…A Dangerous Thing

by Crider, Bill

  Chapter Six

  It was almost impossible to hold classes the next day, and not just because the only thing anyone could talk about was the death of Tom Henderson. The major distraction was the "grief counseling" that Dean Partridge had ordered for any students who felt devastated by Henderson's sudden demise.

  Predictably enough, there were very few students who fell into such a group, Henderson not having been one of HGC's most popular professors. However, so that the program would not look like a terrible administrative misjudgment, all the instructors had been told to mention the special counseling sessions in their classes and encourage the students to attend them.

  Burns dutifully followed orders, though he was highly suspicious of the fact that Dawn Melling had been placed in charge of the counseling. He didn't know how much good she could do.

  He said as much to Fox and Tomlin as they sat in the boiler room, the only indoor "smoke free area" left on campus where anyone felt smoking could go on undetected.

  The reason for that was that the HGC's boiler was older than anyone on campus, with the possible exception of Dirty Harry, the campus security officer, who spent a great deal of his time in the boiler room, asleep.

  Of course it wasn't only that the boiler was old that kept people away. It was also, like Dirty Harry, dangerous.

  Dirty Harry was dangerous because he carried a big revolver and was likely to point it at anyone or anyone who looked even the least bit out of place to him. It was a known fact that hardly anyone dared venture into a campus office on the weekend to catch up on paper grading or to map out assignments for the coming week.

  Harry was likely to creep into the office behind them and throw down on them with the revolver, threatening to shoot if they didn't produce i.d. to prove they had a right on campus. Since HGC didn't furnish i.d. cards to its faculty, there were several instructors who felt that they had gone through near-death experiences while looking down the barrel of Harry's .357 Magnum.

  The boiler didn't carry a gun, but it was just as likely to explode as Harry's revolver, at least according to an engineering study that Dean Partridge had ordered. It was old, and if the pressure built up too much, it was going to take out half the campus. Or that was the story going around.

  It was, Burns thought as he looked at it, certainly big enough. It looked a little like a stubby, asbestos-wrapped rocket ship lying there in its concrete cradles, pipes and valves extending from it and running to all the buildings it served. It was quiet for the time being, however. Thanks to the mild spring weather, the boiler wouldn't be needed to heat the campus buildings until well into the next fall.

  Just the same, no one came into the building that housed the boiler except for the occasional maintenance worker who was sneaking a smoke and who was therefore highly unlikely to rat on anyone else doing the same thing.

  "What's Dawn going to tell the kids, anyway?" Tomlin wondered. "'I share your pain'?"

  "That's not what I'd like to share with Dawn," Earl Fox said with an attempt at a leer. His clean-cut features didn't lend themselves very well to leering, however.

  "That's a sexist remark, I think," Burns told him. "I could report you to the dean for something like that."

  "She might have heard that story already," Mal Tomlin said. "Not about Earl, but if what I heard is true, old Henderson shared at thing or two with Dawn. Right, Earl?"

  Fox looked the other way and tapped the ash off his cigarette onto the concrete floor. One advantage of being in the boiler room was that you didn't have to bother with an ashtray.

  "Hey, Earl, is it true or not?" Tomlin asked.

  To his surprise, Burns didn't know exactly what was going on. He thought he was pretty well up on the campus gossip, but this was clearly something he'd missed. And Fox clearly didn't want to talk about it.

  "What's going on here?" Burns asked. "What about Henderson and Dawn?"

  "I'm not supposed to say anything about it," Fox told him. "I don't know how Mal found out."

  "You ought to close your office door when you've got an irate visitor," Tomlin said. "If you want to keep secrets, that is. I just happened to be passing by when Walt Melling stormed in the other day."

  "I closed the door as soon as I got a chance," Fox said. "I didn't see you outside it."

  "I must've been standing out of sight," Tomlin said, grinning. "I didn't hear much after you closed the door, though."

  Burns was curious. "Just what did you hear?"

  "I can't tell you," Tomlin said. "Didn't you hear Earl? It's a secret."

