassing you.”

  “Possibly at your husband’s request?” asked Pamela sitting next to her.

  “Oh, no!” she cried, “I can’t believe that of Harold!”

  “I hope you’re right, Mrs. Brewster.”

  I guarantee you that I will discuss this with Harold and I will be certain he knows what Victor has done. This will not happen again.”

  “I would appreciate that,” said Pamela, “but truthfully, Mrs. Brewster, I don’t need you to fight my battles for me. All things considered, it might be best not to make waves right now.”

  “All right, Dr. Barnes,” replied Katherine Brewster, turning and looking at Pamela. “I am so sorry that this has happened to you. I had no idea . . . . I really just thought you were a nosy busybody out to make trouble. I didn’t realize that . . . . Mitchell speaks so highly of you, and I think so highly of Mitchell. I have always loved this department. I was a Psych major many years ago when I was a student, did you know?”

  “I believe I had heard that,” said Pamela with a smile. “And Mrs. Brewster . . . .”

  “Please, call me Katherine,” she said warmly, a hand on Pamela’s arm.

  “Katherine,” said Pamela agreeably, “I just don’t understand why your husband is so fearful of anyone assisting James. Even if James is exonerated, it doesn’t mean that he’ll necessarily defeat your husband. I mean, your husband has been mayor for many years. He has a loyal following, I would assume . . . .”

  “Oh, he does,” gushed the woman. “And you’re right. Harold needn’t be fearful of this Grant fellow. I mean, he’s defeated many other candidates. I think it’s just because Grant was running a bit ahead of Harold in the most recent polls.”

  “But, polls change, Mrs. Brewster,” said Pamela calmly. Of course, she hoped the polls remained the same if–when–James was exonerated and that he would ultimately defeat Hap Brewster, but she didn’t feel the need to ram her personal viewpoint down this poor woman’s demoralized throat–even though that’s exactly what Katherine Brewster had intended to do with her when she entered her lecture hall hardly thirty minutes ago.

  “Anyway,” said Katherine, rising and straightening her skirt, “I just wanted to stop by and speak with you, Dr. Barnes. Please keep in mind what we talked about. And please take care of yourself. Victor Baines has a bark that’s worse than his bite. If you must know,” she confided in a whisper, “he had by-pass surgery a few years ago and he really hasn’t been the same since. I can’t believe he would–or could–hurt you. Harold keeps him on staff because the two of them started out together in politics. They’re very close.”

  “I appreciate that information, Mrs. Brewster,” Pamela replied, standing with her and walking her out into the hallway where they said their farewells.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  After seeing Katherine Brewster off, Pamela returned to her office with relief. Opening the door of her mini-fridge, she removed her lunch sack and extracted the sandwich that Rocky had designed for her today. A wave of onion wafted through her office as she unwrapped the waxed paper around the tiny croissant, piled thick with layers of cheese, meat, and various greens. Rocky had also included some of his special granola mix which he kept in a container on their kitchen island. It was composed of various nuts, coconut, dried fruits segments, and dark chocolate chunks–which, he assured her, had no calories at all. Thank goodness, she had devised a system to keep her weight at a tolerable level. She forced herself to workout for an hour almost every morning before class at a local gym. Also, her policy for eating Rocky’s marvelous cooking was one serving only–and a small portion at that. She knew she’d never be able to totally resist his delicious recipes–and she didn’t. Even so, she attempted to behave with moderation in her eating habits because otherwise she would easily become a blimp as the contented wife of a gourmet cook.

  She took her scrumptious-smelling sandwich to her sofa, along with her thermos which contained the remnants of some currant tea. She had managed to savor several sandwich bites when Joan and Arliss arrived at her door together.

  “Oh!” exclaimed Pamela, mid-slurp of tea, “Arliss! I haven’t seen you in a while. How are the baby chinchillas doing?”

  The two women moved into Pamela’s office and made themselves at home in their favorite spots–Joan in the straight back chair by the door and Arliss in Pamela’s rolling desk chair. Seeing Arliss trying to position herself and her huge belly in the moving seat was humorous because the wheels on the chair wouldn’t hold still long enough for Arliss to lower herself into the seat. She would have gladly relinquished the sofa to her very pregnant friend, but Arliss was being stoic today and not asking for favors.

  “Careful, girl,” noted Joan from her distant observation position. “We don’t need you and baby Goodman on the floor.”

  “I’m fine, Joan,” retorted Arliss, panting, “I have at least two weeks to go and I just saw my OB yesterday and he says I’m right on schedule. And, Pam, Eva’s babies are fine and getting bigger and cuter every day. You should come down to the lab and visit them.”

  “I will the minute I get a chance,” responded Pamela still on her sofa, taking a bite of her sandwich. “Is Bob getting excited?”

  “More than me, I’m afraid,” said Arliss with a scowl. “That’s all he talks about. It’s not as if he hasn’t seen babies being born before. I mean, we have Eva now–and our monkey Bailey may be pregnant!”

