A Little Class on Murder

by Carolyn G. Hart

  Their informant, absorbed now in his recital, was talking in a more nearly normal tone and his voice was precise and just a little didactic.

  Annie pictured a pouter pigeon wearing bifocals and suspenders.

  “A legal pad knocked to the floor in the attack contained a number of abbreviated notes which I will summarize as well as I can. The faculty was listed with these comments following: ‘Moss—chair? Tarrant—jealousy? Garrison—department focus? Diggs—revenge? Norden—drunk? Crandall—stupidity?’ There were three question marks after that last one. And scrawled across the bottom of the pad is the name of that unfortunate victim of the blast, Emily Everett. It was written in large block letters and circled a number of times, with three exclamation marks.”

  “Emily Everett,” Annie exclaimed. “Had he talked to her?”

  “You must understand,” the tone was damping, “the department has no way of knowing just how Mr. Burke spent his final moments and the appointment book does not list Miss Everett. As the chief suggested, Burke may have thought of something he wished for her to do in her capacity as secretary or—”

  “Bull feathers,” Annie interrupted. “So she gets blown away just before—or after—he’s murdered. What kind of coincidence does Wells believe in?”

  “She certainly was his secretary, that cannot be denied,” the speaker admonished. “Now, the circumstances of the explosion are being very carefully considered, but at the moment, Miss Everett is believed to be an accidental victim in that she was merely most unfortunate to be an occupant of that office at the time a bomb exploded. It is Chief Wells’s opinion that the subject of the attack was the editor, Mr. Bradley Kelly, and that he escaped through chance, as is often the case in bombings. Homemade bombs are notoriously unreliable.

  “Now, the chief has talked to all the persons listed on the legal pad.” A dry cough. “Professor Crandall claims he had a very civil talk with Mr. Burke, left his office at shortly after eleven-fifteen, and proceeded to the Student Union for lunch. Insists he had nothing to do with Burke’s murder.”

  “What does Georgia say?” Annie asked.

  “Young woman, Miss Finney has been charged with murder in regard to the death of Mr. Burke. On advice of counsel, she has said nothing whatsoever.”

  “That’s quick work,” Max said. “Who hired a lawyer for her?”

  A rustle of papers. “A Mrs. Roethke, I believe. A lawyer by the name of McClanahan.”

  Max sighed.

  Annie had become acquainted with Jed McClanahan, the world’s greatest trial lawyer, during the difficulties in the Arsenic and Old Lace production the previous summer. In fact, she’d hired him to represent Max. She didn’t think Max had ever quite forgiven her. So McClanahan wasn’t top drawer. He meant well. Perhaps he wasn’t quite on the level of Rebecca Schwartz, Jesse Falkenstein, or Arthur Crook, but he certainly did his best for his clients.

  “Is something wrong?” the informant demanded worriedly.

  “Nothing that a bar committee couldn’t solve,” Max groused.

  “Was anything in the office disturbed?” Annie asked.

  “Not insofar as the investigators could determine. The desk drawers and filing cabinets were closed. It was only subsequently, of course, upon the impoundment of the iron bar carried by Miss Finney, that it was identified as the memento which normally resided upon Mr. Burke’s windowsill.”

  That iron bar.

  The dry voice continued, affirming her recollection, “Three items normally rested there, a shell casing that he brought home from Germany, the bar which had been a part of a luxury hotel destroyed by Hurricane Donna, and the brick from the 1977 jail fire in Tennessee. The shell casing and brick were untouched.

  “Several other points are of great interest to the investigators.” A touch of excitement lifted the prim voice. “In particular, the bloodied condition of a raincoat found crumpled beside the desk.”

  Annie frowned. She didn’t remember a raincoat—but then, of course, she hadn’t looked at the floor in Burke’s office. She’d followed those smears of blood from the front office and observed that one clear, woman’s print in his doorway, but when she looked into his office, her horrified gaze had been drawn immediately to the body slumped on the desk. She suppressed a shudder.

  “The raincoat, of a tweedy material which will not retain fingerprints, belonged to the murdered man and normally hung from a rack in the corner of this office.”

