…A Dangerous Thing

by Crider, Bill

  After finishing his breakfast and the comics, Burns read some more from You'll Die Next!, and then it was time to leave for the funeral.

  He drove to the church in his Plymouth and didn't have any trouble finding a place to park. There wasn't going to be a huge crowd.

  Henderson's casket was down in front of the altar, and it was closed, for which Burns was grateful. He didn't want to have to say any last good-byes. He looked over the pews to see who was there. Walt and Dawn Melling were sitting near the back. The Tomlins and the Foxes were sitting together, and Burns was on his way to join them until he saw Elaine Tanner. She moved over, and he slid in beside her.

  He was going to whisper "Good morning," but he wasn't sure that would be appropriate. They were at a funeral, after all. So he just smiled, sadly.

  Elaine nodded, and then her eyes went past him to someone else. Burns looked to the side and there was Boss Napier standing in the aisle.

  Elaine didn't say anything, but she slid over some more, making room. Burns didn't see anything for it but to do the same. Napier sat beside him.

  Burns thought of asking him what he was doing there, but it wasn't necessary. Napier told him.

  "You never know what'll happen at a funeral," Napier whispered. "Sometimes you can learn a lot from people's reactions."

  Burns nodded as if he had known it all along. Napier didn't have anything else to say.

  The crowd trickled in slowly, most of them from the college. Dean Partridge came in, along with Eric Holt, though they didn't sit together. All the members of Burns's department were there as well. Henderson didn't seem to have made too many friends outside the school, though there were ten or twelve people that Burns didn't recognize. He wondered if any of them had a motive to kill Henderson. By the time the service was to begin, there were more people there than Burns had really expected.

  The pipe organ played softly in the background, mostly slow, lugubrious hymns that Burns hoped no one would play at his own funeral. Some of the songs had either too many sharps or too many flats for the organist to handle, and when she hit the wrong key several people would wince slightly.

  After what seemed like a very long time, Samantha Henderson and her family entered. Her mother was beside her. There was a man that looked a little like Tom, undoubtedly his father, along with several cousins, and some older people who must have been aunts and uncles.

  Samantha's eyes were glittery and damp as she looked at the casket, but when she looked out at the crowd and saw the Foxes and Tomlins, the eyes changed and took on an almost feral light. Burns hoped that she didn't do anything unseemly.

  She didn't. She was seated by her mother, and the minister began talking, saying the soothing things that ministers are supposed to say but that somehow didn't seem very comforting to Burns. He hoped the family found them more reassuring than he did.

  The congregation sang a hymn, "How Great Thou Art," and the minister launched into his praise of Tom Henderson, most of which Burns thought was pretty inflated, considering what he knew of Henderson's character. Then there was a brief sermon, though not brief enough for Burns.

  After the sermon and another song, this one sung by one of HGC's music instructors, the funeral was over, and the casket was being rolled down the aisle, with the family walking along behind. Burns allowed himself to relax. It hadn't been as bad as it might have been.

  Samantha Henderson was weeping openly now, leaning on her mother. Fortunately the organ served to drown out the sounds of her sobbing.

  When Samantha reached the row where the Tomlins and Foxes were sitting, she suddenly stopped and straightened up. Her mother looked surprised and put a hand on Samantha's elbow as if to urge her along.

  Burns didn't like the looks of this. He was afraid that Samantha might yet make a scene. Burns didn't like scenes.

  Samantha's mother was whispering something to her daughter, bur Samantha wasn't listening. Her sobbing had stopped.

  "What's the matter?" Elaine asked in a low voice. Whispers were beginning to break out all over the church.

  Burns didn't answer her. He was about to say something to Boss Napier, but he saw that the police chief was watching with a great deal of interest and had no intention of intervening.

  Then Samantha Henderson yelled something that sounded to Burns suspiciously like "man-stealing bitches!" and made a dive toward Joynell Tomlin.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Things happened fast after that. Joynell and Samantha went down into the space between the pews and disappeared from Burns's sight, though he, like everyone else in the building, was standing on tiptoe trying to see what was going on.