  “That would be great!” replied Pamela warmly. She knew how much it meant to Arliss and Bob to have their laboratory animals reproduce.

  “Joan tells me that the two of you are helping with Mr. Grant’s murder investigation,” offered Arliss, bracing herself by grasping Pamela’s desk as she scooted her bottom around trying to find a comfortable position in the seat of the desk chair.

  “Yes,” said Pamela, “Joan conned me into this–and now I’m thoroughly entrenched.”

  “Just as always,” said Arliss. “You know you can’t resist a good murder case, Pam.” Arliss gave her the eye.

  “I can’t in this case, Arliss,” replied Pamela, “because it appears the police may have arrested the wrong man.” She nodded back to her friend.

  “Leave it to you and Joan,” muttered Arliss, shaking her head, “to determine when the police have made a mistake.”

  “Wait a minute, missy!” exclaimed Joan. “You don’t know everything that’s gone on recently! You’ve been all wrapped up in impending mommyhood and furry pets, so you haven’t kept up to speed on the details of this case.”

&nb
sp; “This case!” cried out Arliss to her friend, “Joan, you’re beginning to sound like Pam. Now both of you are detectives!”

  “No, we’re not detectives,” noted Joan, precisely, “we’re scientists, and as scientists we have certain skills and methods that we can utilize to assist Mr. Grant in his time of need.”

  “I see,” said Arliss, “so if Mr. Grant didn’t kill his wife, who did?” She looked from one friend to another with a shrug.

  “We’re not quite certain yet,” replied Joan sheepishly, “but Pamela’s working on it.”

  “And your job–in this investigation, Joan, was to get Pam involved,” explained Arliss. “Looks like you’ve done that.” She twisted uncomfortably in the desk chair.

  “Pamela is the one with the police experience after all,” Joan observed as she leaned back, crossed her arms, and sat back primly in her chair.

  “Stop it, you two!” cried Pamela. “Listen, Arliss, Joan may have encouraged me to get involved, but once I spoke with James, I realized that something was amiss. I don’t know if I can figure any of this puzzle out, but I’m going to do whatever I can to assist him. He’s a fine young man in a horrible–tragic– situation. He’s lost his wife and now everyone thinks he’s responsible for her death. And, what’s worse, he’s given up.”

  “We’re trying to get him to fight for himself,” said Joan. “Imagine how you would feel, Arliss, if no one supported you and Bob when you two were working so hard to save the animal lab.”

  “It’s true,” agreed Arliss, glancing from one friend to another. “I’ll never forget what you did for us then, Pam,” she said with a sob. “Oh, no! Now I’m crying. I don’t know why, but everything makes me cry nowadays. I started sobbing uncontrollably this morning when I dropped an egg on the floor while I was making breakfast.”

  “It’s hormones, honey!” noted Joan. “They’re running rampant through your system.”

  Arliss continued sobbing. Pamela rose from the sofa and grabbed several tissues from a box on the desk and handed them to Arliss.

  “Here,” she said to her friend. “Don’t worry. It’s normal.”

  Arliss patted the tears from her cheeks and gave Pamela a shy smile. Joan rolled her eyes. Pamela returned to her sofa with a snide look in Joan’s direction.

  “Anyway, Pamela,” said Joan, changing the subject, “have you been making any progress on your examination of those recordings?”

  “What recordings?” asked Arliss, dabbing the bundle of tissue against her dark eyes.

  “Willard and I have been comparing the recording of James’s wife’s 911 call with previous recordings that were made of her as Assistant District Attorney,” replied Pamela.

  “Why?” asked Arliss, with a pout.

  “At first, we thought the 911 call might be fake, but it isn’t. I mean, it really is Stacy Grant.”

  “You’re sure?” asked Joan.

  “Quite,” replied Pamela. “Willard and I ran the acoustic profiles together. That’s definitely Stacy Grant’s voice on the 911 call.”

  “So that means she made the call,” said Joan, frowning and nodding.

  “She must have,” responded Arliss, listening to her two friends. Pamela looked from one friend to the other and listened to their comments. Then suddenly, she set down her thermos on the end table next to her sofa and stood up.

  “Stay here,” she said as she headed out the door. “I’ll be back.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Luckily, Willard Swinton was in his office. It was early afternoon and Pamela’s colleague had apparently finished his lunch (which he often ate at his desk). Willard’s handicap prevented him from doing too much walking, so going off-campus (or even on-campus) for a meal would be a major undertaking. At the moment, Willard was apparently grading papers. His head was down, focused on a paper in his lap, and his ever-present, ivory-handled cane was hanging over the back of his desk chair.

  “Willard,” she said breathlessly, as she ran into his office, “I’m so glad you’re here. Are you too busy to talk to me now?” She moved inside and quickly closed his office door shut.

  “Oh, intrigue, my dear!” exclaimed Willard, looking up from his paper, “do we have a break-through in our murder investigation?”

  “Maybe,” she replied. “Can we look at the acoustic output of those recordings of Stacy Grant’s voice together?”