  Swiftly, Annie made a sketch of Burke’s office, combining what she remembered and what she had heard.

  “Quite fascinating, actually,” their informant burbled. “The killer apparently slipped the raincoat on backwards, gripped the bar with a portion of the sleeve, and thus protected, proceeded to attack the unfortunate Mr. Burke. The back of the coat is quite stained. Somewhat reminiscent of the famous Julia Wallace murder. The murderer, whether her husband or another, wore Wallace’s own mackintosh when battering her to death, likely with a poker. The prosecution suggested that Wallace wore the mackintosh while nude then dashed back upstairs to wash up and remove any stains not caught by the coat. Of course, that crime was long before your time.”

  “1931,” Annie said immediately. “The guilty verdict against Wallace was quashed by the Court of Criminal Appeal. It was the very first time in English legal history that a conviction for murder was set aside on the ground that the evidence against the defendant was insufficient to support the verdict. A milestone.” (And the subject of a very intriguing essay by Dorothy L. Sayers.)

  “Oh.” A quickening of interest. “You are an aficionado of true crime. Who do you think murdered Sir Harry Oakes?”

  “I’m not impressed by the theory that gambling lords planned it because Oakes opposed casinos in the Bahamas,” Annie said caustically, “but no one’s ever come up with a reasonable explanation of why the body was set afire.”

  Max cleared his throat. “The other points of interest,” he suggested mildly.

  “Oh, yes, yes, of course. Let me see, now. The coat … oh yes, the door behind Burke’s desk that opens into the cross hallway. That door was locked. But there was a smear of blood on the knob and no identifiable fingerprints.”

  “That’s a surface which would hold prints,” Annie objected.

  “Correct. But apparently some rough material had recently brushed the area, smudging whatever prints were in place.”

  “If the murderer exited that way, he—or she—must have had a key,” Max concluded.

  “Chief Wells believes the murderess attempted to open that door, found it locked, and escaped through the outer offices to the main hall.”

  Wells was certainly fitting the noose around poor Georgia’s neck, Annie thought, with a sinking heart. “Has anyone been found who saw Georgia leave the department after Crandall’s departure and before the explosion?” she asked.

  “Not yet, but the chief made a public appeal which will be carried in the newspaper tomorrow. Someone will have seen her. Besides, that really isn’t necessary. The lab reports are conclusive. That bar was the murder weapon. The girl was found trying to dispose of it in the Broad River.” Unexpectedly, he added, “Credo quia absurdum est.”

  Annie looked at Max, who mouthed, “ ‘I believe it because it is absurd,’ ” then frowned thoughtfully at the receiver and announced, “Fronti nulla fides.”

  What a talented husband she had! She again looked at him inquiringly.

  “No reliance,” he translated, “can be placed on appearance.”

  A sudden drawn breath on the line. “The door, the door. I think it’s Harry.”

  The line went dead.

  “Huzzah,” Laurel cheered from the doorway. “Our repast has arrived. Gather around, laborers in the vineyard of justice.”

  Annie wished her life were more simple and she just had six impossible things to believe before breakfast. That would be child’s play in comparison to the reality. But she was not one to admit to discouragement. And she even dredged from a y
ears-ago French class a lovely aphorism of her own. “Nous verrons ce que nous verrons.”

  Miss Dora was undaunted and stole the spotlight, of course.

  “We shall see what we shall see. Quite appropriate upon the arrival of dinner.”

  12

  It was the kind of meal which, upon completion, left Annie with a hearty craving for barbecued ribs, cole slaw, baked beans, and fried peach pie. With a heaping side dish of lamb fries.

  Not that it wasn’t good. Six courses, beginning with vichyssoise, which had about as much charm for Annie as melted Jell-O. Admittedly, however, the smoked salmon was good, the ricotta-provolone stuffed chicken breasts with apricot sauce tasty, the spinach-lamb salad challenging, and the kiwi mousse light enough to fly.

  But was it satisfying?

  And it didn’t help her indigestion, her appetite, or her disposition when Laurel forestalled Annie’s attempt to get to the heart of the matter (or one of the hearts, this ridiculous and now perhaps dangerous search by her class members for the identity of Deep Throat). Laurel decreed with a gentle, kindly smile that, of course, there could be no conversation of a criminal nature at the dinner table. Had she been reading Rex Stout on the sly?