  Burns looked over at Dirty Harry, who was tipped precariously back in his chair, his eyes closed, his mouth half open.

  "There's no one here but us," Burns said. "And I'm not going to tell anyone."

  "You'd better not," Fox said. "I haven't, not even Dean Partridge."

  "I bet Walt told her, though," Tomlin said. He looked at Burns. "His face was red as a turkey's snout."

  "Why?" Burns asked. "Will one of you please tell me what's going on around here?"

  "You might as well tell him, Earl," Tomlin said. "He'll find out sooner or later. He's probably already helping the cops, just like he always does."

  "I'm not helping the cops," Burns protested. "Boss Napier told me to keep out of it. I'm just curious."

  "Sure you are," Tomlin said.

  Burns could see it was useless to argue. "All right, so I'm working with the cops. Tell me what's going on, Earl, and I'll see to it that Napier doesn't take you down to the station to beat the truth out of you with his bullwhip."

  "All right," Fox said. "But you didn't hear it from me." He tossed his cigarette to the floor and crushed it out.

  There were a number of butts scattered around the area, and Mal Tomlin looked down at them. "If Dean Partridge ever comes in here, our ass is grass."

  Fox looked even more frightened than he had at the mention of Boss Napier's legendary whip. "Can she tell they're our cigarettes?"

  "Nobody but you would smoke Cost Cutters," Tomlin said.

  Fox bent down and started picking up the butts. "You two help me with these. You're in this as deep as I am."

  "Not until you tell me about Walt Melling," Burns said. "Then maybe I'll help you."

  Fox straightened, dropping the butts back on the floor and dusting off his hands. "All right. It was last Thursday, just after Assembly. I was going through my desk to get notes for class when Melling came in. He was upset, all right. His face was just about as red as Mal said it was."

  "I thought he was going to have a stroke," Tomlin said. "I mean, he was red."

  "Why?" Burns asked, though he thought he had a pretty good idea by now.

  "He said that Henderson had been hitting on Dawn," Fox said. "He said that he was going to, and I'm quoting here, 'beat the little worm to a pulp.'"

  "Why come to you?" Burns asked.

  "Because I'm his department chair," Fox said. "He wanted me to have a talk with Henderson before the beating was administered. I got the idea that if I was effective, maybe the beating wouldn't even be necessary."

  "Does Boss Napier know about this?" Burns asked.

  "I didn't tell him," Fox said. "But I advised Henderson to go to Dean Partridge. She should know about things like that. Has Napier talked to her?"

  Burns didn't know. Things didn't look good for Melling if Partridge remembered Melling's feelings and reported them to Napier, however.

  "What about it, Burns?" Tomlin asked. "You think it was Melling? He could've gone to Henderson's office and confronted him. Melling's a pretty big guy. He wouldn't have much trouble knocking a twerp like Henderson through a window."

  "I don't know," Burns said. "Melling doesn't seem like the type."

  "Anybody's the type," Tomlin said. "Besides, he probably didn't mean to kill him. He just wanted to bust him in the chops. Right, Earl?"

  "Don't ask me," Fox said. He pulled out another Cost Cutter and lit it with his green Bic. "I suppose it could have happened like that."<
br />
  "I bet that's just what Eric Holt wants everyone to believe," Tomlin said, getting out a Merit Menthol. He lit it and blew a smoke ring.

  "What do you mean by that?" Burns asked. He was beginning to wish he hadn't quit smoking.

  "You're supposed to be the hot-shot crime solver," Tomlin said. "You figure it out."

  Burns looked out the front door of the boiler room. Students were beginning to walk by on their way to class. "We don't have all day," he said. "Why don't you just tell me."

  "Maybe you've forgotten about Henderson thinking he knew Holt," Tomlin said. "But I haven't."

  "I talked to Henderson about that," Burns said. "He couldn't place Holt. Holt probably just looked like someone Henderson knew at one time."

  "Or somebody he'd seen," Tomlin said. "Like on TV."

  "TV?" Burns said.

  "Unsolved Mysteries," Tomlin said. "America's Most Wanted."

