Too Late to Die

by Bill Crider

  I shook my head. “Dino didn’t tell me anything. I wanted to hear it from you.”

  She held the folder in her left hand, looking at the picture. In her right was the stub of the cigarette, which she ground out in the ashtray. “This picture was taken a few years ago, her senior year in high school. She’s nearly twenty now.”

  I did some more figuring. Sharon had been born when her mother was twenty-six, twelve years after she’d come to the Island. “Were you still, ah . . . ?”

  “Whoring? The word doesn’t bother me. I just don’t want people to know for Sharon’s sake. Yes, I was. I’d been on the circuit for a bit by that time, but when Sharon began making her presence obvious I came back here. I moved into an apartment, told people that my husband had died in an automobile accident. I got a Social Security card. I looked pretty good, and I had a good telephone voice. I’ve been a receptionist ever since.”

  I looked at her a little dubiously. “Most women with a background like you’ve described wouldn’t find it quite so easy to fit into the straight life.”

  She lit another cigarette, exhaled. “Nobody ever said it was easy. I did it, that’s all.”

  “You were never tempted to make a little extra money on the side?”

  “Tempted? Sure. But I never gave in. I had a job and a daughter. I wanted to keep both of them.”

  “How about romantic involvements?”

  She handed me the folder after a last brief look. “None. Oh, there were advances made to me from time to time, but that’s one thing about me that didn’t change; I still see men as good for only one thing.”

  “Let’s talk about Sharon, then. What’s the story?”

  For the first time she looked as if her calm facade might crack, but it was only temporary. Then she was in control again. I wondered if control was something she’d learned while doing her job on Postoffice Street.

  “She went out on Friday night. She didn’t come home. The next morning I called Dino.”

  “I’ve got to admit that’s succinct,” I said. “So. Where’d she go?”

  “I don’t know.” She blew another of the smokey jets.

  “Did she walk? Ride? Go alone, or with someone?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Look,” I said, feeling exasperated already, “you must know something.”

  She ground out the cigarette, looking at the ashtray instead of me. “No,” she finally said. “I don’t have to know something. My daughter lived here with me, but that doesn’t mean we communicated.”

  Something clicked. “She knew,” I said. I thought about it a minute. “She didn’t know, and then she knew. Recently.”

  Evelyn Matthews looked at the folder I was holding, but she still didn’t look at me. “Yes,” she said.

  I thought that now we were getting somewhere and that this might turn out to be easier than I’d thought. “Isn’t it possible that she just went away for a while to figure out how she felt about things? She’ll probably call soon, or come home. You can see that she’s had a shock.”

  She nodded reluctantly. “It’s possible, but I don’t believe it.”

  “Did she have any money? A car?”

  “She might have a little money of her own. She’s been working part-time in a little shop on The Strand.”

  “What does she do the rest of the time?”

  “She goes to the community college. She wants to be a lawyer.”

  “Boyfriends?”

  “No one steady.” She reached for the Marlboro pack, picked it up, and then set it back down. “I smoke too much,” she said. “There’s a boy she likes, Terry Shelton. You could talk to him. He works at the shop, too.”

  “What about the car?”

  “I have a car. Sharon doesn’t. Mine’s in the garage.”

  It was time to backtrack a little. “How’d you get to know Dino?”

  She smiled a reminiscent smile. “He used to hang around the house. He was just a kid, eight, ten maybe. He and Ray came around sometimes. We all knew he was related to the bosses, so we were nice to him. He never came in at night, just in the afternoon sometimes.”

  Something must have showed in my face.

  “Not nice to him the way you’re thinking,” she said. “Jesus. He was just a kid.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  She waved it away. “No more than what most people would think. We were whores, after all. But we weren’t as bad as all that. Anyway, Dino remembers. He thinks of me as sort of one of the family. There’s not many of the old bunch left around here, you know?”

  I said I knew. “Did Sharon have any friends at the college, anyone she might have confided in?”

