Murder Misread

by P. M. Carlson

  “But they should have known he’d tell me! Unless—” Anne thought, “unless he planned to bury it. The way he buried Bernie’s past. Or Cindy’s, um, loan….”

  Maggie twirled her wineglass. “Yeah.”

  “Or unless he didn’t know for sure. He might not tell me if he was just guessing.”

  “Right. But either way, we want to find out. If Tal didn’t tell you, it may well be the secret that led to murder. If he did—well, you may be in danger too.”

  The phone jangled.

  Damn, probably another reporter. Anne got up angrily to silence it. “Yes?”

  “Professor Chandler?” A man’s voice. Pleasant enough.

  “Yes?” she barked.

  “Sorry to bother you, but is Maggie Ryan there?”

  “Yes. Maggie?” She held the receiver out stiffly, at arm’s length. Maggie bounded across the room to take it.

  Still shaking, Anne stumped back to her chair. Could Maggie be right? Could she be in danger too? Hell, she didn’t want to think about it. She sure as hell wasn’t going to quit looking for the truth. She picked up the mail again.

  “Hello?” Maggie said. “Nick! Hi…. Oh, damn. Damn!” Her fist punched the wall. “Yeah, I’ll try. Where’s her mother? ... I see, works on weekends. Well, I’ll try to get in touch with her too…. One other thing. He’ll have a secret collection, I’d put money on it. Try to find out about it…. No, meet us at Charlie’s office, about an hour. He’s got a projector there. I’d like to see if that film you lifted from his office yesterday is really what it seemed to be when we held it up to the light.”

  She replaced the receiver and closed her eyes a moment. Then she muttered “Espèce de merde!” and turned back to Cindy and Anne. Cindy was standing by the sink now, scraping dishes.

  “Hey, guys,” Maggie said, jabbing her hand through her curly hair and surveying them sadly a moment.

  “Yeah? What?” Anne said gruffly. She put aside a note from Tal’s sister and ripped open the next envelope. Handwritten, with no return address. A stupid crank letter, Tell Lambert 6/2 = 8/18. Gazette V. The result of getting your name in the paper was receiving this kind of—

  Maggie asked, “Did you know Charlie Fielding is a child molester?”

  “Christ!” whispered Anne. The letter dropped into her lap.

  “No!” Cindy’s head jerked up to stare at Maggie. “That’s—that’s over!” She bowed over the sink again.

  “You knew?” Maggie was across the room in two strides, grabbing Cindy’s arm and spinning her around to face her. A plate thumped onto the vinyl and rolled into a corner. “You knew! You asshole, you’ve known for years, haven’t you?”

  “No—”

  “And you didn’t say anything!”

  “Cut it out!” shouted Cindy. She was prying at Maggie’s fingers, trying to loosen them from her arm. “You don’t know a damn thing!”

  “Wrong! I know several damn things! I know you and Charlie Fielding hate each other, but you’ve been protecting each other like best friends. So I figure if Charlie won’t tell that you embezzled from the department, even when someone’s murdered and he’s one of the suspects—well, then you must have a real threat to dangle over him. This is it, right? You knew!”

  “It’s over, damn it! I’ve almost paid it off! And as for Charlie, it was only the one time—”

  “Cindy.” Maggie’s voice was cold as an arctic wind. “Charlie was in Syracuse today, in a movie theatre, feeling up a ten-year-old girl.”

  “What?” Cindy stopped digging at Maggie’s fingers to stare at her. “What?”

  “Today. A ten-year-old.”

  “But—he promised! And he got married, even—”

  “God. That long ago?” Disgusted, Maggie loosed Cindy’s arm and stuck her hands in her pockets. Shoulders hunched, she stalked across the kitchen to lean against the refrigerator. “Cindy, maybe you don’t know that most child molesters don’t change. I spent a depressing hour in your library yesterday looking at the statistics. They keep doing it. To dozens of kids over a lifetime. Hundreds. Psychologists are trying, but they just don’t know how to fix them.”

  “But how could he? Damn it, people can change! You think it was easy for me to quit gambling? What does he think—”

  “I don’t know what he thinks.” Maggie sounded very weary to Anne. “But it’s time to hear what you think, Cindy. The whole thing. Start with how you found out about him.”