  Laurel and Max discussed fly fishing.

  Miss Dora embarked on a monologue on the Brevard family, with copious cross-references to the antecedents of Lord Peter and the interesting parallels between the Brevards (originally a Norfolk family, too) and the Wimseys and did Annie know that engaging story about the Wimsey coat of arms with the crouching cat atop a black shield bearing three mice? Before Annie could manage a nod, Miss Dora droned on, “Capital story, really. In Alzina Stone Dale’s biography. Shows how clever Sayers was. When asked by that fellow—you know, Wilfred Scott-Giles—who ultimately wrote the definitive history of the Wimsey family, Sayers told him the shield originally bore three silver plates but they were changed to mice when Gerald de Wimsey served as a confidant to King Edward I. Gerald suggested that the king besiege a castle just as a cat tracks mice, very persistently.” A husky cackle of amusement.

  “One thing I’ve always admired about Dame Agatha is her simplicity.” Henny observed tartly.

  Fortunately, Miss Dora was too busy chuckling to hear her.

  Finally, however, dinner was at an end. Laurel, ever and always the hostess, shepherded them gracefully to a next-door sitting room and poured the after-dinner coffees. “Perhaps a sorbet?” she inquired.

  Annie bounced to her feet from a low-slung love seat. Hot coffee sloshed over the rim of her cup and sprayed her hand. “Ouch!”

  “Festina lente,” Miss Dora suggested slyly.

  “Not bad advice,” Max said cheerfully. At Annie’s glare, he added quickly, “Make haste slowly.”

  Carefully, Annie placed her cup and saucer on a fake Adam mantel. Sometimes it didn’t do to dignify absurdity with an answer. She addressed her mother-in-law. “Laurel, we’re wasting time. Max and I have a lot to do. That idiot, Chief Wells, didn’t even take time to listen to us about the department and all its problems. Now, we appreciate the information you’ve rounded up.” It took an enormous amount of character but she managed a grateful nod to Miss Dora. “Especially the information about Burke’s office. But it’s time for this charade to stop.”

  “The class project?” Laurel inquired. “Oh, Annie, we’ve taken care of that.”

  “I called everyone,” Henny said briskly.

  “Only thing to do,” Miss Dora seconded.

  It was rather like pumping up to face the class bully and discovering he was a block away and disappearing into a cloud of dust.

  “Certainly, my sweet. We couldn’t possibly have Chastain students undertaking a perilous assignment,” Laurel said equably.

  “Not the thing at all,” Henny agreed.

  “The trustees would have objected,” Miss Dora explained.

  “So it’s off? The project?” Annie asked.

  Three genial faces. Annie looked from the fox-sharp nose that quivered just a little to the suddenly bland parchment brow to deeply blue, ingenuous eyes.

  “But all this—” Annie spread her hand to encompass the connecting rooms with their paraphernalia of investigative tools.

  Shocked surprise in triplicate.

  “Why, Annie, nothing ever kept Hercule Poirot from his duty!” Henny exclaimed. “Once engaged, he could not be deflected. Remember Peril at End House.”

  Miss Dora thumped her cane once. “More like Strong Poison. In the finest tradition of Lord Peter, I shall pursue truth.”

  Laurel sighed dreamily. “Mary Roberts Rinehart saw most truly that love is the beginning and the end and shall evermore be triumphant. I should abandon my very soul were I to abandon her ideals.”

  Annie carefully measured the coffee, chocolate raspberry Colombian decaffeinated.

  Max stood with his hands jammed in his khaki slacks, his face drawn in a worried frown.

  “Relax,” Annie said lightly. “What kind of trouble can they get into on the top floor of the Palmetto Inn?”

  He paced into the kitchen. “Will they stay there?”

  Annie recalled the trio upon their departure. They had been much too engaged in what was rapidly approaching a shouting match over the virtues and superiority of their respective sleuths to do more than nod an absent good night as Annie and Max slipped out the door.