  She thought about it for a second or two. “There’s one girl there, Julie Gregg, who works in the Social Studies Department. Sharon mentioned her a few times.”

  “One more thing. How did Sharon find out about your past?”

  She reached for another cigarette and lit it, whether she smoked too much or not. “I wish I knew,” she said. “I wish I knew.”

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  A Preview of ONE DEAD DEAN

  Book One of the Carl Burns Mystery Series

  Prologue

  One hot August night in 1897 Hartley Gorman got saved in the Pearly Gates Baptist Church. Within thirty minutes of the time he walked the aisle for Jesus, the preacher had him totally immersed in the murky waters of Orchard Creek. On the banks, watching avidly an event that most of them thought they’d never live to see, was most of the population of Pecan City, Texas, having piled into wagons, buckboards, surreys, gigs, and one-horse shays to get there in time.

  When Hartley Gorman walked out on the bank, mud sucking at his church-going shoes, water dripping from his sodden pants legs and running in streams out of his hair and down his face, he was vouchsafed a vision. He fell to his knees, threw up his arms, and pitched face forward on the creek bank. He was speaking aloud, but no one could understand the words, Gorman’s mouth being mostly full of muddy grass at the time. Nobody dared to turn him over while he was in the grip of the Holy Spirit.

  He told everybody who would listen later that he’d seen the Lord (though he was always a little vague on what He looked like), who had commanded him to build a school, a college where ladies and gentlemen could go to learn without being tainted by the evil influences of the World, the Flesh, and the Devil, three things that most people in Pecan City thought Hartley Gorman knew plenty about himself. Not that he ever had anything to do with them again.

  In fact, Hartley Gorman became a saintly man, dedicated to his dream, which, thanks to the fact that Hartley was by far the richest man in Pecan City, soon had become a reality.

  By late the following fall, a little over a year after his vision, Hartley Gorman College’s first building was standing in all its glory, three stories high, with a veneer of native sandstone and a tall steeple on top. Twenty-two students had enrolled.

  Twenty years later, when Gorman died, the school, not having grown very much, was taken over by his denomination. Eventually, new buildings were added and more students came, but the school remained small and isolated, known mostly for its occasional powerhouse basketball teams. Nothing very remarkable ever happened there, no Rhodes scholars got sent to Britain, no astronauts were graduated. Hartley Gorman College remained a quiet, undistinguished school, safe from its founder’s three bugaboos, or relatively safe at least—a place that few, if any, outside the state had ever heard of. It stayed that way for a long, long time.

  Chapter 1

  During the ten-minute break between his nine and ten o’clock classes, Carl Burns sat in his office working on his list of things he hated. He had just written down Dental floss that shreds between your back teeth and was starting on People who fart in elevators when his student secretary walked into his office.

  His secretary’s name—her honest-to-God name, right there on all her official records and, Burns supposed, on her
birth certificate as well—was Bunni. With an i. Burns shuddered to think what her parents must be like. He hoped he’d never have to meet them.

  Aside from her name, however, Bunni had certain assets; assets of the kind to make male professors—even male professors at Hartley Gorman College—snap their heads around in the hallways. There was her flawless, creamy skin. Her long blonde hair. Her blue, blue eyes. Her pneumatic breasts. Only two things restrained Burns from leaping across his massive brown executive desk and attempting to rip off her skintight Gloria Vanderbilts with his teeth: (1) He would certainly be fired for moral turpitude, and (2) she chewed gum. People who chew gum in public were high on the list Burns was working on.

  “Hi, Dr. Burns,” Bunni said, giving her gum a good workout. Juicy Fruit. Burns particularly hated the odor of Juicy Fruit gum. “Dean Elmore called while you were in class.”

  Burns looked up at her and then down his list. He drew a line through the word People, which was as far as he’d gotten with the sentence he’d begun earlier, and wrote Dean Elmore in his neat, precise hand. Then he drew a long, looping arrow from Elmore’s name to near the top of the list, the arrowhead pointing to the space between People who talk aloud in movie theaters and Days when the humidity is more than 40%.