  Cindy bowed her head. The mass of highlighted ringlets fell forward from the pink headband, half hiding her face. “It was a few weeks after Tal had found out about… what I’d done. Charlie was working on follow-ups to his thesis back then. Something about reading in older grade-school kids. Well, some administrative order had come down about changing the locks in the building, and I went down late one afternoon to the experiment rooms to see which set of keys worked. The schedules were posted on the doors, and Charlie was supposed to be finished. I didn’t even think twice, just unlocked the door, and there they were, half undressed, him and this fifth grader—” Cindy’s hand went to her face and she shuddered.

  “Jesus. What did you do?” Maggie’s fists were clenched in her pockets, the denim taut over knobby knuckles.

  “I stepped in, closed the door behind me, and said, ‘Honey, I’ve come to drive you home now. Get your jeans back on, okay?’ She was scared, poor little thing, whispering, ‘Don’t tell, please, don’t tell!’ Charlie said, ‘It’s not what you think, Cindy!’ and I said, ‘Yeah, sure.’ And then he said, ‘You know, Tal asked me to look at a page or two of the departmental ledgers a couple of months ago, Cindy. I couldn’t help noticing some problems.’”

  “Jesus,” murmured Maggie again.

  “So what could I do? I said, ‘It’s paid back. And I’ve been in GA for six weeks now. I’m turning my life around. You turn yours around too and my mouth will stay shut as long as yours. But no longer. I promise.’ And he looked at little Melanie, that was her name, and said, ‘I promise.’ I thought—” Cindy raised her head. Tears had run down her cheeks, leaving pale trace lines in her makeup. “That filthy slimeball!”

  “Yeah, and you too!” Maggie’s fists came out of her pockets to thump the refrigerator door angrily. “All those years, little girls were in danger—”

  “Hey, wait a minute! To me, my kids come first! To say nothing of the bravest guy ever shot down in that shitty war! What about the danger to them, Miss Know-It-All? You think I should have said, ‘Oh, sorry, Mark, we gotta give up my job and sell the house and go on welfare’?”

  Anne sat dazed, their words crackling around her.

  Maggie protested, “But those poor kids—”

  “Shut up!” Cindy’s lashes were beaded with tears. “How the hell was I supposed to know? I don’t have a fancy Ph.D. like you. He was the one with the goddamn Ph.D.! I didn’t know I was supposed to look up any goddamn statistics. He said he’d quit. He knuckled right under about little Melanie, didn’t put up any fight at all. If he had—”

  “Yeah, what about Melanie? You just let her deal with it all by herself? You didn’t tell her parents?”

  “Damn right I didn’t tell her parents! She begged me all the way home not to tell. Her dad would beat her, she said. And if she told her mom she’d just get drunk and tell her dad, and then he’d beat her.” She drew a deep breath. “She said Charlie was the only person who loved her. The only one who thought she was nice. I was sick, Maggie. Sick!”

  “Yeah, okay, I’m sick now!”

  “So what would you have done? Be honest!”

  Cindy and Maggie glared at each other. Anne sat still, unable to understand, unable to believe.

  Maggie’s eyes dropped first. “I would have—hell, I don’t know, Cindy. I wouldn’t have told Melanie’s parents, you’re right. Wouldn’t have done any good to call the cops on him either because it would need Melanie to make a case.”

  “There! See?”

  “But I would have derailed C
harlie Fielding, somehow.”

  “Easy to say,” Cindy scoffed. “What would you have done? Poison his coffee?”

  Maggie flapped a hand at her in frustration. “Hell, I don’t know, Cindy. If I didn’t know that these guys don’t quit… well, you’re right, maybe I would have believed Charlie too. Hell, he probably believed it himself, at the moment.”

  Cindy’s anger wilted at the conciliatory words. She said in a small voice, “If only Bernie wasn’t such a tightass—”

  “Yeah.” Maggie glanced at Anne, and her gaze sharpened. “Anne. Are you okay?”

  “Yes,” said Anne. But Maggie, frowning, stepped closer and felt her forehead.

  “You’re pale,” she said.