  "Oh," Burns said. Recently, Tomlin had become a devoted fan of "reality" television, especially the kind of shows that related to law enforcement. He was a loyal viewer of Cops as well as the two shows he had just mentioned.

  Then Burns thought of something else. Where had Holt been last night? He had a class in Main on Tuesday evening, but he had been nowhere to be seen during all the excitement. Burns would have to ask someone about that. He didn't think he would mention it to Fox and Tomlin, though.

  Instead, he changed the subject back to Henderson. "Is there anything else you haven't told me, Earl? Anything that might be useful to the investigation, I mean?"

  "What do you think might be useful?"

  Burns had in mind the student he had seen running from Henderson's office earlier in the semester. "Harassment of students. That kind of thing."

  "I really shouldn't talk about that," Fox said. "It's confidential."

  "Not now," Tomlin said. "Henderson won't care. He's dead."

  "Right," Burns said. "So what about it?"

  "Well," Fox said, taking a drag off the Cost Cutter and then tossing it on the floor, "as you probably know, Henderson was a very strict grader. So naturally there have been complaints about him. There always are when someone tries to maintain high standards."

  "What about other kinds of harassment?" Burns asked. "We've established that Henderson liked women."

  "There's been one complaint this year," Fox said, making Burns think again of the girl who had left Henderson's office in tears. "But I'm sure that had nothing to do with Henderson's death, and I'm not going to tell you the woman's name. She wouldn't have killed anyone, and certainly not Henderson. She probably wouldn't have gone near his office with a bodyguard, much less alone."

  "Did you talk to him about the woman?" Burns asked.

  "Of course. He tried to pass it off as a student upset about a grade, but I think he got my message. I haven't had any complaints since then."

  "Maybe no one killed him," Burns suggested. "Maybe it was an accident, or suicide."

  "Sure it was," Tomlin said. "You just keep right on thinking that. But I'm betting it was murder, and I'll be surprised if that Holt wasn't mixed up in it."

  Burns thought about the movement he had seen in Henderson's office. Was it just a shadow? Or had someone been in there? Burns wished he could be sure, one way or the other.

  Burns was about to defend Holt again when a bell rang.

  "Ten minutes till class," Tomlin said. "Gotta go."

  "Me too," Fox said. "See you later, Burns."

  "Yeah," Tomlin said. "You still have a lot of stuff to tell us."

  "What, for instance?" Burns asked.

  "You haven't mentioned what Henderson looked like when he hit the sidewalk," Tomlin said.

  "I don't think you want to know," Burns said. He didn't like to think about it, and he couldn't imagine why anyone else would want to hear such a description. But then you never could tell about Mal.

  Tomlin and Fox went out of the boiler room, but Burns stayed behind for a minute, picking up the cigarette butts that Fox seemed to have forgotten about. Burns wasn't afraid of being caught in the company of smokers, but he didn't like to be an accomplice of litterbugs.

  He tossed the butts into a trash can near the door of the boiler room and went outside, patting his palms together to get some of the ash off them. Since the night before, springtime had arrived in full force. The sun was shining, birds were singing in the pecan trees, and the air was filled with the smell of cow manure.

  The maintenance crew was spreading the manure on the grounds, and Burns knew it would produce quite green grass in the near future. It always did, though the smell was certainly unpleasant for a few weeks. Franklin Miller had discovered, however, that manure was much cheaper than commercial fertilizer; in fact, it was given to the college free by Harley Gibson, a part-time teacher of agriculture courses. Harley's real job was raising cattle, and his feed lot was full of manure that he needed to get rid of. So the college got green grass, and Harley got rid of his manure. It was an arrangement that suited everyone except maybe those who had the scent of manure in their nostrils every day.

  Burns decided that on such a beautiful day there was no need to go back to his office. He didn't have a class for fifty minutes, so he had time to pay a visit to the library. What better to do on a lovely spring day?

  As he walked toward the library, Burns reflected that in a way teachers lived their lives backward. For most people, spring was a beginning, and the fall was the end of something. But for teachers, spring was the end of the year.