  He put the cap on his black-ink-filled Pilot Precise Ball Liner and looked back up at Bunni. “And what did the Dear Departed say that he wanted to see me about?”

  A cloud crossed the clear blue sky of Bunni’s eyes. Burns knew that he was wrong to joke about Elmore’s appearance with her, since Bunni seldom understood a joke. Besides, Elmore almost certainly hadn’t said what he wanted, one of his favorite tactics being to instill doubt in anyone he could, at any time, about anything at all.

  But this time Burns was surprised. Not only had Elmore left a message, Bunni had remembered it. “It was just a reminder call,” she said. “About the luncheon today.”

  “Ah,” Burns said. “The luncheon: Thank you, Bunni, for bringing that message. You run along to class now. I’ll be in soon.” Bunni was in his ten o’clock American literature class. “Today I’m going to give you a list of ten characteristics of Romanticism. You get ready to write them down.”

  Bunni’s eyes cleared. “Yes, sir,” she said, and left the office.

  Burns smiled. One of the things he liked about Hartley Gorman College was the fact that the students there still knew how to say “sir” with some degree of sincerity. One of the things he didn’t like was the Friday “luncheons,” supposedly a time for the academic dean to hear reports from the various department heads, but mostly a time for Elmore to berate, humiliate, and castigate his staff instead. It was not an event that Burns looked forward to with eager anticipation. In fact he felt a lot like a man Mark Twain had described, a man who was about to be hanged, who said that if it weren’t for the honor of the thing, he’d just as soon skip it.

  Burns gathered up the textbook and his notes from the top of his desk. Then he opened the wide, thin drawer in the middle of the desk and tossed in his list of things he hated. He could work on it some more later in the day. He tossed in the black Pilot, too. For his class rolls, he used a Paper Mate Power Point that Bunni had given him for Christmas the year before.

  He wondered who would get the reaming at the luncheon later that day. Burns couldn’t recall having done anything himself, but at dear old Hartley Gorman College, you didn’t actually have to be guilty of doing something to get a reaming. That was another of Elmore’s tactics. He liked to keep people off balance.

  As Burns stood wondering, the bell rang to signal the beginning of class. He could reach his classroom in seconds, but the route was complicated. His office was on the third floor of the school’s original building, now almost ninety years old. Its official designation was “Hartley Gorman I”—all the buildings were, for some reason, numbered—but it was called simply “Main” by almost everyone—except, of course, for Elmore, who prided himself on knowing the numbers of all the buildings and who never referred to them any other way. Burns’s office was Main 301, slightly isolated since it was in what appeared to have been designed originally as an elevator shaft.

  Burns didn’t mind that his office stuck out on the side of the building above one other office and an entryway. What he minded was what was over his head, and the maze he had to run to get to class. Main’s third floor, which had served as the college’s chapel in its early years, had been remodeled for the Psychology Department some years before and eventually inherited by the English Department when psych moved to newer, plusher quarters.

  Burns had to leave his office, go through a narrow hallway past the usually open doors of two small classrooms (used as observation rooms by psych), turn left, walk past two tiny offices, turn left, turn right again almost immediately, cross a wide hall, and enter his classroom. A rat could hardly run the maze any better.

  The Psych Department was also responsible for what was over Burns’ head when he sat at his desk—namely, hundreds of pounds of pigeon shit. Burns had been assured by Mal Tomlin that the shit was real. “See,” Mal had said, puffing madly on his hundred-millimeter cigarette, “the Psych guys had to have pigeons for their experiments. So they left the attic windows open and put out grain up there. Then when they needed a few pigeons, they’d go up and club ‘em. I’ve been up there, kid. I know what I’m talking about. If that ceiling of yours ever collapses while you’re in the chair behind your desk, you’ll be five feet deep in the stuff. Don’t count on me to dig you out. I expect they’ll just lock your office door and put a little plaque on it, like they did in the song for Big Bad John.”