  There were several screeches and what sounded to Burns like a couple of dull thuds, but he couldn't tell what was happening. There were so many people crowded around the pew by then that there was no hope of seeing anything.

  The minister was trying to fight his way through the crowd, but he wasn't having much success. No one wanted to give up his (or, Burns reminded himself, her) place for fear of missing something. Finally the minister resorted to trying to get everyone's attention by shouting.

  "This is a church! This is a house of God!" he said. But that didn't do any good either. No one was paying him the least attention.

  Meanwhile, the organist apparently oblivious to what was going on, kept playing the same slow, mournful hymns. She was, however, playing them louder. Burns knew that, because he could hear them clearly over the talking and shouting that would ordinarily have drowned them out.

  Napier just stood there, watching like everyone else.

  The organist hit a sour note on "Softly and Tenderly" just as Joynell Tomlin, or maybe it was Samantha Henderson, screamed. There was another thud from the direction of the pew.

  Burns, who was embarrassed by the whole thing, poked Napier in the back. "Why don't you do something?"

  "I told you," Napier said, seeming quite cheerful. "You never can tell what you might learn at a funeral."

  The organist reached the chorus, and the words were punctuated in Burns's mind by the shrieks of Joynell and her adversary.

  "Earnestly, tenderly, Jesus is calling—"

  "Eeeeeeeeeeee!"

  "Calling, O sinner—"

  "Aaarrrrrrrrrggggghhh!"

  "Come home!"

  Burns was about to give another try at poking Napier into action, but then he saw Joynell Tomlin rise up, her beehive of hair a disordered mess. He suspected that at least one of the screams had been when Samantha yanked a handful of it. Joynell's lipstick was smeared across her cheek. Or maybe it was Samantha's lipstick.

  Joynell had her hands on Samantha's shoulders, and she was propelling the grieving widow back into the aisle. The crowd suddenly fell silent, and those around the pew moved away to make room.

  ". . . and try to act dignified!" Joynell said as she shoved Samantha into the waiting arms of her family.

  Samantha looked as if she wanted to make another dive at Joynell, but her mother and her father-in-law restrained her. Joynell glowered at her and straightened her dress. Mal stood beside his wife looking mortified. Burns didn't blame him, although Joynell didn't look upset at all. A little disheveled, maybe, but not upset.

  The pallbearers had successfully gotten the casket out of the church during the interruption, but the aisle was packed with curious onlookers. They got back to their seats, and Samantha and her family walked slowly on out of the church. Instead of the usual respectful silence, there was the buzz of many whispered conversations. Burns thought he could guess the topic of every one of them.

  "Still think your buddies didn't have anything to do with the murder?" Napier asked.

  Burns just shook his head.

  Samantha and her family didn't linger outside the church for the traditional words of comfort from friends. They piled into the waiting limousine for the ride to the cemetery and sat there behind the closed doors and rolled-up windows. Burns suspected that the family was holding Samantha under house arre
st to keep her from creating any more incidents.

  Napier pulled Burns aside as they left the building and jerked his head toward a towering pecan tree near the street. Burns asked Elaine to wait for him and walked with Napier to the tree, away from the crowd, most of whom were still talking about what had happened inside.

  "I got a question for you, Burns," Napier said.

  "What? And why didn't you put a stop to that fight?"

  "That wasn't any of my business. Just shows that Mrs. Henderson really believes those women are to blame."

  "They aren't."

  "So you say. But I want to ask you about something else. That name you gave me."

  A breeze moved the leaves of the pecan tree, rustling them together. A car hummed by in the street. Burns watched it move on down the block.

  "Did you check on the name?" he asked.

  "Yeah. And now I know why I remembered it. Maybe you were right. Maybe I saw it on America's Most Wanted. I'm sure there was a show on the guy, but it could have been Unsolved Mysteries."

