Hoffer was suitably earnest in return. “Regrettably, not all institutions of higher learning are as responsible as this one. I have in my records the names of more than one hundred colleges and universities worldwide that teach courses in astrology, ESP and other lunacies.”
“Surely that is only a reflection of general public acceptance of these fringe studies,” Father Joe observed. “As Mr. Gerard said, people want to believe.”
“True enough,” Hoffer said, fiddling with his pipe. “So true, in fact, that in many quarters I am the one greeted with skepticism, not the Filipino peasant who claims to remove tumors by digging them out with his bare hands.”
“So how do you convince people?” I asked. I had a vague recollection of hearing that Hoffer put on a good show, but I didn’t remember the details. I don’t watch much television.
“The traditional way - in the tradition of Houdini and Randi, that is. I duplicate their tricks by using conventional conjuring techniques, demonstrating that no supernatural powers need be involved. It’s usually childishly simple. Some of the most famous frauds of our day are really rather crude operators.”
“Such as?” Mac asked.
“Remember Alexander Petrovnik, the Russian psychic? His best demonstration was nothing more than the old one-ahead trick. Perhaps you know it, Professor McCabe?”
Mac grunted. “Certainly.” He looked around the table. “Assume you gentlemen are the audience and I am the psychic. You each write a question for me, then seal it in an envelope. I collect all the envelopes. Before I open each one, I mentally divine the question and announce a suitably brilliant answer. Then I open the envelope and ascertain that, yes, I had the question correct.”
“That would impress me,” Father Joe said with a chuckle.
“And yet no real skill is required,” Mac said. “As a member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians, perhaps I should not reveal the secret, but this is in a good cause.” Oh, come on, Mac. Wild horses and the Chinese army couldn’t stop you from proving that you know the trick as well as Hoffer. “It works like this: The first answer I call out goes to a confederate. When I open that envelope to confirm the question, I am really looking at the next question - the first legitimate one. The confederate’s envelope is actually at the bottom of the pile, making it all even in the end.”
“And that’s about all there was to Russia’s most famous psychic,” Hoffer said. “His other tricks were even cruder. We haven’t heard much from Petrovnik since I confronted him on a television show in Florida. The Reverend Elroy Semple has been equally quiet since I showed up at one of his healing services in Louisville with the appropriate electronic eavesdropping equipment. It turned out that the ‘voice of the Lord,’ which informed him about the various illnesses of strangers in the congregation, sounded exactly like his wife. She was reading the data off the registration cards the audience filled out on their way in.
“Then there was the famous ‘backwoods medium,’ Arthur Cramner, who claimed an astonishing ability to make tables move during séances. No one has ever explained why a spirit would want to move a table, by the way. And if you could use your mind to control physical objects, would you employ that remarkable talent in the useless activity of bending spoons as Moshe Kamin claimed to do?”
“Doubtful,” I said. “I’m not a gambler, but I might be if I could move dice and roulette balls with my brain power.” As the only non-academic there, I had to inject some note of practicality into this discussion.
“I was able to easily duplicate both feats,” Hoffer sailed on, “as I relate at some length in my book The Great Miracle Scam.” He’d finally managed to mention the name of his book, which I sensed he’d been itching to do all evening.
“And a very successful book it has been,” Mac observed.
“I’m pleased to say it has increased my audience and hopefully reduced the number of people duped by the sort of nonsense I have tried to expose.”
What he meant was, it got him on a lot of popular talk shows. And the way he’d said it caused Mac to flinch as if hit in his vast solar plexus. In Mac’s mind that common misuse of the word “hopefully” - when he really meant “one hopes” - is one of the great outrages left over from the Twentieth Century.
“More power to you,” he told Hoffer, forgiving the grammatical apostasy. “Your growing reputation is well deserved. Still, have you no fear that you could be setting yourself up for an equally prominent fall? Suppose someday you get fooled.”
“It hasn’t happened yet,” Hoffer said tersely.
“Perhaps not. Or perhaps you were fooled and did not know it. Or then again, perhaps there are some miracles that cannot be explained - except by the fact that they are miracles.”
“Surely, Professor McCabe, you don’t mean to tell me you believe in the supernatural?”
“Of course I do! I am a Roman Catholic, and I try to be a good one. I fail constantly, of course.”
Hoffer stood up. “Surely Gerard must be off the phone by now.” He left the table. Something told me he didn’t want to get into a theological debate with Sebastian McCabe and Father Joe - especially not with Father Joe, his employer. Flight over fight - smart choice, Hoffer.
The psychology prof rapped on the door of the little study. “Mr. Gerard. Mr. Gerard! Are you all right?”
No answer.
With his hand on the door, Hoffer looked back at the rest of us in silent appeal. With one will and an unspoken fear, the rest of us rose from our chairs and quickly crossed the thirty feet or so to Hoffer’s side. He opened the door and we moved into the little room together.
The dead man’s upper torso lay sprawled across the top of the handsome antique desk. The arms were flung about in crooked, unnatural positions. The head was nothing more than a matted mass of blood and hair. A brass figure of a rearing horse, also bloodied, sat on its side inches from what used to be the victim’s left ear. Near the lifeless right hand the telephone’s receiver dangled over the edge of the desk.