  Burns was never sure when Mal was lying, but he was never very comfortable sitting in his office. Well, he couldn’t worry about that now. He walked into his class, checked the roll, and began his list. The students were ready for him, and they began taking down everything he said.

  After class, Burns stopped in the first office on his way back, the office of Clementine Nelson. She was “Clem” to everyone except Elmore, who had the irritating habit of calling everyone by his or her complete Christian name when he deigned to use the Christian name at all.

  Clem was a compact woman of about fifty with short hair that she brushed straight back from her face. She had very clear brown eyes, and she always wore severely tailored skirts and blouses in tones of khaki and brown. She looked to Burns like a retired semipro shortstop.

  Clem was at her desk grading papers. Burns leaned in the door frame. “I really punished them today,” he said.

  Clem looked up. “Another one of your famous lists?”

  “Right. You should have seen them taking it down. You would have thought it was the holy writ.”

  Clem laid down her red pen on the stack of papers. “You remember what it was like ten or fifteen years ago? Always questions. Those kids really kept you on your toes.”

  “I remember,” Burns said. “Now the only question anyone has is ‘How will all this help me get a better job and make over fifty thousand a year?’”

  “What do you tell them?”

  “I used to tell them that anything that made them more human was worth studying for its own sake and that money didn’t mean as much as they thought it did. Some of them even believed me.”

  “But what do you tell them now?”

  “Now I don’t tell them anything. The smart ones will figure it out for themselves.”

  “Ha.” Burns couldn’t interpret the “Ha,” so he didn’t say anything.

  “You have your weekly meeting today?” Clem asked.

  “As usual,” Burns said. “Neither rain, nor hail, nor dark of night . . .”

  “. . . shall keep you from your appointed scolding,” Clem said. “Give Elmore my love.”

  “Naturally,” Burns said. Clem and Elmore had been involved in a difference of opinion in a committee meeting three years before, shortly after Elmore’s appointment as dean. Elmore had addressed the faculty, emphasizing his open-mindedness and h
is ability to see both sides of a question. “We can agree to disagree,” he said. Three days later, Clem had disagreed. Thirty minutes after that, Elmore had gone to the president and tried to get her fired. The fact that he had not succeeded had only increased his dislike of her.

  Burns pushed away from the door frame, took two steps, stuck his head in the next office, said “Hello, Miss Darling,” and kept going. Miss Darling, as far as Burns knew, seldom spoke to anyone. She was long past the regular retirement age, and Burns thought she was quite dotty. He knew of at least one freshman comp class that she had entered and proceeded to teach a lesson on Shakespeare that was supposed to be taught in her sophomore British literature class. The freshmen sat politely through it all. Burns had mentioned Miss Darling to Elmore in his faculty evaluation memo, but Elmore had done nothing. Elmore, in fact, loved Miss Darling, who never spoke up in faculty meetings, never crossed anyone up in committees, and never questioned any administrative decision, no matter how lunatic it may have seemed to the rest of the faculty. Miss Darling could go on teaching the wrong lesson to the wrong class well into the next century and Elmore would never dream of replacing her.

  Another two steps and Burns had turned the corner to the hall leading to his own office. Waiting inside was Earl Fox, chairman of the History Department, which was housed on the second floor. “Got any matches?” Earl asked.

  “I think so,” Burns said, walking past Fox and around his desk. He opened the drawer into which he’d tossed his list and rummaged around until he found a matchbook advertising Hernando’s Fine Mexican Food. He handed it to Fox.

  “Let’s go down for a smoke,” Fox said.

  Fox and Burns had come to Hartley Gorman College the same year, 1973, a time when English and history teachers were a dime a dozen, a time when there were often hundreds of applicants for every job that opened. They had been hired at HGC simply because many people had never heard of the place, and many others didn’t think they could work under the restrictive conditions of a denominational school. Still others thought they were too good to waste away in a tiny college of no prestige located hundreds of miles from anywhere on the eastern edge of West Texas.