  Anne made an effort. “So quit springing shocks on an old woman,” she said. She groped in her pocket and pulled out her cigarettes. The note in her lap drifted to the floor, and Maggie retrieved it. Anne lit her Gauloise and took a deep lung-scorching drag on it. To hell with life anyway. Full of crank letters and pain and child molesters. Who needs it?

  Cindy had been standing by the sink lost in thought, one carefully manicured hand massaging the knuckles of the other. She said, “I’ll do it, Maggie. I’ll tell Hines. You’re right, we can’t let him keep on and on. Maybe Bernie will be reasonable—oh, hell, he won’t be. We know that. But I’m good, I can go somewhere else. Work my way up again.”

  Anne cleared her throat and tried to focus on Cindy’s problem. “You’re willing to risk your job? But Tal worked so hard to make sure you kept it!”

  “But Maggie’s right. I thought he’d quit. But if he’s still doing it…. God, I keep thinking of little Melanie, how he took advantage of that little lonely beat-up girl, made her think she had to pay that price for love….”

  “But what price would she have to pay for justice?” Maggie asked soberly. Her hand was resting on Anne’s shoulder. “When that rapist attacked me I had to go to court. Had to tell the story over and over, to a dozen different people, most of them skeptical. What would that do to a kid? And his lawyer attacked me too, in public, in front of the judge and the jury and reporters, everyone. Said I was the one who seduced that poor vulnerable man. Said I asked for it. Said I was a slut and a liar. If the rapist hadn’t slashed me with a knife, he might have been let off.”

  “But that man had killed people!” Anne exclaimed, and then wondered at herself for even caring. Nothing mattered. Yet some vestigial bit of the old Anne was still protesting.

  “Didn’t stop his lawyer from attacking my character,” Maggie said. “Okay, maybe in this case he wouldn’t call Melanie a slut, but he’d certainly call her a liar. Wonderful imagination, he’d say. And the same with that little girl in Syracuse, and maybe Jill Baker—”

  “Jill Baker? No!” Anne protested.

  “Maybe.”

  “Look, what are you saying?” Cindy asked. “A minute ago you said I should have stopped Charlie. Well, you were right. But now you’re saying I shouldn’t!”

  Maggie squeezed Anne’s shoulder and placed the fallen note on the table next to her. “No, not exactly. I’m just saying there are drawbacks to telling Hines. Anne, listen, are you up to another trip to campus? Because there may be another way.”

  18

  The man in the Aran sweater hung up the phone. His name was Nick, he’d said, and near as Charlie could make out, he was some kind of private eye. He climbed back into the driver’s seat and checked Charlie’s bonds. A careful man. Charlie was tied into the passenger seat of his own car, wrists crossed behind him. They’d stopped on the highway at an isolated service station with a roadside phone booth, and Nick had left him for a moment to make a call. Charlie had wriggled strenuously, but the ropes were secure. He’d yelled a time or two, hoping that the garage attendant might help him, but Nick had parked far from the building and left the windows closed tight. No one could hear him. He couldn’t even reach the horn with his forehead.

  “Well, Charlie,” said Nick, inserting the ignition key, “tell me about her.”

  “I already did,” Charlie pointed out sullenly. “You know her name, where she lives, where her mother works. What else is there to say?” He was not about to tell this stranger any details, damn it, the quick light touch of Deanna’s little mouth, the downy curve of her back….

  Nick said mildly, “I’d like to hear your side of the story.”

  Charlie looked at him suspiciously. “Who hired you?” he demanded. “Deanna’s mother?”

  “No. Doesn’t look to me as though she has that kind of money.”

  “Is this connected with the murder at NYSU?”

  “You could say that, yes. I’m here because of Tal Chandler.”

  “But Tal didn’t know!”

  “Didn’t know what?”

  Charlie was silent.

  Nick said, “When we came out of the theatre you said, ‘It’s not what you think.’”

  “Well, it’s not.”

  “Tell me, Charlie, what do I think?”

  Charlie glanced at the man next to him—solid, muscular, jaw set firmly, sharp brown eyes checking him from time to time. He said he was not a cop. Well, he was probably telling the truth about that. Cops read you your rights, and they had handcuffs if they wanted to arrest someone. Charlie was not under arrest. He wondered who had sent him. He seemed cultured and intelligent, and his underlying violence seemed well controlled. Could he understand? So few understood. “Well,” Charlie said cautiously, “you probably think I’m one of those filthy guys who molests children.”