I wanted to throw up.
Ralph Pendergast moved toward the telephone.
“Don’t touch it!” Mac said sharply.
Without a protest, Ralph pulled out a cell phone and called 911. “We need an ambulance,” he said.
“No we don’t,” said Father Joe. “It’s too late for that. Prayers are the only thing that will help Mr. Gerard now.”
While Ralph gave the 911 operator the details and the location, Mac stood at the other door, the one in the middle of the left wall as you entered the room. He jiggled the doorknob. It turned, but the door didn’t open.
“This door is locked,” Mac announced. “It is the only door the killer could have come through and it is locked from the inside.”
Down These Mean Streets . . .
The murder would have happened whether or not Ralph Pendergast had come into my office in Carey Hall on that Tuesday a little more than two weeks before. But that’s when I date my involvement in the business.
Ralph’s arrival was the second bad news of the day. The first was a rejection e-mail, which I opened on my office computer. If I counted correctly, S&S Publishing had just become the seventeenth publisher to reject Poison Ivy, my fifth Max Cutter private eye novel. The first four didn’t sell either. The most depressing part about the latest rejection is that S&S, a paperback house in Minneapolis, pretty much represents the bottom of the barrel in mystery publishing. Most of the writing they publish doesn’t exceed the quality of their rejection letter: “We are sorry, but your submission does not meet our editorial needs at this time.” Even I write better than that. Maybe I need an agent.
I was staring gloomily at the computer screen when Ralph walked in. All things considered, the form rejection via e-mail was more welcome.
As always, he looked like the keynote speaker at a convention of accountan
ts (no offense to my accountant, or any others). You’d never catch him loosening his rep tie - not even in his own office, much less mine.
He gestured to me with a folded-up newspaper. “I need to talk to you, Cody.”
“Mi casa es su casa, Ralph.”
Ralph was uncharacteristically agitated, and Popcorn was flustered. She stuck her head through the doorway close on his heels.
“I tried to tell him you were busy, Jeff.”
Popcorn - called Aneliese Pokorny on her timesheet - doesn’t come close to cracking five feet tall and doesn’t look forty-nine. She also doesn’t like being called my administrative assistant, and justly so, because her official title doesn’t begin to describe her jack-of-all-trades job in our small department.
Ralph, on the other hand, is one of my half-dozen bosses at St. Benignus College in his capacity as provost. It isn’t so clear on the organizational charts, but he knows it and I know it. He can come into my cubbyhole office any time he gets the urge.
“It’s okay,” I said. At the same time I spread out my folded arms on the desk, surreptitiously clicking the button on our antiquated intercom system into the “on” position with my right elbow. Popcorn, catching on immediately, nodded her head of soft, suspiciously blond curls, and closed the door behind her on her way out.
“What’s the crisis of the day, Ralph?” I asked.
He slammed the newspaper on the old oak desk in front of me in a swatting motion. “If you don’t know, Cody, perhaps we should hire someone who would. It is your job as director of public relations to keep unfavorable publicity like this out of the newspapers.”
The plural “newspapers” was for the most part a gross exaggeration. There’s only one newspaper in Erin, Ohio, The Erin Observer & News-Ledger, although it is true that papers in Cincinnati and other Ohio cities sometimes pick up Associated Press stories about us - mostly when it’s bad news.
The rest of his statement was fair enough. I figure that about a third of my job is to try to generate positive buzz about St. Benignus through media relations and social media (tweeting, Facebook, the website), about a third is crisis communications when something negative happens, and about a third is whatever doesn’t fit into somebody else’s job description, like ghostwriting speeches and articles.
I’d already seen the paper - and cringed - at breakfast. But I picked up Ralph’s copy and unfolded it again now, stalling for time.
“There,” Ralph said, pointing. “That story.”
I knew it. He indicated a three-column story on the lower half of the front page - a light feature to balance out the latest war news from Afghanistan, a preview of local observances marking the tenth anniversary of 9/11, a spectacular top-of-the-page car crash in the next county that killed four teenagers drunk on beer, and a potential Republican presidential candidate’s swing through southern Ohio.
I began reading the feature out loud, starting with the 24-point, two-line head:
PROFESSOR PACKS PUNCH
IN GRAMMAR NEWSLETTER
By Maggie Barton
Staff Reporter
Dr. Sebastian McCabe is the head of the popular culture program as St. Benignus College. But he isn’t very popular with some of his colleagues these days.
His latest project is a blog called The Write Stuff, in which he pokes not-so-gentle fun at the grammatical lapses, flabby writing, and clichés found in the prose of administrators and faculty members of the Catholic college.
“Nice lead,” I commented. “But the third sentence is kind of long. Nice effort on the headline, but the alliteration is a little forced.” I skipped ahead. “You have to admit this list of clichés Mac called out is pretty good.” I just couldn’t stop myself from a loving recitation:
“At the end of the day.”