  Burns couldn't believe it. "You're kidding."

  "Nope. Now what I want to know is why you wanted me to check on that name."

  "I was just curious. I ran across it somewhere."

  "Don't try to mess with me, Burns."

  "I'm not." Curiosity filled Burns. "Tell me what you found out."

  Napier brought out his little notebook, scanned a page, and said, "Mitchum is one of those radicals from the seventies who got himself in a heap of trouble and then just disappeared. Nobody's seen or heard from him in twenty years."

  Or maybe he has been heard from, Burns thought. Maybe he's been around all along, under another name.

  "I don't remember seeing the story," he said. "What kind of trouble are we talking about?"

  "According to him, he didn't do anything."

  "Then why would he be on one of those crime shows?"

  "Because according to the FBI, he did do something. He was part of a bank robbery in California. He was the driver of the getaway car."

  Good lord, Burns thought.

  Napier leaned his back against the tree and put a foot up on the trunk. "His story was that he was just a victim. Four guys kidnapped him at gunpoint, forced him to drive to the bank, and one of them held a pistol on him while the other three went in and committed the robbery."

  "Who were the guys?" Burns asked.

  "Part of some bunch that called themselves FTP. Free the People. They were going to use the money from the bank to overthrow the government, or something like that. But something went wrong and a guard got shot. Mitchum took off with the guy in his car, but they wound up wrapped halfway around a light pole after a high-speed chase. The guy in the car was killed, but Mitchum survived."

  Burns wasn't sure he wanted to know the answer to his next question. "What about the ones in the bank?"

  "All three of them were killed. One of the tellers tripped a silent alarm, and they were trapped in the bank. There was a shoot-out with the police. That's when the guard died. There's always been a little suspicion that no one meant to kill him and that he just got caught in a crossfire, but the robbers took the blame."

  "How did Mitchum get away from the police if he was hurt in the wreck?"

  "He was in the hospital, under guard. He'd given his story to the police, but nobody believed him, and he probably knew it. He was a student, and apparently pretty well known as a campus agitator. He'd been associated with plenty of radical groups. FTP wasn't one of them, but the fact that he was in the car with them was suspicious to everyone. It didn't look good for him, so he got his hands on somebody's scrub suit and slipped out. That's the last time anyone ever saw him."

  Napier folded his notebook closed and stuck it into a pocket. Burns looked back at the thinning funeral crowd. The hearse was pulling away from the curb for the drive to the cemetery. A number of cars followed it.

  Elaine stood near the church entrance with the Tomlins and the Foxes. Joynell was talking and waving her hands. Considering what had just happened inside, Mal and Joynell probably didn't feel much like going to the burial site.

  "So now I guess you better explain why you wanted to know about that guy," Napier said. "That's a pretty funny name just to pick out of a hat."

  "It's just a name I ran across," Burns said, thinking that he was telling the absolute truth.

  "I believe that," Napier told him. "Like I believe the government is going to repeal the income tax. So explain how you happened to run across it just now. And why did you want me to run it through the computer? I remember seeing an old San Diego State yearbook in Henderson's office, and that's where this Mitchum went to school. Is there some connection between the two of them?"

  "I don't know," Burns said, and that was also the truth, even if it didn't tell the whole story.

  Napier looked over to where Elaine was still talking to Joynell Tomlin. "I'm already chapped at you, Burns, or did you not notice that Elaine didn't even speak to me today?"

  Burns had noticed, but he hadn't wanted to say anything. No use to rub it in.

  "So that's one mark against you," Napier said. "Now it begins to look a whole lot like you're holding out on me. If you've got something on this Mitchum, I want to know about it now."

  Burns told the truth once again. "I don't have anything. Let's just say it's something I'm looking into."

  "You're going to get in trouble again, Burns," Napier said, shaking his head. "I know it."

  "I'll let you know as soon as I find out anything for sure. Trust me."