  Graduation might symbolize a new beginning for the students, but for the faculty it meant that another class was gone, with most of the students never to be seen again. Fall, with its incoming freshmen and the first days of class, was really the beginning of the adventure.

  Poor Tom Henderson. Spring had really been the end of things for him. He wouldn't be seeing any more freshmen or starting any more classes. Burns supposed that he ought to pay a sympathy call on Henderson's wife, though he really didn't know her that well, and he hated doing things like that. Maybe, he thought, Elaine Tanner would go with him.

  Chapter Seven

  The last person Burns expected to see in the library was Boss Napier, but of course the police chief wasn't there to look at the books. He was looking at Elaine Tanner.

  "I'm sorry," Burns said, stopping in the doorway of Elaine's office. "I didn't know you had company."

  "That's all right," Elaine said. "R. M. and I were just talking about the case."

  "Is that so?" Burns looked at Napier. The police chief was sitting in the chair by Elaine's desk, and there was a bowling trophy at his feet. He didn't appear any happier to see Burns than the English teacher was to see the cop. "What do you have to do with the case?"

  Elaine pushed her glasses up on her nose. "Well, I don't really know, but I am associated with the college, and R. M. says that a person might know something important without realizing it."

  It bothered Burns that Elaine referred to Napier as "R. M." It bothered him that she seemed to be fascinated with police work. And it bothered him that Boss Napier was sitting there in her office when it should have been obvious to anyone that she knew absolutely nothing about Tom Henderson.

  He didn't say any of those things, however. He leaned casually on the door frame and said, "That's certainly interesting. Have you been able to tell the Chief anything?"

  "Not about the case. But we've been talking about the baseball team. Have you been to any of the games?"

  Burns had not. HGC's baseball team wasn't much better than the football team, which had won one game in the last two years. But that suddenly didn't matter to Burns.

  "I've always been a baseball fan, though," he said. Napier looked at him darkly, which encouraged Burns to go on. "In fact, I played for a couple of years."

  That was true. He had played second base in Little League more than twenty years before.

  "Let's forget about baseball," Napier said. Burns thought the man was obviously j
ealous in the face of a genuine athlete. "Let's get back to Henderson."

  "I'd better leave," Burns said. "I don't want to get mixed up in that."

  "What do you mean?" Elaine asked. "Why you're one of the best assets R. M. has here on the campus. You've helped him out more than once."

  Burns smiled modestly and kept his mouth shut.

  Napier wasn't smiling, but he surprised Burns by saying, "She's got a point, Burns. You remember that I told you to let me know if you found out anything? So what have you found out?"

  Burns straightened a little. "You first. What makes you want to know?"

  "Because it's murder now," Napier said. "We're sure of it."

  Burns wasn't really surprised. That hadn't been a shadow he'd seen. Or if it had been, someone had made it.

  "What makes you so certain?" he asked.

  "There are a number of things that usually indicate suicide," Elaine said. "R. M. was telling me before we started talking about baseball. And this case doesn't fit the usual pattern."

  I'll just bet R. M. was telling you, Burns thought. "Really?" he said. "That's very interesting. What's so different about it?"

  It was Napier who answered. "In the first place, there's no note. If you kill yourself, you want everyone to know why you did it. Maybe you even want somebody to feel guilty. But we've searched Anderson's office—"

  "Henderson," Burns said.

  "—Henderson's office, and there's no sign of a note. That's point number one."

  "What's number two?"

  "Let me ask you a question," Napier said. "If you were going to kill yourself, wouldn't you open the window?"

  "Those windows are pretty hard to open," Burns pointed out.

  Napier agreed. "We can talk about the fire code later. But you'd find a way to open one if you wanted to jump. I've never heard of a suicide where someone jumped through a closed window."

  Burns thought that was a good point. "Could it have been an accident, then?"

  "I don't see how," Napier said. "Even if he fell against the window, it wouldn't break out like it did. We tested the one over his desk. You'd have to hit it pretty hard to break it."