  “Of course, my dear,” he replied, setting his grading aside and reaching into a desk drawer and bringing out a compact disk that she knew contained the recorded data they were analyzing for James Grant’s murder investigation.”

  Pamela pulled a chair from in front of Willard’s desk to beside his desk chair and sat down. Willard inserted the disk into his hard drive and used his mouse to bring up his acoustic software program on his monitor. Pamela and Willard bent their heads toward the screen intently as they observed the line where they knew the acoustic output would appear as Willard pressed the “play” button. The sound of Stacy Grant’s voice burst from the speakers embedded in the computer monitor. “My husband . . . outside . . . trying to break in . . . please help!” This short call for help she had come to know so well. Probably, the entire town of Reardon had come to know it as well because it had been played and re-played many times over by the local media. Although the contradictory nature of the evidence (Stacy Grant calling for police help against a husband whom she claimed was attempting to break into her house, when for all intents and purposes, James Grant had no reason to break in.)

  “Willard,” she commenced, as they listened to the recording of Stacy Grant’s voice again and again. “we agree that the voice we hear is Stacy Grant. Correct?”

  “Yes, my dear,” said Willard. “We’ve checked and double checked the voice on this recording against the voice on the recordings of Mrs. Grant speaking before juries in her role as Assistant District Attorney. I believe we can definitely conclude that the voices are the same.”

  “Yes,” noted Pamela. “The voices are the same, Willard. But that’s the problem with our assumption.”

  “What?” he asked.

  “We are assuming that just because the voice on the 911 recording is that of Stacy Grant, that that means that Stacy Grant made that call to 911.”

  “What are you getting at, my dear?” asked Willard, his round brown face, childlike in eager anticipation.

  “Could it be possible that the voice on the 911 recording is Stacy, but that she didn’t make the call?”

  “I don’t see how . . . .” replied Willard, befuddled, his bow tie wobbling up and down as he contemplated the possibilities.

  “I’m speculating here, so please go with me,” she said to him, running a hand through her hair, her frustration evident.

  “I’m with you, my dear,” he agreed, “wherever you go. You say it’s her voice, but she didn’t make the call. Are you suggesting she was coerced?”

  “No,” said Pamela, “I don’t think so, because I think that would register in her voice. Let’s listen again. What are you hearing? I know you’ve been thinking there is something strange about it, right?”

  They played the recording several more times, listening more carefully to minute changes in the pitch, intensity, and tempo of the speaking woman’s vocal patterns.

  “There is a strange quality to her vocal patterns,” said Willard, “but I can’t say it sounds like duress. Or at least, it doesn’t sound like the duress that a person would experience if they were scared because someone was breaking into their home.”

  “I agree,” said Pamela. “There’s something else.”

  “Do you think she’s afraid?” he asked. “Is that what you’re hearing?”

  They played the recording again.

  “There’s a disjointed quality to it,” noted Pamela. “Listen.”

  “Yes,” agreed Willard, a furrow forming between his eyes as he listened intently to the sound of Stacy Grant saying, “My husband . . . outside . . . trying to break in . . . ple
ase help!”

  “It’s disjointed,” said Pamela again.

  “But isn’t that because she’s scared?” asked Willard. “Fear will make people speak faster and in a more clipped fashion.

  “It’s different,” argued Pamela. “It doesn’t sound like fear.”

  “You don’t think she sounds afraid?” asked Willard.

  “No,” said Pamela, looking directly at her colleague, her mouth dropping open suddenly. “Actually, she doesn’t sound at all afraid. Now that I think about it. Her voice sounds quite calm. Look here at the frequency level–it’s quite low for someone with her pitch range. If she were scared, her pitch level should be much higher. But it’s actually remarkably low.”

  “My dear, you’re right!” he exclaimed. “I think that may be the reason I’ve been thinking it sounded so unusual. Because, except for the disjointed, broken phrasing, she sounds remarkably calm for someone calling 911.”

  “And listen to her say, ‘please help,’” said Pamela. “It sounds like she’s saying “Please help yourself to some more potatoes.”

  “Yes!” agreed Willard. “Surely, if you feared for your life so much that you were forced to call 911, you’d be more excited sounding than this woman is. She sounds much more the way she sounds giving one of her speeches in those courtroom speeches.”

  “That’s it!” cried Pamela. “Willard, you’ve got it!”

  “What?” he asked.

  “She sounds exactly like she does in her courtroom speeches,” said Pamela. “I know what we have to do next.”

  “What, my dear?” he queried, his eyes wide with delight.

  “We need to go through every single courtroom recording we have–or can find–of Stacy Grant and search for these exact phrases that appear in her 911 call.”

  “Oh, my, yes!” he said forlornly. “I see where you’re going. But can we get any more audio of Stacy Grant speaking? The small sample we have doesn’t include the phrases we need.”

  “I don’t know. I believe Ginger Cooper indicated that WRER had quite a bit of b-roll footage of Stacy. All I originally asked for was enough so we could verify that the voice on the 911 recording was her.”