  "Ha ha," Napier said. But he wasn't laughing. He wasn't even smiling.

  By the time Burns got back to Elaine, Mal and Earl were nowhere to be seen, and Joynell had finished telling her story. Burns was sorry he had missed it. Joynell had a way of improving things in the telling, and he was sure that by now the tale of Samantha's unprovoked attack had reached epic proportions. He was about to ask her to repeat it when Mal appeared from around the side of the church, waving his hand wildly in a signal for Burns to join him.

  Burns excused himself and walked over to where Tomlin was standing beside Earl Fox in the shade of the building.

  "We caught 'em!" Tomlin said, punching his right fist into his left palm.

  Fox was as excited as his friend. "That's right. Red-handed!"

  "Good," Burns said. "Who did you catch?"

  He was glad Napier wasn't listening. The police chief would probably have told him that whom was the correct word.

  "Partridge and Holt," Fox said. "Who else?"

  "If you caught them, where are they?"

  "We didn't catch 'em in a trap," Tomlin said. "We caught 'em talking together."

  "Oh," Burns said. "That sounds serious. Is there a law against it?"

  Tomlin was disgusted. "Look, we're just trying to help. If you want those two to get away with murder, just say so."

  Burns was tempted to say "So" and let it go at that, but Tomlin's hunch about America's Most Wanted hadn't been that far off the mark.

  "All right," he said. "Tell me about it."

  "OK," Tomlin said. "I'd heard enough about Joynell and that crazy Henderson woman, and I was tired of the way people were looking at us, so Earl and I decided to sneak off behind the church for a cigarette."

  No surprise in that, Burns thought, though Earl usually wouldn't smoke right out in the open.

  "There's a big bush back there," Tomlin said. "You've seen it."

  He was right. A huge ligustrum of some kind grew beside the back steps, and Burns had seen it many times.

  "There's some space between that bush and the wall," Tomlin went on. "We stepped back in there and lit up. You can hardly even see the sidewalk."

  "And they came walking right up to us," Fox said. "We could practically reach out and touch them."

  Tomlin laughed. "Fox was so scared the dean would catch him smoking that he nearly fainted. He didn't know whether to eat his cigarette or just die right there."

&n
bsp; "What did you do?" Burns asked.

  The question was directed to Fox, but it was Tomlin who answered. "He threw it down and stepped on it. But very quietly. They didn't hear a thing. And that's when they started talking."

  "About Henderson's murder?"

  "No," Tomlin said. "But it was almost as good. Partridge told Holt to come to her house tonight, and they'd 'talk things over.'"

  Burns didn't think that was particularly incriminating. He suspected that they were planning to discuss the impending appearance of George (the Ghost) Kaspar before the student court.

  "What's wrong with talking things over?" he asked.

  Tomlin looked at Burns as if Burns were a student who had just asked a really stupid question. "Don't you get it? She was probably talking about Henderson. They know you're getting close, and they're scared."

  "I think you're reading a lot into a simple conversation. Boss Napier seems to think that you and Fox are a lot more likely suspects than Holt and the dean."

  "That's another thing," Tomlin said. "That cop asked Joynell all kinds of questions about what was going on between her and Henderson, and he even had the nerve to imply that I might have wanted Henderson out of the way because I was jealous of him. Did you ever hear anything so ridiculous?"

  "Yes," Fox put in. "He implied the same thing about me."

  "So that's even more reason why you have to pin it on those two," Tomlin said. "You owe it to me and Earl."

  "But what if they didn't do anything?"

  "You've gotta be kidding! Didn't I just tell you we heard them talking about it? You have to go over to her house tonight and listen in on them. Get the facts and turn them in."

  "I can't go sneaking around the dean's house," Burns protested. "That's crazy."

  "Not if you catch a murderer," Tomlin pointed out. He spread his hands. "If you're scared, I'll go with you."

  "I'm not scared," Burns told him. "I just don't think it's a good idea. We could get in big trouble."