  “The thought did occur to me,” Nick admitted. “You say you’re not?”

  “God, no! Those people—my God, they ought to be—” Charlie caught himself. “Uh, are you—”

  “Well, no, my personal taste runs more to women,” said Nick. “But I can try to understand.”

  Charlie said, “Well, I know there are guys who abuse children. Force themselves on them. God, I can’t understand how anyone could do that. It’s a betrayal, you know? Ordinary children are so innocent, so vulnerable. So much damage can be done! Those guys should be locked up for life.”

  “I agree with you so far.”

  “Well, you see, I’m not one of them,” Charlie said.

  “Could you explain?” Nick said courteously. “I do agree with what you said about the vulnerability of children. The immense damage that can result from abuse.”

  “Yes.” Is that why he had tied Charlie up? Charlie glanced at his captor. He didn’t know what to believe. Nick had overpowered him easily, had tied him up with no nonsense; but since then he’d been sympathetic, almost pleasant. Now he was driving sedately at the speed limit, eyes on the road, lumpy profile unworried. Only the tight grip of his big hands on the steering wheel betrayed any tension. He’d shown no disgust, only a sympathetic curiosity. Maybe he did understand something about children. Maybe he could understand about Deanna.

  And if he understood, he might let Charlie go.

  Nick flicked a glance at him and added, “You said ordinary children.”

  “Yes.” Charlie licked his lips and stared straight ahead at the road. Did he dare explain? Except for Coach Wilhelm, he’d never found anyone who really understood.

  “Some children are not ordinary?” Nick prompted.

  “Every now and then, there’s—well, it’s hard to explain.”

  “A girl who is not ordinary?”

  “A girl who is… very special.” He hated having his hands bound. His glasses were slipping down his nose. “Look, I don’t think you can understand.”

  “I can’t understand why you think you weren’t molesting her.”

  “Because she—well, with most girls maybe that’s what it would be,” Charlie admitted. “Of course I’d never ask that of most girls. But Deanna is—well, special.”

  “How?”

  “It’s—well, for example, Bart Bickford in our department is working with creative children. Some of them are amazing, imaginations far beyond the u
sual child. Or in sports… I remember a boy I used to play hockey with, brilliant even when we were kids. Or there are children who are musical prodigies. Rare, just one out of thousands, but by the time they’re ten or twelve they’re ready to perform concerts with adults.”

  The knuckles whitened on the steering wheel. “So your theory is that the same is true of sex? Some little girls are prodigies, ready to perform with adults?”

  “No, not just sex. Love. Total love. A girl who has a talent for love should be allowed to love.”

  Nick didn’t answer, just shook his head.

  He seemed intelligent. Charlie tried another tack. “This is nothing new, for God’s sake! Do you know how old Dante’s Beatrice was when he first saw her? She was nine! Juliet was thirteen!”

  “Romeo wasn’t thirty-six, like you!” snapped Nick. “And when Beatrice was nine, so was Dante.”

  “But he could tell!”

  “He could tell?” Nick paused, and when he spoke again his words had lost their angry edge. “I am trying to understand, Charlie. You are saying there’s a way to distinguish a… prodigy, you call her, from ordinary children. How?”

  “Oh, you can tell. A girl has a special look about her. You can sense the—the hunger.”

  “She flirts with you?”

  “No, no! Not at first. Most are very timid, little fawns. No one understands them so they’re lonely. But they look at you and you know.”

  “No. I don’t know,” Nick said apologetically, shifting in his seat and glancing at Charlie in a puzzled way. “I didn’t notice anything special about Deanna. She seemed like a shy little girl, extremely anxious to please, who wanted to be agreeable but really didn’t want to spend time with you.”

  The words bruised. Charlie tried to stay under control. “That’s not true! It was just that she had a lot to do, she said! She came to the film in the end!”

  “Ordinary kids would too! It’s obvious that Deanna’s mother is struggling as it is, probably can’t give Deanna much spending money. Someone offering an expensive ticket to a movie everyone in school is talking about… well, a kid doesn’t have to be a prodigy to want to see Star Wars.”