“Just doesn’t get it.”
“Cutting edge.”
“Defining moment.”
“Doesn’t have a clue.”
“Let’s not go there.”
“Been there, done that.”
“Going forward.”
“Shifting paradigms.”
“Think outside the box.”
“24/7”
“Root causes.”
“I know what you’re upset about,” I told Ralph. “Some of these clichés are a bit passé. I’m sure that professors and administrators actually used them, though, because that’s where Mac gets his material. I just can’t figure how ‘vast majority’ didn’t make the list. That’s one of my favorites. Did you ever notice that majorities are always vast, Ralph?”
He pressed his thin lips together, making them even thinner. I take it back: Ralph doesn’t always look like an accountant. With his receding black hair, his sharp nose and his rimless glasses, he sometimes looks like Mr. Mitchell, the long-suffering father in the Dennis the Menace comic strip.
“Your brother-in-law is a - a -”
“Menace?” I suggested.
He tried again. “He’s a thoroughly unwholesome element on this campus. This blog of his holds up the entire faculty and staff to derision by the students.”
“Not all of them,” I pointed out, “only the ones who write badly. I suppose he might argue that he’s making constructive criticisms. You realize, of course, that Mac started this blog back last spring. You complained then.”
“Yes, and that was bad enough.” He bent over my desk and picked up the newspaper. “Now this scandal sheet has spread the damage to the entire community. We’ll be the laughing stock of southern Ohio!”
Ralph nostrils quivered. His voice was operating on an octave that could have shattered glass. But calling The Observe & News-Ledger a scandal sheet really proved he was losing his grip. The Observer hasn’t done anything remotely scandalous since it backed General Eisenhower against Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft for the Republican presidential nomination in 1952. (That cost the paper advertisers it has never regained.)
I grabbed the newspaper back from him.
“Let’s get real here, Ralph. Why don’t you admit that you’re just PO’d because Mac called your memo on affirmative action . . . what did he call it?” I scanned the story looking for the right phrase. “Here is it: ‘grammatically incoherent.’ He went easy on you. Confusing ‘fortunate’ and ‘fortuitous’ was bad enough, but anybody who writes ‘hopefully this won’t happen again’ should be hopefully drawn and quartered.”
Ralph went indignant, his best emotion. “I resent your implication that my distress at this matter is purely a display of personal pique. I am hardly the only one held up to ridicule in this article. McCabe also insulted the president of this college!”
I looked at the article again. “Oh, I don’t know, Ralph. “‘Pretentious gibberish’ isn’t so rough. After all, it is true. Did Father Joe complain?” Knowing Father Joe, he’d be more likely to chuckle.
The thin line of Ralph’s lips turned up and his gray eyes burned bright beneath his glasses. If Machiavelli ever smiled, that’s how he did it. This wasn’t a good sign. And I knew he wasn’t going to answer my semi-rhetorical question.
“When McCabe flew a kite on the campus quadrangle and trampled over a student who happened to be the son of the Swiss ambassador, it was an embarrassment,” he said. “When he played bagpipes at commencement exercises, it was an outrage. But this time he has gone too far. The public ridicule he has visited upon St. Benignus College, its faculty, and its staff shall not go un-redressed!”
Ralph Pendergast never makes idle threats. If anything, he understates. So whatever he had in mind, it wouldn’t be pleasant for me or for Sebastian McCabe.
Mac wears bow ties, lets hair grow all over his face, stuffs his overweight body with every unhealthful food imaginable, and smokes cigars only Winston Churchill could love. He’s a seriously flawed personality, as proved by t
he kind of mysteries he writes. But he is my best friend. I defended his latest escapade - as I had all the others - the best I could.
“You’re not looking at this the right way, Ralph,” I said. “This article is really a positive for St. Benignus. It has conflict. That makes it interesting. Morrie Kindle will pick it up for the AP and it’ll be in newspapers all over the country, getting our name out there.”
“That’s your idea of a positive, Cody?” The skepticism in his voice was thicker than peanut butter, the crunchy kind. “A negative story like this spread nationwide?”
Not only did the Pendergast voice begin to tremble, but the Pendergast legs looked weak. I would have offered him a seat on the oak chair or the worn couch, but it’s against my principles, the ones that say to never let Ralph get comfortable in my office.
“You just don’t understand public relations,” I told him. “We need students. They pay the bills around here. It’s hard to attract students when they’ve never heard of you. One of the six hundred things I’m paid for around here is to make sure they hear about us.”
“But not like this!”
“Ah, but Ralph, look at it this way: The fact that a faculty member can criticize without fear of retribution shows we have academic freedom here at St. Benignus. That’s a good thing, right?”
A certain look crept into Ralph’s eyes and I knew he thought he had me. “Does this tortured attempt to build a mitigating rationale indicate you are responsible for publication of this article?”
“Heaven forbid! I don’t send out press releases or tip the media every time a professor irks half the faculty and all of the administrators. For one thing, it happens too often. I’m just saying this isn’t the public relations disaster you seem to think it is.”
Holmes Sweet Holmes Page 2