  “It should be really hot by now. Henny will have exploded, saying Lord Peter was a foppish, snobbish ass, Miss Dora will be banging away with her cane and demanding sarcastically to know how anyone could defend the superficial characterizations of Christie and Laurel will be humming ‘Always.’ ”

  Max began to laugh. He leaned against the doorjamb and accepted a mug of coffee. “I guess we don’t have to worry about them right now.” Then his smile slipped away.

  Neither said it, but tomorrow, as it inevitably does, would come.

  Annie led the way to the living room. “All right. It’s time for some real thought.”

  Max rustled in the desk, brought them each a scratch pad and pen. They settled companionably on the wicker couch. Annie glanced at the clock. Almost ten. And only a few hours’ sleep last night.

  But, as her three most irritating students would enjoin, duty called.

  Annie poised a pen over her pad, then looked at Max, bewildered. “Now I know how Captain Hastings feels—totally at a loss.”

  “Obviously,” her sometimes charming husband suggested, “let’s begin at the beginning. The first question is: Do we need to investigate at all?”

  Annie’s eyes widened. “Max, of course. Wells didn’t listen to a word we had to say—”

  He held up a cautioning hand. “Annie, maybe Wells is right. Maybe the murderer is already in jail.”

  Laurel would have hooted it down, the suggestion that lovely Georgia Finney had battered out Burke’s brains.

  But Henny would have countered that neither youth nor beauty nor romance guarantees innocence, and suggested a thoughtful perusal of Crooked House, Death on the Nile, Endless Night, Evil Under the Sun, and Death in the Air. And why else had Georgia tried to get rid of the murder weapon?

  Miss Dora would have dismissed that solution as boring and pedestrian, two cardinal sins in the Wimsey salon.

  But Annie had to consider it.

  “She was very upset about the article in The Crier,” Annie mused. “If Kelly published a story on her relationship with Frank Crandall, Crandall’s career could certainly be damaged—if not destroyed. So, I can see why she might have planted the bomb in the Crier offices. But why would she kill Burke?”

  Max sipped at his coffee. “Maybe Burke told her he was going to recommend against tenure for Crandall because of their relationship. Or, how about this—Georgia thinks Burke leaked the information to Kelly?”

  Burke as the betrayer of the faculty.

  It could be.

  He had denied it. Emphatically.

  But whoever had engineered that leak would surel
y deny any accusation.

  “Okay. Okay,” Annie said energetically. “Look, we’ve got to find out who planned this. Who pulled Kelly’s string. And why.” Mrs. Dane Calthrop, in her clear-eyed fashion, put it best in The Moving Finger when she called in Miss Marple to help, because Miss Marple was an expert in wickedness. And that was what they faced, wasn’t it? “Wickedness,” Annie murmured. Her face was stern. “Whoever is behind this is wicked, Max, don’t you think?”

  He looked at her inquiringly.

  She slowly formulated her thoughts. “What kind of person would do this? Someone intelligent enough to know how Kelly would respond? Someone filled with anger? Or at the least, with jealousy? Or was it colder than that? An overweening determination to prevail?”

  Max shrugged. “These are brainy people. Subtle people, accustomed to leading others, if not manipulating them. On that standard, it could be any one of them.”

  “Even Burke,” she said solemnly. He had been, to her, likable. But he had also been a determined, angry man.

  “Right,” Max agreed. “If so, he may have been killed because he leaked all the untidy secrets of the department.”

  “But if he wasn’t behind it, could he have discovered who did it and have to be silenced?”

  Max brooded. “Murder? Was it worth murder to hide the source of the leaks?”

  Annie shrugged. “That depends, doesn’t it, on how much someone had to lose.”

  Max shoved a hand through his thick blond curls, disarranging them in what Annie considered to be a most attractive fashion. Really, rumpled became Max, especially that endearing twig poking up from the back of his head.

  “Look at this thing logically,” he implored.

  Annie tried hard to concentrate, although she yearned for sleep. Or, at the very least, for a good slug of endorphins à la Harry Colderwood. Sleep was almost as important to her as food, and it seemed eons since she’d curled up comfortably in their very cozy bed.